The five of us dwell in a small office, living amongst stacks of hundred year old + archival material, file cabinets, dated furniture, some paintings of explorers, lots of old monochrome photographs. We share the space with the largest known finished (polished) piece of petrified redwood (800lbs) and a brick from the Wall of China, lots of maps and a few globes. The places has an old parchment smell to it. It's not stuffy. Actually very relaxing. If you stumbled into the office you'd think we all lived in a time capsule. Even the secretary looks like he came out of a late 70s heist movie. (elbow pads on the suit.)
To my surprise, I was given a corner office with a view. I was expecting a table or a cubicle. Not bad for a job I have to pay for. The view is to the south east overlooking FDR Drive and the East River. At the moment the view is blocked by a temporary enclosure for construction of a floating extension of the south street sea port. The City is looking to make downtown Manhattan more residential and plans on having a floating boardwalk, recreation area that would appeal to property owners down here. As for the construction it is a bit noisy as they drive pilings into the East River bed. I had to purchase earplugs as I started to get a headache the second day of working. They definitely worked but then I couldn't listen to music (another nice perk.) So tomorrow the David Clarks are going with me (my passive noise attenuation aviation headset.) They have great bass and are good in 93dB cockpits so this should work well with the new tablet.
The actual work I do is a mixed bag. Currently we're updating our Op-Ed email lists and I have to tediously hunt for the less than obvious location of these addresses on online news sites. At the same time I've been reading as much material I can stand to look at. Read a few Op-Ed articles by our webmaster who's a prof. at Western Kentucky U and some from a UC Berkeley grad student. The former was one the geography of happiness or if we can find places on the planet were people are the happiest and vice versa. Turns out the happiest place to be based on the author's findings and travels was (shit I can't remember.) The saddest place was Moldova in the former Soviet Union. Go figure. The later op-ed was on the forgiveness of genocide in East Timor as a means to move forward to rekindle public relations between East Timor and Indonesia.
My goal is to get my own op-ed published in the next few weeks. Just need to decided on a topic. Perhaps something on the dwindling infrastructure in America and lack of efficient urban planning.
Aside from the op-eds, I'm also in search of potential employers who would be interested in using our job board, Geojobs.org. So far I've come across two NJ based aerial survey firms. We're looking for cartography, land survey, statistical, engineering and construction and a slew of other traits. That's pretty much my day besides the rat race of a commute I have from Hackettstown, NJ to Jersey City to catch the PATH train into the World Trade Center then either catch the 2 or 3 from Chambers st. to Wall. I only have to get up at 0530 in the AM to be at work by 0900 but because of congestion that can mean arrival times of as late as 10am. It's not anything that I can't handle. I used to commute an hour on a honda cub to my internship in Hanoi through a river of other motorcycles and blue two-stroke exhaust. Only problem is the cost. It's almost $40 a day just for transport. I'm considering taking a bus from near home that will drive me right into Wall St. at something like $100 per week at the sacrifice of not being able to explore the city after work.
In a couple of weeks I will be working with Prof. "Fritz" Nelson who is a physical, polar, cartography and methods geographer from University of Delaware on the preparation for the centennial to the 1912 Transcontinental Excursion. 98 years ago a group of American and European geographers, naturalists, scientists and writers went on a 13,000mile trip using whatever means they could to go around the continental U.S. We're working to try and get a commemorative excursion organized for 2012. 13,000miles or at least trying to recreate the same trip as close as we can using rail, street car, automobiles and even horses. We're looking to complete the excursion over the period of 5 weeks instead of the original 3 months. We would like to encourage anyone who may be interested. You needn't be a geographer or academic to participate but you need to pay. The trip will include traveling geographers who will give lectures and anything and nearly everything. As well as the 2012 excursion, AGS also has a number of spring and summer expeditions: Africa by Private Jet, South Asia and South East Asia can be found on our website at amergeog.org. (I'm not going on any of these sponsored trips as the cost for a seat is something in the ball park of $35,000USD. My guess is the trips will most likely have university faculty conducting research and rich old people who have nothing better to do.
I'll continue to try to keep things interesting here as I ponder the "why of where."
Here's a quote from Dr. Peter Mires, U Delaware Geog. Department taken from his op-ed "Happy to Be Here."
-"Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude."
Welcome to my office.
