What life looks like after graduation. (I don’t know who painted this.)
So you’re an English major. Welcome. It has been almost ten years since I graduated college and I prepared some advice, as well as responses to common questions. No other major has been so scrutinized, so deemed USELESS by the gainfully employed. Useless. What an awful word for a fantastic study.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably too late to change it. But you wouldn’t want to.
My “useless” degree in English taught me to examine the fabric of life. Everything is present in books. Everything. A writer observes and records. A writer makes his characters suffer so we know what it will be like when we get there.
I learned about love, death, desire, war, sex, passion, food, junk, poverty, disease, diplomacy, philosophy, social issues, activism, etc. I still don’t get commas though.
In short, an English degree is the universal degree. You just need to learn how to market it, how to make it work for you.
Let’s start with advice from one of my favorite writers: Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.~ Murakami.Continue Reading →
What goes on backstage. Coeur de Pirate’s sound test at Summer fest 2011.
Anyone lived in a pretty how town…~ E.E. Cummings
As a teenager, I wasn’t much for journalism. I defined myself as a creative writer, too artistic and impatient for plain old facts. I didn’t like sports and never wanted to write the expose on the cafeteria pizza. I wrote stream-of-conscious poetry for guys who didn’t like poetry and didn’t like me.
I was an idiot.
Journalism is storytelling. At the Quebec City Chronicle-Telegraph (the oldest newspaper in North America), I focused mostly on the small stuff: charity drives, local teams, high school graduations, restaurant openings – the minutia of the small English-speaking community.
As small papers dry up or battle for readership online, we’re losing human-interest stories. We may never read Shelly Brown’s obituary, Shelly who spent thirty years working the counter at the deli; who gave the community three great children, who dedicated her life to rescuing dogs.
Why care about Shelly, the smiling deli worker? We have this to read:
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Syria.
10 Things Amanda Knox Has in Common with a Unicorn.15 Pugs Who Look Like Dictators.
Just like there’s a time and place for the above, (lunch breaks), there’s a time and place for newspapers: Sunday afternoons. I can’t remember the last time I sat with a newspaper article, chewed the story over, let it linger. I love blogs, but getting the story out is stressed more than getting the story out right.
Years ago, when I saw a casting call for the Amazing Race, I thought about it. Travel the world? Win expensive travel packages? Race around the world for one million dollars?
Then I did something I’ve never done before:
The Math.
After the tax man has cometh, one-million dollars turns into $500,000. That $500,000 has to be sliced evenly between you and your partner. Even if you carried your partner in your arms like a baby the whole time and still miraculously ended up in the winners’ circle; you’d have to split it. Otherwise, you’d be the jerk who said, “I should get 70% because I won 70% of the challenges.”
The most you can bring home is $250,000. IF you win. And then, you’d have save for your kids’ college, buy a house, retire mom, give to all the third world countries you traipsed through during your ’round the world jaunt.
That’s if you win.
Winning seems much less exciting to me. But there’s still the glorious-magnificent-earth-shattering travel right? Here’s the thing about that…
5 Reasons I’d never try out for the Amazing Race
1. I like to SEE things when I travel
I fully plan on seeing the world and writing as I go, but at my own pace. I get that the show is spliced and edited into episodes, but it moves so fast, there’s no seeing anything. If I go to Bali, I want to swim and surf without this nagging voice that says, oh yeah, it’s time to get out of this bath-like water now or I’LL BE ELIMINATED IN FRONT OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.
2. I’m bad at sports
If the challenges involved eating 100-plus Cheetos in a sitting, or sniffing out the most infested food cart, it would be game on. But they don’t. No, the race comprises terrifying challenges only those who endorse sports drinks should do, like base jumping and freefalling.
This would happen to me. Twice.
3. I have no Interesting Backstory
Amazing Race teams fall into two categories:
Couples with gleaming teeth and tight calves or partners with an interesting backstory that can be broken down into a one-word nickname: Doctors. Pirates. Debutantes. Divorcees.
I don’t have much of a backstory. I transpose lettesr a lot but can’t say I’m dyslexic. I grew out of my scoliosis. I compulsively stockpile Cadbury mini-eggs, but that’s not a backstory. Continue Reading →
This album is dedicated to all the people who told me I’d never amount to nothin’ –Notorious
The 2013 guide to Montreal and Quebec that I helped author for Fodor’s Travel comes out in March and is available for pre-sale right now.
Some write fake Oscar speeches; I fantasize about crafting clever book dedications. I plan to dedicate future novel to my enormous family for well…everything, the Husband for his patience and encouragement and the Dog who keeps my feet warm as I write. And to my Grandma, for her endless advice.
Unfortunately, I don’t get to *actually* dedicate or thank anyone in the travel book because that would be unfair to the other writers, editors, and photographers who worked on it. Besides, I am a writing phantom taking the form of Eugene Fodor, a fascinating Hungarian wayfarer.
Miss Misery
This is one of the first paintings I ever connected to. I always thought it was icebergs, but it’s clouds. -Art Institute, Chicago
Should I ever write a novel, I would be tempted to throw it into the faces of those who spurned me early on when I was just a kid. I probably wouldn’t do it, because bitter ain’t the right shade for me, but it’s fun to think about.
One of my favorite writer bloggers recently wrote an eloquent piece about a teacher who helped influence his writing career. I have a few of those too – wonderful people, who pulled me aside and told me that despite my horrific spelling, I had a knack with words.
I’ve also had the opposite. Miss Bruner, my 7th grade art teacher deserves a failing grade. A teacher should encourage, not manage expectations. Let kids’ dreams bounce above their heads like big red balloons. When the time comes, they’ll clutch some and let others fly. Give them that choice.
Miss Bruner hobbled up and down classroom aisles with a cane. She’d pull your drawing out from your hands, exam it from behind little glasses that sat at the end of her nose and snicker. When we had to sketch George Washington (impossible!), I erased entirely through his eye. I am no Manet. Did Miss Bruner encourage me to learn from this mistake and be more careful next time? No. She put my rendition of George Washington over her own face and peeped through the hole as if it were a mask.
Ok, so maybe I screwed up the portrait. Maybe she was joking, maybe the George Washington incident was part of her teacher schtick.
But later that semester, when I expressed an interest in going to Venice to view art, she barked:
“How are YOU going to go to Venice? It costs a lot of MONEY, Am-an-da.” Continue Reading →
Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. ~ Mark Twain
I know as a wayfarer it’s not fashionable to like you, my home country, let alone love you. I am supposed to know better; I am supposed to snub domestic travel. I am supposed to like soccer and drink imported beer and refer to those “Americans” as if I am not American myself.
Why this happens: when travelers leave, often the first time, they see all your flaws from through an extra-long lens: the shootings, the rampant obesity, the vacant lots and strip malls and commercialism. The unbelievable pressure: whiten your teeth, go to the right school, chew the right brand of gum. I almost crumpled under your constant demands. I never felt like I was doing anything right. And I hate that you made me drive everywhere.
I ventured beyond your borders, tested our sacred “love or leave it” bond – a contract I entered into without choice. I didn’t want anything to do with you. Like a petulant child, I refused to turn around. My post Post-America life started like any relationship – French Canada and I would have surely broken your heart. We shared poutine and frieds with mayo, we cross country skied, we strolled along cobblestone streets in the middle of the day.
Canada recycles, Canada doesn’t waste napkins and plastic forks. Canada felt nice, Canada felt different. Canada didn’t press weighty expectations upon me like you. You cluck a lot about liberty – but in Canada, I felt freedom – no one asked me what I did for a living; I felt no great urge to keep up; I never felt doomsday paranoia. Sure, the new country had its problems, but I wouldn’t see that until we lived together awhile.
I came home to you after a year and three months defeated — through no fault of my own, Canada and I couldn’t make it work. Finding and holding jobs in the French-speaking province proved difficult and so we moved.
I had forgotten about all the things I loved about you. New York with its waves of people, rushing in from all angles, from all countries; hip-hop, rock n’ roll, blue grass; your vast prairies and deserts, Vegas – yes, Vegas – an homage to glittering capitalism. I had forgotten how much I love Chicago, the city responsible for the first version of me, before I knew anything else. And Seattle – a misty music town with new liberal policies that make Canada look conservative.
We have our fights, USA. There are times I am not proud of you. There are times you gravely disappoint me. But wherever I go, I’ll always be part of this big dysfunctional family.
First, during a writing workshop that combines looking at art and writing, a fellow volunteer (Michael Don’t-Know-His-Last-Name) pointed out that the ancient funerary portrait below, which hangs in the Seattle Art Museum looks justlike Bill Murray, my too-old-for-me celebrity crush.
Where is Bill Murray on Ground Hog Day?
Obviously…
I have been working on three extremely scientific theories about the portrait:
1) Bill Murray’s face has time-travel powers.
2) Bill Murray’s face is trapped in the Seattle Art Museum. In Ground Hog Day fashion, he endures one day on repeat. Except instead of loveable bumpkins in a quaint Pennsylvania town, he’s stuck listening to snooty Seattle art critics. Poor Bill!
3) Everyone has an ancient doppelganger. Mine is surely Cleopatra.
Art Attacks & Attitudes
Also last week, while enjoying a few drinks in an overrated hipster bar, a huge wooden installation fell off the wall and hit my sister’s arm. Had she been sitting one seat over, she would have been knocked unconscious. Or electrocuted by the piece’s blinking bulb nose. This was not the kind of art one dreams of being killed by.
The bar didn’t offer to comp. her meal, not even when she mentioned impending bruises. Rather, the owner gave her the attitude. As if she willed the painting to fly off the wall just to get a small bowl of baked macaroni for free. Continue Reading →
