May 1. T minus four months.

My recent planning has been a bit low-key:

- reading some Pico Iyer and Best American Travel Writing.

- listening to some Indian pop music and Turkish pop music. I feel about the same as American pop music: mostly boring after 3 listens, but there are a couple standouts. (I'm very much looking for recommendations, if you know any good music from any of the countries I'll be visiting!)

- new driver's license

- registered for a motorcycle safety class, so I can get a motorcycle endorsement. Motorcycling around some of the places I go may be dangerous, but it may be a highlight of my life (as it was in Thailand), so I think that's worth it.

- new International Driver's License (just walk into AAA, show them your US driver's license, and pay them like $20); I don't know if this will help anything, but it seems good to have handy, just in case.

- new ISIC (just walk into STA Travel, pay them like $15, and name a university); this seems even less likely to be useful, but I feel like I've used it a couple times in the past when I needed "some kind of identification" and didn't have my driver's license for some reason? It looks kind of official, anyway.

- new pants (let's see if I can get away with only one pair!)

- check this out: Muslim for a Month. I like the spirit of this, anyway: what better time to explore religions than while I'm exploring the world? And while Islam is probably the least likely religion for me to ever actually follow, I feel like there's probably cool parts of it (sufism? dervishes? Rumi?) that I could learn something from. And I know very little about it, so that's exciting. I mean, still, tour group, so meh, but they aren't always awful, right?