A New Beginning

It feels like yesterday I was sitting there in aisle seat, taxing out of Landwetter Airport, Gothenburg, Sweden on my way to Chicago, Illinois, jotting down the first few sentences in what would become my travel blog. It was a travelogue really, more of an online diary of my adventures and exploits in America than a blog in the conventional sense (blog=web log).

How serious was this precocious young man about his blogging-ways you ask? Put it like this, I named it after the latin term for studying abroad. One of tragically few concepts, ideas and words I happened to remember from my third year of law school and a course in the history of law. I wisely chose to focus my attention in class on the obscure latin terms, law school will do that to you.

Bullshit course anyway. How would you frame a half-semester course in the “history of law”? I doubt my scientifically-minded friends sit through two months on “the history of math”. Gawd.

Anyways, this is all by way of saying – from the outset – that this is no travelogue. This is not anything with the suffix -ogue. I fear it might warrant a few –esque:s though. My favorite one has always been Dylanesque. Such a beautiful word. Don’t know how I am supposed to get my blog to be Dylanesque though…Recurring themes of death and Rimbaud? The sad eyed law student of the lowlands? The lonesome death of my VISA card? Hey Mr. Falafel man, sing a song for me.

On a related note I hope each and every one of you saw last year’s magnificent I’m Not There with Cate Blacnhett. I saw it on Thanksgiving (eve?) of all days, stranded solitarily alone in Chapel Hill; after having been working on some big paper since (literally) 5AM in the morning, after having had Thanksgiving dinner alone at Time Out on Franklin St. It was easily the worst meal of my year abroad and one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years. See it all evens out like that.

So you have my word, I will do my damndest to get this little thing here to be nothing but blogesque. This is not a diary, this is not a photo album. This is a blog. It will not chronicle my last semester at the law faculty in Lund in the kind of excrutiating detail that my travelogue did – hell, I’ll be holed up writing my thesis six days a week anyway. Will there be amateurish photos of my hometown in 6PM magic-hour light, quite possibly I’m afraid. Will there be pictures of me squinting into the camera lens with a bourbon and coke in a club setting, most definitely.

My travelogue totaled a whopping 100 single-spaced pages after two semesters, I won’t subject you to that kind of madness folks. And yeah, this one will be in English. Go figure.