Implications of Death Comes for the Archbishop

Yet another dud of a book (I'm really in dire straits for a good novel!). Willa Cather writes well, but this book read like The Hobbit: a series of adventures with little character development. The book is about a bishop and his vicar establishing a proper Catholic diocese in recently-acquired New Mexico, but I had trouble distinguishing between the main characters throughout the story!

There was one thought-provoking quote:

To fulfill the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

When I first read this, I didn't remember the dreams of my youth, but I do now. When I was 5 years old, I decided (with the coercion of my mother) to become a neurosurgeon. The closest I got was working as a technician in a neuroscience lab after college. The experience made me believe that I should never settle for just a "job", but to find something that engaged me intellectually.

I still believe this, which is probably why I still have trouble figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. The search has been complicated with the arrival of Nikita: my job must be good enough to make me leave my son. Making money is not enough.

I do know a few things:

• I like to write/edit, and appear to be good at it.
• My preferred target audience is academics, or at least college graduates.
• My ideal work environment is a coffeehouse, but a desk by a window comes pretty darn close. The window I have at my cubicle is the only saving grace of working in Sudbury - well, in addition to Sudbury Farms, a fantastic grocery store.

Doesn't leave me with many options, does it?

One of the few jobs that has intrigued me in talking with people over the past few months was that of a grant writing consultant. I relish the opportunity of bringing together researchers from different disciplines to write a grant. Ilana, however, wonders how much I would really get to do this, and doesn't think I would enjoy the actual process of grant writing because I don't have the level of duplicity and fiction that grant writing demands.

She may be right. When we were in college, I would always ask her whether something really occurred the way she was telling a story, and she would always confess that no, it didn't, but that her version sounded a lot better. Perhaps this explains why she is an academic, and I am not!