Category: social skills

February 26, 2010

Can’t you take a joke?

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.

–Deconstructing Harry

My last relationship started to fall apart over what I initially thought was a minor miscommunication. I had written something pithy and sarcastic, which he read as passive aggressive, and somehow the whole thing turned into this enormous fiasco. We’re talking knock-down, drag-out misery for days on end. Even when I begged for a pass, an acknowledgement that my intentions were good even if his reading of them was not, he still couldn’t let go of the implications of a literal reading of my e-mail. I should have seen the thing for the red flag it was. Obviously, he and I had radically different ways of communicating. I’m hyperbolic and sarcastic most of the time. The last thing I need in my life is someone too literal-minded. Everyone who likes me tolerates my constant exaggeration and distortion of events.

I tell you this because some people have commented that the picture at the top of my blog had changed from the photo of graffiti reading “fuck this world” to the more prosaic (ha!) image you now see of English bear-baiting. Several people had suggested that the original image might be offputting to new readers. While I’ll readily take suggestions (unabashed reader monger!), I do want to say that the entire “fuck this world” photo is really fantastic. My friend A (another one – this pseudo-anonymous acronym plan is getting problematic, as I seem to have an inordinate amount of friends whose names begin with A, B, M, and S) and I happened upon that graffiti during our time together in Berlin. The whole photo consists of me standing beneath the graffiti, appearing to be blithely unaware of its presence while I read my Lonely Planet Berlin guidebook. We thought that was hi-larious. In fact, I thought it was so funny that I made my mom repeat the basic premise when we happened upon some similar graffiti in Vienna. This time, someone had scratched out “Kill a racist, just for fun!” on an electrical panel and I posed next to it, carefully reading my Lonely Planet Vienna guidebook. Get it?! Because I’m an oblivious tourist!

Obviously, I might just have a sick sense of what it means to “tone things down” a bit. I discovered the current image of bear-baiting on a blog about the history of pit-bulls. Can we just talk for a moment about what a terrific metaphor bear-baiting is for this little blog? Bear-baiting as a sport was a serious attraction in England from the 16^th through the 19^th century. The main bear-garden in London was called (drumroll please) the Paris Garden (!) at Southwark. A bear-garden is a large circular pit surrounded by seating. In the center, a bear is chained either by its leg or its neck, and ferocious dogs are set upon it in waves. Some sport! Sometimes they would switch it up and bait different animals, including one occasion where they baited a pony with an ape tied to its back. The Puritans rightly wanted to see an end to the barbarity of bear-baiting, but it took nearly three hundred years of protest to formally ban the sport in England. While bear-baiting has been banned in the UK for nearly a century and is prohibited in most US states where bears live, it is still a popular sport in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. There isn’t much a linguistic residue of the practice in English, but my boyfriend Wikipedia tells me that “because the practice is time consuming and disrupts a person’s daily schedule, the term ‘bear baiting’ is sometimes used in Alaska to mean ‘screwing around.’” Beyond the obvious spatial concordances between a bear-garden and a blog where somebody writes about puking in public, don’t you love the idea of some Alaskan being like “That blogger girl has way too much time on her hands for bear baiting!”

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you it’s just a metaphor, dear reader, and we in no way condone animal cruelty here at Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background. We do rather unapologetically eat a lot of animals around here, but we have nothing but fond feelings towards bears in general.

February 16, 2010

The youth of today

A big part of my job are these Big Brother-style language laboratory type of classes which I sit at the front of the room and watch students listen to articles in English or practice their pronunciation. For a long time I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be doing in this context. I can technically hear what it is they are listening to and what they say into the microphone. But nothing from my supervisors suggests that I am supposed to actually monitor them. Instructors who have been here for longer have told me that I should regard lab classes as free time and should just go ahead and read or surf the internet or clip my toenails. Apparently I’m basically here to prevent them from stealing the computers in the perpetually-impending class riot. To this I say: fat chance. When the anti-capitalist riots actually start, I’m hauling my American ass out of here as quickly as possible.

One amusing thing about the laboratory classroom setup is that I can see what they are doing on their computers and control their active applications from my central monitor. I suppose this means that I should turn off the internet function on their computers or at least stop them from looking at Facebook during class. In reality, it is much more fun to spy on them. I like particularly when they sign in to the chat feature and talk about me, clueless to the fact that I am watching the entire thing. Yesterday one kid wrote to his buddy about how do-able I am for fifteen minutes or so. My French teenager text-speak isn’t terribly good, but I am pretty sure that he wrote something about how he would want me to keep my glasses on when he (a-hem) was doing something wildly inappropriate to/with me on my desk. I choked on my coffee when I read his little plan and immediately looked up at him, thus totally blowing my cover. I blew coffee-snot out of my nose and he turned beet red. This is excellent evidence as far as I am concerned that these mega-dorktastic glasses that I’ve been sporting this year are working just fine.

In contrast, this morning I am a bit worse for the wear. One of my students just wrote to another: “Is the teacher’s dress on backwards?” Discreetly this time, I looked down and realized with dismay that yes, indeed, I’m sitting in front of a class pretending to be an credible adult, but my dress is quite obviously on backwards.

February 14, 2010

To my reader with love

Happy Valentine’s Day, dearest reader.

I’m not so intellectually evolved as to be able to entirely dismiss the hulking specter that is Valentine’s Day as a mere contrivance of capitalist marketing. It’s a day that makes a lot of people—single and paired-off alike—feel bad about things that they don’t feel quite as bad about on February 12^th or 15^th. I had written you a juicy, long post about my most over- and underwhelming Valentine’s Days of yore. It involved red Mylar heart-shaped balloons, a horse-and-carriage ride, a handful of supermarket bouquets, some Kundera books, and watching my date get stoned in the Whole Foods parking lot. I read it over this morning and realized that it is best left filed in the ever-growing stack of things I’ve labeled Overshare. It’s not that I’m really opposed to the practice of oversharing, as I’m sure you well know. But self-analysis can get dicey if you practice it too often, especially if you do it with the idea of producing a narrative arc. Sometimes I worry that I am beginning to be like Mrs. Witt in D. H. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr. I think ole David Herbert got something really right about a personality type when he described her as such:

Lou shrank away. She was beginning to be afraid of her mother’s insatiable curiosity, that always looked for the snake under the flowers. Or rather, the maggots. Always this same morbid curiosity in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy pre-supposes a corpse, then psychology pre-supposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, pre-supposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

Yes, of course. When they are severed open, my past Valentine’s Days stink of corniness and mawkish expectations. But I realized this morning that all those poor gents that spent this silly holiday with yours truly deserve better than to have their histories splayed out on the internets for the sake of a laugh. Well, all of them except the Whole Foods guy. He joked that I was lucky to have an “almost-date” with him to the grocery store, fixed me a frozen pizza, and passed out blackout drunk on strawberry-flavored sparkling wine on my couch by 6 p.m. Face-down. Feel free to remind yourself of that if you find yourself on a less-than-remarkable date today. You’re welcome.

At any rate, while I’m not a big fan of this holiday, I’m definitely a big fan of you. I hope your day is lovely. Thanks for stopping by.

February 9, 2010

Sous les pavés…

Yesterday I returned to my job after three weeks of vacation time that inexplicably followed the two and half weeks of vacation time that I had for the holidays. The French are experts at not working. My students usually begin e-mailing me a week before a projected transit strike to explain that it is unlikely that they will be make it to class. I’ve seen doctor’s notes for ailments akin to a hangnail as an excuse for weeks of absence. My bank isn’t open on Sundays. Or Saturdays. Or Mondays. Or holidays. Or any day that is next to a holiday. Or after 5 p.m. Or between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Basically, my bank is open two hours a week and they are annoyed if you try to come in during that short window of time to give them your money.

Anyway, while I’m frustrated about the banking part of France, I’m a big fan of the not-working-very-much part. As I’ve said in earlier entries, I’ve been cultivating a rather louche lifestyle of boozing and sleeping late the past few weeks. Yesterday the alarm clock ringing at 6 a.m. felt like cold hard death. My commute is somewhat unpleasant in the mornings, as I’m taking one of the busiest transit lines during rush hour. There are chartreuse vest-clad transit employees at my stop that are responsible for forcefully pushing people onto the trains. When I tell people this, they say, “Oh my goodness, I thought that only existed in Tokyo!” Well, now you know: Paris has caught up with Tokyo in terms of dehumanizing mass transit practices! The only real difference is that the French aren’t big sticklers about body odor like the Japanese are! I jest. Sort of. Actually, I don’t mind it too much. I’ve always been really into commuting, as it involves one of my favorite activities: mindlessly listening to pop music while not feeling guilty for being unproductive. Because I’m in transit! That’s productive! I’d rather do it in a car, but a train will do. I also get to snigger at the fascinated stares that my coffee travel mug garners from my fellow commuters. I can tell that Parisians really want to get with the portable coffee cup program, but they are just too scared. I understand – the Starbuckification of the world is rather terrifying. But a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning as you sit on a train is a nice thing indeed. Unclench, France.

I teach at a rather infamous public university in the suburbs of Paris. I don’t want to spell out where it is exactly (Google seems to be quite the floozy), but let’s just say that it’s where the aborted revolution of another era began and where the next one will probably start. While it’s a hotbed for leftist political dissent, it is also, as the arguably the most important living Marxist thinker said to me, “so cruel and very stark” (he taught there for many years). The graffiti in the classrooms alone deserves a special post. That will have to wait until another day — I’m honestly too tired from dealing with banlieue thugs today to go into too much detail.

There are only two things worth relating about my first few days back in the saddle. First, upon immediately forgetting the name of a student who had just introduced himself, I referred to him as “Mr. Make It Rain On Them Hoes.” To be fair, he did say that Lil Wayne was his favorite musician ever and seemed more than pleasantly amused by his new nickname. Maybe I’ll keep that one going as a morale builder, despite the fact that he hardly seems like enough of a VIP to make a stripper fall in love. God I love that song. Secondly, I had a vaguely poetical moment today on campus when I discovered that something about the cold made the sidewalk stones sound hollow as I walked across them. The requisite May ’68 reference to my friends was made, but we all acknowledged the whirling snow made the beach feel very far away indeed.

Finally, many of you have commented on M. Starik’s killer photographs. Please treat yourself to a visit to her Flickr page, now accessible on the sidebar under Monsieur Bigudi’s Photostream. Monsieur Bigudi is M’s version of Clarence. The two of them are thick as thieves.

Tell your friends!

Tell your friends!

Tell your friends!

Tell your friends!

Tell your friends!