As I copied my old posts over, I quickly browsed each one to tag it. But, in the process, I ran across a series of posts I made when I started my freshman year. Wow, I cared a lot more about school then. I wanted to meet new people, I was excited about classes, and I was excited about working all day at the same time.

I was talking to a co-worker the other day about this very thing. She told me about how, during her freshman year, she felt very much the same way as I did at that point - sitting alone at lunch was awful, everything was new and exciting. And, like me, by the time she had been through a couple years, sitting at lunch alone was a good thing - you can do more work that way.

Wow, this mango ice cream is good... it sounds scary, though.

I can only conclude that, after two and a half years of being gone 10-12 hours/day, there is nothing fun about it. Rather than setting aside breaks in my classes to go to Mass, eat lunch, socialize, etc, I go to school, sit through three straight hours of class, then rush off to work.

But, you know, I'm enjoying this semester just as much as my first one. I've settled into a routine which seems much more like what I'll be doing after I graduate, and ultimately, that's where I want to be. I'm sure it would all be different if I was living on campus, or not working full-time. It's now much less about enjoying "the college experience" and more about "let's get this over with so I can move on and be an adult."

I could begin this post with "Well, it's been a while..." but that would only match most of the last 20 posts I've made on here. Though in this case, it would be a bit more appropriate. This time, it's been a year.

Instead, I'll focus on a change in direction.

This website started as a project for a slow weekend, but I figured, "What the heck, I'll just copy all the posts from my old blog on here." A lot of what was on my old blog was, in my estimation, filler. "I went to Cedar Point. I took a test. I did this, I did that." But what I thought was really interesting was the "... and that's how I feel about that" part. When I think about it... how great would it be to be able to go back 20 years from now and read about how I felt about going to college as an 18-year-old? I suppose that's no new concept, but I'm appreciating it more at the moment.

So, that could all be done in a neat little book hidden under my bed. Why not? Because I think it's better to share it. It gives it purpose. It keeps things positive. And more than those, it will hopefully provide a means to keep in touch with people I can't talk to in person as much as I would like to.

So, I'm going to go with that and see where it ends up.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?