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Books - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Social life – what’s that?

November 5, 2018 by 0 Comments

After last week I was absolutely knackered. To be honest I still am. I had 30½ hours of lessons, which is a healthy rather than a ridiculous total, but it was my biggest week since April. With more work comes more exercise: the most convenient way for me to travel to my “off-premises” lessons is by bike.

On Friday night I joined S for drinks to celebrate her recent purchase of an apartment. After my experience, why entering the property market should be a cause for celebrating is beyond me, but I got to meet some of her work colleagues and we ended up at the Bierhaus where we tried some locally-brewed craft beers. S invited me to play board games last night, but I had two more lessons yesterday morning and after that I felt extremely sluggish so I said no. Normally I might have agreed, but tonight I’ll be seeing the film about Bohemian Rhapsody (which has the makings of a treat) with S and some of her friends. Three social events in a single weekend are one too many for me. Whatever happens with S, it’s great to have a semblance of a social life in Timișoara at last. I’m planning on joining S on a trip to Sibiu, either for Romania’s centenary on 1st December, or the following weekend. Either way, we’ll be there for the amazing (from what I’ve heard) Christmas market.

Interesting moments keep cropping up at work. One of my female students is a 23-year-old in her final year of a medical degree. Sometimes I also see her younger sister, who speaks English at a very basic level, at the same time. One time, when both sisters were in attendance, I did a lesson on directions, because the topic seemed appropiate for both of them. At one point I talked about pubs. “Is there a good pub near here? How do you get to the nearest pub?” The older sister then said that she didn’t do pubs, and could we please make the destination a church instead? She’s a devout adherent of the Pentecostal church.

After yesterday’s lessons I read a few chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale (S had given me a copy) and played eleven games of Scrabble, winning nine. I am improving, without doubt. My last game had just a 12-minute clock but I coped with that without too many problems. My next step (and it’s a big one) is to learn the words. I need to have the threes down pat and get a handle on their front and back hooks. I got my fingers burnt in a recent game by not realising ADRY was a word (why would it be?), and voilà, my opponent was able to hook an A onto the front of DRY and make use of the triple word square in the endgame, leaving me a-high and a-dry. I lost that game by three points. I get down plenty of bingos, but the vast majority of those are words I know from everyday life, and at some point I’ll actually need to study them in a way that isn’t a chore, if such a method exists.

Yes, the Red Sox are so-called world champions for the fourth time this century. Great city, great fans, you can’t say they don’t deserve it. What an incredible season they had.

The midterm elections take place on Tuesday night, my time. The Trump factor has focused the world’s attention on them in a way I’ve never seen before. According to Fivethirtyeight, one of my favourite sites, the Democrats will take the House but the Republicans will keep the Senate, so long as there isn’t a systematic polling error in one direction, which you can hardly discount.

Sodding Halloween, which shouldn’t be within 5000 miles of Romania’s borders, is mercifully over. It’s 4th November and it’s T-shirt weather here.

Books - Films - Life :)

Dipping my toe in…

September 3, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Friday I joined Tinder. My Skype student has been telling me about the wonders of Tinder over the last six months – that’s how he met his wife – and finally, just before my weekly lesson with him, I signed up. So far I’ve only just dipped my toe in, and I’m guessing it’ll be a while before I dip anything else in. I uploaded a selfie of me standing outside the cathedral, but I still haven’t completed my blurb, which needs to be in Romanian of course. I haven’t yet figured out the mechanics of swiping right and “super likes”, and besides, it’s all just a bit scary. At least I wasn’t forced to sign up using Facebook. (Someone “hearted” me earlier today. What do I do now?)
I would like a partner, but I’m not desperate. Most of the time I’m absolutely fine being on my own.

A film festival has been taking place here over the last few days. Some of the films have been showing at the small amphitheatre just two minutes’ walk from here. On Friday night, soon after my Skype lesson, I saw Coborâm la Prima (which I’d translate as “We’re getting off at the next stop”). It seemed very Romanian, being set almost entirely in one carriage of a Bucharest metro train, on the day after the Colectiv night club disaster of 2015. The train got stuck and the occupants of the carriage got to know each other quite well. Some of them even used Tinder. Last night I expected to be seeing a film about the massacre in Norway, but there was a technical hitch and they showed Jeune Femme, a French film, instead. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Neither of those films cost me a penny.

Station Eleven was a brilliant read. My only issue was that the flu pandemic, that wiped out over 99% of the world population, spread at an unrealistic speed. If you die within two days of catching it, with almost no incubation period, how could that level of contagion occur? That’s a very minor complaint though. It was a beautifully written book, and I highly recommend it.

My Skype student also said I should join a dance class, but we all have lines we need to draw.

It’s still pretty damn hot: we’ve had a high of 33 for the second day running.

Books - Other sports - Politics

Just a quick update…

August 27, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve been reading Station Eleven, a bloody fantastic book by Emily St John Mandel. I’m finding it hard to put down. I did however find time to prepare for tomorrow’s lessons and make a crumble with those plums I picked last weekend (but wouldn’t have done if I’d known someone was watching).

On Friday I heard that John McCain wouldn’t be continuing his brain cancer treatment, and less than 48 hours later he was dead. Although I was very glad that Barack Obama beat him to the presidency, I also felt that McCain would have done a fine job. Picking Sarah Palin as his running mate probably didn’t help his cause though. McCain was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War in 2003 but was seen as a maverick in more recent times; that’s more a reflection of how deeply conservative the Republicans have become than anything else. But his vote against the repeal of Obamacare last year was one of the more dramatic moments of Trump’s presidency to date. I’ve just read that McCain, who lived to 81, is survived by his 106-year-old mother.

Baseball. Yesterday morning I caught the tail-end of the marathon game between the Milwaukee Brewers and Pittsburgh Pirates. It went to 15 innings, finishing at quarter to one in the morning, local time. I was glad to see it because it was once-in-a-blue-moon crazy, and the sort of crazy that can only happen in the National League where the pitcher is forced to bat. The Red Sox, on the other hand, have lost five of their last seven, and are now only seven games ahead of the Yankees in the division race. That’s still a lot, but they have a tough run-in. It isn’t quite over just yet.

Books - Films

Just a normal day

April 23, 2018 by 0 Comments

Friday was my 38th birthday, but in my head I’ve been 38 since the start of the year, maybe because it’s 2018, hence 20+18. That handy little rule will work, of course, until 2099. My “big” day was an entirely normal work day.

Last week was a busy one – as usual, I finished work every weekday (including my birthday) at 9:30 pm. One of the students I saw on Wednesday, and who started with me last June, texted me to say she’ll no longer be coming. She said it was for “personal reasons”, but I’m guessing it’s because I told her (finally) on Wednesday to stop interrupting me, even if she didn’t expressly say that was the reason. To be honest I’m fine with that.

I haven’t joined a tennis club yet (I’m still unsure of how to do so) and at the end of last week I sometimes stayed in bed beyond seven, but I didn’t do too badly with my goals. I’m certainly eating less.

After this morning’s lesson (with a guy who, as it happens, is one day younger than me) I had a Skype conversation with the bloke I carpooled with in Wellington. He seemed pretty good.

I’ve just finished Prisoners of Geography, a book about how geopolitics between nations is shaped and constrained by the geography of the countries involved. It’s not as dry as it sounds. I’m just about to see Red Sparrow at the cinema in Iulius Mall.

It’s warm for the time of year. Today it’s been 26 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

Books - Language teaching - Life :)

The snap is back

March 19, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Thursday evening a miracle occurred. The books that my parents bought me for Christmas actually arrived. Who was to blame for the ridiculous delay we don’t know, but they’d been to Timișoara at least twice prior to last week, before making a bizarre detour to Réunion, perhaps because it has the same initial letter and the same length as Romania. I’ve just made a start on Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The best title of the books I received is clearly Fucking Apostrophes.

Only 29 hours of teaching last week. Perfect, really. I haven’t done much this weekend and I don’t feel particularly guilty about that. Yesterday I had my only lesson of the weekend – the best moment was when I showed my student the synonyms for “happy” in an online thesaurus. What’s gay doing there?!

Today I had a look at second-hand bikes at Aurora, one of the weekend markets, but they only had a small selection. I’ll have a look at Mehala, another market (supposedly famous for being where stolen bikes end up) next weekend, if I get the chance. I really need the exercise.

Stephen Hawking’s passing is sad, even if he lived half a century longer than his prognosis gave him. He was something of a local hero for me.

And it’s cold and drab again. Not a ray of sun in the forecast for the next five days.

Books - Films - Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare, here we come

August 12, 2017 by 0 Comments

Today Dad emailed me with a page outlining the potential horror show of complications that I could be faced with during and after sinus surgery, should I choose to have it some time in the autumn. Then, right on cue, I got an attack of severe pain lasting about an hour, this time in my right sinuses.

The ENT specialist told me that extreme weather doesn’t exactly help, and we’ve had a ton of that lately. Caniculă – extreme heat – has often been the first item on news bulletins. Tomorrow things will cool down significantly, and maybe Europe’s most energy-sapping and soporific heatwave since 2003 (which was my last European summer prior to this one) will be over.

Unsurprisingly, being holiday season, I’ll have slim pickings on the work front for the rest of the month. I’ve got a three-hour lesson pencilled in for tomorrow morning, then nothing else until Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to go somewhere, just like my students. But where? Brașov seemed the obvious choice – everybody visits Brașov when they come to Romania, but I’ve lived here ten months (shit! have I really?) and still haven’t been there. Unfortunately, because it’s August, every man and his dog will be in Brașov, and by Romanian standards it’s an expensive city. So I’ve decided instead to head north to Baia Mare, a seven-hour train trip away. I’m due to get up there around 11pm tomorrow. I haven’t done much research on the place, but it’s in Maramureș, an extremely rugged and remote corner of Romania, jam-packed with tradition. On travelling through Maramureș, a 2013 article in the Telegraph says this: “This is not the place to hire a car or to drive your own car. Roads are notoriously dangerous, directions are difficult, and maps are few.” Well, I’ll just be visiting a city in my first taste of the region, but it should be interesting, and who knows who I might meet on the train.

After watching Nosedive, the opener to Series 3 of Black Mirror, in which everything you do and say is star-rated out of five, I dared to watch the next two episodes. Playtest wound up as a full-on horror movie which I thought was spoilt by the ending. Shut Up and Dance though, oh boy. I was hoping for something good to cling to, somewhere, anywhere, but by the end of it I felt my well had been sucked dry. The final twist was unexpected (to me; maybe I’m just bad at reading these things) and not in a good way. I did however sympathise enormously with the main protagonist, even after the shocking revelation at the end. At the start you see him working in a kitchen, and his experiences with his colleagues were similar to mine in real life when I washed dishes in a pub. Shut Up and Dance was very well done, but I’d strongly advise against watching it if you’re feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or if you have anything important to do immediately afterwards.

I’m currently reading The Elements of Eloquence. It’s about rhetoric. Figures of speech. Like parataxis. Which I’m using now. But not very well. I’m just about to find out what the hell epizeuxis is.

Books - Films - Language teaching

Hellishly hot

August 6, 2017 by 0 Comments

It’s been hellishly hot the last few days. As I write this at 6pm, it’s nudging 40 degrees in Timișoara, and Europe as a whole is sweltering in its most severe heatwave since 2003 when thousands of mainly elderly people in France succumbed. I’ve been avoiding the outside world between about 10am and 9pm whenever possible, but sometimes I have no choice. Heading out to Dumbrăvița on Thursday in 38-degree heat wasn’t a lot of fun. But at the time I thought to myself that temporary discomfort was a pretty small price to pay if it meant I go to do something I enjoyed.

On Wednesday I worked for 7½ hours without leaving my flat. It wasn’t a perfect day – I ran into trouble when one of my students absorbed all my planned material with half an hour still to play and I had to frantically find something – but my last lesson went well and afterwards I felt a warm feeling of satisfaction wash over me, something akin to the time I bounced down the steps of my student’s apartment block last November, feeling about eight foot five. Over half my teaching for the week – 14½ hours – was crammed into that one day.

I’ve just finished Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised – he’s an incredible songwriter after all – but it’s an exceptionally well-written and well-produced book. I like that he recognises how lucky he’s been – far too many successful people don’t. It’s funny that whenever I read any published material in English now, I do so with a teacher’s eye. Several times in the book, “bused” is used to mean “transported by bus”. Why on earth would you spell that with a single S?! The answer is that in the US, the spelling “bused” alleviates confusion with the past tense of “buss”, an old-fashioned verb meaning “to kiss”. On a few occasions he uses “mike” to mean microphone. Yay! That’s so much more logical to me than “mic” which has grown in popularity, to my annoyance. He uses A LOT of all-caps – not something I would do – but it WORKS!

This afternoon I watched the first episode of Series 3 of Black Mirror. In this age of like counts and friend tallies and social graphs, a system where likes and dislikes are hard currency is all too disturbingly imaginable. Tellingly, the only person in the film I warmed to was a dishevelled elderly truck driver, and her score had plummeted to the point where she effectively lived off the grid, although at the end I did find the main character much more likeable.

On the subject of dystopia, I mentioned Bruce Springsteen’s Vietnam draft-dodging before. I didn’t know this before, but in December 1969 they held a nationally televised draft lottery, where birthdays were drawn from a jar to determine the order in which young men would be drafted. You can find footage of the lottery on YouTube. The whole process is so messed up, and just to make you wonder if it’s even real, they play a “Merry Christmas” ad for a shaver in the middle of it all. To cap it all off, the lottery wasn’t even random: if you were born late in the year, you had a better chance of drawing one of the unlucky low numbers because the capsules had been placed in the jar in month order and hadn’t been mixed properly – most of the November and December dates remained at the top of the jar. Because it’s a classic randomisation failure, I’m surprised I didn’t know about the lottery before, given my interest in statistics.

Books

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

July 31, 2017 by 0 Comments

I just about gave up reading when had my last flatmate; I just couldn’t do it. I’d read and reread the same paragraph and take nothing in. But now I’m relaxed, my head is free of all that stuff, and reading for pleasure actually works again. I’m currently towards the end of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born To Run. Dad lent it to me last month. Springsteen sure knows how to tell a story, whether in his songs or on the printed page. Reading about his humble beginnings, his relationship with his father, his black dog experiences, his crazy road trips across the country without a licence, the way he unashamedly dodged the draft for Vietnam (I can hardly blame him) – it’s all been very illuminating. After seeing how it affected his father, he didn’t touch alcohol until he was into his twenties, and perhaps even more remarkably, he avoided recreational drugs altogether. That’s probably helped to keep his brain sharp.

As I said to my cousin on Skype this morning, I feel like I’m only on lap two of a 10,000-metre race; I definitely get the sense now that I’m here for the long haul. I’ve been going nowhere for one decade of my life if I’m being kind to myself; two if I’m not. To go somewhere will take a while too.