This is one of the last people I would have expected a column of this quality from. This is the same David Brooks who, in one of his many columns bemoaning east cost elitists, mentioned that none of them had ever eaten at the salad bar at Applebee's. (Applebee's has never had salad bars.)
But yeah, this was me. I had obsessions, first wit…
This is one of the last people I would have expected a column of this quality from. This is the same David Brooks who, in one of his many columns bemoaning east cost elitists, mentioned that none of them had ever eaten at the salad bar at Applebee's. (Applebee's has never had salad bars.)
But yeah, this was me. I had obsessions, first with aviation, then with marine mammals; and that obession took me into training dolphins and sea lions, and that took me onward to veterinary school and my first (and possibly last) degree, a DVM. I have struggled with feeling inadequate in my field, even 26 years on, but also knowing there is always much more to learn; it's one of the reasons I chose it as my third career.
Lately I've latched onto language learning, and defeating the conventional wisdom that one cannot learn foreign languages in old age, I am on my fourth foreign language, Portuguese, for a trip to Brazil this fall. (That said, Spanish is the only foreing language I have maintained; I intend to maintain Portuguese also.) My first serious study of foreign language was in 2020, when I was 61 years old. I didn't take language learning seriously in high school, and I came to regret that. No more regrets!
This is one of the last people I would have expected a column of this quality from. This is the same David Brooks who, in one of his many columns bemoaning east cost elitists, mentioned that none of them had ever eaten at the salad bar at Applebee's. (Applebee's has never had salad bars.)
But yeah, this was me. I had obsessions, first with aviation, then with marine mammals; and that obession took me into training dolphins and sea lions, and that took me onward to veterinary school and my first (and possibly last) degree, a DVM. I have struggled with feeling inadequate in my field, even 26 years on, but also knowing there is always much more to learn; it's one of the reasons I chose it as my third career.
Lately I've latched onto language learning, and defeating the conventional wisdom that one cannot learn foreign languages in old age, I am on my fourth foreign language, Portuguese, for a trip to Brazil this fall. (That said, Spanish is the only foreing language I have maintained; I intend to maintain Portuguese also.) My first serious study of foreign language was in 2020, when I was 61 years old. I didn't take language learning seriously in high school, and I came to regret that. No more regrets!