It is one week to the day until I leave these United States for the next 27 months, and my to-do list is frightfully long.
In my defense, I have been keeping myself occupied this last month. Cross-country road trip? You better believe I saw America, and detailed my brother's car by hand to remove much of the state of Nevada and a little bit of Utah that decided to come home with me. Burning Man, the largest festival in North America? To quote a writer who's mildly more famous than I, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness-- or, at least, my mind was blown by the terrible, awesome force of unleashed creativity and radically inclusive community that come along with an entire city, built in the desert for a week and then torn down. Art. Beauty. Liberation. Blinding dust storms. Fire. Ask me about it in person sometime, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining.
But this morning I took the GRE (I won't claim I knocked it out of the park-- the algebra! Gah! -- but it went well enough that at the very least I won't have to think about it for another two years) and with that, the last non-Peace Corps hurdle was cleared. Cameroon is looming large, and the two years of service, heretofore conceptual, are rapidly becoming quite real. I am beginning to stage my gear, which necessitates whittling down the acquisitions of the last four years to a lovely new internal frame backpack (thanks, REI!) and a duffle bag. It's a liberating process, in a way; it feels oddly cleansing to simplify. Thoreau, I tend to think you're full of baloney, but you may have been on to something there.
Of the remaining tasks at hand, getting a blog up and running was the most pleasant, so here we are. If you are reading this, I probably emailed you a link, which means I think you'd be interested in following my life as I move into the field of community health and international development. Alternately, you were innocently searching for Blaise Cendrars, in which case: welcome, friend! I applaud your taste in poetry. I have no idea how frequently I'll update, but I suspect it will be a cathartic outlet to (pick one: vent / celebrate / whine / use dialectic vocabulary / cry / laugh) every so often. I don't expect all y'all to be waiting with bated breath for my every update; heaven knows I loosely follow enough friends' blogs that I only occasionally scroll through, so I will in no way be offended by having a casual readership. Do feel free to leave comments and use this as a forum to keep in touch; my goal is to travel to the other side of the planet, but not to fall off it completely-- so holla at me!
On that note, Google has indicated it thinks I might be interested in termite flatulence, which tells me anything positive this day had to offer is long gone, and it might just be bedtime. Next stop: Pre-Service Training in Philadelphia!
In my defense, I have been keeping myself occupied this last month. Cross-country road trip? You better believe I saw America, and detailed my brother's car by hand to remove much of the state of Nevada and a little bit of Utah that decided to come home with me. Burning Man, the largest festival in North America? To quote a writer who's mildly more famous than I, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness-- or, at least, my mind was blown by the terrible, awesome force of unleashed creativity and radically inclusive community that come along with an entire city, built in the desert for a week and then torn down. Art. Beauty. Liberation. Blinding dust storms. Fire. Ask me about it in person sometime, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining.
But this morning I took the GRE (I won't claim I knocked it out of the park-- the algebra! Gah! -- but it went well enough that at the very least I won't have to think about it for another two years) and with that, the last non-Peace Corps hurdle was cleared. Cameroon is looming large, and the two years of service, heretofore conceptual, are rapidly becoming quite real. I am beginning to stage my gear, which necessitates whittling down the acquisitions of the last four years to a lovely new internal frame backpack (thanks, REI!) and a duffle bag. It's a liberating process, in a way; it feels oddly cleansing to simplify. Thoreau, I tend to think you're full of baloney, but you may have been on to something there.
Of the remaining tasks at hand, getting a blog up and running was the most pleasant, so here we are. If you are reading this, I probably emailed you a link, which means I think you'd be interested in following my life as I move into the field of community health and international development. Alternately, you were innocently searching for Blaise Cendrars, in which case: welcome, friend! I applaud your taste in poetry. I have no idea how frequently I'll update, but I suspect it will be a cathartic outlet to (pick one: vent / celebrate / whine / use dialectic vocabulary / cry / laugh) every so often. I don't expect all y'all to be waiting with bated breath for my every update; heaven knows I loosely follow enough friends' blogs that I only occasionally scroll through, so I will in no way be offended by having a casual readership. Do feel free to leave comments and use this as a forum to keep in touch; my goal is to travel to the other side of the planet, but not to fall off it completely-- so holla at me!
On that note, Google has indicated it thinks I might be interested in termite flatulence, which tells me anything positive this day had to offer is long gone, and it might just be bedtime. Next stop: Pre-Service Training in Philadelphia!
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