by I’ve just had my 225th two-hour lesson – or should I say therapy session – with a woman who is becoming a giant pain in the arse. I would love her to go away. I have lessons with her son too, and those are highly productive, in complete contrast to anything I have with her. It amazes me how bright and well adjusted he is, considering both his parents are messed up in their own different ways.
Last Thursday I had a lesson with a guy in Brașov; these lessons are always productive and a pleasure. We spent the second half of the session on phrases to use at restaurants. One of these was “the hamburgers are off”, meaning “we’re out of hamburgers”. (Confusingly, we also use “off” to say that food has gone bad.) He said that if he was told that the hamburgers were off, he’d tell them to damn well turn them on then.
Having a bike again is a massive help. It speeds up my life, gives me more options. On Sunday I made a trip to Sânmihaiu Român, for the first time in ages, and got back just before the downpour. The rain totally wiped out the weekend’s tennis.
Poker. Well it hasn’t been that easy to play of late (see next paragraph) but I’ve had a good, or should I say lucky, August. My bankroll is $930, up $226 on the start of the month.
My laptop has been repeatedly crashing. Endless blue screens. CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. Doesn’t sound good, does it? DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE hardly gave me warm fuzzy feelings either. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Not less or equal?! Why not just say it’s more, for crying out loud? But more than what? Why be cryptic and meaningless at the same time? At UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION, the fourth blue screen error, I noticed my hard drive was pretty chocka so I dumped a load of my photos onto flash drives, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. Yesterday morning I took my laptop into the repair shop, and they told me I’d need to reinstall Windows 10. It crashed again the moment I switched it on when I came home; it gave me that crap about not less or equal. At that point I gingerly reinstalled Windows 10, and since then, touch wood, it hasn’t crashed. I rely on my laptop for everything. Without it I can’t do my job, it’s that simple.
Last night I talked to one of my students (mid-forties) about this general malaise that seems to have set in around the world, or the western world at least. From a collective standpoint, what’s there to look forward to anymore? What’s the new, big, positive change on the horizon? In the early nineties the Soviet Union broke up, Europe opened its borders, and the internet age began. Greater peace and prosperity, we all hoped. What have we got now? He said he was excited about the prospect of computers becoming more intelligent than humans and starting to dominate us. That doesn’t excite me, that’s for sure.
I was going to write the last part of my trip report, but I’ll tackle that in a separate post.
