Foreword the Second

To go on from my previous post, though, I should confess that I am terrible at this type of thing. Keeping track of my daily activities has never been easy for the ole' thinker up there top my neck. The process always seems to turn out much harder than I anticipate. A casual daily journal should be easy: "I woke up at such and such a time and ate such and such for breakfast. I went here, here, here, oh, and there, too, and did such and such a thing with these people. I ate lunch. I ate supper. I brushed my teeth. I went to bed." Shouldn't be too difficult. Thing is, for one reason or another it’s always no-go for me. When I get to reflecting back on a day, I first of all can't remember half the things I've done, and secondly, the half that does come to mind does so as a bundle of meaningless details. The stuff’s there, but why? And all this outside the third half--that is, everyday's jungle of random thoughts unattached in the consciousness to anything at all concrete.
I'm left trying to form tidy evening reflections based off hundreds of disconnected memory dots crazily splayed all over my hippocampus over the previous 24, 48, 20,000+ hours. I sit down to catch my mind’s nightly news, but always end up flicking through a thousand channels a second: "What a great weeken--Referat morgen über etwas in Geschi--Call the folks!" It takes me a good while to connect everything together, the minor details with the meanings behind them, and by the time I figure it out, it’s a new day, week, month, semester…
But every hour of real digging through the mind’s files is an hour well-spent. I consider real personal investment the main goal anytime I sit down to think or write in earnest. Without it am I doing anything more than organizing a mere afternoon travel log?
And not that a daily journal which leaves out personal meaning is altogether useless (depending on the audience); it's just not something I'm interested in keeping. When my five months abroad are over, I want to have a record of what I was thinking, how I was growing, the realness behind what I was experiencing—not simply what I ate for breakfast.
I should confess now, however, that I have to be a hypocrite for a while: I can't promise any meaningful personal commentary in these reflections any time soon. I have thankfully been recording little notes and the like every now and then throughout my whole time here so far, but it will be a good while before any of that sneaks its way onto this page. For one, that kind of reflecting, let alone writing, as I said takes me ages to do, and secondly, for concision's sake I really ought to stay away from it in most of these entries. It’s fun to ramble, but I don’t want to bore anyone.
But speaking of rambling, I need to bring this to a close. So, all in all, as I probably also spent too much of your time saying in the first of these needless Forewords, welcome to the as-yet-mostly-meaningless-but-in-due-time-infused-with-deeper-significance telling of the little details I’ve been up to since March, 2010. I hope you find it a pleasant read.
Yuppers.