Ghenghe
It is most assuredly not my plan to make the medium the message on a regular basis, but I do want to take a moment. My inspiration for this venture is sgazzetti, creator of the Best Expatriate Weblog, and my college roommate a quarter of a century ago.
“Real bloggers use WordPress” was the gist of his advice when I first discovered his œuvre. So I bought a domain and downloaded the necessary files, frantically crammed for several days and created a workable theme, and then promptly realized I had no real urge to create content.
Fast forward three years to today when, thanks to geocaching and a constellation of other unrelated happenings, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time communicating over the internet, and a WebPresence doesn’t seem to be such a crazy idea after all.
Frantically cramming again, I’m rediscovering the joys of WordPress, this time with a purpose.
I will admit, however, that the learning curve’s a steep one. The photo below shows the state of the blogue at this moment, as seen quite differently on Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox. Evidently I still haven’t mastered the distinctions among absolute, static, relative, and fixed positioning.
Both sgazzetti and I had our first expatriate experiences simultaneously—his in Florence, mine in Caen—back in 1984, when the internet was in its infancy. The word ghenghe, in the parlance of our circle of friends at the time, was an interjection expressing that humorous angst that comes from the exhilirating thrill that can be found in the overwhelmingness of life.
Back then, it took a telegram to get the message from Italy to France. Nowadays, Slovenia’s just a mouseclick away.
Ghenghe.
April 24th, 2008 at 09:57:22
Your archives must be immense for you to still have that telegram.
April 24th, 2008 at 23:10:18
Telegrams? You’re, like, ancient.
P.S. Would you mind if I used a photo from your Flickr in my blog?
(Now that I think about it, that sentence would’ve sounded supremely odd 5 years ago.)
April 24th, 2008 at 23:13:12
On a related note — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen 24, but you should get the humour of this anyway: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM
April 25th, 2008 at 20:27:46
sgazzetti: You have no idea. In the interest of clearing our space, however, I’ve begun the painstaking process of creating a digital copy of most of the things I deem interesting and eliminating the original.
verseau: Full disclosure: telegrams were pretty archaic even then… we just loved that they were still an option, and it added a certain mystic to the charm of being young Americans abroad.
Loved the video! (And I was addicted to 24 for the first few seasons.)