So, I’m doing a ridiculous translating job for which I am severely underqualified, but am enjoying greatly. Every once in a while my Italian ex-boyfriend’s mom sends article to me via him that need proofreading in English. They’re scientific articles. And sometimes the translation is so odd I need to be able to look at the original.

Now, I don’t actually “speak” Italian. But my Spanish is great, my French is…in there somewhere… and I’ve picked up a bit of Italian here and there. In the past, I’ve had fun with these articles. They’re like brain teasers. Usually I can figure out how to clean things up but sometimes I get sent on a wild google chase to figure out what something means in Italian and what it is in English.

This time its insane! A 6000 word document on an ovarian syndrome. OMG! I spent 30 minutes – and an international chat to an italian -  just trying to figure out what a phrase was, only to find it meant those little plastic tubes that go up your nose for oxygen in the hospital  – nasal cannala, if you care (which you probably don’t). And there’s a blood transfusion term that is driving me completely bonkers!!

And yet, I’m happy. I’m sitting here with my opera on, trying out different ones to see which one I want to see at the Teatro Real. I started out with Rossini, you know, to put my mind in an Italian mode (maybe something will sink in by osmosis) but have moved on to Wagner (Inteeeeense!!). And it’s 12:30 and I’m totally not tired, or feeling burnt out (ok, I needed a little break which is why I’m writing this). I find it invigorating somehow.

Every time I do some translating work I think “maybe this is what I should try to do, like professionally”. I can’t explain it. There is something just so simply, well, fun about it for me. I feel like I’m really really exercising my brain, like this is just some great game or puzzle, and is so satisfying when you find the right piece! It’s just a very intense and focused kind of intellectual challenge, I guess exactly the kind I havent had very much of here in Spain, and the kind I hope to find by going back to school.

Anywho, just wanted to write about an activity that always surprises me with how much it makes me appreciate my brain. Thanks brain, you’re fun!

I’m having a Johnny Cash sort of morning. Might even use one of his songs as a listening exercise with a student. It’s between that and Friend of the Devil by the Grateful Dead.

From the New York Times:

In an emotional address in Canberra, with many in the audience weeping, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a national apology for Australia’s role in child migrant programs that forcibly sent an estimated 150,000 British youngsters — known in Australia as the Lost Innocents — to Australia, Canada and other parts of the Commonwealth. The programs ended about 40 years ago.

I knew Australia had a sketchy immigration history, what with the White Australia Policy and all. But I hadn’t run across this particularly sordid piece of nastiness. Turns out the kids were whisked away from poor families and single mothers (you know, all those unfit people), and generally subjected to all kinds of physical and emotional abuse, and used for cheap labor.

In theory the program was supposed to “relieve financial burdens on Britain’s social service agencies” and give poor kids a new lease on life (as well as import “good white stock”) Instead they ended up being beaten, starved, raped, worked to exhaustion, and generally brutally deprived of anything that could be called a childhood.

One thing to remember – plenty of kids are still living this way today. Except instead of importing them to our countries, we export our labor, and our abuse, to them.

First – I thought this was worth a chuckle: the anonymous sex blogger, who became famous under the pen name Belle Du Jour, recently outed herself. She’s a scientist from Bristol who started working as a high priced prostitute in order to pay for her education. From The Guardian:

[Dr. Brooke] Magnanti, a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol, has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300 an hour prostitute working through a London escort agency. Magnanti turned to the agency in the final stages of her PhD thesis when she ran out of money.

Yeah, so, keep that one in mind while trying to figure out how to finance the old masters, right?

Second – a discouraging piece about the sickening world of student loans. Also from The Guardian, they report that almost 2 million pounds in bonuses were given out by the Student Loans Company. Now, had it been simply a question of dubious proportionality in compensation for a job well done, that would be one thing. But it’s so much more:

Ministers ordered an inquiry after almost 150,000 students who had applications approved were left without funding at the start of the new academic term.

This year was the first time freshers applied directly to the SLC for grants and loans, and the new arrangement has been beset by problems as the agency struggled to cope with demand.

Liberal Democrat universities spokesman Stephen Williams said: “It is absolutely outrageous that the Student Loans Company, which has acted so incompetently this year, has been paying out these massive bonuses.

“While students have been left struggling to make ends meet, the company’s top executives have been enjoying five-figure bonuses.

“Some of these pay-outs are more than many people earn in a year. Rewarding failure in this way is totally unacceptable.” [emphasis mine]

Just another example of a business that should not be in private hands. A fair distribution of funds (but ideally free higher education) truly for students’ benefit and not for profit, is the only way to go. Anything else is a disgrace, and this shows why.

The panic is setting in.

Now that my escape from Madrid is nearly certain, I’m starting to think about everything I still haven’t done yet. It’s amazing the things you manage not to do when you live in a place. For example, in California you can see Alcatraz from the house I grew up in. I was 22 before I visited. (And it was crap, btw, a crumbling ugly building that would probably have been bulldozed had Al Capone not wasted away there with syphilis, yawn.)

So I’ve decided this would be a good place to start compiling a list of things to do before, oh mid-February-ish. They’re not going to be in any order of importance or priority, just in the order in which they occur to me. So here goes:

1. See an opera at The Opera – the Teatro Real.

I tried to take care of this one over the summer. I downloaded the libretto for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and started piecing it together with my rudimentary Italian (which I can sort of read between my Spanish and rusty French), and got all excited to go see it at the Teatro Real! Waited too long to try to get tickets and the only ones left were over 200 euros. D’oh!

So now I’ve got to do a little more planning. Before I leave, there’s a Rossini (L’italiana in Algeri), a Handel (Agrippina), a Janacek (Janufa), a Wagner (The Flying Dutchman), and a Giordano (Andrea Chenier). I know next to nothing about opera, but I have been told Wagner is not for beginners (which of course makes me want to see that one, just cuz).  Any suggestions on what a neophyte might enjoy would be heartily appreciated!

2. Go to the Top of That Stupid Tower – the one in Moncloa that’s hideously ugly but everyone says there’s a great view at the top of.

3. Eat in Every Restaurant on Cava Baja That I Haven’t Eaten in Yet

So I live at the end of this crazy street crammed full of great bars/restaurants/cafes called Calle Cava Baja. Unfortunately I moved into this awesome barrio just as I became too poor to really enjoy that part of the neighborhood. I dreamed of being able to have the money to spend at one of the places every day, so it would become my local, and the people there would know me, and it would be like Cheers, only “Salud.” ‘Twas not to be. But at least before I leave I want to sample the restaurants I haven’t tried yet, which is almost all of them.

My current plan (I use it in the loosest way possible) is to go back to the States and probably do a masters somewhere. I,being overconfident about the process and a tad prone to procrastinate, have only just started putting apps together. With predictable results.

The first headache is going to be the letters of recommendation, it seems. Before I left Berkeley, I used the university’s Letter Service, whereby you can ask for letters of recommendation while professors still know who you are, then put them on file for later use. I just checked out the Letter Service website today for, oh, probably the first time since I last filed a letter, and found out that they hold the letters for up to 5 years. I graduated in 2002. D’oh!

Sigh. Berkeley’s a huge school. I almost never talked to my professors, and even the ones I did have actual face to face interaction with probably won’t remember me almost 8 years down the line. My head hurts. This is an annoying end to a nasty sort of day. Now this is just going to be rolling around in my little cabeza and keeping me from my sleep. Grrrrrr.

So, I’ve been under the weather fighting a nasty cold since Sunday but was feeling significantly better today. The sniffliness had turned into the wheeziness. Everything was progressing fine. So I went to teach my afternoon class in the middle of nowhere (ie. Rico-ville) with a darling 11-year-old girl who I tutor in math, while trying to keep her well-meaning but interfering little sister at bay. It’s fun. They’re cute.

But today, something went terribly wrong.

After about 30 minutes I started to get this dizzy feeling, then I started to feel warm, like I was breaking out in a sweat. I excused myself to go to the toilet. I burped. That was all. I returned to long division.

My student told me “You look really white.”  “No, no, don’t worry, I’m feeling better,” I lied. We continued on to rounding numbers. We had just determined how to round 312.895 to the tens place when she looked at me again “You look a little green,” she said, and to illustrate pointed to my avocado green hair clips with a little giggle. I couldn’t keep it up. I told her to go tell her mother I wouldn’t be able to finish class and I proceeded to wretch, embarrassingly loudly, my beautiful sundried tomato and goat’s cheese pasta lunch into their beautiful, immaculate and expensive toilet, in their beautiful immaculate and expensive bathroom.

Ah well. It got me a lift all the way to the metro station. So, bonus!

Not sure what happened, I am currently considering  two culprits: 1) my uberstrong cough medicine that makes me high as a kite or 2) the cheese sauce in my lunch. Cheese is always a suspect.

Either way, it was a pretty embarrassing situation. It’s difficult to maintain dignity while puking in your employer’s house. And what might they think? That I was hungover? Knocked up? Sigh.

Off to vegetate on the sofa.

UPDATE – It was my flatmate’s milk, of which i used a miniscule amount in my pasta sauce, which was the culprit. We discovered it to be well sour the next day. Boo

My immune system seems to be sabotaging me once again.

I was hoping to come back from my weekend with friends in the Pyrenees rejuventated, ready to hit the ground running, to start a million projects at once, now that my work schedule was finally solidifying (after only two months of scrambling to get classes lined up).

Wheezy the Penguin from Toy Story. This is how I feel today.

But, no. Instead I hit the ground coughing. And sneezing. And wheezing. And snotting. So much snotting. Sometimes I wonder how it is physically possible to produce so much snot and if our bodies have some sort of limit at which they just run out. I have not reached that point yet. I’ll let you all know if I do.

Upside: cough syrup that totally makes me high (Bisolvon – what is IN this stuff?)

Downside: my job is terrible if you have a cold.

I haven’t talked much here about teaching English, probably because I am afraid that I will turn into an angry rant-monster. But I thought I’d include a little mini rant today.

So – English teaching in Spain, if you don’t have papers and therefore can’t get a contract, is, in general, a racket. Some of the racketeers are less exploitative than others, but in the end, it’s really no way to build a career (especially if like me, you don’t even want a career in English teaching, ha!). But that’s not the point of today’s rant.

Today’s rant is about shlepping. (I thank Yiddish for the beautiful contributions it has made to the English language – shlep being one of my favourites). When you teach English here without a contract, you are inevitably going to spend the greater part of your day, your time, your precious life energy shlepping around from one class to another, often in distant parts of the city, cramming yourself into bus and metro and running from one to the other with your not-very-light bag of text books and photocopies and sometimes (groan) a laptop. All of which is uncompensated time and effort.

This is all very annoying in summer, but in winter, for an immunologically challenged person such as myself, it becomes unbearable. All day, running in and out from warm air to freezing air. And what air it is. Madrid is the highest major capital in Western Europe and you can tell by the cold cold, skin crackingly dry air. You breathe it in and pain shoots through your sinus cavity (if you have weakling pathetic sinuses like me). I’m just a poor girl from Northern California. I have never adjusted to this.

Two years ago a I got the flu twice in 4 weeks. Last year I spent the better part of the winter in some state of phlegm over-production. This is my third disease of the season. I give up. I admit it. I am sickly. I don’t feel like a sickly person. I think of myself as full of energy and life. But I have to face the facts. All of my friends can pick out the sound of me in particular blowing my nose, so often do they hear it. My immune system is crap. Defective. Useless. I want a refund!

And so, while most people, when they get a cold, can at least spend most of their day in one, temperature-constant environment, I’m tossed around between over heated metro cars and windswept bus stops, carrying around absurd amounts of soon to be snot covered toilet tissue in my bag (cuz the kleenex ran out ages ago) to whose over-use the red, chaffed ring around my nose attests. It is not a pretty or dignified sight. I look like I belong in a Nyquil comercial.

Reason number 435 why I don’t want to teach English in Madrid anymore.

That’s it. Mini-rant, like I said.

Now, that said, I don’t want to give the impression I have anything against teaching. I love teaching actually. I just hate doing it in the conditions that exist in Madrid. Precarious, laborious, underappreciated.

I love my students though. I have met so many fabulous interesting people so far. One of my new students is an artist. Another is a military officer who is going to Afghanistan in January. And others are incredibly sweet kids who i would gladly teach for free (but don’t tell their parents that).

I’ve also learned a lot from my students. Many of them have lent me or recommended books (I’m working on two at the moment) And one has given me the bestest, stinkiest home remedy tip of all time (for sickly sniffly puppies like me). Teresa was a funcionario for the Ministry of Housing, but somewhere in the past she had studied nutrition and knew all sorts of interesting facts about foods. But the best was when I had a cold, and complained that I couldn’t sleep well at night, because I couldn’t breathe through my nose. She told me to put a chopped raw onion on a plate by my bed. Worked like a charm. My room stank to high heaven, but I could breathe!

Used that tip on Monday night. Was kind of worried that in the morning, perhaps I smelled of onion, but couldn’t tell because my sense of smell was impaired. If I did, the army guy was nice enough not to tell me.

Gotta go get rid of some snot now [wheeeeeze]

Here’s a buttload of links of things I’ve been perusing this week, and haven’t bee able to actually post about.

First US Official Resigns Over Afghanistan – “Not worth the effort.”

Stephen Fry’s Twitter Spat is News?!? The world is a sad place.

Parliament to Host first Gay Wedding! Yay!

US Terrorizing Aid to Somalia – aaaah the War on Terror

Thank Bolivia for you Lithium Batteries -let’s hope they can manage the industry wisely

Random nature links on Seahorse Sex and Humpback Whale Fights (I attribute these links to a recent bout of insomnia. That’s when I gravitate towards nature videos.)

Children Who Get Life in Prison Without Parole – the sad sad state of the US correctional system.

Camorra Boss Arrested in Naples – for those who don’t know about the situation, read Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (one of the best books of 2007) and then go see the Cannes Grand Prix winning film made from the book. (trailer)

Karzai’s Opponent drops out and Robert Fisk says what I was thinking (but so so much better than I could)

The Case For Modesty in an Age of Arrogance – if Barack is so humble, shouldn’t he have refused the Nobel Prize?

One Reason You Shouldn’t Go To Afghanistan With Beard – interesting quick read

Alrighty, to finish up the Rant, here’s the video I ran across a few days ago when I started this rant. It’s a documentary called Addicted to Plastic. I was especially interested to see it because the filmmakers actually go through the Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a pretty good general overview of the plastic situation; history, problems, and people currently looking for solutions either by creatively reusing and reworking plastic products, or by creating new and eco-friendly materials to replace our current plastics.

Here’s the trailer:

It would have been nice to see the filmmakers press the people who make plastics a bit more – like the plastics industry rep they feature throughout the film – but on the whole, I think they were trying to be positive and spend more time on the people trying to find solutions.

And the solutions out there are truly amazing. What is sad is that there are so many really ingenious people coming up with creative, intelligent solutions and I’m sure they could use more government financing to get their projects going, but they seem to have to be doing it all on their own. It’s a shame, we should be supporting this innovation more.

Elsewhere on the subjects of the production process, disposability and waste, here’s two good vids I’ve posted before but it can’t hurt to do it again:

The Story of Stuff – amazing concise explanation of the problems with how we make things, socially, economically, ecologically and ethically.

And Waste = Food, about the phenomenal work of a chemist and an architect working together to create “cradle-to-cradle” systems of production which create no waste at all.