Dear so-and-so, procrastination edition

Dear Self,

You have had a serious procrastination problem this week. All rage will thusly be directed inwards.

I’m only trying to help, NFAH

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Dear Self,

Stop going to bed so late. You know you’re not going to want to get up. The internet is really not that interesting, not compared with sleep.

It’s like I’m a naughty 13 year old again, NFAH

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Dear Self,

You set your self a goal to get to the gym 8 times in a certain period. You made it 5 times. Better than 0, but not as good as 8.

Things still need to improve, NFAH

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Dear Self,

I know some of the work that needs to be done is remarkably boring. That goes for housework too. But you still have to do it, just buckle down and get it over with. These little bursts of energy and inspiration to do things at 10 pm are nice, but are contributing to the “not wanting to go to bed problem”… just work normal hours like a normal person and go to sleep on time.

Tired of the “living alone means there are no rules” syndrome, NFAH

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Dear Self,

I know you just found out that your ex-husband got re-married, but really stop writing about him. That was a long time ago, and you don’t actually miss him or feel nostalgic.

(Shaking head at self in disgust), NFAH

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Dear Self,

You do realize you have to be in a car on the way to a plane in just under 12 hours and you’re not packed. Stop writing Dear So-and-So letters and go to bed!

You’ll thank me in the morning, NFAH

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My slightly unusual T-day

I have quite a few, perhaps too many, good American friends in the UK. But the sad fact is that it was impossible for me to participate in any traditional Tofurkey day rituals. There are many reasons for this. One of my good American friends is back home in America for the week, for obvious reasons. Two of my good friends have babies less than six months old. Another (Kat from 3bedroombungalow) was celebrating, but inconveniently located over 20 miles away and NOT on a major train line. My living in an urban center and having no car makes this a bit tricky. Especially since I had to work straight through until after 5 pm, so no big ‘dinner at 2 and the Lions on television kind of day’.

So my T-day feast ended up looking more like the meal Peppermint Patty shuns in the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. (And props to fellow expat rheaj for Twittering the YouTube link for the Charlie Brown special, made my expat holiday.) I had a team meeting this afternoon. My team is a bit of a mini-United Nations and we’ve been having a bake-off. Today was Italy’s turn to provide treats, which meant amazing hard cheese with crackers, and some positively sinful bite-sized chocolate treats made with ricotta cheese and coconut. So my big T-day meal was Italian snacks around a table with my team, while I spoke on using web 2.0 features for engineering, including using blogging software to make simple websites and Twitter to gather technical information.

After that I went to the gym (which was open, since no one here seems to think it’s a holiday!) and grabbed a bite on the way home. I know I’ve ranted about sandwiches before, but this is different: no soggy factor since it’s made fresh to spec, and frankly something American seemed appropriate for the day. A subway veggie patty (toasted) sub:

Happy Tofurkey day to expats and natives, where ever you are. And if you have kids in the car, I hope they sing a rousing chorus of “Over the river and through the woods” which we definitely always sang en route to Grandma’s house. Happy memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a kid. This one will perhaps be memorable in a different way.

Guest post–The accidental expats

I have answered some questions about my strange expat life in an interview on ‘The Accidental Expats’ site. Please do go read the link and see some interesting factoids about how I ended up here as a stranger in a strange land! And note, thanks to Twitter I am finding intriguing expat blogs faster than I can add them to the listing, so please do not stop checking and please do remind me if you need to be added!

Dear So-and-So, Friday the 13th edition

Dear Anish Kapoor,

You rock. The exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last weekend totally blew my mind. Too bad about the poorly behaved little kids running around unaccompanied, though. Hopefully they’re not doing too much damage to your amazing sculptures.

Glad to be an art lover, NFAH

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Dear Gordon Brown,

That thing where you pandered to the xenophobes and explained your plans to cut skilled worker migration really sucked. Believe me, we net contributors to the British economy (paying taxes and with no access to public funds) are NOT the problem.

Feeling like an unwanted expat, NFAH

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Dear Person from yesterday,

Just because you’re a girl doesn’t make it okay for you to be checking out my breasts the whole time I was talking to you. My eyes are about 8 inches north of where you were staring, ok?

Not sure what to wear in public anymore, NFAH

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Dear Everyone,

Do pop over and wish Mid-Atlantic English a happy 40th birthday today!

I’ll be 40 before you know it, NFAH

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I need a costume for Hallowe’en

I have the most random of Hallowe’en plans, which is that I’m going to a party at the Australian embassy in Paris. Yep. That’s me; Ms. International. But it’s going to be hard to top the costumed performance of my sister last weekend. She lives in China, as some of you may know, and she has a bit of a ‘Mando-pop’ obsession. As do I, now that she’s been feeding me things to listen to. I love music that’s good no matter what the genre, and some Mando-pop certainly qualifies (Leehom anyone?)

Over the weekend, my dear sis went to a concert for the band ‘Sodagreen’ in Shanghai and apparently managed to attract more than just a bit of attention.

Sodagreen:

Now I can highly recommend Sodagreen as a band, as silly as the name sounds, it’s some of the most innovative music I’ve heard in a while–combining pop music with classical themes, and I’m hooked. Yes, I’m hooked on Chinese pop music. Welcome to expat life. It’s a bit random and global. But you can see the whole lime green hair thing. So then we have my sister at the concert:

These images were taken from a Chinese chat website or similar, where apparently my sister had become famous for wandering around Shanghai as an Anglo wearing a lime green wig. She tells me the comments are on the order of, “I spotted her on the subway” and she also appeared on the jumbo-tron during the bid for an encore, so clearly she became a ‘15 minutes of fame’ local celebrity in Shanghai. The full concert story is archived on a blog from her friend here, along with this photo:

Now two things are true. I have never been as creative as my sis, and I absolutely adore that she was wandering around Shanghai in this wig. And using it as part of a greater plan to be the lead singer of Sodagreen for Halloween. Second thing, I still don’t have a costume for Hallowe’en and I need help, being not as creative as my sis I’m a bit baffled at the moment.

Oh and maybe a third thing, I can’t wait until spring break when I’m going to China to see my sister’s life in person! Planning must commence immediately…

Expat Blog links

One of the more visited links on this site is the “Expat Blogs” list, probably because a mini-community has formed whereas some of us in the US-UK group especially tend to “see” each other commenting on the same blogs, commenting on each others’ blogs, and even meeting up in real life (I’ve met three of the “Americans in the UK” on my list.

I’ve just updated the list with a few that I realized were staples in my blog-reader but absent due to my only updating the list every 6 months or so; but here is where I admit that I am not perfect (!) and cannot keep up with the chatter. If you know of a good expat blog, US-UK or otherwise, and particularly if it is something that you comment on and read regularly and think this little community would like, could you please post a link here in the comments section so I can add them accordingly? Thanks!!!

Videos (with apologies to those who have seen them already)

There are several, dare we say “viral videos,” that have given me a good laugh this week and although I thought everyone in the world must have seen them, thanks to multiple facebook appearances, I ended up showing one of these to people twice today so I thought I’d add them here… if nothing else, to make it easier for me to find them to keep showing people!

Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy

This one was particularly good for an engineer. One of my team was complaining this week about a piece of equipment not working reliably, and I had to shake her and say “this thing makes measurements with nanometer-scale accuracy… this is amazing!”

Sell the Vatican, Feed the World (NSFW since it’s Sarah Silverman, duh!)

I love Sarah Silverman. Love her. And I’m not a huge fan of the Vatican (just a mention of Catholics and contraception in Africa in the same sentence gets my blood boiling…)

Rachel Maddow on the Obama Nobel Peace Prize

I was originally not so keen on this award but I find Rachel Maddow’s analysis quite compelling. I particularly liked the clips of the Republican media types saying outrageous things near the beginning of the clip. Oh Rush Limbaugh, you manage to make a complete arse of yourself every time you open your mouth!

Tiny children who must come from a circus family, on Ukraine’s Got Talent

I wish my Russian was better so I could catch more then the little performers saying hello and what their names were. But they’ve either been in ballet school or gymnastics school from a tender age with the level of skill (and balance!) that they’ve got. Thanks for this one to my favorite professional friend blogger.

Update: Commercial. Too good to miss.

Thanks to a relatively random facebook friend.

Wordle

I stumbled on this fantastic website, wordle that makes up to the minute text clouds based on the words you are using most often. I tried it for this blog and was delighted and not surprised to see the huge word “coffee” along with all the others… try it yourself. It’s fun

Social Media and the Expat Life

I had a visitor over the summer, right before I left for America, with whom I had a lovely walk in the sunshine and a nice dinner before he succumbed to jetlag and went to bed early, leaving me to pack for my trip. We had an interesting discussion about expat life and the role of social media. I should preface this by saying that he’s an expat several times over, living now in a third country (and continent) from the one in which he was born and another in which he has lived. When it comes to social media and friends “in the computer” I’m a fan, he was not. I rely on my facebook and twitter peeps and bloggy friends to provide me with some structure. Although, as he noted, if the people are all in the computer, are they real people? Do you end up feeling MORE lonely instead of LESS since you don’t have the human connection that comes with “real” people in your life?

It was an interesting question, and one that I have pondered on more than one occasion since that discussion. Do I think of myself as lonely? I obviously have plenty of time to myself, and spend a great deal of that time sitting in front of the computer communicating with strangers. But I’m ready with my rebuttal now, a few months after the fact. Because the people stuck in my computer have, on more than one occasion, transmogrified into real people. In the last six months or so, I have met up with Kat from 3bedroombungalow, Mike from Postcards from Across the Pond (and Pond Parleys) and, most recently, Michelloui from Mid-Atlantic English. All American expats, all living here in the UK, all blogging about our collective experiences. And people who I can now consider friends “in real life” because they have crawled out of the computer and into the restaurants in my neighborhood. Pretty cool, that. So I will keep justifying my hours spent on social media, and thank my lucky stars for the fantastic friends I’ve met through this computer screen.

One of THOSE people

I am about to embark on a two week trip to Singapore and several places in Australia, all from my London base. And I realize as I do so that I am one of THOSE people. The business travelers that seem to fly in a world quite distinct from the norm. And I feel somewhat apologetic about the path that led me to this life.

Yes, I am one of THOSE people, the people that get off an airplane and look for a person holding a sign with their name written on it. I can’t imagine how I got here. I was raised to be a Super Shuttle girl, a girl who always spent an extra hour trying to get to her hotel after a long flight. A girl who almost missed her flight “home” to the midwest from SF when the driver was running around the town picking up others before going to the airport. I never took a taxi when a shared van would do. And now I look for a person booked by my car service. It’s somewhat discombobulating to realize how far I’ve come from the traveller of my early days.

Now I’m one of THOSE people. I try as best as I can to take a direct flight to my final destination. Of course, I never took a direct flight in my past life. In the US, the cheapest flights are often those that involved a lay-over in some place like Detroit or Atlanta. I certainly never prioritized a flight directly to the place I was going. I spent lots of time in St. Louis or wherever I had landed, but carried around a certain pride about the low plane fare I had won by booking this itinerary. But years of travel have taught me that the best plan is to fly direct into the closest major port: with a driver’s license, you can make up more time by giving up and driving to a connection a few hours away rather than waiting for the (near-bankrupt) airlines to provide you with a shuttle prop-plane with a potentially missed connection.

Now I’m one of THOSE people. I was always a member of a frequent flier club but it never mattered too much. Now I fly almost exclusively across major oceans. The miles add up faster than I could have dreamed as a young girl living in Minnesota, and thinking that San Francisco was the height of travel exoticism. This is the blessing and the curse that comes with living on an island in the eastern Atlantic. I have not graduated to the true life of luxury, in traveling business-class in any of my flights. But I have been upgraded to business-class twice in the past year, because I spend so much time on the road, I suppose, and because I have also been lucky.

So I prep for my trip in the knowledge that I am one of THOSE people. I have a card that gets me into the “club” lounges of the major airlines even when I am flying economy. I have changed from the days when I was living in America, when I thought that traveling 500 miles for work was a long distance (and perhaps involved a stop-over). I have changed from the person I was when I never had to carry my passport whenever I packed my bags. I am no longer the girl who thinks of travel for work as fun, but merely as a necessity of the job I have.

One never expects to be changed, to become one of THOSE people. I can see how it has happened without fully comprehending the transition. And yet, I prepare for my next trip, safe in the knowledge that I will be gathered by a car service on Friday afternoon, to start my latest adventure in Asia.

I hope, selfishly and as one of THOSE people, that the flights will be comfortable and the trip overall will not be too distracting, such that I will be able to see some sights on my visit. And that, on my return, I will be gathered into the back seat of a car to take me straight home, if only for a short visit before the next trip.