My Kung Fu is Strong

One thing I have started to notice lately (and you may strongly disagree with) is that my mind has been firing on all cylinders and that it is coming out strongly in my writing.

Granted, I am not doing a ton of writing for my travel blog, but I have been throwing down some quality work for the comic blog I love to write for - Multiversity Comics.

I find that ideas are coming faster, coming together better, and that I am approaching things from a different and more fresh angle typically. There are a lot of different considerations that could factor into this occurring (or at least into causing me to believe it is), but I think the glaringly obvious one is that this trip has been really, really good for my state of mind.

I find that my mind has been sharper, that any stress or hindrances that have impacted me have melted away, and that overall I am in a really good place mentally.

I think another one of the interesting things that this trip has done for me along those lines has been positively impacting my speech patterns.

Before I left, I would have a tendency to want to get everything I wanted to say out in as quick of a fashion as possible, which would lead me to trip up on my words and sound like I have a speech impediment of sorts. One time, I even remember a rep from Bloomberg I happened to be driving around Anchorage for work had told me that I was like him and that I needed to learn how to "choke my motor" when I speak.

These days though, I believe my motor has been choked. Because I have spent so long working with people who do not speak English as their primary language, their ongoing requests for me to "speak slower" and "speak more clearly" have led me to a point where I have good rhythm and better enunciation in my speech.

I look back at Ryi in Tokyo as a very positive influence. She is the woman who guided me around Tokyo for an afternoon after we accidentally shared a lunch of sashimi, and having not spoken English in 20 years, she required training wheels of sort that could be provided by me altering how I speak.

Since then, I've continued that on throughout other countries to the benefit of myself.

This really came to mind when I was in Munich for a night. I was in my 6 bed dorm in my hostel for the night (the excellent Wombats City Hostel there), and I was surfing the web on my iPad and having a conversation with a woman from Manchester by way of Portugal (which is a lovely accent if you ever get the chance to hear it).

She informed me that I spoke in a very "posh" manner. Only knowing Posh Spice and not the definition of this very British colloquialism, I was a little taken aback. Some time later, I asked her what she meant by that.

"You speak in a very good measure and you enunciate every word as if they all matter to you. I say posh because typically only important people and royalty speak like that."

So that is a pretty cool class of people to be associated with. In that regard, I guess I don't mind being called posh.

Music of the day: The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme (excellent record)