tom.bl*g

My future is so unclear

Today is friday the 13th of February, Valentine's Eve. Tomorrow will pass "as per usual" and the next thing I know it's March. By the end of March I will have not been joined to the Catholic church through confirmation, confession, and eucharist at the Easter Vigil. In early April I finish Pimsleur Mandarin III, with vague plans to travel to China someday. By late April my research is written up, and in May my desk and my computers are handed down to a new student. I pass along what know-how I can, and hope that not too much is lost.

I will graduate, probably one of the last non-Ph.D. students to come out of the Computational Engineering Laboratory. Days later my grandparents shuttle me up to Pearisberg, VA where I set off on the Appalachian Trail once again. One summer and thirteen hundred miles later I walk off Kathadin and into the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Rhode Island. There I join a sonar research group and discard my eperience with IC design and test.

Over the next few months I get a security clearance after only some akwardness. At the same time, I join the nearby Maronite church and am eventually brought into full communion with the rest of the Catholic world.

But then what?