♦ That was fascinating, watching Apollo 13, after having been obsessed with rocket science and space, for a half a year. Back during Christmas holidays, when I watched that movie first, I got this idea... I got the idea that I could be an aerospace engineer. I thought about it a lot, and googled it A LOT, and came to the conclusion that this was an ideal solution to my problem of not knowing what i wanted to do for a career. There was one small glitch, that was that i would have to move away from here and go somewhere -- farther east in canada (away from the ocean, probably to a big city) or even to some ugly place in the US.
Little by little, i realized that what i was interested in (orbital mechanics and stuff, applying Newton's laws to take advantage of the forces that are already there to reduce the amount of fuel you have to use...) just so happened to be the hardest type of aerospace engineering. Great... I didn't want to be in the hardest type of aerospace engineering, which is one of the hardest types of engineering, which is one of the hardest professions. Heck, i'm not that smart. I actually had to study to get my over-90% average in high school.
Nevertheless, I kept reading about it because i found it fascinating and basically couldn't think of anything else i wanted to do. I had a plan: if i did aerospace engineering in university and didn't like it, i could use it for my undergraduate degree to get into med school. The thing was, that I was interested by the actual subject but not by actually being a rocket scientist, per say. That surprised me because it is usually the other way around for things like that -- It would be nice to be a doctor but i'm not all that crazy about their work. (Doing pap smear's all day doesn't remotely interest me.) It would just be a well paying, respectable job, and I could stay here in BC if i wanted to or i could move somewhere else.
A few days ago, i found something I actually wanted to do (YAY go me, although I was a bit of a moron to not have thought of it sooner.) and that was going to have more job opportunities in the future, as opposed to aerospace engineering which will probably always be trying to recreate the glory (American, no less) of the first man on the moon in 1969. (One thing about trying to recreate the glory of something else, is that it never works. A word of advice: create your own glory.)
So, the day before yesterday (a couple days after I decided what I wanted to do) I realized that my laptop had a DVD player, and since i couldn't find in the house, a dvd that i hadn't watched before and that i wanted to watch, I decided to watch Apollo 13. I figured it would be fascinating to watch it now that I had gone through this obsession. And it was. I watched it in my room when everyone else was asleep, and was initially planning to watch only part of it but watched it all, rewound the part "We just put Newton in the driver's seat." because it was so awesome. Understood basically what they were talking about when they were saying that last burn created too much delta-v. I dunno, it just was amazing watching it again with more insight (I also knew stuff about the cold war from history class.) and it sort of marked the ending of that obsession more concretely. It's now an obsession but more of "I plan to follow the space program." rather than "I plan to be part of the space program."
I then quietly put away the laptop and DVD, and was just about to go to bed (I'm not used to staying up till 2 am) when I caught sight of a perfect night for stargazing... thus I opened the window and spent several minutes leaning on the window ledge and feeling undoubtedly serene.
PS: I was looking back at my Writings because i was planning on deleting that stupid fountainhead essay (the epitome of mediocrity, presuming that phrase means that it was very mediocre.) when I noticed that it was about the difference between practical and moral success. That can relate to my life, true? Being a doctor would be practical success, and being an unemployed aerospace engineer would be moral success. Well except for the fact that now since i made my decision i am less interested in rocket science. Or maybe that;s just my mood today.