The Future - Or More Accurately, Thinking Too Much

School is right around the corner, as much as it pains me to write that. YES summer school is great, and I love teaching there, but since it's culmination directly correlates with a week of vacation followed by a week of professional development and then school starts, it is basically like school starts tomorrow. Or something.

Anyway, a bi-product of my rapidly depleting summer is an intense focus on what I will be doing *next* summer. I already have grandiose ideas about traveling the world, or more accurately (yea it's the second time I've used that now) going to some far-away land and staying there all summer, there are other options and perhaps other necessities.

Here are the thoughts running around, pellmell through my brain.

• I could go teach at YES prep next year. This would be a minimum 2 year commitment. It would keep me in Houston. It would be an awesome teaching environment. I would be 27 when I could forseeably leave. I would continue to get summers off. Do I really want to stay in Houston for 2 more years? Is 4 years away from engineering too much? Which leads to...
• I could go work at some engineering company. I could go anywhere to do this. There are some social activist type companies out on the west coast that make products specifically to combat injustice (like clean drinking water), and that would be cool. I could go to Seattle (which I love) and work for Boeing. But do I really want a corporate job again? Would my conscious let me go? I think I'd feel like I was selling out.
• I could go to grad school for engineering. I think it would be great to be a professor, and always be learning and teaching in a subject that I like. I also like school, and am good at it. I always felt vaguely impatient at school though, as if I was waiting for real-life to start. Whatever.
• I could go teach somewhere else entirely. I love the concept of the Big Picture company. That would be a 4 year commitment. I could go all over with those schools; they have schools in Detroit or Chicago or Portland or Denver. All of those would have benefits.

I was talking with a friend of mine today on the phone. She was telling me that I just need to figure out what I love and do that. I said I didn't feel like I was serving anybody if I did engineering or something like that. Her response was that if you don't love what you are doing you can't serve anybody anyway.

I think this is an interesting point. I am not sure if I love teaching. I am sure that I did not love corporate engineering. I could love teaching at YES prep. Who knows.

I guess the thing to do is to go sit on the beach and rock climb and run and swim and watch movies and cook great meals because those are the things I love doing.