Hello to the four or five friends I’ve sent my new blog address to, the man who finds my laptop at Victoria Bus Station (no reward), future employers vetting me, the NSA agent checking this out after my ‘How to make a (totally) bomb cobb salad’ post raised an alarm, and no-one else.I promise to keep this short. A self-depricating, self-referential, totally insufferable introductory post is a mandatory requirement for anyone starting a My Year Abroad blog. I have started my own since I’ll be spending the following year working as an English Language Assistant at a school in Hessen, Germany (I refuse to be any more specific until it’s clear how libelous my blogging will be, and how litigious my colleagues prove to be). I arrived this week and have wasted no time in choosing a title which I will certainly not come to regret. I also made a logo, which took me the best part of two hours and means there’s certainly no going back now.
Other reasons I started a blog include: to score a lucrative influencer partnership with a major athleisure and/or pickle brand, to demonstrate to former school peers and future employers how much adventurous, innovative [REDACTED] I’m now having, to prove to my mum that I’m eating and, in our age of the permanent online record, to mortify any distant descendents who had the impudence to assume they came from good stock.
In conclusion, buckle up! This blog is going to fuck. I hope to post semi-regularly on here, mostly as a means of practising writing and developing good working habits. I promise to try to write well and I hope that my earnest attempts to document a significant and formative year of my life will compensate for any lack of sophistication, polish, skill, wit, wisdom, taste, charm, compassion, wealth, worldliness, courage, height, class, diligence, charisma and/or cleanliness.
Lots of love,
Alex
P.S. To clarify, the title of my blog does not refer to the Hall Pass I most certainly did not ask for (in writing). Rather, I mean actual sausages. Believe it or not, until very recently I had been a committed yet nonjudgemental vegetarian for four years (of the last six). Luckily, the beginning of my year in Germany has coincided perfectly, almost deliberately, with my latest total lapse in fortitude, or “Meatcation”. At one point I had intended this to be mainly a food blog, focussing on Germany’s fourth or fifth greatest export (after Ritter Sport and two or three other things), but I quickly abandoned this plan after I realised I can never follow through on nor finish anything I
P.P.S. How did I do?! Reader, I’m still trying to find my voice. Was that a little too caustic? Trying too hard? I’m not married to anything I’ve written here. In fact, I’m prepared to just scratch it and start again. All of it, right now. In fact, I might just can this blog right now and not have one at all. Believe you me, I'll do it. Nothing I'd enjoy more than to not write a blog about my year abroad.