blog.big-woop.com

1. I will be out of school for one year. The administration saw fit to give me two semesters reprieve from their institution, citing my poor grades—in courses I maintain that I never wished to take, but was ostensibly forced to against my will¹—as due cause for my removal from campus. From a letter, received January 10, ten days before my planned return to campus: "We take this action not to punish you but rather because we judge that you will be best served by time away from campus and the environment in which your academic difficulties arose. We hope that the interval will allow you to assess the causes of your academic problems, make plans, and re-evaluate your personal and academic goals." My appeal—wherein I explained my plight, and asked that they "reconsider the whole of their judgement," or at least "consider [suspending me] for only one semester"—fell on deaf ears. Two weeks ago I travelled to Grinnell, packed my life into the back of a van, then did it all over again in reverse four hours North. I am once again under a roof with my family in Saint Paul, looking for a job—part-time or full, odd or straight—and sorely missing life and people in the middle of that forsaken Iowa corn field.

2. The big-woop.com ride will soon come to an end. Let's face it: I haven't been the best at updating of late. And it's not that I've grown bored of it (or maybe that's exactly what it is). The prospect of writing to the few fine readers of my website has not become tiresome, and it's not even that I feel like I have nothing to write about (Hell, these past few months have provided fodder to last me pages and pages). It's nothing like any of that. I will get a new website², and it will be cool. Really cool. And it'll look right in Firefox, too, I promise. I simply feel, now that I've let this thing fall into relative disrepair, or at least into stagnation, that it's time to move on and make something else. With the "fresh start" Grinnell's administration believes it's giving me comes a whole new set of stuff: Believe it or not I've actually taken pictures since 2004. I feel like maybe I'd like to write about things other than what I've been up to in the recent past, because you know things—being as they've gotten—are going to be interesting from here on out. At least i hope so. Besides, the domain expires in a couple months and I'm broke anyway.

3. Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico were phenomenal. I've never experienced anything remotely like it in my life. I'm an official travel addict and hope to find my way through everything and discover, when all is said and done, that I've been places too. Because my departing flight was delayed seven hours, the airline on which I'd chosen to fly proffered a hundred dollar travel voucher, non-transferrable, to anywhere at any time, and to be used by the time one year is up. So there's a start.

I'll see you when I get there.