Do not feed monkey
This past week, Away.com published a series of blog posts from my trip aboard the Ranger. Right now it’s featured on the home page, and you can read the entries themselves here.
I’m really no good at writing in first person. I think what drew me to journalism in the first place was the idea that I never had to write about myself ever. I can never quite get the right tone in the personal essay; it always seems stilted and stagey. The confessional nature of most internet writing is really foreign to me, and yet everyone else is crazy about it. The most-searched term on nytimes.com is “modern love.”
All things considered, the Away.com essays turned out all right. I left out all sorts of detail: the boiled pulpo I ate in Galicia, the tally system for tracking who drank how much beer on the boat, the time when a guy we asked for directions in Valencia said he only spoke Italian and Spanish and Maureen responded, with desperation, “¡Pero yo estoy hablando in español!” It was funny at the time, I promise. These things didn’t figure in the narrative I was telling for Away.com. Or I couldn’t get them to fit.
I learned last week that Oceana’s office is one floor above Slate’s hq, and that Slate is staffed with intense-looking, plastic-framed-glasses-wearing young men. At that moment I felt as if I was living a parallel life. I suppose you get to a certain point past school when you can afford to be reflective. I have never considered path A and path B to be obvious choices. Even when I stared into them like twin muzzles of a double-barreled shotgun I remained oblivious. And yet here I am, twelve feet and a galaxy away from where I thought I might be.
