The Hermit Poet

Everyone else in blogland is doing this and I’m feeling left out, so here goes…

Ten Years Ago
I have returned home from two years in Taiwan as a missionary and now am in the midst of my first semester back at university. Contrary to what everyone tells me about how my study habits are supposed to have improved, they haven’t. I’m still a bit culture-shocked and part of me longs for the simplicity of being a missionary. I am also realizing that computer and electrical engineering is not really where I’m supposed to be. Nevertheless I’ll stick it out for another two years before eventually switching to Computer Science. My dating life is non-existent — but I’m completely oblivious to that. I’ve discovered rhetoric instead and have slowly begun writing poetry again after a break of several years.

Five Years Ago
I’ve been working for almost a year already at Knowledge Adventure, a software company in Glendale, California, that specializes in writing children’s educational software (read: kids games). I had managed to talk myself into this programming position on the basis of reasonably good performance on various programming tests and a number of phone interviews. Life in southern California is different than what I expected. I’m a bit lonely, but have made enough friends to get by.

One Year Ago
After five years of working on various computer games, I’ve quit my programming job with KA which has since become part of the megaconglomerate Vivendi Universal Games. I’m already part-way through my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. I love being a student again, and especially love writing and workshopping. Living in Riverside is an adjustment though — I miss the proximity and vibrancy of the Los Angeles poetry scene. I also miss home. Due to a mixup with the Canadian passport office in Ottawa, my passport fails to arrive in time and I have to cancel my flight home to Canada. I spend Christmas mostly by myself, though a family from church does take me in for Christmas dinner. I’m well into my manuscript and hope to finish it in the new year.

Yesterday
I spend the half the day designing and coding the initial draft of the website for Boxcar Poetry Review. In the evening I head out with the intention of attending a poetry reading in Redlands. I manage to get myself on the wrong freeway, then fight my way to the location barely in time, and then discover that I’ve confused this reading date with another. It wasn’t Redlands I was supposed to be going to — it was Huntington Beach. I end up missing the memorial reading for Anne Silver, an acquaintance from the LA poetry scene who passed away last month from breast cancer. I buy groceries and sit at home feeling like a heel.