8 Random facts about myself:

1. I was almost kidnapped by gypsies in Florence, Italy when I was 4 years old.

2. I was homeschooled through middle and high school.

3. I have never broken a bone in my body, except for cracking my skull when I was 3.

4. Since I've been cooking for myself for the past 7 years, I can bake or sautee a bunch of the food groups.

5. I have really over-sensitive toes, so if something goes between them (like toe socks), I freak out and totally lose it. I also have to sleep with my feet out of the covers.

6. Of the 5 middle eastern countries I've been to, Turkey is probably the most beautiful (Lebanon being the most entertaining).

7. I've spent time in 12 countries outside the US, but never set foot in Mexico.

8. People close to me claim that I secretly wish I was Jewish.

Currently Listening The Crane Wife By The Decemberists see related

It's been a busy few months. I got engaged in March, and have been recurrently broadsided by the number of details involved with planning this wedding thing. My classes have been somewhat interesting, but overall labor-intensive. The good news is that I'm in a good position to start my thesis, and I'm about to complete a year of Farsi language training. Kung Fu is still going well, and I love it, but it's really tough to stay in top shape when everything else is going on (you really start to notice that when you spar).

Megan is working for an international tax-software company right now, and she claims it's actually pretty enjoyable. The plan at this point is to move to NYC in the spring so that she can start her graduate program in Economics at the lovely New School for Social Research. I'm happy with this plan, because it lets us stay in Portland for another half year, and I have time to work on my thesis with easy access to my school. Anyway, that's a very, very basic summary of my life right now.

Currently Listening Friend & Foe By Menomena see related

"It's ok, I am tour guide"

Hey everyone, I finally remembered my xanga password! But wait, you think, isn't that just another excuse for avoiding xanga for months? Actually, no. I'm actually so bad at remembering passwords that I manage to lock myself out of my own accounts by punching in the wrong password too many times. I think the moment I switched from engineering to history in college I rendered myself technically incompetent. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I'm sure.

In any case, I'm still alive and in Portland. My best friend Dave visited here for a few days, so I showed him the highlights of the city as best I could. We skipped the tourist sites like the Rose Garden and Multnomah Falls and instead went straight to the graffiti areas, watched skaters at the acclaimed Burnside skate park and ate at my favorite communist cafe. It was a good time, but now I have to compensate for slacking off on my schoolwork. Time to read like a motivated grad student... though I think I'm going through senioritis for what, the third time?

Currently Listening All Is Dream By Mercury Rev see related

I feel like I update this site so infrequently that it's become a chore, when in reality it's the only real weblog I have. I think the reason it's so difficult is that everything I write has to be filtered through the knowledge that everyone in the universe with internet access can read it. For that reason, I'm hesitant to mention every single aspect of my daily life that everyone will undoubtedly find captivating.

I'm in a Northern Ireland Conflict class at PSU, and I've just been assigned to be Tony Blair for our role-play negotiation. My first reaction was "ok, I'm the out-bound British Prime Minister who will basically make a lot of noise and blow hot air towards the dissenting N.I. parties". In reality, I have the modest responsibility of facilitating the entire process. In other words, none of the Irish parties are going to move a finger until I push them around and stand firm on the November 24 (actual real-life date) deadline for devolved government. I'm excited about this, because it looks like an opportunity to use some of the things I learned in a negotiation class last year.

I'm also taking Farsi (Iran's national language), which is massively easier to pick up than Arabic, though they share a similar alphabet. Not that memorizing 40 words between each class comes easily to me, but Farsi is structured grammatically like a western, rather than a semitic, language.

Allegedly, yesterday was Columbus day. The only reason I'm aware of this colossal celebratory benchmark is that I didn't get any mail. It just seems so...pathetic - the fact that we have a technical holiday, but the lowest and least dramatized for a guy who revisionist history has all but turned into a greedy barbarian. So we name our country after Vespucci, but we carve out a pithy monday for Columbus. We live in a strange country.

This monumental day - the day we Americans recall vividly where we stood 5 years ago as the reality of what happened to New York trickled through the different layers of our understanding and gave birth to a post-9/11 paradigm. I was sitting in chapel at Geneva College, PA (not far from Somerset, PA) when the news began in sketches. "A plane crash"; "a plane crash into buildings"; "someone flew a plane into a skyscraper"; "the pentagon has been attacked". I didn't process how phenomenally earth-shattering this was until classes were canceled.

So it happened. We went to war angry and embarrassed. We wanted the world to hurt because we hurt. Especially the mysterious and seemingly unfriendly arab world. What a journey it's been, my friends. My personal journey has been profoundly influenced by my country's political actions, because at the start I was a naive and simplistic sophomore in college in my first semester of non-engineering classes. I was committed to liberal arts, which meant I was going to be thinking critically about why rather than how. Now, five long, unpredictable and stunning years later, I sit in Portland's Red and Black cafe surrounded by socialists and hippies, typing on my computer next to a newsstand that reads "Bush pledges to remember 9/11 lessons". I'm not a socialist or a hippie, but I am certainly not the simple kid I was sophomore year. My view of the people of the Middle East is entirely different after having living with orphaned Palestinian and Lebanese boys and experiencing the hospitality of an Egyptian family during Ramadan. My imagination of war is no longer drugged by hollywood's war films, because I have visited a military hospital and seen a 20-year old boy gasping for air through his tracheotomy tube while the remaining stubs of his left arm and leg try desperately to heal from the IED that exploded outside of Baghdad.

Acquiescence is a statement. In the same way that God doesn't cease to exist when we don't think about him, bombs don't stop tearing flesh apart and extinguishing life, and the desperately poor don't get any less hungry when our minds are on other things.