thursday

for no reason, other than exquisite beauty, a west-santiago mural:

top 10 things i would miss about home if i weren't a total hardass incapable of missing anything about any situation (also not including people, that's too easy for a hardass like myself):

1. the internets - waking up and hitting up james horn on the scrabulous horn, listening to copious amounts of unfamiliar music, reading an unhealthy dosage of news, old episodes of this american life, and absorbing emails moments after they were sent.

2. flushing toilet paper after usage.

3. the meal formerly known as dinner, now known as "onces" and sadly, sometimes composed of nothing more than bread and butter.

4. the van

5. living in a country where the majority of commuters use their horns when necessary, if at all. a telling example of frivolous chilean usage: a light has just turned green, cars are lined down a busy thoroughfare at midday, cars at a distance who can see the green light, but nothing else going on in the intersection begin hysterically honking their horns at (presumably) the cars at the front of the intersection. honking solves nothing and yet, it is a widely accepted form of being a total jackass.

6. a dog that never ceased to crave playtime.

7. having readily accessible warm water. we have a water heater that needs to be coaxed and culled every time someone wants a shower/hot water out of the sink. no one ever wants hot water out of the sink. sometimes, i don't mind a shower. recently, the heater was "cleaned" and had a pilot replaced. one would think it would work better now. yes, one would think.

8. a country where common courtesy often reared its pretty head. here, someone gashes your ankle with their stilettos on the bus and gives you a dirty look for it. not a universal criticism, but its happened and it makes you think (about murder).

9. being lavishly spoiled by the fine eastern cuisine of one mrs. chitra rameswaram. sri lankan curries are inexplicably absent from santiago and satellite communities.

10. clean l.a. air. seriously.


of course, i'm too hard to actually miss anything. F the free world! i hope the united states permanently freezes any incoming flights from chile and neighboring nation-states so that i can stay here and throw my dirty TP away in the wastebasket next to the toilet forever.



and now, for no particular reason, a funny teaching anecdote from yesterday:

a student who i genuinely like (i genuinely like many of them) has a habit of forgetting anything that has been taught to him give or take 27 seconds after the fact. this often becomes problematic when trying to you know... "teach" ... in fact, the problem is also quite possibly that many duocUC students (i've talked to other volunteers on this one) seem to often forget the basis of language (theirs or ours) when in class. students will drop articles like fourth period french when trying to construct sentences, wholly abandoning anything they've ever known about speech in general. for example, when trying to say something like, "a doctor helps people at a hospital" a student will often throw out "a doctor helps people hospital."

what's problematic, or perhaps even frustrating about this english epidemic is that it really is baseless. presumably, these cats are thinking in spanish when constructing their english. this would lead them to think "un doctor ayuda la gente al hospital" (mas o menos). the operative word or contraction of two words in there would be "al" which is "at the." these cats forget that articles exist when making their translations. its fascinating (to us, i guess).

so back to my story about nicolas. yesterday, i find myself teaching time expressions and daily activities. not a freak occurrence as unit 2 in the basic english textbook is called "how do you spend your day?" after presenting my lesson and doing some q & a, i begin asking my students questions to practice the new material. when its nicolas' turn, i slowly query,

"nicolas, what... time.. do you... leave... for work... on weekdays?"

to which, after a brief pause, he proudly replies,

" i ...... weekdays! "

i broke out into laughter.

couldn't help it, sometimes shits just funny. after gaining control of my faculties, i wrote what nicolas said on the board (at this point, he's laughing at himself too). "i weekdays, i weekdays, that's like saying, 'yo dia de semana,' you realize that right?" we had a laugh about it and i begged my students to remember most questions that i will ever ask them will probably have verbs and prepositions in the answer. jajajajaja (spanish hahahahahaha), english. it's weird blogging about this stuff, because it seems rather esoteric or insular. but then again, my original URL was "seangoestochiletounsuccessfullyteachenglish.blogspot.com" so it kinda comes with the territory.