I can't believe it...not again! Not another secret admirer!

So I had another secret admirer. I figured it out; thanks to my plagiarism busting, i've become quite the detective. she told me her name was aksana, so i looked through the list of students until i found one, then i looked up her file with photo. later she sent me some photos of herself, classy, but that confirmed that she was a student, and i had to tell her so sorry, that's against the rules.

the funniest thing is that before, for the first ten messeges when it was like "i like you but i don't dare approach you" and stuff like that i was like, "ok, who's fuckin with me?" i simply couldn't believe that secret admirers could exist: my feeling is that the best thing i have to offer a girl is my self, my ego, who i am--hiding it is the stupidest move i can make!

am i crazy? also, how did she get my phone number? man, i feel so bad...

Disappointing Answers

At a town hall meeting for all american citizens last weekend I asked about self defense, and told my story from last ~october when i randomly got popped in the jaw in the middle of the night walking home with cedric. this one guy at the meeting repremanded me for not talking to the police, assuring me that it's not as hopeless as it seems.

so after the throat slitting incident i decided to talk to the police, and i went to ask my director how to go about that. she's always been the only one who could explain things to me in a way that made them understandable, and therefore acceptable.

her answer: "don't go to the police. the worst thing that can happen is they'll find the guys, who'll then come after you in even greater numbers."

is this the state of klaipeda? out of the general population of citizens, the greatest power is held by the hoodlums?

here's my answer: fuck the bullshit, i'm looking for work elsewhere. i'm willing to risk my job by making a stand on academic policy, but i didn't come to klaipeda to risk my life by being the only person here to make a stand on this type of shit.

Someone slit my throat this weekend (don't worry about it)

Friday night, about 2:45.

Cedric and I left Honolulu after his going away party. We walked fifty meters down the street to call a cab, so they wouldn't assume we're two drunk foreigners. Cedric sat down on the steps as I called the cab. As I hung up I sat down and almost had Cedric's phone in my pocket when someone grabs me around the throat with one arm and puts up a knife to my throat with the other arm.

"Give me the cell phone or you're gonna get it!"

There was another one in front of me now. I put the cell phone into my pocket, pushed his knife hand away with one arm, pulled his headlock arm away with my other arm, and jumped away. He threw a beer bottle at my head but I dodged it (or he missed). Then, having me outnumbered from an elevated position, they ran away.

The laceration on my throat was very superficial, two inches long, and barely deep enough to bleed. It's still visible three days later through three days of beard; i didn't want to aggrevate it by shaving.

My Electronic Mail

It was over the quota, but I didn't know, and I had to go on the net version to erase all the saved emails. It's set to save them for as long as possible so that 1) I have back ups of recent emails and 2) I can access them from anywhere.

It's all good now.

Thanks to those of you who let me know.

Sincerely,

Et cetera

Just Checking!

I checked this part of a sentence on google to see if a sudent had plagiarized it:

"When I was traveling around the world i had many adventures but one i'll never forget."

this is what google gave me:

"... him to eat again. When I was traveling around the world, I had to have my breast pump with me cause it was painful! I thought I ..."

weird incident

last night gedas and i went on a bar crawl. at the second place, rotusele, we met a danish magician and his best friend, a danish woman. they had just gotten to lithuania yesterday. we made a friendly bet about the eurovision music contest. denmark made the finals, and lithuania lost miserably, so we owed them a beer. we took them to artistai (formerly Baras Amerika). beer. then she wanted to try something lithuanian so i ordered four krupnikai. eh. liepa's is probably tastier.

then she and i danced. we started grinding. then she asked me how old i was and when i said 24, she said sorry, but she was "too old and ugly" for me. isn't that weird? man, i must've been wearing some serious drunk goggles for a girl to turn me down based on her own appearance! plus, i didn't think she was more than 29, so that's not so old...then she was making out with the magician. they were drunk though, sop i couldn't tell if it was something new for them. when gedas and i left she said sorry again....weird!

unbelievable fuckin french

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/international/europe/18constitution.html?

these are the parts that bother me: "But we can't lower taxes because we have expensive social services to maintain"; European Union ought to force other states to bring their labor practices and welfare systems up to Western European standards rather than drag the rest of Europe down.

first, if we don't have to "maintain" those "social services," then nobody has to; it's merely a choice. if social services are important to you, you choose france. if not, you choose eastern europe.

that's what's the matter with the second part. the french say "we're better but everybody's funning away. let's make everyplace equally great, then our people won't be able to escape from our wonderful policies."

May Palanga Weekend

Cedric and I went to Palanga this weekend. The place we stayed was cool; the owner, Nina, only spoke Russian and German, so I had to whip out my foreign language skills to communicate. At first I was pleased with myself, but then I realized I was probably forming bad habits. I said things like "I want a room for two (in Russian) for two nights please (In German)."

The first night we went bowling, from which I'm still sore. We played three games. Cedric beat me every time. Later we bought Yatzy, though, and after bragging about how he's never lost Cedric lost miserably to me.

We were too drunk by then to find anything good to do at night, but we had a good time wandering around.

Saturday we went to the beach after bloody maries for breakfast. I kept my coat on, but my face at least is visible more tan. Cedric went swimming. He just couldn't leave lithuania after nine months never having swam in the Baltic. We drank a few beers on the beach.

Lunch at the pizza place with a fire place, not chili pizza, where rastenis and neringa and i ate last october. we thought it might be a good idea to get a bottle of wine with lunch. after i went to the bathroom they told me they were out of that vintage and asked if this other would be acceptable. as if i know anything about wine i said "what year is it? 2004? oh, ok then."

yummy pizza. by the end of the meal cedric was resting his forehead on the table. he said he was going to take a piss in the woods (we were sitting at an out door table), but what he actually wanted to do was taste his lunch again. i thought he was gone, it took him so long, but finally he came back and made me go look at it, he thought the color was so nice.

off to the amber museum! we walked on a nice path through the woods not far from the sea. cedric said he needed to take a shit, and i pointed to an 18 inch high cement trach can and said "there's a toilet right there, buddy."

he pulled down his pants and shit in the trash can. there was nobody around for about 50 meters, but there were a few people who saw him, i think. a few minutes later, when he turned into the woods saying "i've got to clean my ass" is the third time in my life i've spit beer out from laughter.

the amber museum was closed. cedric took a nap. after an hour i couldn't rouse him, so i went to buy some beer. after another thirty minutes i still couldn't, so i put a lit cigarette into his mouth. i think he "sleep-smoked" till it fell out of his mouth, and then he jumped out of bed to keep from catching on fire. he explained that the reason he was so resistant to my rousing was that he believed it was morning!

that night we went to Wild Nights. very soon we broke a glass, and the waiter insisted i pay 15 lits for it! i said "that's very funny, but stop fucking with me now." but he wasn't joking, so i picked up my coat and said "fuck you then, we're outta here." the bouncer stopped us and said we weren't going anywhere without paying. i explained that "mugs are intended to be cheered with, and if i'm given one that's so shoddy it breaks due to a normal salute, that's not my problem. we paid ten lits each to come in, but we'd rather forfeit that and leave than continue to support such an unconscionable business." he spoke to the waiter, who then said to me "i'm sorry, i was wrong, it wasn't your fault, it was mine. we'll replace the beer and the mug. i hope you'll reconsider and stay."

we stayed for a couple more beers. p.s. the waiter was so gay!

sunday morning was hard for me. i think you could say that i "merely trudged along" for the first few hours of the day till we had lunch. the trudging along included the amber museum, every new section of which i greeted with "oh no! it's not over yet?!"

lunch was an intersting place. the waitstaff wore Svyturys shirts, and the had Svyturys staff, but they didn't sell Svyturys, or any alcohol. but they said we could buy some at the store and drink it with our lunches. we just pulled wome out of our back packs though.

then we went to eat some smoked fish. then i think we went home.

Helping the homeless help themselves

yesterday cedric and i were sitting in delano pizza bistro, and this beggar comes over to our table, like eight years old, and asks us for some money to buy food. my first instinct was just to say "no," and shoo him away, but i felt bad because he was so young, just a hungry hungry child. so i decided to help him, but not by giving him alms. i thought, instead of giving him a fish, i'll teach him to be a fisherman. so i gave this eight year old boy all the direction he'll need for the rest of his life. i told him the secret of making money: "get a job!"

Do it yourself

I've been on the trail of that damn bilateral agreement from Belgium for three weeks. I've begun suspecting that somethine went wrong and nobody wants to tell me. So I called up the head of their office and charmed her silly and set everything straight. Whatever the fuck the problem was, at least we're moving forward again, for Christsakes.

The Temperature of My Shower

This morning I didn't take a shower at home because I rode my bike to the gym before work. I was out of coffee, incidentally, and my wheels needed air. i stopped and got some though. so then i rode to the gym and did some situps. my membership had expired, but hey were working on that. i went to take a shower. no hot water. then i remembered: no hot water in down town klaipeda all week, for some reason that has to do with accursed kaunas. there was nothing to do but shower anyway; i stank. here goes nothing. the water wasn't luke warm. it wasn't tepid. i'm not even sure it was water; it might have been slush. it was so cold i couldn't even wash myself for a minute because i was shivering so violently.

p.s. my discount is no longer valid at the gym. it will be if i join with a second person, though. he doesn't even have to be a friend. anybody know anybody in klaipeda who needs a gym?

Well, that makes it worth it

I had this computer problem (I let somebody else try to help me with viruses), and all my emails were erased. It was a terrible loss, all my correspondence; luckily I had recently emailed myself a copy of my address book, so I had that at least safely on the internet. It was also a problem for my correspondence students; the past three weeks of works they’d sent me were gone. I hadn’t corrected them yet. I couldn’t tell the until the final test, because they are from all over Lithuania. I told them I’d simply drop the last three works from the average, I wouldn’t require them to resend them; many of my students are very unfamiliar with computers and didn’t have back ups. I told them they could resend them if they needed to bring up their averages, or if they just wanted my feedback. It is my responsibility, after all. There were only two of the second type. Here is an extract from one of the essays; the topic is “ideals”:

“Some of my friends, teachers, and colleagues are examples for me. Of course not for all 100 percent but they have lineament which I like and I try to follow them. I like one of my teachers from Klaipeda College because of his management of talks with students. He managed to present all themes in a very interesting way. When I see the name of an author of a piece of literature I can tell everything about what it is because it was interesting to listen and I remembered almost everything. I forgot only some pieces. So I would like that all teachers managed to be interesting not for me but for all students. If one day I would be a teacher I would like to be as my teacher in college.”

I am the only male literature teacher.

See if you can figure out these riddles

There's a dick in your ear! A midget is standing on your shoulder with his penis in your ear! Why?

I'm a pancake! I'm a big tough pancake smothered in gooseberry jam, and i'm gonna beat the shit outta you! How do you like that, huh, you fuckin eggman, you fuckin Egg McMuffin?

...what?

"It was summer holidays. I was irresolute there I spend my summer holidays I have flew in the camp I wanted in the very much."


"A fink bear it will be kosmos"

My Preference for Plagiarism

It's better when students plagiarize from the internet; google's so much better at finding their sources on web pages than my eyes are on the pages of books. I find 'em anyway, it just takes about two minutes instead of two seconds. And if I can't, if they used a book or person I don't have access to, there's an even simpler way. It goes like this:

"Please have a seat and tell me what you wrote about in this essay you handed in yesterday. You can't tell me? You have no idea? Well, that's too bad. Here's a red zero."

My Contribution to Mankind

And by Mankind, i don't mean the wrestler, aka Mick Foley. He was aka something else, but i can't remember what. I mean humanity.

This is Huge, cause nobody seems to know this. Not even the experts: Dunkin Donuts. you know how they dump out their coffee every twenty minutes to make sure it's always fresh? Well, here's a secret: they're wasting coffee!

This morning I noticed that I left my brand new coffee maker on yesterday at work. There was coffee left, and I was tired enough to try drinking it. I poured in some milk that had been sitting out for 8 days. You know what it perfectly was? Cromulent.

My conclusion? My contribution to Mankind? This piece of life saving info: you don't have to throw out old coffee; it'd been over 14 hours, and it was still freshish!

Belgium Part V

Saturday we had a free day. I was flying out of Brussels on Sunday, and I have a Lithuanian Canadian friend, Emi, going to school there now, so I left Kortrijk a day early and when to visit her. After looking at pictures for a couple hours we went out to bars.

We met a couple of her friends, Americans, and we were dancing at a bar. Here began my more vivid impression of Belgians: pigs! This is probably more the tourists than the locals, but the men were offensively aggressive. On several occasion, involving several different men, I had to pretend to be one of Emi’s friend’s brother to get guys to leave her alone. And even then it wasn’t easy.

We moved on, and on, and on, and ended up having a beer at the grand market, which is in fact, probably the grandes thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s basically a huge town square surrounded on all sides by castles. We were able to have a beer there because drinking in public is legal in Belgium. In fact, beer comes in vending machines next to Coca Cola and Sprite.

The next day I walked around by myself taking pictures of architecture and two statues: Maniken Pis, and Zhaniken Pis (Peeing Boy and Peeing Girl). The Boy is the most popular tourist attraction in Brussels. He gets dressed up in all sorts of costumes, and there’s a cut out where you can stick your face into an image of him for photos. When I found him, he was surrounded by about forty people taking pictures. The Girl, however, is not well known at all, and most locals don’t even know about her. I asked all over the place. Most people thought I was a stupid tourist; some people had heard of it but didn’t know where it was. Only a couple people could give me vague directions. I found it, though. As you can see from the picture, it’s so seldom visited that they keep it locked up behind bars. And the Pee is turned off.