Archive for June, 2017

Eulogy for a Fitbit

Bela the cat Mourns Gary the Fitbit

Oh Gary. I guess at least we saw the end coming. Last week when you couldn’t achieve the right time, I knew there was a problem. Your display then went binary and then you split a little in the middle. I tried resetting you a few times, but we both knew it was over. As all friends must say goodbye, so must we.

I’ll always remember the time I tried you on in Target, the first time I took you out for a walk, the first time you rewarded me with a buzz to celebrate my first 10,000 steps. The addiction was spurred. I knew instantly that you were a game changer and you did not disappoint. I never left the house without you, I wore you in the house. You replaced that Swiss Army watch easily, for how could Seth think he could hold a candle to you, he only tells the time and the day of the month, and half the time he got that wrong. Where would I be without a constant knowledge of my steps, floors climbed, heart rate, sleep patterns, calories burned, and miles sloughed? Pbbt. Somewhere way back in the twentieth century.

Not only have you seen some serious strides in my health, you have played my obsessive nature like a fiddle to force those strides. Remember when you suggested getting off the tram a few stops early to log extra steps? Brilliant. Then you whispered in my ear that escalators are a fitbitter’s wet dream, even the big league ones out of the Náměstí Míru and JZP metros? And then that time when you mentioned that if I cut out lifts altogether I’d gain several thousand more steps per day. And never, Gary, did you laugh at me as I walked around my living room with a book after dinner on a low step day or marched around my bed at 11:57 p.m., trying to beat the buzzer.

Oh there were bad times, of course. I got yelled at once for (accidentally) using you during sex. Well, technically I got yelled at for noting down the activity results. But weren’t they fascinating!? Who’d have known that you gain steps while shagging? And floors, no less! Then there was last summer at my parents’ house, where I amassed about 50 steps a day. We understood together that a sedentary life was for neither you nor me, so we rallied. We took those afternoon walks every day in that awful Philadelphia humidity to the leers of neighbors, which was really part of the fun. Remember when three people asked if I needed a lift somewhere? Boy did we laugh. Then we got ice cream.

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My Doppelganger

Title: My Existential Angst

I’m on the tram sweating audibly into a small puddle on the floor. I am capable of sweating in biblical proportions and pretty soon I expect to see pairs of animals running alongside the tram. In the hopes of distracting myself from the misery caused by traveling through a steaming hot city in a metal box with no shade in sight, I am looking at the faces of pedestrians. Happy, cool pedestrians.

Then I see a guy I know as an acquaintance. He’s the husband of another acquaintance, a nice enough chap. He’s short and brown-haired, he’s stocky. He is swinging his arms as he huffs along down the street in the determined yet stuttered stride of the short-legged. It then dawns on me that he looks exactly like me. He is my Doppelganger. This troubles me.

Like many men, I consider myself far better looking than is evidential in the aesthetics of my biological makeup. This guy is OK looking, but he’s not exactly handsome. Reason states that if I am his Doppelganger and he’s not handsome, well, guess what? I am seeing what everyone else is seeing. A short, stocky dude chugging down the road like a Hobbit heading towards a tavern. And if that’s what we all see when he’s walking down the road, that’s what they all see when I’m walking down the road.

As a side issue, this damages my (I think reasonable) perception of my life as a movie. Let’s be honest, people. We all do it. We have a voice over bespeaking thusly of drama to come or just come above an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. And why not? Our lives are essentially movies, aren’t they? A mix of cringe and romantic comedies, moments of erotica, drama, adventure, and horror, interrupting the 97.3% of our lives that encompasses watching Frasier, scrolling Facebook, and asking people what they want to do that night.

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The Blind Eye

We are at our favorite pub and we are drinkless. It’s been about thirty minutes since we had a beer. Though I should be concerned about the fact that I am starting to twitch, I am focusing on the waiter. Waiters. There are three of them. Apparently the guy who was working the garden service was reassigned to the inside, and as an act of rebellion he is actively not looking at us.

Part of the training to become a Czech waiter must be developing an ability to look at a table of people and not see them. The waiter has looked at our table, the wall behind us, the post next to me, the window, the Bozkov advertisement to our left, but not us. We have obviously displeased him by not only our existence, but the fact that we are existing at this pub and thirsty.

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Zen and the Art of Not Responding

Om. (Matryoshka Doll acting as Stand in Buddha)

I am doing my dishes. I do them slowly, think about each dish, each spoon. I try to notice each tomato chunk and each coffee ground. I breathe in and out, feel and enjoy the warm water. When I have finished becoming one with my bowls, dishes, and utensils, I go back to my computer.

Still, at the top of the screen is a white strip and the phrase: not responding. If you have a computer, you understand this the most frustrating of all computing messages. So I go to water and become one with my plants. My computer is turning me into something of a Zen Master of household chores.

Even if we remove the context of failing technology, the term not responding elicits aggravation. When someone doesn’t respond to your texts, calls, messages. When students, friends, or family don’t respond to a question or point. When the president’s douchy evasion experts simply don’t respond to impossibly direct questions. The list goes on.

Out to dinner with a friend the other night, his four-year old daughter started playing with a similarly aged boy. Things were fine and dandy until it was time to eat, at which time neither the boy nor my friend’s daughter seemed willing to give up their play. They, of course, did what little kids do when they don’t want to hear the laments of their parents: they completely ignored them. And so the boy, glazed in a layer of mucus that will require shots of some sort, climbed on our table while my friend’s daughter offered him pizza. My friend tried to talk reasonably to them both, who, like my computer, were not responding, and then he failed to gain the boy’s parents attention, who, buried in their respective devices, were (you guessed it) not responding.

While his frustration cup runneth over, I considered telling him that my cat doesn’t respond either. I scratched that idea, then thought of telling him to go do some dishes. His facial expression suggested that I keep my mouth shut, which, in a ringing endorsement to social intelligence websites, I did.

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How to be British

Me Beneath an Insanely Accurate Sign

As part of a summer English course run through a local Czech newspaper, I wrote a series of fictional blog posts in which I assume the identity of a British expatriate. Once you’ve stopped snickering, you can imagine that this was rather challenging. Like any writer worth his salt, I had to know my subject and that meant brushing up on what it means to be British.

First off, I thought about the British in my life. A lot of my entertainment intake is British, for example my preferred crime solvers, Lewis, Morse, and Sherlock. There are times I’ve thought Bernard Black was my spirit animal. After I finally understood the accents, I started laughing my ass off at every episode of Spaced.

As a majority of the ESL course books teach British English, I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it. There’s the horrendous u (as in colour), and the tragedy that is –re (as in centre. disgusting). I changed my prepositions and my collating verbs, so instead of taking a walk on Main Street, I had a walk in the High Street. I already said lifts and flats, but knew I had to be careful with a substantial range of lexicon, like autumn, hob, and bugger.

But being British is more than words and language. I sat down with a cup of coffee and a notebook and pen and brainstormed a list. How to be British. With little to go on, I then looked up an article on The Guardian which offered tips. This put my mind at ease, since it appeared that I was already a bit British. I never accept a compliment without immediately self-deprecating, the very thought of someone jumping a queue makes me want to immolate them, and yet instead of acting on those impulses, I instead glare at their neck and imagine their biscuits snapping off and settling on the bottom of their tea.

However, a How British are You test on The Guardian suggested that I was abjectly American. (Who the hell is Emmeline Pankhurst and what the…bloody hell is Mr. Whipple ice cream?) Still, cultural understanding is more than a recitation of trivia or facts, so I decided to step up my game for a few weeks in cultural understanding.

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Postscript to a Wink

How I Appear to Women when I Wink

Last week I winked at a girl on the tram. She had smiled at me and I gave her the benign one-eyed wink you’d get from an uncle with whom you had no inappropriate relationship. Her face went a bit red.

Then I recalled that the Czechs do the benign uncle wink with two eyes, something like a quick blink with pleasant zest. Their one-eyed winks are used by the lascivious to convey their concupiscent messages to their depraved communicants. So instead of reciprocating a good morning greeting, I had told a random young lady that I’d like to take our relationship to the next level somewhere near the tram’s cockpit. [enter pun joke here]

If you have experienced another culture, you know that facial and hand gestures are important. These valuable tidbits are often overlooked simply because they aren’t well known or the gesture expresses something different in the visitor’s native culture. Sometimes we risk offending those in our host country simply because they perform a gesture that means something benign in their culture.

When a visiting friend waves a raised hand to get a waiter’s attention, I say a small prayer to a god I don’t believe in for their soul, which is now going to rot in Ignored by Waiter hell. A friend was on a tram when a rebellious teenager walked in front of it before it could take off from the stop. When the (enormous) driver trilled his angry bell at the teen, the kid gave him a horned finger gesture, just like you’d see at an Ozzy Ozbourne or Metallica concert. My friend was stunned when the driver got out and dropped the kid with a right hook, until he learned that the kid had snarkily suggested that the driver’s wife was cheating on him.

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My Argue-Proof Excuse

A friend of mine visits Prague every half year or so. About two months before she visits, she contacts me, thus setting into motion a recurring series of events.

We need to meet. Sure. When? What would you like to do? We’ll sort it out when I get to Prague. Maybe this one afternoon. Sure. Oh wait, maybe this one? OK, I can do that. It’s hard to organize time. Whenever you want to meet is OK. I’m so difficult, I know I do this all the time! It’s OK. Oh no, I can’t meet, my son has [add physical ailment here].

Flu. Fever. Shingles. Cold. Earache. Such a plague of physical infirmities attack this kid every time he comes to Prague, that if I were him, I wouldn’t visit.

We all have our go to excuse. Stuck at work. Too busy. Not feeling well. Self prostate exam. And in this day and age of the acceptable blow off, we sort of allow people to back out of stuff with little hoopla. We may even expect them to do so. So while there may be a bit of inherent disbelief in employed excuses, nobody can argue with a child-based excuse.

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When Covfefe Fillers Fail

Jean-Luc reacts to Covfefe

About twelve years ago, I was travelling through France with a friend. While most of the hotels and hostels we stayed at had an English speaker, not a lot of people outside of that spoke English. This was great. As we had been through Germany and Italy as well, it was exciting to get on a train in German and get off of it in Italian. But this did mean stumbling through the rigid romance of German, the pronunciation hell that is French, and the full body workout that is Italian.

Neither my friend nor I are any kind of language genius, but we followed one rule. Before we went anywhere, we would learn ten major phrases to deal with basic situations in the country. These included where is…, how much…, excuse me…, and please get your hand off my ass. It’s a rule I still apply today on my travels. There are obviously miles of lexical gaps, but these could be filled in.

One afternoon my friend and I walked into a bakery in Nice in search of pastry. We ordered in awful French, the woman very much upholding the stereotypical French linguistic stinginess. She raised an eyebrow, clearly not impressed with our attempt at her language. Then she punished us by giving us the hardest and oldest croissants in the entire bakery.

This is an eventuality for which I did not possess language. I said something to the effect of “Hello!” and then backed that up with a rousing “When?” She squinted, more so as I began lightly tapping it against the counter with the deafening sounds of colliding rocks. She shook her head and shrugged. Then I said, in a French accent, “Hard!” which sounded sort of like “Chaarday!” and then “Old!” which was like “ewlde!” and then a “Stale” that came out “Unstahle!”

The wheels really came off when I began guessing what the French word for “stale” might be. I threw out a bunch of words that sort of sounded right. Though I can’t remember what those miserable incantations were, in my head they sure sounded French: maybe something like “Zhebrouh” or “Foisoo” or a big old “Champalog.”

The woman silently left the counter (I assume to vomit) and didn’t appear again. My friend and I dipped our croissants in some wine we bought at the shop next door.

I had used a filler and it had blown up in my face. Who doesn’t use one from time to time? I sing famous tunes whose entire lyrics are made up of lexical fillers (my rendition of Eat my Waffles, Yum Yum Yum! to the tune of Camptown Races has been especially appreciated by the neighbor who lives on the other side of my shower).

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