Education

As a professional teacher, and a prospective student (and I promise this will be the last speculative entry for a week or two) I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the function, benefit, and execution of education.

"What is the benefit for everyone?" For instance, is a rough question when in front of 30 children, half of whom would rather (and whose families would rather) be at home feeding something, weeding something, harvesting something, driving something. These students will most likely only come to 50% of classes anyway, and society dictates sympathy for them by giving them passing grades in everything regardless of attendance, work completed and behavior. I understand that there are similar, if not so blatant, concessions made in American schools. Idea being: Just get them out.

These are the kids I tend to spend my spare time on. Yes, the aces are joys to teach. Yes, it's amazing how that girl can memorize 40 lines of poetry. Yes, their behavior makes my life easier. (Though not, really, thanks to Moldovan Tattle Tale Traditions. The good kids turn into at least as big of noise makers as the bad kids thanks to the Stalin-esque finger pointing that happens every five minutes)

The kids that set off your Do Good senses and make you warm and gooey like granmama's cookies though, are the ones who cannot even read in their own language let alone the third foreign one you're teaching them. So, while my partner drills some new grammar or vocab I sit in the backs and sides of classes and teach basic reading skills. I often feel so good about doing so that the 20 minutes I spend haranguing the trouble maker a**holes seem almost worth it.

The added benefit of this, as exhibited by two or three boys in every class I teach, is that they are quieter thereafter. Not just while giving the one-on-one time, but for all the classes after. Especially when they eventually come to my after school art specials, and they learn how to sit still long enough to fold, yes, fold ON THEIR OWN a Japanese paper crane. To many, the anal retentive practice of origami is a distractive 30 seconds of bliss in a cubicled world. For people who have never heard "fine motor skills" let alone possess them... That's pretty spectacular.

You get the idea.

They behave better after giving them a little attention. Who knew. Unfortunately, this only works on kids in the 6th grade and lower. 6th grade and up... No amount of lovin is going to help.

There are also exceptions. The kids who are hard at heart naturally, and not just from their environment. These kids will not only not respond to love and caring, but will actually punish you for it, by becoming mocking of your education efforts and devotion to other students, or to them even, or they'll just point out you haven't plucked your eyebrows in awhile.

So, these are the kids where you have to wonder--is education beneficial? If you can force it down them like a chalice of molten gold, sure. Behavior goes up. In the long term, the education, the grammar and phonetics won't ever come in handy, but they will (in this the most perfect of all possible worlds) retain the semblance of respect and self control instilled in their agrarian little hearts.

Those kids who actually learn and apply the knowledge found in school will benefit in other ways, obviously. Better jobs etc.

But looking with a wider scope, why does education need to persist for even agrarian societies?

I have never heard it better voiced, and put into action than with one organization. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, please check out One Laptop per Child:

http://one.laptop.org

because they are doing what organizations like the IMF and USAID and the World Bank are often unable to do: reach the people they want to foist money on.

Like PC, who I am sworn to advertise, they work at a base level of societies who WANT help. They don't work from high above societies who may not only NOT want help, but also not NEED the help.

Their other focus, again like PC, is not to give the kids stuff and let the kids turn them into sand shovels or something, but educate the children, the children's teachers and the children's families on what is going on. Then, the product given (in this case it's easy to guess: laptops) actually creates its own sustainability. The laptop educates the user on a range of topics. It give the child a chance to understand where he or she lives and his or her relation to the world. In a globalized world children will not survive without this kind of education.

Education is not just necessary for it's own sake--however much it will improve your enjoyment of the world. It is not just necessary for improved behavior. It not even just necessary to improve your chances at getting a job. It is necessary to be educated just to have an awareness of the world today.

Seven thousand years ago, you needed the education of an awareness of where tigers were. Two thousand years ago, you needed the education of an awareness where the Romans were. One thousand years ago, the Spanish Inquisition. One hundred, just where not to grow potatoes. Today you need an education and awareness of not only where terrorists and major governments and major corporations are moving and spending their money, but simply where and how you may be eaten by these things.

To Be a Master

A couple hours a day, I look at what I can do in the future: Where, How, How much money.

Even though my writing has the potential to land an agent, and jet me to a brownstone in Brooklyn, it is unlikely. Yes, yes, less likely the more effort I put into things like Masters Degrees and graduate certificates and other jobs, of course, but I have read the writing of people who make it, and I am not that good.

So!

I mentioned a while ago about my Masters Degree aspirations. Since then I have started research on the things. Uni/MD, George Mason, VCU, Uni/VA... Bigger schools and better schools than Shepherd. Much as I loved living the communal life of hippy West Virginia, the idea of a respectably yuppie job is laughable from a University completed funded by the late Senator Byrd's pork.

What I noticed first was the great range of things I'm interested in. This is not new. Then I noticed there are things called "graduate certificates." I think a collection of those would be quite nice!

So! Sell out to the business and admin world for two years, pay that off, and then gradually accrue excellence!

Best options to date:

Double MBA/MPP from UM with a PC scholarship.

MPP from GMU with mandatory over seas internships.

Poetry will suffer. It is possible, however, that the lackluster poetry that gluts all the magazines that make money is so drab and stilted because all the people who get into things like the New Yorker and Harpers sold out already.

So! There's that goal coming closer too!

The Guy who Won

That mayoral race? I listened, with my cabbie this morning, to the news as we drove from Glodeni at 9 am (It took 40 mins to get there, 10 to do my work, 10 to find an expensive ride home, and 20 to get home. My village just doesn’t have a bank or book store.). Chisinau did not, after all, go communist. Neither did Balatina.

Balatina chose the guy who put limestone gravel in our pot holes. A 20 something who is high up at the lime stone quarry just outside of town. He is married to a girl who looks almost exactly like Natalie Portman, if Natalie Portman had grown up here, poor, and not in Israel and America, rich. Their first daughter was a hard birth at 2 months over due, but is healthy and lovely now, born last September. He is Renata’s neighbor.

Maria’s comment: “He is young, but he is not communist.”

Laurentiu’s comment: *shrug*

Renata’s comment: “He said he will help with projects at the school, so I don’t have to work with Claudia anymore.”

Claudia continues making our life and project hell. Latest Development (after I spoke strongly against corruption etc.) “I don’t want Erika to have a bad impression of me. I will not do more with this project, but I did already buy all the furniture.” She said this as way of placation or apology or something to Renata on the phone and has refused to talk to me since the confrontation. She instead is throwing all her effort into gaining Natalia’s trust and sway her to Claudia’s side. To do this she renovated Natalia’s classroom’s furniture and called Renata to pass on the message that Natalia now has to go buy a new lock for her door…
Does this seem convoluted to anyone else?

But our mayor now is not only not a communist, but has live most of his life in Moldova, not the Soviet Union, not Romania, and has lived half his life with the prospect of the EU hanging in his cultural cloud.

What will happen?

Refrigerators

We have two refrigerators. The first is in the kitchen, brought in with the other wedding presents (cupboards, gas stove, sink). It’s an inch shorter than me , two thirds of it fridge the bottom being apull out freezer full of various bird parts. Maria has no labeling system, but I trust her general knowledge of what good frozen meat looks like and what bad frozen meat looks like. The only time we had even possibly bad meat it was goose boiled in borsh.

Laurentiu claimed it was too pink. Goose being naturally pretty dark, it usually does have a dark magenta hue to it. This color just meant it was not boiled to mushy strings of less-than-meat. It was tastier than any other goose meat I’ve ever had. I told L that it was pink because it had good blood, and it would be good for his blood too. He laughed and ate it.

Though this freezer clearly works well enough to preserve all our meat, its upper normal area is damaged every time you put something warm in it. Theory: Warmth takes longer to cool. More effort by the fridge. Fridge dies a little every time you do this. So don’t.

After twenty odd years of putting warm things in a fridge, it runs out of its Freon.

Like any normal person, you must fix the problem. The problem however must be fixed by taking the whole fridge to a town forty minutes away. No worries, someone will have a car or truck or van, somewhere in the town, right?

“No,” says Maria, “our neighbors have one, but they cannot use it.” The neighbors in question are the sort of red necks who have hobbled together their own chop shop and do nothing with their time but tinker with their two cars, one motorbike, and van. That is, when they are not openly doinging chin ups on the apparatus they welded one day last year and have sitting outside their property fence next to the baba bench.

So, we used the porch all winter for a fridge. It’s large enough for everything, and it sure was colder than the fringe, and often the freezer. Cool.

In Anticipation of Easter, and my family coming, not to mention the warming of the outside pantry, however, a new fridge appeared in the porch pantry. How? Where from?

Laurentiu and Laurentiu Mic of course, from the attic over the bread oven in the bird yard. NB. They also have various little EZ Bake type ovens, an industrial strength hand wash board that’s too hard core for inside house use, the year’s supply of corn meal, various roosting birds, tables, chairs, ladders… Stuff.

It’s little and has enough Freon for the next six to ten years. Only problem is the insulating rubber strip normally used to seal the door to body. All the warm air infiltrates etc. and we have to defrost it once a week. I keep my new ice cube trays in the freezer and they grow their own cube offspring every day. Maria makes sure I don’t drink those ones though. Wise lady.

She tried one of my ice cubes last week when I wasn’t around. She just popped one in her mouth. She said it made all her teeth hurt and she couldn’t figure out why I liked them so much.

“They aren’t candy Maria! You put them in drinks!”

“Like whiskey?”

“Sure, but there is no good whiskey here. Vodka is better. The best American vodka is only like cheap bad vodka here.”

“Oh. And you like it with juice.”

“Yes.”

Our conversations really are pretty stilted sometimes.

“I like, best though, a little vodka with sparkling water and a piece of lemon.”

“Like a cocktail”

“Yea! Like a cocktail. I’ll make us cocktails one day when it is very hot. The taste is mild, you will like it.”

“hahahahaha”

Maria hates alcohol. Less than half a shot of moonshine makes her head hurt. It usually takes four shots of moonshine to make my head hurt. No amount of explaning that’s why we cut it with lots of sparkling water, and then flavor with a lemon, would convince her though.

Oh well. I have ice cubes.

The best part about the fridges, after ice cubes, is that only one of them is cat proof. Thanks to the shrinking door insulation, there is not enough suction to keep Mama the devious old cat at bay. So we only keep capped up dairy products in there and stock a stool in front of the door.

My Own Project

After the organized luge of Monica’s project, coming home and hitting the futile wall of lethargy that characterizes the staff of my school is a slap in the face of progress. It has been suggested I just take control completely and hire everyone and do everything myself. Appealing as that is, I can’t. It just is not conscionable.

The only wall, really, is Claudia herself. Remember when I said autocracy was like a perfect mathematical solution? It does, as all history books like to say, become double edged very quickly. When Claudia wants her things her way, it happens in less than a blink. When you are doing something slightly not to her liking, she will ignore you and not come in to meet you on the agreed day and you will wait from 9 am to 3pm for her with your budget on your lap with little Romanian notes to help explain why we can’t just disregard these things we agreed on in November. Which is to say, I may indeed just end up doing it on my own.

Not completely alone, admittedly. Renata is the contact wizard. It’s her friends who are cutting us deals on furniture, windows and dictionaries. And Matt, maybe Mackenzie, and definitely Adriana will come to help move our existant furniture and books to the new room. Hopefully, Adriana will help me refinish the furniture again, and paint some picture frames. It’ll be good.

So that’s the rest of the week. Not much. Looking for a person to commission for a quilt. I’ve never made one, but our little couch could do with some life…

Monika’s Mural

The foray into the Dirty South was for more than simple conjecture confirmation. I was invited by another volunteer. In my more egotistical moments (which were greatly padded and stoked in the past week) I like to say I was commissioned. Monika sent an email to Jon (alt voluntar) and I saying we were the only artistic people she knew. She just won a grant for a radio station—Radio Giurgiu, find it on facebook. Her school had given her an double room suite to set this up. She was then training her elite students in journalism and internet radio set up.

The rooms, however, were old toilets (yes, under Soviet rule, schools had indoor plumbing and toilets… now, not so much) and were unfinished and just plain ugly. Pipes everywhere. Gross green tile covering the half of wall that wasn’t scabbed and brown. Would we please design a mural after the theme “Media in our Lives.” We did, we met, we conferred, we compromised, we developed. All this back in March. We had to wait for school to finish so we’d all have enough time to spend on the project. Time predicted: 1 solid week.

She needed to fill a wrap-around border and one and a half walls full of image. The border evolved from music notes to music notes and sound waves, then I wanted to draw a gramophone somewhere. Stick some radios from the ages in there maybe. Combine these to make a wholly visual timeline of broadcasting! I started with a bird on one end and progressed to an iPod.

Obviously the big section had to be full of human joy and activity. This activity had better do with reporting and broadcasting. I thought first of a diligent line of reporters in fedoras with pads and Leicas raising hands and typing on typewriters. A whirring press, the sort you see in Citizen Kane or Bringing up Baby when news hits the street, going by In the background of a newsboy shouting “Extra!” in Romanian (the less catchy “suplimentar!”). On the second wall would be a girl with headphones talking into a big mic with appropriately pre-WW2 kitsch sound waves bubbling off her.

No sooner had this unfolded in my mind’s eye than I realized that was America’s perception of The Golden Age of Radio. Why not stick Zorro galloping towards the viewer and FDR in front of a fireplace?

Besides, it was just too busy.

And all my future apprentices would be apprenticed to . . . me. And, in a small pool, yes, I’m pretty damned good at drawing and painting, but my pinups will never get sold to magazines, my cartoons will never show up in the funnies, my comics will have to have a very good inker to make them palatable. Actually, I’m just good enough to be the inker. In fact, that would be an ideal profession of passion for me. Not to mention that my biggest past paintings were 4 feet square and took 3 weeks solid glazing and painting out and re-establishing .

What do Moldovans like? Bright solid colors. Shapely women. Proverbs. Frumosity. Brightly clothed young men and women. Generally, they are preferred to be standing or sitting with good posture and a touch more serious Mona Lisa smiles, probably with food or drink in one hand. . . for supernerd teens though. . .

I settled on three figures in various states of flight/jump. I sketched them and got familiar with the contours. I played with their arrangement. They would all be connected by mic and headphone wires to smiling globes. Monika added that the central feature must incorporate their logo. Big map of Moldova with one of those Golden Age radio tower symbols over her town. Thus, out with the globes and all wires come out of Giurgiulesti itself.

Yea. Cool.

When I got there, Mon had a projector all ready to go! Easy Peesy!

Set up. Trace. Paint.

The kids called me Artist Master, and took us on long walks with picnics and free ice cream. Monika and Matt (who had successfully invited himself along) called me Master Artist.

The kids themselves were great. A smear of ages from 6^th to 11^th grades, all girls of course. Two spoke substantially better English than any of my students and were some years younger. These girls, Valeria and Lidia, spoke about everything in very firm opinions at a million miles an hour. Truly delightful conversation, even if tiring on a 3 day intensive exposure.

The girls even proved to be diligent, punctual and accurate. Lidia excelled at fine penning, Valeria cheered everything up and brought tempers down, Viorica was a photography gem (many an abstract photo I would not have chosen turned out surprisingly revealing. See the one of Valeria’s flower bedecked nails painting a boy’s pantleg on Facebook), and Violeta had a great grasp of color blending and matching different tones together for a ballerina who reads and writes as she leaps.

They ran back and forth to magazines for soda and meat and bread and cucumbers. They chose music and sang softly and out of tune to all Katy Perry and Lady Gaga I had on my iPod, but balked at The Black Keys – too simple and hard. They refreshed our brush cleaning water, and kept trash accumulation to nil.

It’s good I planned on bright colors because those were the only shades Monika had. Her mom sent huge bottles of acrylic from the states, and vacuum wrapped them. The wrapping was handy as one of the black bottles exploded.

Jon came for the second day—happened to be his 25^th birthday—bringing a Fulbright scholar, Becca, with him. Much dancing and more crazed singing accompanied. He added flourish and psychedelic joy to the border. The soundwave/bubbles I had leading from a sports commentator mic to a 1999 Mac desktop now shine in the best sort of rainbow I’d never have managed.

Overall, it took only 3 days. Two and a half, really. Day 1: Drawing for half the day. Monika, Matt and the girls watch, provide me with tech support, tasty music, foods and conversation. Day 2: Paint from 9 to 5. Monika and I direct. Matt, Jon, Girls, Mon and I paint. We go through a dozen picnic plates for palates. Each palate has a range of colors and get swapped back and forth. Becca and various girls ferry between us as we paint. We can’t get the paint and clean our brushes ourselves because we are standing, by turns, on a chair, a desk and a professional sort of scaffold. I doubt I’ll ever feel so much like Michelangelo again.

In that spirit I silently ruled out watering down the paints. Everything was thick like fresco and most blending happened antipasto. It turned out really well. Also in the master spirit I was called in for complex shading of clothes and faces, any details Lidia got scared of and mixing skin tone.

That sounds like a lot, but Monika was nothing like a brainless commissioner. She not only knew what she wanted, but could easily have done most of it all herself. Especially with the projector. She came up with the perfect gold hues for not only the silhouette of Moldova but for the Golden Age radio set. When questions were asked she answered at least as competently as I did.

Further, I learned she is a trained fencer. I’ve been calling her the Stone Cold Latinator for months because she can speak Latin (yes, like Natasha Romanov in Ironman) and is a textbook on theology. She also runs everyday and has gotten these girls running with her! She is easily twice as integrated into her community as I am, and definitely has twice the amount of patience for her 7 year old host sister.

In our off hours, the 3 of us Americans watched Game of Thrones and geeked out over medieval stuff of all sorts. The only downside of everything was the 9 hour busride to her site. On my way home we stayed in an apartment with Mackenzie, drank box wine and watched the newest episode (the one that aired while we painted) of Game of Thrones. I gushed about character development etc. but that’s for another post on another blog.

It was a great experience with a great outcome, with, hopefully, a great addition to my CV.

Dirty South

Dirty South

Just like their cultural counterparts in the states, good ol boys in the Peace Corps like to exemplify their manliness. I don’t know much about what they do at site, since I don’t hang out with them much, but when they are all in Chis together, riled up about bein near each other, they play football, plot to buy an x-box for the PC lounge, drink a bunch and pop their collars. When the play football they most often split the teams into North and South teams, that is anyone living north of Chisinau is on the North team; anyone south-South. The boys on the South team always declare they are the Dirty South. The North team derides them as such.

Oddly, though, Moldovans of the south (my gazdas, students and teachers etc) all claim the south of Moldova is dirty also. “It’s dirty, and the houses are smaller and they are all one color. Not like here, where there is water and forests and beautiful homes and fences,” describes Maria. Apparently she went down south once for a relative’s wedding and what she encountered was a mass of mud hovels, less refined even, than our mud and stucco structures.

“It’s just dirty,” says a neighbor baba, shaking her head, “the roads are dusty. More dusty than here.” As our roads just got a bit flatter and whiter thanks to the mayor campaign, I don’t want to disagree, but a gust of wind to my eyes keeps me skeptical.

“It’s really flat and boring looking,” said a kid whose exploration outside of Glodeni I doubt.

So guess what I expected on my first foray south of this civil border. All this blinding newness started on a 2 lei ruitiera ride to the South Gara—Chis is big enough to have three major bus stations. The North, The Central, and surprise surprise, The South. The North Gara is where I catch my buses home, It’s large and hectic. There’s a small army of bearded women selling nickel worths of chocolate, baby wipes, fans, icons, bags of weird puffed sugar cereal. Dozens of dogs roam around getting kicked by men, fed by women, half of them with nipples big as raspberries and flapping a good three inches below the rib cage. Probably 50 men shout destinations at you as you walk from one end (entrance) to the other (my stop). It’s also rumored that the smokestack domineering the north face of the north gara belongs to Chisinau’s biggest WW2 people-incinerator. It’s a wholly unappealing place. Also, it’s a 12 minute walk from PC—just long enough to be super annoying and needing to be taken into schedule account and just too short to make a taxi or rutiera ride worthwhile (money 1+ waiting time).

The Central Gara is worse. The same, minus smoke stack, but multiplied in every other way by 3.

The South Gara is situated on a hill. I have ridden by it dozens of times going to and from Ialoveni, where training was the last 2 summers. The hill gives it an advantage. It’s breezy, and has a nice view. It’s also half the size of the North Gara in terms of buses, but twice the size in terms of little shops and bars. Also, the ticket sales booths are not outside in the elements and people, but in a bright warehouse of a building, complete with digital screens stating time and temperature and other useful facts. The bus drivers all insist on buying tickets from these—a sure sign of civilization in comparison to the teeth picking apathy of most Northern busmen. That is, they’d rather charge you an extra 3 lei and pocket the difference by forcing you NOT to buy an official ticket. See my rant on the Dick Driver of Balti’s gara.

After buying tickets and sitting in, shock, the seats assigned to us, the bus leaves, shock, on time and, shock, does not stop at random spots on the way out of the gara to pick up the snobs who refuse to wait at the actual, assigned place.

We’re off. An hour in smoke starts curling out of the dashboard. Driver pulls over. All men jump out to smoke as well. Driver opens dash, fiddles around. He turns the engine. Still smoking. Open dash. Use tools. Replace a wire. Close dash. Start engine. All good. All the men jump back on and we’re off.

Only other breakdown I’ve yet experienced resulted in nothing happening for two hours and then the whole of our bus getting on with another. We were going straight north.

So, in that first hour I must point out we went up and down three steep hills with switchbacks. My 4 hour ride northwest has one such.

After that, yes, the landscape does pan out, but that may also just be because our route runs parallel to the Prut river the whole way, and therefore we are always in flood plain. The Prut flows pretty straight south until the land reaches close to sea level a couple dozen miles inland from the Black Sea, when it starts looping around like kitten string. Eventually these meanderings widen to marshes and join the southern mouth of the Danube as it empties out in an industrialized delta at Galati, Romania. In fact, the place I’m going is Giurgiulesti—home to the border crossing to Galati and the Ukrainian counterpart. My colleague there says there’s a hill (hm… hills. There’s a bunch of them. All made of sandstone you know. Make for some psychedelic collapse inducing ravines. Soft enough for birds to hollow out eyries, you know. Full of life and noise and color they are) where you can see both Ukraine and Romania at the same time. Cool.

This phenomenon, not unlike that place out west in the states where you can put your hand on four states, means there’s constant international traffic coming through the little town of Giurgiulesti.

The roads, therefore, are pretty well maintained. In all other respects, the little town does nothing to take advantage of its place and acts only as a conductor of traffic and housing encampment for the customs workers. Yet the people take care of their town in the same visible ways Balatina does. The houses are primary color stucco. Arcades of grapevines shade all driveways. In fact, there is a concerted effort I’ve noticed in the south of people planting flowers in front of their fences, so the road, already in better condition, is full of prettier things to look at.

The only change in architecture is actually only in one of the dozen villages between Cantemir and Giurgiulesti. In this one, I can’t remember what it’s called, the houses are structured like long houses. Three or 4 rooms strung together in a line with a veranda along one side. All the verandas were sporting drying clothes. Same colors on the outside. Same mud bricks on the inside.

On the tree thing, there are trees in the south. They do not, however, as predicted, congregate in beautiful woods so cherished by Moldovans and lauded in Moldovan textbooks.

All in all, a pretty normal mix of half accurate accusations. The South is dirty, but so is the North. Why can’t we all just get along?

New Computer

He, for the new computer is unquestionably male, is settling into his new home.

Sent from Houston to Moldova once, in Matt's original luggage, he fried in Singerei. The fan started making a racket, the body overheated, everything burned out. Matt sent it back to Houston with his family. Family diligently restored him to health even though they'd sent a spanking new replacement through the mail. We all forgot he existed. He remained cool and switched off among other electronics, until one day...

Nothing could sustain Kiddo's lately lamented Alice: the Netbook that had composed Kiddo's life for a year and a half in voltages high and low, through surge after post-soviet surge. Even with a patched together exoskeleton of new power cord and battery, Moldovan electricity was just too much for her.

She succumbed.

She was full of japanese movies, half edited poems, a dozen memoir-hopeful chapters, thousands of photos of smiling but grubby children... And she could sustain it no longer.

I tried evacuating files to my external hardrive. I tried reformatting. Nothing helped. Nothing alleviated the load. Various versions of the Blue Screen of Death appeared. Each time with more spelling errors.

In the end we vivisected her. We tried the hardrive externally with other computers (Matt's shiny knight of a dell). We checked for burnt solder. We shook her for tell tale signs of loose mother boards. Many people contributed to the last ditch attempts at resurrection, but no avail. Thank you Dad, Brett, Philip. Matt and I did what we could with each patient suggestion.

We did however manage to save said hardrive and convert it into an external (now I have two!), plus the two batteries and two power cords or varying age and capability. They are joining my electronics menagerie.

When it was clear Alice was good for nothin' but scrapin' Matt suggested matter-of-factly that this beast be sent out for my last three months. I was a bit gob-smacked but it seemed a better idea than trying to buy or have sent a whole new one. Noobs, you can gather, are beat hard by eastern European power. Also, it's crazy preferable to not having a computer for the whole summer.

His parents found and sent it. We spent the day yesterday putting important things like anti-virus and iTunes on him. I made the mistake of trying to register my iPod with this new complex and lost everything on it. File transfer was significantly slowed by external hardrive rebellions and other MIA hardrives. All we had was a 4 gig thumb drive. It worked like a little mule, but all we could transfer were word documents and Porco Rosso. Important stuff first... right?

Today, home for the first time, New Computer and I are getting acquainted with my Lexmark 5340, OpenOffice and Skype. Also, iTunes' radio channels. A lack of my own music (thanks weird iPod software design) means I have to listen to other people's choices. I may have to write a whole blog just on the thoughts and feelings that go with that. "Is there ever going to be a time I will be completely comfortable with not being in control of things I consider mine?" etc.

So far, he's a peach. Downloading and installing stuff takes the correct amount of time for me to do loads of laundry in between. Very convenient. Size... takes some getting used to. He's a chunk of plastic artillery, more than a foot wide and almost as wide. He has a dozen ports, not all of which I recognize, and a DVD drive/burner. I'm a tight kinda person, and such a big thing makes my fingers stretch and my shoulders hurt from lugging him halfway across this country thus far. However. He kicks ass. I have a separate numberpad. I don't know when I'll ever use it, but it makes me think I have utilities.

Le sigh.