> As recently as a week ago I had to dig down. I was scheduled to do
 > a brace of three, totally new, 8-hour, geography modules. I had
 > zero prep time.  For eighteen days previous I'd not had a single
 > day off, (I was either driving or teaching,) during which I could
 > develop new material.  So overnight, for each of the three nights,
 > I memorized how to draw maps of first Brooklyn, then Queens, then
 > the Bronx, along with their several dozen streets, parks, and
 > neighbourhoods, then reproduced them the following day,
 > hand-drawn, standing at the chalk-board.  The trick is to be able
 > to lay in the features with smooth-drawn lines, and without
 > erasures. Students are usually exposed to several instructors and
 > are quick to make comparisons, are critical, and not shy about
 > verbalizing their thoughts.  Whatever you may or may not think
 > about all this, it was a personal benchmark for me that puts me
 > significantly beyond what I would have been capable of the
 > previous year.

Impressive and interesting. I have spent some time recently 
contemplating burnouts (a surprising percentage of the homeless 
population [One interesting case was a programmer who had a 
stress-induced heart-attack at 28yo]) and the metal-head culture of 
which 9 out of 10 of the few intelligent people I meet in the oilfield 
are a part. The link between them and you is the means by and degree to 
which you seem to be adapting to your current circumstances. It appears 
you are finding your niche in your new profession, but are doing so not 
by evolving (in fact, refusing to evolve) but by making only small 
adaptations to the skills you developed while engaged in other pursuits. 
I think there is a sizeable, hidden world of efficacious individuals who 
insist on defining achievement and performance in terms others would not 
understand.

 > Have not published much on the ng's but through the early to
 > middle of the year I enjoyed an extended collaboration, off-ng,
 > with another POV artist.  It gave me a certain stick-to-it-ness,
 > over an extended period, which had been lacking for a long time.

Will the results of this collaboration be "published"?

 > Fitness:
 > Bad scene, but again, the mental health is improving so that might
 > lead to improvements down the road.

The two go hand in hand, IMO. Despite the stress, danger, and long 
hours, I have never met a depressed roughneck. Almost every driller (a 
non-physical job) I have met has been depressed. I believe there's 
medicine in physical activity.

  -Shay

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