Barhopping (1 of 2): Another Polish bar.

The other weeknight I biked down to the smaller of the city’s 2 airports, and ended up in a Polish bar located in a bar-banquet hall (there’s a few of those in the city).

The elderly blocky-built (Polish) guy in a dirty t-shirt looked like any number of people from my hometown (which is full of Polish-Americans) and was skeptical of me at first, since very few outsiders come into the bar, I’d think, and so asked me for my I.D.

After he saw I wasn’t a member of some sting, he got me my beer and began to chat a bit, and asked me what I was doing there.

“Oh,” I was like, “I worked from home all day, and I just took a long bike ride to relax and decided to stop and get a beer.”

“Why not?”, he said after a short pause, very deliberately, with a smile and a laugh.

I then at some point told him that I was half Polish, and he asked me if I knew any Polish.

“’Dzeinkuja’?”, he was like (“’Thank you’?).

“Of course,” I was like, and he then said that if you know “thank you” in a language, that’s important, it’s the first thing you need to know and pretty much the only thing you need to know.

I then told him several other Polish phrases that I know, including “Give me the cheapest beer” and “How much does the cheapest beer cost?”.

“Oh,” he was like, “You know too much,” and wagged his finger once at me.

We also went over several more phrases, and when I got to “dobra noc” (‘good night’), he was like, “Dose brown nuts,” and when I asked him if that’s what people say, he said that’s what the phrase sounds like in English.

Incredibly cool park.

There’s this one city park near my new apartment that I’ve biked by forever, which has this large artificial hill that slopes up severely to the pathway on the other side of a small fence paralleling the street, and looks kind of insipid, though every once in a while you see a parent and a kid flying a kite there, which is kind of cute.

The other week, though, I chose to bike around the hill to see if it was a shortcut – and you can’t see it at all from 2 sides of the park, but on one side, it dips down into a scenic cut-rock quarry into which a waterfall flows!

There’s a metal walkway around the edge and everything, and elderly (Chinese) couples strolling.

Computer problems.

Last summer during very hot weather, my computer spontaneously blacked out after I had been word-processing on it for a while (you could feel the heat under the keyboard).

The other week, I was supposed to get a job assignment email in the evening, so I headed over to a Starbucks near my local apartment to hop on the wi-fi there and check my email.

Every time I put the wireless card in, though, the computer didn’t pick up that it had been inserted, so when I put it in deeper, the computer would black out, and up popped some error message on the screen!!!

Fortunately, a kindly (older middle-aged) (black) (female) patron next to me let me check for my work email on her son’s cast-off Blackberry.

(She had just had a normal phone, but her son’s company didn’t get good cell reception at his college that he just started at, so he got a new phone and she took over his phone and number for the rest of his contract.)

A motherly observation.

During that same conversation, I told my mom about the brewing scandal, where the president of the university where I go to very bizarrely won’t let maintenance workers use the elevator in the main building on campus, which I guess forces them to haul equipment up up to 6 flights of stairs.

“Man,” I was like, “That really got me p*ss*d off, when I heard that.”

“I can only imagine,” she said.

Joke repetition.

The other week I was talking with my parents on the phone, and I mentioned to my mom that I was going to see Verdi’s “Joan of Arc” that weekend, since a local opera company was putting it on.

She started to say something, and I cut her off and was like, “Don’t tell me how it ends!”.

(The opera, by the way, ends with Joan escaping from the stake, leading the army to battle once more, than ascending bodily to heaven...  They changed the story a bit, as it turns out.)

She then said that like half a year or a year before that, before she retired, she was at the library and had finally got off the waitlist for some book on the Mayflower, and was talking about it with the library’s IT guy, and when he had started to say something, she had said the same thing.

When she said that, I vaguely remembered that story, and I wonder whether I subconsciously filed away that joke, or if I simply re-invented it.

Latin bummer.

My one very good Latin student sent me a semi-dramatic email out of the blue thanking me for lessons, and saying he really couldn’t continue them because he got suddenly tapped to undergo (free) certification training that allowed him to ascend the office ladder, and that’d pretty much suck up all his free time, though he’d try to translate a little bit on his own if he ever had time.

I replied very nicely, and reminded him that I’d be in the city for at least 2 years, so he always had the option of starting up lessons again, and that if he ever got through any decent amount of the texts we had been working on (and I recommended which ones might be easier to do on his own, since a few of them were consistently challenging for him, in a good way), we could always meet for 15-30min. to check his translation on a play-it-by-ear basis.

He said definitely, and thanked me for my flexibility.

It’s kind of sad, he read a ton of Latin each week, and it really kept me on my toes.

I’m certain he’ll be back, though, if/when his time frees up.

At our last lesson, even, we had just started Vergil’s 1^st Eclogue – we had already read the 4^th – and he mentioned that he really enjoyed it, and when I then said that it would be feasible with dedication to read the entire work, he genuinely, immediately exclaimed, “I’d love that!”, and you could tell he meant it.

He really does have a genuine love for Latin, it’s very endearing and inspiring.  I’d *love* for him to be able to study with that one priest I studied with, I know he’d really enjoy it and learn a lot.

I also think that he gets oddly dramatic...  Like half a year ago he said he had a family situation that was sucking up his time and money (he lives at home with his parents – is one of them sick?), and couldn’t afford the roughly $150 a month he was paying me, so we talked it over, and I ended up halving my hourly price to fit his budget, until such a time that he could up it again, as he could afford it again.

I really think he was honest with me then, and had thought I’d be a stickler for my price or something, and that's why he cancelled.