Skip to content

On Monday, we present our results.

This is good news for me, as I'm one of those people that prefers public speaking to death - by a large margin. I like it.

It's also good news because I feel like my work has advanced progress on an issue that matters, in a country I care deeply about.

The only bad news is that I have to make the decision about whether I want to maintain this blog - this could well be my last post, at least on here. I'm planning on picking up my other blog again (in which I think critically about often vacuous books) once I've graduated and am back at home.

So if this my last post, looking back at the arc of what posted here is interesting. At first, the blogs were all about content: who does what, how it works. This past month, though, I've spent more and more of my time thinking not about how things work but what constitutes a good choice and and what our moral obligations and rights are.

These thoughts have led me directly back to Ishmael.

No, not 'Call me Ishmael.' And not the Biblical Ishmael.

This one:

This book changed the way I view my position on the planet, and changed how I want to impact the world with the work that I do.

The book is a loose narrative with an intense ethical core. Really, it's about our perceptions, and how we use those perceptions to group people, animals, and entities together, how we rank them.

Does the correct choice change when we are in a different group? Can we know the right choice when we are looking in from the outside - when we have decided that we are on the outside?

None of the questions I have been pondering on this blog and in conversations with friends are answerable, but I think that asking these questions is a practical exercise.

Of course, another practical exercise is finding a job. The good news is that this masters degree has helped me find a concrete direction for my career, and at least a partial understanding of what I'm capable of.

Ana Tijoux - Vengo.