The Plan

I'm not that into...
I wish I could...
What I really want is...
I don't particularly like...

.....

I'll admit I've been a tad wishy-washy thus far, lots of wants and wishes and not very many actions. You may be getting the impression that I don't have a plan. Au contraire, my friend. At this very moment, I have a most excellent plan. I also had one yesterday, and I can assure you in the strongest terms that I'll have one again tomorrow. The hitch with my plan is that it's rarely the same two days running.

One of my hobbies is something I like to call "master planning," which involves, as one might surmise, making a master plan. I kid you not when I say that I used to sit down and craft these in elaborate, color-coded spreadsheets not only for myself but also for my friends (because I was just that into it). There's something immensely satisfying in picking an endpoint and then plotting a route to reach it that falls within the given set of constraints. It's like a game - winning within a time limit, in a certain number of moves, via predetermined waypoints - played simply by devising the path best taken to reach the goal. So if I've decided that I want to be a hobbit in five years, in making a plan I've paved the path that will get me there. All I have to do is follow my own little yellow brick road, and in five years, I'll be living in Middle Earth like a... well, hobbit.

And if I want to be a (published) writer in five years, there's a yellow brick road for that, too.

And on the days when I remember the bits of chemistry that compelled me to an advanced degree in it, the bits of chemistry that I truly love doing, I decide I'd like to be a chemist, which is pretty much the yellow brick road I'm on if I don't change a thing. Chemist and hobbit? Not necessarily mutually exclusive.

And then, too, there are the days when I feel called to a higher duty and think I ought to run for public office because science is like something of an ugly duckling in politics (where even evolution remains controversial) and in the public eye (where global warming is a tree-hugger myth), and it needs a champion. Politician and hobbit? Probably mutually exclusive. 

So you see, if I sound a little lost, it's for lack of knowing the end point, without which I'm having a bear of a time staying on my yellow brick road. For the time being, that means I'll stay on as many as I can simultaneously, kind of like a game of temporal Twister in which my grad student self progresses towards that career in chemistry while working on a novel or two and researching things like how to build hobbit houses and run for Congress.