About this journal
A guy, throwing his arms up
Every week for two years, I wrote home. This is all of it.
These are the weekly emails I sent from the mission field, gathered in one place and put in the order they actually went out — 45 letters in total, not counting the handful of “testing, does this even send” messages that never said anything.
I’m an engineering student, which is mostly relevant because it explains the subject lines. When you spend your days thinking in logic gates and state machines, the letter home starts picking up binary, bad puns, and references nobody asked for. I’ve left every word exactly as I wrote it. Think of it as a commit history for two years of my life — except the commit messages are unhinged and there’s no rolling anything back.
A note on the numbering: I counted the weeks myself, in the subject line, and I was not rigorous about it. A couple of numbers repeat. Near the end I lost the thread completely and started guessing out loud. So rather than quietly fix my own arithmetic, the letters here are sorted by the date each one was sent — the timeline is right even where my counting wasn’t.
The \[T]/ at the bottom of nearly every letter is my sign-off. It’s the ASCII version of Solaire of Astora throwing up the Praise the Sun gesture from Dark Souls — arms to the sky, jolly cooperation, the whole bit. Two years of letters and I never once explained it to the family, so consider this the footnote. (And yes — the little sun in the corner that flips the lights on is on purpose.)
The photos are the ones I sent along with each letter, resized for the web. And if you spot a typo — that’s not a bug, it’s a primary source.