If you are reading this , you might be a friend or family member of mine. No, I’m almost certain you are. Because, in a digital world where a dog can maintain a blog, the odds a stranger would find, let alone read, what amounts to a slightly more mature Live Journal are slim. If you are one of the people I shared this with, telling you the address or sending you a link in an e-mail: Hi! I hope you are doing well.
But, on the off chance you stumbled upon this by pure chance or errant Google search, let me introduce myself and what this whole affair is about. For all those who could care less, go watch videos of otters.
I’m a 20-going-on-legal-drinking-age student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Il. You may remember it as the setting for the film Mean Girls. I originally hail from the tiny desert community of Acton, CA. You probably don’t know it at all, but it served as the filming location for The Flintstones movie. For the next six months, I’m traveling across the Atlantic Ocean and back, spending most of the summer in England before starting a three-month-long internship at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. This blog serves as a way to document my travels. And yes, the title refers to the Weezer song. But I swear it isn’t as creepy.
The past six months have been very trying and tireing times in my life. One of the dominant theories being applied to this journal is the complete ignoral of the past, opting for emphasis on the uncharted rather than the set-in-stone, so I won’t devote any words to how or why I fell into a downtrodden state where I virtually became a ghost to the world around me, becoming visible to only a few. But I refused to let depression get the best of me, and found an out. Not a therapist or drug habit, but a study abroad program at the University of Sussex, in south England. After filling out the proper paperwork and convincing my parents to help me shell out the dough to make this happen, it all became official.
As for the Sun Sentinel stint, Northwestern expects every journalism major (as I am) to spend a quarter at a professional internship. Glad to see my $40,000 tuition going to something besides a new Starbucks in the student center.
I intend this to be a journal, not a Gawker-worthy blog. I’m not writing about wacky British news or cute marine life in Fort Lauderdale. This is a place for me to collect my thoughts over the next six months, nothing more or less. I post it online as a way to share with the people most important in my life, to keep them updated on what I’ve done and, more importantly, how I am. The most I can hope to offer, friend or stranger, is the chance of somehow connecting to you via my journey into unknown worlds, and the emotional state that follows.
Thank you for reading, whether for three seconds or half-an-hour.
