Allow me to introduce you...

...to the coolest thing I have ever seen.

And really, I'm not making any kind of political statement with this. It's just...you can pick him up! And fling him! He's just so...flexy!

I am officially entranced.

The Landbound Man

Na konci vesnice
v malém domečku
přebýval velmi
velmi starý pán
Ve světnici měl svíčku
starý gramofón
který si večer pouštěl
a zpíval:

At the edge of the village
in a little cabin
there used to live an ancient
ancient man
In his room he had a candle,
an ancient gramaphone
and evenings he'd set it going
and he'd sing:

Jó jó moře mý
je dávno ztracený
jó jó moře mý
a slunce červený
jó jó moře mý
je dávno ztracený
teď jsem suchozemský muž
-- já to vím

Oh, oh, the sea, the sea
is long since lost to me
oh, the sea, the sea
and the sun all red-shining
oh, the sea, the sea
is long since lost to me...
now i'm a landbound man
--and this i see

--Znouzectnost, "Suchozemský muž"
Loosely translated, 06/01/28.

It's these little differences that make foreign language study so rewarding

Holy crap: I just discovered that in Czech, the same word* means both "classical" (as in music) and "serious" (as in serious relationship). Man, I'm glad none of our tutors at TAC were aware of that little factoid...it would have injected an extra element of judgy-ness into their condemnation of everything unMozart.


Huh. So I guess by that rationale, all of my relationships have been rock-and-roll to the bone. Verging on experimental noise-rock, in a few cases. Well, fuck it. Punk rock, represent!




*The word is vážný, in case you're interested, which, ok, probably not.

A big bright spot right there in the future

Ohhh man. I just got into a summer program in Prague. You have no idea how happy this makes me. I still have the get the funding and so on arranged, but...holy shit. It's not even real to me yet. And ok, there's still a right bitch of a semester to get through. It just makes it so much easier, to be able to think about being there after I get through this shit, and not just "after I get through this shit" meaning fucking years from now. Oh yeah. This is good.


It's especially cool because I just watched a Czech movie and realized that, whoa, I've learned a ton of Czech. I could understand it so well that it was actually distracting, because my attention was bounce back and forth between the voices and the subtitles.
And the movie itself was awesome. It was one of the most subtly religious films I've ever seen. It's just amazing, especially for my sardonic irreligious Czechs to have made. Go seek and watch: it's called Divided We Fall.*


In other news, I've spent so much time on the couch with the laptop that I now actually prefer the way it sounds with my wrists covering the speakers. Sort of warm and muffled. Comforting.



*The Czech title is Musíme si pomáhat, which means "we have to help each other."

This week just will NOT END

So it turns out that IF you rip your little sister's copy of OK Computer over Christmas break, and add the resulting mp3's to a 970 song playlist, and then you let it play on shuffle, THEN Winamp's little electronic mind will choose one particular song off of OK Computer four times in the space of two hours.

Or rather, it will try to, because you (if you're me) will hit next within four seconds of hearing that buzzy little robot voice, and will continue hitting next until you get to something more appropriate to your state of mind, preferably something by Billy Bragg about the disaffected youth of the British underclass.


Fitter, happier, indeed. More productive. For fuck's sake.

Oh, it's ONE OF THOSE WEEKS, all right

Dammit to HELL.

I just opened a beer and spilled it before I'd taken the first sip. And this was my first beer of the evening, so don't look at me like that. I have to say, I've never seen a beer spilled that impressively before. I caught the neck of it with my elbow as I was turning, and it made a complete rotation before it hit the floor, where it bounced up into another half-rotation. I grabbed it, but almost all of it had already chugged out. So basically the beer was distributed onto the circumference of a vertical circle bisecting my tiny kitchen; in non-mathematical terms, that means all the fuck over the kitchen and me. It was pretty freakin' spectacular, really.

Hence, I was more bemused than irritated. Right up until I reached into the fridge and realized that that had been the last beer. Then I was right pissed off. Oh well. The Lord sends us these things every once in a while, to remind us that the Earth is not our home.

Apparently this is the kind of week it's been

I just glanced at an email I sent yesterday to a former student, and realized that I had cheerily requested him to "say high to the other students for me."

This will undoubtedly be taken the wrong way. Alas.


In other news, I'm back at the lawyer factory, and deep in a funk. Somehow it was easier to ignore the grim reality of this shit when I was lazing my way through Christmas break.

Anyway though, I really am going to try to start posting again. Maybe posting will make me feel less like wet cottonwool. If that makes any sense, which, yeah, not much.