Let's move on...

 I'm still working on my off time, and tomorrow I will do a bag drag and transfer onto another bunker barge for another week. So it goes. It was really nice to spend the week on a place that I used to call home and where I have good familiarity with the basics. 

      Tomorrow I'm going to more... spartan... accommodations. I'm trying to be positive. I mean, I'm positive it compares favorably to a Pakistani hospice. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts...  No trainees to shepherd so that's a plus.   I'm trying to just go day-by-day, because as a reward for all this, next week I will start my regular rotation on the HQ. 

     My rant last week  

 https://bigironbegfish.blogspot.com/2022/03/and-back-again.html 

where I wrote about comparing the experience at my local maritime school  with the union school I used to attend for Continuing Ed classes got reposted to a large maritime forum page, which is fun. My sense of humor actually was shared and enjoyed by at least one person. Now, after making fun of myself, I knew I was exposing my flank by also poking  fun at the silly snobbery I experienced at MITAGS a few times. I also knew that someone would get to clutching his pearls and running for his fainting couch, overcome,  and I was not disappointed.  I was accused of having an inferiority complex and being insecure because I experienced some pretty obvious classism, neglect and snobbery and was shocked by it. I'm not sure if it's a matter of being blinded by penis envy, or lead pipes at Kings Point, that led the Mean Gurls of the forum to prove my point for me, though I am grateful for them proving my point. 

     Fellas, I didn't go to a trade college. The reason you have to read the Greeks while taking STEM classes at traditional places of learning is to instill a more supple form of thinking. The bridging of synapses. S' good for the mind, helps one to appreciate the value of being around people with greater knowledge than yourself, without making you feel diminished by their presence. An inoculation against self-doubt. 

    While I was living in Boston I got less condescension at the Harvard Club on Fridays sitting with the world's true elites than I experienced at MITAGS by a bunch of self-assured WASPS, some of whom I respected as experienced professionals but found to be shitty human beings once they got a couple of glasses of Loudmouth Soup into their bellies.

  They're jokes not dicks. No need to take them so hard. 

       Funny thing, I once heard E.O. Wilson, THE greatest mind in evolutionary science of all time, call Stephen Hawking (who wasn't there) a snob and a prick. He was distracted at the time, chasing a kernel of corn around his salad plate with his fork, or I don't believe he would have used such coarse language. But both men are dead and gone, now, more's the pity, but it surely shows that snobbery is a character flaw that is unwelcome even among men so elevated as to have no peers. 

 Dr. Wilson refused to believe that I could lyse the dendrites of chemoreceptor neurons using the osmotic pressure gradient caused by exposing them to ultrafiltered water. I couldn't convince him, even after showing the evidence, and even after it became a widely (for values of wide, lol) accepted practice. It was something he just tore me up and down on in public on several occasions. I was just an undergrad stammering his way though a presentation where I was the only non Ph.D presenting a publication on the conference circuit that year. After the 3rd time,  I stopped being timid and speaking as though I was unsure of myself. I never minded public speaking after that, and to date I still enjoy it. 

And so, being called insecure is... a little silly . I suppose if my sense of self  was bound by my job I'd be more prone ad hominem digs. I am surrounded by guys who are REALLY GOOD at their job. I've spent a fair amount of time to ensure that I'm also around a fair proportion who are also good people, too. 

         Speaking of good people, there's a better-than-even chance that I'll be partnered with a friend tomorrow when I transfer for the week, so misery loving company, I'll be able to sleep well knowing that I know the guy whose got the watch knows a thing or two about a thing or two. So I'm saying a little prayer that there won't be a bait-n-switch that sees someone else come aboard like they did to me last week.  I'm fortunate that I got to spend this past week with someone I know and respect, and that my poor trainee, whose time I hope I didn't waste, was improved by the experience.