About a year ago, when I was trespassing on a Communication Theory class, my current advisor posed this question to a group of incoming graduate students. The ensuing discussion was a bit too scatter-brained, but the question remained with me for a long time. I’ve been thinking about it since then, and recently I started writing down what I think.

[Of course, at the time, my first reaction was: "What an artsy-fartsy idealistic question?! What a ridiculous waste of time! And THIS is where my taxpayer money is going??"]

However, over the past year I’ve begun to see just how complex this question is, and as I’ve thought through the question it has also spawned a bunch of other equally idiotic questions in my own head. Working through each of those led to quite a lot of interesting discussions (yes, in my own head…)

I am writing up a lot of the resulting thoughts and ideas, but, in the meantime, I want to pose the original question here, and also pose the questions that it spawned. Please think and respond! Here they are:

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On July 23rd I will be retiring from engineering.

The term is a bit dramatic, to be sure, but I love using it because it does convey the sense of finality that I want associated with my leaving - I am well and truly determined never to do any “engineering” again, even on a contract basis.

Depending on how you want to define it, I began my engineering “career” at 16 when I graduated from high school and went to engineering school (out in Prescott, Arizona, to study aerospace engineering). Or, job-wise, I graduated in 2000 with a Master’s degree in engineering and began working at 24.

Either way, at 32 I find myself leaving the only professional career I have known and trained for, and a career in which I have been very successful. Instead, I begin a new career in a completely different field - “Communication” - focusing on critical cultural studies, rhetoric, folklore, and the artful performance of everyday life.

And so, as I tell people that I am “retiring,” and especially as I tell them what I intend to study, every now and then I hear someone joke that I am leaving engineering to go hide “from the real world” in academia.

Admittedly I probably provoke those statements with my own dramatism about “retiring” at merely 32. Or, those may also stem from the popular perception or stereotype of “academics” in their ivory towers, especially given the passivity and elitism of terms like “cultural studies” or “folklore.” However, the question remains: why AM I retiring?

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And it begins…

So, this Fall I will be starting graduate school at UMass-Amherst! I will be studying toward a Master’s and then hopefully on toward a Ph.D. in Communication, focusing on cultural studies (especially cultural criticism and social criticism), rhetoric, performance studies, and narrative theories of social interaction.

Whew… I have no doubt that those wordy words will change again as I begin learning more about what they mean But, for now, I am deeply excited by two major aspects of what I am about to do: narrative theory and cultural criticism.

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A long, long time ago, God began telling stories. And as God told them they came alive - magical, mythical, mysterious beings, weaving and woven through time and space and the elements. And as God told them so did the Spirit live among them and through them, breathing life and mystery into all they touched.

And these stories live among us today, their language being at once mysterious and also intimately familiar, for the words they use are the words of our lives, and the images they bring alive are our own histories. As we hear them, so they form us, and as we live them so we form them in turn.

And as we tell them, so too do we create them anew and afresh, with the power to go out into the world and breathe life and mystery into those with whom we share life.

Last weekend Alexis and I celebrated our first anniversary by going on a whitewater rafting trip up in Maine. We spent three nights in a luxurious suite at a great place (www.crabapplewhitewater.com) that organizes rafting trips down the Kennebec River, and, when the water is high enough, on the Dead River.

I know, isn’t the name itself kinda imposing? The DEAD River? Yeah, sign me up!
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