The happiest day of my life, up to now anyway. (Photo: ORU Facebook Page)

Two years ago, I was in a phase not terribly different from where I am now. I was at home, it was a few days after Christmas, and I had just laid down for sleep when a jolt of excitement shot through my body, beginning at the top of my spine and ending at the soles of my feet. See, I was inching closer and closer, one day at a time, to the day when I would leave on jet plane to a faraway city to begin a new adventure. Okay, granted, it was a less-faraway city and a much shorter adventure, one that had a very different outcome (hopefully) than the one I prepare for now. Just bear with me.

Seeing as how this post is coming mere days before the beginning of a new year, I suppose it’s convenient to make it a “year in review” sort of thing, but, just to be clear, I don’t feel obligated to constrain life’s arcs to an arbitrary unit of time. This particular post picks up primarily in late 2010. Even with my hesitance to impose a narrative structure onto life’s chaotic happenstance, I can comfortably say that the current arc of “my story” began then and with what one might conservatively call a “series of unfortunate events.” (Incidentally, my sole New Year’s resolution is to reach a point of comfort saying “my story” outside quotations.) But first, a bit of back story to get us rolling. After all, the beginning of one arc in a story is quite often the end of another.

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