I’ve been pretty successful as a relatively responsible and respectable cog in the corporate world, so I’d say my choice to participate in the Africa Rally comes as a shock to about half the people I know. To the rest, I’m so odd and unpredictable that this is somehow incredibly predictable. Of course, these are the people who are pretty familiar with my alter ego: the tiara-wearing, impulsive and delirious Empress of Aparnia.

The Empress was pretty tired of being locked up all this time, so she’s dusting off her sense of adventure and coming on out. She misses the world, and quite frankly would prefer to follow Alice down some ill-advised rabbit hole detour before heading back to the charted route.

So I’m choosing Adventure, Philanthropy, and miles and miles of the Sahara Desert. Is there anything better? I think not. Even though I’ve never spent more than a few days away from city life at any given time, have no idea how to set up camp and am mildly frightened of nature, I think this is going to work. After all, I can seem to be what I need to be, and I can in fact be what I seem to be. Indeed, I should be.

For, as the Duchess has put more eloquently than I ever could, “Be what you would seem to be — or, if you’d like it put more simply — Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

Need to know more about me? Apparently I like to alternate between first and third person when I write about myself. I fall or trip at least once a day. I’m obsessed with knowing what time it is. I have five clocks in my apartment, each telling a different time, none of which is the correct time of the time zone I’m living in. I, like the rest of my generation, am mildly self-absorbed. I always think it’s too cold. I’m probably much more conformist than I’d like to think. I don’t always make sense.

This should be a fun trip. I hope you join us for the ride.

Have any questions or just want to say hi? Drop me a line!