Now that I’m deep into the second half of my career life and it’s crystal clear that I’m never gonna be much more than an all-star paper pusher / major-league bureaucrat, I often think about what could have been. When I was young and in college, I had a pretty good mind I’ll have you know, sonny boy. I pulled down a 3.89 GPA, which might have been a 3.91 if I hadn’t got caught in a senior year feud between a prof. and the department head. Thus, I wonder if things would have been more challenging and more rewarding had I gone the ivory tower route. When I was young, I wanted to stay out of the protected environs of academia and get out there into the real world. Academians seemed like a bunch of wooses. But in doing so, I found out that real world people consider guys like me to be wonderful candidates for paper-pushing bureaucrats. In other words, I couldn’t escape woosdom. But hey, somebody’s gotta dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s while the policy guys and the movers and shakers get all the glory and do all the interesting stuff.

Yea, so maybe I should have stayed in school and gotten a PhD (instead of a law degree). Maybe I would have gotten involved in some really interesting research, and would have been one of those guys who get interviewed on NOVA. Sometimes I almost see myself on TV explaining some new kind of mathematical concept or expounding upon the inner programming structure of the brain or laying out the implications of string theory for the interference of gravitational waves. Yea, that might have been fun.

But then again, there was a reason why I didn’t go into academia. I was aware that a whole lot of academians are in the pocket of the military, especially those like me who had good quantitative skills. Lately I’ve been interested in the subject of consciousness and the interaction of the brain and the mind. Well, guess who’s also interested in such research? DARPA, the Pentagon’s technology wizards. There was an article in the local paper the other day about how DARPA is sprinkling some big bucks on the college campuses (including my alma mata, Rutgers) to study human thinking and awareness. They’re trying to come up with weapons that work more like the flexible, teachable human mind, and less like structured robots. As with the military’s co-option of atomic energy, I’m sure that ain’t going to lead to kinder and gentler warfare.

Yea, maybe it’s just as well that I’m spending my life popping out cost reports and chasing down purchase orders in a county office. It ain’t much, but at least I’m not channeling my technical fascinations to make the world an even crueler, deadlier place than it already is.