I’m Not That Amercan Girl

I had an e-mail fest last night that spanned the globe. Let me explain.

I received a letter that was clearly not meant for me (it was obviously meant for some other McBickle.) It had been forwarded to me by another redacted name. (I love playing redactor. It feels like revenge to all those Redactors who ran their black markers through all the many documents I’ve had to read in my work over the years. It also reminds me of the redactors of the Old Testament. But that’s another story.) It opened like this:

>hi dear friend [redacted]: i am [redacted] from syria i hope you still remember
>me , we meet in turky in istanbul in oreint hostel .
>how are you ? i hope every thing is good with you . am so sorry
>because i didn't write to you emedaitly but i was so bezy so much
>with my case the refeege case with the u.n and with canadian embecy
>and olso i don't know how to write good eglish but finly here i am
>because i am always say to my self tomworrw i will write to . promes
>you to write because as i say to befor it will so nice to see you
>again.

I definitely don’t want to make fun of this guy’s poor eglish, especially because he sounds embattled enough already, but I do want to tell you the culmination of the series of e-mails I exchanged over this.

First, though, here is how the letter continued:

how is your friend the amercan girl ( sorry i don't remember haer
>name ) plese say hi tohaer from my and do tell haer that i forget
>haer name :-)

Clearly, he’s talking about McBickle. The other one.

I sent the nice guy who forwarded me (seemingly the other me) this sweet note (part of me likes being haer) a nice note explaining that he’d found the wrong person.

He apologized. A lot.

No biggie, I wrote back.

Then he sent me this:

“Well, like I said I'm sorry anyway. Just in case you were wondering, I'm a Briton from...Britain. But this e-mail was sent from Germany and meant for another American from Detroit. It was originally sent from a Syrian who was in Turkey. Apparently a lot of kids in America have no idea where Turkey is.”

The world, folks, is clearly wide, even if most of us Amrecans don't know how the globe is mapped. The possibilities, I do believe, are endless.