First Post

Well, after months of planning and preparation, I leave for London tomorrow.

I'm struggling with how to go about writing this blog. Most of the writing that I do these days consists of long, thesis driven essays that I write after hours of deliberation, and I can't imagine that I will want to spend that kind of time writing a blog while I'm living in London (sorry). On the other hand, I could quickly let this blog devolve in a series of long, rambling explosions of thought featuring page upon page of short sentences and line breaks. However, since I'd prefer to write a relatively coherent blog, I promise to do my very best to prevent that from happening.

Over the past few years, I feel as though I have become 'quieter' in the sense that I share less over the internet than I once did. Part of me has learned to recognize both the importance of discretion and the limits of the Internet as a tool for communication, and other parts just wonder if anybody really wants to read what I have to write. Therefore, I thank those of you who read these posts; it's good to know that you're out there. At the same time, though, a few years of perspective on my trip to Costa Rica during my junior year of high school has taught me that I will appreciate having specific, written recounts of my experiences to amplify the memories created by photographs and a hazy, ever decreasing recollection of place names.

With this long term usefulness in mind, I'll be sure to fill you in on classes, adventures, friends, travel, and everything in between as the semester progresses. I also hope to supply you with a variety of quality photographs, all of which will appear in the individual posts in which I first include them and in a collection accessible by the link on the right side of the page -- London Stories Photo Album. Hopefully, I will also take a picture worthy of use as the background of this blog (the one that's there is very nice and rather appropriate, but I'd prefer to use one of my own).

Please let me know if you have any issues reading the posts, I'm always looking for ways to improve the display settings (font size and color, background color and opacity, etc.)

In any case, thank you for allowing me to pontificate in this first post. I promise that my posts will be significantly more interesting (and photo heavy) once I have actually arrived in London.

I can't wait.

Until then,

Joel