The Hole in My Geographic Heart

Within a year, Arnold Schwarchenegger (how the hell do you spell that?) will be my governor, I will be required by some unwritten law to NOT stop at stop signs, and I will start to have to act cold when it is 65 degrees out. That is just the way that we roll here.

You see, I hadn't planned on becoming a resident of this state. I had, in fact, planned NOT to, and thought that holding on to my Washington residency would help me to retain some shard of sanity in this insance graduate school world that I find myself in. I even thought, not a little naively, that they would just be waiving my out of state tuition for the entire time that I opted to be here. Alas, that was not the case. So, to save myself somewhere around $25,000 next year, I put my time in at the DMV, read the book about driving in California (am I the only one, though? There was a big stack of them, but nobody else seems to have read the thing...), worked my way through various interviews with terribly disgruntled DMV beauracrats, and passed my test with flying colors (well, I did get wrong the question about how much jail time you get for driving drunk here).

And then, as if to spite me AND after happily jumping through all of their hoops, they took my Washington license, and punched a big hole in the thing. They didn't even say sorry, or pause in quiet reflection, or give me any kind of knowing glance. The guy just took it, desecrated it, and handed it back. How am I supposed to recover from that?

Of course, the bigger question is, How did something as banal as a drivers license take on so much meaning in my life? I will allow you to ponder that one...

Phase two of divorcing myself from the great state of Washington was applying to become a voter here. That went smoothly, but it just so happened that I had already recieved my ballot for the Nov elections in Washington - including some juicy local elections. So the process of voting in my last Clallam County election for at least some years ALSO took on a note of sentimentality completely out of porportion with the nature of the task. I absolutely pored over the voters pamphlet, enjoying knowing the history of the issues and even some of the people on the ballot. I took hours to work through the thing...it was a pleasure I will miss...

So these are the on-going dramas of my attempt to build a new life "in the sciences". Its not pretty, this process I am in. But I bravely soldier on. What else can one do, really?

- Ian