Connections

I'm about to go all Andy Rooney on you this morning, but I have a few other random items to get through first before I drag out my inner curmudgeon for your reading pleasure, my dear discerning readers.

My favorite Vietnamese poet and the main subject of yesterday's offering, has weighed in from halfway around the world. Check out her very sweet comment attached to yesterday's post.

Speaking of halfway around the world, this virtual freehold had its first visitor from the United Arab Emerites the other day (مرحبا, welcome!). I've lost track of how many nations have been represented by visitors to this site (the Netherlands was another recent addition), but I'm thrilled and fascinated whenever someone from another country lands here. I'm sure many of you get here by Googling a key phrase and finding me instead of anything really useful . . . but still.

I don't know why I continually wonder at the way the internet and cell phones have enabled us to connect to one another with such ease. I guess it's about time I got over it and began taking all this for granted, but I simply can't. For anyone 30 or younger, this is how it has always been and not something to marvel at in the same way that commercial air travel has always been a part of everyday life for me . . . but still.

Today an old high school buddy, my debate partner in the 10th grade, and my first real crush, friended me on Facebook out of the blue. It was such a treat hearing from Pam after a gap of over 30 years and discovering that she is alive and well and living a successful life. She was a year ahead of me in school, we moved to Atlanta in the middle of my junior year and I was as awkward as any teenage boy who ever lived, so there isn't any more to the crush part of that story, I'm afraid. There is a slightly Freudian bit, however. Pam's maiden name is the same as my wife Teri's--same spelling and everything. For some reason I remembered Pam's last name starting with C and not K. Hmmm--we won't make too much of that. Right Teri?

Last week I gave up on waiting until October 26th rolled around and have begun plowing through the second draft of "Carnival Time". I'm sorry to the majority of you who loathe my choice of titles and voted for other options, but I have made the executive decision to make that the official title of Project Y and found a cute way to work it into to the last sentence of the first chapter.

I'm rapidly discovering that writing a second draft is a painful process--partly because I made the decision halfway through to switch from a first to a third person point-of-view and I have to change all those Is and mes to Tonys and hes in the earlier chapters. It's also frustrating, because my first goal is to not make the second draft a bigger mess than the first, and that is turning out to be more difficult I thought. In a few minutes I'll be plowing through a section where Tony muses conversationally about whether the blind poet Homer was actually blind and whether or not he once met the goddess Aphrodite in person. It's actually a lot better and funnier than it sounds, but it doesn't fit with the change in point-of-view and time issues I've created, so it has to go. Ouch!

I tell you what--because you've been so nice today, I'm not going to subject you to my curmudgeonly rant just yet. I'll save that for tomorrow. See you then.