Bend in the river

I have finally made the move to my first proper job in what they say is the real world, joining the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago as an Assistant Professor. The better part of last year was interesting, with a lot of words being entered in word documents and a lot of pdfs being created, with a lot of flying to places I had never been and meeting a lot of people whom I would perhaps not have met had it not being for the fact that they liked those pdfs which I had spent all that time creating. And upshot of it all, of all the flying and of all the meetings and of all the talks and seminars, of all those times which I spent in transit cities wondering if the inclement American winter weather would give me a break long enough for me to make my next flight, is that I have finally ended up in the quintessential American city of Chicago. It's only been a few days here but we all know how important first impressions area and mine have been really nice. But we have also been told not to judge a book by its covers so I will not. I will judge only when I have read her first few pages at least.

However, San Diego is a book which I have read from end to end, several times. I have spent the last eight years poring over its many ink blots and many purple passages. I have come to recognize the musty smell of its dusty Western hardbound and  its pages have turned dogeared between my fingers. I am intimately charmed by its yellowness and I remember its content from its page numbers. San Diego is a book that I can judge, perhaps not to the extent that some people can but more than a lot because of the time that I spent and the people that I came to know there. San Diego is a curious city. I honestly believe that if you live there, there can pretty much be no justification for being unhappy. It exists peacefully in that goldilocks zone of warm contentment which can provide you with surprisingly more than you expect from a city like it. Of course there are always bright young things who are mesmerized by the shiny facade of other places but I have come to take their hopes of happiness with a pinch of salt and a passing chuckle.  San Diego effortlessly provides diversity in demographics, eclecticism in arts, a vibrant outdoor culture, near-perfect weather, and the opportunity to lounge about on the beaches of the mighty Pacific every day. There are great things that one can do in places like New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles, feeding off of the energy and creativity of the teeming milieu. One so inclined can probably write great novels and create great music at these places, inspired by their sharp edges. However, it probably is much easier to be happy in San Diego and that really is the argument to end all arguments.

In addition to landing in the perfect city for PhD I also had the great fortune of knowing some truly interesting and intelligent people there who have wittingly or unwittingly molded the rough draft of the personality that I began with in the US. Through my experience of knowing them I have come to appreciate a certain kind of person, one whose particulars cannot be stated but whose essence can be. They have substance to share and possess a certain depth of thought and view. They are about more than the next hot hangout or the next great financial investment. I have enjoyed the company of such people in San Diego and learned from them. So much so that I have no doubt that the years that I spent in San Diego have been the best years of my life, and the most formative ones. I look back at the company of those people with a genuine sense of gratitude, for having contributed to the exciting exchange which shapes personalities, to the invisible and complex hands of human interaction.