Create a Miracle in Your Life: Increase Your Pen!s

That's exactly what I did today. With Virginia. (She increased her pen!s too.) We went to the store and bought some study supplies, including two new pen!s for me and one new pen!s for her. They're now sitting in bags on the bed, waiting to be added to our collection. So today, truthfully, we have increased our pen!s stock size.

And lo, on returning home, I found in my inbox a very prescient message exhorting me to do exactly what the title of this post says. I have to say the experience was quite miraculous. I'm not sure I've had as large a pen!s stack before.

Tangentially, did you know that Thesaurus.com lists "cock" as a synonym for "stack" and "pile"?

Seeking Work

I've returned to freelance writing and editing again to make money. I'm mentioning this because I'm seeking to put my name out in the world in as many ways as I can so as to attract more business. I realize this blog may not be the most prolific or effective way to advertise, but every little bit can help. So if any of you who read this blog (the few, the proud, my relatives and friends) hear of people looking for an editor or a writer, I would be extremely grateful if you were to pass my name along or refer them my way. Interested parties can check out my iFreelance portfolio here (thank you, Dad, for referring me there) and my LinkedIn profile here.

Or if you have ideas for resources that might be helpful, I'd love to know about them. Ditto for suggestions to improve my profiles, etc.

Thanks three million times.

Update: For whatever reason, the links I provided above for my LinkedIn profile don't work properly. However, you can find the same links in the sidebars of this blog (---->), where they do work properly. Or you can search for my profile in the People directory. (When sifting through the hundreds of David Clarks on LinkedIn, look for one who's a writer and writing teacher in New York. I know I'm in Paris--I even updated my profile to say so--but LinkedIn hasn't recognized this in the directory, apparently.)

Please Tip Your Servers

Wait staff aren't really anybody, are they? Within their jobs, they exist only to ferry desires from customer to kitchen and fulfillment from kitchen to customers. Same holds true for other serving staff: we tend to ignore them.

I was thinking about this as I walked home from a caf&eactue; this evening: the language we use when seeking service in retail and service environments is really telling. We rarely ask about the server him or herself, and when we do, it's often a surprise to the person behind the counter.

But even so, when asking for things, we typically say "I'd like" or "May I have" or "One [x]", and even if we're polite (please, thank you, etc.), there's a fundamental deprivation of subjectivity that happens in our language in these situations. "I'd like" is a simple statement of our personal desire. It ignores any agency on the part of the person who might help us obtain our desire. "May I have" adds some personhood to the server by symbolically asking the server for something--but it's largely rhetorical now, and it isn't much. And simply stating the object(s) of desire is like pushing a button on a vending machine: we don't give even the courtesy of complete sentences and the interpersonal interaction hinted at by introducing ourselves as a subject. It's interesting to me that with all the variations available to us, we never ask "Would you give me", which would open up an even interaction, human to human.

Quoi

Adding "quoi" ("what" en anglais, and usually interrogative) at the end of a sentence as a sort of rhetorical flourish is pretty common in spoken French. Virginia has been trying to get me to say it and other "French" things so I sound less like a barbaric American (my words, not hers) and more like a fluent francophone. Things like using "quoi" properly are hard to get--it's basically colloquial language and doesn't correspond exactly to the meaning of the word that I learned in school. I've been using "oui?" instead, which Virginia says marks me immediately as foreign. She said something to the effect of "It makes one wonder whether you're Belgian. Or weird."

Since my parents will probably vouch against the former, I guess we're left with the latter. I hope the French will still accept me, quoi.