Choosing Calvin and Hobbes
I should be doing laundry. I should be packing. I should be going for a run. I should be tidying up the house. I should be working off a list of things. to. be. done. around the house. I should make a list of things to be done around the house.
But life feels like that endless stretch of time before finals week, when the preparations will never end, when desperately need more time, but you desperately want it to be over. That's what it's like the weeks before launch. All other parts of your life pause, suspended until the milestone is behind you.
I used to force myself to deliberately stop studying by reading something else. I remember sitting in the hallway the half an hour before an aerospace structures final reading Calvin and Hobbes while classmates alternated between staring at me in disbelief and cramming to memorize one last thing. I did great on that exam, but it's hard to relax and trust yourself and stop cramming.
As we're finalizing details on sixteen different things simultaneously, I've been leading the charge on cleaning up the operational procedure documentation. Due to overly clever database features, we can't delete anything without blowing up all the cross-referencing numbering so I just have my team label them obsolete. When I mark final approval of their obsolescence, I paste in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.
I had forgotten I did something similar to make myself stop cramming for thin-walled structures. As my teammates do their own last minute prep, they occasionally trip across an outdated link to these obsolete procedures and start laughing. Now, they're deliberately trying to find them, or suggest cartoons to put in them. Yesterday, a teammate that needed to resurrect one we'd eliminated, and she was regretful to take down the cartoon and put back in the technical data.
Just like finals, everyone starts to loose it a bit on nerves and adrenaline. Yesterday, I found our lead flight dynamicists sitting on the floor drawing data integrity interfaces for our intern and making jokes in Latin only I would laugh at.
To clear my brain, I've been reading non-technical things and my brain has finally rebelled against too much useless romance fluff, so I've switched to meaningful fiction. Like TV, I'm always several years behind watching or reading the 'hot' thing, so I've finally gotten around to My Sister's Keeper.
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.
[SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING FOLLOW]
Her dying sister needs a kidney transplant and this 13 year old girl is expected to unquestionably donate an organ. Anna sues for medical emancipation, and the story is heartbreaking, beautifully told, where right and wrong feel interchangeable; it's gray and tragic and amazing. In a twist, Anna confesses her sister suggested the lawsuit, asked her to kill her, to let her go because she's tired of fighting.
The court grants the 13 year old medical emancipation. The final decision on organ donation will her entirely hers. And then the book failed me. It cheaped out, like a Disney cartoon, where the hero never has to make a hard choice, never stoops to killing the villain; the bad guy simply falls to his doom. (Seriously, go back through every Disney movie. They all fall so the hero keeps their hands clean and soul pure.)
Anna and her lawyer are driving from court to the hospital when a truck hits them. Anna is brain dead on arrival and the ER doctor says I'm sorry, but there is a limited window for organ donation, if you want to consider it...? Epilogue says dying sister gets the kidney, miraculously ends up in remission and mourns and mourns her sister.
I wanted to know what these ordinary people would do with this impossible choice and how they would survive it. Instead, the author took it away.
As all good literature does, whether I liked the story or not, it made me realize something about myself: I like the challenge of facing hard choices. The world is rarely black and white, it's balance and choosing priorities, deciding what to let go, finding a way through. Complexity is. You have to learn to flow through it, channel the outcome and live with the consequences.
This is why I like "The Walking Dead."
No matter how hard the choices before me, I want the right to make them.
This is a good thing to remember when the next five months of my professional life is a state of constant and exhausting choices and we're already so very tired.
But life feels like that endless stretch of time before finals week, when the preparations will never end, when desperately need more time, but you desperately want it to be over. That's what it's like the weeks before launch. All other parts of your life pause, suspended until the milestone is behind you.
I used to force myself to deliberately stop studying by reading something else. I remember sitting in the hallway the half an hour before an aerospace structures final reading Calvin and Hobbes while classmates alternated between staring at me in disbelief and cramming to memorize one last thing. I did great on that exam, but it's hard to relax and trust yourself and stop cramming.
As we're finalizing details on sixteen different things simultaneously, I've been leading the charge on cleaning up the operational procedure documentation. Due to overly clever database features, we can't delete anything without blowing up all the cross-referencing numbering so I just have my team label them obsolete. When I mark final approval of their obsolescence, I paste in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.
I had forgotten I did something similar to make myself stop cramming for thin-walled structures. As my teammates do their own last minute prep, they occasionally trip across an outdated link to these obsolete procedures and start laughing. Now, they're deliberately trying to find them, or suggest cartoons to put in them. Yesterday, a teammate that needed to resurrect one we'd eliminated, and she was regretful to take down the cartoon and put back in the technical data.
Just like finals, everyone starts to loose it a bit on nerves and adrenaline. Yesterday, I found our lead flight dynamicists sitting on the floor drawing data integrity interfaces for our intern and making jokes in Latin only I would laugh at.
To clear my brain, I've been reading non-technical things and my brain has finally rebelled against too much useless romance fluff, so I've switched to meaningful fiction. Like TV, I'm always several years behind watching or reading the 'hot' thing, so I've finally gotten around to My Sister's Keeper.
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.
[SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING FOLLOW]
Her dying sister needs a kidney transplant and this 13 year old girl is expected to unquestionably donate an organ. Anna sues for medical emancipation, and the story is heartbreaking, beautifully told, where right and wrong feel interchangeable; it's gray and tragic and amazing. In a twist, Anna confesses her sister suggested the lawsuit, asked her to kill her, to let her go because she's tired of fighting.
The court grants the 13 year old medical emancipation. The final decision on organ donation will her entirely hers. And then the book failed me. It cheaped out, like a Disney cartoon, where the hero never has to make a hard choice, never stoops to killing the villain; the bad guy simply falls to his doom. (Seriously, go back through every Disney movie. They all fall so the hero keeps their hands clean and soul pure.)
Anna and her lawyer are driving from court to the hospital when a truck hits them. Anna is brain dead on arrival and the ER doctor says I'm sorry, but there is a limited window for organ donation, if you want to consider it...? Epilogue says dying sister gets the kidney, miraculously ends up in remission and mourns and mourns her sister.
I wanted to know what these ordinary people would do with this impossible choice and how they would survive it. Instead, the author took it away.
As all good literature does, whether I liked the story or not, it made me realize something about myself: I like the challenge of facing hard choices. The world is rarely black and white, it's balance and choosing priorities, deciding what to let go, finding a way through. Complexity is. You have to learn to flow through it, channel the outcome and live with the consequences.
This is why I like "The Walking Dead."
No matter how hard the choices before me, I want the right to make them.
This is a good thing to remember when the next five months of my professional life is a state of constant and exhausting choices and we're already so very tired.