When I was 17 years old, just graduated from high school, I was awarded a summer internship working at a DoE laboratory. It was my first “real” job (beyond washing dishes and bagging groceries), and the lab was nice enough to arrange a car pool for me. Every day, a nice 50-something-year-old meterologist who lived near me would pick me up and take me to to the lab with him.<\/p>\n
During our morning commutes, he would often ask me about my interests, how I liked high school, and what I planned to do as I entered college. I have a distinct memory of one particular conversation in which I said, “Well, you know, I guess college will be just like high school, but a little harder, and I won’t be living at home anymore. No big difference, I guess.” He just laughed and said, “Oh my, you have no idea.”<\/p>\n
“What do you mean, I have no idea…?”<\/p>\n
“Enjoy the summer. The rest of your life is about to begin, you’ll understand someday.”<\/p>\n
Sure enough, I went off to college and jumped right in. I made a bunch of friends in the dorms, dove into classes, and loved it. At first, it was a bit odd, being out of my parents’ house… sort of like going off to summer camp. Except that camp kept going on, and on, and on, and on… and then I lost track. After three months, I went home for christmas break, and sure enough, the guy was right. Something was<\/i> different. It was weird and uncomfortable being at home. It wasn’t quite “home” anymore. I had changed, or life had changed, and some sort of bridge had been crossed when I wasn’t looking… I couldn’t backtrack. A year later, I couldn’t even imagine what life was like before college.<\/p>\n
These days, I’m experiencing dejavu. With a baby due soon, I’m getting all sorts of similar messages from friends and relatives: “your life is about to change forever”. It’s kinda weird. I guess I’m coming up against the next “rest of my life”. Perhaps someday, I’ll be incapable of remembering life without kids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was 17 years old, just graduated from high school, I was awarded a summer internship working at a DoE laboratory. It was my first “real” job (beyond washing dishes and bagging groceries), and the lab was nice enough to arrange a car pool for me. Every day, a nice 50-something-year-old meterologist who lived […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}