End of Summer Thoughts

Having not done it in around three months, typing here feels odd...or perhaps oddly refreshing. And since my view count has increased quite a bit, I can only assume that I actually have some negligible number of readers :-)

I won't recommence regular blogging for another two weeks or so, but as my "traditional summer" is rapidly winding down - August, already! - I'd like to continue a tradition that I established last year by going through a list of my end of summer observations and thoughts.
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• It appears that both 2008 and 2009 will be remembered in my life as years of rapid change and instability. Up to this point, the change has been approximately 70% bad and 30% good, but there are many reasons for optimism that between now and January, that balance will essentially flip. But yes, bad change and loads of instability! If it was irritating at this point last year, it is now getting to the point of being slightly intolerable. I have found that in certain matters, being many hundreds of miles away from the backwoods is not necessarily a shield against the ignorance and incompetence of the backwoods, which casts a very wide net. I have found that charting out the most meticulously-detailed plans, complete with worse case scenarios, provides absolutely no guarantee of even minimum success in executing those plans. And, as I could have told you at this point last summer, I have found that my earlier views of life - the typically Randian notion of humans as these self-sufficient paragons of individual autonomy and control- are so horribly deficient a description of mankind that I find myself embarrassed to have ever adhered to them, even as a teenager. We are but one of many factors in control of our destinies. Environment, chance, the (as of yet) unexplained biological reactions inside our bodies that lead to things such as cancer formation, and even things as seemingly trivial as the blood alcohol content of the drivers around us on a crowded highway all shape what we become and how much we will thrive, and those are things over which we have absolutely no control. When conservatives and libertarians proceed to mount the soapbox and deliver a diatribe on the decline of "personal responsibility" - typically just a thinly-veiled excuse for them to excoriate the poor and less fortunate in a juvenile manner - they are blithely ignoring how small a role their own choices had in their own development. The conservative white businessman, always quick to disparage the African American or Hispanic teen with baggy shorts and a poor academic record, forgets the foundations upon which his own successes were laid; his ignorance and lack of contextual understanding is truly amazing.
  

• And continuing an earlier thought, I am extremely optimistic about the next six months. By the middle of December, my (prison?) time in Pittsburgh will be complete. The upcoming semester will be the first time in my entire academic career in which a vast majority of the courses I am taking are electives that I chose because they interested me (needless to say, none of them are programming courses.) Unless the economy takes a truly dramatic nosedive, I have a job in my region of choice, cemented by my performance over the course of the last two summers. January will mean an end to the change, the instability, that has wracked my life continuously since February of last year when I got a frantic phone call one stormy evening. And if that isn't a reason to be optimistic, I'm not sure what is.

• Speaking of that "region of choice", I've spent remarkably little time there this summer, due to economic factors within the consulting industry and my own desire to travel. The more and more that I develop, the more and more that I realize what my own preferences are, the more and more that I realize what I'm willing to tolerate and what I'm not, I've come to the conclusion that I might very well choose to live in California before living in Florida outside of the southeast coast. South Florida is amazing to me because it nearly perfectly conforms to the "ideal" metro area that I would create for myself if given the choice: year-round warm to hot weather; highly diverse, with minorities as a majority but no individual race/ethnicity as a majority; a very large population and a cosmopolitan nature; a strong, world-class economy that (once the housing market stabilizes) will continue to thrive and grow well into the future; robust population growth (again, will take off again with market stabilization); extremely liberal politics and culture; an absolute dominance of secularism and progressive religious traditions over religious fundamentalism; and great beauty. Some people continue to be amazed by the amount of attention that I focus on "region of choice" concerns. By and large, those are people who were content with the regions where they grew up. When you wake up nearly every morning of your childhood longing for the day that you can live elsewhere, you tend to pay an inordinate amount of attention to the nature of the regions that you choose to live in for extended periods of time.

• I'm about to reach one of those fundamental inflection points in life - the oft-discussed school to career transition. Perhaps I should be terrified, but I'm really not. With 3 corporate internships, more than 6 years of part-time work experience, and many hundreds of hours of volunteer work experience as a computer technician and computer literacy instructor, there is simply no "mystery" regarding the work world to me. And I'm not even sad, to be honest. While UF was (and still is!) a hard place from which to divorce yourself, I have remarkably few fond memories of my time at Carnegie Mellon and in Pittsburgh. It was a mistaken 18 month experiment that I am more than ready to end, even given its inevitable benefits (discussed in my "Reflections" series here.)

• Just a bit over 6 months into the Obama Presidency, and I remain fully supportive of in excess of 95% of his agenda. Quite a few analysts on the right-wing, given their sophomoric understanding of race, would attribute that to "affinity bias." I suppose the same could be said about all of those half-illiterate white rednecks in Texas with the Bibles inserted up their asses who remained ardent supporters of Bush during his 8-year unmitigated disaster of a Presidency? It's ridiculous, really. I support Obama because his visions and actions conform to where I want the country to go. Simple; there is no "racial" element to it at all. I supported the stimulus. I supported actions taken to prevent the collapse of the banking and auto industries. I support universal healthcare - hell, if I had my way, I've just nationalize the whole goddamned health insurance industry and be done with the corporate sharks at places such as Aetna and Humana (isn't it interesting how the right-wing claims that we should be terrified of a "government bureaucrat" making our health decisions, as if the bureaucrats at the health insurance giants are any different? The difference is that government will never be driven by a profit motive, and I believe that an individual's healthcare choices should not be dictated by the health of a CFO's income statement. And for the more than 47 million Americans without health insurance - of which I was one for most of last spring and summer after my mother died and before I got health insurance through CMU - having any bureaucrat make healthcare choices for them would be preferable to their current status, just one serious illness away from absolute financial ruin.)
  

• I've done lots of driving this year. A lot. Southeast, Midwest, Northeast. And I remain absolutely convinced that there are few, if any, places in the world that demonstrate the diversity and variety of the United States. If you can't find your niche in a country that includes Alaska and Florida, California and North Dakota, New York and Texas, then there is likely something flawed in your preferences, and it's unlikely that you'll be happy wherever you go.

• I have no desire of settling down in the marital way anytime soon. Regardless, when I see couples my age who have recently gotten married here in Florida I can't help but feel, as odd as it might sound, a bit of rage and indignity. It is because I know that, even if I wanted to make that same choice, I could not; it is because, while I am a net contributor to society - college-educated, volunteer, pay my taxes, never broken any laws more serious than illegal music downloading and speeding - our society treats me, and my relationship, as second-class and inferior. Indeed, I can become downright indignant when I think about how gay and lesbian citizens are still regarded, in the year 2009, as not worthy of any legal protection at all in many places. And then, when I pause for a moment, I think about what my grandmother went through; I think about what it would have been like to have been legally forbidden from living in certain areas, to have been forced to use substandard public facilities, to have little white girls publicly refer to you as a "dirty nigger" with no shame, to have attended deficient, racially segregated schools, and upon graduation to have been told that the best universities in your state were off-limits to you regardless of your academic merit. And in that context, I can find comfort - as much as gays must and will fight for full equality, the injustices that are committed against us can never match the way American society has mistreated many other groups.
  

• Continuing with the Rust Belt and Sun Belt theme of this blog (I concluded that the Sun Belt is far superior to the Rust Belt a long time ago, but it's an interesting discussion), I find it hard to see who would choose the housing options of the Rust Belt over those in the Sun Belt. Even in the suburbs, most Rust Belt housing is just, plain, old; when you attempt to live inside of cities such as Pittsburgh, which I do for reasons of convenience and culture, what you find is not simply "old", but rather, ancient. When I relocate back to that glorious city, I'll be living in a rowhome that is 100 years old. A century; already standing when my great-grandparents entered this world in Louisville a very long time ago. Even when structures that old are refurbished and remodeled, you can only scrape away certain elements of the oldness; you're still fundamentally dealing with a property that was around before World War I. Some people - sheltered urban elitists, largely - are infatuated with "oldness" as an attribute, and they'd be surprised to know that there are indeed older buildings in states such as Florida (though perhaps not as gritty, decrepit, an ancient as those types like.) The house that I grew up in, here in archetypically-Sun Belt Florida, was built in 1955. Here in Pinellas County, a place that experienced a gargantuan wave of urbanization in the middle of the last century, I'm amazed at how much of the housing stock was built in the 1930 - 1960 period (in that period, Pinellas County saw its population increase from just over sixty thousand residents to more than 370,000.) The difference between the two regions is that in Sun Belt states, we have no shortage of newer, greener, more efficient and luxurious buildings and all of the associated niceties. For me, it is a very clear choice.

• Still no firm conclusion on the Carnegie Mellon years; again, while my initial verdict is evident, check back with me when I'm 35 for a better (and more refined) viewpoint on that choice.
  

• And finally, how appropriate is it that I end this period with lots of time at the beach? A final reminder of the validity of my choices in life, as I prepare for six more months in, shall we say, less than ideal conditions? In the end, when I make that final transition from Southwestern Pennsylvania to South Florida, Master's degree in hand, it will have been all worth it - and one hell of a learning experience.

I will return once back in Pittsburgh - until then, enjoy the remaining summer days!