“Oohhuuuuuuhhhmmmmmmmmeeerrrrrrrrrr…”

My dad is groaning. And I am sitting on the other side of the phone, timing it.

I have long been timing my dad’s groans in response to my year’s holiday destination. His groan has become the barometer by which I measure the adventure quotient of my trips.

No groan means that the place does not worry him. Italy and France are no groan destinations. A two-second groan usually means the place was the scene of urban unrest when he was young. Budapest might be a two-groaner, as might Northern Ireland.

A three-second groan means the place has been in the news in the last two years. This might include Turkey, Puerto Rico, or Thailand. Anything above a five second groan suggests that it’s a place with a completely different alphabet, and not in Europe or North American and that he doesn’t know much about it. Israel was a nine second groan.

Ethiopia proves to be an eight second groan. So not as bad as the Middle East, but it is accompanied by two I don’t know, Dames and a few muttered Are you sure about this? for good measure.

It’s worth the cost of the flight itself.

I live my life as a normal enough person, I work too much, go out with friends, gripe about social affairs, cook and read and watch sitcoms on weekday nights, drink too much occasionally. But every year around the end of February, towards the end of the long and bleak winter, a little light goes on inside. It’s the kind of light that goes on when your car starts making sounds like an emphysema patient playing soccer.

A warning.

My Check Adventure light.

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When it comes to my mom, there are things I still can’t believe. She had four teenagers at one point. Four. If I have to interact with four teenagers in one week I need to see a doctor. She once battled a spider who fell in her hair and she didn’t explode into flames. Insanity.

She chauffeured kids everywhere, ran the house, balanced budgets, ran a delicatessen, withheld our infractions from Dad, coped with blood, squabbles, temper tantrums, and yet she did not strangle one of us.

Adding to this are the countless sacrifices to body and mind, wallet, and personal comfort that still boggle my mind. Like many kids, I didn’t appreciate this when I was younger. She was just “mom,” this woman who ran around putting out fires (almost, well, literally), and fixing problems.

In those devastating moments as a kid, when I honestly believed nothing would ever be right again. It was over. At the ripe age of twelve, Cindy Balowonski had checked the “no” box on my discreetly passed date questionnaire, and my life was over. At these dark times when nothing could be made right, Mom made things right. She knew how to fix problems and repair bad moods. She knew the things to say, the snack to make, the movie to put on, the inkling of perspective to give.

It was and is a sixth sense.

This sixth sense is part of a greater art which became known in our house as Mama Fu.

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There’s nothing more pleasant than train travel. And travelling through the eastern Czech countryside only adds to that pleasure.

There are the fields of bright yellow rapeseed that looks as though it’s straight out of a Van Gogh. The forests are green and inviting, bushels of mistletoe perch in distant trees, already mocking me.

The charm is compounded by the occasional tiny village, the cottages that dot the landscape and make you desire country life.

But then the Moravian countryside is abruptly replaced by gray boxed factories, sections of mill, and discarded tin equipment alongside the tracks. The conductor calls “Ostrava” and my Moravian dream is over.

Ostrava is a city in the east of the Czech Republic. It is a sprawling island of industry, gray, metal, and factories. It is as homely as Prague is beautiful.

Ostrava’s greatest claim to fame is probably Stodolní Street, a collection of streets jam-packed with pubs. These pubs are useful for the crowds of people trying to drink away the knowledge that they are in Ostrava.

Why Ostrava? The hockey world cup is being played in the Czech Republic and PJ has an extra ticket. And since I lack the ability to think things through before agreeing to them, just as I lack the ability to wait before biting into scalding hot pizza, here I am.

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“Do you have Monkey Mind?” my friend asks me.

“Monkey Mind?”

My joke instinct instantly makes Monkey Mind a pet-name for syphilis.

Since I have never heard of Monkey Mind, my mental picture is thousands of monkeys drinking whiskey and swinging around in my head chattering and shrieking at top volumes. I mean, they are drinking whiskey after all.

I relate the above vision in a slightly sarcastic manner to my friend.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Do you have it?”

At first, I am stunned to be correct. Then I sit back and listen to my mind. “Yep, I have that.”

I have been telling my friend about troubles concentrating. My mind can’t focus on one thing, but rather gets pulled in twenty different directions at all times of the day and night. It’s infuriating at times.

Monkey Mind is the idea that your brain is filled with thousands of drunken chattering monkeys constantly drawing your attention away from the moment you are in. So in my case Monkey Mind is a spot on diagnosis.

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Tonight seems to be an interesting language night.

I suppose the vinovice is partially to blame. Vinovice is grape brandy that knocks your socks off and makes you feel like a two-hundred foot tall dinosaur named Seth. Whenever a new brandy comes into my life – which happens often since the Czechs are proficient in the field of distilling fruits in order to get you hammered – I always find that the night equals interesting language.

Moreover, it’s probably the fact that I am hanging out with five language teachers. Therefore, the discussion keeps popping back to language acquisition. It’s in my head, so my ears are more in tune with the weirdness of language.

Also, the vinovice.

There have been two sentences tonight that I have never heard before. As a language teacher and a George Carlin nut, I have always loved these. They occurred in the same interaction.

“If I see someone vomit I can’t get it out of my head for a month.”

“Yeah, I’m the same way if I see blood come out of a penis.”

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When I went to the doctor with heel, calf, knee, neck, and back pain, I was fairly certain that my career as a long-distance runner was about to be put on hold.

Sure enough, when I told him I was a runner, he shook his head and said, “No.”

“No?”

“You should swim instead. Running is giving you these problems.”

Translation: You are forty and your body hates you.

Despite the fact that I used to look for excuses to get out of physical activity, I was truly bummed. Running was a way to keep active, clear my mind, and keep me from needing a muumuu and a motorized scooter with a Home of the Whopper decal on the side.

I needed to do something physical to counterbalance my predilection for hotdogs, pizza, Irish Whiskey, and couch.

And yet, I knew swimming wasn’t it. Oh, swimming is fun, and you can sometimes trick yourself into feeling like you’re at summer camp. But swimming not only involves being almost naked in public, it involves being almost naked in public while exercising. Plus, there’s my odd back hair patterns to consider and the fact that swimming involves urine, only some of which is mine.

When a friend suggested I try something called the 7 Minute Workout, I slightly scoffed. Slightly, because anything involving the word workout can make me its prison bitch, it was the 7 Minute portion that got my scoff. Still, after reading about it and losing a key battle in the war against the belt notches, I decided to give it a go.

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It’s Sunday, so I do “Sunday” things. I put on some Tom Waits, make coffee and an omelet. I put in a load of laundry and scan the book for Monday’s class.

After an hour, I realize that I have not yet sat down. I’ve eaten standing at my kitchen counter, read my coursebook walking around the flat.

I can’t shake the Sunday Edge.

I have never liked Sundays. They have always been the day before everything starts: school, work, a new week of anxiety and stress. And so even though it is a day off and a day which in Czech almost literally translates to “don’t do anything” I often find myself edgy and glum.

More than that, Sundays have always seemed a rather lonely day. Even in a house filled with people, Sundays seem to me a day when every person seems unavailable, stuck in their own Sunday world.

So I walk around in circles wondering how to deal with the Sunday Edge. How?

Sometimes we drink.

Sometimes we clean.

Sometimes we walk to the mall and get our phone service changed.

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There are two students in my afternoon class. Normally, there are about five, but it’s the first gorgeous week of spring and I suspect that some students are getting lost in the park on the way to school.

My two students are hard-working and pleasant women; they are sitting on either ends of a long set of desks with four chairs in between them.

A spritz of anxiety peppers my neck. They scan their phones as I organize my books.

We begin by checking the homework and I follow up with two discussion questions to transition to the class theme. As there are only two of them, I sit down and suggest we discuss them together.

They smile.

They shift a little, pointing their knees in the others’ general direction.

They do not say a word.

So…what do you think?” I say to one of them.

After a long, long, long moment of contemplation, she says: “It depends.”

“On what?”

Then comes another period of contemplation that destroys my soul. I look at the other one, who says: “I agree.”

Another spritz of anxiety.

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I was in Vyšehrad a few weeks ago, it was the first blue sky of the spring and so a friend and I grabbed a beer, sat on a bench, and chatted. We sat down near a group of young women who were engaged in the act of selfie taking. We spent a little more than an hour there and the girls spent that entire time taking selfies.

There were traditional selfies, group selfies, selfies with the sky, selfies with the ground, selfies with the statues of Přemysl and Libuše.

OK, people, what’s with all the selfies? Are we just that obsessed with our own faces? I have taken perhaps four selfies in my life and each one left me feeling as though I was leaning against a lamp-post hitching up my garter belt. I suppose I just don’t think that people need to see my face that up close, especially since my recent discovery of a gray nose hair.

Perhaps it would be different if I was one of the beautiful people.

Nevertheless, the selfie is enormous. It was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013. There are now accessories, like a selfie stick and a selfie timer and you can buy them in the selfie shop in the main train station.

Not only are there simple selfies, there are now a variety of selfies. There are belfies (butt selfies – thank you Kim Kardashian), welfies (workout selfies), helfies (hair selfies), and even bookshelfies (I guess a selfie of you in front of your bookshelf thus proving your intelligence). I guess that would mean our Vyšehrad girls were taking skelfies (sky selfies) and grelfies (ground selfies).

The opportunities are limitless.

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