A NEW BEGINNING.

Well, folks, looks like it's time for me to leave all of you. My life has become just too darn stagnant these last two years. Sure, all my pals are great, and I've managed to watch many wonderful Hong Kong movies in the interim. But my job is an absolute joke and I still sleep under my relatives' roof. The sameness of my current, day to day existence drives me to utter distraction at times. Oh Lord, the sameness... The sameness... What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah. I'm leaving. I got permission to take undergraduate Speech Therapy classes at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education. Now, I know what you're going to say: "Phil X, you live in New York City right now. You did your undergraduate degree at NYU. What makes you say that you're going anywhere?"

I'll tell you what. I feel like I've wasted too much of my life already. Rather than spend the next few years working towards a Master's Degree, I'm going to travel back in time several years, do the prerequisite coursework, then travel back to the present day to actually apply for a Master's program. That way, I won't have wasted any time, except the time I've already wasted before! Get it? Personally, I'd rather do the Master's program in the past as well, but I wouldn't have received a Bachelor's Degree until May, 2002.

How far back am I planning to travel? After much careful thought, I settled, for numerous very good reasons, on exactly five years back, to the point of September 7th, 1999. I would travel back further, but my timepod, which I christened the "Mr. Peabody," is still in its prototypical stages. Extended movement across the timestream causes a great deal of stress to the ship's frame, and the last thing I want is to end up stranded in New York City during the David Dinkens era.

For more practical reasons, I settled on 1999 in order to avoid running into either myself, or relatives who might recognize me. As many of you know, I moved to New York City during the summer of 2000. Conventional time-travelling wisdom would suggest not time-travelling back during the same time frame, lest I run the risk of encountering my younger self. (This would cause my double mild confusion, along with major disappointment.) Several cousins of mine also lived in New York City briefly during 96-98, and believe me, they would be all-too-eager to tease me regarding the gold-painted wings welded to the sides of my timepod.

But I'm ranting now. Look, I already test-drove the "Mr. Peabody" over the weekend. I went back a few years to 2002, and nothing unfortunate happened. It runs fine. So off I go to the year 1999. I will continue to update this blog from there, so all anyone has to do is click on the appropriate link on the right side of this page. Will any of you see me again? While I would like to be entirely free of the constraints of the year 2004, I will sporadically travel back to the future in order to check my mail, tape James Spader's new TV show, and answer the comments left on my 2002-2004 blog posts. Also, I do plan to return to 2004 permanently. Not that anyone should notice that I had been missing, since I will return just a few minutes past the point I originally left.

So why am I explaining all this to you, seeing as how I plan to return just a few short moments after my point of departure? How can any of us predict what will happen in the course of time? Or rather, time travel? I might end up back in the Stone Age, devoured by cannibalistic cavemen. Or again, there's that whole David Dinkins New York thing.

So that's all! See you in the year 1999! Ta-ta!