I spoke with 8 different people in my 4 hours of visits on Friday. They asked many of the same questions.
I hate answering the same question the same way twice, even if it is to different people. I refuse to reuse witticisms, even if there is no possible chance that the two audiences will ever out me. I feel like that’s the sort of thing that contrived, fraudulent people do – stockpile canned replies and regurgitate them whenever they are needed. Ever watch a presidential debate?
That’s not to say that I don’t recall facts similarly, after all, the truth is as it is. I just don’t like presenting it the same way twice. As you can imagine, after answering “why are you doing this?” 6 times, I started to run out of ways to phrase it.
When this happens, I tend to get exasperated and increasingly catty. I managed to forestall this tendency on Friday, thankfully. What I came up with might have been the best answer to the question, all told.
It was something along the lines of, “I have continued to train myself in things that I like to do – the physics, the applied math – these are things that I am interested in. This is why I didn’t study software engineering even though it was more useful for work. As I see it, you keep doing what you want to do, and eventually you have stockpiled the sort of skills that you can use to do something that you would be happy doing for the rest of your life. I think this fuses my skills and interests better than anything else.”
I wish that I had said what I thought of in the car on the way back from Lewisburg this afternoon. It might not surprise people that I spend my car rides re-evaluating notable conversations and exchanges that happen throughout the day, mostly criticizing myself, even constructively occasionally.
I decided that an analogy worked, also unsurprisingly. When I run in the woods, I make similar decisions. The choices I make (typically I make the loop longer whenever possible) lead me in the directions that I go. They are not entirely deterministic, but they have a probability distribution associated with them – that is (id est) I am more likely to make some decisions over others. These tendencies guide me down paths that lead me to where I, in particular, want to be. In fact, I am so predictable in those decisions that when I play the “decide which way someone like me would go in this situation and then do the opposite” game while running, sometimes I find new trails in the same woods that I have run in a hundred times.
The point is my path is determined by my natural inclinations. Just as the way that I am guides my feet when I run, the way that I am will lead me through life. Why am I the way that I am? Because.
Words 
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