Work is serious business

My boss returned from his Europe vacation on Monday and the last three days have been by far the most intense days of the summer. Feeling the need for extra workers to get all of the projects done as quickly as possible since we're in some kind of crunch right now, my boss basically decided that it was time for me to stop being just a college-intern-student-worker and start doing the kind of work that all of the drafters do. On one hand it's pretty exciting to be doing serious engineering work, but at the same time I don't feel like I'm ready for it. Everyone else has been doing drafting for anywhere from 5 to 30 years, and I've spent the last 3 days being taught how to do it while submitting real projects to be checked and approved for use by the rest of the lab. Today I actually began creating an assembly drawing from scratch, complete with A JOHANNIGMAN in the "drawn by" box. It was exciting, but once again, I feel like I'm going to mess something up with my lack of experience and knowledge. Part of me also feels like I should be getting paid more if I'm doing the same work as the full time drafters, but then I remind myself that while they are probably getting paid at least twice as much as me, they probably work twice as fast too.

In a more exciting note, I've started emailing my amazing friend Andrea who is in Ecuador about how life has been for her. Since the end of May I've been reading her blog and making occasional comments on her facebook about how exciting it seems. She's on a medical internship sort of thing with Beyond Traditional Borders, and along with another student from Rice, is going around to communities in Ecuador and testing out a series of medical backpack projects that they've been working on in the past year to help out the impoverished areas. It's really interesting and a really awesome use of a summer. She seems to be doing a lot of good in that country by helping to heal the sick and educate the population about healthy habits. If you want excuciating amounts of details, here's the link to her blog. http://ecuador.blogs.rice.edu/

So the reason I mention that is that it was nice to actually hear from her personally about how she was doing and share a bit about how my life was. I consider her one of my best friends at Rice, and not getting to talk to your close friends regularly has been tough this summer. I've already talked way too much about how much I hate only getting to talk to Robyn on the phone or skype every day, and how it's been getting worse and worse the longer I've gone without seeing her (up to almost 5 weeks now). But in reality, that's probably not as bad as it has been to not even talk to many of my other friends. At least I know more or less what Robyn has been doing every day, but with many of my other friends, I don't even know what they are doing this summer.

In some of my prayer and meditation the last few days, I realized that not seeing friends over the summer is a lot like our relationship with God. We can never see him in person, just like how I have literally not seen any of my Rice friends while in Austin (we'll ignore my trips to Houston). But even though we can't see him, it isn't all that hard to keep our relationship if we talk to him regularly. I've talked to Robyn and Ryan almost every day over the summer, but I feel like I've lost connection with many of my other really close friends like Kyle, Andrea, Ian, Gary, Rick, and Autumn, who I have only had a couple conversations with over the summer. Communication is crucial for a relationship with God, just as it is with friends, and I feel like if I spent even half the amount of time talking with God that I do talking with Robyn every night, (and he deserves so much more than that) it would do amazing things for my relationship with him.