“Tell me, Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! Truly Elrond spoke, saying that we could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not … Continue reading
Note: Peace Corps requires all volunteers to take anti-malarial mefloquine pills, which can often produce intense dreams. Regardless, I have pretty strange dreams –and here’s a small window into what I’ve seen in these for the past 20 months. Rainbow parachutes and bouquets of stars (echoing the spectrum of the white sun) rise and fall … Continue reading
My last blog post was primarily about exchanging time for money (i.e. jobs), or in my case as a PCV, exchanging time for experiences. However, there’s another element to this thought and that is how time is best spent. I’m generally content with all that I have accomplished in a year in Peace Corps. One … Continue reading
Note: Writing posts like this is how I celebrate major Quito holidays – Que Viva Quito! In many parts of the world it is the most wonderful time of the year, but being in a primarily Muslim community—where the weather is perpetually hot, where the mango season is ending and mostly, where no commercialism is … Continue reading
As far as I can tell, birthdays are pretty low key in Indonesia. I also didn’t make it a point to announce it to my community, so on the actual day, only my host mother knew. The day went by. I went to a lengthy closing ceremony for a junior high school I casually taught … Continue reading
After my last post, I got a surprising amount of texts, comments and emails from friends either relating to the sentiment or trying to soothe it somehow. It was already comforting enough to know that other people thought about this too, but a friend’s email contained a quote that has helped avert my so-called crisis: … Continue reading
I was telling my friend about my upcoming birthday woes and he decided that “quarter-life crisis” was an insufficiently classy phrase, so he suggested the term “crescent life crisis.” At the time, I thought it quite lame (sorry, Fer!), but now it has deeply grown on me. crescent |ˈkresənt| -noun 1. the curved sickle shape … Continue reading
in the land of dragons 