Time to Travel

I wish the title were "Time Travel," but that's another post and another genre.

Since finishing finals, I did a lot of packing, a lot of seeing people, and some other fun stuff. I played a game of D&D with a fantastic group of friends, visited the Museum of Science and Industry where I was blown away by the integration of art and science, saw some fantastic student theater, and spent some time in the city. I really like my city days :) Oh, yeah, and I watched all of Dollhouse and started watching Lost.

Dollhouse is a Joss Whedon series about an organization that uses neurotechnology to make programmable people. The people sign contracts because they have faced serious trauma in their real lives such that they are willing, desirous even, to give up their lives for a number of years to have time to forget. The ethical issues are raised and addressed very well and the complexity of the situation makes you change how you feel about if the characters are good or bad at various points throughout.

I'm almost done with the first season of Lost and I think like it. I'm going to get the second season to watch on the plane.

Yesterday, I attended the honors ceremony for commencement, and this morning was commencement. The college convocation is tomorrow, and then I'm off to China!

I think the most exciting part of my week was meeting Dr. Paul Farmer, who was this year's commencement speaker. He did a small meet and greet/Q&A with the Global Health students, and I got to go. The remarkable thing was that he was so present and engaged with us the entire time and wanted to stay longer rather than stick to his jam-packed schedule. I asked him a question, and when answering, he spoke directly to me and made tons of eye contact. It was so inspirational to see such an influential person care so much about the current generation of students in his field. I have to admit that he was better in the small group than in the large speech, but that might be because of how miserably hot I was while he was speaking at the ceremony.

Now that all the ceremonial graduating is done, and I've done all of my shopping for both clothing and preparatory medication, it's time to pack, and then go study in Beijing! I'll be trying to keep a blog there (don't know how internet regulations will affect things), so hopefully this summer will be documented on chinasteph.blogspot.com if you'd like to follow.

So, until August, today is awesome because I'm getting time with my family before going far away for an extended period of time.