all hail vic

gobble gobble plop

so, turkey day (or sushi day, for some), came and went. i celebrated on saturday evening.

and, despite the lack of canned cranberries or pumpkin pie filling in the czech republic, we had everything. the magic of connections, man. one of my fellow frisbee players can hook almost anybody up with almost anything... ah, the wonders of the internet age.

there were around 35 to 40 people at the party. for a medium to smaller size flat, it was surprisingly roomy.

the meal went down awkwardly, considering my current stomach ailments. i had a knot in my stomach for a long time afterwards. i have no idea what's wrong with me in technical terms, but i do know it's a problem when you can eat your normal thanksgiving amount - you know, the amount that makes you feel ill with overeating - and your stomach tells you nothing except "i'm feeling kinda ill. i'm certainly not full, though. i just feel half full but knotted. i'm NOT full, okay." i was full, though. instead of telling me that i feel full, my stomach was saying "stop eating you idiot or i'll make you feel even more like wahmiting!" *burp* EXCUSE me!

anyway, this was basically an uninformative pointless post. i hope it was as good for you as it was for me!

home for the holidays

so, i'm headed home soon. in under two weeks time i will be in the U.S. for the 2004 winter holidays.

that said, i'll be travelling around a bit. if you're interested in getting together, drop me a line and we can hopefully arrange things...

the schedule, as such:
11-12 December - Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - already busy
12-16 December - Los Gatos, CA
16-20 December - Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - the scheduling here is tight
20-27 December - Bloomington, IN - kinda busy on the evening of the 24th and all day on the 25th...
27-?? December+ - Prague, the Czech Republic

as such, i'd like to see anybody and everybody that can spare the time!

on a different note, i think it's been like two months, but i'm finally into the last 30 pages of Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree. it's really a brilliant book. he's a good writer and could convince an elephant to roll over in a room of mice... uh... yeah. anyway, it's a bit too pro-business for me. it's quite one-sided. but it does a good job of redefining the world, in my opinion.

national characteristics

so, i have come to the conclusion that czech's have a national characteristic. americans, as seen from abroad, are largely considered to be ignorant to the affairs of the world.

coming from outside the czech republic, i have a more objective opinion of their society and the word i would use to describe it is: PASSIVE.

czechs are passive. it's almost genetic. they are so passive, they lack imagination. they are rarely ambitious in a grand scale - as in highly motivated - and they rarely have the dreams that accompany ambition. they lack imagination. they also lack any tendency to confront problems, constructively or unconstructively.

it's bad to create or maintain stereotypes, but stereotypes exist for a reason. and this is one i find largely true.

trying to get my students (of all ages, mind you - some were largely raised in the post-Cold War Czech Republic) to be creative is about as difficult as pulling the tooth of an uppity lion... it's almost impossible.

i asked one class on monday to think of two prizes, out of anything in the universe. the first one came quickly and was creative - "a lifetime supply of toilet paper" - but not enormously so. the second took about 10 minutes to PULL out of them - "a trip around the world". okay, that's good. but what about a rocketship to another habitable world?! what about being able to name said planet?! what about being a "god", pardon the blasphemy?! nope. plain, simple prizes. maybe it's something that comes with maturity as well.

i know that when i was little i was quite a bit more creative than now, but of course, it was childhood creativity... who would want a swimming pool filled with Kraft Mac n Cheese, really?!

another example, and this deals with their inability to confront problems, that could possibly - and this may be making an unjustified connection - be linked to the Czechs reluctance to take up arms against most occupiers that have ever occupied the country. do you know why old town in Prague is mostly intact?! because the people never resisted and therefore it was never attacked. (that's a rough history, since there were indeed battles fought near old town that are currently part of central Prague, but probably not Old Town.)

anyway, the example:

last school year i started teaching a class with three people registered. the first day i went, all three people attended - two guys and a girl. that was the only time that i saw the girl.

so, the class became a de facto class of two thereafter for the remainder of the year.

another aspect to the class - i was told the first day that they only wanted me to do conversation. why? because they had a native czech teacher to teach them grammar another day of the week. they wanted the native english speaker to do conversation.

so, fine. i did nothing but conversation with the two guys.

great. things went swimmingly for the rest of the year. i told the school that i would be happy to continue teaching them in the fall.

september rolls around and it's time to start teaching my regular classes again. and yes, said class was on my schedule. "great!" i think. "they're a fun couple of guys!"

the first week i get a notice in my mailbox - they don't want to start until october.

okay, great. no problem.

the first week of october, they cancel the lesson a bit too late so i still get paid but i don't have to go. they also inform the school that they don't want to start until november.

this means that the timeslot originally allotted to the class was occupied but since they were cancelling so far in advance, i never got paid. nor could i pick up another class to replace it.

so, i'm up the proverbial creek because i'm not getting the number of hours i've been assigned. i'm not making as much money as i should.

and all because they keep pushing back the start date.

november rolls around and i decide a good first lesson after summer would be to take in my computer with my pictures and discuss - have a conversation - about what we did over the summer. i wanted my computer to provide visual aid.

i arrive to teach and only one guy shows up. the other guy, it turns out, has been fired sometime over the (prolonged) summer.

great. so it's a one-on-one conversation. no problem, i think.

the lesson goes well and he asks me if i can bring the computer back next week.

i say "sure, no problem!"

the next week i get a notice in my box that "they" want a different teacher - they say i'm a nice guy, but i do too much conversation.

did the one guy come to me with the problem?! NO. he makes me miss other possible classes for two months and then ditches me at a time when new classes are scarce.

that, my friends, is where they lack the skills to confront problems. why did he not just tell me that he wanted more structured activities?! because he's too frickin' passive.

and so it goes with most czechs, in my not-so-humble opinion.

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and now for something completely different, here are the answers to my quiz questions from two posts ago!

on the way there

so, i just thought that you might like to know that i might be getting better, whatever ails me is passing, i think, maybe, i'll just have to write a sonnet about it, i think.

i'll post the answers to the pub quiz later.

pub quiz

so, despite my malady being sporadically still in place, i'm hosting a pub quiz at my school tonight.

those of you who know me from Carleton know that i was involved in the organizing and carrying out of KRLX's Late Night Trivia. i like trivia.

so i thought i'd post the questions i'm asking tonight here. the ones that are school specific have answers with them, otherwise there are no answers. i thought ya'll might like to take a stab. it's a Word doc.

good luck. i'll post the answers during my next post.

doppelgangers and beds

so, i thought i'd pop up a quick note today:

i have seen more doppelgangers for people i know in prague than i have anywhere else in my life. i have yet to see somebody that looks like a member of my family, but when i do i can only imagine that i'll be freaked out.

oh, and i have food poisoning and have been in bed (or on the sofa watching 24 Season 3 or various films) since Tuesday. i went to the doctor today and he said i should stay home through Tuesday, which sucks. thank goodness for my stomach of iron, though.

upon reflection, another retraction

okay, the election has soaked in a little better:

let's nominate hillary next time and STOMP the other candidate into the ground.

there are arguments in favor of my own senator Evan Bayh being nominated - he's very moderate, very center and votes with Republicans on moderate issues more than your average senator. his record reflects this and isn't as sporadic as Kerry's. Bayh could draw the middle ground vote and help attract the moderate southerners away from the increasingly fringe-based Republican party.

he was also a governor for 8 years and hit the term governor term limits in Indiana.

i think Bayh stands a better chance of winning simply because he doesn't inspire the same vitriol in the Republicans as Hillary does. but Hillary would cause another enormous turnout because the Reps would be so galvanized to defeat her. and i like a politically active country, even if it works against my own values. it's better than apathy.

my concession speech

so, it's come down to this, eh? the inevitable post-election blog entry and boy, is it lengthy.

i was optimistic that kerry would win. i'm pessimistic that he'll take ohio now.

here's the deal though, no matter how much contempt i have for our current president, i will support the president when he retakes the oath. i know i will disagree with what he does a lot of the time and, more importantly, the way he goes about doing what he does.

but he is my president and he won decisively this time. and i'm sick of the "poisonous atmosphere" of the united states. i felt this atmosphere beginning to seep in the middle of 2003 sometime and i definitely helped contribute to it.

yes, i'm disappointed that the entire federal government is in republican hands. a split government is the best possible scenario. i'm upset the daschle lost s. dakota. i'm upset that (it looks like) my house representative (a dem) lost his reelection bid. i'm excited that obama won. i'm upset that my governor will no longer be a democrat for the first time in 20 years.

this election defied all odds too. it seemed like the news recently has been nothing but bad news upon bad news. voter turnout was enormous and that typically means good things for democrats. the redskins lost. the dow ended up down. the job situation is worse than it was 4 years ago, although it is marginally better than 2 years ago...

jen posted an entry in her blog referring to the frequent discussions of where people would move should Bush win reelection. i think we can all agree that the talk of moving was hyperbole (except in a few cases, i imagine..)

**for what it's worth, i was committed to moving to prague long before the primaries or discussion of the 2004 election even began.**

now is the time to rededicate ourselves to our country. there were some lapses in judgment (like voting down gay marriage) that will be looked down on in shame in the distant future. for now, that is where our country lies and we'll have to work with it.

i asked my father this morning/last night (for him): when did our country become so conservative? he said that walter cronkite had pinpointed the 1960 election when the south started trending republican. sounds reasonable to me.

in a world where progression seems to have been marked by increasing liberalism in attitudes, this is a step backwords. to be stuck in an old world ideology based on fundamentalism is frightening, but it is something that will be reversed in time. i might not live to see it. you might not live to see it. but i am confident that it will happen.

considering that there is still discrimination today, in an almost more evil form - that of subliminal bigotry - we are still better off than we were 50 years ago. and no matter how many steps backwards we take, there will always be plenty of push to step forward as well.

and this is where the democrats come in. john kerry was a flawed candidate. i liked him but i voted for him more as a defensive vote rather than a positive vote. i didn't want bush to win.

anyway, the democrats need to do some major reassessment. what bush has been doing is mixing in his religious beliefs with his policies and that is highly problematic. john kerry said that he believed in god but would not mix politics and religion.

why was religion an issue? let's have a candidate that focuses on secular issues. let's have a candidate that can maintain a steady logic. i don't believe that kerry's ideas changed ("flip-flopped", if you will) during the course of the campaign, but rather his expression of his ideas did. he didn't have a straight pattern. there was too much nuance. there was too much discussion of discussion. this is where the idea of flip-flopping comes from, because different ways of expression yields different interpretations. problem.

solution. find a populist candidate. somebody who can speak to the rural vote. edwards had it, but he let it take a back seat to kerry's ideology. dean had it, but the media screwed him over nicely. hillary clinton is a good candidate, but she's not populist. plus, the same vitriol that dems feel towards bush can easily be found in reps regarding hillary. i want a woman president, i do. but keep her out of it - she would get my support 150% if she were to be nominated, but i don't want another campaign like this.

judging from obama's performance in illinois, he could be a good candidate sooner rather than later. they'll harp on his experience like they did edwards, but it didn't hurt edwards. in the debates he proved that he's competent. that's all that was necessary.

a populist will offer something truly different. a populist would hark back to a more divided political system where the differences are not just nuances...

i'm taking my time reading thomas friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree and i just read a chapter today that talked about why political parties in free-market capitalist societies don't seem that different today. i won't bother rehashing his arguments, but you can find them in the chapter "The Golden Straitjacket".

the thing with populism, though, is that it will go against the trend towards globalization - you need the center people who aren't opposed to sending jobs overseas. it's the nature of globalization and globalization is the way our world works now, for good or bad.

which brings us back to our president. much more dangerous than sending jobs overseas is alienating ally governments. the role of government now, according to friedman, is to interact with other governments, corporations and super-empowered individuals (like osama bin laden, for better or worse). the type of interaction depends on the relationship.

globalization requires global cooperation. by continuing to antagonize foreign governments, we will dig ourselves a deep hole. not to mention spending money we don't have and cannot perceive having any time soon. corporations and individuals can ruin governments. they can pull their money out of economies, causing a massive economic downturn and thereby causing unrest in the populace.

there will not be riots from this election, as we've already learned. there will be unhappiness and a lot of it.

but it's time to put on the rose-colored glasses for a moment:

the country has spoken in one of the largest turnouts in recent U.S. electoral history. George W. Bush will be our president for the next four years as well and it's time to cross your fingers and hope that maybe he can stop being stubborn for a minute, see some of the mistakes from the previous four years and act to correct them.

there's no viable reason to think that we'll invade iran in the next four years, in my opinion, unless it is with the world (and europe, in particular) backing us up. the army is mired in iraq and the country won't support another war, unless there are extreme circumstances.

hopefully he'll act to rectify the fact that he has underfunded every domestic program under federal control. one would hope, that if security really is such a big concern, that maybe he would start putting more money in securing our ports a little better.

or how about education? why create a debatable education program that holds schools and school systems accountable for student performance and then deliberately underfund it?

so, let's support our president. he's an American and he will make mistakes, even if one of them is not acknowledging said mistakes. he will make politically questionable decisions and we are welcome to object - i'm sure i will be the first to do so in many cases - it's the nature of democracy. this is, indeed, a contradictory impulse and it will probably unravel to being one-sided yet again. from me he has a clean but paper-thin slate. but for the moment, i'll give G.W. the benefit of the doubt. heck, if for any reason at all, i suppose my sanity takes top slot for me - i will not and cannot live with this ugliness inside me for four more years.

and... well... if kerry does happen to win Ohio, well, i'll be happy. i simply don't think he will due to the substantive margin laying between the two candidates.

it's on!

if you haven't voted yet, you best be getting off your duff and make your way down to your polling place. you have been given a right, do not ignore it.

why didn't anybody tell me?

so, i'm listening to Sade's Lovers Rock right at this moment, having recently, um, acquired it.

why didn't anybody tell me how cool Sade is? sheesh. and here i thought you were friends!