Am I my resume?  That paints a picture of a person I don’t know*

Tomorrow is the KC marathon – I’m supposed to run the half marathon but that won’t be happening.  My old lady feet have decreed that 3 miles are painful so 13.1 miles are out of the question.  It may be that my days as a distance runner (slow but still a runner) are numbered.  That has been such an important part of my view of myself that it’s taking some time for me to truly fathom the implications.  It’s possible that things will improve and I’ll realize my goal of winning my age group because I’m the only one in it but I fear it will not come to pass.

So if I’m not a runner, am I a different person?  As I sat and cheered for the local baseball team while polishing  R code to do some parallel processing of 3 different structured learning models, it occurred to me that these are different activities than had occupied my time in the past.  People change and grow and that’s natural. However, most often such transformations have tended to be the evolutionary type:  change is slow and incremental.  And yes, eventually you wind up somewhere that you don’t recognize because the sum of those small differences changes your path and you wind up heading in a different direction.

Sometimes this can be painful.  I’m not sure Frank realized how far he has traveled from just being “the car guy”.  He is really enjoying his job refurbishing used cars – it’s actually pretty close to what he did with his students as a teacher – but he is noticing the differences he has with his coworkers.  Funny enough, most of them haven’t seen “La Boheme” at the Met.  That’s not to say a large number of high school teachers have either, but they understood and appreciated what that meant and some even liked opera.  Not many of his current compatriots have that same disposition.  It’s not bad, but it’s different and makes him wonder about his view of himself as well. (But yes, he can still fix anything, loves getting his hands dirty, and dreams of all the cars he will own someday.  So maybe not so different. 🙂 )

And I find myself having come full circle:  when I was on the job market nearly 20 years ago, I was accused of data mining – a terrible thing in the economics world.  Now I’m studying it at local business school.  I knew I was never a “real” economist but I didn’t know that I’ve been a pseudo data scientist this whole time but with an economics focus. Yes, I am still the data queen, metadata maven, empress of the universe – choose your favorite exalted title! – but now I’m one who doesn’t run at 5am but enjoys drinking coffee and reading the paper before leaving for work.  I may turn out to be the kind who manages to hit the gym after work, understands bullpen strategies, and does machine learning research. Who knows?

You’ll have to come to KC to see who meets you at the airport. I can promise good food and wine.  The rest we’ll have to make up as we go!

* Bonus points for anyone who recognized the song lyric without clicking on the link.