Sorry for the lack of blogging yesterday. It was a very busy
day full of subscription renewals at work, then Irish class, and then when I
got home, instead of blogging on a computer with a dysfunctional A key, I just
wanted to work out. Usually I dance around to the hip hop music on my iPod, but
last night I actually ran in circles around the loft. It felt really good. Too
bad I hate running anywhere else...
Not that I have that much to blog about, but I can share a seasonal
childhood memory. (“Seasonal” in the sense of winter, so sorry if you were
hoping for some romantic story about Christmas of yore.) Most of the kids at my
elementary school were very well off, because their dads were doctors, so our
school had an annual ski trip. My family was poor, so I couldn’t afford to go
on this trip, and so I had to go to school those days with the few other poor
kids. Most of them were Cambodian immigrants, so I started hanging out with
them, especially a girl named Sokvouen. (Which is pronounced “So-QUEN.”) I
would go over to her house, and her older sisters would dress me in traditional
Cambodian clothes, which we all got a kick out of: this really blonde girl in
Southeast Asian clothes. I actually learned a few words of Cambodian,
especially the dirty ones, of which I only remember one. The other thing I
remember is how to count to twenty in Cambodian. Sokvouen’s family moved to
California (it was probably too cold in Minnesota for people who had just come
from near the equator), and we sent each other a couple of letters but
eventually fell out of touch. Anyway, there is no real point to this story
except to say that if my family had had the wherewithal to send me skiing, I
wouldn’t have been able to walk down the street and recognize the Cambodian
F-word written in the snow, like I did one winter day. And so I have always
been a pretty good linguist and a lousy athlete.
Famous Hat
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