April 28th 2006
Of all the things, I never expected to receive a mail from Sumida. Happened to me about a week ago, and I've been messaging her back since that. Seems I've regained my old social circle, if I can even call it that, considering that Sumida and Akari are pretty much the only real friends I've ever had. Talking to her has been fun, and she seems to be in kind of a similar situation to mine. Well, not really, she's finished university and is looking for a job but can't find one and is considering moving up to Tokyo because of that, thinking there will be more opportunities here. Teaching seems to be what she wants to do and she's apparently worked pretty hard for her licence. She's also really good at surfing now, apparently. With all the things she's done so well at now, she seems quite different from the self-doubting girl I knew back on Tanegashima, so I asked her how she did it. To my surprise, she said I was the one who'd inspired her, something about me having said: "I just do what I can."
Feels familiar, it feels right too, but I still can't remember having said that. Nonetheless, that's pretty healthy attitude to have. So, since I know can't stay this way forever, I've been spending the past week looking for any sort of options and ideas for what to do with my life, and I think I might have found something. Walking into the convenience store the other day, I took went to the magazine stands to look at the science magazines as usual, and they had a nice article about ESA's Venus Express. Something tingled in me then and I remember feeling a bit of the excitement I used to back when I was a high-schooler. "Working with space exploration would be pretty cool", I thought, and after looking into it a bit I found that programming is an integral part in designing spacecraft and probes and rovers and the like, or their control systems, rather. I wonder why I never thought of this before...
Just do what I can, eh? Sounds like I used to be a whole lot smarter as a kid.