hot, hot, hot

My outdoor thermometer currently reads 101.9 and it’s risen two tenths in the past five minutes.

producing a sense of place

Last night I watched a documentary — which actually I had seen before — on AZN TV, an international channel. First Person Plural is the story of a Korean woman who was adopted at age 5 or so from an orphanage in South Korea in the 1960s. She grew up in a white family in [...]

a walk in Cambridge

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk, despite the fact that it was hot and humid. B. and I had been watching the beginning of the Red Sox-Yankees game, but then B. had to head to the airport to fly back to SF. And it felt strange to be still sitting in the [...]

Boston T-shirts

Some slogans I have seen on T-shirts in Boston recently (note the anti-Yankees theme):
Yankees Suck
France Sucks
Posada is a little bitch
Jeter sucks A-Rod
Rehab is for quitters

foiled again

When I finished my Korea book, I planned to market it to publishers using this very important selling point: There are no armchair travel books about Korea.
Unfortunately, that’s a statement I can no longer make.
Simon Winchester has rereleased his 1988 book Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. So now, not only is there [...]

20 minutes without stopping

I’m having trouble writing today.
Since I can’t seem to get rolling on Korea writing today, I am trying only to write something. I read somewhere that the best way to get past writer’s block is to force yourself to write something, anything, for 20 minutes without stopping. So this is what I am doing here.
I [...]

July holidays

My friend Mercy sent me an electronic “Happy Cow Appreciation Day” card today.
Who knew?
I tried to reply with a “Happy Bastille Day” card, but they didn’t have one.
They had “Cow Appreciation Day” cards, but not Bastille Day cards. This says something about our society, but I am not sure what.

“I got paid $200 to test a razor, so I had to miss class.”

Last night I attended the first meeting of the class I am taking this summer, Americans in Paris. It’s a literature course, and from what I’ve seen so far, it may be a bit wacky. Some clues to this effect:
My professor, excitedly declaring that when Lindbergh approached Paris after flying across the Atlantic solo and [...]

I walked three miles uphill in the snow barefoot

I started working on the Korea book again today, for the first time since I lost three chapters due to some evil residing in my computer. I’ve been pretty demoralized about it, which made me not want to write any more of this book AT ALL. Instead I wrote a 10-page essay and added a [...]

i like summer

In San Francisco, there is no summer. Not in the real sense, with heat and humidity and the ice cream man and shorts and tank tops and sundresses to go out in at night.* So it’s nice to be in Boston for summer. Yesterday the temps got into the 90s, and I have been wearing [...]