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Published: April 21st 2012
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Sometimes I think back throughout this past year and contemplate how I arrived in this country.Actually, scratch out that first part.
Sometimes I think back from the last 5 or 6 years of my life and I juxtapose those years to my current situation and well, I wonder (ponder is fine here right? cause I have a dictionary with me, but only a Spanish to English and vice versa) how my present self arrived in this position. At this moment, one could put your hand on the CD of life, abruptly, violently stopping the natural progress of one’s existence. Time for some retrospective thoughts!
After my little adventure in Spain in the summer of 2006, I had decreed that after I finished school I would take a year long trip through Latin America. And as those years slowly passed, this dream slowly was molded into a kind of fairytale; at its culmination, I would start somewhere along the western coast of the US and throughout 1 years’ time, I would travel all the way to the southern tip of Argentina. A sort of tip to tip trip (I really was not making any sexual references
there, but lo que sea). Money, saved in my mattress of course, Maps, just head south, Companions, bodies with blank faces. Before I could get carried away on my plump, cushy cloud my inner DJ, with a flick of the wrist, produced this lyric:
wake up, wake up, wake up
cause you NOT feelin’ right
(20 peso note whoever guesses the lyric to this song that I am listening to right!)
Education, Governmental shackles! The grad school loan crippled my dream trip. Also, you can add that I was banking (I will never be able to thank you enough Andre for ingraining in my head this usage of the verb, to bank) on getting 2 more internships in the summer to help pay my loan before I was going to graduate. As graduation was getting closer, the dream began to levitate, becoming cloudier every day. My vision in the horizon wasn’t clear at all. Was it bleak? I’m not a pessimist. Was it rosy? I just wrote that it was cloudy (pay attention!). The 15 month stretch between the day that I graduated and the day I arrived
in the DR, was by far the most frustrating stretch of my young life. For the first time in my life, there was no predetermined plan. No lightened path. No fucking signs at all actually. What was I going to do? “Huh” while I idiotically raised both of my hands. The 15 months stretch went like this: started working part time at a local engineering firm 3 days after graduating, worked for 7 months, took a month break to travel to Israel for a cousin’s wedding (just add a spectacular 1.5 weeks in Cyprus and Greece as well), 2 months of tutoring, 2 months more of working part time at another local engineering company, and finally, a great 2 months in Baltimore with Maria, just chillin with her great roomies and some small, cute dogs (okay so I know that this adds up to 7+1+2+2+2=14, if you counted you are not even listening to my literary voice!). But even weirder was my interviewing schedule in these 15 months for full time jobs: 2 interviews possibly designing parts for nuclear submarines, 1 designing architecturally relevant buildings, and the other, a local, small structural engineering firm that also focused on architecture as much as engineering (they were more of the chill variety though…super cool people), and mixed in there was this long, plodding process of some vague engineering-lite-job in a remote country. Pretty obvious which one doesn’t belong here. I will say that the biggest job that rivaled the peace corps was 1 of the interviews with the nuclear sub people. That specific job was super, fucking cool. Nice people, outrageous facilities, and my one and only passion in structural engineering (EXPLOSIONS). I remember even saying that if I got an offer with that company, I would have struck a fatal blow into the bloody carcass that is Peace Corps….yes I get that a carcass is ALREADY dead and that striking a fatal blow into a lifeless piece of meat is completely trivial, but through the commutative property or maybe the associate one, whichever is the one that says that if A=B and B=C, thus A=C, my employment with Peace Corps would be terminated before I would even accept. But really, think about that, either I design a nuclear sub or join some hippie, liberal, naïve agency that could never really mesh with my selfish, egotistical tendencies in that why would I ever help anyone out (thanks close friends for that comment)? Can I say that I am soooooooooooooo fucking relieved that I did this instead, you know that I would have probably wrote the same thing about the other job (isn’t it ironic?). Was this my destiny? Please, child (thank you ochocinco). Was it my brilliant foresight? Even I am not that vain. Was this my way to postpone adulthood, loan payments, the growing monster of the unknown, all while living abroad like a poor, college student? What the hell do you think?
P.S. I tried to post a video, but it is too big so you guys get some random pics!
over there
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