Perspective...

The last month or so has seen me travel all over the United States and visiting all sorts of people that mean a lot to me. Vacations are meant to be relaxing getaways from everything that stresses you about life. And for me, blissfully, all three of my "mini" vacations managed to achieve this basic tenet. I was able to forget about chemistry, grad school, and impending change. Just as important though for me is the readjustment of my perspective that these individual trips helped create. My years of incubation as a graduate student have left me a little jaded about things and have screwed up my perceptions of what "life" is about how I am living it. Vacation permit me to step back and see things from afar and even through the eyes of others. In this space today, I would like to talk a little bit about the ways in which I have felt a shift in my perspective that wasn't necessarily present sometime at the start of June.

My visit to Atlanta was a series of firsts. My first time in the Deep South. The first time that my brother and I have spent significant time together on "vacation" without our parents. The first time to see how someone very much like me is taking to living as a grad student. Coming back from this experience, I was struck by the sparseness with which my brother was living and the seeming total lack of joy he had for both his surroundings and the work he was doing. I have long felt that I have let graduate school consume my life to the point where I do and enjoy little else. My life somehow missing those little bits that you don't realize give you that extra comfort and happiness. My apartment feels like home now in ways that it surely didn't the first few years that I was in Ann Arbor. I have slowly transformed the place with many symbolic objects that represent the places I have been and the things and people that I care about. This is new perspective.

Chemistry may have crossed my mind a time or two while I was down in Atlanta, but one place it did not really crop-up in during my time down in Texas with my relatives. Whether I like or not, what I do at school or what kind of chemistry it is or any of that is something that just doesn't get much play. I have long resigned myself to this. This visit did present an opportunity to explain what I do. I really appreciated the opportunity and the interest my aunt showed even though I struggled to make any of it comprehendible. All these years in college have left me with a distinct difficulty in understanding how far beyond a "common" education I have gone. Things I take for granted just aren't necessarily true. My struggle to describe my work (which is difficult to describe properly even to those who vaguely know what you are doing) to some of the people that matter the most to me has strengthened my resolve to make my science more accessible to those same people before I finish my thesis. It is my avowed goal to write a blog post describing my work in laymen's terms, so that everyone can understand. You better make sure you hold me to this.

Now Chicago is the most complicated of all. My reasons for this trip were manifold. Some of them where vacation-y reasons and others more personal and soul-searching in nature. Of the perspectives in life I sat out on the trip with, I really think several were shattered by my wonderful experience. My disposition has changed the last few days. In my mind, the game is different. I feel more confident in myself as look at my research and out into my life beyond school. My future is in my hands and I control where it goes. I have felt restricted by the career path I have chosen and the inopportune way it segments my life until I have to plant roots somewhere not allowing me to explore relationships in a stronger fashion. While I am sure this all doesn't make a lot of sense with some great context about how going to Chicago changed this for me, I will leave a more nuanced explanation for a later day. I am sure some clever folks may be able to read between the lines and reasonably guess.

Vacations are a wonderful time to relax and regain a sense of perspective.

And brother dear, I owe you an apology.