This is my buddy Siren and I in Costa Rica

I have been fairly absent lately. Absent from this blog, absent from my friends, absent-minded. I don't know why and I don't really want to expound right now. So, instead of being deep and philosophical about why I am the way I am etc., I'm going to tell you some shallow yet interesting things about my life.

I am currently and have been planning for the past three weeks to be an environmental science major with a minor in not for profit business and international development.

This semester, I am taking chemistry, geography, statistics and economics. In a one hundred percent change of pace, I don't have any papers to write this semester! I'm glowing.

I picked up the guitar again. I hope this lasts.

Summer looks like trail work again! I was going to try to fight fire but I think I'm too week to qualify. I can't do a pull up or a boy push up, how embarrassing. But I can beat certain boys at arm wrestling!

I sent about 500 dollars to Tuskegee International School in Ghana. They used the money to buy building supplies for their school. Thank you to everyone who donated!!! If you have any ideas about fundraising let me know.

I love music but most of all I love the Rolling Stones! Their new album A Bigger Bang is great. I also recently picked up Exile on Mainstreet. It makes me cry because it sounds so incredibly twangy. But here's the coolest; Stripped! It's a 1995 release of live recordings from their tour. It spans their whole career and has a lot of b-side tracks. Not to mention, the second track is Like a Rolling Stone.

Also, if you haven't heard Manu Chao or Cat Empire, check them out. Manu Chao is the ultimate world music musician. His lyrics are in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and he is so non sequential. Cat Empire is from Australia and funky. I think they sound a lot like Dispatch. I also can't get enough Good Charlotte, Badly Drawn Boy or Belle and Sebastian. And the really exciting news is that Franz Ferdinand and Peter Tosh are on their way!

In other news, I am looking forward to Jazz Fest, Spring Break backpacking in a Utah national park and Bloomsday. Also on the platter, a possible trip to Vegas with my dad and a possible trip to Mexico from May to June.

Here's an excerpt from a book I'm reading: "Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less and island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and reakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brother, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all; but thee is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three pence for pulling out your tooth yourself and so on; and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still."

So...that's that. I'm going to go wrastle up so pigs and give them all a shampoo and a shave and I'm going to try to stop running away from my fears one baby step at a time.