Fame Flits Fast

Fame comes in strange places and at strange times. Andy Warhol said "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." I get my fame in 15 second increments, so I guess this is a good thing; it feels as if those fifteen minutes will last longer. Way back when, I signed up with HelpX.net looking for find someone who can assist in marketing my three websites. I was extremely explicit in my needs. The deal is that you put the person up in your home with a place to sleep in exchange for their work. Generally, they are supposed to work 3-4 hours a day. Beneath the layer of getting free labor is that the worker gets time to explore the city. Kind of a backpacker’s step up from couch surfing; they get to experience the culture besides.

Though I have had dozens of responses, few actually met the criteria I had set. A number of the state they would love to learn marketing or can help me create a website. Not close to my needs. Yet, when I did get someone who seemed to be spot on, we arranged to meet for a coffee. This is where the fame part comes in.

I was sitting in the café having arrived thirty minutes early so I could relax and read. A young man came in and had an animated chat with the woman behind the counter. He then turned to me and asked in Hungarian something incomprehensible…to me anyway. He then repeated it in English and asked if I would allow my photo taken for an article. I am photographed here.

An old US television commercial had the slogan “When you are #2, you have to try harder.” Well, if you get bored looking, I am in number 10. I have to try hardest. Even the blurred teddies and the pretty coffee drink rated higher on the list.

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Ryan's Popularity Up in the Polls

I just want to think it is a coincidence that I gain popularity when Ron is gone. There is this fear that I am really emitting some loneliness pheromone that I am not aware of causing people to be drawn to me like moths to a light bulb. Honestly, I am not lonely, but the attention is quite pleasant as well. 


Monday it was good-bye lunch with a Fulbright professor who was leaving the next day for the US. Tuesday was a coffee with a Hungarian poet/screenwriter, today I was stuck at home with guests coming and going and our cleaning person, but he never showed. The guests did. Tomorrow, I have lunch with another American who is a poet and writer, living here for twenty years. Friday, one of my former students is exposing me to a new budget eatery, my favorite kind. 


These and now having to clean the apartment myself, are just pushing things on my to-do list back from the top into the middle, and perhaps down to the bottom, but I have to enjoy the attention while it lasts. Come fall, no one will ever have heard of me again. 


Starting tomorrow, I will not have guests for a full week, so one distraction will be out of the way, so then it is serious concentration on those things to accomplish. 

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My Book is Out If You Can Find It

It looks like Amazon.com is sinking on my list of favorite sites. First my editor told me that the publisher had to manually enter the release date into Amazon.com for my book, because it defaulted to the UK release date. Now, when I search Amazon for either Frommer's Budapest and the Best of Hungary or the title without Frommer's, the page with the 7th edition appears. To find the current 8th edition, you either have to be intuitive enough to click "other editions" or specifically type in 8th in the search box. If you want to find it, click here.

If you go to Barnes and Noble online here, and type in Ryan James in the search box, you will find Frommer's Europe and Frommer's Eastern Europe, two books for which I wrote the Hungary chapters followed by a boxed set of Tales from the Crypt, but nary a fully authored Budapest book. Why the Tales...is there, I have no idea, but it would make a great title for my memoirs. To find my most current book, you have to type in Frommer's Budapest, but they too are showing the UK publication date as you can see here. 

Of course, you can order it directly from Frommer's. Click here. Getting it locally will save you shipping charges, but if they don't have it on the shelves yet, here is the ISBN number: ISBN-13: 9780470551264

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