The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 9,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 16 years to get that many views.
Video on how media should cover a mass murder
I am not the person to write about What Happened last Friday. I am a travel blogger and when I am not traveling, I am trying to make people laugh. Expect what follows to be slightly off topic and serious. One travel’s greatest gifts is the ability to look at your own country through a long lens – see its beauty, as well as its flaws.
The USA gets a lot right. And a lot wrong.
I will not use the location or the keywords associated with What Happened because it is not my intention to use it to bolster my blog readership and I am absolutely disgusted by anyone who would do so.
I would like to tell reporters who shoddily covered What Happened exactly What I think of them.
Let me just say: I love the news. Previously, I worked as a journalist at several small newspapers. I think most journalists are honorable, heroic, worthy of medals for risking their lives to cover wars and conflicts in far off places while the rest of the world reads the stories from safe at home.
I think the world needs more good journalists to build bridges across the sky, to places and people we’d never know otherwise. I am a strong proponent of freedom of speech. I am vehemently anti-censorship.
HOWEVER, coverage of What Happened has been irresponsible and dangerous on multiple levels. Continue reading
I am writing this for anyone who considers themselves an artist and has the glamourous job of creating something, submitting it and waiting for the inevitable words:
Sorry not for us
___ (*NOT YOU*) won the You are a Writing God Fellowship.
….not quite right for our pompous-ass publication.
No matter what it says, you hear the same thing. “You: no good. Stop now.”
A rejection letter is only a stop sign if you let it be.
The first rejection slip I ever received came before I ever submitted anything, in the form of cruel words from others. Girls iced me out of the cool cliques. Boys I liked who didn’t like me and made it a point to announce it. Teachers who ignored me. Thankfully, my childhood happened well before the internet because I am quite if cyber bullying existed, it would have pushed me into crazy territory.
Getting bullied isn’t a rite of passage. It’s crowdsourced abuse.
For a long time, I feared rejection so much, all of my writing resided in my notebook or my mind. I lived inside my own head, scared to make a squeak. No standing and delivering for me; I curled up and withdrew. Continue reading
Elwood wondering about the next time he’ll see his friends from Quebec
Goodbye is part of life, especially for travel writers and expats. I said goodbye to a very good group of people recently. As someone who has made three big moves in six years, I should be accustomed to this.
I am not. Especially because I know I probably won’t see these people again.
The Very Good People I speak of are a refugee family from Libya (originally Somalia) who I helped transition here. I showed them bus routes and where to find jobs and taught them simple English phrases. They cooked dinner every Sunday. Heaping piles of rice and pasta with sides of bananas and salads. Never a question if I would stay and eat. They assumed and set up a plate and ushered me to the kitchen.
I worked with the family for a few months. As I watched them pack, (offering to help, but not knowing what to do), I noticed they still didn’t switch their clocks over for daylight savings. I should have explained daylight savings to them. I should have showed them where to buy rain boots and jackets. I could have done a better job as their appointed American mentor. Continue reading
I am thankful for nachos. And kids who think up characters like Nacho Hippy.
I am thankful for lots of things. Number one: all of my necessities have been met since I was born. I have always had food, water, shelter, and toothpaste. And not to brag, but I have always been pretty healthy, as in never hospitalized, never had to look past the first set of symptoms on Web MD. I have been silently expressing my gratitude for these things for years.
I also would like to give thanks to Mick Jagger and the inventor of peppermint mocha creamer*. I have been enjoying cups of minty coffee and the Rolling Stones for years now. Sometimes even together. Time to give thanks.
Let’s get to the things I AM NOT thankful for. I decided since it’s Black Friday and not Thanksgiving, it’s totally appropriate.
* To my family, friends, husband, dog, the thirty or so people who read this, and everyone else in my life: THANK You. My life is glorious and I relish every single second spent with you.
Are we the Amsterdam of America? We do have the tulips.
My current home state, the Evergreen State just became the EverGREEN state with the passing of the legalization of marijuana, coming December 6.
Don’t book your flight just yet. Although the pot fog wafting into my window has thickened, there’s nowhere legal to buy the stuff. And there’s a big parler coming up with the Feds on how this will all work.
As a travel writer, I find this most interesting in terms of tourism. Rick Steves, that khaki-clad, accountant-like celebrity traveler, is a huge marijuana supporter. This surprised me. I had him pegged as the kind of guy for whom a glass of white wine is a wild night. Then again, I am one to talk.
I’ll leave my own political affiliations out of this because I am suffering from political fatigue. Here are some just-for-fun predictions.
Please read the following in your best Year 2000 voice. If you don’t know that reference, you really need to catch up on your Conan O’Brien.
It was cold. Inside the ice hotel. Like, really cold.
Good travel writers must push through their vague, cliché, and even racist presuppositions about a foreign place. ~Arron Hamburger, The Matador Network
I found a French book club here in Seattle. I know, I can’t get much more pretentious, could I?
It would be easy to give up French, to let it slip from my memory here in Seattle and forget that I still can’t tell the difference in sound between an accent agiu or an accent grave or that yesterday, I said, “page soixante-dice-sept.” Embarrassing.
Now that I can make a decent sentence, I refuse to put French into storage with a pile of things I used to do: Breed swordtails. Play the flute. Drink vodka straight.
Anyway, we’re reading L’engime du Retour by Dany Laferrière. Even though I only understand about 70-80% of it sans dictionaire, I can tell the writing is beautiful.
He captures the perpetual snow of Montreal and contrasts it with the vibrant tropics of Haiti, his home country. Even thought the words aren’t in my native tongue, I am right there with the author, watching the snow collect on windowsills in Montreal or birds fly overhead in Haiti.
I may never be able to capture a place the way he does, but I have learned through trial and error (mostly error) what not to do when it comes to travel writing. I put together a list to help some of you break into this glamourous world of small paychecks and (sometimes) free hotel rooms. Continue reading
This made me cry. Ps. I really need to learn to surf
Happy Halloween, everyone! It’s one of my favorite holidays because I love candy, characters, and knocking on complete strangers’ doors. Ok, I am not in costume because last year, in Quebec I spent $80 on a black tutu because $80 and $40 sounded similar to me in French. This year, I decided to watch a free animatronic skeleton rock show instead of spending more money on a costume.
The black tutu has to last. Black Swan is so last year. Future costumes include: Courtney Love in her best/worst (depends on who you’re talking to), fashion stage to Gothic Lolita (not as gross as it sounds, actually so cool I want this idea to live in relative secrecy so I can use it next year), to a ballerina superhero I have yet to create.
Halloween puts me in a strangely sentimental mood. The video above reminded me of all the reasons I love going places.
The Nomad’s not afraid of making waves or catching waves or being uncomfortable. Why should I be? He speaks about finding his community (skaters!) wherever he goes. He speaks about having a life rich in experiences. He reminds me of so many people I have met in passing, ones I have to carry in my heart as I move from place to place. As a writer on the Matador Network pointed out, the Nomad’s not coming from the perspective of a rich American going to ‘find himself’ during a gap-year in Latin America, funded by blazer-and-khaki clad rich dad.
He’s doing it because it’s who he is and needs to, despite all the obstacles. He reminds me that if he can do it, so can I.
And this tree:
And this Copenhagen street at night:
And this Quebec City sunrise:
I have only begun to see the world, to catch my own waves. I can’t wait to venture further into the ocean. Comment below with why you travel. And Happy Halloween!
There’s no manual to life, but I am lucky enough to have the next best thing: my grandma. You’d be wrong in picturing my grandma as a sweet, cookie-baking woman. My grandma, petite with black eyes and (now) cotton-colored hair taught me to play poker and shoot dice when I was just eight. She has fought off muggings with her booming voice. She’s lived in Chicago her entire life, was born the year the stockmarket crashed and was raised in the “back of the yards” as they say there, referring to the neighborhood behind the stockyards.
She is sharp, witty, and sage. I don’t take advice well, but hers is always welcome.
Scarves instantly make an outfit better. Just another lesson.
This is something she said to me recently, when I told her about my new gig as a contract copywriter for a major cellphone company (yay! to jobs).
“If you don’t like it, just convince yourself you like it.” My grandma has taught me this again and again. If we didn’t want to eat something, she’d scoop it up in her fork and talk about how great it was until she had us almost convinced she was eating Skittles instead of canned green beans.
When she talks about her own childhood, it’s never negative, never whiny, although I am positive she’s been through some of the hardest times the country has ever seen. She prefers to reminisce about how the entire family would push the tables aside on Thanksgiving and dance the jitterbug.
Why am I not dancing the jitterbug right now? Oh, because I am on the internet.
I have driven across the country three times and been to 35 out of the 50 states. Some states are clearly superior to others. I’ll get to the signs you’re living in an inferior state later. Most of these are just jokes, I have fondness for all the states I visited.
With the exception of New Hampshire’s whose tagline is “Live Free or Die,” the rest of the states should revisit their slogans as they elect new governors. Most of these state slogans are either ripe with hyperbole, totally unfitting, or just dumb.
Can’t believe I live here.
Washington’s (where I currently live) state slogan is Say WA.
Say Wa! is how an uncool white guy answers the phone in an early 90′s sitcom. It captures zero of the beauty or coolness or …anything of Washington state. This is the land of Kurt Cobain and and jumping salmon and hundreds of islands blanketed with evergreens. And we get SAY WA?
Suggestions: WA you lookin’ at? Simply beautiful. Bet your state doesn’t have an archipelago.
Anglo Adventure 