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JISHOU, HUNAN — Like a lot of other writers, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book. So far, that’s as far as I’ve gotten with the notion, though, so don’t hold your breath waiting for the first Wheat-dogg bestseller. It’s still in the preconceptual stage.
Certainly, there is fodder for a book from my experiences as a foreigner teaching English in China. Many ex-pats end up writing books or ebooks about their lives abroad. Having read a few as market research, these books (and for that matter, blogs) fall into a few main categories:
- My life abroad was wonderful, life-changing! You should give it a try.
- My life abroad has made me an expert in all things abroad. Read my book!
- My life abroad was a crappy experience, but I am going to write a funny book about it anyway.
- My life abroad showed me that America is the bestest place evah in the whole world.
- My life abroad showed me that America is traveling down the road to ruin, but my chosen living place is a virtual paradise. (By the way, I’ve got some land to sell you if you wanna come here.)
I want to write something different, of course. I need a catchy hook to get started, but as yet, the muse has not provided me any imaginative hook, despite a boxful of bait.
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LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — I need to acknowledge some milestones now. First, this month marks the fifth year I’ve kept this blog going, and today is my 55th (double-nickel!) birthday.
[In Chinese shorthand, the number 5 (wu) can stand for "I" or "me" (wo), so this post is really just all about me. Me me me.]
As I’ve said before, I started this exercise in self-expression (and self-promotion) as a lark, then I discovered I actually liked doing it. I can write about anything I bloody well please, so that’s really cool. And it seems people actually read it, which is even cooler.
Thanks to the wonders of social networking, I’ve been inundated with birthday wishes from literally all around the world (the US, China, Israel, and Pakistan, to name a few — and Australia – thanks, mate!). Quite a few of those wishes have come from students I taught ages ago, who still remember me fondly enough to shoot me quick Facebook comments. I am a very happy and fortunate man. Thanks, everyone!
On one birthday 25 years, I watched while the Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing its crew. Today, I am watching CNN cover the civil unrest in Egypt, which while tense seems to be far less fatal than one might expect. Historic events happen all the time, naturally, but today’s events (and the great time I am spending with my kids on my holiday here) will help me remember this day for a long, long time.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Whilst traveling last week, I tried sending posts from my phone to the blog, with less than wonderful results.
Don’t get me wrong, the wp-mail.php script is a great feature of WordPress. You set up a secret email account, point WP to check the account, and it will take plaintext messages and post them on your blog. It didn’t work so smoothly for me, though.
First, my account with China Mobile doesn’t seem to have email services, but I can send multimedia messages. When I tried that with WordPress, it just took the MIME portion of the message and printed it as ASCII gobbledegook. So, I took the same message and sent it first to Gmail, which did display the text. But forwarding that message without the MIME attachment to WP just resulted in a blank post. In the end, I had to use a browser to post the blogs.
Clearly, I need to enable email services on my mobile account. It will make blogging while traveling a little more spontaneous.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — While poking around my own posts recently, I discovered that the third anniversary of my blog had completely slipped past me. Hard to believe it’s been that long.
In the past 37 months, I have written 472 posts, or about 13 blog entries (posts in WordPress lingo) a month — roughly 3 a week. My active readership seems kind of small, with roughly one comment for each post, but my ClustrMap‘s little Mercator projection is covered with red blobs over North and South America, Europe, China, Australia and the Middle East. So somebody must be reading me, even if they leave no comments behind. According to ClustrMap, SiteMeter and my own stats application, there have at least 40,000 visits to this URL since August 2006 — a mere pittance compared to, say, ScienceBlogs superstar PZ Myers, but a helluva lot more than I ever expected.
In the beginning, the blog was just a means for me to vent my frustrations at how willfully ignorant and unscientific Americans seem to be. I also had the intention, which has yet to find its full fruition, to make the blog a place to teach physics and astronomy. As the months passed, I found myself commenting on religion, civil liberties, evolution vs. intelligent design, music, film and a host of more random issues. Since August 2008 the focus understandably switched to my new life in China. I have a wide range of interests, so I suppose the blog reflects that.
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