Killing Batteries

I get a lot of polite comments about my writing style. Sometimes people say “insightful”, often they say “accessible”, occasionally they say “Where’d you learn your grammar? The jungles of New Guinea?” But mostly they say I’m funny.

I’m perfectly happy with this. Foremost because being funny can excuse one from all kinds of embarrassing shortcomings and boy do I have a lot of those. Also, I believe that making something funny will draw in the reader and get them interested, no matter what the topic. If Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” was funny, I’d have probably taken the time to read it by now, but it’s not so screw ‘em. And if only those high school, history text books had some humor sporadically inserted in them, maybe I’d know when the American civil war took place (1492, right?).

I’m also often told that my writing seems like it flows rather quickly, particularly the material that appears in this blog. People reading my posts get the impression that I dash off each blog entry in one high speed train of thought and zip-zop I’m done in less than 20 minutes I can go back to playing online poker naked and eating Nutella right out of the jar. I even hear this from other writers, who should know better.

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First the good news. My Italian is coming along molto f*cking bene (that’s really how they talk, I’ve found my place in the universe).

I’ve decided to get gonzo with my ‘vanity language’ by attending free community Italian classes for foreigners five days a week at the local high school. It’s me, a Romanian chick, a trophy wife from Lithuania and six Chinese kids, all of whom have moderate to severe ADD.

We move along at a sub-Special School pace – we’ve been stuck on a food, cooking and ordering at restaurants theme for almost two weeks. The teacher spends about half the class either telling the ADD casualties to shut the cow up or pleading with them to do something, anything, having to do with the lesson plan rather than play with their cell phones, MP3 players or video games which they carry in convenient, quick-access holsters like Batman protégés.

I’ve only had two Italian oopsies in the past week; once when I commented on how my landlord’s youngest daughter looked like a ‘cute pomegranate’ and again when I described President Bush as being a ‘nose puppet’, which may or may not be true, but that’s not what I was trying to say.

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So I fired off the latest version of my book proposal to my agent a few days back.  We’re on version 573.62 or something by now, I’ve lost track.  On a side note, I’m starting to realize that the content of the book proposal may very well be more important than the book itself.  All this crafting and tweaking feels like I’m working on a painting that will never be done, especially considering the way I paint. 

This round of fiddling was actually a lot of work.  After some very good feedback from an interested editor, my agent and I went to work on putting more of me into the proposal.  By “me”, I mean the gory details of the unspeakable thoughts and emotions that flashed through my mind as I made my way through new countries and the travel writing excitement that went along with it.

This was especially true in the introduction chapter, where, as memoirs normally dictate, the editor wanted to hear more of my back-story.  Nearly all of these memoir introductions involve the telling of a traumatic, pitiable part of the author’s life as a prelude to what led him or her do the thing that they did that warrants them to publish their memoirs at the tender age of 36.  Mine is no different (if you want the details, buy the bloody book, you morbid perverts). 

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The Italian is not coming along as fast as I had hoped. I expected that I’d be speaking like Roberto Benigni in just a few days. Just review some grammar, get a fix on the accent, a few vocab adjustments here and there, zip-zop I speak Italian. But no. Unfortunately, it’s like a, like a foreign language! Curses!

The reason I had all this false confidence is that when you speak Spanish and Romanian, like I sort of do, and put those two languages together you’re about 75% of the way to speaking Italian! So, no-brainer, right? Not at all.

It’s not just that other unrelated, haphazard 25% of Italian words - which seemingly came out of nowhere - that’s messing with me, though it sure ain’t helping. It’s that these three languages are so similar that my poor brain can’t keep them straight. It’s like trying to neatly divide and organize white marbles with off-white rocks with whitish gumballs.

How the hell do multi-lingual people do it? I’ve realized that I’m good for two languages and that’s it; English and Broken-Something-Else.

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