Peace Out

Welcome to my blog.

It’s currently a mostly empty work in progress that will hopefully someday look like a real, lived-in blog. In the meantime, readers, you’re stuck looking at a lot of empty space and way too many commas.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that I’m off to the Philippines in nine days, which seems both impossibly soon and infinitely far away. We’ll have a day-long crash-course in San Fran and then a three-month training period in the Philippines and then I work for two years. After that, who the hell knows.

But that’s really all I have to say about my imminent departure. Actual details are sparse. I’ll teach secondary English on one of the 7,107 islands. Language, Internet access, access to plumbing and all the other little details will be figured out as I go. It’s exciting stuff. Scary, headache-inducing stuff, but mostly really, really exciting.

What I can attempt to explain now is why I’m going on this crazy little adventure in the first place. So, in no particular order, here are a few of the reasons I sent in my application last July (Spoiler alert: They’re pretty much the same reasons everyone joins) :

1. I just graduated from Syracuse with majors in newspaper journalism and religion. Those aren’t exactly booming career fields at the moment.

2. I love traveling. And I’m not yet ready to sacrifice that for something as mundane as a “full-time job” or a “career.”

3. I’m fascinated by other cultures. There’s no better way to experience how other people live than to jump in and live it with them.

4. I’m a journalist. There’s gotta be a good story in this somewhere, right?

5. It’s the right thing to do. This one’s the biggee, and without it all of the other reasons don’t even come close to justifying volunteering with the Peace Corps. As true as the others are, they’re also superficial. This provides the drive, I think, that keeps most volunteers going when the work seems tedious, pointless or impossible.

The one thing I took away from all my religion classes at ‘cuse was that words and ideas, for all their power, are inherently insufficient. After reading dozens of theological books about how the world should be, about how we should and could coexist, the ideas all began to frustrate me. Because no matter how eloquent the writer, or how lucid the argument, no problems are fixed by arguing about what should be. Dealing with right and wrong in the abstract is an important debate, but for it to have weight it must take place in actuality. We have to dive in and get dirty. The slow-moving, insufferably frustrating and difficult work of actually improving lives in our increasingly misbalanced world, no matter how small the degree, is a must if we’re going to complain about how bad things are. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, if I passionately believe in the worldview those classes helped shape — and I do — I can’t not make a major commitment and keep my integrity. Hence the Peace Corps.

There you have it. My first blog post, in all its rambling, incoherent glory. Hopefully as I go on I’ll figure out a more comfortable style for these things, but just remember that the author, like this blog, remains a work-in-progress. Feel free to comment or e-mail me with any questions.

Also, I’ll post my mailing address once I get around to finding it. Mail me things.