A Whole New Me
In case you happened to have just bookmarked the blog instead of accessing it through the website, you should know my blog is now at:

www.englishteacherx.blogspot.com

To the guy who keeps asking -- nothing happened to the rapist. The cops came, decided not to press charges, and left. Who knows what really happened? Not me.

Magnificent Desolation
Came out of the nightclub full of 17-year-olds this morning at 5:30am, me, a 40 year old married American, and a 50 year old Irish guy. The Irish guy had to go buy a bus ticket, so we went to the bus station and got the ticket, and treated ourselves to breakfast beers at the bus station bar. We considered having some steamed hamburgers, but decided finally to just have more beer.

Then we decided to walk over to the Pirate Disc Market to see if it was open yet. It wasn't. Walking around it, I noticed an abandoned half-constructed apartment block over a hill nearby. We walked into what I can only describe as the most magnificent desolation I've ever seen -- something like a cross between a landfill and a swamp, with five stories of half-completed concrete apartment house towering over it, big strange chunks of metal and abandoned construction equipment here and there, crumbling sheets of concrete, and most interestingly a half-completed drainage system and little concrete shelters that I assume were probably going to be guard stations.

We wandered drunkenly about in the empty apartment for a while, the floors littered with crumbled concrete, hypodermic needles and the occasional condom, and the Irish guy said, "So, did you ever imagine when you were a child that your life would bring you to this place and this time?"

"Unfortunately. . . yes," I replied.

My digital camera got stolen by the cops last October, but I'll probably buy a new one soon and I've GOT to get some pictures of this.

Model Behaviour
A few of the females guests at my birthday party -- namely a reserved older women that English Teacher P brought, and African Student S's female friend from Germany -- were apparently "surprised" by our drunken behaviour.

Well, okay, we got pretty drunk and acted up a bit, but think of all the things that DIDN'T happen:

no severed arteries
no fighting
no shouting (beyond the friendly boisterous kind)
no passing out
no vomitting
no police or angry neighbors
no severed arteries
no fucking in the toilet/kitchen/back room

We were on model behaviour, I think.

The Accused
Holy Crap! When I got to work today the cops were there, grilling one of the other teachers because he'd been accused of raping a 17 year old girl. Now this is guy is by FAR the LEAST likely suspect around the school for that kind of thing, and he apparently managed to satisfy the cops that it was just an extortion attempt by some girl he barely knew. I guess he had a good alibi.

It's scary as hell! Think of all the dotty girls I know who could try something like that. . . the identity of the girl remains as yet unknown to me/us, more developments as they break.

X

On My 36th birthday
My 36th birthday was recently.

On that subject I'd like to say:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

But no actually, of course, it was very nice, lots of my friends were there to wish me well, there were lots of young Russian girls fawning over me, all the stuff that makes life acceptable.

Even though I'm like older than Shaun Connery now.

Broken! Broken! Broken!
EVERYTHING I OWN IS BROKEN!! My fucking hot water doesn't work in my flat -- as is common in Russia in the summer, but I can't remember it ever being off for this long before. My DVD player is broken, and though it's under warranty still it will take ONE MONTH to repair. My computer for some reason will not send JPG attachements anymore, and there are loads of problems with Hotmail, all kinds of error messages. My home phone was out for five days because somebody made a long distance call to another city and didn't tell me about it.

My new "relationship" is somewhat trying, despite the good sex, simply because I'm not used to having to do what anyone else other than me wants.



It's sweltering hot everyday, and there's some kind of weird cottonseed tree around here that has the air filled with white puffy stuff all the time, that constantly gets in your nose and mouth, and of course any open drink you might happen to be carrying around with you.

GRRR! ENGLISH TEACHER X SMASH!

Dwarves and Kissing Cousins
My Saturday was rather bizarre -- we went to the Rossia bar, atmospherically filthy and housed in an old theater, which seems to be taking up the slack from The Degenerate Bar going down the tubes. I kissed a dwarf, at one point, though she was quick to point out she wasn't really a dwarf, just she had a spinal disorder. She said she'd had lots of women but never a man, and invited either me or African Student S to give it a shot.

I declined, though -- I took African Student S aside and begged him to do it, that I was far too shallow and selfish for such an act, but that it would be an act of great kindness. He said, "She only likes me because I'm black."

"Blacks got nothing to do with it! This is about dwarfism and dick!"

Incidentally, the term for "dwarf' in Russian is apparently, "Lilliput." I find that pretty funny.

Anyway, damned if the dwarf before the end of the evening wasn't making out with a really cute blonde. I went over and acted like I was jealous, just to make the dwarf feel good.

I also danced with and made out with a blonde who was about four inches taller than me -- there was speculation she was a transvestite but I felt for her genitals and she didn't have a penis, anyway.

Then two cousins of our acquaintance arrived, and well into my absinthe by this point, I invited both of them to sit on my lap and spent most of the evening making out with both of them at the same time. They even came back to my house, but wouldn't do anything below the waist. Don't know, maybe they were on synchronized periods or something.

The American Psycho Turns Pale And Says, "Gee, I don't know. . ."
This Friday my rich guy is going to take me and a few other friends to our new rich guy strip club here in town, supposed to be quite remarkable in its degeneracy. Now before you say, "Like a rich guy would know degenerate compared to you" remember, this is Russia -- these rich guys here have had some adventures that would make Patrick Bateman blanche.

The vice-mayor of Vodkaberg almost got assassinated a few months ago -- somebody rigged up a grenade with a trip wire next to his parking space. I was of course interested in the techinical details of this -- apparently the trip wire was operated manually by somebody standing on the other side of the parking lot out of sight. Not exactly the high-tech wonder somebody who watches too much television would expect, but there you go. He wasn't killed, but riddled with shrapnel -- one leg is badly injured.

My rich guy said this probably came about as a result of being double-crossed by our inept, greedy, and moody Mayor. They make most of their money from bribes related to construction contracts -- as I mentioned a hell of a lot of construction going on now -- and the Mayor will occasionally take bribes from one group for something, then accept a large bribe from someone else for the same thing, and if the first group kicks up a fuss, he says, "Oh, that was the Vice Mayor, he forged my signature on something, it's not my fault."

Needless to say the Vice Mayor has decided to get out of politics, and is taking a healthy rest in Israel, where there are a lot of specialists in treating shrapnel wounds.

The Night's Darkness
Regarding yesterday's blog entry in which I said the neighbors would like me more if they'd seen me recuing the cat from the tree, I received the following email from Former Teacher Q:

"I can see this scenario too well....

The grizzled war-vet sits in his chair as the thin dawn breaks, illuminating his dreary flat. He has been awake for hours. His old body doesn't rest well in night's darkness, as though too reminded by it of the grave that soon awaits his tired bones.

And even when he does fall into a fitfull sleep, its welcome respite is destroyed by the heathen American above him. Last night the old man's weary dreams were broken by the moaning and banging from the
upstairs flat as the American defiled another flowers of Russian youth.

But what matter, all the girls were whores these days. Not like the girls of his day, those proud women of the Revolution who struggled in
the glory of the Soviet cause!

Look, here comes the young lout now, staggering about, with two of his comrades, all drunk, and one of them a black even. Not one of them would have survived the days of Stalin, he was sure, and fighting in the Great Patriotic War would have made them real men instead of decadent hooligans as all youth were in these wretched times.

Now the noisy fucking one was shouting and climbing in the tree. He hauls down a squirming cat, still yelling raucously.

The old man gnashes his steel teeth and wishes again, not for the first time or the last, that perhaps it would have been better had he
not survived this long to see what had become of the world."

One Good Thing
You know, it's generally said of me that I'm pretty much a bastard. Selfish, tactless, etc. We spent much of this evening at a quiet nightclub/restaurant, where I managed to terribly offend two girls we were with by making one slight passing comment about their lack of English skills. This amused me that I'd offended them, so I spent the rest of the evening trying to offend them even more.

Like I give a shit. These two girls are like black holes of fun.

Then we strolled out of the bar at 5:00am or so, went to a shop and got some beers, and eventually decided to stroll back to my place for breakfast.

When we got to the front door, we heard a cat screaming.

It was an orange cat, stuck up in a tree.

"GODDAMMIT!" I screamed. "I'M TAKING HER DOWN!"

I started trying to scale the tree.

My colleagues -- African Student S and English Teacher P (49) -- encouraged me not to.

"THIS ISN'T ABOUT THE CAT!" I cried. "THIS IS ABOUT ME! DAMN IT, I'VE NEVER DONE ANYTHING GOOD IN MY WHOLE LIFE! AND I'M STARTING NOW!" I'd reached the first fork in the tree trunk by that point.

"COME ON KITTY! WE GO DOWN TOGETHER OR WE DIE TOGETHER!" I yelled, scaling the second fork in the tree trunk.

Kitty was reluctant to let go, but I managed to get her off after a lot of tugs at the nape of her neck. And I got her down.

If only the neighbors had seen me do that -- they'd like me much more. But then again, it is 6:00 in the morning.

It's 6:50 am -- I have a freshly opened Kozel beer in my hand, an unconscious black man snoring on my floot, GHOST IN THE SHELL (Japanese anime) playing on the DVD player, an Irish man cooking something involving lentils, beans and eggs in my kitchen. . . and the knowledge that an orange cat is walking free because of me.