Brown Noddies on Midway Atoll's Eastern Island. I do miss that place...
There are benefits to my lifestyle, you know. I have no real obligations, can go wherever I can afford, and can more or less can be paid to travel. I feel fortunate that I (usually) like my job, get to see and make new friends everywhere, both avian and human. One of the smaller benefits is that I get really good at applying at jobs....well, let me rephrase that. I do it so much that I'm kind of flippant when I do it, so it's not a big deal. I had a phone interview yesterday and I actually enjoyed it. Weird.
Right. Being a nomadic bird biologist, in terms of employment, is a good thing. I've applied to seven (7) jobs in the last month, and it will be eight (8) by the end of today. Not many people are lucky enough to have those kinds of opportunities out there.
Of course, there are downsides. I have no health insurance, am unemployed (this is mostly a good thing though), will never make a large income, am usually away from my loved ones (this will change shortly though), and its damn hard to have any kind of normal stable relationship with any particular lady. Having a room can be nice too, although I am adapting to life out of the Honda. It's definitely turning into a hermit crab situation (I'm the crab, the car is my shell, obvi), although I have yet to decorate it with anenomes. Kudos if you got that joke.
Today's wisdom comes from Dr. Greg Graffin, UCLA professor and singer of Bad Religion, enjoy.
The "come join us" attitude that seeks to attract followers, usually results in a rabble of weak people who think that their power lies in the large numbers of like-minded clones they have compiled. There is no strength in numbers however, if the people are glued together by a short-sighted, self-serving, fear-induced mantra that promotes factions and exclusionary principles.
Strong ideologies don't require a mob, they persist through time, and never go away, because they are intimately connected to our biology. They are part of what it means to exist as Homo sapiens. Punk typifies that tradition. It is a movement of epic proportions, that transcends the immediacy of the here-and- now, because it is, was, and always will be there-and-forever, as long as humans walk the earth.
Want some silly yet serious advise?
ReplyDeleteNo?
Well, too late:
Choose temporary jobs where you will not only monitor/count animals but where you will gain experience in the impact assessment sector, get some serious expertise regarding nature conservation laws and then...
...apply at a big bad international company, like Exxon or some Mountain Top removal bastard company as an environmental advisor / biodiversity manager.
I am serious! They will pay you very well and you can actually do a lot of good (conservation-wise) by being a sheep in wolf's clothing. We not only need dedicated and experienced wildlife managers in NGOs, we need to infiltrate the industry as well.
And as i said: they're often paying very well.
But do that only after you got yourself a job monitoring auks on the Aleutian islands.