plutoman.com – Page 17 – a romanian adventure

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Something on the horizon

December 23, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m feeling reasonably good at the moment, maybe because I have two things to look forward to. One, the books getting published, fingers crossed. And two, Mum and Dad coming over in May. When you live by yourself without a family, it’s quite easy to be staring at miles and miles of barrenness. An endless desert, with not even a tree in sight. This is especially true when it seems that everything in the wider world is going to the dogs; you can be totally bereft of anything on the horizon to latch onto, whether personal or collective. So I’m grateful for these two things.

Recently Dad sent my brother and I a pair of tape recordings of us when we were little. They were dated 1984 and 1985. The ’85 one was mostly me, making up a story as I went along. I was surprisingly eloquent for just five years old. I had a habit of repeating myself, but some of that was because I was big into rhyme, which is to an extent repetitious. Dad would read me Edward Lear or something in that line, which I really enjoyed. In fact, by five I was perfectly able to read it myself. Sometimes I think I peaked then, and my life since has been four decades of managed decline.

Yesterday I only had one lesson – maths with Matei – and since then I’ve been cooking. Salată de boeuf, salam de biscuiți, and a crumble which I made with quince and four enormous apples, a variety of cooking apple I’ve never seen before. (On the market they were just called mere acre, or sour apples; in fact they’re not that sour.)

I’m going to beat last year’s number of teaching hours by a small margin. According to my records, I’ve so far done half an hour more this year than in all of 2023, and I’ve still got some sessions tomorrow and a few between Christmas and New Year. I’m glad I’m coming to the end of my Christmas-themed worksheets and spot-the-difference pictures. I’m reindeered out now, I’m telling you.

A few days ago somebody sent me this video of Michael McIntyre’s “Silent Letter Day” skit which he performed at the London Palladium. I know I’m biased because I’m a word-obsessed English teacher, but I thoroughly recommend it for McIntyre’s extraordinary timing and delivery. I’ve had all kinds of fun and games with silent letters in my lessons. A student will read psychology and say “p-see-hhho-lo-jee”, with a pronounced p and a guttural h, just like how the equivalent word (psihologie) is pronounced in Romanian. I then ask my student to have another go, interrupting him or her as soon as I hear the p-s. “P-see…” No. “P-sigh…” No. “P-s…” No. Then I tell them that the p isn’t pronounced at all, much to their surprise.

The darts. It’s been a mixed bag so far. Often I’ve seen either both players performing well together, or both struggling (by their standards, of course). Darts is a funny game in that it has an objective measure of one’s performance (your average score per throw) but it’s perfectly possible to have a better average than your opponent and still lose the game. The best example of this was Jim Williams, the Welshman who was visibly better than Paolo Nebrida, his Filipino opponent. He averaged 7½ points better than Nebrida – that’s a lot – but missed five darts for the match, losing in a deciding leg. He also spurned a bunch of chances earlier on, otherwise the match wouldn’t have been so close in the first place. Another match I thought might go the same way was Matt Campbell’s against Mensur Suljovic. They’re both likeable characters and I didn’t mind who won. Campbell was clearly the better player, and eventually he did win, 3-2 in sets. Last night I saw Luke Littler’s first match. It took him a while to kick into gear but when he did so he produced a record-breaking 32-dart fourth set, coming millimetres from a nine-darter. Such ridiculous talent. Ryan Meikle, whom he beat 3-1, played very well too but couldn’t do anything at the end there. Yesterday’s final match saw Aussie madman Damon Heta win. Heta was lethal on the doubles and also came very close to a nine-darter.

Dorothy has invited me to church; I’ll be leaving any minute. Tomorrow she goes to England for Christmas. After the church service there will be food. I’ll be taking some of my salată de boeuf along.

Life :) - Music - Photos

Sad news, and wondering what came before

December 19, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

On Monday I found out that Petrică, one of the guys I used to play tennis with, had died at the age of just 57. He died a month ago of a heart attack. When I first played with him he leapt around the court. I remember partnering him in a set of doubles which we lost 6-1. If you’d just let me take my shot occasionally, maybe we wouldn’t have got thrashed. The next thing I knew, he’d developed kidney problems and was on dialysis. He still played tennis, but was limited to half an hour at a time. I’ve been in touch with a female friend of his; she said she’s in no mood for anything Christmassy. Petrică is the second of the tennis group to pass away: Domnul Ionescu, who was 70 or so, died of cancer at the beginning of 2022.

In other sad news, yesterday I had a lesson with my London-based student. I asked him if he had any news. Looks like I’m getting a divorce. He’s 35, with two boys aged five and two. I get the impression they got married nine years ago (in Romania, before moving to the UK) because it was just what you did, and now they’re facing a divorce which is just about always stressful and traumatic. With divorce rates hovering close to 50%, I often wonder whether getting married is ever really worth it. I mean, getting married is pretty damn stressful in itself, not to mention expensive.

This morning I opened a letter from my family friend in St Ives whom I spent considerable time with in August when I visited. Getting a letter these days is really quite something.

On Sunday I met both Mark and Dorothy in town, one after another with a longish break in between. I met them both at Berăria 700 which has reasonably priced food and drinks. Mark is almost ten years older than me, and I like to ask him about his memories of the seventies, growing up as he did in Tamworth, which isn’t far from Birmingham. This time he talked about people driving bubble cars. Being born right at the start of the Thatcher–Reagan era and growing up in Cambridgeshire rather than say the north of England, I sadly have no memories of a time before money was everything, except perhaps when I was really little and rampant capitalism hadn’t fully kicked in. I’m thinking of the funny little shops that still existed in St Ives back then, or the local auction in which Dad would scout around for antique furniture. (There’s still an auction in St Ives now, but the bottom has really dropped out of the antique market in the last 40 years.) Being born in 1980 means I can remember nothing that came before, but everything that came after.

I could really see the stark difference between the beginning and the end of the eighties when I read two of Garrison Keillor’s books, one published in 1981, the other in 1988. In the space of a few years, money had morphed from being a tool for buying useful goods and services and providing security, to being a thing in itself that fairly ordinary people wanted to acquire. Share prices were suddenly read out on radio bulletins as if they were things that mums and dads ought to know about, rather than being hidden away in tiny font in some obscure section of the paper.

Music. Lately I’ve been listening to Joan Armatrading. She was born in St Kitts and Nevis, as it is now called, but moved to Birmingham at a young age. She came out with a number of hits in the seventies and eighties. Love and Affection (1976) is wonderful; Drop the Pilot (1983) isn’t bad either.

Here are some pictures of town on Sunday evening:

Then and now. We might be going back to “then”.

The third old-style cinema to have opened in the city

Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Politics

Dodging a bullet and getting up my nose

December 15, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.

The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.

On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.

On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.

I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.

The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.

Autism - Films - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Gradually, then suddenly (plus more pics)

December 9, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Today I made another trip to Peciu Nou and Ciacova. (Pictures below.) The biggest benefit of having a car, after seven-plus years of not having one, is being able to easily see these beautifully rustic towns and villages. I rarely use my car to get around the city; when I’m in a rush (to get to a lesson, for instance) I find that massively stressful, and my bike is just as fast anyway.

In recent months I’ve been reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote, when he said that he went bankrupt “two ways: gradually, then suddenly”. I’ve felt a gradual societal decline over the last decade or so, but lately the process has kicked into an entirely different gear. Perhaps I’m in a better place to feel it than most, because unlike most people, I’m not busy playing the game. I walked off the pitch a long time ago, and now I can sort of sit back and observe. From my vantage point, things now look very ugly indeed.

On a similar theme, a couple of months ago I discussed childlessness with Dorothy, who never had children herself. It was a hot topic in the US presidential campaign: vice president-elect JD Vance basically said that if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in the future of the country, or I suppose the world. I imagine that’s quite a popular viewpoint: if you have kids, you care more about future generations. But if you think about it for five seconds, you’ll realise that it’s actually bollocks. Most parents aren’t really that bothered about the success of future generations; rather, they’re extremely bothered about the success of their own specimens of future generations, which isn’t the same thing at all. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that; it’s simple human nature to want your own kids to succeed. But maybe that means that if you don’t have kids, you’re able to invest in future success in a more dispassionate way.

This weekend I watched a two-part BBC documentary on autism. Presented by the British naturalist Chris Packham (who revealed his autism diagnosis a few years back), Inside Our Autistic Minds showcases four autistic people, all under 30, though all very different. One of them is the son of Ken Bruce, the radio DJ, who is highly intelligent but non-verbal. Chris Packham teams up with animators and other creative people to produce short films to help illustrate their autistic lives better. Very well done (Britain tends to be really good at this stuff), though I’d have liked one or two of the participants to have been older. Naturally I compare myself to these people. On more than one occasion I thought, I’m more extreme than you. When it comes to avoiding social situations and generally keeping out of people’s way, I’m pretty damn extreme.

Yesterday many parts of the UK were buffeted by storms. When I got back from my lessons in Dumbrăvița I tuned into the match between Barnsley and Birmingham, thinking it might have succumbed to the elements. But no, it was on. At times the corner flags were near-horizontal, such was the wind. The first half was mostly uneventful. Barnsley dominated the early stages of the second half and took a deserved lead, only for Blues to hit back immediately with a screamer from Jay Stansfield. Later Barnsley had a player sent off for a second yellow card, and then Stansfield scored what proved to be the winner for the away side. Barnsley were a bit unlucky not to at least get a draw. Thanks to the copious added time, the game was still going on when my online lesson started. I make it the fifth time already this season that Blues have come from behind to win a league game. That’s a lot.

Two weeks ago, or was it three, I decided to self-block YouTube, thinking all those videos are a huge time-waster. I only applied the block to weekdays, but I’m finding I have no desire to watch it at weekends either.

I hope that in the coming days I’ll take delivery of the batch of books I’ve ordered. I’ve missed having a good book to read.

Here are today’s pictures from Ciacova. I’m not sure how that Cadillac ended up there. The guineafowl (bibilică in Romanian, plural bibilici) were all tightly bunched in a corner before I disturbed them.

Family - Photos - Politics - Romania - Writing a book

Good news about the books, an un-election, and some pictures

December 8, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I see I somehow neglected to mention my meeting with the publishers, so here goes. It was a weird meeting with the mother and daughter that lasted all of two hours. The mother likes to talk. She’s a French teacher, and sometimes she even switched from Romanian to French. Like I said, weird. At the beginning I was presented with a print-out of both the picture book and the A-B section of the dictionary. I started to comment on the picture book – for the love of God, don’t stretch or squoosh Dad’s illustrations as you’ve done here – before zooming out to the big picture. Before we start talking fonts and formats and stuff, can you assure me that this book, I mean these books, are actually going to see the light of day? The answer was yes, which was by far the most encouraging thing in the whole meeting. I was worried that everything Dad and I had done to this point might be in vain. It seemed EU funding will pay for a large chunk of it. (Of course, this is Romania, so until I actually see the books in print I can’t be 100% sure of anything.) Sometimes I struggled to articulate – in Romanian – what I wanted to say, but we managed to flesh out some important details. Surprisingly, I’m in charge of the layout, not them, and I agreed to a deadline of 15th January to get the small book sorted. This won’t be an easy task because the pictures won’t all be the same size, they’ll need varying amounts of explanatory text, and so on. We agreed that both books would be in B5 format, roughly 7 inches by 10, though the picture book will be landscape and the dictionary portrait. I have no plans for Christmas, which means I’ll have time to spend on the books.

Yes, Romania, where you can’t guarantee anything. Even whether elections actually happen. On Friday they (Romania’s supreme court, I think) invalidated the first round of the presidential election, less than two days before the second round was due to take place. (In fact, overseas voting for the second round had already begun.) This was a major shock. A couple of days earlier, documents were made available that showed that Putin supporter Călin Georgescu had been hugely promoted, probably by Russia, through algorithms (and money) on TikTok, which is Chinese-owned. The re-run of the election probably won’t happen until March, and it’s unclear if Georgescu will be allowed to run again. Last weekend’s parliamentary elections are still valid as far as I know, so presumably Klaus Iohannis (the current president) will stay in place, with the new parliament, until March. But really, all bets are off.

I spoke to my parents this morning. Mum had her shiny new crown. She described the space-age process of X-rays followed by scans from every angle that enabled the crown to be 3D-printed. None of this business of having to bite into a mould; it’s all cutting-edge stuff. The price is cutting-edge too. I could see a lovely painting of Dad’s which they’d hung in the kitchen; it was of the fruit and vegetable market in Cambridge. We discussed my brother, who has been pulling out every imaginable stop to complete his latest assignment for his master’s. Master’s. Where on earth has this motivation come from? He called me during the week for help with a spreadsheet. Luckily I spent quite a few years dealing with spreadsheets in a previous life. Only six weeks until I’ll be getting a niece.

I had four lessons yesterday – two English, two maths. Matei wanted to talk about the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a gargantuan American health insurer. Delay, deny, defend: that’s apparently what was written on the shell casings. Matei said that his death was being celebrated all over TikTok. I suggested that celebrating the brutal killing of someone with a wife and family who was just doing his job isn’t really OK, even if the company is as parasitic as the one he headed. But at least this has shed a light on the unforgivable state of US healthcare and insurance. Unfortunately I suspect it will all just blow over like everything else in America. It’s headline news for a week or two, but ultimately nothing happens. Just think of George Floyd. Or the numerous school shootings. Or the 2008 financial crisis where the big banks got bailed out as people lost their homes, and people shrugged their shoulders. They just put Trump back in, after all.

Last Sunday I went out for a spin, visiting Peciu Nou, Cebza, Petroman (which isn’t far off my online name) and finally the decent-sized town of Ciacova which its cobbled streets and square. My brother called me while was in Ciacova, so I gave him a bit of a tour. I still hope one day he will visit me in Romania. After getting off the phone, a dog bit my leg, completely out of the blue. He or she (I didn’t pay attention to that) didn’t draw blood, otherwise I’d have seen the doctor.

On Sunday evening I went into town and saw the parade of army men with torches, for the national day celebration.

I sent this picture of Peciu Nou to Dad, who wants to turn it into a painting. He wanted to see the other side of the street, so it looks like I’ll be making another trip there.

Various pictures of Ciacova

No trains have been down this track for a while

National day celebrations. Eight years ago, this was all so new and exciting, even though my feet froze.

Maths teaching - Politics - Romania

A manifest danger

December 1, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

It’s 4:35 and daylight is fading on the last day before winter officially starts. I’ve only had a pair of two-hour lessons today: my 90-minute maths session with the 11-year-old girl got cancelled. I’ve still got one online session to come. Matei wanted to discuss the presidential election with me this morning. Regarding the ongoing recount, he said he thought they’d “put Marcel Ciolacu through” to the next round, overturning the original result in which he was pipped by Elena Lasconi for second place. This comment amused me. Put him through? Is this what Romanian elections are like? A kind of X-Factor, instead of, you know, checking the votes to see who has the most? If the process is above board (big if here I suppose), whoever was ahead originally should win after a recount more than 50% of the time. That’s just basic probability. Like most people, Matei doesn’t have a great handle on probability. His fancy new graphical calculator has random functions where you can toss coins, roll dice, or draw cards. But they aren’t random, he said, pointing to the clusters of heads or threes or spades or whatever. I tried to explain that clusters are exactly what randomness gives you. (His calculator functions in fact aren’t strictly random – it’s impossible to make such processes truly random – but they’re indistinguishable from being random.) A course on probability and statistics would be more practically useful than what we’re actually doing. Matei had been following the election pretty closely, but he said he’d never even heard of Georgescu beforehand. That gives you some idea of how a big a shock the result was. The subject has come up quite a bit this week. At my school we have to learn English, German and French! Soon you might be learning Russian too.

This recount is a logistical pain: there are 9.4 million votes including those from overseas. (Just 98 votes were cast in New Zealand.) The second round is supposed to happen a week tomorrow, and right now we don’t even know whose names will appear on the ballot paper. If the recount does put Ciolacu in second, I don’t know what would happen; he’s already said he won’t participate. Would Georgescu then win unopposed? That wouldn’t go down well. If Ciolacu decides to run in the second round after all, then Romanians have got (as I see it) two total disasters to pick from. Tomorrow we’ve got the parliamentary elections, so it’s all happening. I went through Piața Operei on Thursday night as I came back from a lesson. A protest was starting up. A small one, but who knows where it might lead.

Last time I said that enshittification had been named Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The Cambridge Dictionary gave the honour to the verb manifest. There’s nothing new about manifest as a verb: things can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. What’s new though is that people are now using the verb transitively: you can now “manifest success”. In other words, achieve success by pure force of will. Maybe if I did that I wouldn’t be the irredeemable failure that my 23-year-old student said I was. This manifesting sounds like total woo-woo to me. Woo-woo is sadly on the rise; astrology is booming, for instance. It goes with all the social media-fuelled conspiract theories. None of this will end well.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the young women I teach: many of them have no discernible sense of humour. As I said last time, it’s like you’re communicating with an AI tool. My Romanian teacher said on Tuesday that Georgescu’s very limited sense of humour is a bad sign. I see what she means.

Tomorrow is Romania’s national day, which should mean a parade of military and emergency vehicles. How it will pan out on a Sunday morning, when so many people are at church, I’ll have to see.

A lovely piece on a Romanian news website today. How Europe is preparing for World War Three. From Poland’s Iron Dome to the awakening of an old military giant.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Enshittification: it’s pouring out now

November 28, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Yesterday some candles suddenly appeared in the stairwell. When Elena (the lady who owns the flat above me) called me from Canada, I found out what they were for. The woman on the ground floor had just died. She was only 68. Her husband died at the beginning of this year.

It’s been looking pretty grim for a while, but 2024 has taken enshittification (Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year) to another level. (How did the en- prefix get there?) At every turn we’re sinking deeper into the mire and I don’t see a way out. We’re now systemically prevented from finding an escape. Most of us aren’t even trying anyway. We’re all ordering up pointless crap on Amazon and sharing memes on TikTok that last about five minutes before the next one comes along. At least I think that’s what people do on TikTok; I honestly don’t know.

On Sunday we had the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. Călin Georgescu, pro-Putin, pro-dictatorship, anti-NATO and a conspiracy theorist on every matter imaginable, came from nowhere to top the poll with just under 23% of the vote. He didn’t run a traditional campaign, but he was all over TikTok and Facebook. Since I use neither of them, his popularity passed me by. Also, in Timișoara where I live, Georgescu didn’t do very well. But now I know. He’s 62 so he’s been around the block a bit. He got a PhD in soil science 25 years ago and has since been involved in sustainable development and held positions within the UN where he investigated the adverse effects of dumping toxic waste. So it seems he’s got a brain on him and he did some good stuff before rapidly morphing into, well, toxic waste.

Second place was also a shock. Elena Lasconi, a centrist pro-European, edged out Marcel Ciolacu of the PSD (one of Romania’s big traditional parties) by the tiniest of margins, 19.18% to 19.15%. Ciolacu had a big lead over Lasconi on Sunday evening but his advantage narrowed throughout the night. I watched the results from the last few polling places (out of about 20,000) come through on Monday morning. Lasconi finally poked her nose in front with just 18 of them left to declare. Surprisingly there was no recount. I was glad Lasconi made it to the final two. She’s inexperienced, but the PSD are mired in corruption.

Dominoes are falling all around. Lasconi must beat Georgescu in the run-off on 8th December, or else Romania will be the next to tumble. A lot of Romanians don’t even care. Does anyone care about anything that actually matters anymore? On the radio yesterday there was open discussion of Romania being under attack. Hypothetical, but still.

Today I had four sessions between 3:30 and 9pm. A boy of eight, a girl about to turn 18, then a boy of nine, and finally a woman in her late forties. Last night I had a nightmarish session with a woman of 23. We discussed success and failure. She said that success to her means having a family and a good career. Fine. A shallow definition, but not an unusual one. But then I put it to her that I have neither a family nor a traditional career. Does that mean I’m a failure, then? Yes. I burst out laughing at that point. The rest of the 90-minute session was like talking to an AI bot. Last week I asked her to name one thing she thought could improve Romania. More cars, she said. Hmm, there seem to be enough cars here already. In fact when I’m getting around the city, I’d really like there to be fewer cars. Are you saying that if Romanians became richer then people would have more cars? Or that if Romania’s road infrastructure improved, more cars could be accommodated? Her responses are one word, no words at all, or just utterly bizarre. It’s the same story with almost all women I see that were born between about 1998 and 2008. When I saw the older woman this evening, I told her how great it felt to finally talk to someone like a normal human being.

I recently saw some photos my brother had taken of the little one in the snow, with a mini snowman behind him. They’ve had a real cold snap over there; snow in November is highly unusual. We had a few flurries ourselves last Friday.

When I finished work at 9:30 last night I spoke to Elena and then watched the rest of Birmingham’s match at Exeter. A pretty nice football ground, I thought. It’s called St James Park, and often comes up in British pub quizzes. (Newcastle’s ground is, famously, St James’ Park. Which other team’s stadium is called St James Park?) Exeter sounds like a pretty nice city too; I’ve never done more than pass through it on the train. I’ve sometimes thought that maybe Exeter should vote to leave the UK. What would that be called? Blues were already 1-0 up when I turned on the game. They were dominant but couldn’t put Exeter away until they got (and scored) a penalty ten minutes from the end. Two-nil was how it finished.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.

Books - Family - Life :) - Politics

And the band played on

November 18, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Scârț, the place that has all the communist memorabilia and also houses the theatre I went to last December, reopened today, so I met Dorothy there for coffee this afternoon. They had records and books for sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Tracy Chapman’s first album would be amazing to have on vinyl, but I wasn’t going to fork out 160 lei for it. We sat inside – the renovation was still under way – and had tea and coffee. We met an Australian guy of sixty or so who had a long white beard and had that general bushman look about him. He also had his cat with him. He talked at length about his cat, including how he nibbled first his fingers this morning, then his dick. He said he lived a two-minute walk from Scârț. He settled in Timișoara ten years ago. In the meantime he tried to return to his native Sydney but couldn’t afford a place to live. Dorothy and I talked about all manner of things including Balinese first names.

Chats with Mum and Dad now revolve around two things. Their house (see later) and how irredeemably screwed we seem to be as a species. Things weren’t looking too rosy even a decade ago, but as I see it we’ve recently entered a new dark age, a cultural desert, devoid of meaning and substance and most of all, hope. Too few of us care because we’ve been conditioned not to care. We’ve all got six-inch rectangular shiny things in our hands that distract us from anything that really matters. And most of us are pretty busy working, in some cases just to make ends meet, but in other cases so we can afford pointless shiny shit that we’ve been conditioned to think we need. The biggest story of the weekend was a geriatric ex-champion boxer (who was massively famous when I was about eight) losing to some YouTuber who is supposedly massively famous now. Both trousered millions just for showing up. There’s also some conference going on in a petro-state where they won’t do anything to solve a climate crisis that many in power deny even exists. Bitcoin has hit US$90,000, a new record high, on the back of Trump’s re-election. How that’s supposed to be a good thing for anybody, apart from the bros who have bitcoin, I have no idea. Elon Musk has even named a new government department after a crypto coin. It feels more and more that as we go about our daily lives we’re like the band that played on as the Titanic sank, though worse, because the band didn’t actually make the ship sink faster.

The House. It feels worthy of a capital H now. On Wednesday I called Mum and Dad. After a few minutes with Mum, she went to an exercise class, so I got to talk to Dad alone, which meant a certain calmness and frankness. Their place is irretrievably bad, he said. “I’m embarrassed to have people round, especially if they ever saw our old place.” Yikes. He’s doing a whole load of DIY now, including doing up a big old shed, a process my brother called “polishing a turd”. Is all this work really worth it? Mum is in denial, he said. The only good news is that the house and renovation have set them back (so far!) around $900k, when I thought the figure was more like $1.1 million. It was confusing – there were so many quotes floating around before (and as) the work got started. Dad wants to be out of there in two years. Sounds like a good plan. They should be challenging their energies into finding a suitable next place, rather than, you know, polishing turds.

I’m reading a book that I picked up at Luton Airport in (I think) June 2023. It’s called Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola. I chose it mostly because of the enticing red-and-yellow cover and the author’s name. (The author is a woman.) The modern themes and language (words like mandem which looks kind of Portuguese to me; it’s actually multicultural London English or MLE) make me think I’m too old for this book. It’s like the opposite of a historical novel; I’m reading about a time after my own time. Wikipedia gives the author’s date of birth as 24/2/91, so yes, she’s quite a bit younger than me, but I would have guessed even younger. I’ve so far read just four chapters, and well chapter three was great, so even though the rest of it has left me cold I’ll persevere a little while longer.

Two months, give or take, until I have a niece. Apparently within two hours of my sister-in-law finding out she was having a girl, her mother had bought a whole load of new pink shit. Because that’s what we now do.

Films - Maths teaching - Photos

A big plus

November 13, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

It’s now grey and properly nippy out there. But that’s immeasurably easier to handle than the hellscape that was summer. We had two and a half months of disgustingly hot weather.

Yesterday I hit a brown pigeon on my bike. Ugh. There are so many pigeons here, I suppose I was likely to do that eventually. I didn’t immediately kill it, but I ran over one of its legs and damaged a wing. An old lady picked it up and put it next to a shop wall, where it would surely die.

Maths. Teaching that in addition to English has been a big plus. Pun intended. I don’t get all that enthused by trying to bump a decent student with rich parents up from a B to an A, but when you get beyond that it can actually be pretty fun. Like last night when I taught an 18-year-old guy that a minus times a minus equals a plus. I’m guessing he was taught that at school a few years ago, but maths at school often does just wash over you. Rather than just teach him that fact, I showed him what would happen if a minus times a minus remained a minus. This would be crazy, right? I gave him a “quiz” as I called it, based on we did in the previous session, then spent the remainder of the two hours scribbling on the whiteboard. Every few minutes he took a picture.

Lately I’ve found a Youtube channel called Combo Class in which maths is taught in a pretty unique way – outside mostly, often with things catching fire or falling over each other. The first time I saw it I wondered what the hell I was watching, then persevered and saw that this guy really knew his stuff and could teach it in a very engaging way. He taught me plenty I didn’t know and got me to think about concepts I did know in a totally different way. He’s a big proponent of using bases other than ten (six and twelve, mostly). Base ten, which is ubiquitous to the point that we can hardly think of any alternative, is far from the best base, mathematically speaking. We use it because most of us have ten fingers and ten toes. But it isn’t a fluke that (in the English-speaking world at least) there’s been a lot of twelve around. Time, money, length, cartons of eggs, and so forth. Twelve splits up much more nicely than ten does. And we even have the special word dozen for it. (Here in Romania, everything is so ten-centric – even eggs are sold in tens – that teaching fractions becomes a major challenge; people can’t conceive of dividing something into thirds or eighths or twelfths.)

On Friday I saw a film at Cinema Victoria with Dorothy. We saw Good Bye, Lenin!, a tragicomedy that came out in 2003. It’s about a woman who fell into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her son’s increasingly convoluted efforts to keep the news from her when she woke up eight months later. The film is in German; it was subtitled in Romanian. The soundtrack was composed by Yann Tiersen, who also did Amélie (great film) two years before. Very well done, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I’d have much preferred some good old simple British comedy. Amazingly, tickets were only 15 lei (£2.50 or NZ$5.50).

Saturday was a full-on work day, mostly in Dumbrăvița. On Sunday I went back to Dumbrăvița to meet Mark for lunch at a burger joint called E10. I wasn’t sure whether to pronounce it in the Romanian way, or if it was an English-language pun (Eaten? Eton?). The burger was fine, if a little pricey. The crappy plastic modern versions of great songs did my head in though, and just being in Dumbrăvița is pretty nasty in itself. A massive, sprawling suburb that just keeps growing, so much of it feels like it was plopped there last Tuesday. There’s the park with the two churches, which is nice, but veer far from that and you’re faced with endless acres of fakeness. And then there are the cars. They keep getting bigger and less Romania-like. The whole place hardly seems to be in Romania. The only positive is a large wooded area near where Mark lives, which is great for walking his two dogs.