This is a tumblelog, kinda like a blog but with short-form, mixed-media posts with stuff I like. Scroll down a bit to start reading, or a bit more to read more about me.
grateful for: empty roads, Derby hats, mint juleps drizzled with powdered sugar, a Chesapeake sunset, sandy feet, handmade sea glass necklaces, laughing under that big moon, sun-warmed strawberries by the quart, bunk beds, sweet tea, peel n’ eat shrimp, wet Labradors, midnight scanoeing, hazy afternoons, sun-burnt cheeks, a fifth birthday celebration with Krissy Bohrman. All that has become this life.
I dare say that this is the single most important idea of our time.
After considerable stress, waiting, and worrying, Ilene and I are at last moved into to our new apartment in Orlando. And let me tell you, dear reader, moving has handily earned its place at the top of the list of things I loathe the most. But it’s another obstacle overcome. Now on to worrying about a job…
Such a strange feeling, not going back to class come the end of August. I think it’s made all the more strange by the fact that I live in a completely new area now. No friends. No one that I’m familiar with. But, therein lies the beauty. We moved out here for a fresh start, so that’s what we’ve got. And I’ll take it.
My mind has been churning with ideas lately. Free time will do that to you I suppose. I’m trying to brush up my writing skills and get some good stories hashed out. They’ll be quite rough around the edges, but I’m confident I will get where I want to be. As always, I like to compare myself to a gerbil with ADD on speed when it comes to being able to focus and actually accomplish anything lately. But we’re getting there.
I’m going to do my best to not make this little blog Narcissism 2.0. I have quite a lot on my mind, and I intend to explore much of it on here. Especially politics, science, and philosophy. You know, generally the things most people my age don’t care about.
CRJ-200 Sim. My life the past 2 months.
Two days after finishing a long and drawn out struggle to complete my last ever class as a college student, life is in flux once more. I feel armed and accomplished after completing the Crew Resource Management class. It was mental and emotional struggle, staying with it, hanging in there, through the studying all day and every day for almost a month straight. But it is done, and that is all that matters.
Now, I’ll be returning to Stone Harbor tomorrow, the place that defined my childhood summer days. After 7 months straight of the grind of school, work, and flight training, this is just what I need. To see my family and friends again will be perfect. It will only be for a week, but perfect anyway. Ilene will head home to Tampa to see her family, while I’m away. It will be a chance for us to both recharge our depleted morale, and shake off the stale routine that we’ve been living with for the past few months. Her and I are so alike when it comes to that; we always like a fresh setting and a new place to go.
The changes will really start once we get back from our vacations. We’ll be looking for a new place to stay together, and I’ll be looking for flight schools to start my flight instructor training (which I have been putting off for far too long). Some uncertainties are still hanging in the air, but in keeping with my outlook on things, why worry about that which is out of our hands? We can only do what we can, to influence our lives. I used to curse fate and chance when it didn’t go in my favor. But now, to me, fate and chance are always in your favor, as long as you never lose hope. Do what you can do direct your life, but the lamentation of making choices should be no lamentation at all. Chose to embrace the uncertainty, the upheaval, the newness.
That churning in your stomach you feel when you go to sleep at night in the face of uncertainties, look it it in a different light. Embrace it. You may not always have a choice over how things turn out, but you do have a choice over how it affects you and how you feel. It’s not easy sometimes, maybe most times, and it takes real courage to face failure and rejection. But I firmly believe we all have it in us to take even the most terrible situations and prevent them from defining us. And sometimes, it takes good friends to help you see it.
So here’s to the future, whatever it may be! I’ll be smiling all the way to and from Stone Harbor, excited to meet head-on what comes next.
“What does your conscience say? — ‘You should become the person you are’.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Scott Edward Parazynski, M.D. (b. July 28, 1961 in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. He is the only person to have both flown in space and summited Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.
Parazynski attended junior high school in Dakar, Senegal, and Beirut, Lebanon. He attended high school at the Tehran American School, Iran, and the American Community School, Athens, Greece, graduating in 1979. He received a Bachelor of science degree in biology from Stanford University in 1983, continuing on to graduate with honors from Stanford Medical School in 1989. He served his medical internship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School (1990). He had completed 22 months of a residency program in emergency medicine in Denver, Colorado when selected for the NASA Astronaut Corps.
He became only the second NASA astronaut to perform four spacewalks during a single shuttle mission.
The ability to breath. Whew, how it easy it is to forget what it feels like to not be held to a schedule, to not have somewhere to be, to do things spontaneously. Even trivial things seem exciting, new, and invigorating. Invigorated. An appropriate word for the moment. And the choke hold that was my spring semester is loosening. The breaths are easier to take now. No tightness, no worry. Just the wide open promise of days with nowhere to be. It won’t be for long, but this little reprieve from the hell of finals week to the exaltation that follows graduation is just what my sanity needed. Oh the sweet joy of unscheduled days.
P-51 Mustang. Purely sublime aircraft, and the plane I want so desperately want to fly.
