Tiempo libre

I became a free man again as of 1:33 yesterday afternoon when I submitted my grades and went through the official (and ever-so-asinine) “check-out” procedure at the college.

It’s a bit hard to enjoy the sweet relief that should be flowing my way after two nights of disrupted sleep, though. But yesterday when I got out of bed around 4:00 (after waking at 3:00), I spent the time fairly productively: I began working on a creative writing project I’ve been thinking about for a few months now.

And there are so many other projects that need to be started: cleaning (and possibly moving), planning my spring courses at the college (especially the online version), covering some ground in my reading assignments for the next term, and taking care of myself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I’ve neglected those things for far too long; although I have made it to the YMCA three times already this week.

Last night when I woke up at 3:00, I was too tired to even get out of bed and try to do something. I have an appointment with my neurologist Monday. We’ll see what pills she tries to throw my way this time as I adamantly insist I’m not taking anything she prescribes.

Wednesday afternoon I met Shellie and Blake for lunch at the Polish deli/café in Plano. We shared plates of pierogi (blueberry and potato-cheese) and naleśniki. It is really nice to finally feel like I’m part of a cohort (of sorts) at the university. It’s been years since I felt like I was part of a group of like-minded people who enjoy each other’s company.

Since submitting my last term paper (the one the professor called “brilliant”), I’ve spent far too much time on MySpace, that horrible online (anti)social network. If anyone wants to add me as their “friend,” please feel free, but you’ll have to use “soleo” as my last name. I try to ensure that my students will (at the very least) have a difficult time finding me anywhere online. And if there are any bloggers out there who want me to add their site to my links, send me the URL.

Ah, so much housecleaning … and most of it metaphorical.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Ah, the last of the Bullet-Point Fridays!
• I started this segment when I returned from Germany and began the fall semester just to ensure that throughout the long and difficult term I would sit down at least once a week and post something on my blog. And now it’s almost over.
• Well, not quite: I still have to submit another essay Monday. My research on the Redon painting has been fairly interesting, but—ohmygod!—I have no energy to just sit down and pound it out. I wrote about half of it Thanksgiving Day. While most of my compatriots were stuffing turkey down their throats, I was fasting and writing—what I tend to do best on that holiday. And I spent more than three hours at the museum Wednesday, so I have plenty of information to write about. Just tired.
• I exhausted myself with the first essay due before Thanksgiving. And thankfully that proved to be worth the effort. My professor wrote that I was “gifted.” (And I’ve hence decided to start a “Gifted & Talented” program for my Ph.D. curriculum! Too bad few of my colleagues will meet the requirements….) Of course, I started the research and reading on the flight to Germany last July, so it’s fairly accurate to say that I’ve done some serious thinking about my topic over the past 4½ months.
• Perhaps I will start my Bullet-Point Fridays again come January. But I think I’ll change the name: no good ever came from bullets. And “bullet points” imply a reduction and a leveling that I hope to never be guilty of.
• I submitted my translation portfolio for the term this morning. I feel like after the first draft I was no longer doing translation but merely leveling, making the text palatable to the pack of illiterate philistines who were in the class with me. After several classmates complained that one particular sentence was “hard to understand,” I declared, “Perhaps I should just translate it back into Polish, and then we’ll see how well you understand it!” If nature abhors a vacuum, then I’m certain she would indeed hate my classmates as much as I do.
• So, it’s time to go to bed. I still have so much more work to do over the next couple of weeks: exams to write and grade, essays to grade, grades to submit. And my winter break is quickly filling up with things wanting to be done and read. (And I’ll try to write so much more consistently throughout the week that Bullet-Point Fridays will be unnecessary.)

Bullet-Point Friday

• Stop having those miniature emotional outbursts (read: breakdowns) when you translate sentences like, "The baby with the head like a balloon died in the hospital while she held his hand," or you're never going to finish this translation assignment by Monday. Tochman's reportage is difficult enough without getting emotionally involved with the people he writes about. Besides, you'll have plenty of time to cry after you finish the Ph.D. when you find yourself even more unemployable.
  
• I have to admit that I hate Apple more and more. Their software is utterly non-intuitive and buggy. I feel the vein in my forehead start to throb and my right eye begin to twitch every time that damned spinning rainbow mouse icon appears because that usually signals that I'll soon have to reboot. And why, oh why, can't they not release iTunes updates every fucking week? (Or when they do, make it smart enough to not require that I have to delete all the old shortcuts and add new ones?) And how much longer will it take me to figure out how to add Polish and Japanese fonts to this PowerBook? I've been trying for a couple of weeks so far with no luck whereas I had no problem with all my PC machines. (And yes, I've visited all the help sites and have downloaded various fonts packages, and yet still I can only type in the Devil's language (read: English).)
• Offer to take Jason to the Stevie Nicks' concert next time she plays Dallas. Hell, if he is interested in spending his birthday listening to Tori Amos wail away at the piano, then he's got to be a fan of the spinning lace and chiffon of that witchy-witchy woman with the soul of a poet.
• Remember the pure bliss of sitting at all those coffee shops in San Francisco just last weekend with Jola, Kris, and Stephen with no agenda, no plan, and no anxiety about the sheer immensity of my insurmountable workload waiting for me back in Dallas. That was the best (and most necessary) get-away of all times.
  

Internationalismus

… or the post where Euro-Franz offends absolutely everyone. (By the way, here "euro" is pronounced "oy-Roh," pretty much how a Jew would address Rosie O'Donnell.)

Sitting at Café Angst yesterday afternoon, I asked myself the following question: is it racist for me to call my professor a smelly Romanian? She is indeed from Romania, and my nose can attest to her smelliness especially after sitting rather a bit too closely to her these past couple of days during our one-on-one sessions. And the next question: why am I in Germany studying German with a smelly Romanian? (I guess maybe a better next question would’ve been: why is this particular Romanian smelly? But my advanced education and intellect preclude obvious segues.)

Then I remembered: my morning language instructor is from Hungary. Quick: what’s German for “What the fuck?!?!” So I am sitting miserably at Café Angst—and no, that’s not the real name of this place, but Café Angst is such a better, more appropriate name for the basement of the Mensa, which is Roman-Germanic for "Student Union Building (SUB)"—slowly realizing that I’m here (heute Deutschland) studying German with a bunch of foreigners (“New Europeans,” I believe is the official term used by the US State Dept.; Morgen die Welt! no doubt.)

I refuse to believe that these so-called new Europeans are somehow better or even similar to the old ones. When are the old Europeans going to export their superior "bathroom technologies" to the east? Will there come a day of no smelly Romanians? Hell, why doesn’t Herr Professor Dingleberry just outsource the whole fucking program to the Chinese? That way, my solid German education would be just as good as poisoned dog food without the messy analogy.

Herr Professor Dingleberry, you must know, is the quintessential oompa-loompa kind of German who has a surreal lilt to his perfect cartoon caricature voice. I suspect he secretly wears lederhosen and plays the tuba.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to accept “feedback” on my German from teachers who misspeak and mispronounce almost every word in English. If I can understand their comments in not only broken but completely butchered English, then certainly any poor slob on the streets here won’t bat an eye when I use the “soft” pronunciation of the German ch instead of the “hard” one. But as the Nigerian woman who sits next to me attested, there are still a few old Hitlerites who appear out of nowhere (history? the bushes?) to scold foreigners for speaking English and/or bad German. Funny how it takes an 80-year-old German fuck to protect the language from a young African and Asian woman who came all this way to study the devil's language and who are simply waiting at a bus stop.

Oh, and you thought the Nigerian woman was going to get off easy: I refer to her (in my mind) as the Nigerian communist because what is mine is hers. One day this past week she, throughout the course of the class meeting, had "borrowed" my dictionary, pencil, pen, and notebook. A question I had never really considered asking before: Can I borrow my dictionary again?

Funny how speaking Polish last night after the concert with Kasja was the most normal I’ve felt since arriving in Germany. Looking back at just last week, speaking Spanish (with a lisping Castillian inflection--I sounded like a gay Puerto Rican--redundant?) was pure bliss, being able to express what I wanted and being able to understand the replies. The people I share English with here are not worth the pixels on your computer screens. Besides, there’s no way I could capture their insipid conversations and “observations.” (Case in point: we see a fabric store, and one says, “There’s a fabric store. I like fabric stores.” Gee, thanks for sharing. Why don’t you save that to blog later and just be quiet for now?)

The cute Azerbaijani boy asked me rather rudely in German on the way to the concert last night, “You don’t speak anything other than English?” I replied in Russian that I understood pretty much everything he was saying to the people he had just been speaking Russian to, and then in German I filled out my resume: Polnisch. Spanisch. Japonisch. Suckmydickbisch. I didn’t take it too personally, though, because he’s probably the prettiest eye candy around. When he wasn’t looking, I snapped a few photos of him. What the hell is going on with my fetish for widow’s peaks?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sen nocy letniej
by Wisława Szymborska

Już las w Ardenach świeci.
Nie zbliżaj się do mnie.
Głupia, głupia,
zadawałam się ze światem:

Jadłam chleb, piłam wodę,
wiatr mnie owiał, deszcz mnie zmoczył.
Dlatego strzeż się mnie, odejdź.
I dlatego zasłoń oczy.

Odejdź, odejdź, ale nie po lądzie.
Odpłyń, odpłyń, ale nie po morzu.
Odfruń, odfruń, dobry mój,
ale powietrza nie tykaj.

Patrzmy w siebie zamkniętymi oczami.
Mówmy sobie zamkniętymi ustami.
Bierzmy się przez gruby mur.

Małośmieszna para z nas:
zamiast księżyca świeci las,
a podmuch zrywa twojej damie
radioaktywny płaszcz, Pyramie.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Draft I)

The forest in Ardens already burns.
Don’t come any closer to me.
Senseless, senseless,
I was getting to know the world:

Eating bread, drinking water,
a gale grazed me, a drizzle doused me,
So be on your guard around me, get away.
Cover your eyes even.

Get back, get back, but don’t go by land.
Set sail, set sail, but not by sea.
Fly away, fly away my good man,
but don’t lay a finger on the sky.

Let’s look at each other with closed eyes.
Let’s speak ourselves with closed lips.
Let’s catch ourselves climbing the city wall.

We’re an insufficiently funny team:
it’s not the moon making the forest gleam,
and the blast tears off your lady’s shroud.
We are shadows cast by a mushroom cloud.