upwards and onwards
So things are like this -
It has been a great long while since I last ranted and raved in so public a forum, and I suspect that I may have lost something in not doing so more often. It has not been a sign of disrespect to you, my friends (and some of you my family) - merely a sign that things have not always been well on the home front, or that I've finally decided to take some of your advice and keep my opinions to myself. Anyhow - after much agonized consideration, I have decided that I may have been a little premature in choosing to terminate my career at Lexicon as of December 15th. It is true: I hate my job, and I am wasting my time here. I am not learning or growing - or being challenged to achieve anything of significance by my environment. I have not been permitted to advance within the hierarchy of my organization, and yet I have also not been allowed to change departments to try and find a new home elsewhere within the corporate structure. All of this in spite of being one of the senior-most members and incredibly competent and good-looking to boot!
I would like to leave Lexicon tomorrow - and I am willing to accept that I have built myself a sufficient safety cushion that I probably could do so tomorrow should I choose to do so. I would eventually have to get some sort of dead-end job of menial labour that paid an hourly wage much reduced from my current circumstances - but it could and would be done in order to pay for rent and food and car insurance and gas - and heaven forbid: entertainment costs and medical insurance. That said, I'll be honest: for the first time in my life, I find myself truly afraid of the future.
Which is not to say that I will not eventually be leaving Lexicon - I know that I can stay there no longer, but I wonder at my motivations.
I am being driven away from a thing, and probably by rage and frustration and disappointment. I am not being drawn towards anything, and would be left with emptiness: even more alone than before, and unemployed in what might as well amount to Greenland.
And that is the kicker: I need to be drawn towards something - I need to have somewhere to go. It is not enough to be a wandering tramp, and even I don't really have the money for that sort of strange adventure - nor do I feel that sort of extended vacation would develop me as a person. I'd always want to be doing something more with my idle hands. So I am looking for alternatives - or rather, I have been inspired to look for alternatives for the past two months, but have found it just as frustrating as when I first graduated from college. I have more experience, but in many ways, it is not of the sort that matters to alternative employers in the fields which interest me.
I am no longer going to ignore offers of aid or employment merely because they were brought to my attention by a friend or a family member. I recognize that familiar relationships such as those are often more important to a prospective employer as they bespeak a great deal of trust or confidence by the recommending member: your reputation is on the line. I thank the lot of you who have offered me sanctuary on the offhand chance I am invited to interview at a job - or more importantly, a graduate program - in your area.
There is the heart of the solution: I do need to head off to graduate school.
If any goal stands out like an outcropping in the river of my future, it is furthering my education. This is not because I have run out of other ideas for things to do, or because I feel that retreating into academia will save me from poor management. This isn't even because having some form of graduate education will make me more attractive to future employers: this is because there are honestly questions of science whose answers are as of yet unknown, and I would like to help develop the plan to understand them. I really do care about nocturnal pterodactyls and theropod evolution and dinosaur metabolism and the arrival of bats in the early Quaternary and the disappearance of primates in North America and the Old/New World monkey disjunction and lumping Australopithecines and early members of Homo instead of constantly splitting them and mosquitoes and malaria and dengue and West Nile and whatever else will crawl out of the jungle next and how to control or prevent the spread of that misery to come...
So I have some ideas about how to solve those problems, and I'd like someone with more professional experience to give me a little bit more of the training and direction and resources to attack those problems.
So I need to get into graduate school.
Which means that I will be touring more programs in the near future and taking more care in submitting my applications to a broad diversity of departments, and asking a lot more questions.
First, I need to retake the GRE - and this time around, I need to beat the math section into submission. I don't know how or why I managed to so terribly underperform on that portion of the exam the last two times I took it, but I need to sell myself as competitive and intelligent as possible. If this means I must take one of those awful GRE-coaching courses guaranteed to improve my score - then so be it. I am a better and brighter and more dedicated individual now than ever - I just need to prove it to the rest of the world.
And maybe, just maybe...
prove it to myself.
Time will tell.