"Welcome" and "Thank You"

So....we graduated from college. Swarthmore College to be exact. Thank you to all those who made it out to sweat it out (in the humidity). Peggy, Dylan, Billy and Grandma! (Mom and Dad as well and K-Factor). Duncan had a large contingent which was sweet because I felt like they were on my side as well.

Graduation was pretty cool I guess. If you're into cult ceremonies you would have enjoyed the strange robes of the faculty and the frequent "Quaker" moments of silence. The speakers were pretty decent. I thought the class speaker was overrated and should have made more jokes about her self-plagiarism scandal (whole story in-person only).

In four years we have gained all the tools needed to now go out and conquer the world, shoot for the stars, or build our cathedral, depending on whatever metaphor you like. What are we actually trained to do now? Not much really, become an academic maybe. Even with an engineering degree, I am not really as employable as a state school grad with the technical training to jump straight into a design firm. I guess 160 large doesn't buy what it used to. Of course, the real problem is not that I am unemployable, but rather that it is pretty difficult to do Swarthmore and look for jobs at the same time. I am confident that I am not in the vast minority when saying that I do not know what I am doing next year.

Naturally, I am not fretting (it's not like I have Giardia or something). Graduation gives me the opportunity to do what I have not had the chance to do yet in my life - that is, whatever I want, wherever I want (subject to some budgetary constraints of course). This seems to include concerts, California, summer, backpacking, Chelsea, Westport, though there will be more to come for sure.

Thus, we come to the motivation behind this blog. Maybe you remember the blog from Poland. Maybe you remember that it dominated most of the time. Anyway, I am going to keep the blog updated with me and Duncan (Dizzle)'s adventures across America. I will also be attempting to obtain a job or something for next year throughout all of this. My current plan is to secure some environmental work with AmeriCorps, possibly in California, Nevada or Maryland (?). I am pretty much open to anything, though, so we'll see what happens. Also, I am including Dizzle in all of this because I am hoping that he will do some blogging as well and he will be the photo man, although I haven't talked to him about it yet...

In the immediate future, I am staying my last night in "the barn" tonight, which is an off-campus apartment project which looks like a barn but is really not. I am planning to cook dinner for the vegetarians in my apartment tonight to thank them for letting me stay and feeding me - Waverly, Annie, Lilli (Michelle was around but moved to California last weekend). Also they showed me that the barn is a cool place to live even if it is not the commune it's cracked up to be. Tomorrow, Andrew Leclair and I take a 7 hour bus to Pittsburgh to meet up with Dizzle and prepare for the Bonnaroo Music Festival (www.bonnaroo.com for the lineup). We drive down to it on Thursday (it's in Manchester, TN, almost dirty south). Next update will probably be after that, so you're not gonna wanna miss it.