przerwa

off to kiev and chernobyl tomorrow.  i’ll be writing everything in notebooks of various sizes, so check back in in two or so weeks.  then shit’s gonna get wack.

in the meantime, here are some goats in trees:

ennui

26 June 2010 1:39 pm

jesus christ i haven’t written in so long.

nothin' to do with nothin'

i’ve had a crazy week of getting progress reports done, and correcting finals and make-up tests, and giving oral exams, which means asking people to TALK.  NOW.  and then you grade them on whether or not they were able to do that.

i’ve also felt very much like i’m dealing with leaving here, and there are some great things happening and some sad things and maybe i want to keep some of them to myself and maybe i feel like i must be getting boring and repetitive.

i’m currently waiting to hear if Brendan landed ok, and to find out when i should be waiting on the train platform, which means that i’m jumpy and easily distracted and should probably stop drinking coffee.  listening to the hurray for the riff raff is calming, but maybe too calming.

sing faster, dammit!

so miami, it is.

i had my last class with the saturday pre-intermediates today.  my two troublemakers didn’t know that i wouldn’t be returning next term, so when i told michał that this was it, things got a bit maudlin.  there was handshaking and thank you for everything and awkward goodbyes and i wanted to force them into the non-stop picture party i’ve been having after every class ends, but this time it felt like it would be too much.

looking at some of my teacher friends’ facebook pages, they stick their cameras in all of their students’ faces constantly.  i feel very reserved about the photography, which probably has to do with what the street musicians were doing four years ago in kraków.

well that just makes no sense at all, does it.

ok.  i was walking around with a camera at my hip, so i could nonchalantly shoot from it, and a mini-cassette recorder, so i could record the sounds of the crowds and the musicians and the hejnał and everything.  somehow street musicians in traditional dress can tell when westerners are approaching them with surreptitious recording devices, because every time i got less than a half a block away from them they would stop playing and disperse.  half a block past, and they would come together again and pick up the tune where they left off.

i know that i am not the center of the universe, but after this kept happening even my mom had to agree that there was something to it.

that was the same visit where we ended up interviewing quite a few people, and i felt bad bringing out a tape recorder without asking for permission.  when i did, a cloud would come over peoples’ eyes and they would say, “for communists?”  no, no, personal history, no communists.  if i didn’t ask, even if i put it right in front of them, it was like they didn’t even see it.  after a while i stopped asking.

it’s not that these people we were interviewing believed the communists were still around.  but what other reason could there be for someone wanting to record what they were saying?

none of these thoughts are quelling the anxiety of waiting to see if your friend can get from the airport to the train station with absolutely no language while your damn phone company keeps prank calling you with special offers.

2:11pm

pamiętaj, idź na wybory

18 June 2010 5:29 pm

i am sitting in the café, cursing the fact that the internet isn’t working here today, trying to make out what the people at the next table are saying about the upcoming election this sunday.  i know that they are talking about the election, because i keep hearing “komorowski” and “kaczynski,” the names of the two leading candidates, repeated over and over again.

like smart people, this country puts their elections on a weekend day so that more people can get to the polls.  of course, i can’t get used to the idea of an election on a sunday.  it makes perfect sense, but my mind rebels against it.  it makes even more sense because more people are off work in this catholic country on that particular day.

america is stupid.

everyone’s talking about the election, in english and polish, everywhere i go, though i don’t have enough vocabulary to follow conversations about politics in polish.  i just know, because there are those names, over and over again.

kaczynski is, of course, the twin brother of the president who died in the catastrophic plane crash a few months ago.  komorowski is the guy who’s been running the country since then.  everyone who feels like sharing their opinion with me has expressed, over and over, that it is a moral calling, that they have to vote to defeat kaczynski because he should not be president and things are getting dangerous.

except for one person.

yesterday i had the business class, the class i love to drop controversy on and watch them fight it out in lively discussions that i never want to end.  i didn’t intend this one to be controversial, though.  their stupid book was talking about radio news programs, and since it’s a business class it was focusing on business news.  boooorrriing.  so i asked about news in general, and then i asked, specifically, how they are getting their news on the upcoming election.

remember to vote!

there was a brief discussion about that, and then we started talking about the election in general.  there were only two students there, so i thought it would be nice to have more of a discussion and less of the book.  i asked if they were going to vote, though i already had an inkling of the answer.  yes.  we have to.  it has never been more important.

which is what they said.  then i asked some vague questions about who was going to win, but gotia set me straight right away, telling me that it was very important that kaczynski doesn’t win.  karolina was strangely quiet, even when gotia said, “i do not know how karolina thinks, but i think we agree.”

it’s really easy right now, in groups of certain younger poles, to be certain that they agree.  kaczynski must be defeated.

gotia told me that she thinks that a lot of people, older people especially, aren’t thinking about the consequences of kaczynski being elected.  they are just following the advice of “certain leaders.”  this is exactly what i heard from my co-teacher karolina (not to be confused with the karolina in this business class, or the other two karolina’s i know), who told me that radio marya, the conservative catholic radio station, led people to vote for kaczynski’s brother back in 2005, and that was a big mistake.  now they are doing the same, again.

radio marya’s slogan is “the voice of catholicism in your home.”  nothing is more creepy to me than that thought.

i asked if maybe people were also supporting him because of the catastrophe.  that’s the almost official title of the plane crash that wiped out half the government of this country.  “catastrofa w smolensk.”  they both agreed, that maybe a lot of people will simply vote for kaczynski because his brother died in a national tragedy and no other reason.

things were fine until we started talking about polling results, and how komorowski is really far ahead, and gotia hopes that things do not turn in kaczynski’s favor.  then karolina chimed in, saying “you hope he does not get more votes?”  because of what gotia had been saying for ten minutes now, i was surprised that karolina needed clarification of that point.  i think, now, that she was just trying to figure out a gentle way of outing herself.

gotia said, “of course.  i hope kaczynski does not get a higher level than he has now.  i hope that komorowski stays above.”

karolina’s reply was, “kaczynski is bad, but komorowski is worse.  i do not vote for kaczynski, but also not for komorowski.”

the silence was deafening.

then gotia started talking about how karolina, if she votes for another candidate, will guarantee kaczynski’s election because none of the other candidates have enough percentage to even come close.  this “ralph nader” argument pisses me the fuck off.  it’s fucked up to blame other people because they voted their conscience, whatever that looks like.  i understand, very clearly, how high the stakes are.  people should be more pissed if, somehow, people are disenfranchised, votes thrown out, supreme court decisions bought or otherwise suspiciously reached.  but it’s much easier to blame each other.

i channeled that anger, though, into a description of why i thought it was not valid to make such arguments.  i’m pretty sure i did not argue anything of the sort, and maybe i made them confused about why, exactly, i was babbling on and on about some guy named ralph nader and hanging chads and illegal practices.  i succeeded only in changing the subject, though karolina nodded at what i was saying so perhaps i gave her a little support, as well.

but then she had to bring up the electoral college.

she waited for my description of crazy-sounding voter fraud to fade out before saying, “but in the US, your votes do not go right to the candidate.”  it took me a minute to realize what she was talking about, and then i had to concede that, yes, our founding fathers did not entirely trust the populace to make their own decisions.  then i told them, vaguely, how the electoral college works, making sure to explain that they don’t fully explain it to us in civics class in school, most people don’t know anything about it and, yes, america sucks.

karolina knew more about it than most americans i know.

i asked, “in Poland, your vote counts directly for the candidate?”

“yes.”

elections on a day most people have off?  direct democracy?  what the hell is going on here?

it’s almost like they want people to vote.

i don't even know who this guy is, but apparently he's a big-eared nazi.

the best of sting is playing in the café, again, and Roxanne is mixing strangely with the loudspeakers from out on the rynek.  i can’t tell exactly what is going on out there, though it looks like a large screen has been set up to play a debate of all the candidates, of which there seem to be many.  maybe debate is the wrong word, there seem to be long speeches by a variety of people, some of whom i recognize from campaign posters around town.

that’s another thing.  what, obama started campaigning for president a year and a half or something before the actual election?  here posters went up two or three days ago, no more than a week before the elections.  sorry, wait, kaczynski started putting up posters over two weeks ago, i saw the first on the 28^th of may, but he’s the only one.  not only posters, but stickers on bus stops and buildings, pamphlets on car windshields, his damn face all of a sudden everywhere.

we had just gotten over seeing his brother’s face everywhere.  and they pretty much had the same face.

it was almost like he believed that he could get an advantage by annoying people early.  in my neighborhood, people tore down the posters and threw away the pamphlets they found on their windshields.  this probably happened in more places than my neighborhood, but that is where i saw it.

in a fit of determination, on the kiosk near my house, where kaczynski’s face had been torn down almost immediately after going up, his face went up again a few days later; though this time they plastered it all the way around, and as high up as they could.  harder to tear down.

but not impossible.

anyway, after my descent into attempting to explain my homeworld’s idea of democracy, i deftly changed the subject again, and brought attention back to the book, so i could play the audio of the radio business news, which was supposed to be the point all along, and which brought us directly to the subject of the euro.

which was a topic we all agreed on.

we build agreement.

the radio news listening they had was from just before the euro deadline, when the EU was scrambling to convert its currency.  the point of the listening exercise was to prepare them for writing their own business news item for a pretend radio show, but these people are really really busy and i’m lucky they show up for class at all.  most writing exercises that i do in class i try to keep short, because what they really need practice with is speaking english, not writing it.  giving them homework is a bit of a joke, so there’s no way to get them to write at home.  so really i used the listening as a way to check their comprehension and open up a new topic of conversation.

karolina told me about how her home town of krosno, nearer to the border, is full of people from Slovakia every weekend, because they adopted the euro and their prices went through the roof.  so every weekend people cross the border and go shopping for the week, not only for them but for their whole families, because prices are still so much lower here, since they still have their own currency.

they joined the EU and got higher prices, but also the ability to cross the border into countries with lower prices.  trade off?

we talked about how in the current economic crisis, countries with their own currency seem to have fared better than those with the euro.  then i told them about projections i have heard, made by radical economists, that the euro will collapse within the next few years.

“i hope so!” karolina interjected.

then there was some talk about how prices are steadily going up here, little by little, to get us ready for the euro in two years.  they said it is easy not to notice, like a slight change in temperature on their skin.  i told them about being here in 2006, then 2007, then 2009.  it was easy for me to notice.  shit’s more expensive.

a ragtime band just started up out there on the rynek, and they are on the stage in front of a giant projection that says “bronisław komorowski.  na prezydent.”

aha.  so now i’m trying to figure out if this whole large-screen rynek party is paid for by him, or if this is only his portion of the proceedings.  if the former, he must be doing this in other towns and cities around the country, which means he has a shitload of money.  if the latter, these cats can really swing.

i can’t wait to see what the rest have to offer.

i actually do love that i still have no idea what is going on most of the time.

6:55pm

p.s. remember the conversation club and the Christian woman’s society.

spierdalej, guz

17 June 2010 10:09am

this morning i was rudely reminded of two things.

one – if you see a notice from the gas company with a date and time on it, maybe you should pay attention to that date and time, and invest the minutes required to translate said notice.  that way you can make sure your house doesn’t look like an angry frat boy had a drunken temper tantrum and then refused to do the dishes for days when the gas man shows up at 9:30 in the morning.

two – you have to put the coffee IN the coffee filter BEFORE you pour hot water over it.

at least i knew what the gas man wanted this time, which was to come into the kitchen and read the meter in one of the cabinets.  still, he woke me up, so i was wearing my hospital scrub pajamas that say “property of Stanford university medical center.  do not remove from center.” all over them.  they are also covered in glue and ink, because sometimes i start artistic projects before putting on pants.

but i don’t really care about the state of the house, or myself, because yesterday was the first day i felt incredibly far away from my family and it incapacitated me.  i was waiting all day for a phone call that i knew i wouldn’t get until midnight, my time.  it was also the first day i didn’t have classes, because the ones i usually have on wednesdays are over, so with no work to distract me i spent way too long writing one email, then forced myself out of the house to send it.

there is wifi down by the cell phone store, but you have to hunker down in front of their window so it’s best to wait until after 6, when they are closed.  saturdays they close earlier, and sundays they are closed all day, so if you can stand the glares from passersby it’s really the best for quick internet needs.  i am usually only off on sundays, so i was a little confused about what day it was and left the house before 6.  oops.  so i decided to go down to the kaufland and see about getting a few things.

kaufland is a gigantic grocery store.  really.  it’s huge.  its size makes me feel even stupider about the fact that i didn’t know it was there for a long time.  it’s on a street that i walk down almost every day.  sure, it’s slightly farther down the street from my usual route, so i have an excuse in that i don’t normally go that way.  it’s not a really good excuse, though.  you can see the giant sign down the road, plus there are signs all down that street to remind you that it’s up ahead, somewhere.

it’s not that close to my house and i have only been there a few times.  the reason i even bother to go there is that it’s where sara goes, in germany, to buy tofu.  the fact that there is absolutely no reason why a kaufland in Poland would have tofu just because they have it in a kaufland in germany seems to escape me.  and of course i don’t ever ask anyone for the possibly imaginary tofu, i just wander the gigantic aisles, marveling at the capitalist extravaganza, hoping to come across tofu.

i was looking for dental floss, which i have not been able to buy for three weeks.  that’s fucked up.  i haven’t had money to buy dental floss.  of course, it is relatively expensive here, but still.  i finally found it and then i realized that the last thing i wanted to do just then was wait on the giant “after-work” lines at the check-out.  so i made a few turns through the store, once again glancing for imaginary tofu unicorns.  then i headed back.

if you leave the kaufland without buying anything, you have to go past the “customer service/police state desk,” which you also have to walk past on the way in so they can take your bag away.  they didn’t try to check my computer bag and i wouldn’t have let them, but they were incredibly distracted as i entered.  i didn’t want to deal with being asked about it on my way out.  i didn’t realize, though, that to get out you have to talk to the woman behind the desk and she presses a button and the little gate blocking your exit swings open.  that way she has the time to look you over before letting you leave.  i pushed futilely on the gate, until she stood up, eyed me up and down, frowned, and pushed the button.  the whole time i was making slight whimpery noises and pushing and pushing, trying to get out.

after she released me from the shopping cage, i made my way back to the cell phone store, took forever to send one email, pondered having a beer at one of the bars there, decided to return home and distract myself with DVD’s of a tv show i’ve already seen, but that was perfectly ideal for keeping me from thinking.  i also needed something that i could hit “next” on when one ended, for full distraction capabilities.

it didn’t really work, and by midnight, six hours later,  i had had a little wine and was getting frantic, swinging between panic attacks and serene calm because i would realize there was nothing i could do but wait. panic, serenity.  back and forth.  the call didn’t come until almost one.  i had 8 minutes to talk to my mom and find out everything’s ok before her international phone card ran out of money and hung up on us.

it was enough.

but jesus christ, i’m far away.

things have been emotional anyway, because my classes keep ending.  my wednesday classes ended without me really noticing, since their last classes were on monday, when i don’t teach them.  but tuesday i had my last class with the teens, which was really hard.

i had to give them an oral exam, which means listening to mikołaj and paweł talk on and on about metallica and the CIA, respectively.  only one other student showed up, so we were done with the exams pretty quickly and then we just showed each other youtube videos for most of the rest of the time.  i hadn’t really planned anything for them, since the oral exams were supposed to take longer and it didn’t occur to me that they would want to hang out with me for the whole rest of the time.  i told them they could leave early, and they didn’t.

some friends and loved ones recently made a short movie, the first part of a series actually, dealing with working in the record industry as it dies around them.  they filmed it in the record store where most of them work, or where some of them used to work, and it’s a truly amazing piece of work.  so i decided to show it to the kids.  well, the speakers on my laptop are sad, so i skipped a lot of the beginning where there is a lot of talking, making sure to show them the URL so they could watch it themselves, and got right to the exciting action scenes.

then they took it upon themselves to draw things from the movie on the white board, which my friends back home who made the movie got to see pictures of.  awesome.

but at the beginning of the class, paweł had a piece of paper with a bunch of words and their translations.  he told me that my recent comments on his facebook page (yes, i am now facebook friends with paweł. and his sister.  i am actually facebook friends with six of my students.  so far) were (glance at paper) outrageous.  then he told me, “i will do well on this oral exam.  because i am (glance at paper) important … and elusive.”

yes indeed you are.

then i had my last class with the FCE group, which was also surprisingly sad.  they played a game, and then i asked them for their honest feedback about what they liked and didn’t liked about the course.  martyna yelled, “we like you, of course!”  and we all laughed.  and then i said, no, seriously.

everybody keeps asking me if i am staying in Poland.  they do not ask if i am staying in tarnów, though i don’t know if this is because that is their next question and i usually answer it before they ask, or if they just assume i am not staying in tarnów. a few people have asked me if i will teach at the school next term.  when i say “no” they ask me why, and then i feel torn between wanting to bitch about how the woman they are paying for english classes doesn’t pay her teachers and wanting to act professional and not complain about her while in class.  if i run into them outside of class, though, the gloves are off.

11:25am

heat, indeed.

14 June 2010 11:46am

the crazy 2 am thunderstorms saturday night/sunday morning have thankfully cooled everything down.  i was just falling asleep when the sky started groaning and flashing and we got the first torrential rain in a week, much needed this time.  after so many days of unbearable heat, i think the danger of continued flooding may be behind us.

the mosquitoes have calmed down, as well, so i’m not being eaten alive every time i step outside the door.  i’m still covering myself with citrus herbal bug spray, which just makes me smell like a jamba juice.

i wrote that post saturday, but didn’t get to write about the saturday morning class, and how impossible it was to keep them focused when it was so hot outside, and even hotter in the room.  michał told us all about seeing trans prostitutes in amsterdam and again i was faced with wanting to open up a discussion and deciding that the classroom wasn’t the place for it.  really, though, he didn’t say anything offensive that i could react to, though as always he was about half a step away from it.  he leads you right up to it and assumes you will infer from the look on his face what he is talking about, and that you will also feel the same way he does about it. such tactics are difficult to confront.

i really need to hone my “difficult discussion” skills over the break.  a few times things have come up that i would have liked to have been better at addressing, such as mikołaj’s “chinese eyes” or michał’s borderline homophobia.  the first i said, “don’t do that” the second i changed the subject.

really i’m trying to find the line between personal beliefs and cultural beliefs.  one of these things i can address, the other is a more difficult beast altogether.

12:05 pm

sadness for the way blood moves in my body

12 June 2010 4:50 pm

i forgot what 90 degrees fahrenheit feels like.

i also forgot that in any sort of strong sun all of the blood rushes to my face and stays there, making me look as if i were about to have a heart attack.

mixed with torrential sweating, because 90 degrees is fucking hot, i really look like i am about to have a heart attack.

i was reminded of all this a few days ago when, at the beginning of this heat wave, i walked into the school building, only to be met with renata’s alarm as she glanced at my face.  “you are all red!  are you ok?”

um, yeah, fine.  i’m just made up of blood rushing constantly upward and delicate skin perpetually on the verge of bursting into flame under the onslaught of any sort of sunshine, and you?

this is the first time i’ve lived under such seasonal conditions in a long time.  and i realized while living in santa cruz that while i like the sun, i don’t like that much sun.

then i realized for seven years after that that san francisco has almost the perfect balance of grey and not-grey for my particular skin needs.

then i moved to where there is winter again, and i forgot everything.

so i’ve been pining for the spring, which we didn’t get to have, but i forgot about the summer.

no, i like the summer, when i don’t have to wear long sleeves to cover my tattoos.

well, that’s another story.

two days ago was really the first really hot day, and renata confronted my heart-attack face and then i went off to teach the business class, while sweating like crazy.

i came back to the school and ania was there.  she looked at my long sleeves like i was crazy.  “what are you doing?  take that off!”  i told her i couldn’t.  she gave me the narrowed eyes of her disbelief until i whispered, “i’m covered in tattoos.”

she said, “let me see,” so for the first time i removed the long sleeve shirt i was wearing over my shotwell tank top and showed off my tattoos.  she wanted to know what each one meant.  when she got to the skull and bones on my arms, she waved her hand and said, “i know.  i saw your license.”

which was another thing i forgot to write about.  a month ago we were riding the bus into work together and somehow we started to talk about driving.  she showed me her license, which has an absolutely adorable picture of her on it, and i showed her mine, with studded dog collar and dreads.  “oh!  you were metal!  no, rocker!  no, punk!”

yes, i said, i was punk.  i didn’t correct her use of tense and she didn’t seem to care, she was more enthralled with how angry i look on my license.  i was really angry that day.  thanks to california’s need to reuse license pictures for eternity, she was looking at a me 12 years in the past, and angry at spending all day in the dmv.

back to a few days ago.  ania asked me why i was covering my tattoos.  i told her that i didn’t think they looked professional enough for a teacher.  really, i kept hearing on every online site that teaching in Poland is easy, as long as you don’t have any visible tattoos.  such advice from other teachers has made me incredibly paranoid about my virtually covered arms, which i haven’t had to worry about until … now.

she thought that sounded crazy, and told me about how one of her friends has a tattoo and it is beautiful.  that argument didn’t really counter mine, but she wasn’t hearing it.  so then i told her that if i show them classes will just want to talk about them, and that’s annoying.  though true, it’s not really the reason i have kept them under wraps.  then i tried to change the focus by melodramatically yelling, “and you thought you knew me, and now you find out i’m a different person altogether!”  she was too adamant on my heat levels to see the humor.

she insisted on rolling up my sleeves so only one was visible, and that would have to do.  then she tried to pull down my knee-hi’s, yelling “are your legs covered, too!”  i didn’t think she was ready for my leg hair, so i just said “no” and dodged her attempts.

then when rafał came out of his class, she insisted on telling him how crazy i was for wearing long sleeves.  i told him i didn’t think it was professional to show my tattoos and he, unflappable at the new information of tattoo-age, agreed.  so that’s something.

really i don’t care about being professional, but i do care about being seen as professional enough to give a good job to.  the rest can come later, in baby steps.

but the heat … it’s killing me.

i have seen exactly two other women with tattoos, one a twenty-something mother walking down krakowska, another a teen-looking goth-ish girl, hanging out at my local produce stand.  male-wise, i have seen a lot of burly soccer-hooligan-types with tattoos.

i’m still trying to figure out the rules.

but i also love a woman ten years younger than me mothering me and taking care of me.  i am going to miss her …

5:23 pm

words don’t work here …

http://www.recordstoreinspace.com/

marzenie

i had a dream last week that i was grocery shopping and i went to buy two sponges for the kitchen and then i thought, “no!  i’m leaving so soon!  two sponges is too many!”

and then i woke up.

hmmm

an open letter to the gardeners

9 june 2010 9:26am

dear lawnmower people:

7:00 am is way too early for lawnmowers.  please refrain from using lawnmowers at 7:00 am.  thank you for your consideration in this matter.

love, the angry girl in the window above you who can’t fucking sleep

i would write that on a piece of paper and throw it off the balcony, but my usually-awesome dictionary doesn’t have the word for “lawnmower,” and they’d probably just run the lawnmower over my pleas for quiet, anyway.

plus they have now, finally, moved away from the vicinity of my apartment.  apparently the grass below my building is incredibly resistant and requires hours of attention.

also it might be rude to call them “lawnmower people,” and one of them is actually sporting a weed whacker, which is also not in my dictionary.

the thing i didn’t get a chance to write about yesterday was one of mikołaj’s non sequiturs. oh i am so tired, i just had the hardest time figuring out how to spell “sequitur.”  u?  really?

i was handing out some grammar review sheets and he looked up at me and said, “why can’t i translate myself?”

“what?”

“i can’t translate myself.  why?”

stare stare stare confusion confusion.

“there is only się. that is stupid.”

aha!  he was asking why there is no translation for the reflexive pronoun “myself.”  ok.  phew.

in english, when the same thing is the subject and the object of a sentence, we use myself, himself, itself, etc.  John was talking to me.  John was talking to himself.

in Polish there are certain verbs that are reflexive, so they contain the word się to show that.  for example, to teach and to learn can have the same base verb, but learn has się added, so it literally means “to learn (teach) yourself.”

this came up in the FCE class a few weeks ago, when they had to find the incorrect words in a text and one of them was an added “myself” after “learn.”  i asked, “can you learn yourself?”  and Mateusz smirked as he answered, “in my country you can!”

i am actually distracted by the silence outside, and feeling like i should do something aside from stare at a computer.  like, head toward the café and see if they have my headset.  ugh.

9:53am

mission goddamn accomplished!

8 June 2010 8:13pm

that is, if the mission is trying to get a 13-year old polish boy to not only listen to but also like and be amazed by joy divison then i passed with flying colors.  no, wait, that’s what you do with tests.  what do you do with missions?  put them to bed?  or, simply, accomplish them?

well, he did still compare their youtube comments to tupac’s, pointing out that it was amazing that they had just had a comment thirty minutes before he had looked up their video, but tupac, of course, had had a comment 2 seconds before so therefore was superior.

but, then, partway through a grammar exercise he looked up at me with wide eyes and exclaimed, “thirty years later!  and people still comment on them!”

yeah, he’s hooked.

not like their video has been online for 30 years, though.  still, he is one of my teen students who talk about youtube videos the way we used to talk about albums, so not surprising that’s how he got there.

then he informed me that he was no longer afraid of clowns because he went to a “phobia workshop,” a device that the book had used to teach them present continuous or something, which we covered months ago.  that fact does not stop young paweł from mentioning said “phobia workshops” as often as possible; though, granted he is usually announcing that he needs one, due to his overwhelming fear of clowns.

then mikołaj asked me if i was going to be teaching at the school next term and i had to tell him no.  the look of anguish in his eyes was perhaps 90% playacting, though he was genuinely a little sad in there somewhere.  then he complained that i have not been on skype enough.

ack, ok.  a couple of weeks ago he started pestering me about skype, since he knew that i had it because we watched a movie on my laptop in class and he made out the icon on the toolbar.  eventually i gave in and let him contact me, knowing full well that i was leaving soon and thinking that i would like to keep in touch with him after i left.  really, though, i should have waited until we were all done with classes so i wouldn’t have to hear about how he couldn’t skype text me because i was never online.  he also sends me links to metallica videos on youtube.  and things like this:

i haven’t been teaching enough to know how to say “no” to kids i like all of the time.  most of the time, sure, but they’re gonna break down my defenses sooner or later.

that’s how gabby and anna found me on facebook.  and mikołaj and paweł today expressed their desire to find me there as well.

this is getting dangerous.

well, no, i’ll just have to remember to block them for any posts with ample use of the word “fuck.”

and i was just trying to figure out how to stay in touch with these students after i go.  they are some of my favorites, and they’re all teens, so facebook it is.

so they’re gonna find out how tattooed and queer-lovin’ their teacher is.  it can only help warp their minds in the correct direction.

mikołaj and paweł are in the class i was teaching zines to, but we have mostly run out of time.  i am going to compile what they have done into one zine and encourage them to finish them on their own.  i was talking to them about that today and mikołaj showed me a page he had done weeks ago, saying, “look at this page.  i am in love with this page.  i love it.  look at it.”

awesome.

then he told me he is going to finish his completely and mail it to me, or scan it and send it to me somehow electronically.  “then you will have a copy, and you can use it to teach in your next class.”

it just gets awesomer and awesomer.

“awesomer” is, of course, not a word but i think i don’t want to live in a world where it can’t be.

then i showed them cheyenne’s zines, which i just got in the mail.  (oh yeah, cheyenne!  i just got your zines!  and i showed them to my students!)  they were enthralled at the cut’n’paste, which i didn’t get to go over as completely as i would have liked because a stupid test got in the way and took up two of my class periods, and then the flood kept most students at home.  argh.  then mikołaj got all excited because he found a “dirty word!”  i panicked a little as i took the zine back from him with more force than i meant, but then i realized that the dirty word in question was “butt.”  i then also realized that the same page had the word “shitter” on it, which i hadn’t thought about.  despite mikołaj’s devotion to saying the word “sheet” as often as possible (“you want me to pick up that SHEET of paper?” “is this list of facts called a “FACT SHEET?”  he loves saying “fact sheet” (the Polish “a” sounds an awful lot like the “u” in “fuck”) despite the fact that there aren’t so many contexts he can use to evoke it in our classroom), he apparently isn’t familiar with that particular vernacular.  or i pulled the zine back before he could notice it.

though i decided long ago to only let them see my zines from afar because of the amount of times i say “fuck,” when i’m reading i don’t tend to notice such language.

and none of this is about what happened last night, which actually feels like a dream now.  i was in the café, talking to phil via skype, in the room by the bathrooms.  usually when i’m calling people from that room, everyone who goes to the bathroom gets to walk by me seemingly talking to myself.  or to my computer.  same thing.

i was alone back there, as the table of drunk women next to me had moved their party elsewhere, so i was audible to all who walked by, especially the one guy who glanced at me as he came out of the bathrooms and talked to me, despite the fact that i was in the middle of a sentence.

“are you american?”

totally thrown.  nobody in six months of seemingly talking to myself in this one café has approached me to comment.  especially not in english.  so thus my ineloquent reply.

“yeah.”

i had to ask phil to hang on a minute, as the man continued, “you work at ESCS?”

what?  what the hell?  how did this guy know that?  weird.  but i gave him the same response.

“i used to work there.  i’m outside with some friends.  if you’re alone …”

i tried to politely point out that i was not alone, and that in fact i was in the middle of a conversation with the person on my computer screen, but i think it came out sounding kind of bitchy.  i was thrown, and a little tipsy, and not at all prepared for that kind of interaction.  i told him my name, shook hands, found out he was michael (i think?), tried to figure out if i wanted to ask about his seemingly irish accent and decided against it as he invited me, again, to come sit with him and his friends.

i’m often not good with such invitations, which is not the best way to be when living in a foreign country.  but i’m really miserable with such things when i’m on the verge of leaving town.  it’s hard enough to get me to hang out with my friends when i’m getting ready to go, never mind make new ones.  i’m ok with “passing-through” friendships, traveling encounters, but “i’m about to leave town and where were you four months ago” interactions tend to make me annoyed and no fun to be around.

so i talked to phil somemore, despite the fact that he kept telling me to “go!  be social!”  and then spent more time wrapping up things on the internet before leaving.  as i went outside i glanced over the outdoor tables and saw three groups of people, all of whom had one guy in them who may have been the guy i talked to.  seriously.  they were all thin and had beards and the room i had met him in was pretty dark.  so i let that be my final warning and headed home, completely oblivious to the fact that i had left my microphone headset in the café.

i am high-maintenance of a sort, and have difficult, badly-translated instructions that nobody can follow.

10:12pm

p.s remember to write about “i can’t translate myself.”  and the fucking mosquitoes that are trying to fucking kill me.