The new Blog is up and running.  I want to give a special thanks to Brian for putting this page together (I especially like the pre-1989 chic).  I wanted to start out with a brief explanation of what I intend for this forum.  I hope to produce witty, amusing and profound entries about our time in Bulgaria but that is probably not going to happen.  I mostly thought of the idea to spare my friends and family the tedium of mass e-mails.  Please feel free to come and go as you like.  I suppose this whole exercise is really an English-language outlet to prevent myself from going insane.  So if you find the entire exercise to be gratuitous self-indulgence please feel free to not read it or better yet, tell me to get a grip. 

Anyway, in this first post I thought i’d share a little bit of our pre-Bulgaria experience.  Most of our summer has been spent with family.  What we should have been doing, however, was packing.  Packing is the art of the impossible.  How does one take into consideration every contingency that could occur over the next ten months?  How many pairs of underwear and socks will I need?  Should I bring a life-time supply of deodorant? (knowing me, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt)  We have been homeless now for nearly two weeks and if packing at home is difficult, packing when your belongings are spread across the Eastern Seaboard is pretty close to psychotic. 

Perhaps the stress of packing (and of putting off packing) is good.  Being worried about the stupid material aspect of moving our lives across the world has allowed me to ignore the more important and more worrisome task of coming to grips with the fact that I am leaving.  It hasn’t quite reached existential angst-like proportions but it is not easy to prepare oneself mentally for such a long time away.  It is certainly easier to just ignore the issue but i’m not sure it is very healthy.  We do have almost two weeks to go before departure so there is a chance that I could reach some metaphysical breakthrough and achieve a state of Chi before we depart.  Who knows.

 I have posted this picture as an accurate representation of the problems of moving/packing.  I have entitled it “The Torment of Belongings”.