The End of All Things

It's odd. My greatest fear about moving to London isn't the job situation or finding a good place to live or even petty crime. My greatest fear is living in a major city where I'm not a citizen, don't have my own permanent place of residence and don't have the same civil rights that I enjoy now in the (admittedly far-fetched) scenario of some kind of massive disaster, attack or apocalyptic event. I realize how irrational these fears are, but for a city that has been devastated so many times by plague, fire, bombing and more the fears are slightly more rational than they are in Seattle.

Nitwit zombie psychoses aside, the idea that I could be in London when the city is the victim of some kind of terrible attack is still pretty remote. Somewhere, rationally, I recognize that this fear is likely a manifestation of other things: my own uncertainties about moving to a new place where I don't know anyone, where I will always be an outsider, and into a situation I'm still not sure I'm going to like job-wise. But that still doesn't make it any less scary when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning and contemplate the worst of all scenarios, the end of all things.

In other news, I had a really good discussion with a group at my office today in charge of the kind of analysis I'd eventually like to start doing, and one of the guys gave me some really good advice I plan to take to heart. Career-changing advice, methinks.