On the eve of my departure for Kiev, I realized that it’s been a pathetic 23 days since my last post. I figured I ought to remedy that before heading into Ukraine.
There are three things that generally inhibit me from posting:
- A wish to avoid talking about people here on the Internet
- A desire to avoid being constantly whiny about certain things
- Work
All three factors have colluded in the past few weeks.
The last three weeks have been busy and quite fun. I no longer spend all evenings holed up in my room like an Internet junkie! I have engaged in many semi-scandalous activities such as drinking coffee illicitly and dancing at the disco. The last two weeks were the start of classes, and I had 11 pairs per week to prep for, which is no joke. At any rate, this semester I have a much lighter courseload than last year, thank God. Here’s what I’m teaching:
Development of Conversational Speech
Linguistic Analysis of Artistic Texts
History of English-Speaking Peoples
You gotta love the convoluted course titles! The conversation class is the most fun because I get to teach my students extremely practical things and just talk with them. Today I showed them a bunch of videos of people with Valley girl accents. Then I pretended to be a waitress at a restaurant. Everyone wanted strawberry shortcake. I forgot Alyona’s Coke...sorry, Alyona! For those who are interested this website has pretty awesome, realistic colloquial English lesson materials.
The main frustrations have been getting back into the post-Soviet work culture. Enough said. I am leaving for a training in Kiev with my fellow Moldovan, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani ETA’s tomorrow, which I hope will recharge my tolerance for bureaucracy and give me a plethora of lesson planning ideas. I’m excited in the extreme because the Regional English Language Officer will be conducting the training and he is extraordinarily cool.
To change the subject abruptly, I have found myself getting weirdly obsessed with the Hold Steady and Bruce Springsteen. In particular, the song “Atlantic City.” I went on a fairly long tangent about popular perceptions of New Jersey in my literature class today. It was pretty uncalled for. I’m already getting as nuts as the professors I knew in the States.
I think this has to do with the fact that both the Hold Steady and the Boss are what Russian speakers would call спесифический. That is to say, they reflect the character of a certain place (Minneapolis and Jersey, respectively). I mean, you probably couldn’t even translate Hold Steady lyrics because they just wouldn’t make sense outside of an American context. (Although the chorus of “Party Pit”--“I’m going to walk around and drink some more”--is pretty much the most Russian thing I’ve ever heard.)
They are both essentially trying to tell the stories of people who live in a certain time and place without a whole lot of judgment, which is pretty unusual in popular music. Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady, writes about people like a college girl who gets mixed up with a townie murder and a teenage boy who gets kicked out of his own prom for being high. Bruce tells us about a man moving to Atlantic City to become a contract killer--and trying to convince his girlfriend to come with. It makes for some pretty good listening.
The Hold Steady also adds an interesting element of religion, alternating between blasphemy and piety. Craig Finn says, “I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers / I feel Judas in the long odd of the rackets on the corner.” Nevertheless, he seems pretty pleased that a past girlfriend was “a really good kisser and wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.”
I’m not sure if I’m obsessed because of nostalgia or the good music, but I can say that buying Boys and Girls in America at Hoodlums while I was on break was probably the best $5.99 I’ve spent in quite a while.
With that, I’m going to pack. Here I come, Kievan Rus!
