Eric's Beijing Diary

Tonight Claire and Raymond had a birthday party for me at Sculpting in Time. Sculpting in time has pretty good pizza. After sitting and talking for a bunch of minutes, we decided that a birthday is not a birthday without a cake, so we decided to have a little cheesecake to top off the evening.

Fifty-two. I think it's time I started getting something done in life. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. That's a bit of an overstatement, I suppose, because life seems to have destined me for the classroom. But I have always tended to see teaching as a calling rather than a profession or a job. When I was in 9th grade, my civics teacher said that the we could expect to have four different careers throughout our lives. Depending on how you define the word "career" (that is to say, as a type of work, rather than a specific job), I am already on career number four or five.

Throughout my working life, I have always tended to evaluate a job based on how much I could learn from it rather than how much I could earn from it. This approach is a bit problematic if you have to make a living, but I think it does make you a bit more versatile. The variety of experience, though can be a distraction, because, not being locked into one specific type of job, you do have a tendency to look toward the next bend in the road, rather than just assuming that everything is going to continue to be the same year after year. I can't imagine what it would be like to work for one company for thirty or forty years, and retire with a tea party and a gold watch.