Now.

I am doing just a few things right now in my calm before the storm:

1. Attending and loving Arabic class
2. Working as a research assistant for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
3. Putting the final touches on my mission shopping
4. Going to the temple as often as I can
5. Thinking about doing more actual, doctrinal, linguistic preparation for my mission (I know I should be doing more, but with three months in the MTC it's hard to feel motivated during my last two weeks of freedom)
6. Fearing that my visa will be denied or something else will go wrong and my mission will have to be postponed (this just barely happened to a friend of mine--he was supposed to enter the MTC today--so I am incredibly freaked out!)
7. Spending time with my fabulous family
8. Sleeping as much as I like
9. Eating as much as I like (probably not the best idea, but I figure I'll lose weight subsisting on kimchi)
10. Reading as much as I like

My farewell's on Sunday, I spend the following week at Hebgen Lake with my cousins, and then I come back and enter the MTC. Two weeks from this minute I will have been at the MTC for two and a half hours. I can hardly believe it.

After Arabic this afternoon I attended a lecture given by an Egyptian professor from the American University in Cairo. He spoke on his personal experiences in ميدان التحرير (Tahrir Square) during the Egyptian revolution this January and I almost cried. I've never cared more about a political event in history as I did about Egypt this spring, and I'm sad that I'll miss the election scheduled for September and the developments surrounding the new constitution. It's strange to think about how much politics I will miss, strange to realize that there will be an eighteen-month void in my newfound political consciousness. On the bright side, though, Cairo will probably be calm enough that I can study there with BYU when I return from Korea. إن شاء الله