#mini existential crisis

[kind-sober-fullydressed]

holy shit u guys it’s officially my last day as a teenager

[diaphanouswings]

31 and Horrified

I had what we call in the office “a moment”. So here’s the thing... I’m a Learning Coordinator/former Admin Asst (don’t ask) and I see a lot of people’s DOBs because reasons, excel data sheets are the devil... ANYWAY!

So it’s basically a sign-in sheet for a class we offer to EMS and others about strokes. So I see birthdays, including year. And you know, it goes month/day/year, 00/00/00 format. It’s the US, we do things weirdly. Sometimes people put bullshit birthday dates or accidentally put the current year instead. Like, Bob, no, you were not born in ‘17 unless it was 1917, in which being a Paramedic at 101 years is pretty badass. It’s okay, people can be dumb, no shame in it. I get a good giggle.

So today I’m going over one such excel spreadsheet when I pump the breaks. Freeze, this birthdate looks weird! Red alert! I squint at it, they put the year as 00. Hold up, you cannot have been born 1900, pal.

And then I think about it... This is a sign-in sheet for a class that took place at a Career and Tech Center, it’s a school and homie put that they were a Paramedic student. The year today is 2019. IT IS 2019! WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

I could have died. They were born 2000. They’re 18! They’re a BABY!! A baby EMT learning how to be a Paramedic! Omfg, I had a mini existential crisis. And my coworker just looked at me like I was crazy because our department manages a Paramedic School so we have 18/19 year olds running in and out all the time. But this just punched me in the face.

So I had a moment where I was Jamie Lee Curtis is Freaky Friday exclaiming that I was like the Crypt Keeper! And I let out a little wail of despair to accompany it. My coworker, who is a year older than me, just pat my back and handed me a piece of chocolate for comfort.

The chocolate, for once, did not help.

[daughteroffreyy]

Oh shit

I'm closer to 25 than 12

[korfury]

How I like my coffee is a reflection of my life. Black and bitter.

[taiadominique]

Am I Having A Mid-Life Crisis (Before I Hit 20)?

Boredom: a surefire way to have a mini and diluted existential crisis.

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[azulinos]

Those two seconds of pure agony when you wonder if the world today is amazingly smart or hilariously stupid

[callstheadventurescience]

I met with Kate Mansfield yesterday. She’s awesome, as is her work, and the presentation she later gave was interesting.

I asked her a bit about the ((very tiny)) community of sea turtle researchers, and how often times I see academics write off sea turtles as nothing more than just charismatic megafauna and that this quality is the only reason people study them.

I’m very conflicted right now. I love sea turtles, love the work that goes into them, how much we still do not know about them, but I don’t want to be solely a sea turtle biologist. I am an evolutionary biologist at heart. If I could use sea turtles as my study system, that’d be awesome. But I don’t see academic institutions wanting to fund that, and I don’t think I’d want a govt or industry job (if I could even find one). So I feel a little bit cast afloat right now. I’m doing a lot of work with sea turtles, I wrote my GRFP proposal on it, and profs associate me with sea turtles. But I want to be an evolutionary biologist, trained as such. But now I’m more confused and without direction than ever. Sometimes I wish that I had attached myself to a bigger clade of animals...like bats or fish or something, so that the possibilities of study were seemingly more endless. Idk. I’m actually quite down about this. I thought I had found my niche. But all along I had a nagging feeling that no, this isn’t going to last, this isn’t going to be enough. Sigh. I need a few beers and to talk with Dr. B about this.