I'm leaving for Thailand in 8 days!

I’m leaving for Thailand in 8 days! I’ll be heading over there for a study abroad program where I will take units in 8 weeks. I’ll then stay at Wat Pah Nanachat, a Thai forest monastery for about 2 weeks. I might have to shave my head, beard, and eyebrows there. That’ll be weird. Not so much the head hair but the eyebrows?! I mean, how long do eyebrows take to grow back? After the monastery I’ll meet up with my uncle in Bangkok where we will trapse around for awhile. I’ll be gone most of the summer! (I’ll still do blog posts – hopefully with pictures)

But yeah, I’m pretty stoked for the whole thing. It’s so strange how fortunate I am. I’ve wondered about that a lot in my life, why are some people better off than others? I haven’t ever come up with a good answer. Karma from past lives seems like a lazy answer because it puts the responsibility of a person’s worse conditions on that person and not on circumstances. I don’t believe in a God either so “God’s Plan” is out the window too. So what does that leave?

Looking deeper, I can tell that I am troubled in some way that I am so well off while others are not. I know that a good part of why I consider myself to be a fairly happy person is because of the circumstances I was born into. But not everybody is born into the circumstances that I have been born into. Because of this I feel a responsibility to give back in some way.

Where am I going with this? I don’t know. I like writing. That is where I am going with this.