A Week in El Paso

So my first week is over and things are going well.

I'm still sleeping on the floor and waiting for my moving company to tell me when they are going to deliver all my earthly belongings (yes, there will be a thorough and scathing entry in the near future about this one. I'm waiting to receive all my stuff so I don't write twice and leave anything out.). Other than that, I'm falling in love with the area. The mountains are desolate and beautiful, the air is clear and warm, the humidity is low, and I am repeating myself. No chance of me staying here forever, but it will be a good two years.

Life here is good. I will leave it at that.

Hypocrisy

"Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn't quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?"

-- Orson Scott Card, "Alvin Journeyman"

Please Tell Me Why I Did This Again?

Can someone please tell me why I did this? Please!! Why did I leave my girlfriend, my apartment and the cosmopolitan political excitement of Washington D.C.? Why did I turn down (well, more like postpone) a six-figure job, and move all the way across the country to live in the last bastion of the Wild West for two years? Why did I take a job that -- while very prestigious -- pays a third of what my firm would and leave me probably as much in debt (if not more) than when I started?

OK... granted, it's a fantastic job. I'm going to do substantive work that (while I cannot discuss it) will be great experience and really help me out the rest of my career (so they say). Moreover, my boss is stupendous, my co-workers are good people, and the hours are manageable. The weather is also good, the view from my apartment is spectacular, and the temperament of the people so far agrees with me (those I can understand at least).

But here I am, all the way over here, with the last four years of my life all the way over there. In my life, I've already moved more times than I can remember. Since I was two, I've been jumping all over the planet, staying here and there for a few years, and once again I find myself on Mountain Standard Time. I don't care what anyone says. It never gets easy.

It never gets easy.

It's All Where You Place the Silverware

So I've moved... to El Paso, Texas.

I drove into town yesterday morning listening to Marty Robbins croon about Felina and Rose's Cantina and then again about how reincarnation may have just put him in that same darn spot again. I passed four hours of desolate landscapes, huge rock escarpments and stunted shrubbery on my way from Albuquerque where I landed the night before. Having not slept more than an hour or two in the last 48, the landscape was all the more surreal.

I flew in from Beijing, China two nights ago from a three week vacation to find out my household goods were still somewhere in a storage facility on the East Coast. The reason was that the truck that was supposed to take them to my new home was waiting for a part and the moving company was too cheap to use another one. I also found just before leaving Beijing that my brother's neighbor had backed a Penske truck into my Honda that I had left at my brother's house while I was on vacation (thankfully only causing minor damage). Quite an auspicious beginning to my new duty assignment.

As soon as I got into town, I dropped $300 on the most inexpensive (yet still moderately tasteful) kitchen implements I could find: pots, pans, utensils, plates and silverware, along with a host of detergents, soaps and other things you only realize you can't live without when you don't have them. I still have no place to sit and nothing to eat on in my house, but I hope to remedy that soon.

Running through my head the entire time has been the words of my freshman Philosophy professor and his philosophy on where you place the silverware.

Professor Chuck was a coffee mumbler (he taught his entire class mumbling over the lip of his coffee cup) and one of the most eccentric gentlemen I ever met. His deductive logic class was also one of the most powerful and eye-opening experiences of my life. I won't bore you with all the details, but one thing I remember frequently is his comparison of classic Aristotelian logic to where you place your silverware.

Basically, his reasoning was this: the way you think is very much determined by where you place your tools of thinking. Like the silverware in your kitchen, where you place it determines how and when it will be used. If you place it in a rational and easily accessible spot, it will be much more useful (and much more frequently used) than if you place it somewhere more hard to reach. Such decisions, while appearing minuscule initially, are determinative of far-reaching life patterns. Thus, it is essential to properly place your logical tools in a rational place (and in proper order) in your mind and in such a way as to make them easily accessible or you will always be reaching across all sorts of less-important and potentially misleading material to get to them.

And so I am spending the next few days and weeks placing my silverware. As I develop my initial life patterns here, I am trying to do so in a way that will not force me to waste time or develop ridiculous habits. Some of these patterns will develop by themselves out of necessity, and others from inescapable circumstance. But many will come from my own choosing, and I only hope I will make the right decisions so that I won't be reaching across a lit stove every time I grab for a fork.