Texas, Ten Years Later

Houston, Texas - my home in the summer of 2007

I – Getting there

It is impossible to separate my brief period as a Texan from the broader story of my undergraduate experience - though the two certainly weren't linked initially.

As I prepared to arrive on the University of Florida campus in the autumn of 2005, I faced one of the life-defining decisions common to all new undergraduates:  choice of a major.   And like it was for most 18-year-olds, that moment for me was somewhat daunting and riddled with ambiguity.  I did at least have a few broad parameters to frame my calculus.  Fundamental table stakes – absolutely non-negotiable in my eyes – was that my field had to lead to a career with a higher-than-average starting salary and significant potential for income growth.  My single mom, having spent virtually her entire career in the public service and not-for-profit sectors, had frequently struggled to make ends meet; whatever I end up doing, I thought, I wasn’t going to spend my adult life stressed out about paying bills or finding it impossible to live a materially comfortable existence.  That immediately ruled out any number of fields – education, social work, journalism – but hardly provided clear guidance.  Beyond that basic limitation I knew that I wanted to travel extensively; I had spent most of the summer of 2005 studying abroad in France and Switzerland on a scholarship from the French government – at that point, only my second time leaving the United States – and I yearned to see much more of the world, and indeed of my own country.  My long-established passion for technology drove me to focus more on fields containing the word “computer” in the description.  And finally, having been a member of the Future Business Leaders of America (“FBLA”) student group throughout my high school years, it seemed logical that I would focus on something corporate-oriented, leading to a career working in an office somewhere in a big city.

Ultimately I arrived at a major just about as logical as one could with those criteria:  decision science.  I’ll spare you the painstaking details and just say that the subject is essentially a mix of business, economics, and computer science; almost a type of “applied computer science” focused on the usage of information systems to solve challenging business problems.  It was a great fit for me academically and I did well.  After pairing it off with a minor in French, I blossomed intellectually and thoroughly enjoyed my first two years as a Gator.

Nearly two years in Gainesville flew by and before I knew it I was faced with another coming-of-age junction:  the dreaded "make it or break it" internship.  Decision science is a fairly versatile major;  folks in my program ended up at places as diverse as industrial giants like General Electric, Wall Street investment banks, consulting firms, a scattered few at government agencies.  Even back then I was already deeply intrigued by the possibility of a consulting career – but that didn’t matter as all of the consulting firms, including the coveted “Big 4”, only recruited for juniors and seniors.  And as I would come to learn years later, the truly “elite” strategy houses such as McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Booz generally didn’t touch state schools like Florida.  My attention quickly turned in what initially appeared to be an unlikely direction:  ExxonMobil.

As a company, Exxon barely requires an  introduction.  Headquartered in the Dallas suburb of Irving, by the mid-2000’s it was riding a wave of historically high global commodity prices to routinely vie with Wal-Mart as the world’s largest company by market capitalization.  ExxonMobil had a long-established affinity for Florida students across a wide array of degree programs.  The decision science program sent significant numbers of students and graduates each year to Texas to work in various parts of the organization’s sprawling IT establishment.    I had decidedly mixed opinions about working for Big Oil and living in Texas (more on both of those later), but faced with the prospect of returning to small-town life with my mom in the summer of 2007 I pounced when an ExxonMobil recruiter approached me at an undergrad recruiting mixer.  Exxon was intrigued by my background – particularly my experience working with computer networks – and the rest is history.  Perhaps it was the fact that a majority of my interviewers were fellow Gators, perhaps it was my intense preparation, or perhaps it was something else entirely.  I still remember the “knocked off my feet” feeling in early 2007 when I got the phone call from area code 713 informing me that I’d been selected for an internship with ExxonMobil IT (“EMIT”), starting on May 15^th of that year and based in Houston.  My jaw dropped again when the salary was read out:  on an annualized basis just under $51,000.  At the time of that call I was 19; I would barely be 20 on the first day of the internship.  My mom and dad were both in their early 50’s and with this offer I had blown past their highest ever annual salaries with the very first “real” job of my own career.  I called my mom immediately afterward to give her the great news and we laughed in joy on the line.  The rest of that semester in Gainesville was little more than supremely relaxing undergrad bliss.

April 5, 2007 - Celebrating turning 20 and my internship offer in Gainesville

II – FM 1960

My experience working with the ExxonMobil onboarding team is one which should be instructive to the large parts of Corporate America accustomed to routinely screwing up that key piece of the hiring process.  The HR team was incredibly professional, courteous, patient, and exceedingly helpful; they quickly assisted me with locating a temporary apartment in the northwest suburbs of Houston and answered the myriad questions I had about the relocation process.  And I'm sure I relied on their help far more heavily than most of my peers; reflecting back, it is hard to overestimate how large of a leap, at the time, this move marked for me. 

Other than my brief stay in Paris as part of my study abroad in 2005 (most of which was spent in the small Alpine village of Chamonix, and during which all my lodging and travel were facilitated seamlessly by the French government), Houston marked by far the largest city in which I had ever lived.  Gainesville only had a population of around 125,000 and a handful of exits on the interstate; Houston was a veritable global city.  It would be my first time living truly independently – as an adult on my own means – in such a sprawling metropolis; my first time fighting through urban rush hour traffic, my first time doing a day of work in a skyscraper, and my first time being able to truthfully define myself as a “big city person" as I had long desired.  As much as the income and the paragraph on my resume mattered, crossing that aforementioned geographical line of demarcation served as a crucial moment in allowing me to decisively pull myself away from the orbit of rural and small-town America in which nearly all members of my family passed their entire lives.  It goes without saying that all of these thoughts, running through my undergraduate head, were simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

May 2007 arrived quickly and I drove from Gainesville to my mom’s house in the Panhandle to spend the night before embarking on my journey.  In a move of supreme generosity – the types of sacrifices so many parents make to facilitate their children’s success – she had agreed to loan me her car for the summer.  It was a 2003 Nissan Altima that, critically, had fully functioning air-conditioning; my car at the time, a 1995 Geo Prizm with nearly 200,000 miles, did not enjoy the same feature (oh yes, trust me, I can write at a good length about what it was like to live in central Florida for nearly all of undergrad with a car that lacked consistently functioning air-conditioning.)  She had a job that required a relatively quick 20-minute commute on a country road with no traffic, whereas my commute length at the time was still unknown; besides, she could simply roll down the window and get a country breeze and she didn’t want her son arriving at a shiny office complex in Texas sweating through his button-down shirts in the oppressive summer heat.  I slept during the day as I planned to drive throughout the night, avoiding the worst traffic.  By midnight I had loaded my belongings into the Nissan and my mom handed me a farewell cup of coffee, kissing me goodbye.  When I reached Interstate 10 in the nearby town of Marianna I accelerated down the ramp leading west.  Off I went, driving into the night and the unknown.

By virtue of geography my route was exceedingly simple:  Interstate 10 runs directly from the Florida Panhandle through the heart of metro Houston.  My drive of roughly 700 miles took me through the far western tip of Florida at Pensacola; on through Mobile, Alabama and Biloxi, Mississippi; directly across a New Orleans at that time still early in its recovery from Hurricane Katrina; and finally across Western Louisiana into Texas.  The sun rose as I passed through Lafayette, Louisiana and I stopped to grab breakfast and stretch my legs.  Even at the crack of dawn, I remember the heat was already oppressive and the air heavy with humidity.

Continuing on, I arrived at the far eastern boundary of suburban Houston in the mid-morning hours.  Even if there had been no highway signs with mileage three things would have given away the location of that boundary easily:  the widening freeway with increasing traffic; the sight of endless subdivisions in all directions; and the massive industrial complexes.  It was the sheer visual scale of the industrial development – primarily oil refineries – on the eastern side of Houston near Baytown which rattled me the most, in a weird way.  Remember that at the time I was still a through-and-through child of Florida, a person who had spent virtually no time in areas marked by heavy industry.  Other than power plants and a few paper mills, you simply don’t see smokestacks in Florida; yet here those peculiar foreign objects were, unrolling in front of my eyes like something out of one of the industrial zones in a Sonic the Hedgehog video game, belching god-only-knows-what into the atmosphere.  For me it was all quite breathtaking – no pun intended.  Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry, one of the defining pop hits of that summer, was playing on the radio.  “How appropriate”, I thought.  Time to be a big kid.  As the number of lanes on Interstate 10 tripled I found myself driving into dense urban traffic of a volume I had never experienced before; I was scared just a bit shitless.

If you’ve never visited, Houston is a sprawling metropolis slightly larger in geographic size and population than greater Atlanta – which meant five and a half million people as of 2007, and well north of six million today.  In fact, few people know that the city proper of Houston, with just over 2 million residents, is not only the largest city proper in Texas but also the fourth largest incorporated city in the United States, behind only New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  Houston serves as the county seat of Harris County, the most populous county in Texas and at that point home to just shy of 4 million people – roughly the combined population of Manhattan and The Bronx, albeit spread over a much larger land area.   The metro is bisected east-west by Interstate 10 – my arrival route, which traverses the entire continent from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles – and north to south by Interstate 45, which leads north to Dallas and terminates just south of Houston at the seaport town of Galveston.  Encircling the area are two beltways:  the inner loop, Interstate 610, which is about five miles away from the central business district; and an outer loop, the Sam Houston Tollway, about 20 miles from downtown.  Seeing the skyscrapers of downtown come into view drove the reality even further into focus – right in front of my eyes was my new, massive, and still quite mysterious home for four sultry summer months.

In those pre-GPS days I took the simplest route to my new apartment community:  Interstate 10 to Interstate 45, straight up Interstate 45, and off onto FM 1960.  FM 1960 is not a radio station; Texas is known for its “farm to market”, or “FM” roads, originally designed to accomplish just what their name suggests:  connecting the many farms and ranches of Texas to markets in the cities.  FM 1960 through this particular stretch of Harris County was notably lacking in farms of any sort; instead, I drove the six-lane road through a seemingly interminable maze of strip malls, subdivisions marked by cookie-cutter housing, and nondescript office parks.  “And I thought suburban Florida was bland”, I remember thinking.  I was headed west; taking FM 1960 in the other direction would lead directly to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (named after the far lesser destructive of the two President Bush's.)  I finally arrived at Greenwood Forest Drive and pulled into the complex – or rather, had to be buzzed in; a gated community!  I suddenly felt like a mini-hypocrite given my occasional rants about how suburban gated communities allowed wealthy Americans to isolate themselves from the rest of society.  That was merely the first of no small number of times that I would feel like a hypocrite that summer.

After a brief stop at the leasing office I got all settled into my new apartment:  12820 Greenwood Forest Drive, Apartment 1618, Houston, Texas 77066.   It was by far the nicest and most modern apartment in which I had lived at that point, a spacious one-bedroom with shiny new appliances and a sparkling, clean bathroom.  All for just under $800 a month; in fact, the rent would have been even cheaper had I signed a traditional year-long lease as opposed to a short-term contract.  For a number of reasons Texas effectively managed to avoid the worst excesses of the subprime mortgage-fueled housing bubble which, at that point in 2007, had not yet burst; housing in large Texan cities like Houston remained affordable all throughout the 2000’s.

After getting everything unpacked, I did one of those stereotypical Hollywood-esque vaults onto my new bed.  All those years in middle and high school when I went to bed in a trailer park under the starlit sky of rural America, dreaming to be and to have so much more – that “more", for the first time, finally seemed firmly within my grasp.

Apartment 1618

New pad for the summer

I spent the first few days in Houston before my internship exploring the broader metro area and trying to familiarize myself with traffic patterns; as recent as it was in the grand scheme of things, this was also a time before one could simply turn to Google Maps for a real-time calculation of commute time based on actual traffic.  As I always have in every city I’ve been fortunate enough to call home, I tried to make myself as much of a local as possible.  I subscribed to the Houston Chronicle, the local newspaper, which I discovered still printed a Bible verse each day.  I gorged on local cuisine, falling in love with Tex-Mex in particular:  Pappasito’s (general Tex-Mex) and Pappadeaux (seafood-focused Tex-Mex) would grow to become my favorites across the summer as my newfound adult income rendered $30 dinners no longer off-limits.  Most memorably in those early days, I got to enjoy the famous Houston Art Car Parade which occurred on May 12^th that year.  Houston’s Art Car Parade is the largest such show in the world, and it was celebrating its 20^th anniversary.  It was reassuring to me, here in the very heart of George W. Bush’s Red America, to experience something so artsy and quirky.  Kudos to the folks who spend so many hours each year preparing for that spectacle.

2007 Houston Art Car Parade

III.  Stepping into Corporate America

Have I mentioned the sheer enormity of Houston?  In addition to the traditional downtown central business district Houston has several other prime office areas and numerous notable edge cities such as master-planned The Woodlands, which was even further north up I-45 from my place in the northern suburbs.  My first day at ExxonMobil was at an office facility in the Greenway district of Houston, slightly to the southwest of downtown, off of a road with the peculiar name of “Buffalo Speedway.”   Reading that name on the map was another one of my  “Yep, you’re now in Texas!” moments.

The total day one commute was around 35 miles each way, and I left by 7 AM to ensure that I would arrive well in advance of the 9 AM start time for intern orientation.  I remember being shocked that traffic on Interstate 45 heading south was already clogged at that early hour.  No accidents, no construction; just pure volume.   The commute was stop-and-go for the entire route until I branched off on US-59 south of downtown.  I was one of the first folks to arrive and started to get acquainted with my fellow interns before the official program commenced.  “Nice, well-dressed groups of folks”, I thought.  Other than an immigrant originally from Africa, I was the only black male in the group.

ExxonMobil IT ("EMIT") 2007 Summer Interns

The orientation itself was your typical mix of logistical HR items and corporate cheerleading, though I remember being fascinated and enthralled by every word given my youthful inexperience.  One particular item still stands out vividly, though; about midway through the morning program we were handed a small pamphlet with information on what to tell relatives or friends who were concerned about price gouging by Big Oil.  If you recall, the summer of 2007 was an inflection point when the price of crude oil began a precipitous spike, heading to over $100 per barrel in 2008.  At the pump prices soared to well over $3/gallon – and folks were absolutely pissed.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats were calling for a windfall profits tax targeting the industry.  Big Oil was printing money faster than the United States Treasury; during the two quarters I worked at Exxon the firm earned more than $20 billion in net income.  Note that’s net income – i.e., profit – and not revenue.  The pamphlets ExxonMobil’s 2007 class of summer interns received explained to laypeople how commodity markets worked and how the firm had no direct role in setting global crude oil prices.  One hundred percent accurate, if not a bit convenient and desperate.  I never bothered sharing that bit of crude oil pricing wisdom with anybody outside of the conference room that day.

After a Texas-sized lunch buffet with enough brisket to feed a small army, in the afternoon we finally got to learn which group within EMIT we had been assigned and to meet our new teams.  To my great joy I discovered I had been placed on the Network Operations team, which was responsible for maintaining all of the computer networking infrastructure (i.e., switches, bridges, routers, satellite phones, copper and fiber optic cabling, etc.) for domestic oil and natural gas production facilities.  Given my prior computer networking experience from my first job in high school, as well as my Network+ certification, this was an ideal fit; even better, at that point in my early career I was still seriously considering climbing the corporate ladder to a senior role in network administration for a large firm such as Exxon.   The interns were ushered into a conference room where our new supervisors were arranged by group and waiting for us.  I quickly spotted my group; two men, one who appeared to be in his early 40’s, another in his mid to late 50’s with a full head of white hair.   Both were white.  I quickly introduced myself and learned that the younger gentleman, whom I’ll call Ron, was a Supervisor who was going to be my direct-line manager for the summer.  The older gentleman, whom I’ll call Josh, was Ron’s boss; Josh was a Team Lead with responsibility for networking infrastructure in a wide section of the eastern United States.  Both were wearing blue jeans, had strong Texas drawls in their speech, and I noticed right away, under the conference room table, that Ron was wearing cowboy boots.  Chuckling, I remembered how I and a few of my study abroad friends from warm-weather places like California and Australia were gently mocked on a few occasions for wearing flip flops around Paris a few summers ago; I thought, “Was this the type of impression that we made to the urban French?”

I made introductions and small chat with Ron and Josh, with both seeming very eager to have me on the team;  I was the only intern assigned to their group for the entire summer and the first Network Operations intern in many years.  A few months later I would learn that Josh once had a horrific experience with a heavy-partying summer intern from LSU when he was a manager in one of Exxon’s New Orleans offices; the experience had soured him to the prospect of taking on extremely junior-level people, but my resume and background had made a favorable impression on him.  It truly is amazing how, in aggregate, our lives are impacted and moved along by so many small decisions over which we have no direct impact.  To this day I am supremely grateful to Josh for having taken the risk to bring me on as a summer intern to his team – particularly given the move I made at the end of the summer.  When I turned in my final decision to Exxon for the job offer, I went out of my way to thank Josh and Ron for being excellent superiors.

We wrapped up with the formal onboarding around 2 PM and were released to our local offices.  To my great surprise I benefited from a bit of serendipity; my team’s home office was actually in the northern Houston suburbs close to my apartment and not downtown; this was unlike a large majority of the other EMIT interns, most of whom were either working at the facility on Buffalo Speedway or in downtown proper.  At the time, being a total corporate neophyte and still highly inexperienced with city life, I had simply assumed that all corporate workers had jobs in skyscrapers downtown – why else would you need all of those tall buildings clustered together?  Having planned to spend at least two hours round-trip each day sitting in rush hour traffic, I discovered that my round-trip commute would be more like 30 to 40 minutes – not materially different from my daily walk to class in Gainesville.  14950 Heathrow Forest Parkway - a suburban office complex named "The Meadows at Interwood" just south of the Sam Houston Tollway in a patch of land with thick tree cover - became my corporate home for the summer.  I was absolutely shocked to discover that, as an intern, I had my own office, even if it was one without a window.  That was a tremendous source of pride until I learned that some of the engineering interns in the same building had window offices.  Remember the $20 billion in profit over two quarters that I mentioned?  When you're printing that kind of money, you can afford to lavish fancy offices on the interns to win their loyalty.

I spent the rest of my first week completing mandatory compliance training, getting building entry badges, and wrapping up other compliance minutiae.  Much of that compliance training focused on the topic of safety.  ExxonMobil takes the notion of “safety” incredibly seriously, almost to the point of it becoming meme-worthy.  At the time all of the security training and requirements seemed extremely onerous, particularly for a worker in a suburban office building, but I would come to appreciate and respect ExxonMobil’s emphasis on safety procedures some years later during the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  That served as an early lesson for me on proper corporate governance:  one cannot overestimate the importance of the tone at the top.  At the very top was Rex Tillerson, just confirmed as our Secretary of State and who was at the time of my internship the new CEO.  While I would come to strongly disagree with Mr. Tillerson's worldview and many of his decisions by the end of the summer, his steady style of disciplined, technocratic management has ultimately led me to grant a greater benefit of the doubt to him in his new public sector role as compared to most other Trump Cabinet nominees.  Time will tell if that deference and judgment is a correct one on my end.

At the beginning of week two I was formally debriefed on my assignment for the summer.  As I noted, the Network Operations team supported the network infrastructure for all domestic oil and natural gas production sites; those production facilities constantly communicated a barrage of data (e.g. issues with certain pipelines) back to corporate facilities in Texas, allowing real-time monitoring of production throughput and other metrics.  Like many other corporate groups, over time the Network Operations organization had generated a rather large amount of data to support its ongoing activity; this data was spread over many shared network drives and databases, was unstructured and undocumented, and as of 2007 seemed to be growing at an out of control, unsustainable rate.  For our team it included everything from network topology diagrams, which were mission-critical and highly confidential documents providing a map of how Exxon’s entire information network was assembled, all the way to completely worthless corporate memos from the late 1980’s which folks had saved to network servers in perpetuity for no good reason.  My job over the course of the summer was to understand the scope of this sprawling base of information; categorize it, in a manner similar to your library’s card catalog; and migrate it to a new centralized information repository of my choice, subject to corporate approval.  The mission was clear, but also overwhelming at the time.

The next few weeks were all a blur as I spent long hours familiarizing myself with the global ExxonMobil organization, the petrochemicals industry in general, and the specific details related to my team.  I quickly got up to speed on energy industry terms like “upstream” – the groups responsible for bringing hydrocarbons up from the ground, and where my team sat; “downstream”, basically amounting to refining and distribution; and “exploration”, the sexy-sounding group responsible for traveling around the world and locating new sources of oil and natural gas.  I learned about major new ExxonMobil exploration projects near Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, near Vladivostok; little did I know the political controversy that would surround Exxon's Russian oil interests a decade later based on CEO Tillerson’s role in the identification of those energy sources.  In fact, I can say that I was in the same room with Mr. Tillerson once; he made very brief remarks that I can’t recall at one of our many consolidated intern events that summer.  All that I remember is his thick Texan drawl and impeccable French cuffs sticking out from his suit.  As I familiarized myself with the vast ExxonMobil organization, I would also find my initial love for corporate governance by exploring the org chart; I remember the first time I discovered the shocking number of levels  in the corporate ladder which separated me, as a lowly intern, from Mr. Tillerson (13.)  Discovering that I was 13 levels below the CEO – and that my boss’s boss was more than 50 years old – was one of the first times that I began to fundamentally question if I wanted to truly spend my life “climbing the ladder” through corporate IT, or if I wanted something a bit different and more accelerated.

Lest there be any doubt:  I want to commend ExxonMobil for constructing a solid internship program, at least within EMIT.  Through scheduled site visits, lunch-and-learns, and guided tours, I got to learn about the full scope of this vast Fortune 500 enterprise, as well as – critically – the vast functions of a well-oiled (no pun intended, again) IT organization.  Some of the fundamental IT organizational knowledge that I gained while working for ExxonMobil still serves me well 10 years later, even though my career has taken a fundamentally different route in many ways.  Beyond all of that, the experience was simply a fun one.  In truly unforgettable experiences, I got to travel with my Network Operations team to conduct field visits for inspection of network infrastructure at three oil and natural gas-producing fields – two in Texas, one in Louisiana – and I also got to travel via helicopter to an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.  The opinions that I have on energy policy today should never be construed as a form of disregard for the brave, hard-working men and women in the fossil fuel energy industry.  Their work is frequently dirty and dangerous, with brutally long hours in harsh environments.  They have nothing but my utmost esteem and respect.

Network equipment closet at a natural gas site in Northern Texas

"Safety first!" - the Exxon way

On the helipad of an ExxonMobil oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico

IV.  Liberty?  Really?

As I was gaining invaluable work experience that summer in Texas I was also, without even realizing it, arriving at my adult set of political values.

From the point that I first staked out preliminary political views as a pre-teen in the late 1990’s up until that summer in Houston, I would have invariably described myself as a libertarian.  The etymology of libertarianism is fairly obvious:  liberty.  In the case of libertarianism, that notion of “liberty” is taken to what is a logically consistent if not fairly extreme position:  liberty of individuals and organizations to do as they please within a societal context so long as they don’t infringe on the property or personal rights of anybody else.  Taxes?  Bad.  Same-sex marriage?  Fine.  Regulation which limited dumping pollution into a river?  Bad.  Smoking pot with your co-workers after a long week?  Brooo…totes fine.

Before I moved to Texas in 2007, that was basically my philosophy.  The part of that thought system pertaining to what we would call “social values” in post-Reagan America was fairly obvious.  My own family was only moderately religious, and I grew up as a social outsider in a very small town in the Bible Belt region of the Deep South.  Consequently, I had long been an atheist with a fairly negative view of religion of any sort, and the notion of religious involvement in our government was just as toxic of an idea to me back then as it still is today.  My laissez-faire attitude on matters of economics and fiscal policy was more a development of my high school years, as I got my first job and started earning my own salary.  Given my relative lack of privilege in society, I didn’t see why any of my earned salary should be funding folks on welfare or the poor white people in the South who generally made my high school years miserable.  Never mind that, as a teenager earning less than $5,000 per year and attending public schools, my own tax burden was effectively a very negative figure;  you can’t argue those types of things with the very young and idealistic.  Besides, Ayn Rand made figures like John Galt and Howard Roark so, so convincing and appealing for a teenager like me who was an academically high-achieving social outcast yearning to be more than the circumstances in which I was born.

Slowly but surely my experience in Texas fundamentally changed all of that.  For one thing, the exposure of living on my own - completely on my own - in such a massive, impersonal city made me far more sensitive to why we created safety net programs in the first place.  I traveled frequently with my Team Lead, Josh, in his large pickup truck between sites for different meetings.  He often had Rush Limbaugh playing on the radio and would make comments about the “decline of Christian America.”  Yet at office events he would occasionally comment on the “libertarian” nature of his political viewpoint.  That didn’t seem to add up to me; a "Christian America" didn't seem like a libertarian proposition to me, given the long history of religion serving as a counterweight to liberty around the world.  Josh’s mouth was not particularly loose on matters of politics, but the same could not be said about many of my co-interns.  The white men who were my age, in particular, seemed especially up in arms about perceived threats to their “liberty.”  Many of them were proud of the “Ron Paul 2008” bumper stickers on their trucks and SUVs.  Yet they were almost invariably opposed to abortion rights; perusing their Facebook profiles (few people cared about privacy settings back in those days) revealed their often deep antipathy to rights for religious minorities and gay people, or their disdain for the plight of undocumented immigrants, most of whom had surely made the treacherous journey to America in search of this glorious ideal of “liberty.”  A particular incident from that summer showed just how absurdly anachronistic Texans and Southerners can be on these matters.  Rick Perry, current nominee for Secretary of Energy and at the time Governor of Texas, mandated that young girls in the state get vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, better known as HPV.  For most folks, that wouldn’t seem to be a controversial move, given clinical proof that HPV infection could greatly increase the risk that these girls would later develop cervical cancer.  For many Texas libertarians – particularly those of the religious variety – it was an outrage and yet another example of the government somehow snubbing its nose at their "religious freedom."  I began to wonder how any type of modern-day public health regime would be compatible with this type of a view of the role of government in society.  Many of these types also bemoaned the "government intrusion" of putting flouride in the water to reduce dental cavities.  Whose liberty is it anyway?

In fairness, I was never a “true” libertarian by any metric.  For one of several examples:  I’ve long decried the excessive role of guns in our society.  My experience living in France and traveling the world has always reaffirmed, to me, the particularly American insanity of fetishistic gun culture.  Among these Texan libertarians, that was not even a point up for polite civil discussion.  The more guns, the more ammo, and the less government control over all of it, the better.

As a corporation ExxonMobil was big on this particularly Texan notion of “liberty” – which in their case meant the unfettered ability to roam the world exploring for energy as they so wished, striking deals with any oppressive, blood-soaked regime from Equatorial Guinea to Russia, and consequently allowing as much carbon to be spewed into the atmosphere as individual citizens and organizations wished to spew.  Global climate change was no more in dispute with real scientists 10 years ago than it is today; so as a person trained in the sciences, I found myself increasingly appalled by ExxonMobil’s disgraceful denial of the role hydrocarbon-based energy played in anthropomorphic climate change.  At some point during my summer internship I learned that ExxonMobil was in fact the only super-major oil producer which didn’t spend a single penny sponsoring alternative energy research.  It made me deeply ashamed and embarrassed to be an Exxon employee; another one of those "I'm a hypocrite" moments, like my awkwardness pulling into the gated community of Greenwood Forest.

Nothing, however, shaped my political transformation during the summer of 2007 more than the issue of LGBT rights.  By age 20 I had already lost my virginity to another man and was well-aware, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was gay – but I was still deeply closeted and avoided conversations about my sexuality whenever possible, often employing politician-like lines to change the subject.  Among my close circle of friends in Gainesville my sexuality was already one of those points of thinly-veiled jokes; certainly not mean-spirited or hateful at all, but more like “come on, Adam; we respect your choices and privacy but why the fuck are you dragging this comedy out?”  My understanding of libertarianism was pretty clear on matters of sexual orientation:  that type of stuff didn’t matter, and certainly was not in the purview of the state to govern.  Texas libertarians, at least those working for Big Oil, tended to see it a fundamentally different way:  we may not throw you in jail for sodomy any longer (Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision which invalidated sodomy laws nationwide, had occurred only four years earlier at that point – and it was driven by the Texas sodomy law), but you’re still, as a gay man, a sick individual living a lifestyle which we can't morally approve.  The Houston gay district is Montrose, a lively, walkable (at least by Texas standards) area located between downtown and the Greenway neighborhood where my day one orientation took place.  I would hang out in that area on the weekends, in that pre-Grindr (and for me, pre-21 and thus pre-legal drinking) era; I was making furtive steps to being my full self, but I wasn’t quite there yet.  One week, a few members of my Network Operations team took me on a field site visit to a location near Dallas for some equipment inspection.  Somehow or another, the conversation turned to Houston neighborhoods in general, and Montrose in particular.  I happily chimed in, offering my thoughts on the area and some of my favorite restaurants there.  One of my co-workers, in his late 20’s and at the rank that I would be had I joined ExxonMobil full-time upon graduation, then made a comment that I’ll never forget:  “Ain’t nothing down in Montrose these days but a bunch of Yankees and queers.”  (“Yankees”, for those of you who haven’t spent any time in the American South, is a supposedly derogatory term that culturally Southern Americans use for folks who are raised in the Northern United States.)

Was he condemned for that comment?  Of course not.  The conversation merely kept flowing about why Montrose was “too urban and too crowded and too damn expensive” for other folks, before we moved on to another topic.  The co-worker who made that comment was also a self-described libertarian.  I knew because I had driven up with him from Houston to Dallas, and we shared a long conversation as fellow young people.  Or "fellow", so I thought.

Today, I describe myself as either a “moderate” or a “pragmatic liberal."  When I arrived back on campus at the end of summer 2007, I would have called myself a “liberal”, and later for a brief time a “social democrat.”  But living in Texas changed one thing for me fundamentally:  after roughly July 2007, I would no longer categorize myself as a libertarian ever again.  I gave away my library of Ayn Rand books to a classmate, put an “Obama ‘08” bumper sticker on my car, and moved in a different direction politically.

V.  The American West

I absolutely love the Western United States.  No, really;  I'm kind of obsessed.  From the first time that I traveled to the region, visiting Denver, Colorado for the FBLA National Leadership Conference in the summer of 2004, my love of the West has only grown exponentially.  Although New York is my proudly adopted home state, California has long been my favorite state in the nation (and hopefully, soon, it will be my weekend and part-time home.)  When I need to disconnect from reality, few things accomplish that purpose more effectively than isolating myself at a spa resort in the desert of Palm Springs or Arizona.  And don’t even get me started on the many charms and debaucheries of Seattle and Portland.

Despite being the setting for countless cowboy films, on the whole Texas is absolutely not a Western state; it’s a Southern one.  Seattle produced Jimi Hendrix while Texas was still slowly dismantling Jim Crow segregation.  Across most of Texas the political values, the landscape, the climate, the cuisine, the accent, and the predominant culture are largely identical to what I experienced growing up in the Deep Southern Florida Panhandle; they couldn’t be more different from typical life in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, or San Francisco.    But Texas is also a gigantic landmass, similar in size to France.  At its far western extreme, Texas extends into the Mountain Time Zone.  And that remote, infrequently visited part of Texas is, truly, indistinguishable from New Mexico, which it borders; it is Western – specifically Southwestern – in values, demographics, and culture.  Almost from the moment that I arrived in Houston, I wanted to experience it.

One of the very few friends whom I retained from my high school years - I’ll call him Bob - visited me around the end of June that year and we decided to do a long road trip:  800 miles to Las Cruces, New Mexico, with an overnight stay in nearby El Paso, Texas.  It’s a massive 12-hour trip, almost all along Interstate 10.  In fact, it’s basically a third of the entire transcontinental Interstate 10 trip, although essentially all within one state.  If you’re traveling along Interstate 10 from the Atlantic to the Pacific roughly one day would be spent traveling from Jacksonville to Houston; another day from Houston to El Paso; and the final day from El Paso to Los Angeles.  When Texans brag about how large their state is, they are assuredly not making it up.

Although I made several side trips during that summer, most of them were relatively close – the (icky) beaches of Galveston, Austin, slightly further away Oklahoma City.  This was a true quasi-transcontinental adventure, and as such as I phoned my mom asking for her approval to put that many miles on her car.  Her answer, not surprisingly for a cash-strapped single parent, was a resounding “hell no.”  If not for the fact that I worked for ExxonMobil, that denial likely would have ended the planned adventure in its tracks.  Fortunately, at the time Exxon offered all employees – even those under age 21 – car rental privileges which did not need to be business-oriented in nature.  Though there were still usurious underage surcharges, I found a somewhat affordable option through an Enterprise location relatively close to my apartment.  It was a small black Kia with no cruise control.  For most sane individuals, driving a third of the way across a continent in a budget car with no cruise control likely sounds like a form of barbaric torture.  For a group of hormone-ridden early 20-something’s, it was a ticket to adventure.

On Saturday June 23^rd, Bob and I loaded our bags into the Kia before the crack of dawn and took the Sam Houston Tollway south to Interstate 10, then picked up 10 and headed west.  We were roughly 50 miles outside of San Antonio before the sun had even partially risen over the horizon, and westward I drove; I remember passing through San Antonio and seeing all of the flags that have flown over that city on display in public (six in total - the origin of "six flags" in the amusement park franchise), in what is surely the only appropriate use of the Confederate flag I've ever seen in public.

What I saw slowly unfold in front of my eyes over the next roughly eight hours of driving was surely one of the most profound and beautiful sights of my life.  As a person who today routinely travels via plane between the Eastern and Western United States, it is easy to lose track of the vastness and geographic diversity of our nation when you're not exposed to it on an intimate basis.  And indeed, even many road trips which cover broad distances do not properly reveal the extent of this diversity.  A road trip from Naples, Florida to San Antonio, Texas will easily require two days of travel, but will reveal little more than flat land and various palm and pine trees.  Likewise, a trip from Los Angeles to El Paso will take a full day and reveal nothing other than various forms of desert shrubbery and sand; a trip from Oklahoma City to the far northern plains of North Dakota is also monotonous geographically to a large extent.  The beauty of a road trip across Texas via Interstate 10 is that it fully reveals what continental America means within a day, even if you may never cross a state line.  Starting in Houston, one sees deep pine forests and unyieldingly flat topography little different from what folks in northern Florida or southern Alabama experience on their daily commutes; too slowly to be immediately perceived by your eyes, this yields to rolling hills and grass-covered plains which begin to rise as you drive westward out of San Antonio, blending into the scenery common to Nebraska or Kansas.  And then finally, even more slowly but surely, as Interstate 20 bends south to merge into its terminus at Interstate 10 near Van Horn, the terrain fundamentally shifts into an arid, largely tree-less desert marked by sporadic mountain ranges, with the grass of the Southeast shifting seamlessly into the desert sands of the Southwest.  At this point, when you do pick up FM radio stations, many of the hosts are either speaking in Spanish or in a neutral American accent lacking much of a discernible Texan twang.  And it is also at this point - the 10/20 junction - after having held your foot on the gas all day in a vehicle without cruise control, that you realize you still have roughly two-and-a-half hours of highway driving just to reach El Paso, let alone New Mexico which is further still.  

Fuck.  Wow.  America.

When Bob and I finally arrived in El Paso that afternoon, we quickly checked into the Marriott and relaxed for a bit.  Neither of us was all that sore – the joys of being 20! – and we quickly decided to drive around the town and explore.  El Paso is actually quite a scenic city right on the border with Mexico and Ciudad Juárez, with the Franklin Mountains as a beautiful backdrop.  At the time, Ciudad Juárez was well on its way to briefly becoming the most dangerous city in the entire world in terms of homicide due to the raging drug war, so crossing the border was out of the question.  Bob and I were absolutely intent on visiting New Mexico, so we loaded into the Kia and I drove the roughly 50 miles to Las Cruces.  Finding Las Cruces to be a somewhat bland and attraction-less city, we followed highway US-70 a bit further up the road to a nature area offering desert hiking near Alamogordo.  Interestingly enough, at this point in my life Las Cruces was the further west in the United States that I had traveled.  Few people know that El Paso, Texas is actually further west than Denver, Colorado; just as Reno, Nevada is further west than Los Angeles.

Looking out over El Paso, Texas

Crossing into New Mexico

After a fun weekend of hiking in the desert and exploring El Paso, Bob and I headed back on the road to Houston.  He had to catch a flight back to Florida, and I had to head back to my internship.  The trip to El Paso and New Mexico, albeit brief, had only served to intensify my deep love for the West.  It is hardly surprising that, after visiting California for the first time one year later, I would come to adopt it as my "second home."

VI.  Meeting the Chief Information Officer

The Chief Information Officer ("CIO") is the individual with full responsibility for an organization’s information technology systems and investments.  Before 1990 this was a role that basically did not exist except in the largest of large corporations, and even then it was an obscure back office function with little authority; by 2007, many students in academic undergrad programs like mine envisioned being CIO as a lofty, unlikely-to-be-attained “stretch” terminal career goal.  The CIOs of Fortune 500 corporations were uniformly millionaires who played a significant role in shaping and executing the overall corporate strategy.  A small handful extended the scope of their accountability to include other areas such as operations, and a smaller set still ascended to the ultimate corner office of CEO.  Not a bad gig.

As part of the EMIT internship all interns were invited to a “meet and greet” ceremony with the ExxonMobil CIO near the end of the summer.  At that time Exxon's CIO was Patricia Hewlett, a LSU graduate and ExxonMobil native, having spent her entire career there since starting in the 1970’s.  The event was held at the Exxon location in downtown Houston, in a conference room with fancy wood paneling and sweeping views of the city dozens of stories below.  I took care to get a fresh haircut the day before this event, and it was perhaps the only time the entire summer that I wore a full suit (albeit, without a tie.)  Patricia entered the room wearing what was, I’m assuming, a rather expensive pantsuit.  Diminutive in stature and soft-spoken with a slight Louisiana drawl, she wasn’t immediately one’s typical idea of a senior executive in Big Oil, but her command of the vast subject matter of IT and the complexities of Exxon’s global business immediately drew respect and admiration from the room.  In particular, her answer to one of my questions still resonates with me to this day and would become a pearl of wisdom that I would come to rely on extensively during the tumultuous year to come in 2008.  Always being pragmatic in nature, I asked Ms. Hewlett about the details of a “normal” day in her life as a Fortune 500 CIO.  As one would expect, she described a packed schedule with a smorgasbord of conflicting responsibilities.  Reflecting on the sheer enormity of her typical task load in one day through the eyes of an intern, I reflexively asked her a follow-up:  “How do you sleep at night and avoid being overwired from all the stress - how do you keep your cool with so much responsibility on your shoulders?”

She laughed at the question, paused for a few seconds, looked at me and said, “You know, I try not to be too self-important about these things.  If I got hit by a bus today crossing the street, I don’t think the stock price would move a penny.”

Looking back today, her answer is common sense – or at least, it became more logical to me over many subsequent years as a consultant working with executives and realizing that they are indeed flesh-and-blood human beings just like the rest of us.  At the time though, Ms. Hewlett was essentially a human deity in my eyes given the scale and complexity of the organization that she managed.  In reality, of course, there were any number of other more junior executives eager and able to jump into her role if needed.  In fact - unfortunately common to how information technology is treated in many organizations - one might not even consider Patricia to be a “senior executive” in the true sense.  She was never one of the named corporate officers listed in the ExxonMobil proxy statement.  And not only did she not directly report to CEO Tillerson, she didn’t even report to one of his direct reports; she reported to a global VP of shared services, who reported to one of the executive vice presidents, who in turn reported to Rex Tillerson.  As I noted earlier, it was in beginning to understand the scale of the ExxonMobil organization that I started to seriously talk myself out of the possibility of a long career spent climbing the corporate ladder through an IT organization.  Grasping that even a woman as polished and accomplished as Pat Hewlett was still two layers removed from the top brass may have been the proverbial final straw that would end up pushing me into a career in consulting next year.

I got Ms. Hewlett’s autograph at the end of the event – a request which pleasantly surprised her – and would keep it displayed on my desk for the remainder of the summer in a frame.  To my surprise, not a single individual on my Network Operations team was particularly impressed with the fact that I had met the CIO – in fact, they were more surprised that I was wearing a suit, which nobody in that building did.  “She’s just a bean counter in my view”, Josh said.  “I bet she’s never even seen the inside of a data center in her life.”  And that was probably the mildest reaction on the team.  That would serve as another important career lesson for me:  the higher up you climb on the org chart, the more seemingly impossible – yet critically important – it becomes to maintain an understanding of the concerns motivating the staff at ground level; the folks who actually do the hard work which delivers products to customers and moves the organization forward.

VII.  The Decision; Looking Back

The entire summer flew by before I knew it, and it was time for my final intern presentation.  My internship project had been a success; Network Operations data was cataloged, rationalized, and migrated, and the team loved the new Lotus GlobalShare database where everything was now stored.  A note for those still languishing under the special hell of using Lotus Notes for email; your company likely is still using it for email because of databases like the one I designed in 2007.  Migrating from Lotus Notes to Outlook or Gmail for corporate email is relatively easy; migrating all of those legacy databases, on the other hand, is like trying to unwind a derivatives contract.

My final intern presentation was a small event, attended by a number of the interns I had befriended, a HR representative, Ron, Josh, and Josh’s boss, a Director whose name I can’t even recall to this day; Josh's boss reported to the VP in charge of network administration for the entire ExxonMobil Corporation, so it was certainly good exposure.  I was surprised to see that he actually took notes during my presentation, and he thanked me afterwards for helping to "bring some sanity to the data mess in Network Ops."

As much as I had grown accustomed to life in the big city of Houston, by August I was definitely ready to get back to the campus environment in Gainesville.  Infinitely more comfortable with driving in urban environments at this point, I departed after grabbing Chick-fil-A for breakfast around sunrise.  Driving through the day, I reached my mom’s house near sundown and decided to stay with her for the night.  She was excited to see me, as parents generally are, and curious to hear about my experiences; we had only spoken on average about once every other week during the summer, as I was a young adult eager to maintain and assert my already well-established independence.  Vividly, I remember her asking me to stay a few days and relax before heading back to college.  I politely declined, not wanting to spend a second longer than I needed to in the small town that I had worked so hard to escape.  That’s a decision, of course, that I would come to deeply regret next year; little did I know that moment was the very last time that I would see my mom as a fully healthy person, before she rapidly started to die from kidney disease.  It is rarely a good idea to cut time with loved ones short, particularly if that decision is made in the expectation that there will always be an infinite supply of it.

When I arrived back in Gainesville I was heading into my third and final year at UF, as I planned to graduate a year early.  Despite the obvious pressure to procure a good job, I was also already certain that I would be rejecting whatever offer ExxonMobil made.  For one thing, I knew that I wanted to go directly to graduate school the next year, meaning at least another year of being out of the labor market full-time.  And as impressed as I was with the likes of Pat Hewlett, I had essentially decided that I didn’t want to spend the many decades typically required to climb up the corporate ladder, particularly given the precarious position of IT jobs (many are always vulnerable to outsourcing/off-shoring) and the often “second class citizen” nature of IT in corporate decision-making.

Far more importantly, however, my decision to not join Exxon boiled down to a referendum on the values that were important to me.  I simply could not envision myself working for an anti-LGBT firm which actively denied climate change; almost to the same extent, I could not imagine myself living full-time in a state like Texas where, if anything, the values of ExxonMobil and its well-educated employees were relatively moderate.  That still did not make the process any easier.  For one thing, it presented a tremendous financial blow for me at the earliest part of my career.  I was shocked when the offer came back from Exxon.  Because the team had been very pleased with my performance, I was offered a follow-on internship, which could be renewed for the two following summers until I obtained my Master’s degree, with conversion at that point to a full-time offer.  The salary offered blew me away:  $67,000, a full $17,000 increase over the $50,000 from my 2007 offer.  Graduating at age 21, that would have easily made me one of the best compensated decision science undergrads coming out of UF that year.  When I later obtained an internship offer from KPMG to be an IT Advisory Intern based in South Florida, the offer was a full $20,000, or 30%, less – only $47,000.  Not to even mention the cost of living problem.   While greater Miami had long been my dream region and the KPMG offer finally got me there, it was also a region with California-esque housing prices (and in 2007, the housing bubble still had yet to burst.)  Despite being a pretty avowed leftist on most matters, my mom thought I was being a bit insane when I explained my decision to her.  But I knew what I wanted and where I stood.  In October I called Exxon’s HR team in Houston and politely informed them that I would be declining their offer to head instead to KPMG; the entire team could have not been more polite.  I have been a management consultant in one form or another since that phone call.  

And ten years after the moment when it happened, rejecting ExxonMobil's job offer remains, by a wide margin, the career-related decision of which I'm most proud.   Today when I'm asked to give an example of a time when I did what I knew was right despite immense pressure to do otherwise, it is usually the example which I cite.  Back then, I reflected with shame on my behavior during my first trip to France in 2004 as a 17-year-old; that summer I remained silent as a clique of teens from Selma, Alabama mercilessly mocked and denigrated a gay teen in our tour group (behind his back, of course) from Austin.  I didn't want to "rock the boat" - particularly as I had befriended a few of the offending teens - so I remained silent and did not defend the target of the homophobic vitriol.  Now here I was, only three years later, standing up for what I most strongly believed in even as it cost me $20,000 - money I really could not afford to spare as a 20-year-old about to go to grad school.  I had grown up and matured tremendously without even realizing it.

My decision to reject Exxon’s offer created a bit of mini-controversy within my peer group of decision science students.  I was fairly well-known within the small program, serving as Vice President - the highest undergrad officer - of the Association of Information Technology Professionals ("AITP"), the student group at Florida representing our major.  A number of my fellow officers simply could not fathom why I had rejected the offer.  There was one fellow in particular, whom I’ll call Andrew, who seemed downright perplexed.  While Andrew and I worked together just fine as club officers, our personal values, priorities, and lifestyles could not have been more different.  He represented a part of the UF culture that was entirely foreign to me:  fraternity traditions, football, the entire “Florida Blue Key” legacy of conservative Southerners whose families had loyally attended UF for generations.  Every time that I interacted with him and similar folks, I could tell that I came across as a bit of an enigma; this weird kid on scholarship, in the Honors Program, who hung out with French majors and didn't watch football, yet who wanted a career in business.  Andrew had also long made it clear that he wanted a position with ExxonMobil, almost exclusively due to the company's above-market salaries.  Given that I had managed to land one of those offers, it was simply inconceivable to Andrew that I was rejecting it.  My explanation of being uncomfortable with the culture at Exxon made no sense to him; “dude, it’s just a job, and a fucking well-paying one”, I remember him saying as he shook his head in disbelief.

I don’t mean to trash Andrew’s character; he was a perfectly charming person and, in fact, had he and I met a year later, after the traumatic experiences I would have in 2008 remade my character into a more relaxed version, we might have enjoyed a more fruitful personal relationship.  But I will say that, all these years later, he represents a very common stock character that I have seen recur again and again throughout my personal life and career:  the person who, without even thinking about it, accepts what I call - and have written about in this blog - the "narrative of legacy."  Folks like Andrew – in my own life most often but certainly not exclusively white men – are born into a particular set of circumstances, and they never venture that far from what you would predict of them based on those early cultural norms to which they're exposed.  Their pedigree renders them largely blind to broader system-level issues and the thinking of diverse groups; hence, the fact that I didn’t want to work for a company that I found toxic to my values just didn’t square with Andrew.  Folks who accept the narrative of legacy are often politically conservative or entirely apolitical; because they don't think critically of broader systems, they often see little need to change or challenge things as they are.  As philosophers say, "the fish doesn't know that it is wet."  

Throughout my life, I’ve never had much difficulty understanding the viewpoints of folks like Andrew; in fact, I spent the first 18 years of my life surrounded by them, in the fiercely conservative rural America of the Florida Panhandle.  But people like Andrew, when faced with folks like me who approach life through a "narrative of choice" – a narrative typically deviating widely from the heteronormative suburban white tradition and middle class privilege in which they are raised – simply do not know what to think.  I understand Andrew; but he could not understand me.  And it is easy to see why.  His approach to life rendered him like a leaf on the sidewalk, pushed along by the winds of life with little seeming willingness to forcefully exert his own critical thinking and choice in terms of where he ended up being blown.  

I frequently hear from folks like Andrew that I'm "too critical", "too political", too "obsessed with creating problems where none exist."  The narrative of legacy crowd sees me as out on a vendetta to blindly destroy traditions, almost like some type of a modern-day iconoclast.  On all counts, they're wrong.  While I certainly acknowledge the importance of understanding your personal roots and honoring traditions that make sense or add value to society, that type of an undue deference to accepting “things as they’ve always been” just strikes me as absurd given how broad, complex, and terrifyingly imperfect our world is.
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As I type this, I cannot quite believe that it has been 10 years since my brief time as an employee of Big Oil.  Rarely have I spent much time thinking about the experience, and this is certainly the longest piece, by far, that I have ever written on that stage of my life.    I regret that many people, in briefly speaking to me about my time in Texas, might have reached the conclusion that it was an invariably negative one, sort of a summer of blight on my existence.  That could not be further from the truth.  Houston is a fantastic, diverse city and I enjoyed living there.  While there were undoubtedly negative aspects of my experience at ExxonMobil, that brief four-month period provided me with a critical grip on the entry-level rung of the ladder of Corporate America, positively influencing and impacting all of my subsequent career decisions.  The effect on my personal life was certainly just as, if not even more, profound.  Far beyond pushing me to ditch the political label of “libertarian”, living in Houston transformed me as a young adult.  No longer did I need an awkward explanation to sweep away the rural characterization of my life; from the summer of 2007 onward, I was unquestionably and unequivocally a denizen of urban America in my own right.  And as painful as it might have been at the time, even the homophobia that I experienced in Texas ultimately drove a very positive impact.  By the time that I arrived back in Gainesville at the end of that summer, I knew that the period of my life spent cowardly sheltering myself in the closet had to come to an end; there was absolutely no way that I was going to receive my Bachelor’s degree and enter the workforce as a closeted man, remaining silent while future co-workers made the type of anti-gay slurs I heard regularly at ExxonMobil.  That November, on a chilly early morning before heading out to a Habitat for Humanity community service event in East Gainesville, I updated my Facebook profile to state I was interested in other men, and posted a short message on my wall letting the world know.  I received an outpouring of support and “we already knew, Adam” comments by the end of the day.  Living in Texas had forced me to enter the joyous, prosperous period of my life as an openly gay man which continues to this day.

Indeed, the most important and enduring legacy of the summer of 2007 for me was not the acquisition of any one particular skill, but rather the significant broadening of how I defined the narrative of choice.  Up until age 20, I still retained a provincial identity as a “Florida boy”, a “network technology specialist”, and I approached many of the opportunities that passed in front of me by screening them through those filters.  My experience in Texas began to fundamentally dismantle those last remaining barriers of comfort zone and, in doing so, began to radically alter how I perceived my own identity.  Things that would have once seemed downright impossible to me – for example, attending an elite private university in Pennsylvania for graduate school – started to seem increasingly feasible.  And to my great surprise, I started doing many of those things.

Sitting here today as a New Yorker and world traveler open to living in just about any democratic nation in the world,  all of this seems like common sense and baby steps.  For many of my contemporary peers who went to Ivy League schools right out of high school and who were raised in affluent families that vacationed abroad as kids, I'm sure it might seem downright trivial.  But for me, it had to start somewhere.  The narrative of legacy dominates, like a suffocating fog, for the vast majority of kids born into the type of background I was.  Nothing guaranteed that I would think differently about how to structure my life.

Indeed, one might say the most profound step to framing my existence through the narrative of choice was that fleeting moment of accelerating onto the Interstate 10 West ramp in Marianna just after midnight in May 2007, heading out to make my small mark in Houston, and scared to realize that my life was changing even if I could not yet appreciate by how much.