From Dresden

I'm in Dresden. I'm staying in a cool-ass hostel. I spent last night hanging out with some cool German guys we met on the street. Hint: a good way to meet guys, at least if you're in an area where young punkish people hang out drinking on street corners, is to purchase several bottles of beer and wander around looking for some nice guys to borrow a lighter from. It worked great; the guys didn't have a lighter, but (a)they recognized immediately what our desire was, i.e. lighter qua opener and not qua fire, and (b)the one guy was able to open the beer by knocking the top off on a handy marble ledge they were leaning against--without spilling any beer. See, I too can remove the cap from a beer using basically anything hard; in my time I've used the hub of a wheel on my van, a random chunk of steel cable sticking out of the ground near Under the Bridge, and even another capped beer (that one was pretty clever, I thought). But usually this operation ends with the beer foaming like a motherfucker amid a chorus of "CHUG!" and "OH SHIT DRINKITDRINKITDRINKIT!!"
So these boys were clearly capable fellows. And when we'd finished our street beers, they took us to this bar and bought us another one. They were hella cool.
And our awesome night last night is yet another example of why clara and I are the best travellers ever: because we started out yesterday afternoon with, Hey, I think we should go to Berlin tomorrow. Do you know what train we can take? No, but I'm sure it'll be easier to figure out if we just take a train over to the German border. Ok, sounds good. Thus, we ended up in Dresden, for some reason, but it still ruled, because that's just how we roll: we have fun whatever we're doing, even if it involves sleeping in a train station or staying up all freaking night on the Jersey Shore. Hells yes.

I'm seriously going to miss the hell out of clara. Last night I was totally panicking about my Friday lesson. Not just because it's phonology and there's no textbook and I have to pull it straight out of my butt every week. This was way worse. See, two weeks ago, my beloved Scary Boss Lady informed me in her usual chipper tones that she would be observing my lesson that week. I'm all, gulp, but I had a pretty decent lesson prepared, so I was cool with it. She then proceeded not to observe any of my lessons that week, nor the following week. So when she finally told me, ok, definitely on Friday, I was totally fucked, because I'd already blown what meager ammunition I possessed on making the previous two lessons into things of grace and beauty. Anyway, I spent all of Thursday night freaking right out about what to do the lesson on, and I finally gave up and went to bed at like 10:30. *

Or so I thought. I lay down, with the taste of fear in my mouth, and just then clara got back from the Eastern Tour and buzzed my room. She told me her adventures, and I do mean all her adventures. After half an hour of shooting the shit, I was way more relaxed about the lesson. Which is why I'm going to miss her so much. It's not just the whole having the companionship of your good buddy thing. It's that when you find someone with whom you can stay up late at night discussing the peculiarities of the human digestive system, in great detail and with personal examples....well, you don't want to let them go.

Heh. "Go". Clara has to "go". Holy shit, I am such a child.

So the bottom line is, I guess we'll just have to keep on telling poo stories by email. Or via text messages, like this one she sent me last year: "i just got out of the usa gas bathroom, and i feel TEN POUNDS LIGHTER!!!" Comedy gold, y'all.

* yeah, it wasn't that late, but that's been my time-honored strategy...I'd rather sleep than think hard, and if I get up early the next morning, the rising tide of panic will break the writer's block.

I'm shriven!

In yet another sign that nomikkh and I are karmically linked, I finally got my ass to confession on Sunday. It was officially About Damn Time, too...I hadn't been since right before I left the US. Not entirely my fault; in addition to the stomach-wrenching anxiety I feel about telling out my darkest deeds, they speak some crazy foreign language around here, so I have to go all the way to Prague and hunt down an English speaking priest. Finally managed to, though, at the Infant of Prague church. Like many times before, I dreaded it beforehand, and it turned out to be...totally painless. Didn't get yelled at or anything scary, and I felt so overwhelmingly relieved afterwards. Well, maybe not *completely* painless; I buttonholed the priest in the nave, so he just sat down with me in a pew....which was fine and all, except I've got the distinct impression that the giggling group of Irish girls a few rows up could hear what I was saying. Hey, fuck 'em, I hope it was educational.

I love this country

I turned 22 on Friday. It was an awesome birthday--my classes went really well, and two of my buddies and I decided to head down to Prague for a party that our TEFL trainers were having. Once there, I made the mistake of letting them know it was my birthday, which resulted in tequila shots, and lots of them. Yeah dog. I didn't actually get that hammered, or at least I think I didn't...there don't seem to be any serious gaps in my memory of the night, and that's always a good sign.
The next morning dawned bright and early--far too bright, far too early. I woke up on my friend's couch, hungover like a motherfucker, and discovered that clara, my main girl from the Summer of the Roadtrip, was waiting by the payphone at the Prague bus station. Poor girl had been on a bus from Berlin all night, got to Prague at 6:30 am...because I'd blithely assured her the night before that "Hells yes, we'll still be up at 6:30--hell, we'll still be partying, that's how we roll, girl!" But the flesh is weak, and thus I was sleeping the sleep of the unjustified when she called at 7, 7:30, and 8. At that point, she, being an intrepid traveler, went to sleep on a bench for two hours. Anyways, I woke up eventually, and stumbled out to find her. Several false starts and two metro rides later, we had a joyful reunion in front of the Powder Gate on Naměsti Republiky. So good.

On the way to the joyful reunion, however, I had an interesting experience; I'm still not sure whether it's a good omen or a bad omen. I was investigating the contents of the gutter* in an alley behind Florenc Metro station, and I saw a very familiar looking object. No, not a used condom, you nasty-minded people. It was a bullet. I'm not sure what kind, but it was definitely a bullet, a live bullet in fact. So now I have a cool little souvenir of the Russian Mob activity in Prague. I'm pretty sure it's a good omen; it made me happy, anyway.

*Never mind why. Let's just say that I got "Chundermonkey" on the Drunk Test, and the Drunk Test never lies.

Very quickly, before I have to go teach phonology and pronunciation:

Phonology class is kind of the bane of my existence. On the one hand, I teach the same lesson four times a week, which is no small advantage, as Wavelet and Jedno can attest. On the other hand, I share the lesson with my esteemed colleague, the head of our department: she gives a (boring) lecture on the theoretical aspects of phonology for 45 minutes, and I waltz in with my native speaker charm and do 45 minutes of practical exercises. Which basically means I'm making up half of a university course from scratch. This was totally kicking my ass; I mean, once you've let them run through a bunch of tongue twisters once, they're going to get a little fed-up if you try it on them again. Luckily, I found an awesome little book that I can rip off without compunction. Plagiarism is a way of life for me.

Moreover, phonology class provided me with a bona fide Precious Moment:

This was during the first part of the lesson, while my esteemed and extremely stuffy colleague was teaching. She was trying to get the class to give her examples of the differences between British English and American English. One bright young lad, completely without guile as far as I could tell, came up with a wonderful example, which he said loud and clear:
"In American English they say can't and in British English they say cunt."

And I believe they do, on occasion.

My colleague is either a very good actor or she totally missed it, because she didn't bat an eye. I, on the other hand, was dying, seriously, but I managed to maintain, for the sake of my future employment.

Write something, damn you

The title of this is addressed to me, or more specifically, to my lazy ass. I sit down at the computer, I read everything anyone else writes, I post random shit in the comment sections, but for the past like week and a half, the blank staring New Post window makes me freeze the fuck up. So now my new strategy is, just fucking write something and never mind whether it's shite or not.

So here we go. I actually taught classes last week! I didn't screw them up! At least not majorly!! Seriously, though, the classes went really well. I was nervous as hell, for one thing about the huge size of the classes, and then again about the individual students. I was imagining hostile, glossy teenagers. Instead, I got sweet, fairly shy kids, most of them in the awkward eighteen stage. I loved them for that, since four years ago I myself was quite possibly the most awkward eighteen-year-old in the history of the world. Yeah. So one week down, 13 and a half to go.

Last weekend, Jedno visited. It was brilliant--as she mentioned on her blog, the themes of the weekend were beer and reconnecting. A lot of beer. And even more reconnecting. One night in particular, we sat at the bar at Edward's* and talked for like, 5 hours and I can't even remember how many beers. What was awesome about it was Jedno and I had fairly similar experiences at the college, knew and loved mostly the same people even. But (a), there's a year difference between us, and (b) we were in slightly different circles of the same, um, echelon. And yeah, I know that's not quite what echelon means, but I really wanted to use that word, and what I mean is we were both Pit people, and Non-Frat Pit people, at that (I was going to say Thinking Pit people, but come to think of it, that was another group altogether, and they could get kind of annoying). Nonetheless, there's enough difference between our perspectives that talking about those years, and the people we knew, was absolutely fascinating, for me at least; getting to see the events unfold in the early years that shaped the people I knew later on.
So the whole weekend was really fucking cathartic. I got to go back through and recount a lot of shit, particularly all the stuff that went down senior year after Jedno left. Which sounds, I guess, and could have been, fairly morbid and unhealthy, particularly given how unhappy I and those around me were during most of those years. But I've always found it really good to remember stuff, particularly the kind of remembering you do when you tell the story to someone. Helps me move on, I guess. Also, I got to hear her take on stuff; I learned a lot from that, because of the perspective differences I talked about earlier, but mostly because she's really insightful and perceptive about people and their fucked-up shit.

*Ok, this essay has been too damn therapy talk-oriented. Thus, I will now tell you something random, which is about Edward's. Edward's is an immeasurably cool pool hall on Sokolovske Namesti. It's all dark wainscotting and brass finishings, and legend has it that it's a hang out for the Russian mafia, which makes it even cooler. Unfortunately, the only clientele I've ever seen in there is seventeen and under. That's the only drawback, though. One thing to bear in mind when you go to Edward's is that when you have to pee (and you will, we're drinking beer for crying out loud), you should remember that the toilet paper is conveniently located outside the stall. So get some before you go in.