Should have done...
I watched the feed as Galileo descended into Jupiter today. You can read all you like about the mission and what we've learned about our universe. I won't try to justify money spent on the space program, or wow you with some piece of trivia. This is a blog for god's sake. I have to get personal.
My early good memories are of watching Apollo launches. Every year my family vacationed in Florida. It was cheap. My uncle lived there. In an effort to make up for the last 50 lousy weeks my dad tried to schedule our two-week vacation around a launch. Watching that man made object free itself from Earth I knew I had found an escape. From the age of six on I would tell everyone that someday I'd be an astronaut. Well, until the coma and illnesses convinced me I'd never make the cut. From that point on I was going to be an aerospace engineer! I'd work for NASA. I'd find a way to make someone as physically screwed up as I was able to handle the rigors of spaceflight.
I'd like to say I studied my ass off. But I didn't. Math was simple for me. Like riding a bike. I took classes advanced for my years until I simply ran out of math classes in my school district.
So, of course, I still went to college and discovered even greater math! Wrong. After finding myself free of math I started discovering other classes and interests. One day, and I'm sure it was in one day, I decided not to pursue a career in aerospace. I decided that math wasn't my life work.
Basically I decided to throw away 12 years of certainty and exchange it for umpteen years of "nah, I'm not sure what I want to do. It all looks good."
So, that's why I can list numerous professional positions on my resume. None seem to fit the others. I'm a floater in the sea of careers and I like that.
But, each day I look up at the sky at some point and wonder why in the hell I'm still on Earth.
