Today technically marks the six month day when I landed in South Africa to board the KNORR. Six months ago I had no clue what I was getting into. I had no clue what to expect. To a certain extent I still don’t know what to expect from day to day. I have grown used to the regimented life that is living aboard a ship. 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, a day or two in port every once in a while that you can get away from the ship, other than that it’s been nothing but blue water and work. Not saying I haven’t enjoyed every minute of it. This internship experience is what you make of it. I chose to learn as much as possible about a career I very much wish to continue in. I chose to inundate myself as much in the culture and work as I possibly could. I wanted to know exactly what I might be getting into if I were to continue this.
You begin to get so used to breakfast at 730, lunch at 1130 and dinner at 1730, never getting an actual good night of sleep because your room is either next to the bow thruster, directly under some crane, or have a roommate that works not quite opposite shifts. These things become the norm. Your old life becomes an exotic thing. A bed that is large enough to stretch out on becomes almost a novelty. Something as simple as taking a bath to shave your legs instead of standing awkwardly against a bulkhead and hoping the sea state stays nice become things you dream about in the odd nights you actually end up dreaming. Not saying this is a rough life by any stretch of the imagination. It is fundamentally amazing to get to witness science first hand. The little things begin to count way more than they used to. I love listening to music. I love going to live shows. I gave up several hundred dollars of concert tickets to take this internship. I love movies, watching new and amazing art house films is a big part of what I do when I am home with my friends. You begin to miss these things. You begin to miss sitting around having a beer on a Friday night with friends and watching some weird movie they dug up out of some dusty box in the basement of some rental house they just installed granite counter tops in; only to be confused by the lack of plot, and slightly bummed because the subtitles stop half way through and you don’t speak enough Russian or Turkish or whatever odd language it is in to fully understand what is going on. But as the movie fades into the background the night becomes more about the conversations that spring up randomly, the coming and going of friends throughout the evening always makes for a shift in dialog that no Shakespeare or Huxley could ever have attempted to write.
You get some of this on ships, but by the second week in everything is routine, you only run into the people you share the same shift with. There are exceedingly small amounts of randomly running into someone. You see the same people at the same times, every day. It is not uncommon to go for a two week cruise and meet someone for the first time as you are both heading down the gang way to the nearest bar. It is this routine that both has become a comfort and something I have become fearful of. What am I going to do when I get back home? I have a brief job lined up a couple weeks after I get back, but then what? My comfortable routine of 12 hour blocks will be no more defined by the ship I am on. I will be able to walk more than a couple hundred feet in one direction. I won’t have to plan my shopping list by port stops and how long the cruise is going to be. I will be free to accidentally run out of something and it won’t be a big deal to run to the store at 1am and grab some shampoo. Due to my planning I have thus far run out of nothing of importance. I have managed to quit smoking, a 21 year habit that has nearly at times defined my presence to some people. For the most part I always had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth when I was working on a car. I would sooner run out of clean socks than cigarettes, but no more. I am done. When your smoking habit can legally buy beer it’s time to give it up. Having had malignant melanoma, and gall stones they thought might be cancerous, which caused me to have my gall bladder removed, I feel it is time to stop pounding the proverbial coffin nails.
So yeah six months can change your entire way of looking at things. I have a whole suite of knowledge that I did not possess prior to this experience. I have run high definition satellite systems, trouble shot DGPS systems, built and rebuilt various scientific instruments, trouble shot pieces of equipment I have never seen before, and learned more about myself than I ever thought possible.