Dealing with Reality

Two things tonight: first of all, the weather. It started snowing here around the time I got back from Thanksgiving break, and since then it has both continued to snow and gotten to that kind of cold that makes you understand why someone who didn't know where shelter was would just dig a hole in the ground and die. However! There are a couple of reasons I don't mind this weather too much. First, I have been pretty busy and haven't been to the gym in a few weeks, but walking down unshoveled sidewalks wearing twenty-plus pounds of clothing seems like a pretty good workout to me. Second, one of my favorite movies of all time is The Day After Tomorrow (because I have terrible taste), and when I pretend that I have to save Jake Gyllenhaal, walking to school is kind of fun. Third, I have set myself a low bar for having a successful day: not driving into a snowbank. Still going strong there, somehow. 

Second, and this is a little more serious, one of the things that I enjoy about living in Fargo is the fact that it's really weird that I live in Fargo. You might be surprised at how far that line of reasoning has carried me. In a sense, I'm still coming to terms with the fact that living here is my life, not a punch line. But it's more than that. Because Fargo doesn't quite feel real to me, I've been letting myself worry about problems I sort of invented for myself, problems that have no real basis in reality. Having basically resolved one of these quasi-problems, I'm looking around me and realizing that I have actual problems to attend to. And they're not exactly small problems. I believe that I'm in the right field and in the right program, but I'm overwhelmed, both with the amount of material and technique I have to master, and with the work that needs to be done in Emergency Management to turn it into the field it will need to be as disasters become a more common experience. Do I want to stay in academia? Do I really want to stay in academia? Do I want to do policy work? If I do policy work will I have to work with Congress? Is there some way we can get rid of Congress so I don't have to work with them? It's unfortunate that no one has given me a roadmap, but I suppose that's life. And speaking of dealing with reality, I should probably start writing that paper that's due tomorrow... If you know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, give me a call.