Wednesday, August 31, 2005

I'm thinking of getting some bumper stickers.

Monday, August 29, 2005

germany pitchers

me, waiting for the pope to drive through Cologne, having a beer...



some ten/eleven year old kids who were also waiting for the pope. and having a beer. they didn't want me to take their pictures at first, because they were afraid i would tell their respective mothers...



some italian guys. in case you didn't catch it, the fellow on the right has a shirt which reads "Football Team."



a monk, perched on top of a telephone box. gotta dig those Jedi threads.



dusseldorf.



me, trying to stay warm when we camped in Marienfield for the closing papal mass. word to the wise: emergency blankets are a little more helpful than wet towels re: warmth retention, but far less helpful than sleeping bags. guess who only brought an emergency blanket. that would be me.


travel log part II: Lourdes

We took a bus through Southern France to get to Lourdes. Lourdes, as one of the kids put it, is Catholic Las Vegas...the narrow streets of this little town are lined with shops and neon signs offering glow in the dark Virgin Mary statuettes, Virgin Mary shot glasses, eight foot tall crucifixes, and so forth.

Lourdes is a small, safe town so we mostly wandered around doing our own thing (there's the grotto, the baths, the basilica, the tacky shops, and, yeah, that's about it). I was praying at the grotto at night, and a creepy French guy tried to pick me up (while there was a Mass going on directly ahead of me, mind you). Or perhaps I misunderstood his intentions, and he really did just want to go on a rosary walk...

Actually, I was pretty popular with the French guys, much to my dismay. I guess the baggy, bright pink polartec jacket which I wore constantly really did it for them.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Soon, I will be re-immersed in the universe of granting bathroom privileges and perusing "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essays. I've kicked my preparation process off by marching down to the party store and buying a buttload of candy, plastic bugs, goofy erasers, games, and so forth, to dispense to the sixth and seventh graders. This year is the Year of the Bribe! Shut up and I'll give you candy, kid...

some things I can't wait to try out this year:

In an effort to encourage library use, I plan to hold a Weird Book Competition with the sixth graders. Everyone goes to the library and tries to find the weirdest/grossest book possible. Winner gets, I don't know, a jar of fake eyeballs. As an example, I'm bringing in my copy of "The Eat a Bug Cookbook."

To the budding Latin learners: their first translation exercise will be "semper ubi sub ubi."

I'm trying to find neat prayers written by saints to accompany each Faith and Life lesson (sixth and seventh grade). We're learning about God's creation in the first week, so I'm bringing St. Francis' Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

Starting the pre-algebra class with math puzzles, along the lines of "If Susan is five years older than Bob, and Bob is three years younger than Sara, and Sara, much to the dismay of her parents, has decided to major in textile arts, how old is the prophet Habakkuk?"

some france pitchers


one of the smart cars everybody was driving. those things fit in insanely tiny parking spaces. saw many of these, no SUVs, at least in Paris.


candles inside chartres


chartres


statue thingie outside the louvre.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

travel log part I: Paris

All right. As an introduction, for those of you who don't know, I spent the last two weeks traveling with eight adolescent types (some students of mine, some former students of the school I teach at) on a pilgrimage through France and Germany, winding up in a small village near Cologne for World Youth Day. We travelled with another, much larger youth group from the East Coast, some forty-odd kids and chaperones, which turned out to be somewhat unfortunate, but more on this later. I packed everything I needed for two weeks in a carry on school sized backpack. As it turns out, I should have left a little space for souveneirs. Hohum.

The teenagers: as it turns out, with teenagers, emotional baggage has NO WEIGHT LIMIT. Half the teenaged group just wasn't on good speaking terms with the other half of the group. Every time I tried to ask "Why can't we all just get along?" or "How come we can't have a nice meal as a family together any more?" they just called me a damn hippie.

The France: The French really aren't into creature comforts. Nothing is air conditioned, bathrooms are few and far between (and you have to pay for them), the toilets lack toilet seats, and water fountains are non existent. Also, everything is hella expensive. They make some fine coffee, though. And I loved the fact that every apartment window had red geraniums growing outside...

We arrived at our youth hostel, after our eighteen hour plane ride, to find that our rooms weren't ready yet. Also, there were a number of strange people hanging around in the hostel lobby; strange as in rocking back and forth and muttering to themselves. I didn't think anything of this at the time.

Grubby as we were from the plane ride, we set off immediately to see Notre Dame. Trying to fit fifty people onto a crowded Paris metro was not easy, but we soon learned that shoving perfect strangers and not having any personal space whatever was how things were done here. Notre Dame was neat looking, although a bit too crowded to stop and ruminate on any particular feature. Five minutes into the tour, half of my group disappears. I find them later outside; as it turns out, they are bored by cathedrals. This does not bode well for the rest of the trip; as it turns out, they also find museums, scenic views, and in fact all manner of sight seeing boring.

Time for lunch! Our tour guide provided us with bread and cheese, which we ate by the Seine. Oh, hey, guess what else some of the teens aren't fond of...bread and cheese. We saw more of Paris, then headed home for the hostel. After a shower (in a communal unisex bathroom), and a nap, I went with five or six people to see the Eiffel tower. Very pretty.

The strange muttering folks were at the hostel's breakfast, too. Apparently, the other wing of the youth hostel was an assisted care facility for the mentally disturbed. Mostly they seemed harmless. They just wanted to shake your hand, hug you, babble at you in French, and follow you into the bathroom. How sweet!

We spent three days in Paris, basically walking from scenic thing to scenic thing at an insane speed. The group we were travelling with wanted to see EVERYTHING, and so we did. Five minutes of the Louvre here, eight minutes of the Arc d' Triumph there.

There are military dudes walking around with machine guns in most public areas. They will not cooperate when you want a picture of them pointing a machine gun at you.

The Eiffel tower is surrounded by swarms of young men selling light up miniature Eiffel towers. This is apparently illegal, as occasionally the police will sweep through, and the young men will scatter. One of the boys in my group bought a light up tower for five Euro (bargained down from fifteen Euro), and spent the rest of the time trying to sell it back to various tower vendors for six Euro. This, we discovered, was the best way to get the light up tower vendors to leave you alone. I guess they thought we were part of some light up tower selling sting operation, so they started avoiding our group like the plague.

The river Seine had some really gorgeous barges moored to the side. Apparently, some people live on these barges seasonally, spending their time cultivating container gardens on deck, and slowly touring the waterways of France. Damn that is the life.

At first, I was afraid that my teenaged charges were going to get lost. Eventually, I ended up hoping they would get lost. As it turns out, some of them expected the trip to include more in the way of shopping, eating at fancy restaurants, and staying in luxury hotels than it actually did. This is odd, since the trip was billed as a pilgrimage with simple food and lodging. Anyway, the complaints about how France (quelle surpise) was different from America, and different was bad, got a bit grating.

stay tuned for part II: Lourdes.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

In Germany for WYD. We are staying with a German family who speak no English at all, which makes breakfast conversation a fun combination of shouting and charades. On the other hand, the matriarch ironed my underwear for me. SWEET!

Sunday, August 14, 2005

i am in france. the vending machines eat your money, and air conditioning is unheard of, and only tourists go to mass, but at least it's purty.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
      And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
      And the hunter home from the hill.


- Robert Louis Stevenson

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Y'know what's the worst? Being frustrated with yourself for being frustrated with yourself. If you (metaphorically) kick yourself for kicking yourself, that means that you're kicking with both legs, which implies, of necessity, that you are (metaphorically) falling on your ass.

In other news, I'm going to France and Germany for two weeks. Anyone else going to WYD? You can spot me easily: I'll be the grubby looking American, possibly wearing a space blanket as an impromptu hat.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Life is basically one huge hassle after another. Sources of hassle include, but are not limited to, banks, telecommunications companies (cell, broadband, and landline), IRA rollovers, auto repair shops, credit card companies, insurance companies, the DMV, landlords, payroll, smog regulations, airlines, library late fees, the IRS, Caltrans, doctor's offices, Amtrak, and last but not least, jury duty.

But, at least, in California, we're spared the hassle of intestinal parasites, monsoons, snow chains, and blue laws.

HOORAY!!!

Seriously, though. I want to live in a back to the land isolationist quasi-commune where the only time you pay taxes is when the (duly elected by random lottery) feudal lord rides through and sets a few cottages on fire. Where the only legal mode of transportation is breed your own mule, or assemble your own hovercraft, and the only acceptable form of payment is in terms of live goats and/or witty haiku. Where we're off the grid, but on the interweb. Where EBOOOOONY AND IIIIIIIVORY live together in perfect HAAAAAAAARMONY...all right, I'll shut up now.