Category Archives: Blogging/Writing

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Please Post for Haiti: Pressing Port-au-Prince


As many of you know, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake and accordingly huge numbers of media and NGO big wigs are here in Port-au-Prince to commemorate the event.  The streets, still strewn with 95% of the original earthquake rubble, are more crowded and crazy than ever, which is saying a lot for a city whose roads boast potholes the size of swimming pools and mounds of debris that dwarf the SUVs that try to travel them.

So, I’m back in this city I love, hoping to participate in some small way—hoping to commemorate along with many others, both here and around the world, a catastrophe that shook this nation to its historic core, killing nearly a quarter million and leaving, still today, more than a million homeless in Port-au-Prince, entire families living in tents and under tarps that remap the landscape, blanketing the city in a patchwork of sadness and resignation–the hillsides and former parks of Port-au-Prince quilted in the aftermath of tragedy.

Tomorrow the American Refugee Committee is organizing an event called “Bells for Haiti”—asking churches, schools, and city halls across America to ring their bells for 35 seconds, beginning at 4:53 pm EST—the time it took the earthquake to topple Port-au-Prince one year ago.

Likewise, I’m asking those of us at WordPress to somehow remember the Haitian people in our blogs tomorrow.   

Please post for Haiti on January 12th. 

I don’t know how.  I can’t tell you what to say, since I myself fell muted by the enormity of what we face here.  I’ll post my part, but it won’t be enough.  My voice isn’t loud enough.

But I know the blogosphere can raise a collect cry against the pain and suffering that still cripples Port-au-Prince, still haunts all of Haiti.

So, please press your words for Haiti tomorrow.

Post!  Pray!  Remember!

(And if you’re willing, please re-post this request to your own blog to help spread the word.)

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Luxuries Most-Missed in Haiti: an Inventory


Item #2—(Without a doubt)—bandwidth—

First a bit of context—

Most of you reading this post will do so using a high-speed internet connection, the speed of which exceeds the old dial-up connection by hundreds of times.  Do most of you even remember how slow dial-up was?  Yes, I know, when you think “dial-up,” you think dinosaur, not so much from the last decade, but from the remote history of the previous century.  (Does anyone even use dial-up any more?)

More context—

I have given up my career teaching writing to live on island with the infrastructure of 19th-Century London, given it up, hoping to make meaning from the work of ACTUAL writing, rather than the work of merely teaching writing.  Given this, the tools of the trade tend to matter.  At least they matter to me.

Herein lies my problem—namely that I’m blogging, and blogging requires bandwidth—or, at the very least, the option of up-loading text and images at a reasonably decent speed—and by “decent” I mean—able to post 1000 words and one photo in not more than 8 hours. 

(Let me be perfectly clear—I’m not talking about writing time—I’m referring to the time it takes to upload a word document and a photo or two—something that from our home in Kentucky I can do in a matter of seconds—copy, paste, save, upload (image), save, post—not a complicated or time-consuming process—5 minutes max, if literally everything imaginable goes wrong.)

Not so in Port-au-Prince—

Not so by a long shot—

For example—

One day over a month ago, I decide to change my blog’s theme (big mistake), which ultimately involves uploading a new header image (even bigger mistake). 

The process begins around 9 in the morning.  I have been awake for several hours—since 5, actually.  I’ve had my French lesson, which is challenging and something I sometimes even hate. (See “A Tale of Miserable Failure: Moanings of a Second Language Learner” to fully appreciate my struggles with the language.)  I have been to the gym—

I am eager to get started but remember that posting to my blog the day before and the day before had not gone well—had taken considerable time—

Here’s how it all goes down—

9:15 am: I make myself a cup of coffee.  I need to be fully fortified.  Caffeine should do the trick.

9:21am: I position myself on the corner of the couch, open laptop.

9:23 am: Click the Internet Explorer icon on my desktop and wait for my Yahoo home page to load.

9:26am: Still waiting.

9:27am: Text begins appearing on the screen.

9:30am: Text still loading.

9:33am: The first image—a photo of Michelle Obama—begins appearing.

9:35 am: More photos———

9:38am: With Yahoo fully loaded, I decide to forego checking email.  (It might take too long.) 

9:39am: Sigh—click “WordPress Dashboard” on Favorites drop down menu.

9:43am: Dashboard still loading.

9:50am: I decide against checking stats.  (It might take too long.)

9:51am: Sigh—click “Appearance.”—Sigh—Click “Theme.”

Fast forward————-

10:01am: First page of themes fully loaded.

(You see where this is going)

Fast forward——————-

Around 6 in the evening Sara comes home. 

I am not in the best of moods.  I am not welcoming.  I am not gracious when asked how my day has been. 

I share.

Apparently, I share too much.

I share too vigorously.

I use a few too many expletives.

“You wanna know how my day has been?”  The rhetorical question is Sara’s first clue—things may not have gone well.

“I’ll tell you how my day has been.”  Sara takes a step back.  I have that look in my eye.

“I have just spent 8 hours pounding my f—ing head against a f—ing virtual wall.  And I’ve accomplished  nothing.   Absolutely.  Nothing.”

“Nothing?”  Now Sara has the look—duck and cover—duck and cover!

“Nothing—a big, fat, mind-numbing NOTHING!”

“In that case, I think I’ll get something to eat.”  Sara leaves the guest room, where I am hovering as close to the router as humanly possible without morphing into router myself.  I’m hoping it might increase my chances.  Improve my reception. 

I’m hoping it will keep me sane and Sara able to live with me, not living with enough bandwidth.

Fast forward several weeks—————–

Sara shares the other morning, once we’ve decided to schedule my return to Haiti, “I’ve had Steve from IT working on our internet connectivity.”

I’m thinking—

Wise woman.

Maybe this means it will only take half a day, a mere 4 hours to post 1000 words and one photo.

I’ll keep you posted—

I hope.

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What’s up with Freshly Pressed?


Is it just me—or has it not been updated for anyone?  I’d HATE to think the editors at WordPress were only keeping it from me and other home-for-the-holiday-hanger-on-ers in Kentucky. 

Has the Obama administration sanctioned an extension of the New Year’s holiday?  Is there some new politically correct way to celebrate that makes it last a few days longer—go days and days without pressing  the premier of the blogosphere?

What’s the deal?  Is there something the gods of when we celebrate what are keeping only from us, from aid workers and their significant others, slogging it out in Haiti?

I know I’ve been sort of living on an island with no TV and only periodic access to electricity—but I’ve been back in the US for over two weeks now.  I should be up on these things—at least for the next few days—until Saturday when I return to my Caribbean paradise.

Somebody please fill me in!  Help me out!  What’s up? 

It’s January 5th already.  Are we not pressing new words in honor of the New Year?

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Gone Blog-Wild and Comment-Crazy!


Your mothers may have washed your mouths out with soap, but on my blog–

–Big time “back-talk” rocks my comment world!  Gotta love it—

Yeah—I know I excite easily—a sassy six-year-old myself at Christmas time.

But seriously, I posted several questions a few days ago—confessed my insecurities as a writer/blogger and asked if any of you shared these feelings.  Well, clearly I’m not the only one who sometimes thinks herself inadequate—because people commented, commented, commented.  And some of you even posted response pieces on you your own blogs!

I can’t tell you how supportive that feels, how great to be part of a community of writers willing to admit their fears of imperfection—how amazing to be embraced by bloggers who have welcomed me into their world by responding so thoughtfully to the questions I pose.   Thank you!

Thanks especially to Tori (The Ramblings) and Mrs. H.  (A.Hab.’s View of the World) for continuing this conversation in their own blogs.  If this discussion interests you, I encourage you to read their posts, as actually these writers take the dialogue to whole new level.

The question remains: why are we writers/bloggers so gung-ho about comments—why have we gone blog-wild and comment-crazy—outside the superficial realities of Search Engine Optimization? 

For me it’s about community.  I don’t mean to suggest blogging is a religious experience—no, wait—maybe I do—to the degree that posting and commenting, the call and response of it, is like a liturgy.  I feel embraced by it.  Thankful—

So, in honor of the new year. let me proclaim a little less reverently–

–Sass out the ass, my blogging buddies–

And back-talk some more–tell me–what’s the best part of blogging for you?

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Fear and Trembling in the New Year: a Writer’s Confession


It’s the beginning of a new year and I’m facing the feeling so many writers dread—the fear that I will never compose another decent sentence—the dread that I will not only have nothing to say, but also that what I do write will limp along badly—boring, boring prose that no one with even half a literary brain would lay claim to.

Part of what frustrates me is my seeming lack of focus, the realization as this blog evolves that my interests are too eclectic.  I enjoy a little of this and a lot of that and that and that.  With Sara and I traveling so much, I feel my writing is both literally and stylistically all over the map, sometimes funny, sometimes deadly serious.  Are my own eccentric inclinations exaggerated by the sheer geographical range, if nothing else?

 It might be boring, but I sometimes wish I were one of those people with a singular focus!  Practically speaking, how does one lend cohesion to a blog that’s at one time or another about Haiti, Vietnam, art, poetry, dogs, travel, disaster response, and election fraud?  Then when you expand that list even further by adding topics I’ve yet to address, but plan to (my work in India this past year, for example), it becomes a dizzying mish-mash that would give even the most open-minded reader a case of topical whiplash.

So, my questions this New Year’s Day remain:

–How singularly focused does a blog need to be?

–What makes you keep reading one blog but not another?

–What is your biggest fear as a writer?

–Would you be willing to discuss any of these issues in a post to your blog?

I’d love to know I’m not alone with these writerly fears for the coming year.  How do you manage your own creative insecurities?

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Babel-ed by it All: a Retrospective


(Another post from Vietnam as part of my holiday retrospective.  The piece below, written in the summer of 2009, describes my cultural and linguistic confusion soon after arriving in Saigon.)

I haven’t posted in over a week—not because I have nothing to say—but because I have too much.  I’m overwhelmed with stimuli.  Each time I try to write what comes out sounds silly or clichéd.  I’ve drafted but gotten nowhere—several starts.  Perhaps, I’ll post the pieces—these nudges toward nothing I can name.  I’d also like to post a few of the photos I’ve taken—several of Saigon—many of my trip South to volunteer with a building project for the poor–a good hour and a half drive into the country from Rach Gia.  It seems I’m struck most by the faces of children—the eyes of cows and water buffalo grazing.

children playing in sand at volunteer build site

the children's existing housing

squat toilet at build site--common in Southeast Asia

water buffalo grazing in rice patties

We carried bricks from where we parked, to the build site—balancing on narrow paths through the rice patties—shouldering heavy sacks—so god-awful hot we sauna-ed even in the shade.

rice patties at build site

carrying bags of bricks through rice patties to build site

 Sara seems stressed—works ridiculous hours—well into evening—early mornings—weekends.  I don’t see how she does it all—so many people, places, programs—details out the ass—the bulging bigness of it all.  It’s clear why she rarely shares with friends or family what she does.  You have to live it to understand, to appreciate the enormity of the task.

Like Sara, I have trouble pronouncing people’s names—so many sound the same to me–probably because my ear is unaccustomed to the tones—so many combinations of vowels—the words for watermelon and several other fruits differing only in the dipping, the sinking of the sound—or rising at the end.  I used to think I had an ear for languages but not anymore.  I can do European sounds—but the tones of Asia—it’s like I’m deaf to them—can’t hold them in my head.  I’m muted by a Babel I can’t untangle for the life of me.

I know next to nothing about Vietnam.  Only that I am pleased to be here—curious, eager to learn more, saddened by my own ignorance of the place.  I do know, though, that I feel a stirring in me, a creative impulse to make—what?  I don’t yet know—only aware that it’s there, nosing again my consciousness, like a cat marking territory, putting down its scent.

And it rains here every day this time of year, sunny in the morning with clouds thickening toward afternoon—the air heavy even in the early hours—first hints of light just after five, full sun by six.  It’s just now begun to drizzle again, the rainy season soon a downpour. 

I try to go out in the mornings when it’s still dry, before the heat intensifies, boils over into wet, one that doesn’t help to tame humidity.  It sucks all oxygen from the air well into evening, when I hear our landlady pull the garage door down, signaling a close of shop—a metal rattle rumbling our small stack of flats.

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Weighing in on Bangkok: a Retrospective


(Since the holidays have kept me from writing for several days now, I’ve decided to offer a retrospective, of sorts, hoping a peek at past posts would offer decent reading in the meantime. 

The piece below was written nearly two years ago–January 4, 2009–just after this blog was born under another name.  Sara and I were living in Kentucky.  I was teaching writing at a local university, and Sara was considering a return to disaster response work that was expected to take us to Bangkok.  Initially this blog was meant to chronicle that adventure. 

In the post below, I’m moaning about a diet I’d begun as part of a New Year’s resolution.)

Okay, I got on the scales this morning–big mistake!  It may be that we are about to embark on a grand and exotic Asian adventure, but, God knows, I can’t do it fat!  I simply can not walk the streets of Bangkok like this–all 173 bulging pounds of me.

This is how it all went down.  Sara and I had agreed we would weigh on Sunday.  I had begun dieting a week ago but was too afraid to step on the scales.  Sara is to start watching what she eats on Monday.  Sunday then seemed a reasonable day to determine what we weighed.  While I may be a chicken shit when it comes to actually quantifying my size, once the decision is made to put a number on the situation, I want to get the pain over with as quickly as possible.  So when we woke up at 2 this morning to take the dogs out for their middle of the night pee, I brought the scales into our bedroom, as the floor in the bathroom slants too badly to weigh accurately in there, and proceeded to strip naked, because God forbid I weigh even an ounce more than necessary.  I even removed my glasses and seriously considered doing without a barrette but decided it unwise to try reading the numbers both blind and with hair falling in my face.  Then, stepping on the scales like the most over-sized contestant on the Biggest Loser, I was told I weighed a mere 75 somethings or other.  Now I may not have a completely realistic sense of what I weigh, but I did feel fairly certain I hadn’t been 75 pounds since I was seven.  And, of course, being without glasses I was unable to get the stupid scales to stop reading in kilograms and begin weighing in pounds, as I stood shivering and blind in a drafty 100-year-old house–not able to weigh having made the big decision to do so.  This did not sit well with me.  So Sara, who knows my inclination for throwing fits and was herself sitting warm and fully PJ-ed under the covers of our bed–decided to intervene.  After playing with the thing for a few long and chilly minutes and asking me where I had put the manual–when in fact she is the manual keeping half of this relationship–got the apparatus reading in pounds again.  You know something is not right with the universe when a book of directions is necessary for figuring out scales.

To make a long blog a little shorter, let it suffice to say I weighed a good many pounds more than I wished.  So I am an Asian bound woman on a mission.  I will not walk the streets of a Thai city like this.  I may be willing to wear my glasses the next time I weigh, but I will not make a big fat spectacle of myself on the sidewalks of Bangkok.

(Sara returns to Haiti soon, so in a few days postings should resume normally.)

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A Frenzy of Freshly Pressed


I had a less-than-cool response to being Freshly Pressed.

I may have over-reacted.  I may have caused a scene.

For those of you who don’t know, for those of you who are just now tuning in, I blog from Haiti, where not a lot of positive things have been happening lately, what with the January 12th earthquake, Hurricane Tomas, cholera, and now the close-to-coup political uncertainty.

To distract myself from this atmosphere of never knowing what’s next, I began blogging again after a year away from posts and comments—from Search Engine Optimization and RSS feeds.

I poured indecent amounts of energy into my renewed foray into the blogosphere.  I was a down-right bloggerly drudge when it came to reading and commenting on the blogs of others. 

I wrote and posted—

Wrote and posted—

Commenting maniacally in between.

For three whole weeks—

Until Tuesday—

When I did my daily duty of checking Freshly Pressed, posted most mornings by 11 Eastern Standard Time.

I had developed a near religious devotion to this posting of posts, ten blogs featured each weekday on WordPress.com. I knew my duties as a devotee, arriving with the requisite ritual beverages (coffee and Coke Zero, of course). I knelt at the altar of blogging greatness— and clicked.

Strangely—the list of featured posts included one that had not only stolen the name of my blog, but the name of my post, as well.

This was a desecration.

A cardinal sin against the goodness that is Freshly Pressed!

Until it hit me.

Oh, may the gods of blogging forever bless the shrine of Freshly Pressed—for, in the name of blog, indeed,

I had been Freshly Pressed.

Heavenly choirs were singing as I twirled my Port-au-Prince kitchen dizzy—

Shrieking—

OMG—OMG

Twirling and shrieking—

Shrieking and twirling—a dervish of posting devotion.

And in this blogging frenzy, I did what any blogging diva worth her salt would do in such a moment.

I called my mother—

(Called my mother with the zeal of a six-year-old, just home from kindergarten, ready to show off her printing practice sheet, S’s marching capital and lower case across the page.)

“Mom, this is costing gobs of money, so I can only talk a minute, but I’ve been Freshly Pressed.”

“You’ve been what, Dear?”

“My blog.  My blog has . . . “

(How should I explain it?)

“My blog has won a prize.”

“Well, that’s lovely, Dear.”

“What kind of prize?”

(I dare not mention “Freshly Pressed.”  She’ll confuse that with French press or launch into a discussion of ironing!)

“It doesn’t matter, Mom, just a really cool prize.  You should hurry and check your email.  I sent you the link.”

“You sent me what, Dear?”

“The link.  The blue LINK!”

“Oh, the BLUE ink, yes, I know, Dear.”

“But wait, let me write that down.  I don’t want to forget—BLUE ink?”

(To better appreciate my mother’s memory issues see a post called “Airing Family Secrets via Haute Couture.”)

“Just go check your email, Mom.”

 You know how the story ends—

Not with my mother delightfully 72, trying to figure out this world that was once Smith Corona and is now Google, Facebook, Twitter. 

Rather with me—dizzy in my kitchen—reeling with the down-right, unabashed, writing-posting-commenting joy of it all—

The joy of FRESHLY PRESSED!

Yippee!