by It’s year four in Romania for me. Some things change. Most don’t. One thing that hasn’t is my success in meeting new people. (Well, actually, I had more luck when I arrived than I do now.) There are three reasons why it’s a struggle. First, it’s really tough to break into a society where everyone has their obligations and close-knit groups, even in a city where people are as open-minded as perhaps anywhere else in the country. Second, my schedule is hopeless for meeting people. So much of my work is in evenings and weekends. Third, and perhaps the biggest problem of all, as that I’m quite happy being on my own most of the time I’m not working (and I never have the urge to interact with dozens of people all at once). I simply don’t need much human contact (but I need a bit!). I don’t know what the answer is. If I found any of this stuff easy, I doubt I’d be in Romania in the first place.
As I’ve said before, this job (or the way I choose to do it, at least) involves printing, cutting and sticking, sometimes on a near-industrial scale, as well as thinking about exactly what to print, cut and stick. One example of this is Taboo, a game you can buy, where you have to describe a word to somebody without mentioning any of the other words on the card. My handmade version of Taboo has been a success, and it works especially well with my pairs of students. I’d made ten sets of 36 cards, at various levels of difficulty, but I’m in the process of making another four sets. In total, that’ll be 504 cards.
Last Thursday I had another difficult lesson with the pair of young women, one of whom cried in the previous session. The other woman (not the one who cried) was so vacant throughout most of the lesson that I wondered why I was even bothering. She’s 27, but she was like a 14-year-old sitting in the back of a maths class, waiting for it to be over. She’d checked out. Are you bored? Tired? Would you rather we did something else? I did tell her that if she doesn’t participate, there’s really no point. Other than that (and the cancellations), I had some quite productive lessons.
A week ago a pair of 50-foot masts appeared in front of the cathedral, and last night two huge flags were hoisted on them: a flag of Romania and another showing Timișoara’s coat of arms. I wish they could have spent the money on a ramp for the poor man with no legs who has to crawl up the steps (and the numerous others with mobility problems) instead of pointless frippery.
I spoke to Dad yesterday. Mum was in Alexandra, on her annual golf trip. Unfortunately we only spoke for ten minutes because I had a lesson to get to. Somehow we got onto the subject of sanitation and wooden water pipes. After that, he sent me an email saying he’d been quoted several thousand dollars to get the engine on his MG repaired, and he wasn’t looking forward to telling Mum.
I pay virtually no attention to memes. I almost never use social media. But in the last ten days I’ve been hearing a lot about “OK, boomer”, a phrase used by young people who are fed up with the attitudes of baby boomers. Last week a New Zealand Green MP in her mid-twenties used the phrase in parliament. This inter-generational conflict is all a bit silly, really. We’re all products of the world we’re born into, which we have no say in. It does annoy me, therefore, when wealthy older people deny the role that luck has played in getting them to where they have, and instead (ridiculously) talk of overcoming adversity. We had 15% mortgage interest rates! Well, big deal. You also had annual salary increases of almost that. Sure, it was a struggle to pay off the mortgage in 1980, but by 1995 you were laughing. Of course, I’m not that young myself anymore, and things have got even harder since I went to university and entered the workforce. Degrees have become vastly more expensive, and less valuable, in the last two decades. Would I have even gone to university in today’s environment?
These generational differences crop up in conversation in lessons. Many of my students are surprised to learn that in the Anglosphere it’s often older people who have the money.
