Amanda Read

The Public

Some hilarious anecdotes from Amanda Read, posted in response to the water story. When you’re done, check out her blog. It’s legit.

She wrote…

Oh goodness, I have water stories too…I think some are written in my childhood journal.

As a five year old I fantasized about making an elaborate escape out of the doctor’s office when we had to get immunizations before going to Uzbekistan – but I ended up getting the blasted typhoid shot and so forth anyway.

In Tashkent, we had to drink filtered water I’m sure. But I still remember being sick for at least a few days. Then I naively insulted our Russian babysitter, telling her their water was nasty and I could never drink it. “Our water isn’t dirty; our water is clean,” she protested. I then pointed to some muddy brew coming out of an…(Click to read more!)

A Note on Water

Travel

I have another piece of travel writing for you, pals! That weird flesh-eating virus I got on my elbow in Nicaragua came back in a big way, and it made me think of this little essay. There’s a cartoon at the end.

*ahem*

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When I was 16, I learned that it was not with an apple that Adam and Eve brought sin into the world, but a glass of water.

I was leaving the country for the first time. The good folks of Foothills Community Church and I were going to spend two weeks in Thailand building a school, and as far I was concerned, that meant I was heading straight for the Heart of Darkness.

In the Fellowship Hall,dim so we could see the projector screen, gone was the usual talk of new REI backpacks and Camel Back bladders. No one chatted about how their visas were coming along or what trinkets they bought at Sam’s Club to give to the Thai children.

None of us said anything. This was the safety briefing.

The team leader was going to tell us how to survive out there. He would teach us to walk the leprosy-scourged streets of the Third World and live to blog about it. He was the grizzled sergeant that would point with a three-fingered hand and say, “Remember your training, and you will come back alive!”

But after the team leader had finished with money belts, shower shoes, and typhoid vaccinations, when he had warned against every variety of pickpocket, swindler, kidnapper and cutthroat, his PowerPoint went black and his voice dropped to a growl.

It was time to talk about water.

Don’t drink it – that went without saying. But had we thought about ice? Water changes its shape. Fresh fruit? Water comes in a Trojan horse. Dishes? They’ve been washed, and can’t be trusted. And lettuce? Don’t get him started about lettuce.

Water was everywhere. It lurked in every bathroom and restaurant, every cup of tea and bottle of Coke, waiting for my first careless moment to strike with dysentery, E. coli, hepatitis A, and, as far as I was concerned, AIDS, Ebola, and the plague. But the specific affliction didn’t matter. No, by the time you let water get inside of you, it would already be…

A Hollywood Ending

Denver

That’s Tessa there. She came and visited me a while ago, and then Kevin (Birddog) came the next weekend. Why did it take me so long to post on it? Is it because I stopped updating this blog? That’s for you to decide! (the answer is yes)

I’ve become something of a workaholic. I still write – in fact, I write all the time – but I’ve been doing it for the student newspaper a lot. The News section pays me to do it (in the term’s loosest definition), but I still manage to put the clever stuff in columns for Lifestyles.

It’s just a lot easier to write when you’re doing it for 30,000 people versus, like, six.

But I realized that if I’m going to post more, I’m going to need to do less cartoons – it takes surprisingly long time to make a cartoon look like it took no time – and more straight written pieces. There’s a chance no one will read anything without pictures, but hey, what have I got to lose?

Not to say I won’t draw ’em. In fact, I got a new pen tablet to replace the one that got stolen. It looks like this.

The old one got stolen along with my laptop when a thug (our prime suspect is Cam Newton) broke open the back door, which probably wasn’t that hard considering the fire department had already broken it down once looking for corpses after the tornado, which passed two blocks from my house. More on that later.

Maybe. You know me.

*ahem*

They roam the street like pigeons
Drunks looking for their keys
Groping in the streetlamp
Because the light is better there.

Thank you.

A very tasteless comic

Denver

…Yeah, I know. Please understand that I save all my tastelessness for celebrity deaths. It’s how I react to people who freak out. Take MJ. I was listening to the radio in the parking lot of an Albertsons, waiting for my dad to come out.

“Dad, is Michael Jackson dead?”

“Not that I know of.”

“HE IS NOW!! Bwa ha ha ha ha!!”

I could talk about how us nobodies die unnoticed, save for maybe a murder, and then only for the morning paper. Or how news of Jobs’s croakage spread faster than news of the Alabama tornadoes. But I can understand how the celebrity-follower relationship could be important to someone, and people are entitled to feel however they want about it.

But, hey, if you can get blubbery, I can get cynical.

I just saw 30 Minutes or Less. I didn’t read reviews this time. I thought I would see it without bias, and with the best expectations. That’s the last time I’ll do that.

It took a perfectly fine story and destroyed it with terrible screenwriting. I mean, just awful.

Yeeeeeeaaaach

Patrons

Denver

My tablet broke again! This time I think it’s the connector cord. Or that it’s a four year old Wacom Bamboo Fun. I had so many neat posts in mind, but now I’m put-out. And it’s your fault. You people don’t read words. You know how many people read mosquitoes? Two.

Amanda Read…


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…and Tessa Nelson.
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What is wrong with you people?