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Oh, man, am I glad this day is over. We went to Isabel’s dance competition, which can be entertaining for an hour or two,but this went on for about 10 bloody hours, plus an almost 2 hour drive each way, we left the house this morning at 7:30 and got back just after 10.
It was a lovely town, took a couple of walks, sat by the lake and watched the ducks, took a couple of selfies up at the castle, found a decent kebab place for lunch. But, in the end, we still spent hours and hours sitting, watching one dance group after another, and suffered through the din – don’t get me wrong, I admire their enthusiasm, and Isabel loved it, all the participants did (why they’re there), and it’s just me being a grumpy old man.
But din it was. The decibel count of hundreds of ten year old girls screaming at once is like a 747 warming up on the tarmac, or a construction site in full jackhammer mode. But higher pitched. For hours. And hours.
Each group had a kids team, a juniors team, an adult team (15+) and seniors (I don’t know what the age was, they weren’t like grandmothers or anything, but over 40 maybe. And every team was screaming like mad for everybody else in their group.
And there were more groups than there are grains of sand in an hourglass.
Oh, well. Next time I’ll take a book.

Well, we’ve got an out of town street dance tournament of Isabel’s to go to tomorrow. that should be fun, and I’ve got a poetry reading Monday night that I’ve barely got anything written for, like two really short bits, they have a 6 minute time limit and with what I’ve got written so far, I could be up and down in about 30 seconds, so I’m thinking I’ll try to combine the two activities and write something while I’m sitting and listening to the chosen music of 10 year old Czech girls who are trying to be ghetto.
It doesn’t usually work but I’ve got three or four ideas percolating so maybe I’ll be able to force one of them into shape.
Now, maybe that’s what poetry is. It’s the shape. It’s got to look like a poem to be a poem, otherwise it’s just prose, it must be something because nobody pays a damned bit of attention to rhyme or meter any more.

I defriended somebody today, at least partially due to my own misunderstanding so maybe I’m a bad person, but I’m not trying to undo the damage or regain her as a friend because a) don’t know her in real life so it doesn’t matter much anyway, and b) I’ve got too many Facebook friends as it is, so shedding a few here and there is not actually a bad thing, and c)partially means there is another partially, and the first part was enough right there.
Here it is: First she was bitching about Sanders, saying as how he’d sold out and was no longer a leader of the progressive movement, which is troll talk, it’s bollocks. Who are you going to support, then? You have to go right outside of politics to find anyone purer than the esteemed Senator from Vermont. But, I just added my opinion and moved on. Then, a few posts later, there was a TV interview with a George W., who turned out to be George Webb, whoever that is, and I’d just jumped to the conclusion that she was a right wing paid provocateur. And maybe she’s not.
But, there’s still the Bernie content, and that was enough.

Kind of a frantic, confused day but there were definitely some bright spots. First, I noticed pretty much as soon as I left the house that my phone was not charged, stupid phone, I need to charge it pretty much every night, but, never mind, I figured, it was not so long ago when we got through days, weeks, months, entire lifetimes without having a phone in our pockets and being linked to everybody else in existence 24/7.
Got a nice, albeit short poem written while on the Metro.
My gymnasium kids were all pretty good despite the fact that I had no lesson plan at all and just bullshitted my way through. Grabbed a cheeseburger and fries at everybody’s favorite American restaurant and headed for my monster kids’ class, did flashcards as always, it’s amazing the number of variations on that game I can come up with, and they all liked the phrase “Big Pig” because it rhymes and then the only boy in the class (they are 7 and 8) said “Big Dick Pig” and I told him not to say that and then I realized he had no idea what he’d said and I had to explain it to him, there’s no point wondering where he heard it in the first place, it’s all around them these days.
Then, I thought I was done. One student had suggested maybe meeting for a lesson this afternoon (not so much a lesson as help with a translation), but my phone was off so I figured ‘well, that’s not going to work out’ and just as well, but her husband was waiting for me at the bus stop and drove me back to his office and we worked there for an hour.
I was worried I’d get home after Helena and she’d be mad because it’s her birthday and we had plans to go out for a nice dinner and leave the kids at home, but I was home first after all and then she suggested taking the kids out and making it a family restaurant night and so we did.
That’s it, I’m done.

Partly it’s due to Kindle and partly it’s due to it’s about damned time, but my reading habits have taken a hard turn to Terry Pratchett in the last couple of months. Oh, I’d read one or two before that, but now I can say I’ve read several, and that is a much more satisfying thing to say.
Also, it’s a good habit because he’s probably written like about 40 of the Discworld books (I’m not going to look it up – when I say ‘like about 40’ I mean ‘a rather large number’), so it will take me a while, a couple of years, to get through them all, even if I read nothing else and I don’t intend to go quite that hard core.
That would be like saying I just want to listen to Paul Simon over and over again or that I only want to watch films from the Coen Brothers or I want to eat only pizza for every meal for ever. This is like a Facebook survey that starts “If you had to choose just one…” Books, films, music, and food are not like women. You don’t have to choose just one.
I like the writing, of course, it’s always humorous and his metaphors are spot on, and his characters are funny, but extremely realistic in their shortcomings, but I really like the world. Ankh Morpork is even sleazier than Mos Eisley, there is an endless supply of quirky creatures, and I love the way that light moves slower when it encounters a heavy field of magic, like the one that covers that particular flat planet. I suspect it would be an entertaining place to live, despite the excessive probability of getting killed if you’re not a main character, or turned into a frog or some such shit.
I don’t understand how this series of books has not been turned into a TV series. Films are also an unexploited possibility.
The one I’m reading now is ‘Equal Rites’ about the little girl who wants to be a wizard and, of course, she’s ten times the wizard as any boy around but… So, it’s a feminist message and all but it’s more than that, the whole discussion of men’s magic vs. women’s magic opens a wedge and allows the exploration of the question ‘what is this magic stuff, anyway? And that is a very important discussion to have.

I just got back from a meeting of ‘Democrats Abroad,’ which I can attend because I haven’t actually demexited yet, at least not formally, officially, partly because I’m living abroad and it would be complex, but that’s probably an excuse, I’m sure I could figure out how to do it if I were really in a hurry, but it’s not as if there’s anywhere to go, so that’s reason #2.
Anyway, I went because a friend was running for a position on the board, and he’s a die hard Berner and I wanted to support him.
It went about as I expected. People speaking in general, non-heated terms. Some good folks, I ‘m just not sure we’re all in the same party any more.

Made a kid cry today. That’s not good, but it was kind of unavoidable. He was sitting at the back of the room, totally not getting the lesson, while 5 or 6 of the louder kids in the class were shouting out the answers to everything, and arguing like mad whenever I awarded the point to someone else. Anyway, I decided I had to bring him in to the conversation, and I still think I was right to do it. I made him change seats so he was sitting in the thick of the action, knelt down to eye level, and pretty much forced him to speak one simple, coherent sentence in English – I believe it was something like’the tree is green.’ Anyway, the other kids, well-intentioned, I’m sure, were shouting advice at him, telling him what to say, and he was yelling at them to shut up, he took it as an insult that they were giving him the answer, and he didn’t get it that they were giving him the answer. I could see the tears welling up in his eyes, but I had to persist at that point.
I felt bad about it, but I hope he learned something. Not the sentence. The need to participate. I doubt very much that I helped him overcome his fear of English, which would have been nice, but that’s expecting a bit much. Basically, I’m just hoping I didn’t traumatize the poor kid for life.

Need to get new glasses. Frame is cracked. Tried gluing it together yesterday but today the lens just popped right out – in my pocket. Tomorrow.