Can't you hear me knockin?

They say when opportunity knocks, you should answer. If something big or exciting or interesting is coming your way, there's no reason you shouldn't take a chance to revel in the impending awesomeness that might ensue (yeah, like remember those old honda commercials? mr. opportunity is knocking on your window).

Now I can safely say that there were times in my life in which I shouldn't have let opportunity in that door (the story of both my middle school and high school debacles comes to mind), and plenty of times when I just didn't answer when opportunity was ringing the doorbell and yelling at me to get my ass out there. Case in point: I SHOULD have accepted the offer to go to Japan with my high school my first year in college. I turned them down because I thought I would have midterms to worry about. The trip turned out to be on 2nd week. I SHOULDN'T have agreed to sell my brother's ninja stars from Tijuana to my classmates in 8th grade in 1999, when Columbine was still fresh on everyone's minds.

So let's fast forward to today, well last year, really, when I've matured and learned the dire consequences of attempting to establish a lucrative business in dangerous and exotic weapons on a Catholic school ground. It's the latter half of my senior year in college, and I'm down to my last 2 classes I'll need to finish my major. The class was Remote Sensing (studying images of surfaces through remote or external sources...or rather the stuff google earth is made of), and as a class project, we had to study a certain region of our choice. There was a special project that we could have opted to join, a team project per se. Since this was a geography class, and my professor, Tom Gillespie, was a biogeographer at heart, placed the special team project to study the region of Afghanistan. Using geographical theories, such as spatial theory, the team would try and discover the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden.

Now, originally I was a part of this group. I couldn't think of any other region I'd wanna do, and joined. A few weeks down the line, the work piled up for this project. Longer hours of research had to be done in order for this project to fly, and our professor held our hands along the way. He wanted to make this as realistic as possible, so he even contacted government agencies such as the FBI to offer some advice and some information. He always joked that we could use this project to actually find Bin Laden and collect the reward money for it....

But my laziness got the best of me. It was halfway through my last year of college, I enjoyed my free time, and I was starting to get back into making stupid parodies of commercials again.
someone on facebook told me this shit is sick. I'm validated!

So with all those factors coming into place, it was only natural for me to pull aside the professor, and tell him I wanted out of the project. Why, he asked. I told him I wanted to pursue a project in a different region...say, Dubai. And he made sure I wanted to do this, and I did, and so just like that, I was free to wallow in my lethargic sloth-ish self at home.

Fast forward a year. My friend sends me this link to a video of Rachel Maddow (on MSNBC, for those of you who are 24 hour news cycle-illiterate), and she asks if this guy was ever my professor. I watch. My jaw drops. My heart sinks.

Huh.

Turns out my professor was serious about making this official. Turns out he published the project that the team that I was formerly a part of onto a reputable science journal. And it turns out that the team that I was formerly a part of and the fruits of their labor got major mass media attention. Not only did my professor interview in the aforementioned video, the published project popped up on major news sites everywhere, including The Telegraph (a UK based publication), USA Today, the LA Times, and apparently here, here, and here.

Super. Imagine that. I could have been part of a media praised (though technically flawed) theory that would have provided accolades, national attention, and one hell of a point to put on my resume. But no. Instead, I decided to research and praise (according to my report) the "the most fantastic and fastest urbanizing and growing region on the planet," a region today that is literally stewing in its own shit.

So there you have it. I could've been part of a major university study that has caught the eyes of scientists and government agencies all over the world, but instead I decided to research a small, relatively failing country which shares the same name of a cheesy Filipino romance flick.


But my lesson is learned now...again. When opportunity knocks, check and see who it is before you open that door and let him in (unless opportunity happens to be delivering a pizza). Then let him in regardless. I'm hungry.

17 days.

"just seeing if a visit could possibly be in order and if you would have the hospitality skills to meet my…meet my…oh whatever, if I could crash at your pad…"
-CT