The best nap of my life

Friday was a coleague's birthday, so guess what, I had start drinking at 1pm, whop dee doo. I met Cedric at Maxima, and we drank some beer and bought ingrediants for meatloaf, including one pound of ground beer and one pound of ground beef/bacon mixture (yeah, we have beef/bacon in Lithuania).

We had to stop on the 30 minute walk home to rest for a while. I was really tired. We got back, but the meatloaf in the oven, and I went to lie down. I expected to lie in bed miserably for tweenty minutes and get up again.

My alarm clock went off. Cedric opened the door and said "come on, let's go eat!" I thought that's weird, we don't usually have breakfast together. I go to the kitchen and he's preping fries.

"You wanna eat french fires for breakfast?!"

"No, it's dinner. It's friday night, man!"

"What the fuck are you talking about?!?!"

"Yeah man, it's fucking friday night!"

"What the fuck, are you sure? It can't be!"

I had to go back to my room and check the date/time on my cell phone before I would believe it. I slept to well that my hour nap felt like a 24 hour nap. It was awesome.

Cuss Words

Cedric had been traveling around with some friends from France, and they made it back to Klaipeda. After spending a few hours with me they asked Cedric if I was a big Big Lebowski fan. How did they know? "Cause he constantly uses the word 'fuck,' especially the phrase 'the fuck?'"

Cowboy: "Do you have to use so many cuss words?"
The Dude: "The fuck you talkin about?"

I think I might have gotten into this habit so easily because most of my coworkers (and any that are old enough to care) don't speak English. I have two middle aged female coworkers sitting in my office with me, yet it is not the least bit offensive to anyone if I quitely say to my computer "what the fuck? fuck you, you mother fucking cock sucking piece of shit."

Belgium Part D

Friday I met with a representative from the General Nursing Faculty. I wanted to set up an exhacge with them also. The first thing he told me was “All of our courses are held in Flemish. Mastery of Flemish is essential.” Well, that was the end of that idea. We did work out something else very useful, though. All of the former EU institutions offer midwifery as a marjor in medical schools, not just part of another program. We don’t have midwifery at all now, since the birth rate in Lithuania has dropped so much. But we’d like to, and this guy offered to help us out a lot. “Don’t bother inventing the wheel from scratch,” he said, more or less, “We’ve done it and we’ll gladly teach you how to read our blueprints.”

So that’s quite useful. Something else about my meeting with him was even more useful, though. When I went back my main coordinator asked me how it went, and he was genuinely surprised when I told him they have no classes in English. Their buildings are adjacent, and they’re both high up in the administration. I have tons of problems communicating with the various departments of KLK, sometimes it feels hopeless, but seeing the same problems in a big, successful institution made me feel like maybe we’re not so bad, after all.

Belgium Part Three

Tuesday they had nothing planned for us, so I went to Lille, France, by train to see the place. I went with another professor from Kaunas Technical University, who is apparently famous. All my students know who she is, she writes text books. We use her text books here at KLK for our social work students in the Health Faculty. We were guided around by a student who lives there and is attending Kathos as an Erasmus exchange student, same as my two social work students. It was nice; I’ll try to get some doubles of photos to include.

Wednesday was my lecture. A Perfect Day for Bananafish, from Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, summarized and analyzed for a group of fifty psychology students. It went very well, there was laughter, and almost tears (only mine!), and the students were plenty talkative. Actually, their professor apologized later that they were so quiet, but with Lithuanian students it’s like pulling teeth. We had a lot of spare time in the end, though, because they were so much quicker at analyzing the thing with me than my students here are. That makes sense, since they’re psychology students. After I read a passage to a class, my most common questions are “Is that normal? Why would somebody do/say/feel that? What does that mean?” But my students are future teachers, not psychologists, so it takes them longer to come up with good analyses.

Thursday I took a train thirty km to another campus, the Teacher Training campus. This was my big opportunity: make a deal to exchange some pedagogy students. We don’t have any of that going on yet, and we need to catch up to the Health Faculty, from which I’ve already sent students, but which has had these bi-lateral agreements for three years (unfulfilled; I’m the first employee they’ve had to succeed in this capacity).

Within five minutes it was clear to me that we were going to make a deal. I had just found out that there’d been a proposal for exactly what I wanted last year, and that it had not been approved. This guy was friendly and eager, though, and I found out later that he had no idea why the proposal had been rejected; I thought it must have been from their side, but he said they had no reason not to work with us. We wrote an agreement to exchange two students for a semester next year and two teachers for a week each, and also he invited us to attend an conference there in November called “CRIPSIE"—CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN EUROPE. The agreement still has to go through both of our superiors, but I accomplished my main objective: mission accomplished.

Atlas Shrugged

Such a good book. Teaching literature for eight months has given me an appreciation of literature. Isn't that convenient? It's a weird new standard. It's as if my standards have gone down, because I now appreciate much more than I used to, but it's actually just because I was always interested in narrative rather than the art of its conveyance.

So it turns out she's 14.....oops

For some time I've had a secret admirer. I had no idea who she was, but I'm generous with business cards and hanging up flyers for English lessons, so I figured that's not so strange. Here's our last sms conversation (translated):

SA: hey babe, maybe :-pd-:?

AV: what does :-pd-: mean? and how old are you?

SA: i'm 14, and that means let's go make out

AV: i think you might have the wrong phone number

SA: don't fuck with me, you wrote back normally last week

SA: the police council has issued you a fine for three things: 1, sleeping alone; 2, sleeping not naked; 3, not sleeping with me! the fine: 500 kisses (with interest) when do you wanna pay up? =))):

AV: when you're no longer a minor!

SA: don't fuck with me, you're fifteen yourself, i see you every day

AV: let's get this straight: i'm not who you think i am, i'm a 24 year old college professor. sorry about the mix up.

SA: don't fuck with me!

i actually feel really bad about it. it's true that i was replying normally, for weeks, but that's cause i though she was older. i never questioned her identity, assuming that she's a secret admirer, but because of that she believed she was communicating with some 15 year old boy. now the poor girl must feel rejected, supposedly by him, and isn't getting the sex she deserves.

Belgium Part Deux

Afterwards, each week exchange students from one country do a presentation about their homeland. This week was France, only one students showed up to do it. She had a PowerPoint presentation, which I thought was quite good, definitely better than my PowerPoint presentation about KLK. Later, though, I heard people saying it sucked, very unprofessional, and I got a little worried about what they would think of mine. It was the first PowerPoint of my life. The schedule of my presentation to social work students wasn’t set yet, though, so I figured I would have plenty of time to spruce it up.

We went to lunch, which was very good, especially the soup. One guy at our table, Jean-Paul, is a professor of philosophy, and he happens to teach a philosophy of social work class. He said he was meeting the students I was looking for that afternoon, and would I like to do my presentations then? Well, I couldn’t very well say “No, I’m not ready, I flew here unprepared.” So I just said “Okay, that'd be fantastic.”

I had about an hour. I went to the library and fixed it up a bit, which was not easy because they had these stupid French keyboards with all the letters mixed up. It slowed me down, plus their right-clicks didn’t do anything, plus everything was in Flemish, which was a problem since, as I said, it was my first PowerPoint projects. I wasn’t familiar enough with the commands to recognize them by their placement in the menus.

It went off totally well. The visual bit was a little basic, but what I said was good, and the students had lots of questions, which means they’re interested: mission accomplished. Saying something good wasn’t easy either, since I don’t really know anything about our social work program, it’s not even part of the Faculty of Pedagogy where I work. I seem to be pretty good at coming up with appropriate answers off the top of my head, or bull shitting my way through them if I actually have no idea.

Belgium Part I

I arrived in Brussels at 8 thirty and made my way via Kortrijk via two trains. I asked people where am I and where do I go many times, with the result that my journey was wrong-turn-free and peaceful with just a minimum of anxiety (if that wasn't there I would think I was dead).

By ten o'clock I was at Focus Hotel, which nobody could tell me how to find, but I figured it out. It was within a kilometer of the train station. It was a very night Bed and Breakfast, in which every room was designed by a different artist; my room was designed by a dancer. Neato. And the breakfast included liverwurst, which I ate every day. In the end I started making sandwiches of liverwurst and this spreadable white cheese--oh baby.

Monday the owner drove me a professor from KTU (who is famous, all my students know who she is (author of social work text books), though I didn't till then) to Kathos Hogeschool (~College). How do you like that last sentence? I'm an English teacher.

They had a really neat thing going on: Kathos International Classroom. All the foreign exchange students, their own prospective exchange students, and their students who have been on exchanges get together in a big auditorium and listen to a lecture on Some Global Topic. That's an hour and a half. Ours was about global finance: World Bank, IMF, and so on. Then we were separated into groups: seven of the poorest countries, and the eighth group was the World Bank. My group was East Timor. The World Bank had 1000 units of money to distribute as gifts, and 1000 as loans, and we had to try to get some. We had a half hour to prepare, so we went to the library to find out stuff about East Timor. Guess who was elected our group's speaker. My speech went something like this:

East Timor is a land rich with resources, opportunities, and manpower, all of which are wasting away. We have petroleum, which is not being refined. We have natural gasses too, also untapped. We have gold, un-mined. And meanwhile, we have a population, half of which is unemployed. Let us put two and two together!

Besides this, 85% of our trade is imports. What little money we do have in East Timor is on its way out.

Lend us 150 so that we may build a petroleum refinery. This will put our resources and our people to work, and the profits from this will both pay back the loan and expand our industry into other potential exports, natural gasses and gold. This way we may balance our imports and exports.

Also, we ask for 15 as a gift, so that we may endow upon our people the skills and competences that will allow them to begin the construction and manning of the refinery, to make them feel like human beings again, and give them the will to be part of society and part of the world.

I’ll find out the result of the contest soon.

Fuckin French Bastards

So those French Bastards have to have they're own wierd keyboard set up, just to mess with foreigners, just to make sure we never forget what bigots they are. I show up in Belgium, which is forced to use the bloody french hardware, even the Flemish side, full of good faith. I thought, "lemme give the cocky French Homos a chance, let bygones be bygones."

And what do I find? I go to the library to spruce up my power point presentation. I get some things done, but what should've taken me fifteen minutes took an hour. Why? Those Penis-Eating Frogs wanted to get even with us for being better than them at everything. So they switched the A and the Q. They switched the M and the semi-colon. They switched the W and the Z, for the love of God! And the Numbers? Forget about it. Anybody who got an email or IMed with me last week knows...

And here I am back in Klaipeda, ready to forgive and forget. Guess what happens now. After a week of struggling with the bloody things, I got used to them! Now I'm mixing all the shit up in reverse! Dq;n it!

Besides that, my Belgium Trip was a huge success, which I'll write about tomorrow.

What I said when my glasses fell off

They fell off and as the hit the floor I screamed "Oi Oi Oi!" I didn't do it on purpose, but it sounded exactly, but exactly like you'd hear it after someone had started of with "Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy!"

Random Grafitti by the Docks

Rastenis' ass is so fat it don't fit,

On his head a pile of shit!

So stupid he can never comprehend,

But for every guy he bend (over)!

He chokes himself on cocks,

Right here at the docks!

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Rasteni, fuck you up the goat ass!

Rasteni, you're the gayest bitch i know!

Rasteni, you pass out at every club!

Rasteni, you're a fat ugly fuck!

You my boy, Blue!