life as understood

Call it a lifelong quest to self-legitimize.

I've never thought of it that way, but I imagine Freud would. Basically, I'm obsessed with place. This obsession manifests itself in spatial things, like how I gravitate to architecture books in Barnes & Noble and how a good percentage of my dreams feature me discovering new rooms in my own house.

Mostly, though, my interest is geographical. I knew the 50 states and their capitals when I was three years old. I still peruse maps whenever the opportunity arises. And above all, I'm fiercely loyal to and proud of my home country, state, and especially city. Actually, this deep love extends to my university, church, and pretty much every other institution that makes me who I am. I defend each of them voraciously. This is where it gets Freudian, I imagine. One could easily say that I'm just attempting to combat an innate sense of inferiority, especially considering that my state, city, university, and church could all be considered backwards by the mainstream public. That's probably a little bit true. At the very least, the obsession is traceable, logical. I love what's mine because it's mine.

And then there's another place: Russia, and more specifically, Siberia. I loved that long before I had a reason--long before I took it as my own. Since I was 11 or 12 years old, I've been inexplicably fascinated. I have theories for how it budded, but nothing obvious comes up. Growing up, I studied the language, geography, history, and culture to the extent I could with limited resources, and then in 2004 I went there. For two glorious years, I lived and served there, and the interest exploded further.

I haven't talked much about Russian things in this venue for some reason, but I probably will now, because I'm about to start a master's program in Russian Studies. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with the degree yet, but I suppose this mini-opus is my attempt to make verbal sense of all of this. While I may still not know what the future holds, as far as I can tell, professionally speaking, I was put on this earth to study and utilize this very knowledge.

Those who know me well know that this has been a long journey, to which I'm pleased to announce a landmark development. After more than a year of deliberating, applying, waiting, hearing back, and deliberating some more, I have accepted an offer to pursue this degree at






Stanford University.

Sarah and I couldn't be happier about the school, program, people, or location. Plus, they made us an offer we'd be fools to turn down. It's going to be different living in the most populous and popular state in the union, in a huge and cool metro area, and studying at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but I tell you what, I'm excited. We both are. I won't go so far as to say that this is my moment of legitimacy, but I do feel like this is the beginning of something new, in a more wide-ranging and profound way even than it appears on the surface. We'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, party in California.