St. Patrick’s Day gift ideas. A poem.

It's been a while since I've written any poetry, so I decided to whip up a little something in honor of my Irish ancestors and St. Patrick's Day. Poetry is not my forte, as you'll see below, but this little tongue-in-cheek verse was a fun exercise nonetheless. 

With the greatest of Irish holidays approachin',

I pray you won’t consider it encroachin'

For me to offer a selfish thought.

It’s about what March 17^th could be

And how we can stimulate the economy

By exchanging gifts that we’ve each bought.

For starters and in the first place,

Anyone with Irish heritage to trace

Should receive the greatest haul of gear.

Our ancestors put up with lots of shite,

But bribing us will put things right.

So we get two Christmases this year!

I’d start by requesting a plate of green food,

Either dyed or naturally hued.

Health insurance would also be nice.

I’d continue with a plea for some books to read,

But lest you think I be consumed by greed,

I suppose I’d settle for a Coke with some ice.  

Of course this is all just a silly notion,

And I’ve no intent to make a serious motion

Calling for the spoiling of myself and others.

Celebrate the day together, is all I ask.

And I don’t think it's a difficult task

To share some corned beef with your brothers. 

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day 2007 in Buenos Aires with my friend Stew and a porteño partygoer.

Did I ever tell you about the time I was the victim of a hit and run?

It happened three weeks ago, in Burien. My friend and I were on our way to a wine tasting party in nearby Normandy Park, and I’d just pulled off the highway and onto the town’s main road. I approached a stoplight turning red and quickly hit the brakes. My car came to a rest just beyond the stop line, and a second later I heard something screeching behind me. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw an old pickup truck skidding toward me. “Oh …” a cussword escaped my lips as the pickup bashed my bumper.

                I was in the left of two lanes, and put on my blinker to cross in front of the other stopped cars and into the QFC parking lot next to us. I expected the pickup to follow me so we could exchange insurance information, but as the light turned green the truck took off straight down the road. I looked over my shoulder in disbelief and let out a stream of words I don’t care to repeat. My friend’s eyes widened as she feared our evening had been ruined and my mood irretrievably altered for the worse. We hopped out to assess the damage. The truck hadn’t been going very fast when it hit us, but the sound of the crash had me worried that I’d find a crumpled bumper.

                To my relief, my trusty Honda proved to be resilient. The only damage was two barely noticeable indents where the bolts holding the truck’s license plate had contacted my plastic bumper. I began to cool down, to my friend’s relief. The night could go on without cursing or worries of damage and insurance premiums. And we now had an anecdote for our friends at the party.

Later the next day, my friend and I were talking to the party’s host and I said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was the victim of a hit and run?”

“No,” she responded

I said, “It happened just a few miles from here, in fact. And pretty recently.”

Our host said that was terrible, and I started in on the story.

“So last night …” I said, and my friend and I laughed as a look of realization spread across our host’s face.

And now a note about work

After five months of fairly steady unemployment, I’ve been hired. Hallelujah.

Starting Monday the 14^th, I’ll be writing for a nonprofit organization in Silverdale. They build orphanages for kids in Africa and the Caribbean, and offer child sponsorships as well. I’ll be taking care of some of the organization’s web content, news releases, brochures, newsletters and stories about sponsored children.

It’s the first full time job I’ve had since I quit working at the newspaper last September and blew all my money on a poorly budgeted trip to Europe. I wrote a freelance story about a high school basketball game for the Kitsap Sun last week, but other than that the only thing that’s kept me afloat in the last three months has been the charity of family and friends. I’m incredibly thankful to them, and I see a mooch-free future up ahead. Hopefully I can pay them back in some way.

I'm a blog slacker

But I’m not a complete slacker when it comes to writing. I’ve ignored my blog for a few weeks, yes. But I’ve been steadily working on some travel writing that I want to get published. I finished a short (1,200 word) piece about trying on a kilt in front of an audience in Scotland and submitted it to an online travel publication a week ago. I haven’t gotten a response yet, but even if I get rejected there are plenty of other online magazines I can try. And I’m not opposed to further editing my work.

This week I’ve been writing about Istanbul and a walk I took from the European side of the city to the Asian side, crossing the Bosphorus Straight in the process. I originally thought I would just write a brief blog about the experience, but two sentences in, I realized I could develop it further. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m almost done with the first draft of that story, but I’m a little unsure of the direction I should be taking with it so I’ll have some friends look it over and then rewrite it a couple of times before it’s complete. Such is the fun and painful writing process. 

Fuelyourwriting.com

A little thought about Romanian

A few days ago, while I scrubbed my scalp in the shower, I started thinking about the Romanian language. I thought about the way it sounded when I heard a Romanian woman speaking on the phone in a hostel in Istanbul. For several minutes I sat in my bed trying to concentrate on the book I was reading but I was constantly distracted by the voice just outside my door. “Is that Portuguese?” I wondered. I took a year of Portuguese in college, and the language I was hearing had some recognizable words as well as the nasal inflections characteristic of Portuguese. But I kept shaking my head. Something wasn’t quite right.

Romanian is one of the five main Romance languages, alongside Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. You can hear and see the common Latin roots in each of these languages. I thought about this as I continued to lather. I also thought about, geographically, where the speakers of Romance languages ended up, and how Romanians seemed to be the odd ducks. Everyone else moved west from Rome, while the Romanians went east. And not just a little east. The other four homes of Romance languages are connected geographically – Italy borders France, which borders Spain, which borders Portugal. But Romania doesn’t touch any of those countries. In fact, it’s got a bunch of Slavic speakers between it and its nearest brother, Italy.

So how did Romanians end up so far from their linguistic siblings? And how did they manage to keep their language in the process? I asked myself these questions as I rinsed off. What I should have done, once the Romanian woman hung up and introduced herself and told me where she was from, was ask her to shed some light on her country’s history for me. But I didn’t think of doing that, so now I’ll have to spend some time on Wikipedia solving this mystery.

New Year's update

This is just a quick update to let people know where I’m at as the new year begins.

At the moment, I’m still unemployed and looking for any sort of work. I’ve been jobless now for 4 months, since quitting the newspaper to gallivant around the world and spend too much damn money. I’m working on some travel writing that I’ll pitch to online magazines soon, but all that is going through editing and re-writes right now. (Thanks to Andy, Dan and Nathan for the help.)

Other than that, all job prospects are kind of up in the air. I’m hoping the places where I’ve applied will be ready to start hiring now that the holiday season is over. Being broke and going into debt get old pretty fast.

In the meantime, I’ll keep working on my writing and doing odd jobs to stave off depression and the feelings of being unproductive and poor. I want to save some of my travel stories for telling in person, or for possible publication. But there are a few I can tell here, so keep an eye out for those in the coming weeks.