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Companion to Chapter One Chapter One was a tricky one to write because I had to squeeze a very dramatic and life-changing year-and-a-half period into 13 short pages. I had to leave out a lot of freshman-in-the-world philosophical musings and tortured self-reflection, a crazy summer backpacking trip through Europe that I had no business taking (a rational person would have paid off her student loans instead of spending money she didn't have), an affair with an Irish sailor that went horribly wrong, my months at a Russian summer camp, and nearly everything I experienced in the Middle East other than the times I had in Palestine. It's a brutal reality of writing a memoir. In the process of taking a lot of wildly disparate events and finding the thread of meaning within them, a tremendous amount has to be left out, otherwise you'll end up with a monster that no one will ever read. But if you want to learn a little more about these times, follow the links above. I've also compiled some of them into eBooks, which you can browze on my Smashwords or Amazon author profile pages. My Other Titles Siberian Travels My journey from Moscow to the Sea of Japan in 2000 Camp Golden Shaft Adventures in southern Russia and the Middle East in 2003 Tribute for Ronan A story of love, death, and betrayal that landed me on the cover of an Irish tabloid The Fable of Megastan If America had been Iraq for the past 30 years The Brimming Void Poetry