Peddling pt. 1

It may seem like I'm turning into that "friend" who's always telling you about some new product, film, album or book that you HAVE to read... in fact, I read a really great short story in the New Yorker on that very premise. Let me see if it's available to read online...

Boom. Click.

Amazing what the internet can do, right? Especially on the super-sleek dual core processor of a Macbook...

Um. So I've been reading McSweeney's since before it was mentioned on Juno, but after I moved out to Iowa where I met my buddy Jason and, via Jason, Ben Folds, Robert Post, gin, the north Minnesota coast, Mountain Dew, the pseudo-Irish, robot penises and, like I said, McSweeneys. Currently, the New Today feature on the site is a very quick, genuine, sad and funny essay by Robin Hemley (writing professor at Univ. of Iowa, for crying out loud) on his current experience in the Philippines. There's a lot of good writing on McSweeney's - some features are more hit-and-miss than others... it seems the lists used to be a lot funnier than they have been... but I started reading 'Dispatches from Manila' after, well, we traveled to Manila for ten days.

This was during Christmas break 08-10 with Professor Volkers. We spent only ten days there, but we spent ten days there with the sole purpose to meet poor people and see how they live. I've rambled enough about that experience elsewhere...

But there's a lingering, how would you say, sentiment? Maybe not, but we won't take any more time to think of a more accurate word. The memories of certain scenes from that trip still play vividly in my mind. It helps to have a stock of images and notes to fall back on, but even during the semester when we got back, even here in a nice suburb of Colorado Springs, certain moments will come back to me. So there is, of course, an interest in the country, and in hearing other stories... and if they're from a writing professor's experience on his Guggenheim fellowship, why not?

OK. I made about $68.33 from this post. There's lots of microbreweries in Colorado.