Thanks for buying my e-book, How to Get Your Humor Published! It’s always great to meet a fellow writer. Getting published is easy; all it takes is a little jar of elbow grease, this e-book and a computer.

Like me, I’m sure you’ve heard it over and over again: “The only way to become a great writer is to keep writing” or “there are no shortcuts in life” or “you can’t be a writer, you’re helplessly illiterate.” I assure you, these are nothing but ludicrous things parents tell their children before bed and after college.

You have access to a thesaurus and a checking account, there’s no reason your humor shouldn’t be published.

Have you ever been so excited it hurts? Then I guess you understand how I feel right now. Because my husband just told me we’re getting a new mailbox. That’s right, freaks. I said MAILBOX. As in, that philatelic hot spot in front of your house where the letters come and go. Six days a week. Rain or shine. And not just letters but other mail too. Like utility bills. And pre-approved credit card offers. And random flyers from guys who paint. Sometimes a fat wad of Valpak coupons even creeps up in there. Hell yes it does!

The term “barbarian” is bandied about a lot these days. Of course, everyone knows it comes from the Greek term “bararoi”, which originally referred to a species of talking pumpkin. Only gradually and through the sedimentation of linguistic geology did the term come to embrace its modern idiom; that is, anybody who, coming across in a thrift store the Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer on the one hand, and, on the other, a questionably pasty stack of Busty magazines, picks up the latter, in a full, though erroneous, confidence that he has made the dirtier choice. Real culture knows the juicy bits.

Here, it’s all Bieber. During week one in Daegu, “Korea’s most colorful city,” which is actually, “Korea’s card catalogue of faded gray sky scrapers, overcast skies and endless stream of black Hyundai’s,” I digress into the infantilization that occurs when relocating to a new country. Neon signs are everywhere: small dashes and zeroes mixed into an array of disfigurement as if someone has jumbled the shapes together in a felt bag and then blindly arranged them into miniature squares. My rationalized excuse for not yet enrolling in Korean lessons is that I’m afraid Korean words might lose their beauty. What are probably cell phone adverts and other mindless billboard messages look like oversized scrabble pieces, as if the whole, uniform city is actually a playing board being used to somehow score points in life.

It was quite a wedding, Aunt Tilley being fifty-three and as independent as a horned owl although that’s the wrong bird for this story because the whole day revolved around guinea hens, especially Maud, about whom later. They couldn’t find a church that would accept the guinea hens—there were six of them—as part of the ceremony, even when Tilley explained that each bird would be wrapped in bridal lace to protect the carpeting. Yes, they said, but what if one gets away and flies up into the croft and sets there, surely some poop will fall and all that. So they used the old bandstand next to the skate park beside the Y and that was fine, with the wedding party up in the middle and the guinea hens being carried by the bridesmaids and the Unitarian minister losing his place every time a hen let out a squawk.