Blogs and I, well, we go way back. I have been blogging in one manner or another for since 2001, possibly before it was even called “blogging” and it was just a “News” section in a personal website that I through together with badly written HTML after school hosted by some free hosting provider (remember those?) with enormously long URLs that had to be deciphered by trained cryptographers. From the free hosting I moved onto paid hosting and my own silly domains and eventually onto CMS or “Blogging” platforms and more professional domains names (not that my current domain name is exactly a CV improvement).

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Over the past several years, I have come to realize the wonderful world “out there” for me to explore and experience. Over the past year, I have come to realize the wonderful world “in here” for me to explore and experience. I cannot figure out which of the two realizations I am most excited about. I wonder if they are one in the same, I just have not come to that understanding yet.

It’s a new year! I am looking forward to 2009 and I look forward to another year of living my life for me and following my dreams. This past year I have set out to accomplish many goals and I think I’ve done just that. This year I will most certainly be doing more volunteering and certainly do more traveling with and without volunteering.

Happy New Year to everyone!

It’s been close to a week since I’ve landed “state-side” and have been adjusting to the time difference. All twelve timezones worth of it.

I am very happy to be home, in the sense that I can see my friends and family again. The timezones is not all that I am adjusting to. I hate to admit it, as it makes me feel very conceited, but since coming back, it feels that everything is sprinkled with the flavor of insignificance. I guess it’s just something I have to learn to adjust with now that i am back in the “real world” of work, bills and responsibilities. Though it does make me really wonder about the necessity for a lot of things, living on so little for so long.

I have just under 1000 pictures on flickr. I’ve gone through a good number of them already and given them captions and/or descriptions and will continue to do so in the coming week. Going through them is something I am enjoying very much. Reliving all of these great memories of a trip that seems so close, and at the same time so far away.

So, things have changed. For the better

I’ve gone ahead and reactivated my old blog, but I am seriously considering boarding it up and closing it down. I think it might be a good idea for me to put that part of my life behind me. I’ve also spent a bit of time considering not blogging any more. At all. But since I’ve enjoyed my dabblings in Tumblr, I am gonna go ahead and give it a try.

I am going to keep the title “Awkward Silence”, though for different reasons than why I chose it in the first place. I’ve also registered the domain awkward-silence.com and should be live sometime this week.

I will try to remain a bit more focused with the content on this blog. I will try to talk a bit more about my experiences volunteering, traveling, and maybe the misc item here or there.

I am looking forward to this new chapter in my life and I hope not to bore anyone who happens to tag along

Happy Birthday Mom. Thanks for being one of the handful of people who selflessly always had my best interest in mind.

I know its been a while since i’ve talked. I know i am neglecting my brother and my friends.

I’ve been feeling very melancholy as of late. So much has happened in the past year. I feel as if so much is always out of my control. I have no grasp in my own life.

I am trying to fix things. I am. I just feel very weak sometimes, which is probably a result of “lack of control”.

I felt a bit inspired to write something, anything down while listening to the song “Night on Earth” by the Bouncing souls.

One thing i have learned, I mean, really learned, is that things can always be worse. They really can – and be very careful with what you wish for. You may end up getting it and then regretting it.

/end bullshit.

I guess perception is everything, either that, or some people are just plain ignorant. Possibly a combination of both. Someone today mentioned to me something that hit a nerve, somewhere deep inside the fabric of my moral matter, and as usual, i did keep my cool and went about it professionally, and decided to post here about it.

The topic in question is Che Guevara, the person and what he stood for. Specifically, what gets to me is how people are so quick to connect Che Guevara with communist dictatorship and all the evils that come with the governments that wave “red flags”.

The person, who so innocently threw a wrench into the inner workings of my ideals, had very recently watched “The Motorcycle Diaries”, which, in my humble opinion, does a very good job at taking Che the person away from everything that he is so commonly associated with, which makes me wonder even more – that the preconceived thoughts and ideas about said subject were so great that the mind was closed to any new ideas.

To me, Che IS a great man. He wanted to see not only the people of his own country, and not only people of his own continent, but everyone be free from oppression and have freedoms and he wanted people to be treated equally. Jesus fucking Christ, this is what the great American Revolutionaries wanted. They fought back from oppression and for freedom. You put Che and Jefferson in the same room and you would see that they agree that people should have freedoms, people should not be oppressed and that people should be treated equally. Where they would differ is in economic principals.

What a better way to make my first real on post tumblr by talking about my weekend with my wonderful niece Kailly?

My sister, busy with work, asked me if I could take care of Kailly on Saturday. This quickly expanded to be Friday evening through Sunday morning. No complaints here.

Truth be told, I should spend more time with Kailly, along with a lot of other things I should be doing. This was to be our first weekend together.

Kailly is about two and a half and from what i can tell from experience, she is just about your typical two and a half-year old. We played together and watched more Disney movies than any human being should be exposed to, but all in all, I had a good time with my niece. The only time that she cried was during bed time when she missed her mother. oh, and when uncle accidentally let some soap fall in her eyes during bath time.