2L Job Search

I read the following quote on Andrew Sullivan:

[T]heir striking claim, based on careful empirical research, is that across all of those categories, the feeling of scarcity has quite similar effects. It puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character—an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience—may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity. If any of us were similarly situated, we might end up with a character a lot like theirs. An insidious problem is that scarcity produces more scarcity. It creates its own trap.

Because they lack money, poor people must focus intensely on the economic consequences of expenditures that wealthy people consider trivial and not worth worrying over. Those without a lot of time have to hoard their minutes, and they may have trouble planning for the long term. The cash-poor and the time-poor have much in common with lonely people, for whom relationships with others are scarce. When people struggle with scarcity, their minds are intensely occupied, even taken over, by what they lack.

 While not about the 2L job search, my experience with my classmates, and of Peter with me, stands as evidence of this sentiment. My only disagreement with the quote (I've not read the whole article) is that I tend to believe stress reveals character, not changes it. Or, maybe my view is colored by my experience in the military. You didn't say of someone who was a blue-falcon in Iraq, "well, he was stressed" you said of that person when he was in garrison, "Don't trust him."

chronological wanderlust

I was recently looking at a map of Africa and the growing US presence there and thinking. I have some friends who spent some time in Ethiopia and seemed to really enjoy it, and they told great stories of their travels.

I was thinking that if one wants to see the world, there is an impetus to do it NOW. Why? Consider Afghanistan. I have friends who went there years and years ago...before the Soviet invasion and before our own debacle there. They have experiences similar to Lee and Gosias in Ethiopia. The thing is, if I wanted to visit, I couldn't. Not only because it's dangerous, but because they place and environment they saw no longer exists. It's gone. Forever.

As the world changes, our opportunities dissapear. Ethiopia may be a place where every street corner has a McDonalds soon, or where Somalia style anarchy and violence prevail. I want to climb Kilimanjaro. I want to spend a week in a palace in Venice and climb the Peruvian mountains. But, if I don't do it now, Kilimanjaro may be ice free, Venice could be bombed out and Peru could be Disneyfied. You just never know...