Squamloonland

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.