New York Hiatus

Finish first year of grad school - check.
Propose to girlfriend - check.
find a productive way to spend the summer between grad semesters??

Check.

As many of you already know, I will not be in New York this summer. At Shelley's urging I went searching for opportunities to improve me knowledge in the areas of my graduate studies during the summer break, and through one very helpful university contact, and my practically patent-pending system of dumb luck, I landed a whopper.

Based on my prior experience in radio operations/management, and my current academic/social interest in the region of Central Asia, I was approved for an internship with Radio Attazyk, the Kyrgyz branch of "Radio Free Europe," now re-branded as Radio Liberty. For those not familiar with RFE/RL, it is an international news/journalism organization with certain functional similarities with the BBC or NPR. Like the BBC, it has a strongly international focus for its news content, but like NPR it is actually a confederation of independent news organizations which share resources and content. It is also, it must be admitted, funded by the US Congress as a carryover from its days as a propaganda machine pumping in "free press" via radio to Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the main office has moved from DC to Prague, and the mission has shifted to more generally support freedom, democracy, etc. around the world. Continued US funding of course requires at least a critical eye, though not necessarily skepticism. In addition to radio news, they also support vibrant web coverage from all the countries in which they are involved, and I would encourage you to flip through the articles and judge for yourself. www.rferl.org

As for myself, I'm nominally going as a radio intern, though it seems more likely at this point that I'll be conducting training in radio copy writing (essentially, high-level english training), and also be assisting with a youth (15-20s) radio program. I will find out more when I get there.

That's the long version, now here's the relevant detail:

the (lame) Texpatriot is setup to be a blog about my life, but specifically my life as a Texan Expatriot living in New York. Moving to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, transcends most of what I would usually write in this blog. I will no longer be a Texan - or even a New Yorker - I will now be living as an 'American' representative, dissolving the fun nuances this blog is built to discuss.

Luckily... I happen to have another blog, which predates this one and addresses exactly the issues at hand: what do I experience when traveling outside my comfort zone and beyond the territorial borders of my own prior experience. I started this last summer when I spent almost 3 months touring around Europe, first alone and then later accompanied by my girlfriend. It was a tremendous experience, and I had a lot of time to think deep and write about it on the blog.

I have my doubts about this summer resulting in such ephemeral contemplations, but it's a close enough fit that I'll be documenting my Kyrgyz adventure on this alternate (previous) blog chain. You can follow along at http://weberonthelamb.blogspot.com

The name doesn't make much sense, being both a euphemism for "legal fugitive" and a (not very) comical allusion to a (formerly) recurring segment on the Colbert Report. Since the creation of that blog, Colbert dropped the bit, and I realized that I wasn't fleeing anything, but rather searching for things.

Nonetheless, the blog (and its mis-nomer) took on a life of its own. It became personified, and I've come to think, in a very weird way, about 'the lamb' as my companion in my travels. It is an honest, occasionally brutally honest, confidant as well as a catalyst to push me further beyond my comfort zone when the opportunity arises. In a sense, it has become my 'journeyman's conscience,' reminding me of my purpose to explore and the friends and family who await an update.

Having said all of this, the primary purpose of this post is only to inform you that, in all likelihood, I will not be reposting to this blog until I return from this particular engagement. When I get back to NYC in August/September, and my regular life and TX:NY comparisons again become relevant, the (lame) Texpatriot will return.

Until then, I would love to have you follow along in my digital footprints at Weber on the Lamb, and I wish you the very best wherever your summer may take you.

Weber
:: (lame) Texpatriot