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“Extry! Extry!”
At this point, following my return from the Peace Corps and my proposal to my girlfriend, few things in my near future felt noteworthy or eventful. Gradually, I managed to pull out of the temping spin cycle and land a job that somewhat complemented my college degree. In 1997, I graduated from the University of Colorado (aka CU) with my Bachelors in International Affairs and a minor in Geography (Concentration on Africa, which solidified my position in the Peace Corps). Up until this point, I never realized I could take the hours in the Geography lab constructing map tables and analyzing topographic spatial grids that illustrated migration patterns of refugees and alchemize those into a lucrative, sustainable job. Those classes occupied such abstract and dogmatic spaces that our instructors never illustrated how someday we could potentially survey oil fields in Texas or design fiber optic networks in 20 major municipalities.
Regarding those oil fields, I did get to survey them — and I had a complete blast. Like most of my professional career, I lucked into the opportunity. To my chagrin, it sadly only lasted three months. Every morning over the course of a summer, I woke up early, drove to the oil company’s outpost down south, loaded up my gear, hopped on a whirly bird and zoomed to the land of the oil derricks. At the end of a week of land surveying beneath an unrelenting Sun, they’d hand me a pile of cash and release me…
