We’ll start with what’s gone down that will be forever indelible.

I got a tattoo this past Wednesday night, after several years of consideration on the subject. I’ve had this design in mind for several years, with some minor modifications along the way. The central symbol is the Green Lantern’s. On the top and bottom are the first two lines from the Green Lantern Code (as done by Hal Jordan) with a small modification to avoid having to put punctuation in there, which would have looked silly.

The Green Lantern has long been my hero. He’s a super hero of a different sort, you see. Rather than garnering his power from radiation or being an alien, his power comes from a ring he was given. That ring allows him to bring his imagination to life. As a result, rather than being a super hero of strength or speed, he’s a super hero of intelligence, wit, and cunning. His only limitations are his intelligence and his imagination, and I’d like to see myself in that same light.

I’m a very mentally-based person. I take pride in my mental faculties (even if I sometimes don’t think they’re up to par), and whenever I come at a problem, I don’t go for trial and error so much as I reason through it, and I try to come up with creative solutions to problems. I would like to imagine myself as being able to do anything that I set my mind to, and the only thing that can stop me is if I stop thinking, imagining. Yeah, I know it might be geeky, but I’m geeky, and it means a lot to me. So there. Also, the story of getting the tattoo is pretty funny, but I’ll tell that in another entry.

The other major happening was hearing back from the people on my application to go to Oxford from January to April. After being entirely unproductive at work because I was pacing around waiting for them to contact me to say yea or nay. Around two that afternoon, I finally got an email.

Dear Tyler,

Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been accepted as a participant in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities’ The Scholars’ Semester in Oxford (SSO) for the Spring 2009 semester (09 January – 18 April, 2009). You will be joining a talented and exciting group of fellow Christian university students on what I hope will be a life-changing journey.

So. There it is. I’ve been accepted! I’ll be going to Oxford! There’s a lot to do between now and then, but goodness me. It’s going to be a heck of a trip. I’m not looking forward to being away from my girlfriend for that long, but she’s being very supportive of my going, and we’ll work through it, hard as it’s going to be.

I don’t really have anything else to say about the trip as of now, because there’s so much information that I still have to receive from them regarding details, but rest assured that I’ll post more whenever I know more. I’ve created a new category, Oxford 2009, so you can easily keep track of anything Oxford related.