So it is less then a week before I am gone from Abilene. I have been here for lets see... about seventeen and a half years. All my schools from second grade through college were within thirty or so blocks of each other, and there is nothing like that to make a wide read and educated guy feel a bit provincial.

Dr. Cicero Bruce, one of my English Professors at McMurry liked to talk about provincialism a lot. It was, along with the great conversation of western literature, and the original seven liberal arts, one of his favorite literature as a way of life lectures. He spoke of how reading a text carefully and considerately, engaging the author in a sort dialog would make us become less provincials in time, for though the works in the western cannon of literature were written by people who have made our culture what it is, the works are products of a vastly different time place and culture, yet they are still undeniably human. By engaging these works we can sit with those authors and look at our own culture as it is, good and bad. So after reading so many of those illustrious works and also a whole bunch of sci-fi, I would like to think I am pretty well covered on this sort of provincialism.

Now I hope this journey into another culture half way around (almost precisely) the world for a year, will begin to polish off this education of mind and make me less (literally) provincial in the other sense. If you consider Texas a province, I can actually count on my hands how many times I have left it since I moved here... yeah... the number is eight. I went to Florida and New Mexico with the Boy Scouts. I went to United States of Mexico four times on mission trips, and I visited two friends out of state one time each, Arkansas and Missouri... oh wait, make that nine. I also went up to Colorado for the National Gathering Of Episcopal College Students.

So this ought to be a adventure. Possibly even Mythic. At least for me. No crones have accosted me and given me dubious fortunes, and have yet to receive any mysterious packages with ancient totemic objects in them.

No robots falling out of the sky with partial messages from pretty women in them either.
That last kinda disappoints me.

So if you are a pretty woman, and have a robot and a big sling shot, I'll be waiting.

Of course if you consider the pretty woman God, and the Robot the Holy Spirit (also God) and the message a calling, then I believe I have that, and you needn't bother becoming a computer scientist, no matter how pretty you are.

But now I think I am making this too complicated. I just really wanted to say I am excited about going. Finally. Huzzah!