No, not another photo of me, but rather an explanation of one.
I took the blog's banner photo in the summer of 2007, on yet another one of my trans-provincial displacements. That was the summer I enrolled in my first pre-requisite course for medical school: the dreaded organic chemistry. I was moving back to Alberta, after nursing all across Canada and traveling in Europe, Asia, Africa, NZ...to live in my mother's basement and study chemistry. I figured o-chem would be the best litmus test* for my academic abilities in basic sciences--if I could succeed in that class I could do the rest. (Little did I know physics would end up being my dark lord and master as well as the greatest obstacle.)
I know almost the precise spot on the highway where I took that picture. The mountains of BC are fading in the background, and the TransCanada is soldiering on into the prairies of Alberta.
At the time I didn't know how symbolic the image would become for me. It captures almost the exact moment I began saying goodbye to things from my life. Goodbye to the Rockies, a wonderful career, a house in the mountains, the people in the world that I was closest to, my hobbies, my favorite forms of recreation, and most of my belongings.
That summer set in motion a chain of events which would certainly take some wild and unpredictable turns.
And now here I am. No one said it was going to be easy, they only said it'd be worth it.
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*Pun intended, of course.
