Blood, Sweat, and Eye Water (Prologue)

I'll be thirty-three years old in three years, and by that time -- unless, knock on wood, I meet my untimely-yet-perhaps-deserved demise -- I'll have lived a third of my life abroad, in South Korea. (That's three threes, if you're scoring at home.) We just call it Korea over here, by the way. Adding the preposition "south" is as pointless as ordering a tuna FISH sandwich.

To paraphrase the older Gordie Lachance, Eleven years, man. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

At thirty-three, I'll be eleven years removed from my senior year in college, and eleven years before that my fifth year in grade school. It's unsound to compartmentalize your life -- because existence doesn't follow chapters -- but it's what keeps us sane, I believe; in much the same way sleep helps us divide our days and memory serves to sort the everyday from the exceptional. So now's the time: to document as best I can the third chapter of my life, before the killjoy phantoms of age steal my recollections and bury them forever.

If I make it to sixty-six, I'll write a follow-up. I promise.

Let's take a walk.