Michael goes overseas! Or really, actually, to Chicago. And soon to Michigan. Heh.

Hi!

For those of you wandering idly through this puzzling piece of blogmanship trying to verify that it is in fact the site from which I, Michael, will be blogging from and about Jerusalem for a year:

Yes.  It is.

I can’t promise I’ll stay entirely on topic – so don’t be too surprised if you catch some weird tangents about terrifying high fashion department stores in urban Germany, classy horror-filled clothing boutiques in French cities, or any of a wide variety of numerous other topics I might end up on that have little or nothing to do with scary clothing outlets in Europe. (I'll be writing newsletters occasionally that will be a lot more direct and to the point in terms of letting you know what I'm doing.)

Usually hopefully the tangents will have a point, potentially relating to the issues and events more immediately at hand. The point of this most recent tangent being that I’ve seen Abercrombie & Fitch outlets in Paris and Dusseldorf, and they were something out of an Orwellian nightmare tinged with high school nostalgia and dripping with a noxious cocktail of musk, matching tight shirts, and peer pressure.

It was dark, there were more random staircases than I knew what to do with, and identically dressed store employees kept popping out of random dark corners with perfectly-styled hair and eerie German-accented unison choruses of “Can I help you?” It was like a dimly lit alien museum full of a very limited range of confiscated Earth artifacts – namely, tight, over-priced teenager clothes.

I wanted to feel bad for the imitation-human creatures apparently forced into servitude as robotic tour guides by their cruel Martian overseers, but I got the feeling they were far beyond the reach of sympathy by this point. (I guess the real question is why are the alien masters so fond of Abercrombie & Fitch? Perhaps unresolved middle school traumas and anxieties? Or more likely the outrageously over-perfumed ventilation shafts are easily adapted for larva incubation purposes.

Anyway.

I don’t really have much to talk about yet, so I reverted to talking about other things to give you a little bit of content. I’m just gonna forget for now about all the other things I said I was gonna talk about on this blog in the past, but watch out for random unexpected jaunts into the past throughout the next year! (Maybe they’ll be more relevant? It will be a journey of discovery for all of us.)

I’ve officially left my sticky, humid home in the South, and am now in Chicago. Will be here for a week for various types of orientating, and then I’ll be moving on to Michigan for two weeks of more Jerusalem-specific orientating as we wait for visas to arrive. Hah.

Oh gosh, do I sign off? I don't know even normal blogging protocol all that well, let alone when you have piles of people you're specifically writing for and to.

Um,

Michael.