Of Vietnamese First Names and Mine

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/This is a writing contest entry I had submitted that did not place. Instead of tweaking and/or submitting to other contests, I have decided not to do this to motivate myself to write more and other content for future contests. I’m not trying to make a living on this, or even earn extra cash, so there’s no need to judge value based on how much time I put into it. If anything, it’s only about minimizing losses of contest entry fees to what’s been “proven” to be “unworthy” of recognition. :)

I hope you like it. 2000 word limit 2021 CBC Nonfiction contest.

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The Rejected Poems

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/I have a poetry blog. It’s nothing special, and I am absolutely not being modest here. Pretty much nobody reads it, right now or ever in the past, and that’s quite fine by me, because I don’t write for the readership. You don’t write and post over 1800 poems for readership over a few decades if you’ve never gotten any readership, so I am honest in saying I don’t write for the readership.

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My Answer for 10 Quick Questions. What are Yours?

Tonight, I found out about a very inspirational Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) series called Player’s Own Voice, where athletes, or those involved with athletics, talk in-depth about something grouped by these topics:

In each article of many, is a feature called 10 Quick Questions, where the interviewee is asked the 10 questions below for quick answers, rather than deep thought and recollection, with chance to revise before submitting. These are a pretty good collection of questions to give a fair representation of someone’s mind, unlike a lot of stupid quizzes you see these days!

  • The best book you’ve ever read?
  • Must-listen Podcast?
  • Best advice you ever received?
  • If your life was a movie, what would it be called?
  • What word or phrase do you overuse?
  • What is a skill you wish you had?
  • What’s something no one would guess about you?
  • If you could have the ultimate influential dinner party, who are the six people you’d invite?
  • What makes you cry, every time?
  • What’s the next goal you want to accomplish?

I LOVE this sort of stuff, much more for being able to get a strategically random glimpse into someone’s mind rather than to contemplate my answers. However, for the experience, I put myself through it. My answers are below but I’d LOVE to know yours if you were so kind as to share in the comments, or on your own blog with a link to this post for me to know.

If you answer those 10 questions in any way, publicly or not, please do it before you read my answers because no matter whose answers you read before doing something like this, they are bound to influence your answers in some way. The influence might be to steer you down a different thought path you might not have taken independently, rather than agreeing with some answers to incorporate into yours, but it’d still be influence. Thank you.

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CBC Musical Keys Signature Series

A week ago, I stumbled across an award winning series on CBC Radio which I absolutely loved! It was a called the Signature Series, and comprised of 5 minute podcasts about each musical key. Each podcast is a poetic narrative about the persona represented by that key, beautifully done by  Paolo Pietropaolo, over mostly famous classical music all composed in that key.

You can listen to the series via the CBC websites, or on SoundCloud, where you can “collect” them by Likes or into playlists. However, the SoundCloud free account was so freakingly limited for what you could do with building playlists, especially for this day and age, that I’ve decided I’ll collect them here on my blog for reference, and to share with others.

Here are the podcasts of all the keys, from C to B like on a keyboard, alternating between major and minor keys. Enjoy!

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