Archive for March, 2019

Yoga Guy

al….most…. there

It’s 5:30 am. The cat has heard me rouse and meows at me through the door, where I assume she has been waiting since around 4:15 am. We trip and kick our way into the kitchen (neither of us has gotten used to simultaneously roaming the slighter narrower hallways of the new flat). There are bites and meows, a squeak.

Once I bribe her quiet acquiescence with food, I pour a tall glass of lemon water. And I start my day.

Since awakening and moving, my body has been incrementally becoming less stiff. A more mobile knee here, a crack in the neck there. The dissipating spasm in my lower back. Who knew sleeping on your side could hurt your cowlick?

It is all part of what I have come to define as the physical reality of being in my forties. There are other physical realities. The mamba routine that goes on between my arms, my eyes, nearby lights, and the directions on a box. The mystery box game that my gastrointestinal system plays after digesting pizza, Mexican food, or, well, basically anything that isn’t lettuce.

In the wee morning hours, before starting to work, I move into the living room and work out the physical kinks. Work on the aches. I do a few stretches that I learned in aikido and a couple I learned in various other sports. And then I sigh, open my phone to the links I researched the week before and, swallowing my pride, begin the Dolphin Pose.

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A Short History of my Life with Bidets

Chauncey the Bidet and Derrick the Cockatoo

It’s been a little over two weeks since I moved into a new flat. Like almost anyone, I have gotten accustomed to my new neighborhood. And not just the big, basic things like how long it is to get to the metro or the shop. I’m also getting used to the little things, like my preferred ATM or the shortcuts to the main road. Or the most efficient path through the grocery store.   

I am getting used to the little things in my flat, too. I am figuring out which windows allow the best breeze, where the floor creaks are, and where I stand around nekkid in my living room without accidentally giving the neighbor a mildly disappointing peepshow.

But in terms of the little things, it’s the water things that’s taking a while to get used to. I lived in my last flat for thirteen years, and so I knew my shower, toilet, and sinks like old friends. There were no surprises. I knew that the water pressure was going to be strong in the shower and exactly how to angle the nozzle at what exact pressure to avoid soaking the floor or ceiling. I knew that if I was in the mood to drink really cold water I’d pour from the bathroom tap, which, along with most of Prague’s pubs, spews absolutely glacially cold H2o. I knew the water pressure in my kitchen so well that I could turn it on without looking, walk away, and come back when I knew the sink would be filled to the desired level.

Now I have to get used to a new shower, a new bathroom, and new sinks. The water pressure is different as is the water temperature from the respective taps. I am acclimating myself to a new water system.

So is the cat. Every morning I was greeted by not so much a cat, as by a continuous thronging of meows from a mobile furball beneath my feet. It didn’t stop until I turned on the tap in the bathroom for her. She would then drink, play, and then stare at the water in amazement. Occasionally she’d pass her paw through it to test its stability. While I showered, she’d stand on the shelf watching me the way I watch Keith Moon play the drums. It is a picture of astounded.

In the new flat, I haven’t quite learned how to control the shower, so the bathroom floor is often wet. I have been drinking lukewarm water and washing my hands in freezing cold water. The cat, a literal creature of habit, meows at the bathroom sink, but can’t quite get her head under the tap as it’s lower than in my last flat. So she spends a lot of time trying to understand the geometry of the sink. It’s a bit sad.

Oh, and then there’s the bidet.

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Don’t Get Me Wrong

I was once sitting in the movie Happy Gilmore. If you have seen this it features Adam Sandler as a fragile tempered wannabe hockey player turned golfer who makes headway into golfing tourneys despite an unorthodox swing. As he is a hockey player, he doesn’t do the traditional static golf swing, but rather dances forward in a crow hop of sorts, winds up the golf club, and takes a huge slapshot.

It’s the quintessential mid-90s Sandler movie. A high volume comedy that was ridiculous, but not I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry ridiculous. We happily suspended our disbelief at the door. I can’t say the same for the guy who was sitting behind us who spent the majority of the golfing scenes critiquing and commenting to his date on the main character’s absurd slapshot and slapstick swing. “There’s so much more to golf than just driving, you know,” he said. “This is ridiculous, you can’t drive like that. What about his short game, huh?” He asked the screen.

I didn’t hazard a glance at his date, but I can only hope that he was single less than five minutes after the film’s end.

I couldn’t understand the man’s motivation. Why not simply sit back and enjoy the movie? It’s a movie, we willingly suspend our disbelief so that we don’t spend the whole time asking stupid effing questions and driving people nearby insane with those stupid effing questions. And also, did he think the absurdity of the movie’s details were lost on the rest of us? Did he think we didn’t know that usually a gold swing doesn’t work out like that?

Two things have happened recently. The first happened while watching my all-time favorite sleuth, Lt. Columbo, take down a dastardly chess player who killed a fellow chess player. The dead chess player was from some unnamed Eastern European country and the guy in charge of his security detail manager was no doubt upset that the man he was to protect had ended up in the bottom of a trash compactor in thousands of little pieces. It was during this scene of stress that he erupts in anger, spewing the following(ish) in an accent so “Eastern European” that is was made of borscht.

“Why is it so impossible for you to figure out what’s going on, Lieutenant? How can you be so in the dark about what’s happened? He would never have stolen off into the night on his own. He would have …. (searching for word, asks his colleague) notified one of us.”

And then, between handfuls of popcorn, laid out an argument to invalidate the language being used. “There’s no way he would be using that phrase or that other phrase or that grammar. No way. Figure out. What’s going on. Be in the dark about. What has happened. Steal off into the night. On his own. Never would have. And then ‘notify’ is what trips him up? Nah. Nope.”

Burke kept her thoughts to herself, but I read in the sardonic (and a little sad) look over a handful of popcorn a loud and clear statement: shut up, man, can’t you just enjoy the show?

I could. I did. I set all subsequent notes to mental and quelled my distaste with popcorn.

As a language teacher, I spend a lot of time looking at, working with, and thinking about language. Since I teach English and am a non-native Czech speaker, these are the two languages that mostly occupy my brain’s time. And while I have actively and definitively avoided the ideology of Grammatical Nazism, my pet peeve has become misrepresented non-native English speakers in films and shows.

Everyone would have a guess as to what a non-native speaker of your language might have trouble understanding or using. Big words. Complicated grammatical points. Hard to pronounce words. But there’s a good chance you’d forget about the words and phrases that we use each day without even a moment’s thought. Take off your pants. Change off to any other preposition and it’s a radically different meaning. Take in your pants. Take out your pants. Take away your pants. Each of these phrasal verbs have vastly different meanings. So it’s no wonder that a film or TV director would misrepresent the language difficulties that a non-native speaker of English might have.

Another example from one of my favorite shows of all time. The West Wing was written by probably the greatest living screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin. In one scene, one of the president’s aides played by Rob Lowe is telling his colleagues about a meeting that he had with two aides to the Russian president. One of the meeting’s goals was to reschedule the meeting between the Russian and the American presidents. Lowe comments that the Russian aides spoke “conversational” English, but not “idiomatic” English. We then see the conversation that occurred:

Rob Lowe: Can you pass this along to President Shogurn?

Russian Aide 1: ‘Pass along’? Is this not bad?

Rob Lowe: No, it means give ‘go’. I think you’re confusing it with ‘pass over.’

The two Russian aides speak in Russian for a moment and then thank him for the language lesson.

Rob Lowe: We need to talk about the time of the meeting.

Aide 2: Is not the time OK?

Rob Lowe: It needs to be an hour later.

Aide 1: Why?

Rob Lowe: The president will be getting in too late the night before. Don’t get me wrong, this president can do two shows a night, but you’d be hard pressed to find a person with a worse reaction to jet lag.

The Russian consider the point, agree to it, and then, moving on, hand Rob Lowe a paper with suggested additions to the American president’s speech. Lowe reads it aloud and is surprised when he hits the phrase ‘stem the tide.’ He asks the aides who had written the edits and the first aide claims that he had. At this point, Rob Lowe, because of the trip up with ‘pass along’ and ‘pass by’ knows that someone else besides this aide had written the addition.

So, the Russian aides didn’t understand idiomatic English, but Rob Lowe uses three highly nuanced phrases “don’t get me wrong,” “he can do two shows a night,” and “hard-pressed?” These would almost certainly be understood by high-level English speakers and fall, by the way, directly in the category of “idiomatic” English. The inconsistency has driven me nuts for years.

I have been jokingly toying with a niche company in which I offer editing services for scripts which feature non-native English speakers. Until then, I’ll keep my mouth shut so Burke doesn’t smother me to death with popcorn while I sleep. Maybe I’ll track down that golf guy and we can put together a joint company of language editing and golfing skills.

I’ll be sure to….notify the lot of you once it comes to fruition.

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The Move


Last time, coming or going

It’s Friday, about 2 pm. I am on my way home on a tram filled with young teens and kids, who, while in various stages of personal and physical development, share in common a momentary ecstasy that is born of the beginning of the weekend. I am immensely jealous.

Since I was a kid, there has never been anything quite as euphoric as a Friday afternoon. I have always loved the “look ahead” stage. More a fan of Christmas Eve than Christmas, a fan of the last weeks of school rather than the beginning of the summer holiday. It’s when I have everything ahead of me that I am happiest. And Friday is just that – everything is ahead of me and the possibilities are endless. Pizza and a movie, a nice walk on Saturday, a nice walk on Saturday that ends conveniently at a pub. So on any other Friday I would be sitting on this tram, outwardly a middle-aged dude listening to podcasts, inwardly a twelve year old with a peach-fuzz mustache throwing the devil’s ears at passing motorists.

But this weekend is the weekend in which I will move. After two weeks’ prep, planning, organizing, boxing, bagging, and throwing away huge portions of the collected booty of thirteen years, it will happen. Without touching the obvious horrors of tragedy or medical crises, there is nothing worse to look forward to on a weekend.

Friday night is spent standing in various rooms in my house having meltdown moments. “Has someone fed these things after midnight!?” I scream to the ceiling, wondering how our bags and boxes are multiplying. “What is this? I don’t own a toaster! Where has this thing been, just waiting for me to move it!?” I occasionally center myself (read: avoid prison) by sitting on my soon-to-be-disassembled bouch (bed + couch, you get it) and eat some form of carbohydrate while watching a sitcom and purposefully not looking at the room beyond my laptop.  

The misery that comes with moving isn’t the carrying and lifting, but the fact that every single thing has to be reckoned with. Whether that means it gets thrown away, put in a bag and brought to the new house, or set on fire and thrown out the window. Everything from the deep, darkest caverns of the last thirteen years must be dealt with. Every single item. Everything.

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