First, the most important things you need to know. I am coming home June 9th. Part of my plans for the summer are to visit people, specifically in NYC, DC, and maybe the west coast. I am currently finished with teaching, I finished last Thursday, April 30th. I am very happy to be done but also a little sad. I'll get into that later. For now, random thoughts!
- I suck at posting. I really do. I want to do this more, but I just sit at the computer so much doing other shit, work, talking to people, watching baseball, that I don't want to sit there longer to type. Also I've been fairly busy. However, now with a month of basically nothing to do, I'll start doing this more, je crois.
- French people suck at walking. Obviously, this is a gross generalization, but in general I find this to be true. There is just a certain lack of awareness of their surroundings that I find maddening. You just shouldn't do things like stop in the middle of a busy doorway, look around, take our your cellphone, consult it, look around again, wonder why all these angry people are pushing by you, sit down, take a nap, etc. etc. One particularly exciting tactic is to get in front of the doors for a metro that people have been waiting a long time for, and either just stopping in front of the door and not going in, blocking those behind you, or my personal favorite, going into the wide open car and standing just inside, again blocking the doors. Weaving around is another good one, most people tend to walk reasonably straight, and not weave around like a drunken hobo. Here, not so much.
- It's amazing how much nicer Paris is when it's sunny. I know, I know, it's the same everywhere, but I think the fact that it rained for a solid 3 years straight after I got here (rough approximation) really conditioned me to think that the sun in fact no longer existed. There are so many nice places to go out and relax and have a picnic, it's just lovely. Makes me never want to leave. Of course, once it goes away I'll be sad again. A rainy Paris really is a veritable cornucopia of bland colors.
- I know the meaning of words without knowing the meaning of words. This has nothing to do with Paris, but every time someone asks me to define a word, I have no idea how to do it. I just know the correct way to use it. It's the same way I work with computers, I can't explain things, I can just do them. I feel like there must be some sort of word for that. For example, I used the phrase veritable cornucopia without being 100% sure what it meant, so I doubled checked, only to find that I nailed that sucker. Used it perfectly. Couldn't explain what it meant for my life, but I knew how to say it. Which incidentally is my teaching style for English. I have no idea why things are the way they are. I just know what's right. It's why I am a terrible teacher but a terrific male model. That and my sultry good looks.
- Some French students ask the weirdest questions. There isn't an underlying logic to everything in language, sometimes things just are the way that they are. For example, I was teaching a lesson on daily routine, and I talked about breakfast, and some kid was like breakfast? Caisser rapide? Which means something akin to breaking quickly, and I said no, that's the word for petit dejeuner, and he said why? Now, of course (as I learned later), the word breakfast comes from breaking the fast that is sleeping, but it's very much not worth explaining that to this kid. Sometimes you just have to accept that things are the way that they are.
- Men suck. A lot. And they need to stop hitting on my girlfriend. This is honestly one of the scariest things for me going home, because I've seen some shit when I'm with her, and that's nothing to say of what happens when I'm not around. Last night, apparently some guy started following Sarah home, asked if she was single, and then when told about me said he was going to fight me for her. First of all, I will gladly crush his soul. I've had it up to here with chauvinist men coming after my property. She's my piece of meat, not yours assface. Secondly, what the fuck? Do guys think this shit works? We were out jogging and some guy started cat calling at her. I'm right there! Looking buff! I wanted to key his car. Why would you ever think that is a good idea. Finally, and this is somewhat more expected given the location, we were walking through the red light district, with Matt. In front of the many strip clubs there are people who try to get you to enter the strip clubs. As we passed one, said strip club guy said "Oo lah lah". This one wasn't so bad, because again we were in the red light district, and she was walking with two guys, but still, little irritating. Now, I may have been drunk at the time. Very drunk. The point is, I shouted something at him as I walked past. I don't honestly remember what, but it was something along the lines of wanting to punch him in the face. He then started telling me to go fuck myself. I believe at that point I told him I loved him. The point is, men suck.
- Branching off on that, "Oo lah lah"? Who says that? I have never in my life heard that while living in France before. Other French stereotypes I've never or rarely seen
Tiny mustache, à la Steve Martin in the Pink Panther
Berets (One or two to be sure, but not that many)
Striped shirts (Same as berets)
Accordions (People are more likely to be playing guitar)
French stereotypes I have seen
Baguettes (People love their baguettes here)
Bicycles (Is that a stereotype? They do ride them a lot. Not nearly as much as the Dutch, but a lot)
Cigarettes (God they love to smoke here)
The Eiffel Tower (It exists! Color me surprised!)
- Branching off again from the men suck point, people here are aggressive, especially the sketchy people in the sketchy areas who want stuff from you. For example, one of the first days I was here, I was walking to meet one of my coworkers for my first time (she ended up being one of my favorite people here, and I'm more sad about not seeing her than most of my friends). Again, I walk right through the red light district on my way to see her. Now, the difference is, in the story before, it's after midnight on a Friday. This was Tuesday afternoon. As I walk past one of the many strip clubs, the woman in front says that I should come in, I'd really like the show. No thanks, I say, continuing to walk. She begins to follow me, no no, you'll love it, we have girls in there! Naked girls! No thanks I say, picking up the pace. Long story short, she followed me for a good solid 2 blocks before finally becoming convinced that I wasn't too keen on going to a strip club on a Tuesday afternoon. The worst though are the myriad of characters by the Sacre Coeur. The Sacre Coeur is a gorgeous church that I love which has a nice lawn you can sit on and also happens to be near the apartment, so I spend a good amount of time there. And every time I go, I see a group of guys. They all have pieces of string. What they do is, they find unsuspecting tourists, and tie their string around your finger, for "good luck". Then, once you have been tied up, they ask for money. It's a particularly irritating scam, and one I've never had any interest in. But for some reason, I must look like someone who really wants to have a string tied around his finger. That, or someone who is particularly gullible. They will forcibly grab me when I walk past, because apparently saying no isn't enough. I've had to push them away to get my point across. One day, I'm going to have them tie a string around my finger and then just walk off. I'm.... so bitter.
Alright, that's enough for now. Hopefully this whets your appetite my glorious reading public. I hope everyone is well.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Lent
I have never in my life given up something for Lent. This is mostly because I'm not even remotely religious, plus I'm pretty sure it's one of those Jewish holidays I'm not allowed to celebrate Something about Jesus being lost in a desert, tempted by a potato pancake for 40 days and 40 nights and then starring in a terrible movie about his experience with Josh Hartnett. I may be wrong about that, but I don't think so.
However, this year I was talking with my friend Paul, and he said for Lent he was giving up swearing, for the fourth year in a row. Needless to say, he is not doing a terribly good job at it. He swears constantly (I may goad him a tiny bit) and punishes himself by hitting himself REALLY hard in the leg. I suggested he give me money every time he swore, but he didn't think it was a good idea. I personally thought it was a great idea. I'm also pretty low on money.
So this year, I decided to give up something for lent. I ended up starting with coke, and making it soda in general. For those of you that know my physical dependence on the stuff, you realize what an epic decision this is, to not have soda for 40 days (more actually, given that apparently Sundays don't count? Bullshit, I say). This may not be terribly exciting to any of you, but I couldn't tell you the last time I went a week without a soda of some sort, it's easily been years, so this is quite the undertaking for me. I'm on day 13 or something ridiculous right now, and I hate every second of my life. As if the kids I teach weren't horrible to begin with, now I have to deal with them while going through withdrawal (actually happening, by the way). Man life is fun.
Anyway, this is uninteresting to anyone but me, but I have a blog. That's what people do on their blogs. I'm blogging! So, if you people care what I'm doing with myself in my spare time, now you know. Torture. Thanks Jesus! Way to ruin things YET AGAIN
However, this year I was talking with my friend Paul, and he said for Lent he was giving up swearing, for the fourth year in a row. Needless to say, he is not doing a terribly good job at it. He swears constantly (I may goad him a tiny bit) and punishes himself by hitting himself REALLY hard in the leg. I suggested he give me money every time he swore, but he didn't think it was a good idea. I personally thought it was a great idea. I'm also pretty low on money.
So this year, I decided to give up something for lent. I ended up starting with coke, and making it soda in general. For those of you that know my physical dependence on the stuff, you realize what an epic decision this is, to not have soda for 40 days (more actually, given that apparently Sundays don't count? Bullshit, I say). This may not be terribly exciting to any of you, but I couldn't tell you the last time I went a week without a soda of some sort, it's easily been years, so this is quite the undertaking for me. I'm on day 13 or something ridiculous right now, and I hate every second of my life. As if the kids I teach weren't horrible to begin with, now I have to deal with them while going through withdrawal (actually happening, by the way). Man life is fun.
Anyway, this is uninteresting to anyone but me, but I have a blog. That's what people do on their blogs. I'm blogging! So, if you people care what I'm doing with myself in my spare time, now you know. Torture. Thanks Jesus! Way to ruin things YET AGAIN
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Guess who sucks at posting? This guy!
Alright, so I've already decided that this probably isn't going to be a regular thing, and you shouldn't treat it as such. Think of it like an update email, something that comes irregularly and with frequent long intervals in between. That will help.
Now, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to try something new and start doing more daily updates with shorter posts that tell you what my day to day life is like*. We'll see how it works, I'll talk about what I've done this week, and you can see how little I actually work, and hate me for bitching as much as I do about my job.
*After writing this, I then changed my mind for a third time, and decided to do weekly recaps. So lets try that. Of course, it's already Tuesday of the following week. I'm not good at blogging
Monday: To understand Monday, you have to understand my schedule. So I work at two schools, College le Parc, and College Christine de Pisan. At le Parc, I have a set schedule, 6 hours every week, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, no variation. At de Pisan, they are on a two-week schedule, so I am also on a two-week schedule. Because of this, I have some classes that alternate, so I have them every two weeks. Monday is one of those classes. Before this last vacation, I had one class on Monday, from 11-12 every other Monday. Given that it takes an hour to and hour and a half to get there, and the same to get back, it seems sort of foolish but whatever. I was originally supposed to have another class that day, but the teacher decided it would be more interesting for me to visit all her classes instead of just one. Anyway, I usually have this class at 11, but the teacher told me not to come, which is great, and a not terribly uncommon but still delightful occurrence. Unfortunately, my schedule has been altered for the last six weeks. I used to have two Friday classes that again, met every two weeks, but they got cut so I could pick up one extra Monday class every week. Confused? Yeah, that's the French system for you.
So Monday was my first time with this new French class of what I took to be not the most intelligent kids*. We worked on introducing yourself/asking questions, so we started off by reviewing question words, and then they had to figure out how to ask me things like "What is your name" "Where are you from" "How old are you" things like that. This managed to take up the entire class, and it was weird because the kids were terrible, which I am used to, but a little less used to seeing them be terrible with another teacher. They didn't bother waiting until they had covered the question as a class, they just shouted at me as I was sitting off to the side. This actually happens to me a lot at this school. The kids just yell questions at me. Also, the teacher wasn't the strongest English speaker. Every so often, the English teachers will ask me about something, or will make I mistake that I try to subtly correct, but this poor man kept asking me, because he wasn't trained as an English teacher in the slightest. Of course, neither am I, but at least I speak the language. This was one of those pointless classes where I stood off to the side watching them be bad for the entire time. I think the highlight of the class was that, as most of the students tend to do, this class assumed that I didn't understand them when they spoke, because I refused to respond to them unless they spoke in English. They don't realize I do this to try and force them to come up with the answer in English. So this one kid asked a question to the teacher I missed, and the teacher said (in French) that's why you need to learn English, and the kid said he (meaning me) should learn French. I wanted to tell the little bastard that I speak French better than he ever will speak English, not to mention I could probably stumble along better in Spanish and Russian than he could in English. But somehow arguing with a 12 year old about who's smarter is surprisingly beneath me.
*I have since learned that the reason I was switched off of the Friday class was because the kids were being bad, and so to punish them the teacher took away the pleasure of having me sit around and looking like an idiot every Friday. Can you even imagine? Having me as a teacher is seen as a privilege? What a world we live in. Of course, the hilarity is that he gave me this class because they were so terrible that he couldn't take care of the entire class by himself, so he wanted to split them up with me taking half of them. This will be a short-lived experiment, as you will see next week.
Tuesday was a magnificent display of the level of organization that I've grown to expect and admire from both the French in general, and this program in particular. My first class, from 9:05-10, was canceled. This at least I knew beforehand, the teacher was in London on a field trip with some of the students. My second class was another class that I have every other week, and is one of my least favorite classes. I take half the class for an entire period, and then wait two weeks, and then take the other class. This means I see one group of students roughly once a month, which is a completely pointless endeavor from my part, plus these students are very very stupid, so there's really no point in it, but I can't just not show up (I mean I can, and I have a couple of times, but it's sort of poor form). I hadn't seen this particular group since January I think, because I had missed a couple of Tuesdays, and the half that I was having today was the one I really don't like, and had led to my worst class so far. Fortunately the teacher said to me "Oh, are you with me this week? Can you do next week? They've been bad and I want to punish them" (Noticing a pattern?) I was like of course, I'd love to teach your class because teaching is my lifeblood and I take such joy from molding their young minds, but if you insist, I'll skip a turn. So, at this point it was about 10:15, and I didn't have my next class (English Club) until 12:45, so I hung out for about two and a half hours. Then, it turned out that the school was having meetings in the afternoon, so the afternoon classes after English Club were canceled. But the kids left anyway, so at about 1:05 I headed home, having been there for three and a half hours, and not working for a minute. Just to keep track, I was supposed to have taught 5 classes at this point, and had taught one, where I stood to the side and watched.
Wednesday is the one day I have that is always the same. I teach three classes at College le Parc (or the good school), from 9:25-12:30. My first class, which is hit or miss because some of the kids are very interesting, and some are very loud, and that means that some percentage of the time they are really into what I have to say, and another, slightly larger percentage of the time, they spend the whole time babbling. Today was more of an interested one, which was good, and amazingly, I managed not to fall on my face. I find that when I prepare very well, I have good classes, and that I suck at thinking on my feet, which has done wonders for my work ethic. Unfortunately, I started to teach them stuff they already knew, so I had to switch courses mid class and try to make it work, and amazingly it did. I taught them about preterite versus gerund, and when to use it, which is probably the most difficult thing to learn when trying to learn English. Basically, when do you say I speak vs. I am speaking? We just know what sounds right, but the kids don't know that I want knowing sounds very wrong and that I want to know is right. So I taught them a bit about that and I think it was helpful. My second class, with my favorite teacher, was canceled because she also was on a field trip (Spain for her) and my third class I taught superlatives (the greatest, the most intelligent, etc.) to a class that is uninspiring given the lack of participation, but at least rarely have behavior problems.
As a quick aside, it's amazing how few grammar rules I have learned, and how much I know just by what sounds right. For example, I never realized how superlatives are formed. If it's a one-syllable word, you add -est (for example: greatest), and if it's two or more, you had the most (the most convenient), with the exception being adjectives that end in -y (the happiest, not the most happy). I never even think about these things, I just know not to say the most great or the convenientest.
After my classes, I met this woman named Muriel at a library. Muriel, the poor girl, thinks that I can speak French well enough to teach her English. I think I do a pretty good job with the grammar, but a big part of what she wants to do is take magazine articles in English and translate them into French. Straight translation is epically difficult, especially for me, and trying to do a word for word translation is an exercise in futility, but it's what she wants to do, and I don't want to say no because I love the money she gives me, so we soldier on.
Thursday is usually my hell day. I start at 8:25 and end at 6, and on a full day teach 7 classes. Of course, I am not sure if I have ever had a day where I taught every single class (maybe one or two). One is almost always canceled, and today was no exception. My first class was canceled, again with my favorite teacher because she was in Spain. My second class was with a teacher who, while very nice, is incredibly child-like, and difficult to have a conversation. She apparently also has a major problem with discipline, but I'll have more to say about that another time. She told me that because many of her students were in Spain, maybe we could go to the computer room and the kids could work on the computer. I thought great, the less work I have to do the better. So we get to the computer room and she turns to me and says so, what do you have for them to do? I was like you whorish slut-face, YOU suggested we come to the computer room and now it's MY responsibility to come up with an activity? Fortunately I had this stupid Valentine's Day web search that I had used the week before vacation when I just didn't care anymore, and they could do that, but it was a little irritating.
My second class was actually the one where I was going to use the Valentine's Day thing again, but unfortunately, the teacher that I taught with had booked the room out from under me, and I ended up going into the class with absolutely nothing prepared. As I've said earlier, I don't necessarily think on my toes very well. I kind of babbled about vacation, told them about visiting Amsterdam, got into an impromptu discussion on World War II and the Holocaust (which they seemed ignorant of. Middle schoolers mind you! Stupid French), and then decided to make them write about their vacations. I made a spur of the moment decision to give them a grade on it, and you should have seen them jump. Apparently, they don't have things like graded homework here, so every time something is graded, they think it's a test and flip the fuck out. Which was fine for me, they took it more seriously, it somehow ate up 30 minutes of time, and I got out of the class unscathed.
So, at this point it's 11:30. Usually, I have classes at the other school from 1:30-3:30, and then after school lessons from 4-6. But both my other school classes were canceled, one teacher was in London and the other didn't need me. So I got to sit around for four and a half hours waiting for my afternoon lessons. Super exciting, let me tell you. I thought about canceled my after school lessons, but I've done that a few times and they don't like it, plus unlike canceling my other classes, this one costs me money.
The lessons I teach from 4-6 are extra, on top of the 12 hours I'm supposed to teach a week, and I get extra money for it, an absurd 25 euro an hour. The problem is, there's no structure, and no way to prepare a lesson beforehand, because I never know who will show up, so I basically have to make it up as I got (have I mentioned I suck at that?). Today, I had 4 kids in the first hour, all of different levels, all learning different things. So I taught them a cavalcade of random crap, I think we covered can and cannot, daily routines, playing sports, and body parts. My second afternoon lesson has basically been this one kid who is just learning English, so I take my French book and just do it in reverse, so Thursday we worked on beginning verbs, and important connecting words like and, but, with, etc.
So that was last week. I'm entertained that my attempt to make a shorter post has still led to 2500 words, and I left a ton of stuff out, and didn't talk about my weekend (3 hours of soccer and an NYU house party where some kid peed off a balcony and three different girls hit on me, one after hearing that I had a girlfriend). I'm working on one about the apartment I live in, and then one about this week, which has been horrible so far.
Thanks to the two of you who read this. It makes the hours I spend typing all worth it.
Now, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to try something new and start doing more daily updates with shorter posts that tell you what my day to day life is like*. We'll see how it works, I'll talk about what I've done this week, and you can see how little I actually work, and hate me for bitching as much as I do about my job.
*After writing this, I then changed my mind for a third time, and decided to do weekly recaps. So lets try that. Of course, it's already Tuesday of the following week. I'm not good at blogging
Monday: To understand Monday, you have to understand my schedule. So I work at two schools, College le Parc, and College Christine de Pisan. At le Parc, I have a set schedule, 6 hours every week, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, no variation. At de Pisan, they are on a two-week schedule, so I am also on a two-week schedule. Because of this, I have some classes that alternate, so I have them every two weeks. Monday is one of those classes. Before this last vacation, I had one class on Monday, from 11-12 every other Monday. Given that it takes an hour to and hour and a half to get there, and the same to get back, it seems sort of foolish but whatever. I was originally supposed to have another class that day, but the teacher decided it would be more interesting for me to visit all her classes instead of just one. Anyway, I usually have this class at 11, but the teacher told me not to come, which is great, and a not terribly uncommon but still delightful occurrence. Unfortunately, my schedule has been altered for the last six weeks. I used to have two Friday classes that again, met every two weeks, but they got cut so I could pick up one extra Monday class every week. Confused? Yeah, that's the French system for you.
So Monday was my first time with this new French class of what I took to be not the most intelligent kids*. We worked on introducing yourself/asking questions, so we started off by reviewing question words, and then they had to figure out how to ask me things like "What is your name" "Where are you from" "How old are you" things like that. This managed to take up the entire class, and it was weird because the kids were terrible, which I am used to, but a little less used to seeing them be terrible with another teacher. They didn't bother waiting until they had covered the question as a class, they just shouted at me as I was sitting off to the side. This actually happens to me a lot at this school. The kids just yell questions at me. Also, the teacher wasn't the strongest English speaker. Every so often, the English teachers will ask me about something, or will make I mistake that I try to subtly correct, but this poor man kept asking me, because he wasn't trained as an English teacher in the slightest. Of course, neither am I, but at least I speak the language. This was one of those pointless classes where I stood off to the side watching them be bad for the entire time. I think the highlight of the class was that, as most of the students tend to do, this class assumed that I didn't understand them when they spoke, because I refused to respond to them unless they spoke in English. They don't realize I do this to try and force them to come up with the answer in English. So this one kid asked a question to the teacher I missed, and the teacher said (in French) that's why you need to learn English, and the kid said he (meaning me) should learn French. I wanted to tell the little bastard that I speak French better than he ever will speak English, not to mention I could probably stumble along better in Spanish and Russian than he could in English. But somehow arguing with a 12 year old about who's smarter is surprisingly beneath me.
*I have since learned that the reason I was switched off of the Friday class was because the kids were being bad, and so to punish them the teacher took away the pleasure of having me sit around and looking like an idiot every Friday. Can you even imagine? Having me as a teacher is seen as a privilege? What a world we live in. Of course, the hilarity is that he gave me this class because they were so terrible that he couldn't take care of the entire class by himself, so he wanted to split them up with me taking half of them. This will be a short-lived experiment, as you will see next week.
Tuesday was a magnificent display of the level of organization that I've grown to expect and admire from both the French in general, and this program in particular. My first class, from 9:05-10, was canceled. This at least I knew beforehand, the teacher was in London on a field trip with some of the students. My second class was another class that I have every other week, and is one of my least favorite classes. I take half the class for an entire period, and then wait two weeks, and then take the other class. This means I see one group of students roughly once a month, which is a completely pointless endeavor from my part, plus these students are very very stupid, so there's really no point in it, but I can't just not show up (I mean I can, and I have a couple of times, but it's sort of poor form). I hadn't seen this particular group since January I think, because I had missed a couple of Tuesdays, and the half that I was having today was the one I really don't like, and had led to my worst class so far. Fortunately the teacher said to me "Oh, are you with me this week? Can you do next week? They've been bad and I want to punish them" (Noticing a pattern?) I was like of course, I'd love to teach your class because teaching is my lifeblood and I take such joy from molding their young minds, but if you insist, I'll skip a turn. So, at this point it was about 10:15, and I didn't have my next class (English Club) until 12:45, so I hung out for about two and a half hours. Then, it turned out that the school was having meetings in the afternoon, so the afternoon classes after English Club were canceled. But the kids left anyway, so at about 1:05 I headed home, having been there for three and a half hours, and not working for a minute. Just to keep track, I was supposed to have taught 5 classes at this point, and had taught one, where I stood to the side and watched.
Wednesday is the one day I have that is always the same. I teach three classes at College le Parc (or the good school), from 9:25-12:30. My first class, which is hit or miss because some of the kids are very interesting, and some are very loud, and that means that some percentage of the time they are really into what I have to say, and another, slightly larger percentage of the time, they spend the whole time babbling. Today was more of an interested one, which was good, and amazingly, I managed not to fall on my face. I find that when I prepare very well, I have good classes, and that I suck at thinking on my feet, which has done wonders for my work ethic. Unfortunately, I started to teach them stuff they already knew, so I had to switch courses mid class and try to make it work, and amazingly it did. I taught them about preterite versus gerund, and when to use it, which is probably the most difficult thing to learn when trying to learn English. Basically, when do you say I speak vs. I am speaking? We just know what sounds right, but the kids don't know that I want knowing sounds very wrong and that I want to know is right. So I taught them a bit about that and I think it was helpful. My second class, with my favorite teacher, was canceled because she also was on a field trip (Spain for her) and my third class I taught superlatives (the greatest, the most intelligent, etc.) to a class that is uninspiring given the lack of participation, but at least rarely have behavior problems.
As a quick aside, it's amazing how few grammar rules I have learned, and how much I know just by what sounds right. For example, I never realized how superlatives are formed. If it's a one-syllable word, you add -est (for example: greatest), and if it's two or more, you had the most (the most convenient), with the exception being adjectives that end in -y (the happiest, not the most happy). I never even think about these things, I just know not to say the most great or the convenientest.
After my classes, I met this woman named Muriel at a library. Muriel, the poor girl, thinks that I can speak French well enough to teach her English. I think I do a pretty good job with the grammar, but a big part of what she wants to do is take magazine articles in English and translate them into French. Straight translation is epically difficult, especially for me, and trying to do a word for word translation is an exercise in futility, but it's what she wants to do, and I don't want to say no because I love the money she gives me, so we soldier on.
Thursday is usually my hell day. I start at 8:25 and end at 6, and on a full day teach 7 classes. Of course, I am not sure if I have ever had a day where I taught every single class (maybe one or two). One is almost always canceled, and today was no exception. My first class was canceled, again with my favorite teacher because she was in Spain. My second class was with a teacher who, while very nice, is incredibly child-like, and difficult to have a conversation. She apparently also has a major problem with discipline, but I'll have more to say about that another time. She told me that because many of her students were in Spain, maybe we could go to the computer room and the kids could work on the computer. I thought great, the less work I have to do the better. So we get to the computer room and she turns to me and says so, what do you have for them to do? I was like you whorish slut-face, YOU suggested we come to the computer room and now it's MY responsibility to come up with an activity? Fortunately I had this stupid Valentine's Day web search that I had used the week before vacation when I just didn't care anymore, and they could do that, but it was a little irritating.
My second class was actually the one where I was going to use the Valentine's Day thing again, but unfortunately, the teacher that I taught with had booked the room out from under me, and I ended up going into the class with absolutely nothing prepared. As I've said earlier, I don't necessarily think on my toes very well. I kind of babbled about vacation, told them about visiting Amsterdam, got into an impromptu discussion on World War II and the Holocaust (which they seemed ignorant of. Middle schoolers mind you! Stupid French), and then decided to make them write about their vacations. I made a spur of the moment decision to give them a grade on it, and you should have seen them jump. Apparently, they don't have things like graded homework here, so every time something is graded, they think it's a test and flip the fuck out. Which was fine for me, they took it more seriously, it somehow ate up 30 minutes of time, and I got out of the class unscathed.
So, at this point it's 11:30. Usually, I have classes at the other school from 1:30-3:30, and then after school lessons from 4-6. But both my other school classes were canceled, one teacher was in London and the other didn't need me. So I got to sit around for four and a half hours waiting for my afternoon lessons. Super exciting, let me tell you. I thought about canceled my after school lessons, but I've done that a few times and they don't like it, plus unlike canceling my other classes, this one costs me money.
The lessons I teach from 4-6 are extra, on top of the 12 hours I'm supposed to teach a week, and I get extra money for it, an absurd 25 euro an hour. The problem is, there's no structure, and no way to prepare a lesson beforehand, because I never know who will show up, so I basically have to make it up as I got (have I mentioned I suck at that?). Today, I had 4 kids in the first hour, all of different levels, all learning different things. So I taught them a cavalcade of random crap, I think we covered can and cannot, daily routines, playing sports, and body parts. My second afternoon lesson has basically been this one kid who is just learning English, so I take my French book and just do it in reverse, so Thursday we worked on beginning verbs, and important connecting words like and, but, with, etc.
So that was last week. I'm entertained that my attempt to make a shorter post has still led to 2500 words, and I left a ton of stuff out, and didn't talk about my weekend (3 hours of soccer and an NYU house party where some kid peed off a balcony and three different girls hit on me, one after hearing that I had a girlfriend). I'm working on one about the apartment I live in, and then one about this week, which has been horrible so far.
Thanks to the two of you who read this. It makes the hours I spend typing all worth it.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The three phases of Paris
A couple of things to start. I’ve gotten a few requests about things to write about. While I may go in that direction at some point, this is basically to update people on how my life is going because I hate writing the super long emails. The problem is that given my propensity to ramble, the emails become incredibly time consuming because I want to include everything. With this, I can tackle one subject at a time and explore it more in depth. The other thing is, as sad as this makes me, I can’t promise that all of, or even the majority of my entries will be amusing. For the most part that’s not their purpose, they are just to update on my life. However, I’ll try not to be completely dull and boring.
So I initially wrote a long and fairly depressing blog entry about how Paris/any other interesting big city seems mystical and amazing from afar but once you spent a little time there you realized it was just like any other city in the world, only with pretty buildings. A lot of this crankiness was exacerbated by what could best be described as shit weather, which Paris seems to have in abundance. But then, the sun came out for three-four days straight, which I believe MUST be some kind of record, and I started writing another one which was absurdly happy in a boy do I love Paris kind of way! Then today it snowed and rained the entire day. So it took a little edge off the happiness. Anywho, because I don’t feel like just tossing all this lovely material, here comes my three part entry on the evolution of the mindset of your average American living in Paris. This, of course, assumes that I am an average American living in Paris. Utter crap, of course, but whatever, it’s a necessary conceit.
Phase One: The Arrival: Oh my God, I’m in Paris! I’m giddy and such!
This phase, pour moi, lasted from when I arrived in mid-September until roughly mid to late November. When I arrived, it was still the end of summer, and the weather was surprisingly decent. I didn’t have to teach yet, and I’d been reasonably successful at finding and making new friends with the other assistants. Sure, I didn’t have an apartment yet, and finding one would turn out to be an epic pain in my ass, but it started off very well. In fact, there were numerous problems the first couple of weeks that I managed to shrug off relatively easily. I mean, I was homesick and sad, but it didn’t really change the fact that I was in Paris, and all that jazz.
If there was any real problem, it was my lack of language, and my beginning attempts to deal with the mind-numbing bureaucracy that pervades every aspect of French life. This is another entry in it of itself, as is the one on my follies of the first few weeks (I may have mentioned them already in my one email, frankly I can’t remember), which I’ll have to pump out soon. What I learned about French is strictly for survival, you don’t need to know that much. You can buy food with minimum conversation, once you have your major situations taken care of, apartment, things like that, you can get by with maybe a 10-20 word vocabulary. Obviously if you want to, you know, INTERACT with people, that becomes a problem, but the other nice thing about arriving is that it feels like you have all the time in the world to do silly things like learn the language, and see the sights.
The best part about the beginning was I didn’t have to teach, and even when I did it was criminally easy. All assistants are supposed to have one week of strictly observation time, where they sit in the back on the class and watch the teacher do their thing. I took a few notes as to exactly the teacher did (remember, I have no freaking clue how to teach at this point) but in general, there isn’t a whole lot you have to prepare when you’re sitting in the back of the class. The second week, the kids had to prepare questions to ask me. They hit most of the main ones, name, age, location, family, etc. but they occasionally threw a few screwballs my way. One kid asked me where I was when the towers fell in New York. One kid wanted to talk about the Boston Celtics being champions. One kid wanted me to explain the economic crisis to them. Think about this, these kids are like, third year English students, and want me to explain the economic crisis in a way they understand? Yeah right stupid French kid. So I said something like, banks gave money to people who didn’t give it back. I don’t even know if that’s right, but whatever, they don’t care or remember. After a rough two weeks of 1) observing and 2) answering questions about what my name was, I got a well-deserved two weeks off at the end of October. After another two or three weeks of fairly simple stuff talking about Halloween and the Election, I took another week off to go home for Thanksgiving. Yes sir, this teaching life was the way for me. Then I came back from the US after Thanksgiving, and things started to change.
Phase Two: The Reckoning: Why in God’s name am I here?
Paris certainly has an aura and mystique about it from afar. Fashion capital, city of lights and love, and the most Eiffel tower I’ve ever seen. Very few monuments can claim to be even a little bit Eiffel*, let alone at the levels of this particular tower. When I visited in 2001, I was taken in by the whole Paris vibe, and certainly in the beginning of this trip. For some reason, I thought it would be amazingly fun to get drunk and then on my way home stumble past these world famous monuments. The first few weeks played into this feeling.
* Obviously named after it’s designer, Gustav Eiffel. For some reason this joke, while being incredibly unfunny (using Eiffel as an adjective) always makes me giggle. Which brings me to something I read in one of my many guidebooks I have lying around. The guillotine is named after the guy who designed it. His name was Dr. Guillotin. Seriously. He was apparently horrified that it was given his name, and had promoted it as a humane means of execution, saying that the executed would feel only a little tickle on the back of their neck. That’d be super weird to have something like that named after you. Oh, did you see that dude get Taylored? Yeah, that damn Taylor cut his head right off. The nation’s razor they called it. Clever.
Sadly, I learned that mystique and aura are just strippers in a nightclub*. One of the most interesting changes about living here is realizing that Paris is basically just another city. I think part of the reason for this is that the obvious symbol of France is the Eiffel Tower, and it’s basically down the street from me. I walk by it every time I got to the grocery store. And don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite impressive, but at the same time I’m getting used to it. Over time, I’ve realized that Paris is basically just like any other city, only the random things you see in the background are slightly cooler, and more famous.
* Curt Schilling reference. Curt Schilling is the tits. And by that I mean he’s soft and squishy and I’d love to squeeze him but would probably get in trouble.
A couple of things led to this general malaise and unhappiness that I (and many of my teaching brethren) felt. One big change was the weather. Paris is the greyest city, probably in the history of humanity. It rains, and it’s grey. It snows and it’s grey. It’s grey and it’s grey. Somehow it’s sunny, yet still grey. Yes, the city is so incredibly blah that it sucks up excess sunlight so that even when it’s sunny, it’s still grey. What makes it even worse is that every single building here is white, grey, or beige. Every one. My particular building is beige. So when you leave your warm bed early in the morning to go out to a job you don’t particularly care for, and all you see is blah. It’s a veritable canvas of melancholy. So that certainly doesn’t help.
What was also annoying was the job started getting more annoying. First of all, teaching is freaking HARD, and I have a lot more respect for those who do it. Secondly, the teachers, foolishly thinking me competent, became more hands off to the point where I had to figure things out for myself a lot more, which given that the program offers you little to no training, was not the easiest thing in the world. Also, when I first got there, the students were great because they were like oh my god, an American! Lets ask him if he likes Britney Spears! The kids loved me for a while. They still do mind you, I’m excessively lovable, but at the same time its still school, and they still don’t care. It’s very frustratingly hard to go to a job where maybe 10% of the people appreciate what you’re doing, and the other 90% are actively trying to sabotage you from being effective at what you do.
Finally, certain things were not coming along the way I’d like. I’d practice trumpet, but with nothing to practice for, being disciplined was hard. French was going, but again the progress just wasn’t where I wanted it to be (which was an unrealistic expectation anyway) and when nothing is really going the way you want, the whole situation becomes hard. So that’s how I felt until about a week ago when…
Phase Three: The Reawakening: If you ignore all the bad stuff, this place isn’t so bad
The sun started shining! Hooray! I hadn’t seen the sun in about a month, it was amazing to behold. I felt so much better. My French still sucks, but I’m working on improving it. I now have a small jazz group to play with; our first meeting is in a couple of days. The kids are still terrible, but I no longer care! Apathy to the rescue! So for the past few days, things are certainly looking up. Hopefully it will continue, though today the weather was terrible, but I was still ok. So we’ll see where it goes from here.
So I initially wrote a long and fairly depressing blog entry about how Paris/any other interesting big city seems mystical and amazing from afar but once you spent a little time there you realized it was just like any other city in the world, only with pretty buildings. A lot of this crankiness was exacerbated by what could best be described as shit weather, which Paris seems to have in abundance. But then, the sun came out for three-four days straight, which I believe MUST be some kind of record, and I started writing another one which was absurdly happy in a boy do I love Paris kind of way! Then today it snowed and rained the entire day. So it took a little edge off the happiness. Anywho, because I don’t feel like just tossing all this lovely material, here comes my three part entry on the evolution of the mindset of your average American living in Paris. This, of course, assumes that I am an average American living in Paris. Utter crap, of course, but whatever, it’s a necessary conceit.
Phase One: The Arrival: Oh my God, I’m in Paris! I’m giddy and such!
This phase, pour moi, lasted from when I arrived in mid-September until roughly mid to late November. When I arrived, it was still the end of summer, and the weather was surprisingly decent. I didn’t have to teach yet, and I’d been reasonably successful at finding and making new friends with the other assistants. Sure, I didn’t have an apartment yet, and finding one would turn out to be an epic pain in my ass, but it started off very well. In fact, there were numerous problems the first couple of weeks that I managed to shrug off relatively easily. I mean, I was homesick and sad, but it didn’t really change the fact that I was in Paris, and all that jazz.
If there was any real problem, it was my lack of language, and my beginning attempts to deal with the mind-numbing bureaucracy that pervades every aspect of French life. This is another entry in it of itself, as is the one on my follies of the first few weeks (I may have mentioned them already in my one email, frankly I can’t remember), which I’ll have to pump out soon. What I learned about French is strictly for survival, you don’t need to know that much. You can buy food with minimum conversation, once you have your major situations taken care of, apartment, things like that, you can get by with maybe a 10-20 word vocabulary. Obviously if you want to, you know, INTERACT with people, that becomes a problem, but the other nice thing about arriving is that it feels like you have all the time in the world to do silly things like learn the language, and see the sights.
The best part about the beginning was I didn’t have to teach, and even when I did it was criminally easy. All assistants are supposed to have one week of strictly observation time, where they sit in the back on the class and watch the teacher do their thing. I took a few notes as to exactly the teacher did (remember, I have no freaking clue how to teach at this point) but in general, there isn’t a whole lot you have to prepare when you’re sitting in the back of the class. The second week, the kids had to prepare questions to ask me. They hit most of the main ones, name, age, location, family, etc. but they occasionally threw a few screwballs my way. One kid asked me where I was when the towers fell in New York. One kid wanted to talk about the Boston Celtics being champions. One kid wanted me to explain the economic crisis to them. Think about this, these kids are like, third year English students, and want me to explain the economic crisis in a way they understand? Yeah right stupid French kid. So I said something like, banks gave money to people who didn’t give it back. I don’t even know if that’s right, but whatever, they don’t care or remember. After a rough two weeks of 1) observing and 2) answering questions about what my name was, I got a well-deserved two weeks off at the end of October. After another two or three weeks of fairly simple stuff talking about Halloween and the Election, I took another week off to go home for Thanksgiving. Yes sir, this teaching life was the way for me. Then I came back from the US after Thanksgiving, and things started to change.
Phase Two: The Reckoning: Why in God’s name am I here?
Paris certainly has an aura and mystique about it from afar. Fashion capital, city of lights and love, and the most Eiffel tower I’ve ever seen. Very few monuments can claim to be even a little bit Eiffel*, let alone at the levels of this particular tower. When I visited in 2001, I was taken in by the whole Paris vibe, and certainly in the beginning of this trip. For some reason, I thought it would be amazingly fun to get drunk and then on my way home stumble past these world famous monuments. The first few weeks played into this feeling.
* Obviously named after it’s designer, Gustav Eiffel. For some reason this joke, while being incredibly unfunny (using Eiffel as an adjective) always makes me giggle. Which brings me to something I read in one of my many guidebooks I have lying around. The guillotine is named after the guy who designed it. His name was Dr. Guillotin. Seriously. He was apparently horrified that it was given his name, and had promoted it as a humane means of execution, saying that the executed would feel only a little tickle on the back of their neck. That’d be super weird to have something like that named after you. Oh, did you see that dude get Taylored? Yeah, that damn Taylor cut his head right off. The nation’s razor they called it. Clever.
Sadly, I learned that mystique and aura are just strippers in a nightclub*. One of the most interesting changes about living here is realizing that Paris is basically just another city. I think part of the reason for this is that the obvious symbol of France is the Eiffel Tower, and it’s basically down the street from me. I walk by it every time I got to the grocery store. And don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite impressive, but at the same time I’m getting used to it. Over time, I’ve realized that Paris is basically just like any other city, only the random things you see in the background are slightly cooler, and more famous.
* Curt Schilling reference. Curt Schilling is the tits. And by that I mean he’s soft and squishy and I’d love to squeeze him but would probably get in trouble.
A couple of things led to this general malaise and unhappiness that I (and many of my teaching brethren) felt. One big change was the weather. Paris is the greyest city, probably in the history of humanity. It rains, and it’s grey. It snows and it’s grey. It’s grey and it’s grey. Somehow it’s sunny, yet still grey. Yes, the city is so incredibly blah that it sucks up excess sunlight so that even when it’s sunny, it’s still grey. What makes it even worse is that every single building here is white, grey, or beige. Every one. My particular building is beige. So when you leave your warm bed early in the morning to go out to a job you don’t particularly care for, and all you see is blah. It’s a veritable canvas of melancholy. So that certainly doesn’t help.
What was also annoying was the job started getting more annoying. First of all, teaching is freaking HARD, and I have a lot more respect for those who do it. Secondly, the teachers, foolishly thinking me competent, became more hands off to the point where I had to figure things out for myself a lot more, which given that the program offers you little to no training, was not the easiest thing in the world. Also, when I first got there, the students were great because they were like oh my god, an American! Lets ask him if he likes Britney Spears! The kids loved me for a while. They still do mind you, I’m excessively lovable, but at the same time its still school, and they still don’t care. It’s very frustratingly hard to go to a job where maybe 10% of the people appreciate what you’re doing, and the other 90% are actively trying to sabotage you from being effective at what you do.
Finally, certain things were not coming along the way I’d like. I’d practice trumpet, but with nothing to practice for, being disciplined was hard. French was going, but again the progress just wasn’t where I wanted it to be (which was an unrealistic expectation anyway) and when nothing is really going the way you want, the whole situation becomes hard. So that’s how I felt until about a week ago when…
Phase Three: The Reawakening: If you ignore all the bad stuff, this place isn’t so bad
The sun started shining! Hooray! I hadn’t seen the sun in about a month, it was amazing to behold. I felt so much better. My French still sucks, but I’m working on improving it. I now have a small jazz group to play with; our first meeting is in a couple of days. The kids are still terrible, but I no longer care! Apathy to the rescue! So for the past few days, things are certainly looking up. Hopefully it will continue, though today the weather was terrible, but I was still ok. So we’ll see where it goes from here.
Friday, January 23, 2009
The destruction of "These pants make my ass look great"
I thought just for funsies I’d start off this blog with the story of the destruction of my last blog*. It occurred to me that not everyone is familiar with the story, and even those who are, it’s been a long time, so a little refresher wouldn’t necessarily hurt. It’s even a mildly interesting story! **
* Technically, there was one in between, who’s remnants still exist at bigpoppasmurf.blogspot.com. Don’t bother checking it out, though I imagine some of you will anyway, there’s nothing there anymore. Anyway, that one faded out due to disinterest on my part. I also may have still been a little gun shy at that point given what happened with the first one. I’ve tried to find the first one online, but I think it no longer exists, since I took all the posts down.
** There is a very talented sportswriter by the name of Joe Posnanski who writes for the Kansas City Star, which is a shame because nobody cares about the Kansas City Royals. The Chiefs haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire lately either. Anyway, he has a blog where he often goes off on tangents, and he doesn’t want them to interfere with flow of the narrative, so he uses asterisks and at the end of the paragraph he writes his tangents. I’m going to give that system a try, and see if it works for me. I have a feeling I don’t have enough irreverent tangents to make it worthwhile, but who knows, so far the extra notes far outweigh the actual post
The year was 2002. “Spiderman” was the top movie of the year. Kids were rocking out to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and we had just invaded Afghanistan (ah memories). Also, my current students were 8 (MIND FUCK MIND FUCK MIND FUCK). It was also the end of the senior year of high school, and blogs were starting to become popular with a number of my friends taking part. Because it was the end of high school, a somewhat tumultuous times, people’s blogs were filled with sadness, the whole what comes next, will I ever see my friends train of thought* (ironic how little has changed, how many of us actually knows what we’ll be doing in a couple of years from now?). Needless to say, reading these was often a downer, and I didn’t do it very often. So I decided to make a blog of my own, but being that I wanted to be different, as well as hoping to cheer my friends up, I decided to make a blog that was my ridiculous ramblings to the world (not wholly different from this one), and so my first blog “These pants make my ass look great” was born.
* One thing about blogs that baffled me, and something that is true in general with the internet, is what people were willing to say on them. They knew that their friends were reading them, yet they would say things that they would never say to the person to their face. They would also pour out their innermost thoughts, as if it was a private diary, only it was online for anyone to see. Very weird. On the other hand, it’s not like I would have said the things that got me in trouble to the person’s face either, but that’s getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, plus I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.
“These pants make my ass look great” was very enjoyable for me to write. I used to love to write when I was a younger man in the prime of my life, and I didn’t really have the chance to anymore, other than papers which aren’t quite the same. I wrote on a variety of topics that I can barely remember now, I think I talked about my classes, I remember I had a two part post on my interesting time working at Bruegger’s Bagels, god knows what else, all with my somewhat skewed perspective on the world. I can modestly say that it was somewhat enjoyed by at least one or two people that read it. Whether it ever achieved it’s stated goal of cheering my friends up, probably not, but it was fun anyway.
Then high school ended and it was off to college. I didn’t write for a very long time as I got used to college life. The transition to college life was not a very easy one for me, as I had trouble making friends, and a difficult time with my roommates. There was Jeremy, the druggie musician with the spiky hair, and Brendan, the preppy jock with annoying friends and a MASSIVE alcohol problem. That boy, he’d put a few away by noon, drink 20+ on a weeknight, he was something else. So when I finally wrote my first post about college, it may have been a little bit darker that my previous ones. At the same time, I felt my clever lampooning of the hippie drug culture there was both incisive and witty. Man I’m modest.
One of the things I talked about in my college post (note how there’s only one post at college. This should tell you how well it turned out) was the hall staff. The two girls who were staff on my floor were very nice, but certainly not without their flaws, that I could highlight for the purposes of hilarity. I zeroed in on one in particular (who we’ll call RB), talking about her dalliances with drugs, alcohol, and her particularly amorous relationship with a friend of mine at the time. The number of times they had sex in a day had become fairly common knowledge, and it was surprisingly high. So I mentioned all of this, and in my intelligence mentioned her full name, as well as the college. I did this in about September, and completely forgot about it.
Second semester, I had been moved out from my forced triple into a double by myself, which was incredibly sweet. I hadn’t written in the blog in forever, I just hadn’t felt like doing it, and I had forgotten I had it. Then I got a phone call from my friend who was in a relationship with RB. Apparently (and I still don’t know how much of this I believe) someone from the college newspaper had done a google search of this girl’s name. Turns out that at that point if you googled that girl’s name and the name of the college, my blog was the third thing that came up. The person had then called RB and asked her for a comment on the story. She then read it, and flipped out. Fortunately, I didn’t make it too easy to figure out who I was. I just used her full name, the name of the college, mentioned she was on my hall staff, and the address of the blog was sastay. Yup, no way they could figure out it was me. So the friend told me that she was incredibly angry and was talking about suing for plagiarism*. Obviously looking back on that now, I realize there’s just no way that would have ever happened, but I was mildly perturbed at the time. So I took down all the posts, and hoped it would go away.
* For the record, and I’m not just saying this because one of her best friends almost certainly reads this (Hi Hillary!) but I certainly don’t blame her for being so mad. I’d be pretty pissed too. Threatening to sue for plagiarism seems like a bit much, but whatever. Such is life
No such luck. The head resident in my new dorm, who also happened to be a high ranking member of Residential Life asked for a meeting with me. Just what I wanted. So I met with her, and she was like ok, tell me what happened. And I explained about how I had made this blog to entertain my friends at home, and I came up with some incredibly convoluted excuse as to what had happened. Google had recently bought blogger, and I told her that before that, my blog was private and couldn’t be read, but since Google had bought it, now even private blogs showed up on Google. This is patently false, since you could find it on other search engines too, but I don’t think she really cared. She was then like, this is so dark, are you ok? I think she was worried I was going to shoot up the school or something and I was like uh yeah… kind of just a joke. So she said well, she’s really mad at you, but you took all the posts down and that’s what’s important, so if you do this again, just don’t use people’s names, and you’re fine. The craziest part was she mentioned that the entire hall staff at my old dorm had had a meeting and read through printed out copies of my blog. So weird.
And that is the magnificent story of the sad destruction of “These pants make my ass look great”. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson, but I’m sure I’ll mess up again at some point. I’m going to some house party tonight of people I mostly don’t know, so we’ll see how that goes. I have no idea how to end this so, yeah, the end*.
* Any typos Jack? I really hope this becomes a regular occurrence. And “herre” doesn’t count
* Technically, there was one in between, who’s remnants still exist at bigpoppasmurf.blogspot.com. Don’t bother checking it out, though I imagine some of you will anyway, there’s nothing there anymore. Anyway, that one faded out due to disinterest on my part. I also may have still been a little gun shy at that point given what happened with the first one. I’ve tried to find the first one online, but I think it no longer exists, since I took all the posts down.
** There is a very talented sportswriter by the name of Joe Posnanski who writes for the Kansas City Star, which is a shame because nobody cares about the Kansas City Royals. The Chiefs haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire lately either. Anyway, he has a blog where he often goes off on tangents, and he doesn’t want them to interfere with flow of the narrative, so he uses asterisks and at the end of the paragraph he writes his tangents. I’m going to give that system a try, and see if it works for me. I have a feeling I don’t have enough irreverent tangents to make it worthwhile, but who knows, so far the extra notes far outweigh the actual post
The year was 2002. “Spiderman” was the top movie of the year. Kids were rocking out to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and we had just invaded Afghanistan (ah memories). Also, my current students were 8 (MIND FUCK MIND FUCK MIND FUCK). It was also the end of the senior year of high school, and blogs were starting to become popular with a number of my friends taking part. Because it was the end of high school, a somewhat tumultuous times, people’s blogs were filled with sadness, the whole what comes next, will I ever see my friends train of thought* (ironic how little has changed, how many of us actually knows what we’ll be doing in a couple of years from now?). Needless to say, reading these was often a downer, and I didn’t do it very often. So I decided to make a blog of my own, but being that I wanted to be different, as well as hoping to cheer my friends up, I decided to make a blog that was my ridiculous ramblings to the world (not wholly different from this one), and so my first blog “These pants make my ass look great” was born.
* One thing about blogs that baffled me, and something that is true in general with the internet, is what people were willing to say on them. They knew that their friends were reading them, yet they would say things that they would never say to the person to their face. They would also pour out their innermost thoughts, as if it was a private diary, only it was online for anyone to see. Very weird. On the other hand, it’s not like I would have said the things that got me in trouble to the person’s face either, but that’s getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, plus I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.
“These pants make my ass look great” was very enjoyable for me to write. I used to love to write when I was a younger man in the prime of my life, and I didn’t really have the chance to anymore, other than papers which aren’t quite the same. I wrote on a variety of topics that I can barely remember now, I think I talked about my classes, I remember I had a two part post on my interesting time working at Bruegger’s Bagels, god knows what else, all with my somewhat skewed perspective on the world. I can modestly say that it was somewhat enjoyed by at least one or two people that read it. Whether it ever achieved it’s stated goal of cheering my friends up, probably not, but it was fun anyway.
Then high school ended and it was off to college. I didn’t write for a very long time as I got used to college life. The transition to college life was not a very easy one for me, as I had trouble making friends, and a difficult time with my roommates. There was Jeremy, the druggie musician with the spiky hair, and Brendan, the preppy jock with annoying friends and a MASSIVE alcohol problem. That boy, he’d put a few away by noon, drink 20+ on a weeknight, he was something else. So when I finally wrote my first post about college, it may have been a little bit darker that my previous ones. At the same time, I felt my clever lampooning of the hippie drug culture there was both incisive and witty. Man I’m modest.
One of the things I talked about in my college post (note how there’s only one post at college. This should tell you how well it turned out) was the hall staff. The two girls who were staff on my floor were very nice, but certainly not without their flaws, that I could highlight for the purposes of hilarity. I zeroed in on one in particular (who we’ll call RB), talking about her dalliances with drugs, alcohol, and her particularly amorous relationship with a friend of mine at the time. The number of times they had sex in a day had become fairly common knowledge, and it was surprisingly high. So I mentioned all of this, and in my intelligence mentioned her full name, as well as the college. I did this in about September, and completely forgot about it.
Second semester, I had been moved out from my forced triple into a double by myself, which was incredibly sweet. I hadn’t written in the blog in forever, I just hadn’t felt like doing it, and I had forgotten I had it. Then I got a phone call from my friend who was in a relationship with RB. Apparently (and I still don’t know how much of this I believe) someone from the college newspaper had done a google search of this girl’s name. Turns out that at that point if you googled that girl’s name and the name of the college, my blog was the third thing that came up. The person had then called RB and asked her for a comment on the story. She then read it, and flipped out. Fortunately, I didn’t make it too easy to figure out who I was. I just used her full name, the name of the college, mentioned she was on my hall staff, and the address of the blog was sastay. Yup, no way they could figure out it was me. So the friend told me that she was incredibly angry and was talking about suing for plagiarism*. Obviously looking back on that now, I realize there’s just no way that would have ever happened, but I was mildly perturbed at the time. So I took down all the posts, and hoped it would go away.
* For the record, and I’m not just saying this because one of her best friends almost certainly reads this (Hi Hillary!) but I certainly don’t blame her for being so mad. I’d be pretty pissed too. Threatening to sue for plagiarism seems like a bit much, but whatever. Such is life
No such luck. The head resident in my new dorm, who also happened to be a high ranking member of Residential Life asked for a meeting with me. Just what I wanted. So I met with her, and she was like ok, tell me what happened. And I explained about how I had made this blog to entertain my friends at home, and I came up with some incredibly convoluted excuse as to what had happened. Google had recently bought blogger, and I told her that before that, my blog was private and couldn’t be read, but since Google had bought it, now even private blogs showed up on Google. This is patently false, since you could find it on other search engines too, but I don’t think she really cared. She was then like, this is so dark, are you ok? I think she was worried I was going to shoot up the school or something and I was like uh yeah… kind of just a joke. So she said well, she’s really mad at you, but you took all the posts down and that’s what’s important, so if you do this again, just don’t use people’s names, and you’re fine. The craziest part was she mentioned that the entire hall staff at my old dorm had had a meeting and read through printed out copies of my blog. So weird.
And that is the magnificent story of the sad destruction of “These pants make my ass look great”. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson, but I’m sure I’ll mess up again at some point. I’m going to some house party tonight of people I mostly don’t know, so we’ll see how that goes. I have no idea how to end this so, yeah, the end*.
* Any typos Jack? I really hope this becomes a regular occurrence. And “herre” doesn’t count
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
What is up
Hey everyone, I promised Chris Cook I'd write a blog about my European adventures, and if I've learned one thing in my life it's to keep a promise to Chris Cook. Seriously, that dude has crazy eyes and no moral compass.
So I'm sitting here in my Parisian apartment, located delightfully close to the Eiffel Tower, where I rent a room in the positively garish apartment of a Parisian woman, who lives here as well, along with her son and another American named Amy. To put it into perspective, my room is bigger than some of the apartments I've seen. So I'm very lucky in that sense. If any of you creepy stalkers want to google map it, it's 93 Avenue Kléber.
Just as a refresher to my loyal/nonexistent readership, I am currently living in Paris France where I am embarking upon a journey of enlightenment and discovery. And if you think that's code for fleeing the country because he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, you are delightfully correct. I'm teaching English as a Second Language to middle schoolers (misleadingly called "colleges" here). Pretty much every day (and I'm not exaggerating when I say this) I think to myself, how the hell did I get here? How is it that I'm teaching (teaching!) middle schoolers (middle schoolers!) in France (the country!)? It boggles the mind. I teach at two schools, one of which is fairly nice (College le Parc) and one which is not nearly as nice (College Christine de Pisan). The main difference between the two schools is the discipline level of the children. Don't get me wrong, they all take way way too much. I tell them to shut up and they look at me and go oh of course Mr. Sasha, and then they go back to talking two seconds later. It's delightful. Reminds me why I never dealt with children before. Actively avoided them, I believe. So many poor life choices.
In a subsequent blog post (because I'm getting a headache, and I have a tendency to write Homer-esque length documents when allowed to) I will talk about what I've taught, what I think of this delightful country (hint: it's depressing and I'm homesick!), how my French is going (trés mal!), and what my literary device de jour is (comedic interjections with exclamation points!) Peace out home slices
So I'm sitting here in my Parisian apartment, located delightfully close to the Eiffel Tower, where I rent a room in the positively garish apartment of a Parisian woman, who lives here as well, along with her son and another American named Amy. To put it into perspective, my room is bigger than some of the apartments I've seen. So I'm very lucky in that sense. If any of you creepy stalkers want to google map it, it's 93 Avenue Kléber.
Just as a refresher to my loyal/nonexistent readership, I am currently living in Paris France where I am embarking upon a journey of enlightenment and discovery. And if you think that's code for fleeing the country because he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, you are delightfully correct. I'm teaching English as a Second Language to middle schoolers (misleadingly called "colleges" here). Pretty much every day (and I'm not exaggerating when I say this) I think to myself, how the hell did I get here? How is it that I'm teaching (teaching!) middle schoolers (middle schoolers!) in France (the country!)? It boggles the mind. I teach at two schools, one of which is fairly nice (College le Parc) and one which is not nearly as nice (College Christine de Pisan). The main difference between the two schools is the discipline level of the children. Don't get me wrong, they all take way way too much. I tell them to shut up and they look at me and go oh of course Mr. Sasha, and then they go back to talking two seconds later. It's delightful. Reminds me why I never dealt with children before. Actively avoided them, I believe. So many poor life choices.
In a subsequent blog post (because I'm getting a headache, and I have a tendency to write Homer-esque length documents when allowed to) I will talk about what I've taught, what I think of this delightful country (hint: it's depressing and I'm homesick!), how my French is going (trés mal!), and what my literary device de jour is (comedic interjections with exclamation points!) Peace out home slices
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)