drunk with students

TODAY'S LEARNED VOCABULARY:

pele wele - colloquial slang for sex

pusca (that 's' is a 'sh' sound) - rifle

bet - drunk

there are many a taboo in the world. most of course differ between cultures.

Taboos in Murka:

Drinking with Students

Having Sex with Students

Taboos in Moldova:

Women Drinking

Women Smoking

Women Swearing

I of course have no qualms with myself drinking, smoking or swearing. I curb them all in order to be initially respected and then let them go with time, thus easing my community into the idea that a woman CAN IN FACT do these things and STILL function in a respectable manner. Who knew.

However, mixing taboos is an interesting taboo cocktail. Like a Long Island Ice Tea -- by all chemical rights it shouldn't work... but... it does!

That is, I just returned home from the following:

+ 6 breakless hours teaching kids who have no interest in what I am teaching.

+ 2 hours cleaning, talking with my host mother in Romanian, making bread.

+ 1 hour speaking in Romanian with Renata (magic) and two of my least motivated boy students in 11th grade about why I won't sleep with them and drinking Renata's (magic) moonshine (the only tasty moonshine I've yet tasted.... stay alert for a posting on Moldovan moonshine)

+ Picking up Renata's daughter at the kindergarten

+ Having a snow fight with one of the students (who previously I'd hated for breaking the concentration of one of my favorite girl student, Olga's, in her classes as they are unfortunately dating)

Home now, I feel fulfilled and happy and warm. Tomorrow I leave for Spain and I could not have imagined a better way to leave my village to entice me to come... home.

Because I Remember Almost All These Instances, and I Can't Love the Real World All the Time

Or:

"100 Reasons We Like Kirk More than Picard, Kiddo's Favs"

1. When Data died, Picard had a funeral. When Spock died, Kirk reconstituted the body, forced it's soul back in, and even got him laid along the way.

5. Kirk has caused computers to self-destruct by out-thinking them on three separate occasions.

9. Picard is from France

14. Kirk chastises omni-powerful super beings for not being polite to women

20. Picard's name is known and respected throughout Klingon space.
Kirk's name is cursed and vilified.

24. Picard quotes Shakespeare for fun. Kirk quotes Shakespeare to intimidate his enemies.

30. Kirk once said: "You're the Captain's woman till he says your not."

37. Kirk mocks Federation bureaucrats that he doesn't like and then proves that their aides are Klingon spies, just to make the point.

I take issue with:

43. Kirk repopulated the Earth's once extinct humpbacked whale species.

I think this was more Spock's doing than Kirks. Kirk just banged a blonde

57. Kirk fought the Greek god Apollo. And won.

59. Kirk's middle name is Tiberius.

66. Kirk chops his own firewood.

67. Kirk once led a Mafia take over.

68. Kirk would have slept with Beverly Crusher by episode two

87. 87% of all Klingon opera is about the singer's desire to kill Kirk.

88. The other 13% of all Klingon opera is about the singer's desire to be killed by Kirk in glorious battle.

96. "KHHHAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!"

97. Kirk blatantly disobeys one out of every five Starfleet orders just to remind them who's really minding the store.

100. Style: Kirk did it first, he did it better and he did it wearing gold velour and Beatle-boots with a space girl on each arm.

.

Now, I ask you, Chuck Norris fans, what have you to say for yourselves and your sloppy idols?

Frosted Glass

As a kid I was fascinated with frosted glass. Its glass -- but I can't see through it! I always wondered why it was called "frosted" as it was clearly, just furred, just brushed. Either of these options have been my mind's mainstays til last week while on hall duty in the high school.

Our school, like most around here, is run on a series of wood-burning, hot water boilers called sobas. and they tend to be unreliable and not terribly good at heating anything. The rooms are warmer than the halls, and the halls are warmer than outside, but its been sitting at -20 F for a week and "warmer" is on that relative sliding scale usually reserved for igloo terminology.

Igloos, by the way, are uninsulated, impermanent structures. Cinderblock walls with unglazed windows and no mention of tapestries at least cause me to think of layering clothes in a completely new way. However! The unglazed windows have become a thing of fascination for me! Did you know that if you press your hand, lightly, on a thickly frosted glass window, and take it off relatively quickly, your skin will melt the ice just where your prints are, so you are left with a police mugbook quality print in frozen condensation of 600 teenagers breathing? Its fantastic!

To make a long story short I have a flu like sickness confining me to bed. Mom's winter care package of DayQuil, NyQuil, long underwear, gorgeous thick socks, tea and poetry books has come at the perfect moment! Gods bless my parents.

I'm not the only one getting care packages either! (Franny, I wish you could have seen this) Today I didn't really teach my lovely second grade class... a woman came in with felt puppets and told a lively rendition of the nativity ending with "and that is why we get presents on Christmas! So here are your presents!"

Every one of these children who cannot afford to buy new copy books so I'm handing out typing paper and pens every class, was then given a shiny, christmas wrapped shoe box sealed with "Samaritan Purse" tape. Each package had a To/From sticker on it. The To was for Girl or Boy, tick this, this or this age.

If any of you (I know many of you do, cus you do it with me) ever put together a charity shoebox present and wondered if it mattered, if you'd bother again next year, if maybe you skimped and should have added a bag of cherry flavored cough drops or 2B pencils, wonder no longer. My kids love you. They love you like you will never know until your English class gets interrupted by true joy.

Inversal?

There is a definite difference between school systems in America and school systems here.

Scratch that, almost everything is different. All the same factors apply, but the way those factors manifest is completely different.

For example, textbooks exist in both places. In America every kid has one. Totchka. (Period, my russian vocabulary grows...) In Moldova, maybe most have them. Maybe some of those remember to bring em. Of those who do, maybe half of them have their exercise books as well in order to record the lesson. Of those that have both, half will be any state of repair and at least two editions will exist in the group or bunches of 6 pages at a time will be ripped systematically from them or... god knows what. I am learning grant writing. This will be rectified.

Another example is discipline. In America, it is enforced. In Moldova, it sometimes exists, and then a kids eye gets beat out of his face by another kid (in my single best behaved class I might add) and people are surprised.

The most interesting thing though, is that I live out in the country. My friends live in cities. Their students sound like images of angels eager to pour grammar into their hopeful and well fed ears. Mine, well, mine act like creatures from Detroit or Baltimore. The inversion, is this how America was 100 years ago? Were country school houses unmanagable and big town schools full of eagerites? How big does a city have to get before it gets its inner-ness?

National Wine Festival

As I have regaled you before, Moldova's big export is wine.

As a reminder, it is very different from whatever you think wine is. As is the attitude toward it.

I announced in one of my twelfth grade classes that I went to the national wine festival in Chisinau this weekend, and i was immediately asked what wines I drank, from where and what chemical differences there were in the making of each -- obviously the reason for there being no age where drinking is illeagal here is simply that everyone makes the stuff as well as drinks it, taking it from simple enjoyment to geniuine snobbish artisanship.

phew.

The festival itself was in a big park. Super frumos stands looking alot like parade floats were shouldering each other outta the way to toss dixie cups of whites and reds at us easy drunks. Also, there were bottles for sale. 5 of us went in on a 4 litre of nameless red, made two weeks ago. It was sweet and potent. It came in the biggest plastic bottle I've ever seen. It was worth every drop.

The other two parts of the festival were Arts and Crafts (almost bought some sheep skins, but am saving for a trip to Majorca in January) and Food. The food was fantastic. so many tasty kebabs... i bought a chunk of the most gorgeously seasoned pork bigger than my fist. Marinade consisted of a plastic 4 litre bottle of beer--the cap wasnt twisted off, just had a tiny hole stabbed in the cap for squirting. Rednecks, beware, Moldovans got youse beat for ingenuity.

As I was licking bbq sauce off my plate (bbq sauce was a total surprise, and a gladly taken one at that!) a Russian man began hitting on me (how do they find me? do I have a sign on my back: "speak russian? I don't! please, i wish to be picked up") and was saved by Matt and super fabulous Jon.

phew.

Slept on a balcony in some borrowed sleeping bags with the older experienced volunteers.... So fun.

I invited those knowledgable students to come with me next year.

Bedazzle Me Hiney

Moldovan women have exceptional fashion sense. One of the higher points of their taste runs in the Jeans department.

Watching girls my age and younger squeeze into these beauties of constriction defies flesh physics like the highschoolers of Dazed and Confused. Except they'd have to haul well water to shrink themselves into these bad boys, and knowing their faculties for work, I think they must have other means of magic.

Also, if it can be Bedazzled, it is. Shoes, shirts, bags, sleeves, socks, ass pockets, seams, jewelry, holes cleverly torn into advantageous thigh spots...

Which brings me to my point.

My jeans (procured in The Lost Dog from one of the Caitlins in exchange for a belt with a big big buckle) are very much not bedazzled and growing their own periculos holes.

Thankfully tomorrow is piata day. The bi-weekly outdoor market is descending and my partner and I don't have the first lesson... can we say open air shopping?

Photos will happen if I gain me a tight, shiny badonkadonk...

Wine Season

Today at lunch I drank 4 glasses of week old wine with my host family!

This is exciting for a few reasons:
1) My host family rarely rarely drinks (as in this is the first time)
2) The grapes were literally picked the week before last.
3) In the interim weeks the courtyard has smelled either of grapes or wine all day, every day!

Unfortunately I was not allowed to help. Maria, my mama gazda, explained that because I am a teacher, I must be mai frumos--more beautiful--and not stain up my hands with the several tons of grapes that were being processed a bit at a time everyday for two weeks.

Thats ok, I just kinda stalked Maria in the meantime, watching her do everything and asking absurd questions like "wow, NOW what are you doing?" or "wow! the grapes are boiling themselves!" So, most of the time it wasn't questions, just out loud and grammatically incorrect (I have the language level of a 5 year old) fascination with the whole process.

First we picked grapes for 10 hours straight, 2 days in a row. The bags lined the corner of the house under my window. It smelled sweeet every day and night as they waited for step two to finish.

Then we cleaned or made barrels. Think the size of an original VW Bug. And wooden, like what pirates keep rum in.

Then put a grinder on top of each barrel and dump grapes, vine and all into it, grind. Repeat until full. Cover. Leave for a week. there were 4 such barrels in the yard!

These barrells of squished grapes bubbled and fumed and fermented and smelled awesome...

Matt and Becca stayed the weekend here last weekend while this fermentation part was happening. I think they were sufficiently jealous/impressed with my sweet provincial life.

NEXT! scoop up a couple gallons of this mess into a small barrell with a crank on top and big bowl underneath. The crank squishes the grapes so all the wine presses out into the bowl when the bowl is full or the gallons are depleted empty bowl into the keeper vats which are far more modern and equipped with shininess and spigots.

These shiny ones are kept in the bechiul (pronounced bitch)and can be easily accessed whenever we need wine for lunch or dinner! woot!

Today's preliminary samplings were tasty tasty. Very sweet and faintly carbonated, really, the white was more like champagne! oh, so good. Especially with fresh sheep cheese -- so salty! very like Halloumi if you know this greek awesomeness!

Water... more please?

yo kids, those of you still doing this and caring to read mine!

This last week saw my worst day of teaching so far, and my best. I talked to Dad about it, it seems there it is endemic to the Ostergaards to be very good at a profession they don't much like. Like Kelsie and engineering, and now me with teaching. (Dad has had almost every profession on the sun during my lifetime).

The worst day was Wednesday. Long story short, I'm not very good at disciplinary action. Can't we all just get along? The best day was Friday. my third and eleventh graders have finally caught on to my teaching methods (high on grammar puzzles and interactive vocabulary, low on lecture) and love them. Second graders are not yet caught into the vulgar habits of adults.

Also in the week: I havent showered yet. Its cold and hauling water from the well is colder and time consuming. I will take my bucket bath tomorrow!

On this subject, no one considers how not to waste things until they have to go through a ten minute ordeal for what was once a half second habit. For example flushing the toilet. We at the Cires household have a flushable outhouse. This is amazing! however, we appear to be experiencing a drought or something because the wells are now so low the pumps cant reach the water level. Until it rains a bunch I am in charge of getting water for the toilet and my baths and dishes washing. Its good times, my biceps are super awesome toned! If anyone has a goldrush era wash board they aren't using in an old timey jam band.... I'd appreciate it!

As a result of this I am forming a natioal holiday devoted to bathing. When I return, there will be a day out of the year you cant reach me because I will be showering until the water turns cold, then I will eat some prepared food in my super well insulated and overyly plush, comfy bathroom as I wait for the water to reheat.

I don't speak Russian

One of the more fascinating things about Moldova is of course its political history. Its fresh and confused. But rather determined. Its confusion extends to the people's confusion of course...

As a former Soviet state, alot of the population spoke Russian primarily for many years. Today, fewer people speak Russian primarily, hence I speak Romanian -- the national and literary language.

Yet, 2 people have mistaken me (before I opened my mouth of course) for a Russian... fine, I correct them, speak to them in Romanian and move on.

But! When a strange, Russian speaking man calls your phone 5 times in a row speaking only Russian, and you apologize in every language you know (two) and he responds by hanging up and calling back and mixing "fucking" into his Russian more and more... well, that's not fun.

However, my friend Matt and I have decided that one axis gauging our success is based on the strangeness of experiences, and I think I'm leading. If not 10 minutes ago, just wait til I tell him about this little encounter.

Live from Balatina

Hey!

I just bought a flash drive with a SIM card and have a form of wireless jigging in little Alix here... The connection's a bit dodgy and I'm having serious problems downloading Skype, but overall I'm just damned happy to have any internet at all! I've waited this long to get back connected to the world, I can ponder this fresh problem a couple days...

The other problem is this window here is refusing to let me copy my ready-made Open Office documents into the bodies of blogs... Thus, they will not be terribly well thought out... Stream of Conciousness Commence. (this statement makes me think of Virginia Woolf in a 70s anime robot form... foarte straine)

Anyway, my having any connection to y'all (I've decided its a travesty that the English language doesn't have a plural you pronoun, thus the traditionally hickish "y'all" is quite acceptable) is all thanks to my wonderful partner Renata. She's my only real friend here in the tiny village of Balatina--right on the Romania border, ages away from everyone else I know in this continent. She is one of the two English teachers at my school and my Romanian tutor as well. She had to stand as proxy for me to buy my little Orange USB stick of internet since foreigners aren't allowed to buy it themselves.

She kicks ass. I think she is magic.

More on everything as daily-y as possible! It's good to be back!

PC HQ

The Peace Corps Headquarters is a great big white building in the capital of Moldova. I like it very much. The top floor is the volunteer lounge, where I am currently. It has internet and AC, flushing toilets, showers and english speaking people, unlike everywhere else in the country.

I'm almost done with my training. At first I couldn't wait for training to be over, I wanted to get out and be on my own, away from these other Americans, What am I here for? etc. etc. But in the last week I've finally started feeling close to a couple of them and will be sad to see them go. Ah well. I really can't wait to start doing the things I wanna do here.

I'm starting to plan my secondary projects in my head already. As an English teacher, teachingEnglish is my primary project. In addition to that we're encouraged to find a need in our community and fulfill it as a secondary project. My ideas are: debate team, school newspaper, contradance club.

I have two teachers I'm going to be working with in my village, Renata and Natalia, and when I told them I'd been a journalist, they were exceedingly jealous. Its their dream to be journalists and its almost impossible to do in this country. This is where the newspaper comes in. I feel it will be a good thing for the students, obviously, but if I can teach two very intelligent young women (they are 23 and 25, by far the youngest english teachers any volunteer will be working with in the whold country) how to operate and maintain a newspaper, I will feel doubly useful and proud!

IE. if anyone wants to send me newspapers, school or otherwise -- please do so.

My Romanian comes along nicely. Its really noticable to me how my english speaking skill deteriorate as I get better at Romanian. My sentences all get restructured into Romanian grammar and some words just dissapear completlely. I think I may have plateaued in my learning curve, but that just means my sentences are becoming more consistently good.

Unfortunately, I am in a place where I must vacate to free up a rare computer for other volunteers so I cannot write you all emails, but I love you all and hope to write to you personally soon.

Open Office

Hey kids...

Since I have limited internet access I've been keeping blogs on my computer, saving them on my flash drive, and ready to load them onto a computer with internet! huzzah.

Except I can convert Windows 2000 Word files into Open Office, which is what I'm running with on Alix the 10" Wonder, but cannot get them to open into Windows 2000 Word again on the internet computer.

Sorry.

In the mean time know that, in abbreviated form:

+ I can't drink the water here. I have special equipment.
+ The buses are small, very full, cheap and dependable.
+ Gummies = a recreational drug for self medicinal purposes
+ Summer is delightful
+ Teambuilding exercises reveal more about yourself than they teach you about teamwork ... quoi?
+ Baby ducks are adorable (its all manipulation, I know, but its still true)
+ I feel like a baby duck

That's all.
Office closed...

Musical Woes

So, I have no way of burning cds and little time... I will post my mix when I can and reimburse people for the cover printout, blank cd and jewel case...

sorry...

Also, I've been told by Billy that Franny and Phil's mixes made it to the apartment in OK. If you all want to, send them there this month since he has to fwd these two to me anyhow, and I'll get you the next address to send them to Moldova asap.

I'll also let you know if I get an external cd/dvd drive for my new pooter.

New pooter is shiny, black, named Alix (to keep up the weird A names I have for my pooters, precursors were Azrael and Alys) and only10 inches wide, less a cd/dvd drive, weighs a good 2 and a half pounds but has 160 gbts hardrive! woot! Who needs a drive when they can use Hulu and have all the less baggage?

Also, Billy uploaded all of Venture Brothers and a bunch of french films on her for me before leaving. God bless big hardrives.

Costesti

Hey Everybody!

This is officially my first blog as a Peace Corps Trainee! Rejoice!

After all that grief you all saw me go through in the application process I am now in the last leg of it. If I pass my language exam in August (its a ten week course to fluency) I will be a full fledged volunteer. The other part of my training is how to teach ESL, so that when I'm displaced into another village, the one I'll stay in for two years, I'll be able to teach all their children.

As I talk to other volunteers who have been here a year, there is not one who doesn't love it. Apparently the people think we're odd for jogging, but they are in no way snobbish about our abusing their language as we struggle to learn it! So far I've been met with nothing but patient encouragement. I try to say something and they correct me, say the words super slow a couple times so I get all the correct dipthongs and "ts"s ans "sh"s. I didn't know it was so possible to have "sh" as every other sound in a sentence. Ok, not that much but the phrase for "so so" is "asa si asa" with each s being an sh. I know that seems easy, but its rough when youre in rapid conversation.

I'm now living with my first host family at my training sight. The village (it seems to be a big enough cluster of houses to be a town, and there is more than two schools and churchs that I know of already, but it's still called a village. According to one of the other volunteers there is a disco in town too, but, still, its a village. I have to find out what the definition is there. The town's name is Costesti, but the "i" is mostly silent, very short, but I haven't figured out yet how to make it that short without just dropping it. The second s is one of the sh sound, but my kepboard doesnt romanian letters, only russian, so I can't put the little tail on it's s to make it the sh letter.

Wow, did that make sense?

I'm learning Romanian like no-body's business. Loving every scrap of it. Its the closest thing alive to original latin, so it looks french, pronounced in Italian and spoken with a Russian accent!

Every family, it seems, has a little farm in their front yard. My family, for example, has a family of turkeys, 15 yr old grapevines (yes we drink wine all the time, barrel is in the "bitch" or cellar), what I think my host mother said is water melon, a cherry tree (its cherry season!) and a couple other things I haven't yet identified.

I'll check in again soon! My family has internet so it should be pretty prequent.

Istanbul

I'm there!

Much Profusion of Grovelling

Darling Readers,

I do apologize, with effusion and bunches of daisies, for my late and steadfast absence from you esteemed presence.

Alys, dear little Dell, has succumbed to a tragic Trojan related death.

In her own absence I have neglected horribly the keeping up of conversations in favor of darting on and off Billy's pristine Mac while he is not writing great long treatises on Derrida and Truffaut. These jaunts have mainly been concerned with Peace Corps, immediacy.

As an update:

Everyone must read:
Lost in Austen
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Also, I will be on the East Coast in three weeks. I wish for Empire Night.

I am moving to Moldova on June 10th, I do hope to see you all before imminent departure.

Forever, devotedly yours,
Kiddo

It's odd to me how I manage to go through life oblivious to all sorts of things. I only discover new things as they present themselves to me.

It's like I'm secure enough in knowing exactly what I like and to focus only on that.

Or, I'm just oblivious.

At any rate, I have just now fallen in love with Bjork. Turns out that most of the pop imagery I adore was at some point engineered/initiated/exploited and developed by her imagination.

Verdict: either the cutest crazy lady ever, or the craziest cute lady ever.

Also, her type of crazy is both high brow crazy and low brow crazy.

High brow crazy: google image search Stelarc, kind of imagery.

Low brow crazy: "He left me! My life is over! F*** him!" mentality

Pretty cool all around.

May's Musical Endevor

The next cd theme is mine to command! Muwhahaha...

Yet, it is not that big a puppetry domination, so I shan't revel too much.

I've been trying to think of something good, wide enough that we can all find awesome stuff, but closed enough that there is some continuity. Coffee is my favorite thing other than Absinthe, and coffee has been done, so I thought initially Absinthe, but I don't want to impinge on the whole drinks thing, or start this as a series of thirsty mixes. After all, we shouldn't dwell on addictions here.

Which brought me to smoke. I don't like the idea of cigarettes too much beyond Holly Golightly and Humphrey Bogart and how cool they look/make you look on film etc. but smoke it self is gorgeous and difficult to capture and universal enough that I'm sure you can find a song about it somehow by almost every artist under the sun.

However, that too seemed too much like coffee. (aesthetically).

Taking into account that I'm supposed to be leaving you all for reals in May, and that being the biggest thing in my life that month (close runner up being Kelsie's wedding) I'm thinkin the theme should celebrate that!

Thus, my proposed theme (feel free to interpret, as we all would anyway, we analysts and artists) is Deployment/Embarkation.

Have at it kids!

Kiddo's Toilet Confusion

So, I think there are enough interesting toilets in the world to write a book about them. Or publish a coffee table book about them. Or a little humor book of reviews or something of the ilk.

Mine will kick off as follows:

In the diner made out of a double wide, fully one quarter of the back end is taken up with a boy loo and a girl loo. In the girl loo there are two toilet bowls in one room with the only door opening directly into waitress traffic and, brushing this across the aisle, the edge of one booth.
Many situations can be imagined, and probably have been enacted--its the only place open 24 hours a day in a college town of countless bars in a state where all bars close at 2 am. Most commonly though, I'm sure its just a relief for mothers with multiple weak-bladdered children. For general purposes though, its a bit odd.
An attempt seems, at one point, to have been made to separate the two bowls with stall walls like you see everywhere else. The dingy white tile has a T of orange tile between bowls and a sliver at the walls. One assumes this is where the walls would have gone if the holes had ever been drilled and the whole idea of privacy had not been aborted.
I guess its because the mirror is sequestered in one half of the room and the sink in t'other. If the wall had been successful, they'd have been separated and you'd have to wait for the other party to finish their biz-ness to use one or the other.
I don't know which alternative is worse planned, but both are awesome as an emblem of "we don't give a shit."

Watchmen.

Possibly a perfect movie.

Must watch 4 more times to confirm/deny.

Two Movie Reviews

Australia.

I love Baz Lurhman. I love Baz Luhrman when he has a tight story to work with. If he had decided to make this as two movies they would have been awesome, however, they were slammed together into a three hour collage of gorgeous shooting, wonderful acting and some earnest humanity. Really, I think there was just some over exuberance in the story boarding room. I think Luhrman kept having ideas for ways to show off his home country (yes, they were great, yes, I was reduced to tears with the beauty and nostalgia) and forgot that just because it's an epic does not mean it's allowed to leave half its plot lines open--where did those japanese planes go?-- and dwell endlessly on a few key melodramatic moments stolen from Michael Mann films.

The first fifteen minutes were brilliant. Then a loose hour, fifteen minutes of brilliance, another loose hour, and so on, until 3 and half are up and you realize you have to work at 6am.

Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are great of course, their predictable romantic rolls are both played with equal doses of heartfelt seriousness and terse comic timing. Makes for some fantastic scenes, and some that should have gone the way of the editing floor. However great our Hollywood heroes are, however, the supporting cast definitely steals the show.
Brandon Walters (Nullah) is one of the most natural child actors I've ever seen. I'm sure this is because he is allowed to just run around like a normal kid, but his reactions to all situations are perfect. Encounters with death: tragic. Encounters with freedom restriction: indignant. Acceptance of new circumstances: immediate. He's great!
King George, David Gulpilil, haunts every background exactly as his character metaphor (The Aboriginal) is supposed to. He's graceful and creepy, but endearing.
Together, these two characters illustrate the political situation in Australia towards Aboriginies. Just last year the Prime Minister gave an official apology to the Aborigines for what's called The Stolen Generation -- aboriginal children taken from families, relocated into catholic boarding schools to "breed the black out of them." One of the plots of the movies is the fight of Mrs. Boss/Mrs. Ashley (Kidman) to keep Nullah (Walters) from being taken to one such school. From this front, the movie is successful, lots of sympathy and lots of info = a win for Luhrman -- if people absorb it through the slew of the rest of the plots and remember it after all the over exposed studio shots with vaguely realistic horses (Yes, it looks like Mr. Jackman has never sat on a horse before shooting and there are many a stunt man and many mechanical horse).

Anyway, I know I just thrashed it, but, other than the pacing, it was pretty good. Definitely watch the first 20 minutes then fast forward to the bits where the cute kid is on screen, if nothing else, it's worth watching for these things!

I'm tired and gotta work early, thus, feel the suspense until I follow the promise of two movies up tomorrow with "Penelope."

George Lucas isn't the only one makin money off archetypes

Harry Potter is Luke Skywalker!

is Fry, Philip J

is Cinderella

is Hukleberry Flynn

is Jesus

is Hamlet

is Odysseus

golly...

No wonder JK Rowling did so well... Is this what the Bella girl is in the Twilight books? is that why they're successful?

Ridilin Needed for Spring

hello friends!

I actually had a good morning at work today. worked with good people. trained a new kid---with actual intelligence. listened to the new Franz Ferdinand album (tres bon. copies ne1?).

Next.

I got perfect shoes. Cherry Red. mary janes. super cute button. durable plastic that vaguely looks like a leather product. don't scoff. hard but flexible soles. don't rub badly anywhere. don't slip off my heels. are red.

they are beautiful and I love them.

not only this! Oh No. I bought them at walmart. $14. last pair in stock. just happened to be in my size. Ie. the universe wants me to own them.

ahhhhh...

today is mail day. if you are not on my penpal list and wish to be, please say so! those who are already: expect mail! Only small potatoes mail tho... gots me some wedding invites suckin' up most da effort.

it's been gorgeous here the last several days. walk around in sheer shirt and flowy skirt gorgeous. Pimms and Croquet Gorgeous. granted, it won't last. next week will be dully 50 and sad again, but for now I can sit on an almost terrace and drink my espresso and almost imagine flowers dripping from the high allies around me. acoustic music somewhere in the distance.

Unfortunately my asthmatic boyfriend cannot enjoy this as fully as I do, but he loves it despite the pollen hacking...

le sigh...

procured pretty printer. Kelsie's wedding has me in charge of all things paper! pretty paper!

Blue and Copper... these are the colors. themes include fish and sailing! Woot!

I picked out my dress. strapless and gathered at my left floating rib with (fake) diamond clasp. Pretty! my other choice made me look not unlike a Feminine Chrysler Building. I know what you're thinking -- "something that phalic... feminine?" But, yes, that was the only thing I could think of when I tried it on.

I finished reading Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. wow. like reading luxuriant intellectualism strung out on symbololism. extremely likable.

received a postcard from Bergen today. I receive more post here than Billy does, something he's jealous of, but most of his friends live nearby and gets to see them regularly. I suggest to everyone having penpals though, whether they're right nearby or not! We had that going for awhile right?

I love you all!

Cultural Curiosities

1. A billboard on the highway: "If you sleep with a boyfriend you will never marry a gentleman"

2. A gas station sign: "Happy birthday michelle ethanol free"

(they were supposed to be separate messages, but they just kinda ran together, pressuring michelle into having a sober birthday)

3. Pineapple pie. WTF. All the tastiness of the tropics and the black forests of germany... colliding. It took me awhile, but it does seem like a good idea.




More to follow.

Hastings

I don't know why this store is named after a town in southern england that symbolized the birth of modern history, but, no-one who works with me even knows it exists, so I guess I'm... ahead? of the game?

For a person who grew up organizing her horse models according to one of Color, Breed, Alphabetical Name, Size or Age spending 6 hours a day stocking books is incredibly relaxing.

Also, once a week I get one free paperback book of my choice and any of the old magazines that didn't sell by the time their month was up.

Yep. My life is freaking exciting.

Highlight of today: Bob the Bear got a blog. Check it out!

writing update... progression...

so, over the last couple of years I've improved my writing just by actually paying attention to it and forcing it on people whose opinions are more complex than "i like it!" or "this is crap" or "I don't get it." The actual impact is showing up in the pacing and voice. Now, instead of being strings of gushing images that create an overall effect, I have a rash of pseudo narrative poems with the slower pace of southern or biblical prose. The tone isn't anything like that, or the subject or wording or characters or anything... I don't think I'm even properly describing it. I feel like my own knowledge of writing is waning the more I do it and the more I pay attention to it, and this is odd and not a little frustrating and discouraging.

I've just been informed, by two people who don't know most of the characters in my poetry, that the biggest problem with my poetry is that I don't follow it through enough. The subject isn't explored fully. Without exploration I can't relate what I know to the reader. See how this is bad?

I read Millay's biography and her biggest fear was not being clear, thus I have started trying to translate my poems into boring sentences and then reinserting the pretty words. I think this may work.

So, that's what I'm working on.

In other news, I enjoyed seeing ice balls the size of tennis balls fall from the sky a whole bunch earlier! It was awesome! It was my first slightly worrisome tornado warning. Billy and I sat and watched the swirl clouds on doppler pass right over us. Nothing touched down, nothing in Stillwater was damaged, I drank a screwdriver, I was texting Elise throughout... it was fun!

Dirty Jobs!

My new favorite show is Dirty Jobs. It's fantastic.

Content:
Mostly it has to do with food processing. Increasingly I've become aware that food is gross. It's grosser when mass produced. You hear about the puss on udders of cows when they get milked, and the steroids in cows, and the methane they produce and how they're cooped up and how baby cows aren't allowed to move around so veal is more tasty for us, but being introduced to the people who do this day in and day out makes you second guess complaining about whatever your own job is.

That's what's great about this show. The people who do the jobs are the focus at least as much as the job itself!

I mean, I've caught, gutted and cooked fish myself. It's a gross process when just you and your sister have a fish to do each. Our two fish fed our family and one other family one meal. My fish weighed (before having half of it scrapped) almost 30 pounds, Kelsie's almost twenty. We felt so good about ourselves! This Mike Rowe guy went on a fishing boat in Alaska (already notorious) and learned how to process 12 tons of that a day. Yep. On that scale there's enormous waste and ways to dispose of it and places where it gets backed up etc.

It's fascinating to watch because:
Mike Rowe has an excellent sense of humor (both mental and physical)
The content fascinates everyone's inner rubber neck
You learn stuff!

Excellent!

ahh! Shurbutt bites my ass!

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is on Colbert.

Please, please tell me someone understands my pain!

1985 Honda Aero

Now taking suggestions for names for my new scooter. This is what he looks like:


I think it's a He. Feels like a he.

He has a one gallon gas tank, and gets 80 miles to the gallon. The only thing about this is he also needs an inordinate amount of oil, but not so much that it's going to be any more of a pain than filling up the ol tank more than once a month!

Accesories include my round black bullet helmet and Billy bought me a pair of sweet goggles and a thick chain and lock (he weighs twenty pounds more than I do).

I love him.

Work Out!

So one of those resolutions that people everywhere make every year and I never have.

For various reasons.

Mostly an admittance to my own abject laziness, and abject fear of failure/measuring up to parties who force it, embarrassment at figuring the damn machines out, characters exemplified by Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading etc.

So when Billy decided we were too unhealthy and that he was going to resume his natural habits of jogging/cycling/weightlifting I balked. But not too much. Turning the age Keats died has a way of scaring you a bit: read: Erika's body won't always be able to fend of the consumption and regular exercise is definitely something missing from dear John's life.

Thus, I pulled on my only pair of work out ish pants (yes, steffie, the same ones I wore when we tried doing the gym thing) and my excuse for sneakers and a camisole from White House Black Market designed for looking good, but the closest thing I have to a sports bra. I sure DID pair it with an actual bra for as much support I could Macgyver.

I was eased into the idea with an exercise bike. You can read and exercise at the same time! Did anyone know this? Multitasking the intellectual and the physical is encouraging.

From there I realized that running may not, in fact, be the worst thing in the world. He had me jog slower than I ever would left to my own devices. I found myself constantly speeding up and having to pull back. This made me not only feel kinda good about myself, but, better yet, able to run further than I would have otherwise. Jogging was also the first instance of actual tutelage in how to optimize one's body through posture and thought. I've known for ages--since my silly wiccan days--how to breathe properly and pay attention to it and use it to one's advantage, but actually pairing it with physical work brings the purpose of doing so to fruition! Huzzah!

This was awesomely developed when we got to the machines. Billy is rather an organized being and prone to over research things before doing them, meaning we were only going to work legs today, and then (after we work out our schedules and find times we can both regularly go to the gym) one day biceps/triceps, one day chest, one day back etc.

Today was Legs. There are like 7 machines for the specific muscle groups. Some are rather sexy looking (see the one where one must squeeze pads holding 55 pounds of weight together with one's thighs) and some are ridiculously unflattering (see the one where you lean back against a barbell and stick your ass way out). Billy knows how each works and how to maximise its effects and explains it all in understandable terms. Also, he incorporates thought and breath control in his instructions. This is how I relate to it. Me and my overly intellectual pretentions.

All the thought involved reassured me of my ability to belong in a gym. Telling me I was doing pretty well reassured me of inadequacies. Being lazy is something I hate about myself; doing this and scheduling it and being forced to do it alleviates my self-hatred in that arena. Being there with someone who is equally as nerdy looking as I am gave me a wall against the Brad-Pitt-in-Burn-After-Reading lookalikes. Ha!

Explorations into exercise are thus successful and life is better.

It also doesn't hurt that the gym at OSU--being financed by T. Boon Pickens--is the super happy fun mall version of over priced gyms. I'm talking plush carpets, 5 basketball courts, 3 squash courts, two pools (with whirl pool in the outdoor one), ping pong tables, a climbing wall to die for, giant TV and watching space for big games, coutless TVs hovering over the stair machines and treadmills... Bloody hell.

Left arm = Tetnus, Right arm = Polio

I am beginning to resent the Peace Corps and their red tape and their apparent inability to pay for things like other branches of the military does.

Kids: Join the marines, get your medical work done, resign, THEN join PC.

That is all.

Distractions from writing: 1. Silky, 2. Blog, 3. Cleaning

Places for writing:

1. Shower
2. Bars, Day or Night.
3. Coffee shops
4. Book shops
5. Empty desk with headphones
6. Waiting rooms
7. Bed

Edibles while writing:

1. Tea
2. Wine
3. Beer
4. Gummies, all sorts
5. Water, but only in a pretty glass
6. Ramen

Of course these things are incidental, but they recur so often for me it's kinda silly.

Mostly I've been feeling claustrophobic the last couple (literally) days. When I'm all bunched up like this my thoughts jumble on top of each other like an old graveyard bristled with trees. Each thought is disturbed by its neighbors and none get laid out straight.

In between thoughts, my head is neither fuzzy/foggy nor clear/empty; just running, just idling. It's a weird zenlike state where absolutely nothing but the abstract present exists. Although, ultimately, a desirable state of mind, I want very much to create, and the creation I desire is boiling just out of periphery, just outside my little white sand mind.

And if you can read a person's mind from their punctuation, what the hell is there to learn from all the fucking commas in that last paragraph. Golly!

resolutions

So, yellowstone is going to blow soon and the sun hasn't spotted in itself in months.

Why am suddenly jumping on the apopcalypse bandwagon?

I don't know, but it's a shitty way to be.

Conspiracy theorists are lucky people. They sit in their mediocre lives happy in the belief that they must lay low in order to outrun their other, much more dangerous lives.

The two are only vaguely linked I guess, even in my type happy head.


But, the letter writing thing is going well. So far.

I have urges to be passive aggressive to people and stop. This is my contribution to a more rational world.

Pistachio Reverb

Ok kids, timing is everything and it's the bloody new year, and I watched Ze Frank the other night. It's to perfect to pass up the urge to determine to not only blog everyday, but to write one letter to one person everyday.

One of the biggest things I've gotten chewed out for this past year is a lack of communication. Here I start.

Gonna make a list of people deserving of letters and start sendin' em out. Of course, that means many a stamp must be bought...

Except, some genius reminds me, if you put stampless letters into the mail with the return address and sending address swapped... Yes, that's right damn the man.

In other news, I saw the Flaming Lips for the New Year, and I don't understand why it's referred to as New Years with strange pluralization, as if to cover the next couple years also. Just in case.

Also, I spent $50. at The Lost Dog on tea, coffee and sweet sweet pistachio. Life is better with Pistachio.