Bunica Stares

For winter, Bunica Lyuba has holed up much like a small, furred creature in her two room hovel.

In early December the outside of the windows were plastic wrapped, and sealed with two inch wide beams. She hung up blankets, in addition to the customary carpets, on the inside over all the doors and windows. When you walk in, they fall down.

She get's pretty snippy about most things, like whether or not she's sat at the head of the table, or how bad beans taste always, but if you knock down one of the blankets -- you're in for it.

Up to November she was still ambling around, herding turkeys, picking up sticks, feeding the birds. Now she yells at Maria when Maria goes over to bring her beans, or watches me do these things. I'm exempt, like all grandchildren, from being yelled at. However, whenever I haul wood, or chase birds, she's there, in the window, with her cane and scowl, usually pretty amused by my doing things.

In October, when we were chopping the last of the summer wood, she sat and watched me hatchet away for an hour or so. In the bird yard. Now we bring her corn sacks full of that wood. Now it's just from the window. Knowing how freaking cold it is.

Podcasts, Academy Awards and Sustainable Materials

The big things in my life currently: those named in my title.

Podcasts:

These things, if you manage to scan through the hundreds of options per topic to the good quality stuffs, are gold. Downloading them onto your computer, and then maybe onto your mp3 player, seems to make you smarter. Like going to libraries and book stores and buying/borrowing books and then putting them on your coffee table. Then listening to them is like reading the books. Except it's free, and your hands and eyes are free. Thus, walking, driving and riding on buses. Yes. We all know about them.

My 4 hour commute to the meetings in Chisinau and writing pretty boring and repetitive lesson plans are perfect for them. Go, find and download and listen to: The History of Rome and Stormtrooper Poetry.

Steer clear of: Podcast Squared. Smarmy dick of a narrator (Andrew Johnstone) with rambling, incoherent, uninteresting things to say (I'm sure like this blog) about whatever he's talking about.

Academy Awards:

Because we live in a magical place of high-speed internet, I have copies of some of the awesome movies up for awards. They are, as to be expected, awesome. They make me happy.

Also! Lindsay has set up a screening for three of them before hand, and then I do believe, we'll be congregating to watch them live at whatever weird time it will be! woo!

Sustainable Materials:

As a volunteer I am the "man power" of an interesting agreement with my school. I'm in the middle of creating what I see as the coolest collection of organized lesson plans and materials for each of them. woo!

That's all. Nothing too interesting happening.

Alone in Chisinau

That's right. Extenuating/extra-enuating/extensive reasons have called me here for tonight to sleep in TDY, the PC owned apartment, all by myself. And maybe tomorrow night too.

How is Chis without gaggles of loud-ass Americans surrounding me? More relaxing. I still don't really meet anyone native to the city, because it's a city, but the day doesn't seem snatched from me, and I'm not overly embarrassed walking around it.

I actually cut a passable Moldovanka. Long, felt coat. check. black felt hat. check. fur circle hood. check. Even the uggs i wear in lieu of frumos hooker heels are in fashion here in the big city! If only I had the guts to walk around in sub zero weather in nothin but tights...

My walk still gives me away though. I walk, as my teachers have told me time and again, like a soldier.

Overall, I like it. I get as lonely as the next 25 yr old with romance issues in this Zooey Deschanel world, but... I dunno... isn't kinda nice?

Why do so many people complain about being alone? Are these people with nothing with which to occupy themselves?

The Art Girls of Second Grade

They are a tight knit set now, but split in two factions.

Vladya and her little friends, and Olga and her little friends.

Vladya and Olga clearly come from warring families at opposite ends of the social and economic scale. They snip at each other endlessly.

Olga: Where's the red (glitter marker)?

Vladya is using it, looks up, glares, looks down again and scribbles away at a butterfly's polka dots.

Olga: Miss Erika, where is the red?

Erika: I think Vladya has it. Vladya, do you have the red?

Vladya: Yes.

Erika: Can Olga use it after you?

Vladya: Olga can use that one over there.

Olga and I look at the green glitter marker.

Erika: Vladya, please give Olga the red when you are done. Olga, have patience. Try something else in the same time.

Olga: Where are the scissors Miss Erika?

Erika: Ask the other girls, if one of them are using the scissors, wait for your time.

Olga: Give me the scissors!

Erika: Patience.

minutes pass....

Olga: Where is the red?

Vladya: I don't have it!!

Erika: Where did you put the red Vladya?

Vladya: I don't know.

Erika: Here it is

It was on the table behind the box of pencils and erasers. Give to Olga. Olga starts shaking the fuck out of the glitter marker.

Erika: Girls, everyone, what do we NOT do with the glitter markers?

Blank looks.

Erika: I've said 6 times, today: If we shake or press really hard on the points of the markers, they will lose all their color and we will not be able to use them. What do we not do?

silence.

Erika: Olga, please do not shake the marker.

silence, ignores, starts pressing.

Erika: Olga, please do not press on the marker.

Basically is how it goes.

Most days if I have nothing else to do, I let them do this for an hour or two while I finish work. Thursdays are guided lessons. They are not as popular. Every session though, turns into a competition of who can draw me the prettiest, most glittery show of flowers and houses. Today Olga gathered her posse to present these in a long row of shouts "May you live many years Miss Erika!" and giving me the picture. Pretty cute, if a little disconcerting.

Also, it seems that no one has the concept of cleaning up after themselves. This I don't understand as possible at all. I'm pretty sure that their teachers, whom I know pretty well to be controlling ladies who prize frumosity, don't stand for it. They are all girls, so I'm sure their mothers don't stand for it.

So, guided cleanup ensued. You sweep. You take out the trash. You wipe off the table and window sill. You tidy the crayons. You tidy the paper.

Olga's posse jumped to. Vladya's... not so much. They got their jackets and things on and were almost out the door when I caught them --

Erika: Did you use paper? Did you use colors?

Vladya: No! we didn't touch that!

Erika: I just sat next to you for an hour and a half and you made me all these things for the walls.

Vladya: I didn't do it.

Erika: You did, and if you want to come again, you must help to clean them now.

She did, but grudginly and was still the first out the door. Not so weird, they are, after all, 8 yr old children. At any rate, I'm thinking of more ways to enforce the following ideas:

Organizational perception and skills

Patience

This is not your problem, do not exacerbate.

Does that matter to your art? If not, stop doing it.

Cleaning responsibilities.

I have a set of 300 colored pencils. I think a coffee cup per major color group could help. And specific places for markers and paper. Currently all supplies share a brown cardboard box -- the one in which they were sent.

Also, I have to buy more paper. And find a place to hang their display board I found them. And a dustpan. We need a dustpan. Woo! Thursday is piata day AND the next art day!

Star Trek Changed My Life

I'm rewatching Star Trek the Original Series. And yes, the pacing is insane, their "powers of illusion" and random Greek gods and light blobs are ludicrous, and the acting just preposterous. But, it just now, not 5 minutes ago, occurred to me that Captains Pike, Kirk, Picard and Janeway don't give in to the sorts of situations that the people around me would.

They aren't normal. I've been watching and idolizing people my whole life who aren't normal. They don't quit, or harm, or betray people. They look at their emotions and don't allow themselves to succumb. Demands from inefficiency or bigotry or idiocy aren't tolerated or even entertained.

So... is it any wonder that I grew weird? It's a good time. Hooray for Star Trek.

Because Pike doesn't give in to banging the awesome blonde chick who has his old Tango the horse, I don't know how to quit jobs and career-related ambitions once I have them. Huh.

Update on What the Boys are Saying

Grigore and Roma continue to be fed up with their classmates, and the music everyone in their village listen to. They also maintain that I lost my voice because I drank a cold beer.

They are starting to come around to the idea that not all gypsies are thieves and cutthroats. And Roma wishes he were a little bit black. People, he says, who are half black and half white have the prettiest skin. But they had to informed not to use the word "nigger" which, according to every encounter I've had so far with Moldovans, is their word of choice for black people regardless of where they're from. When I tell them that word is offensive, they get a bit confused and ask why. Dunno, why do you have bad terms for, say, gypsies?

Oh, yea, but that's different. All gypsies are bad.

What about Lumilla's neighbors?

Ludmilla's crazy. Don't listen to her.

Whatever.

And that wind? is it still killing you?

Yes.

Ok.

Also discussed today: how not all Russians are in the Mafia (my counter example of what Americans think of people here), fat chicks, chickens eating their own young is disturbing (no it's not Erika. Don't be silly), and aliens. I believe in them, and they don't.

Tutoring Time Explodes

Since I decided to let students hang out with me after class while I work in my office, the gaggle of girls aged 7 - 14 has burgeoned. As has my time at the office. Now, only Tuesdays I don't read Hop on Pop and Fox in Socks or espouse the gains of thinking before drawing, or observing before drawing.

And even so, I'm sure Adriana will show up full of vigor and a new poem she's memorized (look for the video we're making on Facebook soonish) and we'll sit and drink coffee and she'll tell me about her new boyfriend (she dumped the old one because he insulted her mom) and how crazy this or that is.

New ways to deal with this:

- Window sills can, indeed, be used for desks.

- Four 2nd graders can fit where only 3 6th graders can.

- 2nd graders are small enough to use chairs as pull TV-tray-like desks.

- Everyone loves glitter glue.

- Thank you Tammy Vaughn for the 500 piece puzzles.

- Lending library (though this really needs to be a little better organized. Maybe I'll buy a stamp and some name plates for books!)

- Uno.

So, really, tutoring is only half tutoring now. Some kids come and are tutored at my desk and others color or read or glue things at the window or couch.

Art Club, when it's in session is awesome. The only things I really have to teach are:

- Draw more lightly!

- Observe!

- Have patience!

and really, these are the only things I've been wanting to teach all my students from the get go. Thus, I'm pretty chuffed.

Today is the Old New Year

NB. few places in the former Yugoslavia have free wifi. Fewer still when one is on the move with a tight train schedule: I'm sorry you didn't get the other cities reported upon, I was busy.

Taking a stand against drinking, as a wannabe writer, is always a dubious sort of thing to do. Seriously, when is it best to write things? Right after your third high ball glass of homemade hooch with the color of wine and the reputation of gin. In less than half of one hour. With people whose language you don't speak. With unnamable parts of unnamble, tame animals displayed on the table.

That is, Maria and I commiserated about how stupid the villagers of Balatina are. She via her accountant business she has going and me through all their children. Laurentiu was drunk and assuming it was a holiday was trying to get me there as well. I'd just spent 9 hours trying to get those mentioned children to pronounce “th” and connect the word “dog” with the countless drawings of such creatures in a best-selling classic Go Dog Go.

And it's not like they don't have these creatures to relate to. Every morning now, Adriana's puppy greets me at school. You can track how much earlier to school she is than me by when I see her retreating pup. Right outside school. By the student-stalked, candy-filled shop on the corner, by the student-haunted, booze-filled shop on the further corner, out side my own gate.

Meanwhile, loud music in split, phonic something earphones makes me close my eyes and meditate in a way Siddhartha could never have done with such technology and savor the delights of contemporary voices cracking over agnostic wishes of death and invitations to eternal darkness with steel and slide guitars. Oh man.

It makes me wonder what the fuck people in the 70s needed acid for. How could this feeling ever get old?

The next time possible, I will be on a train to Bulgaria. Those who wish, and are able, make contact.