The Beginning

     5 months & 10 days. A lifetime for me. 7 lifetimes for my mother. Time which will be spent across an ocean, 2 or 3 continents (depending on your mood), 7 time zones, 5742 miles, 9240 kilometers, countless countries and cities away. Beer Sheva, Beersheeba, באר שבע, however you want to spell it, that's where I'll be. Far from home, far from school, far from family, friends and the grand ole US of A. Ben Gurion University of the Negev, get ready, cause you're about to get a grand old helping of Douglas Gage Swift. Good luck, to all of us.

     But less about them, more about me. MEMEMEMEMEME. I'm a junior at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. My major is Middle East Studies (hmmm, why Israel then?), and my minor is going to be Environmental Studies. I'm 5' 9", brown haired, blue eyed, and enjoy long bike rides through the countryside and lobster dinners. I spend my summers working on a lake at Kenmont Camp in Kent, CT. I grew up in Freehold, NJ, have travelled up and down the East Coast of the US, once to Israel with Congregation Kol Am, and once to Russia with my high school Russian teacher. Potpourri is a great noun to describe me; I'm random, eclectic and strange, not at all sarcastic, have decent sense of humour, and I like to use British English when writing to spice things up a bit.

     But less about my history, more about what I want to do at BGU. If there's one thing I want to get out of this experience, it's... something. I guess I don't really know exactly what I want, but I do want to enjoy the experience. Recently, I've been reading and re-reading travel journals, specifically those of Jack Kerouac and my favourite author, William Least Heat Moon, and I've come to understand that you can't plan a journey, you need to just go and experience it as it happens. 

As Heat Moon said in his best seller Blue Highways (1982), "I can't say, over the miles that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know".

     So that's what my game plan is: go with it. And this, my friends, compadres, family, חברים, חברות ומשפחה, will be my logbook, my Blue Highways, of what I experience, whether good or bad, fun or boring, ups, downs and diagonals. So sit back, or if you're my mother, on the edge of your seat, and enjoy the ride. Because I certainly will :)