A Discovery

I don't have a lot to do at my job. The second semester has started, so I'm teaching again, but still--I have to be in my office from about 9 to 3 every day, and I don't spend a lot of that time working. Instead, I mess around on the world wide interweb.

Despite my devotion to the interweb (and I love the internet like poor sweet John Frusciante loved heroin in the mid-nineties...seriously, if it's been more than a few hours since I've checked my email, I get all twitchy and shit.), any way, despite my addiction, I tend to run out of things to do on the internet. I mean, one can only spend so much time Googling the names of boys that one had crushes on in elementary school. (For the record, I have yet to find anyone in this way. "Hunter Schmidt" has no internet presence that I can discover, so if you know him, please tell him from me that I thought he was the hotness in third grade. Whoo. Anyways.)

So I discovered a page with a whole bunch of uncollected J.D. Salinger stories. They're mostly from his early writing, before he wrote Catcher in the Rye, I think, and before any of the Glass family stories. Some of them are kind of over-sentimental, but a lot of them are damn good. Some of them are, in fact, about the Caulfield family. They really make me want to re-read Catcher, because I'd always thought it wasn't nearly as good as the Glass stories.

Anyway, "Last Day of the Last Furlough" totally made me cry, y'all. I highly recommend it.

In other news, I heart Peter Zelasko, and I will definitely find a way to namecheck him in my Culture Talk, whatever its topic ends up being.

Throw me a bone

So. I'm supposed to turn in the title of my Culture Talk for this semester. Actually, I was supposed to turn it in, like, two days ago, but we're not all anal about deadlines around here. I dread the Culture Talk, but it's really not all that bad...about 45 minutes of something vaguely related to the culture of the English-speaking nations. It doesn't even have to be me talking the whole time--my colleague with the Ph.D. showed The Wizard of Oz for his culture talk last semester. Right now, though, I'm drawing a total blank.

That's where you come in: here's your chance to influence tender young minds, albeit vicariously. Give me topic suggestions, and I'll be eternally grateful. Bear in mind, however, that I am lazy like the ocean is wet, and thus the ideal topic is one that can be easily half-assed.

Emendation

Ok, I spent some time wrestling with online Czech-for-foreigners resources (and don't get me started about those--as Jedno has observed, the general attitude is 'Nobody wants to learn Czech, we hate ourselves and everyone else does, too', so all the resources are ordered towards Czechs learning English, so I have to fucking use individual Google searches to find out the damn gender and declension of each noun I come across. Which leads to a lot of hits in Polish, so I sure hope the genders are the same. Anyway.) and I've revised my translation of the song. It's a very slight change, but see what a difference it makes:

this is a song for you
from (inside) the bus (i see)
the cold and blueish outlines of the clouds
of the the birds and of the panelaky

Now it's more personal, like he's inside the bus, looking out on the land passing by. I like this version as well or better than the way I thought it was before. I've spent a lot of time on buses in this country; the mountains smoothing out to flat plains between here and Prague, the hills and forests out west. Little towns pass by in the blueish distance: a baroque castle or a church in the center, a smoking factory, and panelaky all around them.
Yeah. This is a song for me.

Písnička pro tebe

to je ta písnička pro tebe
z autobusáku
mrazivé a modravé obrysy mraků
ptáků a paneláků

This is the first verse of a song by my new favorite Czech band, Mňága a Žd'orp. I liked it instantly, because when I heard it I recognized the words autobus and panelak. The meaning of autobus is self-explanatory; they're pretty much ubiquitous here. The panelak reference is what makes this song so incredibly evocative of the Czech Republic: a panelak is a block of flats, literally--they look like big gray lego blocks dropped all around every Czech city. Communist architecture at its grittiest.

So then I translated the rest of the verse, Latin-style with a dictionary:

this is a song for you
from the buses
from the cold and blueish outlines of the clouds
of the the birds and of the panelaky

And now I'm even more impressed. It reminds me of a Japanese poem, almost, in its extreme economy of words. Four lines, very little description, and yet the image it calls to mind is so perfect it takes my breath away. It's every Czech city, once you get outside the center of Prague: the buses, the clouds, the birds, and the big ugly gray buildings. This is what it's like in my town on a cloudy afternoon, the air misty with smog, and the cold all around. It's so beautiful.

Right now it seems to me that the most moving image in all of literature is that of Aeneas walking through the burning city, leading his little boy by the hand and carrying his father on his back. And in his father's arms the household gods, which Aeneas couldn't touch because his hands were stained from battle.

I don't know why I was thinking about that just now.

Observation:

The only thing harder than finding an English-speaking confessor in Prague is finding a fucking Tabák that's open on Sunday so you can buy a tram ticket so you don't have to WALK ALL THE WAY FROM EAST BUTTFUCK TO DEJVICKA. As I just did.

I am a bad person...

...because when I heard that a (male) acquaintance just got engaged, my first thought was, "Oh, that's cool...when is she due?"

Maybe I've been away from the US too long

My new office-mate: I'll just go make these copies...
Me: Dude, just let Lada do it. She's the secretary, that's what she's for.
New: Oh, of course! [laughs] It's funny how they just use that term so openly over here!

Well, color me mystified. Is secretary a dirty word now? What the hell?

And on this cold gray afternoon, when I'm tired and depressed, what book do I decide to pick up?

George Orwell's 1984. Such a bad choice for today.

I have offically seen every last thing there is to see in the city of Prague. Most of it on foot, and outdoors. To say that the weather was cold is like saying that the Flood was wet. Holy shit it was gorgeous, though.

But my family left this morning, and I'm back in my office with the free internet and the computer that makes buzzing noises. I'm totally fucking exhausted. There was a lot of stress involved in shepherding the family through the foreign climes, and there was major other shit, and I've been wound tight for days, and all in all I'm pretty damn depressed right now.

The trip was a lot of fun in a lot of ways, though; my parents are some of my favorite drinking companions, and we got to introduce my 15-year-old sister to some of the world's finest beers. One of the highlights of the trip was the night we spent with Jedno at U Svateho Tomaše, a beer hall with a live Gypsy band playing. Needless to say, we got retarde-ed. Jedno probably got more insight into my background and upbringing than she ever wanted to.


Anyway. I don't know what's going to happen. But I'm apprehensive.

Everything's going to be ok soon
maybe tomorrow
maybe the next day

--The Mountain Goats, "Game Shows Touch Our Lives"

Ok, so anzwaz, the hostel has happz hour with 1 euro beers from 6 to 8, and I partook of this, and eventuallz I realiyed that I had totallz omitted to have dinner, at all. And since I got up at 0530 this morning and have been on buses and trains ever since, this was a situation that needed to be remedied. Remedied in an alreadz rather sloshed manner, what with the happz hour and all.
So I ventured forth on the streets of Altstadt Muenchen, in search of the almightz Kebab. The kebab is not, as zou might think, a skewer with shite thereon. It is a varietz of things, in fact, but most properlz it is something like a Turkish burrito...of YUMMY!! Yeah, Jedno and Clara know what the fuck I'm talking about.

So. Having secured the Kebab, and also a beer, I sit down to enjoz both of these. Whereupon this old German guz greets me, wishes me happz Fasching (German Mardi Gras) and strikes up a conversation. Anzwaz, we had this whole long talk, wherein he basicallz told me the storz of his life...mostlz it was about the fact that he had had an older brother who had only lived one day, and it was only because this brother died that the guy himself was born. Also, that he and his brother were both out of wedlock, which I believe was not too common in Germany 50 years ago or so... and he kept saying how much he loved Oktoberfest, and then he told me how his only memory of his father (who was married with children to some other lady in Stuttgart) was of riding on his daddy's shoulders at Oktoberfest when he was very small. Which...just...holy shit.

It was so nice to be able to speak German to him, though. I could understand everything he said, which is so the opposite of my life in the Czech Republic, even though I wasn't quite so hot at actually speaking German...



Anzwaz, also involved in the conversation was an Italian alleged whore, alleged because she reallz didnät seem Dressed For Work if zou know what I mean, and the whore bit was entirelz on the assertion bz the old German guz that she, yknow, was all whorey and whatnot. She really wanted me to meet up with her tomorrow, but I managed to prevaricate as to my actual whereabouts tomorrow. Cause girlfriend was scary.



p.s. I'm on time limited internet, and plus the beer, and I so donät have time to fucking tzpe y instead of z consistentlz, so just fucking deal, a'ight?

Computer issues

Ok, my computer makes a funny noise now. Well, not "funny" as much as "insanely annoying." It's sort of an irregular and very loud buzz, like a car that's on the verge of stalling out. Did I mention it's annoying?

Anyway, I think the sound is coming from the fan, because (a) the source of the noise is in that general area, and (b) when I give the computer a firm slap on the fan (heh!), the noise stops. For a second. Sometimes it goes away entirely for days at a time, but it always comes back eventually.

So. What the fuck is it? Any ideas? Although come to think of it, I'm not too sure that knowing what the problem is will do me any good, really.

But damn it's irritating.

A post that gives new meaning to the word "trivial"

I just bought my fourth hat of this winter alone. Why is this?

Just to clarify, these aren't big Easter Sunday ostrich-feather hats or what-have-you. All four are or were very functional and utilitarian ski-cap type things.

So why have I owned four fucking caps this winter? Let's recap:

1. Big grey ski cap, "SANTA PAULA" in Gothic letters on the front fold. Yeah, Gothic letters, bitches. I acquired this one at the Chevron on 10th street in that ghetto town...I'll always have a soft spot for old SP; at least it wasn't Ojai. I managed to bring this cap safely through many drunken escapades and window climbing. Ironically, I lost it while stone cold sober, in a movie theater in Northern Bohemia. RIP.

2. Light grey, fleece, VERY warm, little loop on the back to clip onto your mountain climber harness. Bought at Tesco, the WalMart of Europe. Current location as far as I know: somewhere inside the Cologne cathedral. I discovered this loss as Jedno and I reached the top of the cathedral tower, which incidentally is 509 narrow slippery stairs from the bottom of the tower, when I began wondering why my head was so damn cold in the driving snow and sleet. In case you're wondering, the Koelner Dom does not have a lost-and-found that's open any time you can get to it.

3. Very cheap black cap with a red stripe. Purchased from a Vietnamese market in Cologne, following the events described in (2) above. Even for costing only 2 Euro, this cap kind of sucked. Thus, there was not much mourning when I accidentally left it in my private lesson student's car and the elves ate it.

4. Grey with blue and white border, all cool and hi-tech and moisture-wicking. Bought at the cool-ass ski shop near my office. It's made by SWIX, who make all sorts of neato cross-country skiing gear that I can't afford. But this cap was all on sale and shit. And did I mention it's made by SWIX! and thus complements my ongoing attempt to be a real live cross-country skier. The cap did come with these two little, like, pom-poms on the top, which is just not punk rock at all, but they were easily removed.

So there you have the story of my headgear, Winter 2004/2005. Let's just hope the tale ends here.