Fifty Thousand Words

My New Office

Happy Thanksgiving.

Quantity II

For some reason, Louis, the head mechanic, was obsessed with the fact that I went to college. I think he mistakenly thought that I was the only duck captain to graduate with a four-year degree. He was also impressed by the fact that I went to a “good school” although he was never quite sure which one it was since no one out here has heard of Brown, unless they’re into that sort of thing. I think once he misheard my school as “Graham” (I guess I do have a mumbling problem) and I didn’t bother to correct him. This was even weirder, that he was impressed by me going to a school that he had never heard of because it didn’t exist.

He thought my captain name should be Sarah Bellum and my schtick should be that I was smart. While I appreciated the pun, I didn’t think the intelligence act would go over so well. First off, if I ever got any intelligent people on my duck, they would hate it even more. They would pity me, perhaps. (There is nothing worse than someone pretending to be intellectual, especially when they are driving an amphibious vehicle and wearing funny hats.) And everyone else would feel like I was being condescending.

It depended on the tour. I would literally say at least three times over the course of the 90-minute tour that the Space Needle was 605 feet tall. It was kind of a running joke that the Space Needle was so omnipresent and all. Although it’s better than the Liberty Bell. At least the Space Needle is somewhat impressive to look at. The Liberty Bell has ridiculous security. I almost got the mini-Swiss army knife taken away when I had made it through airline security with it on my keychain just a week before. And then at the end of the tour I would do a little quiz. Sometimes before I even asked the first question, someone would say “How tall is the Space Needle?” Sometimes I would actually ask the question and people would blurt out all kinds of incorrect answers. The funny thing is that I really wanted people to learn something about the city. I felt like I was letting them down if I didn’t share with them at least one fact they could throw around at their next cocktail party. They didn’t seem to care, though. I was really not sure what people were expecting when they bought tickets. I think I tend to project and so I imagined that everyone was like me, skeptical of the cheesiness. But that didn’t really make sense. If you knew what you were getting into, why oh why would you ever buy a ticket? So then I started thinking that they were just normal people looking for a normal tour of Seattle. But what I realized is that those people were on the Gray Line tours, the people who wanted to learn about the history and all that. People on the ducks, by and large, wanted to have fun. They wanted to buy the fun we were selling. They wanted me to make them dance to cheesy ‘70’s songs. It was kind of a paradox. (What do you call two doctors?)

Quantity

During the first two weeks of this month, I have probably done more writing than I have in the past three years. So it is somewhat ironic that November has the fewest blog posts so far. This is because the emphasis placed on sheer volume of words by NaNoWriMo has freed me from the paralyzing self-doubt that the blog sometimes inspires (is anyone going to want to read this crap?), but has also meant that I haven't produced anything to post.

Now, as you know, it's not like I have very high standards for these blog posts of mine. But (and ,again, you probably can't tell) I actually do edit them to some extent, as in it's not just the words that spew out of my brain unfiltered. I figured that I could wait until I go back and edit my "book" and then post excerpts. This could be years from now. So I thought I'd post a short unedited excerpt today to celebrate the halfway point and 25,000 words and me actually staying on track. (It will make the rest of my stuff almost look good in comparison.) Here goes.

my first duck ride

My parents were coming to visit for the weekend. In terms of tourist activities, Philadelphia is pretty much limited to a small selection of Birthplace of Democracy sights and museums and a giant clothespin. I thought something outside would be a nice. Since my parents love to sail and spend their entire summers on the water, I thought a duck boat tour would be great. We could drive past the requisite historical sites, and then have a nice water cruise. Granted the water cruise would be on the industrial Delaware River, cut off from the downtown area by I 95, but still. Why not?

I didn’t know that duck tours were the cheesiest things ever. In fact, I didn’t have much experience with tours. I wasn’t sure that I had ever even been on a tour before.[1] My family didn’t really do tourist traps. We went to Disneyland once when my sister and I were in fourth grade. We stayed at the Caribbean Beach Resort—it was one of the budget ones—we didn’t have breakfast with Mickey. We missed the Electric Light Parade because of what has become known as “The Automatic Flushing Toilet Incident.”[2]

I knew that all tours were pretty touristy—but I didn’t really mind that. Obviously you are riding around on a tour vehicle, you look like a tourist. The doubledecker bus tour went right past our second floor apartment on Antique Row. Occasionally I could overhear the moderated tone of the tour guide talking about the antique shops. (I wonder if at any point in the tour they explained what the deal with Philly and rows is. Not to mention the rows and rows of rowhomes—which were built skinny with floors stacked vertically because property tax was based on the width of the houses on the street—but everything in Philadelphia is on a row, not just the antique stores. We also have Jewelers’ Row, Boathouse Row, Restaurant Row, Fabric Row, etc. ) So my idea of a tour was quite tame. The guide tells you some fun facts about the city, points out the sights, right? It did not occur to me that a tour would in any way involve dancing the Macarena while driving down South Street.

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[1] Actually, I have to take that back. I did go on a tour once but it was so bad that I think I’ve attempted to block it from my memory. The one tour I went on was when my sister and I were backpacking through Europe. We were the ultimate budget travelers, and it never occurred to us to spend money to see a city that we could walk around and see ourselves. Unless someone or something was physically preventing us from seeing something, we were not going to pay to see it. But when there was a free tour offered through the hostel in Berlin, we decided why the heck not. The problem with our tour guide is that he was trying to be funny. And it was painful. And I also thought it was vaguely inappropriate when he took us to see the apartment building that had been built on the site of Hitler’s bunker. There is nothing marking it because the government didn’t want it to become a shrine. Let’s just take people on tours and point it out instead. Then our tour guide attempted a comedic dramatic re-enactment of Hitler’s last hours. For some reason, it really annoys me when I don’t know whether or not something is true. Like Hitler could have had a German shepherd named Heinrich. Did he, or was this a joke?

[2] Basically what happened is that back in 1991, automatically flushing toilets were not commonplace. They were a new invention that apparently freaked my sister out because she started crying and when I went over to her stall to see what was wrong she slammed the door on my finger and the lock caught me on the knuckle. With me bleeding and Pam wailing, my mom decided there would be no Electric Light Parade for us, and we walked against the tides of tourists, the only ones heading toward the gates what with all the magical excitement happening inside the park.

In Case Anyone's Still Reading

This month I have decided to funnel any writing energy that I might have into a larger project of writing 50,000 words by the end of November. Caroline (the Young one) and I have decided to jumpstart our respective writing careers by taking part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I'm not actually writing a novel, of course, since I suck at making things up. But I figured I could use the opportunity to force me to write something substantial, or at least get a lot of words out there to work with later.

You can track my progress here. If I am slacking off, please feel free to offer encouragement and/or threats since I really want to actually do this.

Thanks for Reading

And thanks for your comments. Just send me your mailing address and I'll mail your prize out within 3-5 business days.

It's November. Hope y'all had happy Halloweens. I'll write more later.