Practice this morning left me happy with my boat, but pissed off at Coach DI. (I
know, I know, what else is new?) I keep thinking of something Andy Rooney once
said: that when he broke his collarbone, he knew something about it that the
doctor who treated him, no matter how good, will never know until he breaks his
own collarbone. That analogy applies especially well to a boat like ours, where
we've begun to come together as a team. We're starting to know what each of our
quirks are, and what works well for us as a team -- which isn't always what DI
thinks will work for us.
Also, as Pigtails pointed out, his inconsistency makes him difficult to deal with.
One minute he's joking with us, the next he's telling us to stop talking because
our chatter is becoming unbearable for him and thus must be annoying others in our
crew. The way she put it was, "It's like having an alcoholic
parent."
I need to give K. a nom here. She's the token non-lightweight in our four. She's
four inches taller than Egret, the next tallest woman in the boat (which makes her
7 inches taller than me), and a good twenty pounds heavier than the rest of us, so
I'm leaning toward She-Hulk. That's not meant as an insult; if you've ever seen a
comic featuring Marvel's She-Hulk character, you know that she's a total babe
(though green). We love having K in the boat; she pulls hard, has a great
attitude, and doesn't throw off our set. The clearest indication of how hard she
works is that she is the only one of the larger women whose body has
changed significantly since she started rowing. Her rowing style has improved
immensely over the past year or so, too.
Back off the water, I am worried about the job thing, or rather the lack thereof.
Though I have financial reserves to last through March, I need to start making
plans now. If I don't have something within the next month or two, I think it may
finally be time to go back to school and learn to do something new. The most
obvious choices are to get an MIS or MBA, which would make it easier for me to
stay in software, but convince someone to give me a management job. On the other
hand, it's not like there aren't tons of both out there already. Another idea
would be to go restart that Linguistics MA I bailed out on when I took my last
job, and maybe go for the PhD. I would enjoy the period of schooling immensely, in
that case, but I don't know what I'd do afterward. It's the ideal solution if my
goal is to learn, but the worst one if the goal is to get a job. I'd like to
balance those two, really.
Two more far-out options are to go to school for either architecture or law.
They're interesting fields, though my primary interests aren't in the more
lucrative end of either (as an architect, I'd want to design houses, not big
public buildings; as a lawyer, I'd probably want to study constitutional law). But
that's ok. My engineering background would be a plus for architecture, and maybe
for law, if I decided to become a patent lawyer instead. I'm not sure whether they
all have to live in DC, though.
If anybody has other brilliant ideas,
I'm open for suggestions. I've got some writing projects going, too, but I'm not
naive enough to think of living on those.