The Goodbye Tour/The Red Cross Tour

Sorry if you were hoping for more frequent updates -- I don't want to bore you with a bunch of entries that say "I'm sad." But, jeez, I have just over two weeks left here and, yes, I'm sad. I hate all this saying goodbye to people, not only because it sucks to be leaving people I really like, but because it's exhausting. I don't have the right constitution for going out every night, and that's what I've been doing. In the past week, I've been to trivia, a gay bar and a WNBA game, and I had fun, but I also haven't been getting enough sleep as a result. On a more, I don't know, philosophical?, note, I also find it frustrating to try to tie up loose ends. It feels kind of like Zeno's paradox, where no matter how much time I spend with people, I never feel like I've satisfyingly concluded our relationship. On the one hand, you hope that you will continue to have relationships with people. On the other hand, apart from a few people, you won't. It sucks. I hate it.

But! It's not like I'm spending all my time having depressingly inconclusive dates with my friends. This morning was ridiculous and I'd been dreading it for a few days, but I got something great out of it, and I'm going to tell you about it. So, at my mother's insistence (hi, Mom!), I scheduled appointments with my doctor and endocrinologist, and, for reasons that are not worth explaining ("I had a check that I could not cash... because it was from an out of state bank") my endocrinologist's appointment was at 8:30, and an hour and a half away from an informational interview with a someone who does disaster mitigation for the Red Cross downtown scheduled for 10:45. I had to get up super early this morning to make it to my appointment, but I had the first appointment and was able to get out by 9. I sprinted to the bus stop, and just caught a bus to the metro. From the metro stop downtown I power walked the eight blocks or so to the Red Cross office and made it right on time. The meeting with this guy, Court, was amazing, and reinforced my conviction that I'm getting my degree in the right field. It also really made me want to work for the Red Cross.

For those of you who are not interested in my professional ambitions, go ahead and skip this paragraph, I won't judge you, it's not terribly exciting. My primary interest is in incentivizing disaster preparedness behavior. For example, reforming insurance or zoning ordinances to prevent people from living in flood plains. It seems more efficient to get people to avoid situations where disasters are likely than to help them once disasters hit. Ultimately, though, I think doing that you run into the same problem I was reacting to when I gave up on environmentalism, which is that it's hard to get people to make those kinds of changes, to policy or behavior. It's still my primary interest, but what I heard today made me excited about the response side too.

Today, I learned about how the Red Cross responds to all different kinds of disasters, and the innovative work they're doing to improve their performance. I guess my impression of disaster response was that it's fairly routinized and there's an SOP for various kinds of emergencies, but it was clear from what Court told me that response is always evolving and getting more sophisticated and effective. Now, there aren't all that many things that I think of myself as being good at, but solving the kinds of problems they solve at the Red Cross is one of them. I don't mean to suggest that I would have had the same ideas that they've had for improving their performance, or that I would be nearly as effective, at least not at this point, but with experience, I believe that's something I would excel at. It's exciting to think that I may have really found a way to effectively improve peoples' lives doing something that I'll find stimulating and enjoyable. It makes all this saying goodbye ever so slightly less heartbreaking.