The Great Down Under

Sunday evening, we had a youth fireside meeting at our new church building. Everyone gathered in the Relief Society room and listened to Brother R (whose wife had mentioned an embarrassing story in a talk that morning) talk to the us about the importance of setting goals. I had spent the majority of Saturday planning out what I wanted to do with my life and how I might get there, so his fireside hit exactly what I was going through at the moment.

For anyone who wants to know, my major goal in life is to be a writer, the idea being that I can write fiction (short stories, novels, et. cetra) from home while I have a family of my own. Since writing isn't exactly a career you can move up a ladder for, I decided that as a secondary option, I would like to work either in a book-publishing house or for a literary scout agency (Essentially, they find up-and-coming books and recommend titles for film studios or foreign publishers to buy the rights for).

This, however, is my ultimate goal, and while I had spent the majority of Saturday tracking how I would progress towards this goal, during this fireside I wanted to think about the other major goal I had in mind for my life: before I die, I want to be able to say that I have spent some time living in Antarctica.


I think, when they first hear me say this, that people think I'm kidding. I'm absolutely not. My interest in the 7th continent started when I first realized there was a 7th continent - I'm not talking about when I was 6 and my teachers said 'there are seven continents, and one of them is extremely huge but really cold and no one lives there so we're not going to talk about it', but when I looked at a globe for the first time and noticed that, in the bottom section, half covered by the axis-pole and gore disk, was an enormous landmass, larger that Europe, Australia, or the Continental United States.

More surprising to me, however, was when I looked at a few other maps and realized that a number of them didn't even feature Antarctica at all. Sure, some of them were kiddie-maps for elementary school but even when I looked at the huge map we had tacked up at home, which I had thus far revered for its size and the uncountable flags featured at the bottom (to stand for every country in the entire world), it seemed to have forgotten the entire continent.

Since then, I have been annoyed every time I see the equator on a map anywhere but exactly in the middle (which runs through Brazil and Indonesia, by the way). I don't think I said anything to my parents about my disapproval, but the map we have hanging in the hallway now clearly shows Antarctica, along with a large inset of Europe (always helpful).

Antarctica has been my favorite continent, much the same way that Pluto has and always will be everyone's favorite planet - they're both out of the way, far from civilization, cold and forgotten. Unlike Antarctica, however, Pluto is quite small, very very small, and though I disowned the IAU after they abandoned Pluto (Not that I knew who they were before August 2006), I half understood why they might think it was acceptable.

Antarctica, on the other hand, is enormous, as I pointed out before; larger than Australia or Europe (but not the two combined). The majority of the Penguin population of the planet resides on that continent, with several thousand migrating up from the Antarctic Peninsula up to the Southernmost points of South America, and the rest living in zoos. The ice trapped on or around Antarctica itself makes up almost 70% of all the freshwater on our planet!

Though it took a couple years, I slowly became indignant when it came to this subject. I learned all I could about Antarctica, the discovery and peace treaty and what kind of people lived and worked there today - because it's true, in case you didn't know, people do live in Antarctica. It may not be a country or have any form of unified government, but it's a wonderful place to do research, especially with the latest panic about Global Warming. There are over 60 research bases in Antarctica, some with smaller teams of scientists out on the ice just trying to get data, and some with entire mini-communities established as support staff to keep the base running all year long.

This would be my way of getting in. I have no interest in becoming a geological scientist - I want to be a writer, remember? So being hired as a member of support staff would give me a credible, useful reason to be there. Tourism is nice and all, but I don't want to just see Antarctica, I want to live there. Their support staff numbers are huge, ranging from technicians to waste management to kitchen staff and to retail managers, and they're always needing new people.

There's also a Artists and Writers Program through the USAP, which involving writing a pitch for a project to be approved for a grant, and the opportunity to live in Antarctica for 6 months working on your project. While this fits in perfectly with my writing aspirations, I'd need to actually be a writer before I had any hope of my pitch being accepted, and I'd prefer not to wait my entire life to get one of my life goals checked off.

So while we had this fireside about goal setting and planning for our future and what we wanted to do, I thought to myself exactly how badly I want to get to Antarctica. I'm still not sure who believes me when I tell them this is my life's dream, but there's the truth for you. Hopefully, once I've been there, I can focus more narrowly on my other life's dream - being a writer.