My best friend from high school texted me today: she's stuck in the Phoenix airport while her flight is delayed.  I asked where she's headed, and here was her response.. "to the tsunami."  A Hawaii vacation, she says.  While the Kalpana region is under severe tsunami warning.  She offered to hide me in her bag and bring me along.  My answer?  Hell yeah......... sounds like my kind of adventure.

A break for the soul.  Today I drove until I found mountains, until I found snow topped glistening points in the horizon, then I drove some more.  Glimmers of memory guided my way toward the answers I seek, of a question unknown.  Your words rang clear in my mind; the initial shock is over, now I'm just trying to adjust.

I realized that was the first Valentine's Day that I've spent single in a very long time.  Like, this long.  As part of striving to remember the kind of person I was before I lived for others, I've been looking for things I miss, like old music videos I used to watch that took clips from anime's and put them to songs.  Here's an old one I loved.

No sleep, and two projects due today, neither finished.  Thankfully my advisor cancelled my meeting tomorrow, so I might actually catch up on some relaxation.  It feels good to be pushed to my limits again.

Growing up is hearing a song you know by heart, one you've been listening to for years, and finally understanding it for the first time, because you have experienced exactly what the song is about.

Not the one you'll keep, but the one you'll never forget.

I've been rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and last night as I started the third book, a quote from the preface caught my eye...

"For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkein's considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either; he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers- thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams."

Hey, Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you.

Two summers ago when I did my internship at an aerospace company, I had one of those pivotal eye-opening moments.  One of the guys I worked with was talking about daisy cutters and how cool they are when they explode and kill everything.. and as I'm sitting there listening to him gush over the awesome death and destruction.. I realized I didn't want to devote my life to something I didn't feel good about.  I had every opportunity to come back to that company after I got my degree, and it would have been the smarter choice, with a great salary and plenty of people watching out for me and a shoo-in for a management position... but I picked the life of a starving grad student instead.  Sometimes you have to choose something based on what is most important to you, and when things get rough, you can hold onto that decision and remember why.

As I walked through the palm trees today, listening to the cool desert breeze whisper by, I was reminded of my decision and my hope that I'm pursuing something I can feel proud of.