I’ll Make a Brand New Start of It

I’m back in New York, looking for work and procrastinating on the bit that I have left to do. I think I need a separate workspace if I ever want to get anything written! Mostly I just play around on the internet.

On Sunday I got back from London, where I had spent the summer performing free labor in a museum. It was good times, but I really hope my next job pays. I came home on a cruise ship and documented the experience (well, I’m still in the process of documenting the experience) for a travel website, thetraveleditorDOTCOM. I’ve hated mostly everything I produced during the trip itself, because those articles were written in a hurry and with an excess of noise (I was traveling with an entire family of chatterboxes). I wrote one yesterday–in the peace and quiet of my suburban home–and I actually like it. That’s the one I’ll link you to. If you want to inflict the others on yourself, that’s your deal :P

Bird’s Eye View

Three cheers for Tennyson quotations, yo.

Bye Bye Blighty

Well England, it’s been real. Now, following my lovely 2 hours of sleep, I will be departing your shores aboard a slow boat to… America. I hear there will be unlimited vodka; I’m enthused!

For anyone else reading this, you can follow my journey in not killing other people’s families over at thetraveleditorDOTCOM. Please do. I can almost guarantee that the grammar will be better than it is here. Almost.

My Favorite Poems

I am not a terribly huge poetry fan. I think my awful, very public (Google me. I dare you.) run-ins with emo high school poetry have probably scarred me for life. The other poetess you will locate if you Google my real name is an actual poetess, but I happen to think her poetry style is pretty contrived and emo high school-ish. And she is my ancestor. Crappy poetry is in my very blood!

Case in point: I know absolute jack about poetry. I don’t even like it much.

This doesn’t stop me from having a couple of poems that I adore. Lately I’ve been thinking about them both as I traipse about London awaiting some transatlantic voyaging. You will see why!

The first is my favorite poem of all time. I feel the way about this poem that I feel about Everything is Illuminated and Barack Obama and sushi. I want it engraved on my tombstone. I want to be worthy of having such a poem on my tombstone. (For the record, Everything is Illuminated is hardly inscription length, having Barack Obama on my tombstone might confuse people, and sushi goes off rather quickly. So I suppose I feel differently about this poem than I do about those three, albeit similarly.) In the interests of length I will link to it instead of posting it in full: “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

If “Ulysses” represents my idealized self, my second favorite poem more accurately reflects my actual self. It’s not really flattering, but it’s all pretty true. Except I have not been in London “this score years”, haw haw. It is “Portrait d’une Femme” by Ezra Pound. What do I do besides sit around and talk about “some curious suggestion;/Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,/Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else/That might prove useful and yet never proves,/That never fits a corner or shows use, /Or finds its hour upon the loom of days”? Not much!

So self doubt and stuff! Current anxieties include the ubiquitous job search (how pathetic that “ubiquitous job search” is actually a phrase I use with regularity) and aforementioned upcoming endeavors. I have some concerns about how well my chatty, bloggy, underwhelmed self will take to travel writing.

I hope my relatively high usage of adverbs (often pointlessly) doesn’t hinder my travel writing. Similarly, I find myself concerned about another trope I frequently employ: the long and self-indulgently complicated sentence. And sentence fragments! And CAPS LOCK. And excessive exclamation points!!!!!

I love the smell of epic fail in the morning.

The promised optimism will make an appearance in the next entry!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Glamour and VIKINGS

Remember the utter non-event that was Flying (By the Seat of My Pants)? You probably do not, because I updated it approximately twice. It was supposed to be a painfully detailed account of my year abroad, but it just didn’t work out. There are two reasons, I think. One is that a year is an awfully long time and tends to be filled with long stretches of Nothing Much to Do. Yawn! The other is that I am chronically lazy and need to be held accountable if anything is ever going to be accomplished.

Well guess what? I have found someone to hold me accountable! The folks over at The Travel Editor will be hosting several articles that I, my friend Kat and her sister Jennifer will be writing about our upcoming transatlantic cruise. Yes, you read correctly: transatlantic cruise. Oh the life of the idle rich! (Ha, if only. Idle unemployed more like.) It’s actually cheaper to cruise than to fly, not to mention about 100% less nightmarishly stressful and cramped. We’re going to be updating daily from the ship and our ports of call (the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia). It will be simultaneously glamorous AND Viking themed! Plus there will be pictures of all the cake we are going to eat. And maybe of some sights too. I will keep this blog (and my LJ, and Facebook) updated with the forthcoming details.

I was re-reading some of my blog entries just now because I include a link to this site on my TheTravelEditor.com profile page. I wanted to see what other people are going to see if and when they click! I realized that my blogging ‘voice’ can best be described as Underwhelmed. Oops?

This is my vow to you, fair readers, that I will keep things peppy enough to make for enjoyable reading (i.e., no poetic dirges about how deep and wide the sea is, and how this clearly reflects the deep and wide chasm of my soul or some such nonsense). That said, I am a young lady of unassailable character and I cannot be bought! I’m going to tell it like it is in my (hopefully charming) curmudgeonly style. If it sucks it sucks, and if it’s great I might grudgingly admit that it’s not entirely without merit.

That said, TheTravelEditor.com is pretty meritorious, and I hear tell it’s about to get even better. Check it out!