Oh so familiar...

I've been in the States for 11 days now. I leave in five more. The first couple days back felt awfully surreal. Riding the L through Chicago, hearing the CTA announcements on the speakers, seeing the city bounce past me on the less-than-perfect red and brown line rails... it almost felt like watching a movie I knew well but hadn't seen in a long time. It didn't quite feel I was actually there. The most instantly obvious difference was the ambiance of being surrounded by native English speakers and the signage and advertising aimed at them (us). It all normalized quickly after meeting with more and more friends and seeing the familiar places of my not-so-distant past.

I got to visit a truly wonderful number of people, and will visit a couple more still.

Last night we went to Goshen to see a performance by Garrison Keillor. It was everything you'd hope it would be. The show started with the audience, well accustomed to his styling of Lake Wobegon, waiting breathlessly for the cue that he had begun being funny. The first few laughs were hopeful more than earnest. Normally the performer needs to warm up and relax for the show to be enjoyable. This time, it wasn't until the audience relaxed a few minutes in that we found a more natural cadence at which to laugh. You could almost hear the expectation in the pre-laugh silence - "The next line will be a good one, I'm sure of it!" His mammoth reputation preceded him, and it took a short time for the audience to get over their giddiness to truly enjoy the show. Keillor closed by saying that what our country/the world needs now is gratitude. "Gratitude is the cure." And to choose to be cheerful. Not happy (because who really knows what that means), but cheerful.

I don't know what to try to process next. So many different strains of thought have positively flown through my head during the intermittent quiet moments of this trip - thoughts of the future, the past, Midwestern sensibility and humor, motivation, biking, sickness and death... everything really. I can only hope that some portion of the ideas I'd like to mull around come back so I can spend some proper time with them and get them down on paper.

Turn the Page

No, I haven't started a new phase of my life since the post-biking phase. I'm still post-biking. "Turn the Page" is simply referring to Bob Seger's song, because I'm on the road again. But this time I'm killing the atmosphere in the process (with my car). Eh. Whatever. I think there are about 2100 miles of solo driving planned between this past Thursday (when I came out here) up through September 22nd, when I should be arriving back in Archbold from Columbus, Ohio.

I have not been quite as proactive as perhaps I ought to in the job search. So far, I have only applied for maybe 6 or 7 jobs, with only a few more lined up in CareerBuilder that I plan to apply for. I spent much more time exploring graduate programs online. The future that currently looks fun is to work 1 - 4 years, and then study to get a Ph.D. (Ph.D. is cheaper than a Master's, and only takes a few years longer). Where? I don't know. In what? Right now I'm thinking Neural Engineering.

You may wonder, what is that? Well, it's studying the brain to figure out how to plug various machines into it - robotic arms and legs for amputees, small circuits that can simply bypass a damaged segment of nerve to keep the electric signals travelling between the brain and the limb that is on the other side of that damaged nerve, and so on. An example of an electronic prosthesis that is already available is the cochlear implant. Basically, a few signal processors are implanted into the cochlea (the part of the inner ear that translate sound vibrations into electrical signals to send to the brain) while a hearing aid is worn behind the ear. Though each implant can only process a narrow frequency range, they can now put enough in that it give very nearly ability to sense the standard frequency range, quite literally giving hearing to the deaf (my grandma got this 5 or 6 years ago; it does work).

I'm not actually as interested in the cochlear implants, but that's what is actually commercially available now. Also in the works are mechanized arms and legs, and even an optical implant (though right now they have only brought that up to being a 4x4 pixel sensor, giving a total of 16 pixels of sight, which would barely help in sensing movement). The optical implant is some distance from implentation I think. But all this is getting there and terribly exciting.

So, Biomedical Engineering, here I come. The deaf will hear, the blind will see, and the lame will walk (and even have fully functioning robotic hands). It's the new Jesus major. (Can I actually say that?). There are many sub-areas of research related to this, some more engineering, some more physiology, some more materials science, but all of it is interdisciplinary and quite fascinating. I guess I will be taking some biology after all. But for now, to continue making supper and enjoy the rest of my visit to Syracuse, etc.