All posts tagged: social media

google translate poetry

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I am friends with several people who do not live in the US, and/or who do not speak English as their native language. I love keeping up with them on Facebook, and luckily for me, Facebook even provides a simple way for me to translate their foreign-language status updates into English! Unfortunately for Facebook, their automatic translator is not always the most accurate, and has trouble with idiomatic expressions and slang. Luckily for all of us, many of these translations come out sounding like pieces of strange avant garde poetry. In honor of World Poetry Day, I have decided to share with you a poem I constructed out of my favorite lines: The dream year [year of dream] That’s going to give this new year? Anguish of the beginning of the year, which fall on me all of a sudden, like lightning.. It’s not laugh the seagulls.. Beautiful, isn’t it? ^^ I find myself almost as beautiful as a salmon En papillote. Look at the roots and wings, and falls on the Castle of Miolans On …

will you be my friend?

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My best friend from middle school and I were basically attached at the hip. Everything she did I did, and vice versa. Her family became my family. Then we graduated high school and she moved to Boston. Now, I meet up with her as often as possible…maybe once a year or so to have coffee, catch up with one another’s lives. The friendship is not over, but it is diminished. A girl I became friends with in my last year of college and I worked really hard on a project together. I trusted her as a collaborator and came to know her as a friend. Over the past 2 years she has become one of my best friends, despite her move to Chicago and my own to France.  We are able to share and stay in touch in similar ways which allowed our friendship to grow across the miles. Two of my best friends in the entire world live a very large ocean away from me, but I feel as if we still live in the same little mountain town, …

Courage, Paris 💔💙

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I was planning to write something fun and light-hearted tonight, maybe about some high points of my week, or another random story from my life, but I’m just so sad and in shock. Paris tonight suffered one of the scariest and most unprecedented coordinated terrorist attacks in recent memory. The death toll continues to rise, though the terror seems to be over for the night, thankfully. Social media has been both a comfort and an annoyance tonight…The cynic in me is frustrated by all the surface-level “solidarity” posts, which ring somewhat meaningless in the wake of such devastation. The misanthrope in me rolled her eyes at every person who tried to break the news to me, as if I hadn’t gotten it from French newspapers 2 hours earlier (she’s also a little bit snobby). But the humanitarian in me shushed those other guys down and was exceedingly thankful to have a direct line of communication to my people in France and all over the world. I am heartened to see strangers opening their homes to those who …