Resurrection

This blog has laid dormant for the best part of four years, originally created as a way for me to keep family and friends informed while I travelled abroad during the summer of 2013 on two separate mission trips to Brazil and Cambodia (...I know - a prime example of the pretentious liberal undergraduate travelling to the developing world to help "poor people" and solve their problems whilst "finding" himself. A mini-messiah of social justice.) I would probably cringe greatly to read my posts below (I consciously choose not to), despairing at my poor writing ability, with its likely clumsy grammar and errors in spelling, as I will most likely cringe in 5 years to come, reading through this post. Nevertheless, I want to improve and for a few years it has been in the back of my mind to resurrect this site as a means for me to do so.

I am naturally melancholic, but regretfully I feel I have lost some of this in recent years. The chaos of life as a young father and husband trying to get by has a tendency to sap all moments of artistic expression away from me in the stress and mild disorientation of it all. Five years of higher education in the humanities quickly made writing (or, rather, I made it) a chore for me to procrastinate over, and now over a year out from graduating my masters program, I feel in a position to resurrect my melancholy, voice my thoughts, however dull and uninsightful they may be, simply for the sake of improving my ideas and the ability to communicate them.

I am an expat--an Englishman living in Calfornia. Though I joke about my travelling, I have been blessed to visit many different places and meet many people. I have had some fantastic teachers and mentors too, throughout. As I begin fatherhood, and a new job as a Theology teacher, I wish to think out loud, so that I may think more clearly. I may be adding to the noise of the internet, or playing to deaf ears. Neither matters are of great concern to me. On the latter, I hope my "noise" will be more meaningful, or at least less harmful, than most.  As the nihilist philosopher, Ferris Bueller says: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around every once in a while, you might miss it." I feel life slipping through my fingers, not in a depressing emo-rock kind of way, but just that I fail to stop and look. The end for me in writing this blog is simply to stop and look, to listen and see, to taste and feel and breathe and sigh. In the reading of it, I hope it will be an opportunity for others to do the same.