Is it me in the landing picture?
Article Preface:
This was one of the first blog posts on this website, and much of it is little more than rambling. I was primarily testing the mechanics of publishing a blog post. And what better way to do that than to ramble a little about why I chose the image on the landing page to be what it is?
Is it me in the landing picture?
It is not me. The picture that I feature for the landing page of this website depicts one of my friends. So, don’t make the mistake—it is not me!
I took this picture in , atop the parking ramp in the center of the town square. I am most certainly misrememebering this moment, but one of my accompanying friends told me that the building to the right of the picture houses part of the team that worked on a video game, which I remember to be . One can glean by gazing into the blurred background that there are a few cars on a road in the distance—that is the Dallas North Tollway. Beyond that is residential sprawl.
Frisco is an exurb of , the word “exurb” being completely unknown to me before I visited; the friend of mine in the picture had relocated there for his work. Frisco, while not a particularly exciting place, nonetheless fascinated me. After having spent the last four years of my life in , a small college town that exhausts its meaning after about three miles, life in Frisco felt… important, meaningful, fast-paced, interconnected. Were there exurbs of Bloomington that I was simply missing when I lived there?
We visited my friend during the week, which meant that he was unavailable to participate in our Texas shenanigans during the day. But in the summer months, the Texan days were long, and we enjoyed plenty of sunshine still after he clocked out of his job around 5 o’clock. One night, after our dinner at the excellent, nearby burger joint , we took a sunset stroll around central Frisco. As characteristic of exurbs, the central plaza petered out quickly, but I nonetheless was enthralled by its modern and careful development. I could see myself living here, I heard myself dangerously entertaining. (It was in his gigantic apartment complex—everything’s bigger in Texas—that I found a copy of . In retrospect, it was probably this finding that initiated me into the so-called Mind-Body Problem in philosophy.)
While the walk was exciting, the view of the sunset drew me into an evaluation of my life, as sunsets typically do: Where am I going? And is this the trajectory upon which I wish to tread? In less than about two months time, I would ship myself off to (Nanjing City, People’s Republic of China), because I was obsessed with learning Mandarin at the time. The plan was already set in stone. But staring into that sunset with my friends stirred up an agitation within me. The Frisco Agitation.
At some point during this trip, my friend and I took a 100mph-trip down the highway that bisects the city of Dallas at dusk, accompanied by . Along the highway, we zipped past a glassy and pristine Toyota corporate office building. It was a modern, reflective, advanced campus that sat undeterred in the center of Texas. The agitation arose again.
After about one year following this trip, involving my travel to and tumultous return home from China (due to the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, which I might describe in another post later), I looked online for career opportunties at the Toyota base in ; maybe they could use a recent graduate of astronomy/astrophysics. After all, I was well-versed in Python, analytical and thoughtful in analysis, as required of someone in the field of astronomy, and willing to learn and expand my skillset.
I found a single position—it looked like a wonderful fit for me! “Data Science Analyst.” Sure, it wasn’t a particularly scientific role, and if I’d have to malleate my scientific skills to fit their keyholds I would do so. But if it provided me an opportunity to escape my present life, the devastating memories of my time in Bloomington, ghostly and echoic memories of Minneapolis, to live with one of my good friends in a new place that we could explore all by ourselves, to start anew, devoid of expectation, to cruise down I-35E in the middle of Dallas at high velocities while blasting , then I would pack up my few belongings and settle down in the enigmatic exurb of Frisco. I applied on 2020/06/30.
On 2020/10/05, they rejected my application.
Notes/References
Updates:
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