HAT

' I would travel across the land'

'Searching far and wide'

-Pokemon theme song

The 2 lines from one of my favorite songs reflect my life as a future geologist. I love what I'm doing now, often expressed it in my previous posts. I just simply like the idea of waking up at 6am, driving for a few minutes or hours to destinations, arrive and look at the landscapes. When the prof/s post/s questions such as, "tell me what you see", "what do you think happened to the rocks?", "why did you say this is a metamorphic rock? give me the evidence" etc, I would cram my brain and try to remember all those hours spent in classes and labs looking at AFM diagram, identifying muscovite and phlogopite, and cursing my way through the semester while trying to keep my sanity. I also love having my lunch under the sun while admiring the thrust fold that overturned the underlying rocks. And now I know how mountains are made and what will happen to the Everest in million years from now.

The more you see, the less you know.

And it humbles me. We are so tiny like a speck of dust in the galaxy that we actually know almost nothing about the universe.

Again, it humbles me.

Chile, Feb 2011: My usual field trip gears - a hat, a hand lens, a rock hammer, a pair of hiking boots, a pair of shades, a bagpack (with water, snack bars, sunscreen, vaseline, write-in-the-rain notebook, camera), my dice-watch, sometimes a compass. Oh, a sweater/jacket, t-shirt and jeans/hiking pants.