Rethinking

I've been considering, lately, my choice of vocation. I'm not making any changes to my major just yet, but I have trouble considering a whole mess of similarities I have with this ball of predominately slow moving silica and oxygen. While I understand that geology is a science preoccupied by the past, I sometimes wonder at its effectiveness in understanding myself and others, as is the goal of any science or art when the stuffy academics drop the pretense. So, here am I, rethinking life choices based on not much at all.

While men and women the world over find little parts of themselves in their jobs, great or small, I plan on going into a field that pretty much negates the worth of a person's miniscule time of inhabitation of the rock. While we have destroyed and repaired ecological left and right in the last few centuries, no man has ever fought terrus and won. Sure, there was some ingenious and frantic redirecting of lava flows in the last few decades, but even that is nothing more than dodging a half-assed eruption of slow, felsic lava.

When I lived in Hawaii, I saw a lava flow. As we sat and watched it encroach in small foot wide transgressions, the fauna that didn't burst into flames due to proximity of the silica melt was simply covered, forever and ever, by the impartial flow of new rock. Trees would stick out of the lava for awhile, a sick spectacle of melodramatic, teenage need to be accounted and acknowledged before the slow death of burning. The tree fought the crushing wait of the lava until its heat weakened stem buckled slowly, sinking into the red-hot mire. Not even the dignity of a quick snap or tragic holocaust was given to the pitiful pest in the way of the advance of the Earth.

See, life has been around for only a brief time, and even then, the massive variety of flora and fauna available to study at this point is even more recent. I think this lends it a gravitas in a way. The quick explosion against all odds and whatnot. Maybe I'm going into the wrong field.

I wonder if littoral biology should be my focus. Possessed of a voracious appetite and libidinous to a fault, I share primary motivations with many animalia available for study in warm, shallow water.

Getting wet and dirty in the compulsive search for good food and good copulation suits me.