I never know what to say.

Some questions I don't know how to answer

Every one of these questions makes me wish I could express myself more concisely — because they do not come from people with a long attention span.

• "What brings you to Ireland?"
    I don't know the answer to that.
      There is no answer — nothing to fit within the short period of time that a stranger is going to listen.

• "Do you understand this?" — an obsession of the bilingual...

• "What is your website about?"
    Of course the question implies that a website must be "about something," which is not true.
      Sometimes when I try to answer, people ask "so it's a blog?"
        It's not a blog.
          A blog is a linear set of documents, unless I'm mistaken. I don't know, and I don't care. It's not a blog.

• People ask me, sometimes, here in Ireland, "what do you think of Obama?"
    The question is so broad that there is no possible specific answer.
      The subtext, I think,* is a curiosity about my opinion on race.
        I just say that I voted for him.

  ... And I never know what to say.

* Between Cork and Killarney my visiting brother noticed a "halting site," where members of the nomadic Irish Travellers ethnic community had parked their "caravans" (or travel-trailers) and camper-vans, the rigs that are the modern-day incarnation of their traditional nomadic vehicles.

I was telling an Irish lad who was sitting between us in the back of the Bus Eireann coach that we don't have any nomadic ethnic groups in America.

He asked me what I thought of Obama.

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