but I’ll share something that I’ve come to grips with recently.  To be honest, I think this is something I’ve had to come to grips every few months or so since high school.

Some people in this world will always do whatever they want, no matter what anybody else says.

I’m not trying to get down on people who follow their heart and try to do their own thing.  I’m just observing that some people are so self absorbed in their own world that everything looks gray to them.  The problem is: things aren’t ALWAYS gray.

There are times when you SHOULD feel guilty for things you do. I’m not asking you to take a razor blade to your thighs, just admit remorse or change your attitude.  People as a whole are understanding.  The notion of the value that repentance has is engrained deeply in all of us.

But for those people who constantly buck and thrash against everything in this world that gives guidelines for decent living: I think you’re fucked.  Too much reliance on reason and logic drives people to insanity.  So go ahead and rationalize everything away in your head and sleep better at night.  You’re just a well-rested drain on society’s resources.  I think more highly of a man that has robbed and hurt people but recognized the error of his ways and apologized than I do of you.

But of course, you don’t care about my jaded opinion anyway.  Enjoy your life, but for the sake of everyone else around you: please don’t have children.

When my boss is in town I almost never stay at work past 5:00 PM.  I get in late too, usually around 10:30 or 11:00.  He complains all the time about it, but I get stuff done so he’s never really too upset.  The weird thing is that when he goes out of town, I’ll stay at work until 8:00PM or later some nights and get in by 9:00.  It makes absolutely no sense, even to me.

The real point of this story is to say that I’m exhausted from working so much.  It may just be the way I’m wired, but even when I get home and have some down time I’m still thinking about work.  I think its just a consequence of science and graduate work that your life becomes so intertwined with your work.  You practically live with your office and group mates.  You eat lunch and talk about science with the same people everyday.  Then  when you go out you see everybody again.  I think I’m starting to embrace that a little more now that my head is starting to clear of outside influences.  These are good times.

It’s not very often that I read a scientific article and I’m genuinely surprised by the ingenuity of what I find.   Most of science is just trotting along doing the same stuff your boss did with minor improvements. This was slashdotted so you may have seen it, but this is really just good science:

Scientists Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2

The questions in the last post seem simple on the surface. But if you consider them deeply enough, you’ll realize they are extremely difficult to answer. This is rapidly becoming at least a two part post so I’ll start take it slow.

“Who are you?”

The question isn’t, “Who do other people say you are?” or “Who did your parents raise you to be?”. What defines your identity? Have you grown to be the person you thought you would be? I used to take comfort in thinking that I fell in some pre-fashioned slot and I was running on autopilot with the plan God had laid out for me. That mentality almost ended me.

It’s so easy to become convinced that things have to be a certain way that I managed to work myself into a huge knot of stress so tight that I had panic attacks every few nights.

A very good friend of mine slapped that notion out of me. He just looked at me with complete frustration and told me to snap out of it. I changed my life up a bit and things got better.

By no means would I contend that I figured stuff out. I just realized that you don’t have to figure it out. You are who you want to be, and if you don’t like it you can change. Changing isn’t easy, but there’s nothing preventing us from deciding our own fate.

It’s strange how television shows can draw attention to some really important questions.

One show, I’ll spare you all the title so you don’t write off my point, says there are basically two questions everyone must answer in their life:

“Who are you?”

and

“What do you want?”

I don’t know the answer to either and that really scares me.

I’ve had blogs in the past. Most of them were started so I could call attention to the things that upset me about the world and I could unload my irrational opinion on them. Now that I’m advancing in my career and you can Google my old blogs where I’m bitching about my ex-girlfriends amongst my papers about complex magnetic materials, I realized its time to start anew.

On this blog I’ll try to be a little more civilized. A little less personal. A little more even keeled. And maybe even a little less angry.