English Teacher X

The Alpha Mystique: Why I'm Not an Alpha And You Probably Aren't Either

2012-02-11T12:38:00.003+03:00

So I've received some attention and good reviews from the site In Mala Fide, which has a lot of interesting and varied articles about the nature of modern manhood. (This is a really good one.)

This blog was my introduction to the (rather unfortunately named) "manosphere," the blog groups basically concerned with the idea that modern men are gelded and oppressed by feminists who have become the dominant force in society. (I suppose the name "He-Man Woman Hater's Club" was taken.)

The term "alpha" is bandied around a lot -- referring generally to dominant, confident males. Guys like Tucker Max and Mystery, who have dedicated their lives to randomly fucking as many women as possible, are often considered to be exemplary "alphas." One writer on the subject postulates that an alpha male is all about self-gratification and dominance and does whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

Recently, shockwaves have been running through the "manosphere" -- sex-and-alcohol icon Tucker Max announced in an article in Forbes magazine that he was giving up drinking and fucking around, and had taken up yoga and psychoanalysis and gotten a girlfriend. (I guess he hit his fornicating "max" as I postulated in another post.)

The Forbes article is rather unfortunately couched in self-pitying Oprah-speak, but most of the points in it are valid and can't really be argued.

I thought it was pretty self-evident that running around drunk all the time, fornicating randomly, is pretty much the OPPOSITE of "Alpha" behavior.

It's like nobody every bothered to look up the word "alpha" on Wikipedia.

This is from the Wikpedia article about chimpanzees:

The Alpha male is the highest-ranking male who controls the group and maintains order during any disputes. In chimpanzee society the ‘dominant male’ does not always have to be the largest or strongest male but rather the most manipulative and political male who can influence the goings on within a group. Male chimpanzees typically attain dominance through cultivating allies who will provide support for that individual in case of future ambitions for power.

So basically, if you don't have a "pack" you are leading, you're not an "alpha."

Equally misused is the word "beta," when referring to the submissive, ineffectual modern man -- the beta, in animal hierchies, actually has a very important position:

A beta animal is an animal that is second-in-command to the reigning alpha and will act as a new alpha animal if the old alpha dies.

It's the omega animal that is last in line for food and sex. (But of course referring to "omega males" just brings to mind the fucking awesome Charleton Heston movie OMEGA MAN.)

I quote from the website of former bodyguard and correction officer Marc MacYoung, www.nononsenseselfdefense.com, in the section on alpha behavior:

“Being an alpha has to do with one’s involvement in a group. More specifically, it’s about helping develop and maintaining a group dynamic, hierarchy and the functionality of the group. And this not just for your own benefit.

Being an alpha is about leadership and taking care of others.”

So doing “whatever you want, whenever you want” is pretty much the opposite of being a leader. There are a complex web of responsibilities and relationships that are navigated to get to that point.

You know who does whatever they want, whenever they want? Spoiled Western college kids with absentee fathers.

You know who does what they NEED to do?

Alpha males.

ALL people in a position of power or leadership reach that position by navigating a series of responsibilities and relationships with their superiors, their subordinates, their rivals, and their enemies. Sometimes violence and immorality will get to that point, sometimes not; but pure self-indulgence and irresponsibility?

No way.

Yeah, sure, once you ACHIEVE a position of power and responsibility, some self-indulgence probably comes with it — of course you get the best women and so forth. But that’s a RESULT, not a CAUSE.

This all has nothing to do with morals, being an asshole, polygamy or monogamy, ruling with an iron fist, whatever; sometimes that’s an expedient to achieving the goals of leadership, sometimes not. They got to their position by dealing intelligently and effectively (perhaps brutally, perhaps not) with threats to the good of the group they were in, not by fucking around indulging their every whim.

Then there's the issue of the fact that it's not really too difficult to LOSE alpha status:

“Before you can understand what an alpha is, you first need to understand something about the nature of power. Namely: Power is granted to you by the group. You don’t have power unless other people give it to you.

Here’s the catch, the group gives you power on the condition that you look out for their needs. That’s the deal. You get extra power to serve them. If you violate this trust then you will be stripped of your power by the group.”

One website mentions Caesar, John Gotti, and Pablo Escobar as classic alpha males, but they're also good examples of guys who lost power by not serving the group. Caesar was assassinated by the Senators. Gotti doomed himself by pissing off longtime lieutenant Sammy the Bull. Pablo Escobar was chased down by police hit squads and vigilante groups when his reprisals became too brutal. Certain sources even have Atilla being murdered by a wife!

And you think those guys spent a lot of time doing whatever they wanted when they were young? Not working hard to establish themselves in their particular spheres?

Fuhgeddaboutit.

Too much self-indulgence and not enough leadership will eventually get your ass kicked by the people you used to lead — that’s true of everybody from Tony Montana in SCARFACE to Muammar Gadaffi.

Blaming "civilization" misses the point entirely -- "civilization" is just the order that we have adopted and the power we have given to our "alphas."

Now of course -- the metaphor begins to grind down -- human society is a lot more complicated and stratified than monkey society. And these guys are ignoring the fact that there are "alpha females" in the animal kingdom -- elephants, for example, are a matriarchal society, and it's common in primates like bonobos as well. Female chimps sometimes choose (or oust) the alpha male. Alphas do mate with one female, also -- the concept of the "alpha pair" is common.

We have in human society a lot of unfortunate examples of "insecure alphas" -- betas thrust into leadership positions who clearly have no idea how to fucking lead. (Yeah, you know who I'm talking about. The last two American presidents, and many others.) And clearly, the supposed "alphas" -- leaders of the world, are WAY too busy self-gratifying and not leading. That's why the streets are full of rioters all over the world.

That's why guys like Tucker Max and the PUAs (and me!) are (were?) basically miserable -- they've succeeded at nothing other than getting drunk and getting laid. They only get respect from other fuckups. That kind of rootless fucking never led to any kind of dominance, except over "beta" college-age chicks. (I suppose you could argue that Tucker Max and Mystery have a pack of fans and followers on the Internet, and Mystery has his students.)

Basically, it's beta behavior. Jockeying for position in the pack.

I was kind of the "alpha" in my community in Vodkaberg, at least in the early years -- I had some respect as a teacher, as a foreigner, among the foreigners as a guy who knew the nightlife and lots of girls.

But it was more like a zombie movie -- I was the guy who was leading the group not because I was a natural leader, but because I was less helpless and hysterical than the others.

If we want to define the kind of nomadic, rootless, selfish drinking and fucking that characterizes that behavior and dream life of so many of the guys in this world, we could instead look to the idea of the "lone wolf" --

In the animal kingdom, lone wolves are typically older wolves driven from the pack, perhaps by an alpha male, or young adults in search of new territory. Rather than openly challenge the dominance of the pack leaders, many young wolves between the ages of 1 and 4 years leave their family to search for a pack of their own. Some wolves will simply remain lone wolves; as such, these lone wolves may be stronger, more aggressive and far more dangerous than the average wolf that is a member of a pack. However, lone wolves have difficulty hunting, as wolves’ favorite prey, large ungulates, are nearly impossible for a single wolf to bring down alone. Instead, lone wolves will generally hunt smaller animals and scavenge carrion.

So, I make no bones about it -- I left America because I was scared of responsibilities, and was frightened of the "rules of the pack" and wanted to go out on my own and indulge myself.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it sure as fuck isn't "alpha" behavior. Better to be a lone wolf than an "insecure alpha!"

So basically -- any guy with a family or a business is probably a LOT more alpha than a guy with no responsibilities, just by definition.

Take it from a guy who spent many years hunting smaller animals and scavenging carrion.

Happiness To Go

2012-02-10T12:14:00.000+03:00

While I was in Thailand a few weeks ago, I happened to run into an American guy that I used to work with in Russia. He was there with his Russian wife -- they're both currently working in China.

Over beers, he asked me how I was getting along with no alcohol or nightclubs.

"Well, you know, funny thing about that. After all those years of drinking and carousing, when I stopped, something strange happened."

"You missed it."

"No, actually -- I felt fucking great!"

"Really?"

"Here's how it unwound. I mean, remember life there in Russia -- not just the constant drinking, the day-time drinking on the weekend, the all-night sessions at those nightclubs with no ventilation . . . the second-hand smoke alone was enough to kill a lesser man at some of those places."

"No doubt about that."

"And the quality of the alcohol. The cheap draft beer, the fake vodka. You remember the hangovers. You'd wake up at 1:00pm on Saturday afternoon, freezing cold, blind in one eye -- "

"Miserable," he agreed.

"And you're like ten years younger than me. And the weather -- below freezing 6 or 7 months of year, the rest of the time varying between rainy and muddy and a few weeks of too fucking hot."

"Mud in the spring, dust in the summer, plenty of pollution all of the time."

"And the hours at work -- no sleep on the weekend, irregular hours during the week, rarely getting a full eight hours."

"Very rarely."

"And my social life, which tended towards the . . ."

"Unfulfilling?" he offered.

"Well, stressful and sordid, at least. So I rolled up in Saudi -- I arrived at the end of summer, and there was no work. I was sleeping 9 hours a night, it's sunny and warm pretty much every single fucking day."

"Too hot?"

"Well, yeah, but the ocean is right there also. So . . . suddenly I stop drinking alcohol. All my blood chemistry is suddenly normal again. I'm swimming in the ocean every day, exercising a lot, eating healthy food, very little work to do. I have no social obligations -- I was reading, watching movies, researching interesting stuff on the internet and playing computer games . . ."

"Most people travel to get away from that stuff."

"Well you know I spent very little of my adult life doing those things. And every two months, there are holidays, with the girlfriend I somehow managed to get, the week I left."

"Yeah, that's pretty freaky."

"But I think mainly it was just a question of chemistry. All the assault on my blood and brain chemistry by cheap alcohol, lack of sleep, stress and pollution suddenly halted. My seratonin and blood sugar and vitamin B and D levels and such all got back to normal and I woke up every day feeling fucking awesome."

"Inspiring," he said.

"Happiness -- an involuntary physical reaction."

(I was unable to find a better version of this old 80's indie rock song from Boston band Scruffy the Cat, and it's hard to understand the lyrics, but happiness attacking you at unexpected times seems to be the idea of it.)

The Cat

2012-02-08T20:04:00.001+03:00

So I don't receive much mail from fans -- or foes -- but a good 75 percent of it, recently, is along the lines of, "I BOUGHT YOUR BOOK, TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY, AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CAT?" or "Was that really the ending of the book, or was some part missing? The last line just has you taking a cat home!"

So yeah, the book ends rather suddenly -- but it seemed like the correct place to stop, since that was the beginning of a second part of my life -- living full-time in Russia for nine years -- between 2000 and 2009.

Somehow the cat seemed like the beginning of it all.

The next book, VODKABERG, will be about all of that; some of it will be stories I posted on the old website, but probably half of it will be new material.

So without further ado, here is a story I wrote in 2005 about THE CAT.

I've known some pretty disturbed and difficult Russian girls over the last few years here in Russia.

And then there's my cat.

I found my cat the second day I arrived here in Vodkaberg. It was the second week in September and it was cold and raining. I was walking through an area of old wooden gingerbread houses not far from my apartment. They were cute as hell, though crumbling and lacking conveniences -- there were public pumps around for the ones that didn't have running water.

A tiny kitten, no more than a month or so old, ran out from beneath the crooked wooden gate of one house.

It didn't look like your average mangy street cat -- it had tiger stripes and long hair that suggested good breeding. Although its hysteria certainly did not. It screamed and peeped and cried as I picked it up and scratched it behind the ears.

I put it down, but it kept running pitifully after me.

I decided to take it to the market and buy it some fish. There was a small market -- not really a market, actually, just a bunch of old women with metal teeth selling vegetables and fish off of tables, protected from the light rain by yellow plastic tarps -- at the end of the street.

As we got there, it became frightened by the traffic noises and ran off.

The next day I was walking in much the same area -- and saw it again, crouched under a step. It was raining harder that day, and it was crying pitifully.

I scooped it up. "Come on, shithead, let's go home."

I think that was a gesture to karma, as much as anything. I'd been recently rescued, literally at the 25th hour, from a crappy job in a crappy city, where I'd been all but broke, by my current employers in Vodkaberg. I was feeling very emotional.

I considered what to name it. I wasn't sure whether it was a boy or a girl -- I'm not the kind of guy that likes to go around looking at cats' genitals -- but was informed by a friend that it was a girl.

It was the most emotional and frightened little cat I'd ever seen, and we'd owned plenty when I'd been a kid. Probably more than twenty.

Most of them had died in a series of accidents of ever-increasing horror, ranging from getting ground up in the car engine to being savaged by my brother's retarded dog, to strange feline diseases to being trapped in the tumble dryer during a spin cycle. (To my mother's credit, she had the tact to conceal that last accident from us until fairly recently, saying the cat had been run over by a car.)

After awhile, we'd stopped naming them, not wanting, perhaps, to get too attached; we simply referred to them as "the black cat" or "the brown and grey cat" or just, if there only happened to be one, "cat."

But I thought my current cat deserved a name. I thought about naming it after an old girlfriend who whined adorably all the time, but somehow it didn't stick -- then I thought about naming it after this hyperactive Thai kid I'd taught in Phuket, who had, as his parents said, "trouble controlling his emotions." That didn't stick either.

Finally I named it "Doofus."

The first trial was the worms.

Most of my guests commented that Doofus' belly was huge (for such a small animal) -- it looked like she'd swallowed a baseball.

I, typically, ignored the problem until one evening Doofus was lying on my chest while I watched TV, and I couldn't help but notice when a shiny white worm oozed out her asshole.

Naturally I got her to the veterinarian as quickly as I could. Speaking no Russian, this required the assistance of the landlady's daughter, who was then pursuing me, despite the fact I was 31 to her barely 18.

Doofus was treated with some kind of medicine that I had to grind up and put in her food -- I don't know what it was exactly, but the poor little animal was knocked into a stupor by this. It rarely moved, only perhaps to seek me out and sit on top of me motionless. I can remember walking around a park on a bright October Russian morning, Doofus perched peacefully on my palm, peering around with a dazed, smacked-out interest.

Eventually she recovered from this, and to say the least, her energy levels improved dramatically.

She was a constant nuisance. She slept on top of me, then cried when I rolled over in the night and knocked her off. She climbed up my back while I was cooking dinner and sat on my shoulder. She perched on the edge of the bathtub while I was showering. To effect a better view, she even clawed holes in the old plastic shower curtain. Sometimes she would get her head caught in there.

Of course, a young growing kitten loves to claw things. Most of my furniture has proven fairly indestructible, but the wallpaper didn't share those properties. It was extremely old and falling off the walls in places anyway -- the cat made quick work of ripping whole sections off.

I tried to punish her in different ways. Following the advice of my students, I tried squirting her with a water gun when she misbehaved. The only thing she seemed to learn from this, however, was that if I stood up quickly, she had to run away.

She had a thing for books, too. She managed to rip up most of the books or paper that I left unattended -- she even managed to claw my visa to pieces. I was impressed with the ingenuity it showed in getting it out of the drawer -- like a FBI profiler trying to outwit a clever psychopath, I couldn't help but respect my foe.

In September of 2001, I went to St. Petersberg for a few days. When I left Vodkaberg here, the hot water had not been working, around the whole neighborhood -- as often happens in Russia.

Regrettably, when I left the house, I left the hot water tap open.

Sometime in the next few days, the hot water came back on. And began filling the bathtub.

And stupidly, I'd left the plug in the tub, and put some water in it, so the cat would have a lot of water to drink while I was gone.

The bathtub didn't flood the house, thanks to the overflow valve, but it filled up with steaming hot water. After a day or two of this, fortunately, the neighbors called the landlady to tell her about the rushing water noises, and she came to find poor little Doofus laying quietly near death in the sauna-like conditions of the flat, large sections of wallpaper steamed off, and then clawed apart by the poor hysterical little cat.

I had to pay about $175 for new wallpaper and paint, in the end. I had a lot of conflict with the school about that -- the wallpaper was at least twenty years old, according to the redecorator, and I didn't think I should pay for a complete redecoration -- but in the end I paid it. They refused to actually put the wallpaper up until the cat was gone.

There were more stresses, after that -- she had a fondness for getting up at 3:00am and running wildly in circles around the flat. I usually locked her in the kitchen when she did this.

One time I heard her moaning even more hysterically than usual, and went to check on her -- one of the gas jets on the stove was still slightly on.

Little did the cat know, when she'd started bothering me, that the gas chamber was an option.

Then in 2003, she got a fungus. This required numerous trips to the vet for more shots. Not having a carrier basket, I just stuck her in my backpack. This generally ended up with me getting scratched a lot, and ending up with a lot of hair all over me and in my backpack.

So finally, last summer, 2004, they agreed to put up the new wallpaper I'd paid for, without me having to pay for the cost. While they did so, I had to live at the flat of one of my colleagues while she was in England.

The flat was on the first floor -- and this was the dead of summer, August. It was scorching hot. Keeping the windows closed was impossible. My colleague had no fan or air conditioning, of course. This is Russia. I tried to keep the lower windows closed, so the cat couldn't get out, but it didn't work. My cat isn't emotionally stable, but it's clever. Diabolically so.

It got out. There were enough other cats wandering around outside there that the end result was a foregone conclusion. I walked outside one day to see, in the bushes, a big Siamese carefully trying to mount my little Doofus, both of them making those strange cat sex noises.

I decided that the time might be right for Doofus and I to part ways. She could live comfortably enough in the bushes outside, and under the building, with the other cats. The old women in the building fed the cats, throwing them scrap meat and such.

Doofus would be happier here. Friends of similar interests, maybe even true love. Although I wasn't sure the big Siamese was her type.

I went to a nightclub one night, and came back at five a.m. There were two 18-year-old drunk girls with me. We went into the kitchen and sat down to drink beer, as is customary. I was waiting for African Student S to arrive, thinking that I might be able to get both of the girls into bed if he didn't arrive soon.

Then I heard the familiar crying, a plaintive peeping. Doofus was sitting on the outside windowsill, looking through the bars at us.

I went and let her in.

"What a cute kitty!" said the girls.

"Yeah," I said.

We moved back home together.

She gave birth to three babies two month later -- actually four, but one died -- and I managed to find homes for all of them after a couple of months.

So now, it's just me and the cat again. What does the future hold? Obviously our relationship is doomed. It's doubtful that I'd be able to take her back to America, for example. But that's the future. Now is now.

Until then, we just have to make do with each other.

* * *
(As to the current whereabouts of the cat -- when I left Russia, I gave it to a colleague who is probably a much better master than I ever was.)

Greed is Good (Excerpt from HOW TO SURVIVE LIVING ABROAD)

2012-02-06T11:28:00.003+03:00

(This is an excerpt from my newest book, HOW TO SURVIVE LIVING ABROAD, in the chapter DATING, ROMANCE, AND FUCKING, in a section specifically concerning marrying foreign women.)

GREED IS GOOD

To me, the saddest of all are the guys who go abroad with this constant refrain of “American (or British) women are too greedy, I can’t stand them anymore!”

Poor bastards.

Once, another teacher and I got a ride to a language school exhibition with one of the young women who worked in the administration of our school.

We were surprised when she picked us up in a new Toyota SUV.

"Damn, I wish I got your salary," joked the other teacher to the pretty administration girl, who was a former artistic gymnast.

"My boyfriend bought me this. He's very rich," she added, unnecessarily.

We knew there's virtually no way she'd go out with a guy who wasn't. Like many Russian girls of the Glasnost era – she was about 26 – she was taught by her parents to find a rich husband by any means necessary. (Her salary at our language school was probably no more than $500 a month or so. That might have covered her makeup money every month, but not much else.)

"Nice," we agreed.

"But you don't know how hard I worked for this," she said, without a trace of self-consciousness or humor.

Now – here’s the thing – you should be GLAD that women in other countries are greedy. I mean really, what OTHER reason would there be for some girl from the village in the middle of Kazakhstan to marry you? Because you’re so fucking awesome?

So let’s face facts – if a foreign girl wants to marry you, it is almost surely because she figures you for being a better economic bet than the guys around her.

If you don’t make a lot of money, it might just mean that you’re her chance to live in a foreign country where there are more opportunities for women, or for the children she intends to have.

Perhaps she just loves you because by local standards, you’re kind of a pussy. You don’t beat your woman, or scream at her for talking to other men, and actually help out around the house a little bit.

You better get that straight from the jump, if you have some misguided idea about settling down in the village or continuing your life of bohemianism as a broke drunkard in the capital city of whatever country she’s from.

Because I suspect your girl has other ideas.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Now of course, the pick-up artist community talks a lot about “demonstrating value.”

Traditionally, as a foreigner – you were already demonstrating value, just by being a foreigner.

Regrettably that’s changed a lot in the last five or 10 years.

As countries like Brazil, Russia, and China turn into the economic powerhouses of the 21st century, the value of your stock as a foreign guy is just going down down down. There’s a whole generation of college-age people in Russia and China who can’t even REMEMBER the Cold War and isolationism of the ‘80s.

And what’s more – there used to be plenty of thin, beautiful girls in villages all over the world who had no real idea how desirable they were.

Then the internet came along, and then Myspace came along, followed immediately by Facebook, and suddenly the homeliest girl in the village now has 5,000 friend requests a day and 54 marriage proposals a month.

Of course in Eastern Europe and some parts of Africa, there are statistically more women than men, and even fewer men that have any money.

So that’s a useful demographic to keep in mind.

Now another depressing fact about the Western world is its aging population; not only are we fat, we’re old. The developing world has a much younger skew to its population.

Fortunately, in developing countries, there tends to be much less stigma connected to an older man going out with a younger woman. (Not that there’s a tremendous amount of stigma attached to it in America or Britain, but a 10- or 15-year age difference will raise even fewer eyebrows in developing countries.)

But alas, still, the more money you have and the better looking you are, or at the very least the more charm you have, the more luck you’re going to have with women. Don’t expect miracles.

ETERNAL LOVE AND LOYALTY

So, after you find your lovely slim feminine child-bride from the village, is she more likely to stay with you than an American or British woman?

In my experience, no.

I’ve known dozens of guys married to foreign women – Koreans, Chinese, Ethiopians, Russians – and I’d say better than half ended in divorce. Some of the marriages were extremely short and spectacularly disastrous.

(If the girls didn’t take half of the guys’ money, in these divorces – it was mainly because the guys didn’t HAVE any money.)

Check out this list of statistics from Divorce.com.

Divorce rates in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union are even HIGHER than they are in America and Britain. In my experience, Russians were some of the LEAST faithful spouses I’ve ever seen. (Just because their men are such dicks and they’re looking for a nice guy like you? Well, be my guest and give it a try.)

So in conclusion, for every story from a guy praising his happiness with a foreign wife, you’ll hear at least one other guy with a horrifying story of how he was drained dry by a vindictive and cold-hearted foreign woman with whom he shared no cultural background and practically no language.

Ask Mel Gibson about how fucking awesome it was to be married to a Russian. And, you know, ask her how much she enjoyed being married to a foreigner.

How to Survive Living Abroad (The Fourth Book)

2012-02-01T10:16:00.002+03:00

Newest book available now as an ebook:

BUY IT HERE FOR THE AMAZON KINDLE

BUT IT HERE FOR OTHER EBOOK FORMATS ON SMASHWORDS

BUY IT HERE AS A PAPERBACK AT CREATESPACE

(Or, hell, you know, just email me with a sob story, englishteacherx@yahoo.com, and I can probably just give you a copy for free.)

The good news? It's now easier than ever for anyone to move abroad to live and work.

The bad news? It's now easier than ever for anyone to move abroad to live and work.

In response to the mass exodus of the disaffected and disenfranchised from Western countries, English Teacher X is back again, to cast his bitter and cynical but always perceptive eye on the concept of moving abroad.

After more than fifteen years of living away from his home country, English Teacher X brings a special perspective earned from long and hard experience. He offers suggestions and warnings for current and future expats about money, health, documents, and security, as well as more prurient topics such as alcohol, drugs, and your sex life abroad.

Part survival guide, part memoir, part self-help book, and part blistering parody of all of the above, this book is required reading for anybody thinking of leaving their everyday problems behind and taking on a whole new world of problems abroad.

* * *

Now I should say -- like my last book, this is pretty much all new material that's never been on this blog before.(But I admit I recycled a couple of blog posts for it, though it's more than 90 percent new material.)

Thailand, 12 Years Later

2012-01-29T23:03:00.004+03:00

So I took my girlfriend to Thailand for the last 10 days, my mid-semester break holiday. This was the first time I've been there since 1999, and I'd say in general I was more surprised by how much it hadn't changed, rather than how much it had.

It's much like it was -- only moreso. More tourists, more traffic, more buildings, but still very much itself.

A lot of people made the joke that taking your girlfriend to Thailand is like taking sand to the beach, but I can't say as I regretted it; especially down on the islands, where we spent most of our time, there always seemed to be a dearth of hot chicks compared to the men chasing them.

We spent a couple days in Bangkok and seven days on Koh Chang. My shy and conservative and provincial Russian girlfriend thought that Thailand was a bit scary; the lizards and transvestites especially freaked her out. But she was eased by the lovely beaches and the fact that there are so many Russians in Thailand now that most tourist restaurants have Russian menus.

I wanted to show her where English Teacher X was born so we stayed around Khao San Road in Bangkok; certainly it has changed a lot, in that it has expanded greatly, and the guesthouse rooms that used to cost $5 now have cable TV and aircon and cost $25, but the atmosphere is very much the same -- a non-stop global clusterfuck. It's a tourist attraction composed of tourists, an area that is popular with tourists pretty much solely because it is popular with tourists. Very post-modern. (And still a great place to rock out, it would seem -- far more bars and alcohol on the street than back in the 90's, when people tended to just sit in cafes and watch videos.)

I took my girlfriend around to some of the places I'd lived in Bangkok during the 90's, and gave her some very vague outlines of some of my less-offensive adventures. Unable to romanticize squalor and drunkenness as much as the average Westerner, she thought the whole tale a bit on the goofy side.

I can't say as I particularly disagree, in retrospect, but I also can't say I wouldn't do it all again without a moment's hesitation.

On the bus to Koh Chang I was kidding her as a female German backpacker lugged a 20-kg backpack around without the help of her metrosexual male companion.

"See, that girl always carries her own bag. Look at the arms on her. Don't you want to be like her?"

"No," she said, "I want to be feminine."

(Notice the only semi-ironic deployment of a bikini with a stars-and-stripes pattern. My baby is wearing her heart on her sleeve, or her ass, at least.)

Coming Soon -- How to Survive Abroad

2012-01-15T13:27:00.002+03:00

I know I said my next book would be about Russia -- but this one demanded to be written first. It simply sprang from my brow like a fearsome creature of myth.

It will be published in the next couple of weeks; it's finished and just needs to be edited and formatted.

Basically the purpose of it is to answer all the non-English-teaching-related questions about living abroad that I'm often pestered with.

Then, in the spring, back to the book about Russia.

Is It Really Cheaper To Live Abroad?

2012-01-13T16:58:00.000+03:00

(The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, HOW TO SURVIVE ABROAD, which should be available in the next couple of weeks.)

COST OF LIVING

You hear a lot of claptrap passed around about how it’s so much cheaper to live in this country or that.

Some countries are very expensive, it’s true – Britain and the Scandinavian countries, for example. And some countries are noticeably cheaper by Western standards, like Thailand and India.

But prices are kind of leveling out, all over the globe, and If you’re expecting to lead a life full of creature comforts and carousing – some stuff will cost more, some stuff will cost less, but if you buy a lot of international brand-name products, you’ll probably end up spending the same as you would anywhere in the world.

(And if you’re working a low-level, non-corporate, locally based job, you’ll probably be making a local salary, so it’s not like you have some tremendous advantage.)

Now, if it’s the simple life you want – there are some countries where living the simple life is rather a lot cheaper and more enjoyable, or at least more interesting, than it would be back home.

You can rent huts on the beach for $10 a night all over Southeast Asia. Even in a major city like Bangkok, if you want to eat nothing but local food, drink in alleyway bars with cab drivers, and rent a one-room studio with a squat toilet, you can probably live on $400 a month.

But if it’s the international life of Starbucks and internet and a new phone and nightclubs with DJs and fog machines and an apartment that actually has a kitchen and air-con and stuff – you could easily spend the same amount that you’d spend in the West.

And don’t forget variables like health care. Quality health care might be pretty high compared to the cost of other stuff.

In countries with shitty infrastructures, corrupt cops, unsafe streets, horrific pollution, etc., yeah, the cost of living is a lot lower than places like Switzerland or Germany, which consistently top “quality of life” surveys – and you get what you pay for.

And don’t forget about all the money you spend on plane tickets and visas and all that.

I lived on $600 a month in Thailand back in the ‘90s, but I also lived on $600 a month in back in America in the ‘90s when I was a student. Living like a student is always cheap and usually jolly.

(Until you hit middle age, of course, when the life of the student suspiciously begins to resemble the life of a bum.)

So yeah, no shit, if you live without a car or health insurance, eat only at cheap places or at home, and live in a cheap apartment, the cost of living will be less.

Is that awesome or pathetic? Is living like a student in one country really cheaper than living like a student in another country?

Living cheap is a lifestyle choice, not a geography choice. If you’re the kind of person who blows through all their money mindlessly every month, you can do that anywhere. I’ve seen numerous examples of it. And believe me, there’s always SOMETHING to blow all your money on.

The very useful website Numbeo.com will give you some specific numbers about the country of your choice.

For example – cigarettes, rent, and hookers are cheap in Thailand, but wine and cheese is hellishly expensive. Francophiles need not apply.

Judge it by your lifestyle, or the lifestyle that you want – if you spend all your extra money on Starbucks and McDonald’s in America, you could certainly do the same in Thailand.

If you want cheap rent and alcohol, you can find them, too. . .

2011: The Year in Review

2012-01-09T17:16:00.005+03:00

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Things I did in 2011:
-Visited the UAE twice and Barcelona, Spain once for holidays

- Spent one month back in Vodkaberg and one month in America

- Self-published three books

- Brought the light of knowledge into the world, (as usual,) here in the Kingdom, hopefully stopping our young students from turning to extremism or drift racing

- Learned how to use a handgun defensively and to draw and fire at center-mass at seven-ten feet away

-Learned about the basics of edible and medicinal plants (although the only edible plant I have so far mastered is the dandelion)

- Saved an amount of money I can comfortably describe as "a buttload."

- Continued my YouTube studies, and can claim intermediate proficiency with the Kata Dante, also known as the Ninja Dance of Death:

- And finally started to become comfortable with the idea that I have a girlfriend.

So what do you think, good year?

Hands Across TEFL

2012-01-05T11:05:00.001+03:00

You know -- lest you think I was joking about sending out free books to the needy -- here's this week's winning entrant:

Hey Mr. X,

I'm an English teacher in Pecs, Hungary. I'm about negative 10% at the end of the month, but that's because of the drinking. I think if I didn't go out at all, I'd be saving 10% on top of bills. The salary here is about 450 USD a month. Rent is half that. Anyway, its home until next school year. I'd appreciate any copies of your books. I always enjoy your blog. If i quit teaching and get a real job, I'll buy them all :)

(NAME REDACTED)

Dear (REDACTED)
I feel your pain man. I hope for that tiny salary at least you're having an awesome time and hooking up with loads of Hungarian porn stars.

You didn't say what format you wanted them in; I attached them at word documents. If you would prefer to download them in another format, let me know and I'll send you a coupon to get them free at Smashwords.

Oh -- by way of repayment -- you can give me a review on Amazon (good or bad) or if you could throw a link or review of the books somewhere like www.eslcafe.com you will contribute to the good fortune and continuing operation of the English Teacher X self-publishing empire.

And don't forget about my burgeoning YouTube channel:

Speaking Activities in Dead Tree Format

2012-01-02T22:29:00.003+03:00

SPEAKING ACTIVITIES THAT DON'T SUCK now available as a dead-tree book!

Buy it here as a paperback at Createspace

Buy it now as a paperback book or for the Kindle at Amazon.com

Buy it here as an ebook for your Apple device on itunes

Buy it here in all the other ebook formats at Smashwords

And if you're an English teacher, email me at englishteacherx@yahoo.com, and I'll probably be moved enough by your poverty to send you a free copy.

Christmas in Bangkok

2011-12-25T12:43:00.000+03:00

December 25th, 1995 --

When I saw all the middle-aged whore-mongers standing around wearing Santa hats, I couldn't control my laughter.

A small after-work Christmas party was taking place at our rather remote branch of the largest language school in Bangkok. I had actually quit a few days earlier, along with another guy I worked with, in order to spend a month long holiday on the island of Koh Samui. We weren't leaving until Dec 26 in the evening, however, so we went back up to the school on Dec 25th for the party, with the intention of going out to celebrate more seriously afterwards.

We were the two youngest, at 25; all the others were in their 30's, 40's, and 50's.

The sight of these dissipated, bleary men making a half-assed attempt at sober Christmas cheer was enough to send me into gales of hysterics.

"Shut up and put on a hat," said English Teacher T.

The Thais, despite being Buddhists with a Muslim minority, had adopted Christmas in a big way; or perhaps it's more accurate to say they'd adopted consumerism and shopping in a big way, and Christmas seemed to them to be all about that, all overseen by this mysterious Santa Claus figure.

Most Thais liked the idea of Santa Claus; just another Buddha with a white beard, to them, I suppose. But not everyone agreed.

"No good Santa Clause come Thailand," said the 19-year-old boyfriend of one of the 50-year-old British male teachers, one of two homosexuals we worked with. "No good come house at night. People will shoot him like a kamoey," he said. (Kamoey being the thai word for thief, not to be confused with the Thai word katoey, which means transvestite.)

The party went off quickly and painlessly; no alcohol was permitted but we exchanged token gifts, Secret Santa style, with the Thai secretaries and had punch and Christmas cookies. (Naturally somebody had bought a flask so our punch was loaded with Thai rice whiskey.)

There was one uncomfortable moment when a secretary who was a Muslim received a ceramic piggy bank, but it all passed in the spirit of international Christmas cheer.

At about 10.00pm, we headed off to go in search of the true meaning of Christmas.

Our favorite place was Nana Plaza, a cheery little cul-de-sac of bars on two floors, with "gogo bar" style places on the ground level, where the girls danced on stage in bikinis, topless or even naked depending on the bar and the time of the evening. The second floor had smaller places, with more of a bar or pub style atmosphere; and of course on the second floor was the Nana Guesthouse, which rented rooms by the hour.

All of the places had free admission; to take a girl out you had to pay a bar fine, which if I remember correctly at the time was 500 bhat, about 20 dollars. You could buy a girl a "lady drink," which cost 3 or 4 dollars, and sit with her a while and get to know her; while the hovering mama-sans encouraged it, most of the girls I knew considered it bad business and felt a little embarrassed to ask for it.

(For what it's worth, I seem to remember the price of a small Carlsburg (33 cl) was 50 bhat -- $2. Our paycheck for the month was about $800, so that actually seemed a little pricey.)

Now of course the bar made its money with the "bar fine" -- whatever price you negotiatied with the girl for anything else was up to you and girl. 500 to 1000 bhat was typical ($20 - $40), in my experience; whether I was receiving a discount for not being fat and gross, I don't know.

There were of course all of the shows which have become legend: bananas, razor blades, transvestites, fire dancing, snakes, etc. The girl who specialized in shooting darts out of a blowgun in her vagina actually had a crush on me and was chasing after me for a while, but I never had the nerve to give her a try.

As you can imagine, Nana Plaza was a fucking blast.

The girls were mostly beautiful and slim, and the atmosphere was amazingly friendly and pleasant; I never experienced any rip-offs -- the $200 bottle of champagne or whatever -- and there was no hostility from anybody.

The girls never seemed abused or even depressed. Why should they be? What teenage girl doesn't enjoy dancing and hanging out with her friends? And here they made money doing it. Fucking fat sleazy German guys can't be that pleasant -- but there were plenty of youngish, fit guys in their 30's, engineers and army guys and what not. Nana Plaza was usually populated with the local expats, unlike the more touristy Patpong Road flesh-pits.

Needless to say, on December 25th, 1995, at 11.00pm or so -- this was one festive place. The area was decked out with Christmas trees, Christmas lights, candy canes, etc.

Into this den of sin walked the English teachers. Wearing Santa hats.

We had a few at one of our favorite downstairs go-go bars, Voodoo; we'd arrived just in time for "tit frenzy," as we referred to it, when all the girls came out and danced topless for one song.

Then we went upstairs to get hamburgers.

There was a little food-stand where a guy made hamburgers; I'd make a hyperbolic statement like, they were the best hamburgers I've ever eaten, but I suspect in actuality, the atmosphere and having a hot little Thai chick on our laps had a lot to do with how much we enjoyed them.

There was a small bar near there that we usually had a drink in; it was called something like REBEL YELL or something equally white-trashy and rednecky, but they played rock music, unlike the blaring techno-dance music at most of the gogo bars, so we found it a bit easier on the ears.

Only two girls worked there; we referred to them as Crazy and Tattoo.

They claimed to be sisters, but I don't think they were actually related; sister is a word close friends often use to refer to each other in Thailand. (Particularly hookers.)

Tattoo, as you probably guessed, had quite a few tattoos and piercings. This is EXTREMELY rare for Thai girls, and was damn near unheard of at that time, despite the rest of the world being pretty into that stuff back in the 90's. She had a really nice panther on her stomach.

The Crazy one was Crazy. She looked like a stunning example of a typical Thai girl; the delicate features and unbelievably fine, soft and honey-dripped skin, the almost total lack of body fat besides nice hand-fulls of breast; the long raven hair.

But she clearly deferentiatied herself from most Thai girls by scowling all the time. In The Land of A Thousand Smiles, this was damn near as strange and unusual as the tattoos and piercings on her sister. She liked to talk to me, for some reason, but I saw her meet most come-ons with outright hostility. Once when English Teacher Q kept trying to talk to her, she suddenly slapped her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and started screaming until he backed off.

Neither of them would leave with any of us, ever; they neither asked nor allowed any of us to pay their bar fine. We drank with them and played Connect Four, but that was the extent of it.

But this Christmas day, the two of them were drunk off their asses. They were dancing on top of the small bar in their underwear, to the Rolling Stones. This was a jolly sight, you can believe it.

Almost immediately, the Crazy one leapt down and jumped into my lap. "You pay bar fine?" she cooed.

English Teacher M high-fived me. "Now that's the Spirit of Christmas!"

I finished one more beer and eagerly led her up to the Nana Guesthouse. She was so drunk she was actually staggering; I'd never seen a Thai girl so drunk. Not a young one, anyway.

I can't remember what it cost for a room -- it seems like it was about 150 bhat ($6) for an hour. (For comparison's sake, that's about what I paid per day at the cheap hotel on Khao San road I was living in.)

The rooms were okay, with a nice shower and bathroom and cable TV, and while I'm not exactly sure they changed the sheets after each guest, they kept the rooms relatively clean.

She asked me to order a couple of Carlsbergs from the room service guy while she took a shower.

I happily laid on the bed to watch MTV and uncapped my Carlsberg.

Twenty minutes later, I impatiently knocked on the door. "You alive in there?"

She came out, wrapped in a towel, weaving on her feet like a boxer who'd taken too many head shots.

"You okay?" I asked, a bit concerned, taking the second Carlsberg from her as she tried to drink it.

"Okay," she said.

She lay down on the bed.

I, as eager as any beered-up 25-year-old would be, unwrapped the towel from her gorgeous slim young body.

The unusual smell that came up is difficult to describe. It wasn't a typical fishy smelly vagina odor; the best way I can think of to describe it is like a particularly strong and cloying combination of spices.

She was reclining with her eyes closed; I bent down and kissed her for a while, on the lips and nipples, and then gently tried to insert my finger into her vagina. She flinched and said, "ow!"

"Okay, look," I said, "you're sick! Your pussy is sick! We can't have sex!"

"We can! It's okay," she said.

I tried again, and again she squirmed in pain.

I thought of trying to get her to blow me but I knew that was probably going to be a lost cause; Thai hookers don't often do that, and she looked like she was going to fall asleep any moment.

"All right, get dressed!"

That woke her up a bit, when she realized I intended to leave without giving her the 1000 bhat I'd promised her ($40.)

She argued that she needed the money to get home. After some haggling, I agreed I'd give her 500 bhat if she gave me a quick massage. It was a sucky massage even by non-Thai massage standards and after a few minutes she wanted to take the 500 bhat and go.

"All right, shit, Merry fuckin' Christmas."

I went back down and found English Teacher M drinking on the ground floor with a couple other guys we knew. He still hadn't found a girl that he liked.

"How was she?" he asked eagerly.

The impersonation of me saying with a worried, perturbed look on my face, "Something wasn't quite right down there," became a running joke and catch-phrase over the course of the next six months.

It was already after one a.m. at this point; the go-go bars around Nana Plaza had to close at 2.00am due to government regulations, but there were other options, so we decided to head for the second most festive place in Bangkok:

The Thermae.

The original Thermae bar was actually officially referred to as a "coffee shop" so it could get all-night status; it was run by the police, anyway, so it stayed open well past dawn.

I'm still not sure where it actually was; we would just get into a taxi and bellow "THERMAE!" and the driver would take us back on some side street behind a big indsustrial-looking building, and drop us off in a dark parking lot in the back; we entered the building through a rear doorway, and into an old industrial restroom, with a long trough to pee in.

Then you went down some stairs. You couldn't see much, due to the heavy smoke from dozens of cigarettes that obscured everything; it was very dark, as well. There were, I think some windows, but they were painted over and most of the place was underground.

I remember -- your feet would stick to the floor, like in a movie theater where somebody has spilled coke. In this case it was spilled beer and god knows what. A general gluey ooze of desperation.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a room on the right; if you looked in, you could usually see a group of Thai policemen playing cards. There was never any trouble at the Thermae, because everybody knew the cops would just come out and beat the living shit out of any troublemakers and perhaps kill them.

Decorations? Near the bar there were vinyl couches, I remember that. Wooden chairs and tables. It was a small place and usually packed at 3.00am; it was always difficult to find a seat.

Thai bar girls went to the Thermae when they got off work at 2.00am; there were plenty of freelancers there, too. The men that went there were usually the die-hard Bangkok locals; literally this was the bargain basement of hookers.

Still and all, you could see some nice looking girls there, despite the older whores occsionally attacking the younger ones in the parking lot.

English Teacher M and I applied ourselves to some more Christmas Carlsberg; before too long he'd found himself a nice girl, and was ready to leave with her.

"I guess I'll just go home," I said, weary and, for all the second-hand smoke and stench in the Thermae, still recalling the strange smell that came from the Crazy girl's vagina.

I made one last glance around the dingy bar, and a little Thai girl suddenly latched onto me. She was cute, but a little pudgy by Thai standards.

"I don't know," I said to M. "I think my heart's not in it."

"Oh, man, look at her! Can you break her cute little heart? It's Christmas!"

I agreed and we went to a very cheap guest house nearby. This was was considerably grubbier than the Nana Guest House, but only cost about 50 bhat for an hour. It smelled of bug spray and had peeling paint on the bathroom walls.

We sat on the bed and snuggled a bit; we chatted. I remember she asked me how many Thai girls I'd been with, and I said I thought she was the 5th or 6th; she volunteered the information that I was about her 40th customer. She was very cheery, I remember, and I wasn't feeling too cheery as the dawn rolled around.

We undressed; I put my arm around her and felt that she had some kind of lump near the base of her spine. Tumor? Prehensile tail?

She was playing with my cock, and it was stirring slowly and crabbily to life.

She had her head on my chest and indicated my nipples. "Tomai?" she asked. I knew that meant "why" in Thai.

"Why do men have nipples? Now that's an ancient and difficult question, isn't it?" I babbled to no-one in particular.

She dug her tongue into my nipple and quickly administered a very firm and professional and extremely festive Christmas handjob.

"Jak wao" the Thai girls call it -- tugging the kite string.

Jack, wow! "Whew!" I said afterwards. "That was nice, thanks." And no lingering worries about diseases, unless I'd gotten bedbugs from the crappy room.

She beamed and hugged me very sweetly. I can't remember what I gave her, I think it was something like 300 bhat. ($12)

We took a tuk-tuk out of whatever hovel of a street we were on and I began making my slow and painful way across Bangkok back to my hotel, as the sun rose on the city.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!

(Amazingly, I was able to find this video on YouTube of the original Thermae's entrance area; it does not linger on the toilets, but you can see them.)

This is a website about the old Thermae, which closed in 1996; another bar with the same name opened up, but it lacks the subtle ambiance of the original.

New Old Motion Comics

2011-12-21T13:03:00.000+03:00

The England vs. America Debate:

A Conversation About Cloning:

English Teacher X in Singapore:

Because hey, what cartoon isn't better with some generic techno music behind it?

Vodkaberg Mashup

2011-12-17T10:41:00.001+03:00

Yes, I took all those pictures personally, and yes, I knew all those girls, usually in the biblical sense, and yes, those tits are all real.

And yes, there are lots more pictures like that on this blog; look at the archives and you'll see plenty.

My book about Vodkaberg should be available about March or April of 2012.

And before I start having to answer a bunch of "DUDE I'M GOING TO RUSSIA" emails -- remember a few things:

1) Almost all of those pictures were made in 2004 - 2006 -- you can see the dates, there.

2) While you can certainly still rock out in Russia, expecting to have the same experience I had is about like going to Seattle in 1998 and expecting to enjoy the grunge scene, or going to Height-Ashbury in 1977 and expecting to enjoy the Summer of Love. It's vastly different now than it was even five years ago.

My Latest Thang

2011-12-16T12:03:00.002+03:00

Yo dawg, I heard you liked trailers.

Okay, so TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY is now available as a paper book, also:

BUY IT HERE FROM CREATESPACE

BUY IT HERE FROM AMAZON

New content? Dude, I'm too busy marketing! That's the worst part of the internet in general, it turns us all into whores and advertising agencies for ourselves.

Book Book Book Book

2011-12-14T22:58:00.001+03:00

So I'm branching out into video, this is my first putative effort:

Blatant self-promotion, of course, but I hope to put some more entertaining videos up soon, now that I know how to use the video editor. I promise, my Christmas gift to you all -- at least two funny stories about whores, before the New Year. And perhaps in the form of a motion comic, or an actual animation.

The ETX GUIDE is now available in a new, properly formatted version as a paper book on Amazon. and directly from Createspace; regrettably, when I corrected the scaling errors, the increased page count caused the price I needed to charge to make a profit go up. (Blame the bankers with their blatant speculation on commodities, and go occupy whatever.)

And kind regards to the Alpha-Gentleman Bardamu, who runs the In Mala Fide website / magazine, who gave kind reviews of my books recently.

READ THE REVIEWS HERE.

The Feminine Mystique

2011-12-07T11:16:00.006+03:00

So there's a lot of talk on the internet castigating American and European women for being masculine, and praising women in other countries for remaining true to their femininity.

But there's never much discussion of what feminine actually MEANS.

Basically, on all these pick-up artist and wife-hunting forums, feminine is just kind of a synonym for "hot" with sort of the added idea of "not very mouthy."

Yeah, obviously, I think anybody, even most women, would agree that it's better for women to look like models or ballerinas than like lumberjacks or merchant marines.

But my Russian girlfriend is probably the most feminine, girliest, girly-girl in the history of womankind, so I can speak with authority on the issues that people who haven't gone out with some really feminine girls aren't thinking about.

You will have to start opening doors for her. Growing up in the 70's, my generation got a kind of half-assed introduction to doing that, but I suppose guys who grew up in America in the 80's and 90's weren't even taught to do it all. (I can remember one incident when I first went to Russia, of standing dumbly in a hallway with a girl, and saying "Uh, what are you waiting for?" and her saying, "I'm waiting for you to open the door!")

If you don't live with her, you might have to go to her apartment and get her, and then escort her out on the town. Sometimes in Russia it was a 45 minute round trip to get some girl, and of course then you double the taxi money.

When we were in Russia, I had to meet her at the bus-stop after she finished work. My girlfriend is exceptionally kind and allowed me to sleep in the morning and not walk her to the bus-stop, but I know she onsidered it a bit of a dick move on my part.

You will carry her bags, and some cases she'll even want you to carry her PURSE, if it's especially large.

And here's the one most of these guys on the forums aren't going to be able to deal with --
YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR EVERYTHING. A truly feminine girl wouldn't pay for anything. She needs all her money for make-up and skin creams.

Now of course my conclusions are drawn from dealing with Russian women; but I knew guys with Thai girlfriends and I suppose it's probably the same in other countries.

There are two other issues that frequently go along with being very feminine that fortunately I don't experience with my girlfriend -- girls who buy into the whole "princess" thing are often very greedy and often extremely jealous. (Thai girls especially are known for being incredibly possessive and jealous; I knew a former boxer in Thailand who was terrified of the temper of his 40 kg Thai wife.)

After all -- she's a princess and you'll have to TREAT her like a princess.

So I doubt that these guys harping on the Internet are really thinking about a world in which all women are the epitome of feminiity, because then THEY'D have to develop the old-fashioned, elegant manners of Cary Grant and go to considerable trouble and expense to do so.

These dudes are dreaming an impossible dream of Lara Croft and video porn stars who look perfect but they can turn off immediately upon ejaculating.

The Most Famous TEFL Teachers (Updated!)

2011-12-01T00:14:00.002+03:00

There are a number of influential and important figures in the world of TEFL.

These include luminaries such as Stephen Krashen. Noam Chomskey. Jeremy Harmer. Michael Swan.

The problem, of course, is that NOBODY OUTSIDE THE WORLD OF TEFL, and MOST OF THE PEOPLE WITHIN THE WORLD OF TEFL, have never heard of them at all.

Noam Chomskey is arguably well-known among grad student types for his political activism, but until he goes on DANCING WITH THE STARS, the average American will have no idea who he is. In addition I haven't been able to find any indication he ever taught English as a Second Language, despite all the linguistic theory he came up with on the subject.

With that in mind I offer this list of the most famous (former) TEFL teachers.

7) Charles Berlitz, the grandson of Berlitz School founder Maximillian Berlitz, probably deserves a place on the list. Unlike his father, it would seem he actually taught English. (His father actually began the Berlitz Schools to teach French and German.)

Most sources are unclear as to whether he actually taught, merely saying that "during breaks he worked for the family language school"; he later worked mainly in the publishing and tape-production part of the business. But we can assume he probably did a little teaching, somewhere along the line, so he can at least earn 7th place on the list.

He sold the company in the 60's, and focused himself on other equally scientific and logical pursuits:

Although I somehow managed to miss this film, he apparently believed that The Bermuda Triangle was related to the lost city of Atlantis and ancient astronauts, subjects upon which he wrote many books. He also wrote a book about The Philadelphia Experiment, which supposedly had a World War 2 battleship disappearing due to time-travel and invisibility experiments.

(Now, I DID see that film, when I was a kid.)

The Berlitz company actually entered legal proceedings at one point trying to stop him from using the Berlitz name, as they felt it might reflect badly on the school.

And if his rather kooky wrting wasn't enough -- he married a student!

6) Perpetually grumpy and acerbic author and professional backpacker Paul Theroux worked as an English teacher for the Peace Corps in Africa as well as at the National University in Singapore.

As we all know, Peace Corps volunteers are hardly the usual kind of English teacher; Theroux didn't think much them, himself, nor did he think much of teaching; in the introduction to a collection of early novels, he describes wanting to write to escape the "tedium of teaching" and that he "found nothing" in Singapore.

Nonetheless, Theroux had plenty of adventures, it would seem; he writes that "In Malawi I saw my first hyena, smoked my first hashish, witnessed my first murder, caught my first case of gonorrhea.” He also got kicked out of various countries for getting involved in political activism.

So we place him respectfully at number six on the list.

5) Todd Solondz is probably not any better known, in terms of being a household name, than any of the above-mentioned, but he is a director who has made several award-winning and commercially successful films. He taught ESL in the early 90's for the New York Association for New Americans.

One of the characters in his second and most famous film, HAPPINESS, works as an ESL teacher, and has an affair with a Russian student (who turns out to be an abusive grifter.)

The other characters in the film are a father who proves to be a pedophile who rapes young boys, a guy who makes obscene phone calls, and a murderous fat woman. Yeah, it was made in the 90's.

4) James Joyce, author of critically-lauded, weighty, unreadable novels worked for many years for the Berlitz chain in Trieste.

We are informed by Wikipedia that during this period his was constantly scheming to make money in other fields, while simultaneously drinking heavily and wasting his brother's money:

"Joyce's ostensible reasons (for teaching) were desire for Stanislaus's company and the hope of offering him a more interesting life than that of his simple clerking job in Dublin. In truth, though, Joyce hoped to augment his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings.
Stanislaus and Joyce had strained relations throughout the time they lived together in Trieste, with most arguments centring on Joyce's drinking habits and frivolity with money."

3) John Fowles , the British author of THE COLLECTOR and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, wrote his first novel THE MAGUS while teaching English in Greece. Wikipedia states that "Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside of the school," and that he and all the other teachers were fired after two years for "trying to institute reforms."

In addition, he stole another guy's wife while he was there, and THE MAGUS was full of a reasonable amount of sex, as far as 60's literature goes.
As far as I know, it's the only popular and critically-acclaimed novel in which the main character is an EFL teacher.

Therefore, despite not being particularly widely-read these days, he earns #3 on the list.

2) John Mark Karr taught English in Gautamala, while fleeing from a child pornography charge in the United States, and was teaching English in Thailand when he was arrested for confessing to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

Of course he didn't do it, and was exonerated by DNA evidence after he received a business-class trip back to America escorted by federal marshals.

(TEFL teachers around the world should pay attention to this quick, free, and easy way to get a ticket home in an emergency.)

John Mark Karr is apparently in the process of undergoing a sex change and lives as a woman named Alexis Reich.

Since then he has been up on domestic abuse charge and there are recent reports of him making death threats related to organizing a cult around JonBenet Ramsey, and his current whereabouts are unknown.

1) : J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. She taught English in Porto, Portugal in 1992, and in the course of two years, got married to a local, had a child, got divorced, and returned home to be diagnosed as clinically depressed. I'd say that establishes her TEFL cred, wouldn't you?

And of course, eventually, she came up with the idea for Harry Potter books and is now worth a billion dollars.

In addition to being the most well-known, she also provides inspiration to the legions of TEFL bloggers out there hunched over the keyboard. (Rule #1 for success: don't write about TEFL.)

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2011-11-29T11:01:00.003+03:00

Here are some pictures I found on my camera from this August:

My girlfriend trying on shoes

This is a sign at a bus-stop in Vodkaberg -- loosely translated as "ENOUGH DRUNKENNESS!"

A Conversation About Cloning

2011-11-26T22:13:00.000+03:00

So you see, English teachers don't just talk about banging students and vomitting! Important issues of the day are occasionally addressed!

The Inevitable Results of Too Much Fornicating

2011-11-18T12:21:00.003+03:00

As I see it there are basically only three possible results of that lifestyle:

1) Early death -- not so much from the fornicating (although that can happen, ask Easy-E) as from the drugs and alcohol that are almost always necessary to fuel your enthusiasm for it

2) You get tired of fornicating -- usually that's followed by getting married, but not always -- perhaps you could, like Augustine, become a great philosopher and theologian. ("God grant me chastity and continence, but not yet," is a quote attributed to him.)

3) You knock somebody up and have to get married -- probably the most regrettable of the results. I've seen WAY too many English teachers end up in this boat. You'd think people never took a basic biology class. Although, of course, being married with a child or two doesn't prevent random fornicating, so then you lead back up to the first two choices.

I'm curious about the second issue -- whether that's actually an issue of aging and your testosterone levels going down, or it's something that just happens to everybody. You look at rock stars and movie stars, who are usually champion fornicators, and you still see a lot of marriage (albeit often repeated and unsuccesful ones.) You rock on there, George Clooney!

I remember having a discussion with a couple of Mormon kids who ended up in Vodkaberg on one of their missionary programs, back in 2004. They were taking advantage of the time to act up a bit, drinking absinthe and going out with the English teachers.

One of them was a very good-looking young dude, with a cleft in his chin, and he'd nailed 3 or 4 girls in a couple of weeks; he was saying it wasn't nearly as satisfying as he'd always thought it would be.

I postulated that it was perhaps an issue of numbers; that everybody had some number in their head, beyond which the fornicating simply wasn't that big a deal. And if it's not that big a deal, than so what?

So the question is, what's your number? If your number is 50, and you get married after you had sex with 30 partners, you'll always be miserable, dreaming of those next 20.

Conversely, if your number was 50, and you're banging number 78, you're probably not going to give a shit, so there's not much happiness there, either.

I mean let's face it -- you want to bang loads of girls, it's not that hard. If nothing else you can go to Amsterdam, Eastern Europe, or Thailand, for the investment of considerably less than the price of a used car, you could bang hundreds of girls who look like Maxim models.

Even the most die-hard of whoremongers tend not to keep that stuff up for too long. I knew plenty, and most of them ended up married.

It's a question of knowing your number.

You get guys like Gene Simmons who claim to have bedded 4600 women -- there's the impression of joyless obsessive-compulsion there, certainly. Like masturbating -- a momentary spasm. Does Gene Simmons remember 2961 or 3872 with pleasure and fondness? Even allowing that he's pretty smart and speaks four languages, I doubt he does.

(Now, I direct you back to this cartoon and subsequent blog post -- this is not solely directed at men. Remember that AMERICAN PIE joke that men tend to multiply their number of sex partners by three, while women tend to divide that number by three.)

The Third Book

2011-11-13T13:07:00.005+03:00

One of the most painful aspects of any TEFL job (except of course for the low salaries, terrible prospects, and awful hours) is getting the students to speak.

Far too many teachers exhaust themselves trying to entertain and motivate and gently coax English out of surly, exhausted, or shy students - but yet again English Teacher X, with more than 15 years experience at some of the worst language schools in the world, is here to help.

Here is a book full of clear, succint, and superbly effective ways to give your students virtually NO CHOICE but to produce HUGE AMOUNTS of English in a variety of classroom situations, with little or no preparation, all presented with English Teacher X's usual mordant insight and cynical irreverence.

From large classes to individuals, from beginners to advanced classes, English Teacher X provides you with a comprehensive set of activities, strategies, and tricks to help you deal with even the most uncommunicative and recalcitrant of students.

BUY IT HERE FOR THE AMAZON KINDLE

BUY IT HERE ON SMASHWORDS IN ALL THE OTHER EBOOK FORMATS

* * *

Okay, so that's the official ad copy, but what the hell is this? English Teacher X devoting his time and energy to writing about speaking activities, when he could be practicing stick fighting or watching porn?

Well, not exactly. Let me explain.

So - first -- this is ALL MATERIAL THAT HAS NEVER BEEN POSTED HERE.

Basically it's revised and edited stuff that I wrote when I was Director of Studies in Vodkaberg. So it'll be new material to you, unless you're one of the dozen or so people who worked in Vodkaberg at that time.

In the book you can find advice for how to make students speak more in the course of usual activities, short and simple pairwork activities, and some lessons plans - including lists of questions - showing how to deal with individual students and advanced classes.

I threw in plenty of jokes, although of course a book about speaking activities probably isn't ever going to be as funny as a book about hookers and stuff. But it will actually be useful...

Cartoon About A Random Travel Memory

2011-10-25T00:31:00.001+03:00

"Fuck You" Money

2011-10-17T00:00:00.007+03:00

I've always been surprisngly responsible about money.

I always tried to have some savings on hand so that I could get out of whatever hopeless predicament English teaching (or my drunkeness, or cruel fate, or whatever) left me in.

'FUCK YOU' money!

I first heard the term "fuck you money" in this film, Burt Reynolds' long-forgotten 1986 HEAT (not to be confused with the Pacino / DeNiro / Michael Mann classic from 1995.)

In this clip, Burt Reynold's character, a washed-up bodyguard in Vegas, finally wins the $100,000 he'd been dreaming of to run away to Italy; he'd figured on spending $20,000 per year for the next five years.

Discussing it with a friend afterwards, however, he realizes it's not enough -- during the last three years he'd never be able to relax as the money ran out. He decides to try to win $1,000,000 -- $20,000 per year for the rest of his life -- and of course (spoiler) loses it all.

How much is 'Fuck You Money' for an English teacher?

I rolled up in Thailand in the 90's, when I was 26, and had about $1000 to my name; after a year there, I decided I needed more of a cushion to better enable me to enjoy my feckless lifestyle. So I went to Korea in 1996, to save some money.

I decided I needed $10,000.

That was enough money, at that time, to last me a year in places I liked, like Thailand or Prague. Living extra cheaply, maybe even two years. I stayed in Korea about 9 months, until I had $9,980 -- at that time you could change a maximum of $10,000 per year from won -- and then I got on the next plane out with no regrets.

The US inflation calculator tells me that $10,000 in 1996 is about $14,000 in 2011; but in fact the cost of living in "the third world" has gone up at least 3 or 4 times what it was in 1996, so it's not such a straightforward calculation. ($100,000 in 1986 dollars is more like $200,000 in 2011 dollars.)

Is there anyplace in the WORLD where you can still live comfortably on $1000 a month? Let me know. I think you could probably still manage it in Thailand and maybe in China, but anyplace in E. Europe would be a tight fit. Mainly due to the cost of apartment rent.

Nowadays, $10,000 would definitely get you safely out of one country and established in the next; but beyond that, you could blow through all of that easily in a few months, especially if you had to buy plane tickets and pay an apartment deposit.

So what's "fuck you money" now?

I see that it's a pit you can fall into, actually, trying to decide that.

There are plenty of guys who've been here in the Middle East for eight or ten years, and have $500,000 or even closer to $1,000,000 and they continue to insist how much they hate it here and (once again) will stay for "only one more year" before they go somewhere else.

Obviously if you have a family, calculating "enough money" becomes very difficult. As you get older of course there are the various nebulous worries of retirement and health care costs.

But English teachers don't usually have the typical money worries; no mortgages, car payments, not much of that. Student loans? Anybody I know who has them seems to have pretty much decided they're simply not going to pay them.

And I got to thinking about the movie OFFICE SPACE, where the guy says that if he had a million dollars, he'd do absolutely nothing, and another character says, "You don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man, my cousin's flat broke and he don't do shit."

So I think that's what it boils down to -- the more money you think you need, to tell your boss to fuck off, the less likely you'll ever do it.

(I could only find THIS BIZARRE ANIMATION featuring that dialogue from OFFICE SPACE on YouTube; anybody finds the real thing, we'll be waiting.)

My original plan, like Burt Reynolds in HEAT there, was to save six figures. I'm sticking with that -- six figures and go. I don't even particularly want to tell my boss to fuck off, they treat me pretty well. . .

Meeting Girls

2011-10-03T23:45:00.008+03:00

An old cartoon, I think this was like the second or third one I made with the Paintbrush program, back in 2003.

I was reminded of this recently hearing a story about a colleague who lost his wallet (and passport) while he was over in Bahrain, after he couldn't think of any tactful way to tell the cops and administration that a "female guest" in his room had probably taken it.

I heard it plenty of times in Thailand, of course; guys often claimed to have been "drugged" but in point of fact, they were probably just really fucked up drunk and passed out.

I heard it a couple of times in Russia -- Uncle Cool lost a computer and phone and some money to a midnight visitor once, and Crazy Bob's apartment got robbed -- although I think he didn't have much to steal -- after a female visitor stuck gum in his lock. (At least, that was the cops' theory.)

But not only did I know victims, I knew a PERPETRATOR -- I actually knew a girl who went to jail for 2 years for doing it.

This was back in 2003 when we were hanging out at the "gay" bar -- which had quickly, and strangely, become a hangout for English teachers and African students as well.

(Old story about this bar, and my first bar fight there.)

She was one of many demented bisexuals I knew at that time, and regrettably she probably wasn't even the most dangerous. (That is another story, as they say.)

Anyway, this girl was remarkably colorful even by Russia 2003 standards -- I remember one time sitting outside the gay bar with her -- she was wearing black satin pants, red 6 inch stiletto heels, a tight red top with her huge breasts pushed up under her chin, and a choker neck-band thing with the word SEX written on it in fake diamonds.

A girl in a plain white dress walked by and my bisexual friend shook her head -- "That girl has no style," she said dismissively.

(Now -- it occurs to me -- you might see people like Lady Gaga dressing all fucked up like that in some kind of retro-ironic glam thing -- there was not a goddam bit of irony about Russia back in those days, though, and I think that's a big reason I liked it.)

She divided her time between fucking rich guys for profit and hanging out at the gay bar fucking girls and metrosexual boys. She and some of her dyke friends would occasionally rob the guys she slept with.

(I never managed to have sex with her -- not so much out of fear as that she was always losing phones or never had any money on them, or would forget about dates or just not show up. Her crew of dykes and metrosexuals guarded her pretty jealously, also. I once saw her touch her tongue to the tip of her nose, I suppose that might have had something to do with their high regard for her.)

The "gay bar" kind of burned out in 2005 and we stopped going there, and I didn't see her again until I ran into here at another degenerate bar in 2007 -- and she revealed she'd just spent two years in jail for robbery. (She looked exactly the same -- perhaps even healthier than before.)

We danced the night away, but I tactfully didn't ask her for any details. Didn't manage to have sex with her then either, before her metrosexual and dyke friends dragged her away.

Anyway, next time you think about the hordes of sex tourists, "sexpats", pickup artists and douchebag "new rich" flooding Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America to fornicate with the locals -- think with a smile of all the wallets, phones and passports that disappear while their pants are down.

Real Paper "Book" Book

2011-09-30T21:41:00.004+03:00

So ENGLISH TEACHER X GUIDE TO TEACHING ENGLISH is now available as an actual paper "book"-type-book.

BUY IT HERE FROM CREATESPACE

It'll be available through Amazon as a paper book in a few days.

Featuring such classic English Teacher X essays as:

Five Really Bad Reasons To Teach English Abroad
Why English Institutes Usually Suck
The Three Unwritten Rules of Teaching English
Teaching vs. Mcdonald's vs. Piracy
How To Do a Runner

and many more.

Crazy Bob, in a review on Amazon that I didn't even solicit of him, but which he probably wrote because he owes me like $150, said --

"Infamous in the TEFL world for his brutal frankness about the nature of the industry, English Teacher X has also often shed a very accessible melancholy in his regular entries, maintaining through it all a humane critique of this debauched and unfair world."

The traditional-style book is $9.99 -- that's more than I'd like to charge, but apparently we're running out of trees because Createspace and Amazon keep most of that. But you can save money and buy it as an e-book for only $2.99.

BUY IT HERE FOR THE AMAZON KINDLE
BUY IT HERE FOR THE BARNES AND NOBLES NOOK READER
BUY IT HERE FOR EVERY OTHER DAMN PLATFORM AT SMASHWORDS

Funny Stories About The Middle East...?

2011-09-23T21:05:00.002+03:00

Drop a hard-drinking, womanizing English teacher in a country in which both things are completely illegal?

Sounds like a recipe for hilarity, right?

Well. . . .

Thing is, if I wanted to drink and womanize, I would have stayed in Russia, or gone somewhere fun like Brazil or Thailand or whatever.

Some of my colleagues here go to Bahrain or Dubai frequently; spending $300 or $400 in a weekend kind of moots the point of coming here to save money, in my opinion. Why come here at all, if you spend a huge chunk of your salary leaving every week.

(Now, of course -- we have week-long holidays about every two-three months here, and I always take a nice vacation with my Russian chick on those.)

I don't live in, or near, a compound where there are any females. I've heard of high times at the compounds, but I saw a couple of parties inside compounds back in 2009, and I feel I can safely apply the "sausage fest" joke even in this country, where pork is illegal.

(Once you've been to a few Russian nightclubs that are 70 percent women, something like that can't help but feel like a bit of a time-waster.)

The place I work is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but next to an attractive beach area. (Although it's way too hot here most of the time for most people to enjoy the beach.) A lot of my colleagues are married guys here with their families. People tend not to socialize much, outside of the school, although I do occasionally eat dinner with colleagues.

Alcohol is available -- mainly in the form of bootleg "sidiki" which is a toxic mess of methylated alcohol. I've seen the unfortunate results of drinking too much of that; one teacher went berserk on it (somewhere upstairs in the faculty residence here) and punched another teacher in the face.

He'd been losing it, quietly and not so quietly, for a while; he'd begun coming to class late, not showing up at all, coming to class red-eyed and stinking of alcohol, etc, stuff that would get you fired even in Russia, these days.

Far from being executed for this, however, he was quietly let go at the end of his contract. (I suspect nothing worse happens in cases like this because the administration here would have gotten in trouble if they let THEIR superiors know that such things were going on here.)

(Not for nothing, he was the youngest teacher here, at 33. Clearly this is a place for the Golden Years, because when you combine the Fire of Youth with the desert heat and emptiness, nothing good will come of it.)

There's plenty of sodomy going on around the Kingdom, apparently; colleagues have been spotted in public with Phillipino 'friends.' If kept low-profile, nobody kicks up much of a fuss, but there are tales of a teacher who got fired for being less than circumspect about the constant stream of young men visiting his apartment.

(I'm happy to say my personal Gay Stalker has never bothered me again, although I think I did see him drive by in his car a couple times.)

Guys make their own wine; I haven't had any recently nor have I tried to make any. (Because mostly I found when I tried it that it just made my head hurt and gave me a stomach ache.)

Guys smoke hash in their rooms and plop in front of the TV to watch downloaded movies; I can smell the hash in the hallways. It's never been a favorite thing of mine, hash and marijuana. But it doesn't sound so bad, does it?

So it's hot, and it's empty, and there's no social life at all -- but I have filled my time with a variety of projects and haven't been bored. Or rather, perhaps I'm enjoying being bored.

It always feels like I just finished a vacation, or am about to go on a vacation; and waking up not feeling like you're about to puke and die is actually pretty pleasant.

So for a middle-aged man, this isn't a bad life, as long as you can entertain yourself in a suitably non-destructive sort of way. Some guys study for Master's degrees or PhD's online, for example. (I've been too busy studying kung-fu on YouTube for that.)

But yeah, if you're in your twenties or thirties? I can't say I recommend this life, unless you're really deeply in debt or something.

Fuck It in Phuket

2011-09-20T22:03:00.005+03:00

So here it is -- the long lost story of how I sprained a kid's arm while teaching in Phuket, Thailand, in 1999. As featured in TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY, my compilation of late-90's old-school English teacher adventures.

I knew the job was probably doomed when I sprained the kid’s arm.

I arrived in Phuket at the beginning of the rainy season, at the end of May. I checked into a cheap Chinese hotel in Phuket Town and then went to meet my new colleagues.

It was a small school, only two teachers, a few secretaries and one manager. The other teacher, and titular DOS, was a wan yet chirpy British woman of about my age. (I would turn 30 soon.)

We chatted briefly about the job and then she said, “Oh, and one more thing, do you mind starting the day after tomorrow? I know we said next week, but our other teacher injured himself.”

“Oh, sure, no problem. What happened?”

“He accidentally cut his foot with a samaurai sword.”

“Oh, right. Occupational hazard. I’ll be here.”

The next day, I rented a Honda Dream scooter and drove down to Kata beach to look for a place to stay. All the beach huts and small hotels seemed overpriced, but I saw an “apartment for rent” sign on the road leading out of the city.

I stopped and checked it out; it was a small row of five apartments and a café run by a French guy and his Thai wife, and a young transvestite guy worked as the sort of manager and attendant of the place.

It was about $150 a month, and by the standards of most places I lived in Thailand, luxurious and roomy. It actually had a living room, with a big vinyl couch and an end table. The bedroom had a big double bed, a ceiling fan, and was blessedly free of windows to keep the blazing tropical sun out.

It even had a kitchen and a refrigerator, although no stove or oven, and there was no hot water, unless the sun made it hot during the day.

I rented it immediately.

The job in Phuket was the one that most English teachers dreamed of – working 20 hours a week on a tropical resort island? Oh man you lucky bastard!

But.

A few things.

First of all – when you imagine living in the tropics, you probably don’t imagine the rain. It rained, and it rained, and it rained. Every day, all day, rain was POUNDING down. For WEEKS at a time.

This kind of stops you getting out much. Even moreso than heavy snow.

And then various creepy-crawlies from the jungle start trying to seek shelter in apartments like mine. I had a foot-long blue and red lizard living in my bathroom for quite a long time.
I got used to him. “Good morning lizard!” I’d say.

I had to ride my scooter 17 km to work, from Kata to Phuket Town, in the rain – my bright orange poncho whipping around me, the rain spattering on the plexiglass faceplate of my helmet, big delivery trucks roaring and grinding past me, my work trousers rolled up and my work shoes in a plastic bag in the front basket.

Second of all – when you imagine this dream job in the tropics – you probably aren’t teaching a bunch of little kids.

The weekends were the hardest part of my schedule – I had two six hour days, full of little kids between the ages of 5 and 11.

Old enough not to be intimidated by their English teacher, young enough not to give much of a fuck about actually learning English.

Two times during the week, I had to go teach at a kindergarten.

Some of these children were so small they couldn’t walk. Most of them were 3 or 4. I had four 30-minute classes in a row, each composed of 20 to 25 little kids, screaming and peeing and and sneezing and snotting.

English Manager C had conveniently waited until after the interview to tell me that, “Overwhelmingly, the majority or our students are young learners.”

Miss Dim, a secretary at the other school I worked at in Bangkok, put it more succinctly – “X teach babies!”

Nonetheless, I put some effort into it. Having finally gotten a job at a school that had some books about teaching, I read up on how to teach children and generally manipulate, intimidate, and brainwash those who you have some authority over.

My rowdy class of 8-9 year olds spent the first class running wildly around the room and wrestling as I futilely attempted to get a few of them involved in playing Hangman.

Two lessons later, I had conquered them like Ghengis Khan.

I had them seated in rows raising their hands to participate, organized into Teams. If one student misbehaved, the whole team lost a point. This left the discipline to brutal peer pressure. Whichever team had the most points at the end of the lesson got some various cheap prizes, including gold stars and certificates I whipped up on Microsoft Pagemaker.

I later demonstrated my powers to the other teacher and DOS during the break by holding up two fingers – the accepted signal for “two points” and getting the whole class to scream in unison, “X is a good teacher!”

The little kids—the kindergarteners, the 2-4 year old – I conquered with songs and puppets. (Having to do this in the morning, I owe a great deal of thanks to the original Red Bull Krataeng Dang energy drink. )

They loved me, too. When I pulled up on my scooter, they all came running out screaming, “Hello Hello!” and “Bee bee bee!” and “chicken chicken chicken” referring to the bee and chicken puppets I used.

Teaching kids that small – especially in large groups – there’s not much you can do. We sang some “eyes ears nose” and “head shoulders toes” kind of songs. I held up flashcards with pictures of animals, fruits and vehicles, and they repeated the names after me. Then we played a game where I put pictures of different things on the wall, called out the name, and the students ran to them.

I remember thinking to myself, as the students laughed and cheered and followed me around shouting the names of fruits and animals, “Wow, you’re really doing a good job of this, these kids are really learning.”
Idiot.

It was a couple months into it when the DOS told me the the owner of the kindergarten was VERY displeased with my lessons, that they needed to have some system of evaluation and that the lessons should contain more writing and not so much pointless playing.

“Evaluation? Writing? These kids are TWO YEARS OLD!”

“I know, I know,” said the wan but chirpy DOS, now more wan than chirpy. “I have to come observe you, believe me, I’m no more happy about this than you are. It was apparently the reason the last DOS left, incidentally – we can’t do anything right, as far as that kindergarten is concerned, but that’s a big contract.”

They got a new Thai manager of the place, about that time. She was a chipmunk-faced Thai woman of about 26 who had just returned from studying in England, and I think she was the daughter of some friend of the owner.

I would say her English was about Intermediate, at best, though she’d just completed a Master’s in something at some diploma mill for foreign students.

“I will help you solve this problem,” she assured me, but I knew from experience that when dealing with Thais, by the time you know about the problem, it’s usually too late to do anything about it.

We met with the owner of the kindergarten, an old sour-faced Thai spinster who simultaneously insisted that everything we were doing was wrong and refused to tell us why, and our young Thai manger rattled away in Thai at her while the DOS and I sat, arms folded, trying to remember to smile, as we’d been instructed.

Finally we came up with a completely nonsensical system of evaluation – I’d hold up a couple of pictures, and if the student could say the name of one of them, they passed, and we came up with some worksheets where the kids had to sit and color in the letters of the English alphabet.

Then, I sprained the kid’s arm.

As I mentioned, there were 25 kids in each group, and one of them, a lively little curly-headed half-Western 4 year old, had wrapped himself around my leg and refused to let go.

I attempted to lift him by his arm and there was a POP and a piercing shriek.

Don’t ever lift a kid by one arm, by the way. I know that. Now. Especially little Thai kids with arms like pretzel sticks.

Everyone assured me that it was okay, that I’d done nothing wrong, that everything was fine.

“Look,” I said to the DOS. “I know how this works in Thailand. They never want to deal directly with problems. I’ll resign now. Because I know what will happen – I’ll just come in here one day and I won’t be on the schedule, and they’ll say, “Oh, sorry, come back next month, the owner can’t talk to you right now.”

“Really, I don’t think it’s necessary,” she said, wanly. “I told them in your evaluation that you didn’t really do anything wrong, it was an accident, your lessons are fine.”

But she didn’t seem convinced at all.

They took me off the kindergarten class and gave it to a fat English chick they hired. There was some worry at first that she would frighten the kids, but it seemed they didn’t mind her, and as per the instructions of the kindergarten owner, the kids were sitting and coloring their worksheets most of the class now, anyway.

A couple weeks later, she told me the curly-headed little bugger was back. “And he’s right as rain. It was a mild sprain, that’s all.”

My social life in Phuket was actually a bit slow. During the height of the rainy season, I actually went out and bought a Playstation (chipped to play bootlegged games) to help keep myself entertained.

Other than that, I went into the main Patong Beach strip in the evenings, where I befriended several cute young bar girls. I celebrated my 30th birthday with two of them, only one of whom I paid.

I swam a lot; I was fit and tanned and my mousy brown hair went streaky blond. The off-duty bar girls at the Shark Club loved me.

My favorite game was seeing how much I could get them to do without having to pay them. I discovered that in low tourist season, when there were a lot more hookers than guys, the girls considered there to be some issues of “face” in having a guy taking them out of there, even if he was only giving a nominal payment or no payment at all.

I invited them over to play Playstation and bought them som-tam.

I spent about an hour making out with and feeling up a lovely young big-breasted hooker on my vinyl couch in the living room, after establishing she would do that for free, before she finally asked me if I wanted to have sex.

I told her I didn’t have any more money.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Pay next time.”

Hey, whores get bored, too.

Other than that, there were tourists. One evening I picked up an Australian girl visiting Phuket on a package holiday; we danced for hours and then went back to her room at the Holiday Inn at about 2.00am. We swam in the hotel pool, making out, and then went back to her room, without turning on the light, and got in the shower, and then in the bed.

Afterwards, pleased, I dozed until the sun come up, filling the room with soft blue light, and I noticed some dark spots on the sheets.

She came out of the bathroom. “Uh,” she giggled nervously. “This isn’t the best time of the month for this. . .”

I got up and went into the bathroom. My face, my chest, and my stomach were all smeared with frothy dried purple menstrual blood. I burst into hysterical laughter.

Generally speaking, when it wasn’t raining, I would spend the day on the beach at Kata, near the Club Med, or snorkeling at different points around the island I’d reach on my Honda Dream scooter.

I discovered an abandoned resort in the trees up a hill near Kata – this was one of my favorite places. Hillside cottages empty, a central building full of discarded papers and furniture and even a pickup truck. I wandered around it in the gentle tropical rain, startling green snakes and looking for interesting odds and ends, occasionally breaking windows and sitting on the rotten deck of the empty restaurant and watching the sun disappear into the purple, orange, and violet sky.

In my evening classes, which consisted of adults, I actually worked hard to be a well-organized teacher and cover the material thoroughly, which I should ALSO have known was a bad idea.
Generally, after a day on the beach, all I wanted was a nap, and resented having to go into work. The adults thought I was unfriendly, and I resisted their attempts to invite me out for dinner and things.

So then basically, about five months into the contract, towards the end of October, I went in one day and was told that the Thai manager hadn’t put me on the schedule for November.

Despite good evaluations of my teaching, the manager didn’t actually want to meet with me to discuss it, although the vague reason of students finding my lessons “too difficult” was mentioned, and they wanted me to transfer back to the school’s main branch in Bangkok.

Sigh.

I dug out my contract.

I found an ad for a lawyer, in Phuket’s small English language paper. I rode to the office on my Honda Dream, jittering with anger.

The lawyer was the unfortunate product of a law school in Pennsylvania in America. Despite looking like a usual dignified business-suited Thai office worker, she spoke with an unbelievably annoying whiny American voice that inflected every sentence like a question.

Nonetheless, she did her job.

I explained the situation to her, showed her my contract – which guaranteed me at least one month’s notice of termination of contract – and asked her to phone the school to discuss breach of contract.

This was, amazingly, one of the few jobs in Thailand that had actually bothered to get me a legal work visa. I’d gone to Malaysia to get it a few weeks after I’d arrived in Phuket, and they had registered me as a legal employee. I had a little ID card, even.

It was always amusing to watch Thais who had been in America speak Thai. When reverting back to Thai, all the brash inflection they copied from Americans was gone, and they were again the modest demure Thai kunla satri (good girl).

While my Thai ran the gamut from none to almost none, I could follow the conversation very well.
My lawyer began with clear indirectness and deference, speech laden with the polite particle “ka.” Then she began interspersing it with American lawyerisms, particularly “lawsuit” and “breach of contract.”

She became more firm and accusatory as the conversation continued, and it was clear that the Thai manager was backpedalling and making excuses furiously and hadn’t actually bothered to look at the contract. I made my lawyer tell the manager that we would discuss this with the owner of the school as soon as possible.

Half-way through the conversation, she wrote on a small piece of yellow memo-pad –“Take this to court!” and slid it across to me.

When she was done, I applauded her, and told her she’d clearly done a beautiful job.
I can’t remember how much money I gave her. I think it was about $50. One of the better $50 I’ve ever spent.

I wrote the now-stereotypical indignant letter to English Manager C in Moscow, and claimed that I was sending copies to English teacher forums and the Thai Department of Education. (Ha! Whatever the hell that is.)

A few days later, it was a very pleased English Teacher X who interrupted his sunbathing to ride his scooter into Phuket Town to meet with the young chipmunk faced Thai manger and the DOS.
The owner missed the meeting, perhaps to save face or perhaps out of genuine lack of interest, but I accepted a check for “a final agreed sum of 13,000 baht, for a 2 week period, November 1, 1999 – November 16, 1999” in lieu of proper notice.

I cheerfully signed a document stating that I agreed not to pursue any legal action against the company, or “bring the name of the company into disrepute.”

I made plans to move to Ko Samui, which I liked a bit better than Phuket, for the Millenium New Year’s Eve. I sold my Honda Dream to a British scuba diving instructor and rather regretfully told my French landlord that I was leaving. I’d miss that place. Even the lizard and the ants.

A few days before I left, I saw the DOS of the school, and the fat English girl who’d taken all my classes, sitting on the beach. I sat down and chatted with them for a while.

“Would you really have sued the school?” she asked me. “You know that’s a pretty dodgy thing, in Thailand.“

I thought about it. “I don’t know. Mostly I was bluffing, I think; I knew a bluff would work. Chipmunk Face clearly didn’t know what she was doing, so I knew I could play her against the owner.”

She smiled. “You’re good at this.”

“You gotta take care of yourself in this game, baby, nobody else will.”

“You know, they re-wrote the contract, and put in a clause for immediate termination.”
I laughed. “Always leave a place better for your having been there, that’s what my granny used to say.”

That Day

2011-09-11T13:33:00.003+03:00

Where was I 10 years ago today, when I heard?

I was in Vodkaberg, and I was coming home at maybe 11:00pm after eating with a colleague at one of two pizza restaurants in Vodkaberg at that time.

The phone was ringing as I unlocked the series of three doors which allowed access to my apartment. I thought the phone ringing was a little unusual; at that time, nobody called me on a weekday at that hour.

The phone rang ten times or so while I was unlocking the door, and then stopped; it started ringing again as I was taking off my coat and boots, and continued ringing until I picked it up.

It was an annoying student guy, something of a stereotypical dork with glasses, who missed no opportunity to practice his English.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, I didn't know if you were sleeping, there's been a huge terrorist attack in America, maybe 40 or 50 thousand people are dead..."

"What? 40 or 50 THOUSAND? How is that possible..." I don't think I even had internet at home at all, at that time, so I turned on the TV.

"It was at the World Trade Center in New York."

I flipped through the channels -- it was the usual detrius of stuff that was on Russian TV at that time; true-crime programs, infomercials, badly-dubbed reruns of TV shows from the 90's like PROFILER. (This was slightly before reality shows became prevalent.)

Then I saw live news footage of this:

(Of course the body count turned out a lot lower than originally reported, but it was still plenty high.)

There was a lot of sympathy and support from students during the next week, although our little screech-owl of an office manager said something like "Frankly speaking, it's not a surprise, because America has interefered in other countries' business many times."

Russian thugs rose to the occasion; a friend who had a sister working in the emergency room reported a tremendous rise in the number of "choorkies" -- people from the Caucus region -- hospitalized after being beaten on the street.

Speaking to a girl I knew, a couple days later, who could see that I was upset, she said, "you just can't stop thinking about all those people who died?"

"It's not that . . . or not just that. The whole world is going to change, and it's never going to go back. Do you know how difficult EVERYTHING will be, from now on? Travel, work, everything. They'll watch every move we make, every dollar we spend.
America will go crazy. . a lot more people are going to die after that day, than died ON that day."

The Grid Game: A Good No-Preparation Speaking Activity

2011-09-07T08:43:00.001+03:00

So the books are selling very well, thank you for that, Internet. Just enough to provide a nice little bit of bonus income but not enough to worry me that my identity may become an issue.

Here's a bonus chapter, which I couldn't stick in the first book due to some issues of formatting regarding the pictures. (Although, of course, it's really just something I wrote on the original website in 2003.)

Might stick it in my third book, which will concern speaking activities, and which should be available in the next couple of months.

* * *

This used to be one of my favorites. Suitable for killing a good half-hour to forty-five minutes when you have a bad hangover and haven’t prepared, or you get shanghaied into teaching somebody else’s class, or you just want a good “getting to know you” activity for the first day of an intermediate level class. Basically it's kind of a general review of question formation.

Make a grid on the board resembling the following:

Now you could do this as a team game:

Divide the class into two, or however many groups you need, and explain to the students that they have to make a question using the question word and the auxiliary verb indicated on the top and side of the board for the square they choose, to claim one of the squares in the grid.

For example, to get the square marked with “x” in the picture, they’d need to make a question with “what” and “does”.

For example, “What does your mother think of your pathetic career choice of English teaching?” They ask you the question, and you answer it.

“Well, she’s misguided enough to think I’m doing it out of a sense of adventure, rather than just laziness and general degeneracy, and she’s ignorant enough of conditions to actually think I’m performing a public service.”

Alternately, you could have somebody on the other team answer it.

And the team which makes the correct question gets that square – marked with whatever symbol, for example, an X. Then it’s the next team’s turn. The object is to get three squares in a row, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. In the picture, Team O would have needed to make a question with “Where” and “is”. “Where’s the nearest titty bar?” for example.

Don’t be an idiot and stop the game after one team gets three in a row – let them keep going and try for more three-in-a-rows, until the whole grid is filled in.

In the picture, Team X is leading Team O by a score of 3 – 2. Rah team rah.

You can do lots of different things with this. If you don’t feel like answering questions, or it’s a big class, you can put the students in groups of 2 to 4 and have them play, drawing their own boards.

For advanced classes you could make a larger grid with “How long” “How many” and a few other questions words, and maybe “have” and “has” and “can” along the top.

Warn them there may be a few squares that aren’t possible. It’s not possible to make a question with “When” and “has” or “have”, for example, except for a rhetorical question like “When have you ever seen an English teacher who’s not a drunk?”
So enjoy.

And make sure to tell everyone you got the idea from English Teacher X.

The Normal Life

2011-08-23T09:49:00.000+03:00

Friends always asked how I avoided any kind of long-term romantic entanglements in Russia.

"Willpower," was my witty reply. "Sheer willpower."

I never had girls calling me telling me to come home, or chasing me from bar to bar screaming.

I didn't do this through any kind of blatant cruelty, mind you. I simply refused to act like a boyfriend. I always acted like a drinking buddy.

Sometimes friends would bemoan their lot in life as they left the drinking session to go home to their wives or girlfriends.

"It's not complicated; it's simple mathematics," I would explain to them. "You met a girl who wanted to be your girlfriend more than you DIDN'T want her to be your girlfriend."

That never happened to me.

Until the week that I left Russia!

It's the damndest thing.

"But we're nothing alike!" I say to her. "You're kind, honest, hardworking, sensible and responsible! I'm none of those things!"

"You are," she says.

"I. . . don't . . . live in that kind of world!" I struggle to explain.

"Of course you do," she says.

And then I think, do I? Where did all the degeneracy disappear to?

I also used to say that people didn't chose the dissipated English Teacher lifestyle; it chose them.

Could the same be true of the normal-type life?

Then I think of the realties of English teaching -- the bizarre hours, the job insecurity, the moving from place to place -- I try to reconcile that with this terribly normal and shy little girl.

I'm going back to Saudi on September 2. In the meantime, I'm in Russia, playing normal guy in a normal relationship and going to bed early.

(2007 post on the subject of marriage.)

Requiem for Vodkaberg

2011-08-12T11:03:00.001+03:00

I'm back in Russia for a month.

Again, living with the small blonde girl, in a rented apartment on the 19th floor a huge new complex in the remains of a (former) wilderness reserve overlooking the Volga River.

Sure, my life is fairly quiet, but witness the following:

There's a prominent sign on the front door of the supermarket next to the apartment I'm renting, stating that hard liquor, of any sort, can't be sold between 10.00pm and 10.00am.

Last night at a pizza place, there was a sign stating that beer without any sort of food purchase could not be sold after 10.00pm.

But there's more.

Stating January 1, 2013, a whole new raft of laws about beer go into effect, banning beer sales after 10.00pm completely, and banning beer sales from small kiosks.

Beer prices are already pretty much on par with prices in Europe on America; taxes on beer were recently tripled. They banned drinking beer on the street some years ago; I got a fine for having about an inch of beer in a plastic cup at a bus stop one day back in 2007.

I'm surpised to find that until now Russia has only placed fourth (or fifth, depending on how you figure it) in the world rankings of per-capita alcohol consumption.

Prior to about 2006, it seemed like most of the country was drunk, most of the time. People considered beer something like a soft drink. But if you wanted something a bit more toxic, there were "minibars" at many kiosks and small mini-markets that sold liquor -- by the shot -- 24 hours a day.

I even remember back in 2004 -- often, at supermarkets, there were promotions where beautiful young women used to offer you a free shot of vodka, or a free glass of beer, as they might offer cheese on a cracker or a cookie in a western supermarket.

Back in the old days -- 2000 - 2007 -- we walked around soused, all day, without the slightest worry of police bothering us. We bought beers at the supermarket -- a half-liter beer was about 75 cents, US -- and drank them while we alked around, went to outdoor pirate CD markets where we bought beer, occasionally having a pick-me-up shot at a mini-bar, wandering from kiosk to kiosk buying more beer in parks and riverside cafes for the rest of the day until we staggered drunkenly into some nightclub or the other. We'd stagger out at 5.00 or 6.00am and wake up at 11.00am or so and repeat the process.

I went out with the three remaining teachers last Saturday -- they're all leaving soon, as teaching in Vodkaberg is becoming unbearable, with constant children's classes and huge amounts of travel time. (They mostly travel to nearby small cities and villages, which are the only places where schools can still demand top dollar payment for foreign teachers.) Two of them are heading out to different cities in Russia, in search of contracts promising only company classes.

Recent new teachers didn't stay long -- Saturdays and Sundays are packed with children's classes, and stern hawk-like parents are terribly observant of hangovers and beer-breath.

So, as we can see, civilization has finally caught up with Vodkaberg.

(EDIT, AUGUST 16 -- Some other anti-vice legislation that will go into effect over the next couple of years include bans on smoking in cafes and nightclubs and public transport. There is already a curfew of 10.00pm for people under 16, and all of the casinos and slot machine parlors have been closed.)

Uncle Butthole's Blackout

2011-08-01T14:43:00.000+03:00

I've seen both those HANGOVER movies. They're good, but mis-named. The characters show little evidence of crippling hangover during the films.

They should have called it, "The Blackout."

Fortunately I've had very few blackouts in my 25 year drinking career.

(But I've had shitloads of hangovers.)

I think that was one reason I wanted to leave Russia, actually -- blackouts were becoming more common, which is of course an indicator and symptom of alcoholism and I certainly didn't want to be THAT guy, who ended every drinking session on the Dark Side of the Moon.

Some people have them every time they drink; English Teacher R, one of my first colleagues in Vodkaberg, was one of those. It was difficult to dislike him for the lunatic things he did, when he clearly had not the slightest memory of doing them.

(That's his hairy ass there, and he did that in a bar in the middle of the day.)

My first big Russian blackout adventure with him occurred back in 2004. English Teacher R ditched his new wife and child, turning off his phone, after some kind of student get-together.

My last memory was going to a bar and a student opening a second bottle of vodka. My last memory, literally, is of going, "Oh, shit, we can't drink that!"

I woke up in my own bed, at a quarter to one in the afternoon, and the room was trashed; the phone was off the hook, clothes were scattered all over the room, and a chair was upended.

The phone rang shortly after.

It was English Teacher R. "What the fuck happened last night?" he mumbled miserably.

"You're asking the wrong guy," I rasped.

He'd woken up in the doorway of a bar across town from the last place we'd been drinking vodka, with his jacket missing and his shirt on inside out.

The bar where we were drinking vodka with the students, incidentally, refused to let us in, the next time we went there.

It took us some time to discover, from one of the students we'd gone there with, that we'd been challenging English Teacher R to kiss men in the bar, to see their reaction, and we'd then started breaking bottles on the concrete floor.

I've had very little to drink in the last couple of years in Saudi Arabia -- part of the reason in going there was to dry out. My girlfriend doesn't drink much, so I've not had more than a couple beers on holidays with her.

Last summer I came to Russia and only had two heavy-duty drinking sessions -- one ended with a crippling hangover, and the other ended with another blackout.

So I arrived in America at the beginning of July -- the first weekend, the weekend of the 4th of July, my family and some friends had a party.

I drank a lot of rum; not sure how much. The party ended at about 3.30 am.

I woke up on the couch in the den, covered with cat hair. One of my nephews, the 11-year-old, was shaking me and asking me if I was okay.

"Yeah, sure. . ." I wondered why I was on the couch, when I'd gone to bed in an upstairs room. I remembered the end of the evening all right, and remembered going to my bedroom and chatting to some Russian girls I knew on the internet.

He giggled. "You were sleepwalking last night."

"Really?" I said, horrified.

"You came in our room and were going to poop on the chair. Dad asked you if you were sleepwalking and you said yes, and he took you into the hallway. You went into another room and were going to poop on the chair again."

"Oh. . . my . . . god. . ."

"They led you into the bathroom and you pooped but you didn't flush."

"Oh man. . ."

And somehow managed to "sleepwalk" down the steps and over two doggie-doors into the den, where I'd ended up on the couch.

My nephews are 8 and 11; they're a wonderful couple of kids, who love ninjas and zombies and after this event began referring to me as "Uncle Butthole." What might have been traumatic in another family, they thought was hilarious.

Sleep disorders run in the male side of the family -- both of them, like my brother, sleepwalk and sleeptalk and the older one had night terrors. My father (who doesn't drink, incidentally) suffers from restless leg syndrome.

So in this backdrop was Uncle Butthole's blackout wanderings camoflauged.

"I'd punish you kids for giving your uncle that nickname, if it wasn't so appropriate," said my brother, later.

Nothing Worse. . .

2011-07-02T18:39:00.000+03:00

. . .than one of those blog posts where the author says, "Well, I don't have anything to say but I just wanted to say that I haven't posted for a while but here's a general update."

So I finished up my second year in The Kingdom, and signed a contract for a third (and probably final, though a lot of guys say that) year.

I got a raise of about $150 a month, which brings my salary up to the nice round number of A GAZILLION dollars a month.

The plane ride was the usual excruciating nerve-torture. The four films that I watched on the plane were THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU (about how one must defy the forces of the universe in quest of true love) THE TOURIST (which seems to be, vaguely about how love is more important than money, but was mainly just a travelogue) LITTLE FOKKER (which was about how love and family is more important than boning Jessica Alba) and EAT PRAY LOVE (which was about how it's okay for spoiled white women to leave their families to go to exotic destinations for sex tourism.)

America. . . the fat, the baseball hats, the ethnic variety. . . it never feels like coming home, particularly, it's just another place to visit.

Anyway, I've got a list of activities to keep myself occupied and hopefully make myself feel more mature and adult, mostly related to improving my knowledge of practical things and surviving emergencies and disasters.

I spent most of yesterday trying to light fires with batteries, aluminum cans, and the bottom of broken bottles, and I'm also taking some handgun training classes at a local range.

While I've probably fucked more and hotter chicks than any of the instructors at the range, it was hard to feel superior to them. Aiming at the center of the chest used to mean something completely different to me. . .

More Fun With My Privates

2011-06-15T19:56:00.000+03:00

(Another re-post from 2004. Most of you weren't even born then, I'm sure.)

Admit it. You want to hear more about my privates.

In Prague I taught quite a few individual classes -- although a lot of them actually featured two people -- and these were usually young hardworking professional women, who if not exactly thrilling were not particularly agonizing.

Of course after a few years of it all, you develop your techniques. You learn some methodical little tricks to force conversation out of the recalcitrant ones, and the patience to put up with the chatty ones. I no longer dreaded my privates.

I came to Russia and did a few privates here and there. No big whup.

One was the mistress of a fat businessman who even after eight months of English lessons could barely string together a sentence like "It is a pen" or count higher than 100. She was not unpleasant, though she was stupid.

Sometimes she'd bring four Miller Genuine Draft beers to class and we'd drink them while we studied. (It was the last class of the day so I felt no professional compunction about it.) In the warm months we'd sit outside on a bench, patiently practicing the alphabet and basic vocabulary and grammar again and again.

Hey, it beats loading bricks.

They weren't all that good though. Once I had a fat female judge who was horrified that there were pictures of black people in the text book and wanted to talk about how much she hated black people.

"And how many black people have you actually met?" I asked in Russian. She never had another lesson after that.

Then I got this rich guy. He was from one of the ethnic regions to the south, or maybe it's a separate country now, one of those places with a lot of K's and Z's and U's and A's that end in "-stan."

He looked and dressed like a guy you'd make fun of who owned a laundromat, but he was quite rich, owned fish canneries and the usual assortment of other businesses.

He wanted to pal around with me to improve his English -- he invited me and another teacher out for nice dinners a couple of times, took us to his sauna at his country house, all that sort of stuff.

I had a Russian female friend who was pretty experienced with going out with rich guys, and after meeting the guy, she warned me not to hang out with him much.

"He's dangerous," she said.

"You're just saying that because he's ethnic," I said. "Anyway, what's the danger, is somebody going to assassinate us in his sauna?" I laughed.

She looked at me.

"Yeah, that's exactly what somebody might do." She explained that the sauna was a very popular place for gangland rubouts. The target was naked and had nowhere to run or hide.

Crap, and I was worried enough about him looking at my penis.

Anyway, it never amounted to anything. He invited me and another teacher to take an all-expenses paid trip to Lake Baikal during out May holidays, but then I guess couldn't for some reason or the other and was then too embarrassed about it to ever see either of us anywhere again.

Or hell, maybe he got killed or deported or something, how the hell should I know.

Then you get some fucking impossible task, like I did a couple of years ago -- I had to teach this 13 year old kid to prepare, within three months, for the FCE examination.

The FCE (or First Certificate in English) examination, in case you don't know, is an essentially meaningless but impressive looking test of English language abilities, administered by representatives of the testing syndicate of Cambridge University.

I didn't like the looks of the kid -- he'd been to England for a couple of months, but he was a snotty little brat who lived for Rammstein and violent computer games.

I mean that literally when I say he was snotty nosed, incidentally. He often had a runny nose.

His parents attempted to motivate him for the exam by promising to buy him a new computer, but even that didn't do the trick. Not surprising perhaps, since they wouldn't let him play any of the games he liked (though he'd learned a lot of cool English words like "sucking chest wound" and "pimp" and "rubout" from Grand Theft Auto III.

His parents were typical new Russian -- rich, gaudy, energetic, vigorous, and stupid as a couple of houseplants. They'd heard about the exam, and decided that their son needed it because they wanted him to go to university in England. I attempted to explain several times that the test was not valid for university entrance, and even had someone at the British Council confirm that the test was not recommended for people under the age of 16.

No dice.

They insisted; their little brat needed it. Within three months.

The real reason eventually leaked out -- they had a friend whose son had passed the test at age 14. They wanted to keep up with the Ivanovs. I had to go to their luxurious apartment in the morning twice a week to teach the little shit.

Man, I tried. I tried to get him to read by giving him shit off the Internet about computer games, I tried to involve him with grammar in games of all different sorts, I used computer game cut-scenes for listening activities -- nothing worked. He sullenly refused to do any homework, while somehow convincing his parents I simply never assigned any.

The mother, who looked to be whacked out on tranquilizers or perhaps healthy shots of cognac in her morning tea, walked around blissfully unaware with one of her tits hanging out of her dressing gown, and forced me to eat the healthy breakfast of cake she inevitably fed the little bastard.

The father attempted to cajole me into going ice diving with him. He would often return from morning trips with big bags of slimy back fish, and offer to give me some. I'd graciously decline.

And let me remind you this was at 9:00 in the morning. The main reason I've stayed where I am so long is that I don't have to get up early anymore.

Finally we got to the end of the 80 hours or so we'd paid for.

A few months later the boss called me on the carpet.

They told me that the mother and father of the little snotnose had called and screamed because the little bastard had failed the test. And what's more they'd been to America on a holiday and he had claimed not to understand anything anybody said.

(I'm sure he was lying. I envision this scenario. -- "Son, go over there to the car rental desk and speak to the man for us. You need to practice your English."

"But I don't understand anything!" he insists, continuing to search in his computer gaming magazine for the secret code to use in Grand Theft Auto 3 which will allow full frontal nudity.)

There were a couple of other memorable ones. I had a fifteen-year-old demonologist and heavy metal fan who I talked about horror films and such with for 90 minutes once a week, often while playing computer games. We'd discuss the vocabulary of things on the screen while we played DOOM 3.

"What's that thing on the right behind the zombie?" he's ask.

"I think it's a turbine," I'd reply.

Then of course there was my favorite rich guy. He was a colorful media mogul and bag man, who quite openly admitted making his fortune working as a go-between between local mobsters and politicians.

He was colorful in the literal as well as the figurative sense -- he never wore grey or blue when he could be wearing pink, yellow, or green.

He told me lots of interesting stories about who was bribing who and who was behind various assassinations around town. It occasionally worried me. I wondered if his enemies had his office bugged or staked out or something.

We went to dinner a few times, had a few interesting nights at a local strip club, and went water-skiing a few times. We even discovered we'd had sex with the same model, a notorious social climber and gold-digger.

Eventually he suddenly changed teachers. I didn't take it personally -- I'd known for a while that rich guys don't have friends, they have partners and employees. And a lot of enemies.

Anyway, those are the exceptions. The rule is some bored and boring office employee, exhausted and uninterested. It always gets back to that, unfortunately.

"What did you do this weekend?"

"Worked."

"And after work?"

"Watched TV."

"What did you watch?"

". . . I don't really remember, I was too tired."

My privates just aren't the laugh they used to be.

My Privates

2011-06-09T14:00:00.000+03:00

Here you go -- another birthday present -- a cartoon and an old article from the first website. Who loves ya, baby? These are originally from 2004.

"Private students," as English Teacher R pointed out the other day, would actually be defined as students that you are teaching on your own, outside of your normal work arrangement, whereas students you're teaching one-on-one as part of your normal working arrangement might be more accurately called "individual students."

Whatfuckingever, I'll be using the two terms more or less interchangeably.

There are a lot of reasons teachers hate doing one-on-one lessons through their schools -- not least because the student is probably paying three or four times what they'd pay for a normal class, but the teacher is getting paid exactly the same as he always does despite having to work a lot harder.

But mainly it gets down to the tedium factor. A small minority of individual students will have much of anything to say, the rest will just smile uncomfortably at you while you desperately try to jump-start a conversation or run monotonously through the book with them, leaving out all the games and songs and other stuff that makes class halfway interesting.

Fun With My Privates in Bangkok and Korea

We had loads of them in Bangkok in my first job; they gave our individual lessons away at bargain prices outside of the 10:00am to 12:00pm and 6:00pm to 8:00pm peak hours. They were generally unhappy teenagers being forced to study by their parents, sitting with a terrified grin the whole time and answering virtually every question with a nod of the head and a broad smile.

And in a one-on-one class, baby, there's NO WAY OUT. You can't take a break, most likely, and students will probably bitch to the management about too many songs or too much time spent reading. It's ALL YOU, stuck in a small room with somebody you've got nothing at all in common with on any level beyond the cellular.

I can remember them all quite clearly.

There was the middle-aged guy who worked at the TV station, whose wife had just died, who had never studied English and answered every question with a sober nod of the head and a "Hmmmm." There was the little fat girl who looked like she was about to cry she was so frightened. There was the little gay fashion designer named Aye with the punk hairdo who smiled and made cow eyes at me during the whole lesson. (The secretary loved to tell me -- "Piwate student Aye like man, like X! Like man!" and then burst into hysterical giggles.)

Then there was the fat kid. He was pretty typical.

We had a lot of fat kids in Bangkok. Obviously they were rich kids, and in the grand Thai tradition were spoiled rotten and given each and every thing they wanted -- and that usually included a lot of fast food. Our school was in a shopping mall -- in the summer, students were dropped off in the morning, where they ate a big fast food meal, went to some classes at our school in the morning, after which they had a big fast food lunch, and then spent the afternoon shopping, at the cinema, at the waterpark, or at the videogame arcade -- after which they had a big fast food meal.

We had 'em all in our mall -- McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut. Even my personal favorite, Popeye's Cajun Fried Chicken.

The fat kid was about 13 or 14, but probably weighed close to 200 pounds. None of it was muscle. He had a bodyguard, a strange-looking guy with an Elvis haircut who sat by the entrance while the fat kid studied.

The fat kid had asthma. His breath rattled disgustingly in his lungs. He made weird wheezing noises constantly. He was a pack-a-day smoker already, and was being forced to study by his parents, as he would soon be shipped off to Australia to learn English the hard way.

I sat in a small enclosed room with him. The stench of McDonald's lard coming out of his pores was overpowering. I had him read the book and then asked him if he understood. "Understand," he would say. "So what's the difference between the present perfect and the past simple?" I'd ask. He'd nod his head. "Understand."

"So what did you do yesterday?" I'd ask.

"Watch TV." He'd smile in the incredibly uncomfortable way that a person living in Thailand quickly realized was a signal of abject desire to be someplace else.

"Watched TV. Past tense."

"Yes. Understand."

"What did you watch?"

A long pause. "No remember."

"What kind of TV programs do you like, in general?"

He'd smile and nod. "I like watch TV."

"Do you like movies?"

"Like."

"What kind of movies do you like?"

"Yes, like."

"Did you see BATMAN FOREVER?"

"Yes."

"What did you think of it?"

"Like."

"You should say, 'I liked it.' Past tense."

"Understand."

Long pause.

"What did you like?"

Pause.

"No remember."

This gay banter continued for ninety minutes or so. Three days a week.

(But don't let me give you the impression the fat kid was different from most Thais -- that would be a fairly usual exchange between a teacher and a student. It's just the agony of being trapped alone in a room with a fat kid stinking of hydrogenated vegetable oil and salt that I'm trying to get across here.)

When I got to Korea, I had a little more luck. Generally, anybody that cared enough to try to get a private lesson was into it enough to try to actually speak a bit, or at least that was the case with my students. And of course I did all my private lessons outside the school, where I was paid a good $30 an hour or so, and occasionally was bought some nice meals.

I taught one guy who was a real prince. He was a self-made man, a manager of a company that made buttons. He'd started out poor -- he spoke movingly of having to catch and eat crickets as a child -- and got a job in a button factory and managed to actually claw his way to the top, or at least the upper middle.

He was a really pleasant and open guy, only a couple years older than me, and he bought me a lot of nice food and generally made even the worst of the hangovers that I was experiencing on our lessons bearable.

One of those zen-like moments happened while I was teaching him. I met him outside the coffee shop we usually had our lesson in and indicated the rain falling and said, "Do you like the weather today?"

He smiled ear to ear. "I like all weather."

Always thought that there's a great philosophical truth in there somewhere.

Then there was the little religious bitch.

Oooh, fuck she made me mad. But, total prostitute that I am, I sat there quietly and said not a word. For a mere $25 an hour, too.

She was a born-again Christian, I can't remember exactly what denomination, other than it was Protestant, who'd just returned from a two-year long missionary mission in Pakistan. She was a doctor, although she was so petite she looked about seventeen. She even had braces.

She was bigoted, racist, narrow-minded, homophobic, etc, etc. And I had to sit and smile while she told me about how homosexuality was evil and how all Muslims are damned to hell and how she'd visited Notre Damn cathedral in Paris and found herself disgusted by it, as the Catholics obviously had no idea what religion was all about.

And worst of all -- she spent almost a whole lesson telling me about the evils of Halloween.

I just smiled and took it all. I did, however, manage to, with apparent earnestness, undermine her faith in the Bible by pointing out that after Cain kills Able in the Book of Genesis, he runs off with a wife, which means either all people WEREN'T descended from Adam and Eve, or that he was fucking his sister.

I was furious about her for months after leaving Korea. I can recall walking along pleasant beaches in Thailand, money belt fat with cash, fuming about how I wished I'd told that little bitch off.

Of course now I doubt I'd feel much for her other than pity -- she was obviously a lonely and unhappy woman. But I was an emotional and angry boy of 27 then.

I had a lucky couple of years -- I never had any privates in New York, although there were a couple of uncomfortably small classes, one of which contained only a shy Japanese girl and a pathologically lying young man from Zimbabwe who refused to buy a text book and who was attending class for free because he had a lawsuit pending against the school after tripping on the stairs.

I had one interesting private when I returned to Thailand in 1999. It was an eight-year-old girl who'd just spent a year living in Brooklyn in America. Her spoken English was about normal for a native-speaking eight-year-old, but she was pretty hyperactive and living in America had left her foul-mouthed and outspoken.

We were discussing the parts of the body once and she didn't so much as giggle as she rattled off "tits, ass, dick, pussy."

And then she extended her middle finger.

"And you know what that means?" I asked.

"Yeah. Fuckin."

She'd never managed to connect a "g" with that word, nor that it had any other conjugation, but I guess living in Brooklyn, you might well not.

She was hard to keep focused, but nobody cared much, so we spent a lot of the class just drawing with crayons and talking about cartoons and New York. There are worse ways to make a living.

Occasionally I'd trick her into doing something academic by bribing her with junk food. "If you do this," I'd say, "we'll go over to 7-11 at the break and get you a snack."

This would backfire -- she'd slam down a couple of donuts or ice cream and a Slurpee, and thus be hyperactive and incoherent with sugar rush for the last hour of the class. On one occasion she vomited all over the floor.

On another she climbed out an upstairs window onto a ledge, and refused to come back inside. I suppose I can consider myself lucky that my superiors didn't find out about that.

We always had a ball.

So as you can see, I've had my ups and my downs with my privates. Haven't we all though.

Just remember what the Button Guy said though -- try to enjoy whatever weather life tosses your way.

The Girlfriend Experience

2011-06-04T22:45:00.001+03:00

So, man, she just keeps hanging in there.

To recap -- I met her in August 2009, just before I left Russia, and after I got here we embarked on a Skype-and-holiday relationship that I didn't think would last for three months, but somehow has lasted nearly two years.

Obviously the foreign vacations don't hurt -- we went to Barcelona for a week in April -- but greed doesn't seem to be her prime motivation. She frequently suggests ways to save money on these holidays, and dislikes expensive restaurants.

It's really mystifying. She's honest, shy, quiet, hard-working and loyal to a fault. She's on Skype pretty much EVERY night at nine.

She's exactly what I imagined Russian girls were like, before I actually met any.

I'm thinking back -- of all the girls I went out with back in Vodkaberg, how many could actually be called my girlfriend? Certainly no more than 3 of them, and of those -- the longest was only for a couple of months.

While the popular image of English Teacher X is of a heartless cad injecting women full of his misogynistic hatred via sexual intercourse, and leaving them weeping in the stairwell, the actual reality of it was more complicated (if no less sinister.)

The practical girls who went out with me quickly realized that I wasn't nearly serious or wealthy enough to be a good husband -- and there's strong social pressure on girls to be married by 25, in provincial Russia. (Basically, girls had 2 choices after they finished university -- get married, or move to Moscow.)

There were a couple of girls I know who "liked me for me" so to speak -- but in both cases, they had very strict parents. Despite the fact that the girls in question were in their 20's, they couldn't spend the night away from home, except on the occasional Saturday, so it was hard to consider them "girlfriends."

There was one girl, a girl from Kazakstan who was studying in Vodkaberg -- she was great in a lot of ways and, living away from home, she could spend the night with me whenever she wanted. She was the closest thing to a live-in I've had, I guess, and that was really only for about a month.

We argued like wolverines, however, so we broke up, and she got married to somebody else seemingly about a month later.

The party-girls I went out with -- well, they were party girls. They weren't looking for anything serious either. At least, not with me -- some of these girls had "sponsors" -- rich guys, usually older, who they serviced mostly just to get clothes and cash.

These were the most distasteful to me -- the ones who would race to answer their mobile phones in the middle of sex and then run and stick their heads out the window before they answered, so it would sound like they were on the street. "Oh hello honey," they'd exclaim to the married rich guy. "I'm just walking with some friends."

I went out with a couple of divorced single moms. Obviously there, you had the problem of me and my party-boy reputation, as well as not having any money.

So as it turned out, I didn't break as many hearts as you might think. (If indeed most of these girls could be said to have hearts at all.)

Even the girl from Kazakstan kept in touch with me, and we met after she got divorced. (And she got married AGAIN, about a month after I left Russia.)

In general, it would fade out gently; girls would stop returning my text messages, or we'd settle into an amicable friends-with-extras situation, and I'd be somebody they'd call when they were between boyfriends, or fighting with their husbands.

And why not? I was nice to them. A fun guy.

Well. . . almost always nice to them.

There are a couple who curse my name, undoubtedly, but only a couple. And it took a LOT of work on my part, in those two cases. One of those I regret; the other I wish I'd been more cruel to.

(Two, in nine years! That's pretty good, really.)

Anyway, that's what I had to do to get a kind and decent Russian girlfriend -- leave Russia completely. There's definitely a lesson there.

The one I wish I had been more cruel to:

A little retro-Russia gift from ETX to you, on the occasion of his 42nd birthday. God bless us every one!

The Border: Visa Nightmare #3

2011-05-27T17:32:00.000+03:00

I can barely stomach writing about the whole chain of events that led up to it, but I can tell you that I spent the better part of the day yesterday trying to get to Bahrain, with an exit visa I had been assured by my administration was valid, only to be told at the border that it was not in the computer.

(You see, the Kingdom is such a fun place, you even need a visa to LEAVE.)

This is the third time something like this has happened to me. In 2000, when I first went to Russia by train, I discovered the hard way that I needed a transit visa for Belorus, despite being assured by the school I was applying for that I did not.

In 2009, I returned to Russia with a new passport that did not match the numbers in my old visa, and was turned away, despite being assured by my school that it didn't matter. The expense and conflict caused by this was the Prime Mover that got me out of Russia, so perhaps that was Allah working in his mysterious ways.

I spent about $100 on taxis and buses yesterday, and I'll be charged one night for the hotel I reserved. All in all that's cheap. I spent over $1000 in Germany getting a new Russian visa back in 2009.

The visa thing is a nightmare on many levels -- not only is it impossible for you to know what's correct, with the language barrier and everything, it's generally impossible for your school to know what's correct, because rules change all the time.

One mis-spelled word, one wrong date, one lacking stamp, one wrong number, one picture with the wrong colored background -- and YOU'RE FUCKED.

The government offices involved tend not to be much help because there are so many people involved that different people will tell you different things. (Assuming you can find somebody who speaks English in the first place.)

The internet is a help, but of course, you get people mouthing off with great authority who don't have any fucking idea what they're talking about.

It's such a nightmare of beauracracy now, being a TEFL teacher. That was kind of one of the appeals of it, back in the day -- you didn't need references, certificates, work visas, anything. You could just roll up and work on a tourist visa, get paid in cash, take a few months off between jobs. . .

Now it's all one big apostiled document. Stamped with The Mark of the Beast.

The Second Book

2011-05-22T00:48:00.001+03:00

By popular demand. Wait, is three people asking me for something, popular demand?

Anyway, here are the collected, chronological, edited, EXPANDED adventures of English Teacher X between 1995 and 2000. These are all stories from the old website, but heavily revised and with a lot of NEW material added -- maybe 15 percent new stuff? At least 10, anyway.

This is old-school TEFL teacher shit -- brazenly dishonest and illegal schools, foreigner groupies, filthy pre-globalism third-world hellholes, and drugs and alcohol for all.

And finally revealed -- the story of how I worked in Phuket, Thailand and lost my job after snapping a small child's arm.

That's worth $2.99, wouldn't you say?

BUY IT HERE FOR AMAZON KINDLE

BUY IT HERE ON SMASHWORDS FOR ALL OTHER E-BOOK FORMATS

BUY IT HERE FOR BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK READER

One man. Five years. Five countries. Seven cities. Seven employers. A lot of alcohol. Countless brain cells.

Every Teacher's Fantasy

2011-05-19T19:51:00.006+03:00

So, yeah, I made this cartoon in like 2004; does anybody even remember POLYPHONIC pop song ringtones?

And of course, now, that kind of rampant phone abuse usually doesn't happen because people don't show off with their phones much anymore; even homeless people and peasant farmers have Iphones these days.

But I'm sure plenty of teachers still fantasize about shoving phones up their students asses. Completely sure.

Fight The Future

2011-05-11T00:36:00.000+03:00

Cartoon from 2005.

They Whacked The Beard!

2011-05-05T20:40:00.001+03:00

So they finally whacked The Beard.

Nobody in a passing car has shouted anything about it; no little kids have accosted me with thrown rocks.

Only one of my students mentioned anything about it, asking me if I thought it was true.

"I guess so," I said. "I saw the same thing that you did on the news," I hedged.

The student shrugged and let the subject drop.

My colleagues, however, are full of theories; some believe the one that he's been dead for a while and the US has only now revealed it; the most popular one seems to be that he's not actually dead, he was abducted and is being held in a secret prison somewhere to be tortured and interrogated at the US's leisure.

That does make more sense than the theory that the whole incident was faked for PR purposes; I mean, how would they get Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda to go along with it?

Unless maybe they did it to smoke the real Bin Ladin out of hiding. . . or maybe the whole of Al Qaeda is just a crypto-fascist government plot . . . in which case why would they fake Bin Ladin's death now? And why reveal it now, unless they needed good news after the J-Quake and the tornados in America. . .

Anyway, let's leave that serpent to devour its own tail.

So assuming that it all happened much as reported, that a crack team of US badasses gunned him down in cold blood -- is this really going to incite extremism?

Think it through -- what, was the whole of Al Qaeda sitting around waiting, going, "Okay, well, we'll give the foreign devils one more chance -- OH NO THEY KILLED BIN LADIN! NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!"

I mean, they ALREADY hated us and tried terrorist attacks all the time. What will change?

The average person in the Middle East is probably not going to be too swayed one way or the other here; Bin Ladin was a very vocal self-professed enemy of the US, vowing more death and terrorism, and the US finally manged to kill him.

So what's the problem? He's going to Paradise for the cause anyway right? With his 40 virgins or whatever.

It's the thousands upon thousands of completely innocent Muslims killed in Iraq that incited people to hate the US; compared to THAT, how can you hate a country for killing a guy who was their sworn enemy?

And now we hear that they shot him when he was completely unarmed; the only REAL question that raises to his fans is, why was the guy who was supposedly the most dangerous terrorist in the world completely unarmed and helpless, when it came right down to The Moment of Truth?

His WIFE was rushing to protect HIM, or so recent reports have it. AND he was in his pajamas when they blasted him.

News stories a while back had him living in caves and wired with explosives so he could never be taken alive; and in the end he gets killed so ignominiously, in a suburban compound retreat.

So basically, all the unrest in Egypt, Syria, Libya etc, is a lot more on people's minds then the death of The Kingdom's most infamous son. A revolution that undoubtedly wants more money, video games and Internet porn, and less old school terrorism.

Anyway, I'm packing my piece of pipe with the tape around it in my backpack; so far, no unrest or confrontations to report from Desert Station X. Observing all standard high PERSEC and OPSEC.

Over and out.

Double or Nothing

2011-05-01T10:19:00.000+03:00

So, in response to the unprecedented unrest in the Middle East, the King gave all government workers DOUBLE salary last month.

Naturally we were all looking forward to this, being government workers.

Of course we didn't get it; only the local teachers (a small minority)got it. This didn't really surprise anybody.

But then we heard that teachers contracted to the military through British Aerospace got it. Then we heard that teachers working for the national oil companies got it.

We found we got a raise of about $75 a month, however.

Teachers here are understandably mercenary; there are very few other reasons to be here. A few wrote angry letters, a few swore they'd stay here only "one more year."

Angry English teachers rioting in the streets? Stay tuned.

What Your Boss Thinks About You

2011-04-26T08:54:00.000+03:00

So I was going to post a bunch of correspondence I had with the owner of the chain of Language Schools I worked at in Russia.

Basically, however, it would be a lot of reading about visas and hours and insurance and this and that, which out of context is not very interesting; I can say that, inevitably, you had to email the owner at least three times to get him to reply at all, and I had forgotten what a fucking funny guy I am -- towards the end I started signing letters, "Anxiously awaiting your excuse."

The Owner is a mysterious figure even to people who know him; there are all kinds of presumably bullshit stories about how he used to work for the Moscow bureau of the FBI or the CIA or that he'd survived helicopter crashes in Vietnam and son on.

I can say one thing about him; he talks a lot. I once sat in a room with him and he spoke nearly nonstop for a sold hour. I was getting dizzy, I think because he was using up all the oxygen in the room.

But anyway, here's a snippet of correspondence that summarizes his philosophy about his employees:

You can state that there are a lot of unhappy teachers but then I would have to ask what they are unhappy about. Like you, I suppose that much (if not most of it) has to do with the economic situation in Russia. Yet I do not believe that you can point the finger of blame at (REDACTED)or Russia. Though I am not happy with what is happening, it is the same everywhere. To date, since November I have been receiving between 300 and 400 requests for employment per week. I can no longer even respond to them all. I can however tell you that if you are so down on (REDACTED), or Russia than perhaps you should consider leaving either or both. Perhaps there are greener pastures out there.

* * *

I suppose a lot of corporations have this attitude towards their employees -- didn't Wal-Mart get press attention recently when some memos along the same lines were leaked, stating that there was no productivity difference between new employees and old employees, so why should they offer more benefits or salary to keep employees at all?

At my DOS training in Moscow in 2007, I was frankly told, by the second in command there at the time, about many of the things which are discussed as rumor on ESL message boards:

1) Be careful about hiring older people, and divorced or middle-aged women; they're rarely happy with the job and students often don't like them

2) Be careful about hiring experienced teachers who have worked in universities or high schools, because they won't like the hours at a private language school and might walk out

3) The salary is paid twice a month because otherwise teachers would simply drink it and piss it against the wall

4) Don't worry too much about training new employees; people rarely stay long enough to make it worthwhile

I was one of the last (actually I think, the last) guy to get a DELTA paid for by the school in honor of working there more than 2 years; it took him about 3 years to pay for the whole thing, however, and it was recently confirmed to me by my colleague here (who once stayed in the Owner's apartment in Moscow for a few days) that they were trying to wait me out, figuring I'd leave before they had to pay the full amount.

And you know, to be fair, there also verified first-hand stories about this guy paying teachers "out of his own pocket" regarding some conflicts that they had with their branch, and obviously, some teachers cut a very destructive swath indeed, trashing apartments and so on.

But reading the messages again, he is right about one thing:

I would suggest that you take the bull by the horns and make a good decision for yourself. Only you can do that. The only person who can take responsibility for the past eight years is you. You can't give that away nor can you not accept full responsibility for your own decisions. You're not a prisoner and you're free to make good decisions for yourself. If you want to place the blame on someone else and simply let it go at that, then I don't get what the point of being an adult is.

I agree; basically, if you agree to do that shitty job, then you have to deal with whatever happens. Like Deniro said in HEAT -- "Do not have anything in your life that you wouldn't leave behind in 5 seconds flat if the heat comes down."

Anyway, if King Shit of Turd Mountain is reading this: indeed there are FAR FAR FAR GREENER pastures than the McDonald's of English teaching, and I can look back on my nine years with them as paying off in debauchery, if not financially.

Hell, that DELTA that they eventually begrudgingly paid for got me an extra $1000 a month here, I think.

Now I can look back and laugh. In fact, I cackle hysterically. Especially as I look at my bank account now, and see it approaching six figures.

Here's the scene I was talking about from HEAT. Change a few reference here and there -- "prison" to "crappy language school branch" for example -- and this could be a conversation between a DOS and an employee.

Split Shift Soup

2011-04-21T08:58:00.000+03:00

For a happy six or seven yeras, I worked in Russia without split shifts.

Pretty much all my classes were from 4.30pm to 9.30pm. This allowed me both to sleep late and go out after work and get hammered.

By 2007, we had something like eleven teachers, I was Director of Studies -- and everybody was fucking miserable.

Russia had become an oil superpower. Drinking on the street was illegal, and Russian woman expressed little interest in the eccentric, poor, middle-aged English teachers. our students were no longer happy-go-lucky rich people; they were angry overworked young professionals.

Most of the teachers were working weekends from about 9.00am to 3.00pm, weekday mornings from 9.00am - 11.00am, evenings from 7.15pm - 9.30pm, and other classes in the middle of the day involving hours of travel time.

Administration had no pity. Everybody hated everybody.

I fought them tooth and nail about the scheduling. Here's one document I offered them:

* * *

PROPOSALS FOR ENDING THE SCHEDULING MESS

Split shifts and excessive travel time are the number one reason for teacher dissatisfaction with their jobs here at (REDACTED). We need to do something about this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

REASONS WHY SPLIT SHIFTS ARE A PROBLEM FOR EVERYONE:

• A teacher working a split shift five times a week in our current schedule will, most likely, spend an average of 2 hours per day traveling – an extra 10 hours per week / 40 hours per month. Our teachers are contracted for 40 hour weeks – they almost surely exceed this amount if travel time is counted in addition to preparation time, arriving at least 15 minutes early, etc.

• The teacher working 5 split shifts will spend about 200 rubles per week / 800 rubles per month on buses and trams – more if the teacher takes marshroots (and the teacher probably will!)

• I travel approximately 4 ½ hours per week to teach one student for approximately the same number of hours. I am therefore occupied twice as much in teaching one client. Economically this makes little sense.

• To teach at a certain company class, a teacher living near the school needs to make a round trip of two hours to teach them for 90 minutes. Again this is not economically sensible, for the teacher or for the school.

• A teacher returning home at 10:00pm and then working the following morning at 9:00am will almost certainly be unable to sleep eight hours. Ending split shifts will most likely diminish complaints that teachers seem tired or hungover, are unprepared, are arriving late / almost late for class, are not neatly groomed, etc.

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

• Inform clients that teachers are only available 12:00pm to 9:30pm. Classes in the morning can be arranged with consent of the teacher, as overtime pay rate, or at considerable additional cost to the students.

• Give teachers a bonus for working split shifts, payable every month or at the end of the contract. I recommend that this bonus be at least 2500 rubles per month. (Remember, 800 rubles is going to pay for the teacher’s bus fare!)

• Reduce the number of contract hours required of teachers who work split shifts. I recommend it be reduced to 25 academic hours. Additional hours should be considered overtime. (I am currently working 24 academic hours per week, with split shifts and 3 different locations per day twice a week, and I feel like I am working MUCH more than when I was teaching 30 hours 4:45 – 9:30 five days a week.)

• If a teacher is working split shifts, change the starting and finishing hours of evening classes to give them more time to get home in the evening. I recommend starting time for evening classes be 18:30 and ending time be 20:45. (This should give workers, who usually finish at 17:00, plenty of time to get to (REDACTED)) Even starting at 18:45 and ending at 21:00 would be preferable to the current system. It is important to remember that this does not mean ALL evening classes should start at these times – only those of teachers with split shifts. Classes for teachers with a “block” schedule could end as late as 10:00, for example.

• Alternately, change the start time of morning classes to 10:00am and the finishing time to 12:15. The extra hour will mean a lot to teachers and probably very little to students.

• At the very least, teachers working split shifts or at companies that require a lot of travel time could be given free bus / tram passes. If they travel by marshrut due to time constraints, they could be reimbursed for this.

• (REDACTED) could hire a driver to take teachers to /from work and to / from company classes. This might actually work out rather more cheaply than the first option!!

• Promise teachers that they will only work split shifts for HALF of their nine month contract. The other semester will be “blocked.”

• (REDACTED) could offer additional BENEFITS to distract teachers from their schedules. SEE DOCUMENT 2: SOME POSSIBLE BENEFITS TO ATTRACT AND KEEP TEACHERS.

AGAIN, LET ME EMPHASIZE: THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM (REDACTED) HAS AT THE MOMENT. ALL OTHER PROBLEMS ARE EITHER CAUSED BY BAD SCHEDULES OR MADE MUCH WORSE BY BAD SCHEDULES. LET’S DO SOMETHING!!!

* * *

But it never happened, of course. Teachers were in and out of there like a revolving door; administration didn't particularly like each other, either, so girls from administration were in and out frequently also.

Something like four teachers walked out without saying goodbye at the end of 2007; the world economy collapsed at about the same time, so they told me that it was fine by them that so many teachers had left, because they had fewer students.

"In fact, we would have had to let some people go," said the Manager.

"Good use of the 3rd conditional," I muttered, and went out and got drunk.

Now It Can Be Told!

2011-04-18T12:34:00.001+03:00

As loyal readers know, I was actually the Director of Studies at the school I worked at in Vodkaberg, Russia, between 2007 and the beginning of 2009.

I worked for a large chain; strangely I'm still hesitant to say the name of it, even though it's fairly easy to figure out which one it was, and it all ended badly enough that I shouldn't give a shit.

Becoming a DOS or ADOS in Moscow was no complicated feat; all you needed to do was stay there for a second year, usually. Very few people did that.

They took me up to Moscow for training; three days of general advice and practice observing teachers. The girl I was doing training with -- a heavy, whiny-voiced American -- was only in her second year of teaching, and she was being made ADOS at the suburban branch she worked at.

My school, down in the provinces, was growing fast at that time, and went for three or four teacher to about a dozen at that point. I was the first DOS -- I got a raise of about $100 a month and my hours were reduced a little.

This week I'm going to discuss some DOS secrets, and reveal some DOS documents.

Was just cleaning out some old USB memory cards and found this. My first tasks as DOS were to make a system of observation, make course schedules and plans, etc, and after I did those thing I offered them this little document:

SOME POSSIBLE BENEFITS TO ATTRACT / KEEP TEACHERS

(REDACTED) Moscow’s business model has always been based on the following assumptions:

• Russian students would accept low quality of teaching as long as it was from a foreigner.
• There would always be a stream of young enthusiastic Americans and Brits who wanted to teach English in Russia for the experience, rather than for the money or benefits.

These things are no longer true!
• Russian students are demanding high quality tuition from foreign teachers, and are no longer impressed by the novelty of meeting a foreigner.

• Young Americans and Brits are scared away from teaching by stories on the Internet about the bad conditions for teachers at Language Schools, as well as by strict new laws about repayment of student loans in their home countries.

• The political climate between Russia, Europe and America is becoming worse; incidents of hostility against English speakers is on the rise in Russia, as several of our teachers can testify.

• If an American or Brit wants to work in Russia, there are a lot more profitable positions than as teachers – average salary of an engineer for Alcoa or Petrofac is a good 10 times what a teacher makes!

To attract and keep qualified, enthusiastic teachers, I recommend that (REDACTED) consider instituting any or all of the following benefits:

• higher salaries / more holidays / fewer hours. Cost of living in Russia is at least twice what it was 5 years ago; the salary (REDACTED) pays has not increased to keep up with the cost of living.

• washing machines in all flats, or a laundry service at (REDACTED). (REDACTED) could install a washing machine in the building, or have one member of staff take teacher’s laundry to a service, and pick it up and return it to the school.

• free house cleaners visiting flats once / twice a month. This would not be too expensive for (REDACTED)and would also have the advantage of smoothing relations with landlords as well as making sure teachers are not drinking too much, unable to take care of themselves, etc.

• free cable TV / cable internet hookup in apartments. Teachers would have to pay monthly fees, but free hookup would provide a lot of distraction for homesick teachers.

• free lunches / dinners for teachers – Many young teachers can’t cook and live off of Pelmeeni – hiring someone to prepare a quick, cheap (and good!) meal in the (REDACTED) kitchen might be a cheap way to improve teacher morale (and health!) If not free, then for a small fee.

• discount cards for Pizza Sicily / Beer Loga etc. These could be obtained easily enough by arrangement with these restaurants, which our teachers eat / drink at often. Could we make an arrangement for cheap meals at lunch time for everybody?

• Free group health club membership at Planeta Fitness or another sports club. A nice bonus, and it would give teachers a place to bathe when hot water cuts out in the summer.

• Free Russian lessons. Survival Russian for new teachers or ALL teachers seems a very easy, affordable benefit with concrete results for everyone, the teacher and the school. A Russian teacher could be hired to give group Russian lessons.)

• Profit sharing arrangement. Very motivating indeed! Teachers could be given a bonus for every student that signs up for a new course, that passes a test, etc.

• Student - Guided tours of (REDACTED), the Volga, Krasna Glinka, etc. Unrealistic now, probably, but when there are an increasing number of teachers, you might find that there are students who would be happy to volunteer to take teachers on trips for an opportunity to practice their English.

• TVs and DVD players for teachers – these are not too expensive now, and would go a long way for making up for the poor quality furniture in most of our flats. Alternately, the school could offer to pay half the price of the cost of these things, and keep them when the teacher leaves for use around the school / resale.

• Library of books and DVDs for teachers’ use – We have plenty of books at (REDACTED) (and I have hundreds of DVDs at home) we just need a more convenient location for them.

• Free membership on volgagirls.com or some other internet dating site for older male teachers who express interest in it! Again, a little effort on our part would probably provide a lot of happiness for them.

* * *

The first response to this was along the lines of: "You have some interesting ideas, we will discuss them sometime soon."

After Christmas the next year, when nothing had changed at all, I submitted it again.

And was told that determining salary and benefits were not a part of my job description, and not to be concerned with such things.

The only thing they changed was the washing machines; I believe in the end, every school flat had a washing machine. That was probably just because they were tired of teachers clothes smelling bad, though. We started a conveniently located library, but I discovered that very few people care to read, anymore. . .

I should say I was wrong about Americans and British people being scared off of English teaching; wishful thinking on my part. No matter how hard I try, there seems to be a never-ending stream of young morons willing to take worse and worse conditions and crappier and crappier salaries.

Epic Fail

2011-04-06T19:29:00.001+03:00

So it's kind of up in the air, as to how easy it is to lose a job here, as a government employee in the Kingdom; people rarely get fired in the middle of the school year, but the administration often, and capriciously, fail to renew people's contracts.

My office mate suffered that fate; he'd told me a few times that he felt it was a job we could do until we dropped, because they needed teachers that badly. He routinely left a couple days early for his holidays, as well as letting his classes out early quite often; we could assume that's the reason his contract wasn't renewed, but it would be speculation, since they weren't obliged to offer him any reason why.

As usual, he found about this suddenly, a month before the summer holiday, and had to hurriedly sell his car and get things in order to leave. (Making a pretty decent salary, as we do, this wasn't nearly the disaster that it could have been, but still, inconvenient for him.)

A few months ago another teacher got pie-eyed drunk on sidiki -- which is basically rubbing alcohol -- and punched another teacher in the face, but despite some vague threats of "an inquiry" nothing much, it seems, will happen to him; this is largely, I feel, because the people in charge here simply don't want to admit to THEIR bosses that such things go on around here.

Now, to the meat of the story:

There are three stories about guys who got fired right in the middle of their contracts.

One guy was making little secret of the parade of young men (boys?) that he was running in and out of his apartment at all hours of the day and night, and finally the neighbors kicked up a fuss and he was quietly let go.

Another guy was arrested trying to smuggle duty-free alcohol back in from Bahrain; he was arrested, but laughed it off due to his un-named "connections" and despite losing his job here, was observed working in a nearby city a few months later.

And this story, which I love:

One notably loony teacher decided to kick up a fuss about the slovenly attire of many of the teachers; he went to the head of the department to complain about one teacher who habitually wore sandals.

He was told, undiplomatically, to stop complaining and mind his own business.

He went into his class, steaming with anger, and monomoniacally ranted to his class about it for a while.

"A job requires proper clothes!" he finally said. "What if I were just to come into class in my underwear every day?"

And then, of course, he stripped down to his underwear.

Ah, there was a time -- it would simply have been another unverified story of a teacher's lunacy.

But now -- all the students began making videos with their phones, and within a couple hours, it was all over YouTube.

I don't know if it's still on YouTube or not; I think not, and searches for "teachers undressing in class" mostly yield . . . I'm not sure what that stuff is. Porno films without the sex scenes?

Anyway, wrong gender, right idea, but fun nevertheless, here's a good one to sign off with:

In Search of: The First TEFL Blogger

2011-03-31T13:17:00.000+03:00

Okay, okay, I've been credited as, and even have taken credit for being, the first TEFL blogger.

I can't continue this masquerade any longer.

So of course, there weren't really any blogs, until about 2004, and if you wanted to write something about your experiences you basically had two choices: you could post some stuff on somebody's message boards, or you could make your own dedicated website.

(I used the wonderfully crude free one at Angelfire to start my own website about English teaching, back at the beginning of 2003.)

Now, as I mentioned in another entry, I know Harry Hutton had posted some stuff about English teaching in the Gaza Strip on a dedicated website he had as early as 2000 -- but then, like most of us, he switched to a blog in 2004, and I don't think that original website exists now.

As is also well-known, Simon Barnes' I HATE ESL website existed as early as 2001, but came and went many times, and changed into ENGLISH DROID. (Recently resurrected here.) In a sense it was not a "blog" however, as he wrote satirical article involving fictitious characters, rather than stuff about his real experiences.

Now, there was another guy who posted stuff about his experiences as a teacher in Japan -- the original site went under the name "I am Japanese School Teacher" and "Gaijin Smash." it's hard to follow the web-train now, because he lost his original domain name after getting involved with Tucker Max's ill-fated Rudius Media blog network.

(That might make him the most widely-read English teacher blogger, not that he made a dime out of the deal. I can go ahead and admit that he beat me out in applying for a position there -- thank you once again, Cruel Providence!)

He, I think, started posting stories as early as 2003 -- definitely in 2004. I think most of his fans were not English teachers, as I never saw him mentioned much, but rather fans of anime and Japanese culture and all that.

He's married to a Japanese woman, has a baby, and maintains a Wordpress blog called GAIJIN CHRONICLES at http://gaijinchronicles.com and, after the recent ongoing tragedies in Japan, deserves a visit and probably a donation.

But, as for English Teacher Zero:

Dating back to 2000 -- an English teacher in Thailand has maintained a website that discussed dating Thai women, advice about nightlife and other aspects of life in Thailand, and a rather extensive amount of information about teaching in Thailand. (Including, at one time, reviews of specific schools, which were so influential at that time that a former employer of mine actually contacted him for ways he could improve the school, or at least the review of the school.)

It has changed considerably over the years, and now seems to be heavily focused on advertising and Thai holidays in general. His readership, it seems, was mostly fans of Thailand and its particular charms, rather than English teachers, although he was often mentioned (and castigated) on ESLCafe back in the day.

He did however, frequently post "columns" which were very much in the spirt of blog posts, and had MAINTAINED THAT WEBSITE CONTINUOUSLY since 2001.

So, English Teacher Zero, the first English Teacher blog was:

STICKMAN'S GUIDE TO BANGKOK.

www.stickmanbangkok.com

Casualties

2011-03-24T00:19:00.000+03:00

The first confirmed American death in the earthquake in Japan was an American English teacher working for the JET Program.

She is described in the article as "passionately dedicated to her students and fascinated by Japanese culture since childhood."

Strangely, I don't think I know a single English teacher who has died in the line of duty. (Maybe that's not the right term, but you know what I mean.)

One English teacher I know was in Phuket during the tsunami there in 2005; he wrote a lengthy blog post about it but I can't find it online anymore, in a quick search. Fortunately he had to wake up early to get an insulin shot, and noticed what was happening, and managed to get himself and his friends up onto the roof.

It was Christmas morning at 6.00am, and I'm absolutely sure that had I been there, I would have been so drunk I would have drowned like a rat.

There's a story in Russia about an early English teacher -- around 2000 -- who died after falling into an open manhole while drunk. I heard different versions of the story -- somebody who claimed to have known him said that he had slid down a hill on ice and fallen into the foundation of a building site, where he got stuck and froze to death.

Given the number of open manholes, neither story is hard to imagine. I partially fell in one myself one night -- only my leg went in, fortunately not at an angle to snap in half. I emerged unscathed from that one.

Man, black eyes and fat lips? I've seen plenty of those, all over the world. Mostly the result of drunken stupidity, but occasionally legitimate street muggings.

I got my lights completely punched out not just once, but twice in a ROW one memorable evening at a crappy nightclub in Russia back in 2008. Strangely not even so much as a lasting headache later -- but two big ugly black eyes for a week.

That was not nearly as painful as the events of my first bar fight, in which my foot was stomped on and swelled up like a pumpkin. I refused to try to take care of it properly, and limped for months.

Then, of course, there was the time the dog bit me, in 2004. At a house party, I let the family dog out, and went out to try to get it back . . . and mistook a street dog for the family dog. This was the result:

This resulted in series of rabies injections, and an unpleasant week of sobriety. The scar has faded, but girls reading my palm occasionally mention it.

There was a particularly scary story about one guy: one of my colleagues found this guy, a teacher from Australia, wandering in a park near his house, covered with blood and delirious. He'd apparently been smashed in the head with something hard enough to crack his skull. He had no memory of it, so nobody knows if it was a mugging or a disagreement.

Scarier than that -- he hadn't signed a contract yet, so the school he worked for refused to pay his medical bills, and his cracked skull prevented him from flying home for medical treatment.

Other than that, we're like the Mafia -- we mostly hurt each other.

One colleague drunkenly tumbled down some stone steps and ended up in the hospital for a week, with a bad concussion. Crazy Bob sprained his wrist one time drunkenly punching me in the back, and ended up with two cracked ribs after some drunken horseplay with another colleague.

Having fun is hard work, you know.

A Cartoon About Needs Analysis

2011-03-20T22:54:00.001+03:00

Now here's a strange thing -- I posted this in 2004, but I seem to remember having this conversation with Crazy Bob, and Crazy Bob didn't arrive until 2005.

But anyway, the basic idea is a conversation that has been had many times. . .

The point where jargon meets drunken banter is always a cute one.

35 TEFL Career Milestones

2011-03-17T10:23:00.000+03:00

(Article from 2005. Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.)

The following is a list of typical career milestones for a TEFL teacher. How many have you achieved? How many will you achieve? Just tick them off, and see if you can consider yourself a full-fledged master of the game, or just another also-ran. (Note: these are in a likely, but not inevitable, chronological order)

* Your first job

* First time you make a kid cry in a children's class

* First time you are late for class

* First time you vow you won't end up like the losers you work with

* First time going to class without any preparation at all

* First temper tantrum with management over late paychecks or scheduling

* First 'relationship' with a student

* First time student breaks your heart

* First time you return to your home country and experience culture shock

* First angry posting about your employers on the Internet

* Second job

* First time going to class drunk

* First time going to class without any sleep

* First time going to class drunk and without any sleep

* Second relationship with student

* Second time student breaks your heart

* First time you vow never to date a student again

* Second time going to class drunk

* First time you vow never to go to class drunk again

* Third relationship with student

* Second vow never to date a student

* Third time going to class drunk

* Third job

* First time you vow to go home and straighten your life out

* Fourth job

* Second time you vow to go home and straighten your life out

* First time you realize you aren't qualified for or suitable to any other job

* Turning 30 abroad

* Fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth job

* First marriage to foreigner

* First child by foreigner

* First divorce

* First realization some of the younger people you work with think you're a sad old drunk bastard

* Second marriage

* Turning 40 abroad and peaceful zen-like acceptance of your lot in life

Score:

1 - 8 milestones achieved -- you're pretty much still a rookie

9-15 milestones achieved -- consider yourself a member of the gang

15 -25 milestones achieved -- you're a total pro, baby

25 - 30 milestones achieved --- man. You poor bastard.

How I Spent The Day of Rage

2011-03-11T14:23:00.000+03:00

Message on the US Consulate website:

Participants on a few social media networks have called for a “Day of Rage” to take
place across the Kingdom on March 11. The U.S. Embassy cannot verify these calls,
nor do we have information about exact times and locations of possible demonstrations.
However, we take this opportunity to remind U.S. citizens to be alert to their
surroundings, to avoid any large gatherings, and to be mindful that spontaneous
demonstrations can occur anywhere. Even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can
become confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. If caught unexpectedly
near a demonstration, U.S. citizens should obey instructions from the police and leave the area as quickly as possible.

12.45am -- A colleague knocks on my door, reeking of home-brew and warns me that he had just been walking around and seen a lot of army trucks going by, and that a student had called him warning that "something big" would be happening on the next day.

We live in a peaceful suburban beach-side area; however, the center of discontent is only a few hours drive from here.

We make an evacuation plan in case the protests get ugly. We don't have our passports -- all employees' passports are held in place of the official residence and work permit they give us. We decide we'll drive down to an American compound an hour from here and try to get in there, should a lot of protesters end up dead.

1.00am -- The Internet reports that police have fired into a crowd of protesters. It is soon clarified that 3 people were injured, but the police were firing into the air over the heads of protesters.

1.10am -- I spend some time registering myself with the nearest consulate on the Internet.

1:35am -- I don't keep a "bug-out bag" per se -- but I have bags of things which can easily be assembled into one for speedy exit in case of emergency.

Bag #1 -- Practical things -- flashlight, rain slicker, multi-tool, duct tape. And some rope, I guess in case I decide to do some light bondage with some girl I meet at the airport.

Bag # 2 -- Medical things -- ace bandages, aspirin, antihistamines, disinfectant gel, and a couple of leftover tablets of Cialis from my last holiday. Can use that with the rope in case I meet a girl at the airport.

Bag #3 -- Survival rations -- 3 cans of tuna, 2 cans of sardines, a box of Ritz crackers, several liters of bottled water.

I examine these things and toss them together into one bag along with some tough-looking clothes -- black t-shirts, wife-beaters, wool socks, and cargo pants.

Considering the survival rations, I add a bag of mixed raisins and cashews. I saw footage of people trapped for several days at the airport in Cairo; I'll at least be able to eat. Because I assume the Sbarro's and the Krispy Kreme there will run out of food quickly.

Maybe I should add some laxatives to the medical kit, however.

I keep going to the window, thinking I hear people thumping around.

1:45am Can't sleep, so I watch another episode of RESCUE ME.

My God, Dennis Leary loses ANOTHER relative? What are the odds of that, even if they are cops and firemen.

2:30am -- Finally get in bed and fall quickly asleep.

10.45am -- Wake up and check the internet. Devastating earthquake in Japan, huge tsunami. I watch videos of waves covered with debris and flaming wreckage innundating farmland. Trying to think of the last time I checked the Internet and there WASN'T some huge disaster or mass murder.

What could you do to survive that, even if you were prepared? You'd have a little time to kiss your ass goodbye, that'd be about it.

11.15am -- Skype and Facebook filled with people wondering about my safety and the situation here. I go outside and the college is as deserted as it usually is on a day off. The prayer call starts. If anything happens it'll be after the prayer.

12.10pm -- I hear horns honking and jump up and carefully look outside, but it's just somebody's car alarm going off. The guy turns the alarm off and drives away. I walk outside; it's cool and raining.

A couple of students in casual Western clothes pass by and say "Hello teacher."

12.20pm -- My egg sandwiches are sublime as usual and I sit down to watch another episode of RESCUE ME. Dennis Leary trapped in another burning buildings? Well, I guess he is a fireman. . .

1.30pm -- I have a few household weapons -- I bought a pair of nunchucks for $10 in the city -- more for playing with than for any practical usage as a weapon -- and I have a light 16-inch long piece of pipe with duct tape wrapped around the handle.

I decide to go over to the supermarket; I put the piece of pipe in my rucksack, having no doubt that I can easily beat off any angry mobs I might encounter.

1.35pm -- I see a group of people outside the Recreation Center and wonder if it's an angry mob; it's just a bunch of guys playing soccer, however.

1.40pm -- On the 10 minute bike ride to the supermarket, I inhale my chewing gum and almost choke on it; I stop at the gas station and get a lemon-flavored Holsten non-alcholic malt beverage to wash it down. I cough and finally get it all swallowed.

That would certainly have been an ignominious way to die on the Day of Rage.

1.50 -- As usual there's a brisk after-prayer crowd at the supermarket but everything seems as usual.

I walk by the news stand: the headline of the English-language daily reads, "BUSINESS AS USUAL BUT EXPATS WORRY."

The subheads read -- "Foreign Journalists Chase Non-Existent Stories" and "Panicked SMS and email rumours fly"

2.00pm -- I see a couple of colleagues and most of them think that nothing much will happen. I'm sure people in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya said much the same, however.

2.45pm -- Watching tsunami videos on the Internet and listening to Howard Stern. Still no news of any protests, much less any violence.

3.17pm -- Another prayer call. Still no news.

I find the following:

The Gulf Civil Society Forum, a liberal pan-Gulf group, expected a low turnout because the call came from London-based Saudi dissidents who do not have a large following in the kingdom.

London-based dissidents, ha, issuing calls to protest from their hotel suites at the Ritz-Carlton.

and this:

Other Facebook youth activists have called for nationwide protests on March 20.

Shit, so there will be two Days of Rage this month? I'll note that down on my desk calendar.

3.32pm -- I'm looking at jobs on TEFL.com and considering where I'd go if I left here. . .

3.42pm -- Finally a new news story. AP reports that the Kingdom "launched a massive security operation Friday in a menacing show of force to deter protesters from a planned a "Day of Rage" to press for democratic reform in the kingdom.

Illegal demonstrations were supposed to start after Muslim Friday prayers at noon but as the mosques emptied there were no signs of rallies, with security men manning checkpoints in key locations across several cities."

Does that mean the Day of Rage is over, or didn't begin?

Maybe I'll go to the beach and go swimming. . .

Another Cartoon About A Bad Moment In Class

2011-03-09T01:30:00.000+03:00

This happened in Russia in 2002 or 2003.

Several people have asked if he really had that strange little smile on his face.

Answer: da.

Are You Suited To English Teaching Abroad?

2011-03-04T12:16:00.002+03:00

(Repeat from old website, 2004. Damn, am I that old?)

Indeed, the first question to ask yourself is not, "Which country would I enjoy most" or "Which certificate course would allow me maximum job prospects" but "Am I suited to being an EFL teacher?"

Here is an aptitude test to judge your potential suitability.

Please answer yes, no or sometimes.

1) Are you outgoing and enthusiastic?

2) Do you enjoy being the center of attention?

3) Do you like meeting people. . . and then saying goodbye to them forever soon after?

4) Do you enjoy being stared at?

5) Are the ideas of stability, financial reward and long-term relationships repugnant to you?

6) Do you know what "repugnant" means?

7) Do you enjoy washing your clothes in the bathtub?

8) Does the idea of going out with women or men who like you only because of your passport's color appeal to you?

9) Do you like strange foods cooked in less than sanitary conditions?

10) Are you fond of trying to defend American and British military policies?

11) Do you thrive on loneliness and uncertainty?

12) Do you like cutting up paper into small pieces?

13) Do you enjoy making yourself vulnerable to the whims of rich foreigners?

14) Is the smell of whiteboard markers much like a rare and sensual perfume to you?

15) Is the thought of owning more than one bag of possessions repellant to you?

16) Do you enjoy trying to converse with people who you have nothing at all in common with?

17) Could you easily dispense with such luxuries as a pension or Social Security?

18) Do you drink heavily?

19) Is hot water a luxury you can easily do without?

20) Does the idea of waking up early on a Saturday to try to entertain a room full of hostile nine-year-olds appeal to you?

21) Do you give a crap about the difference between the present perfect and the present perfect continuous?

22) Does the idea of paying $1500 to get a certificate to learn how to do something that you usually can't save money at sound perfectly logical to you?

KEY: For questions 1 through 21, give yourself:

2 points for each "yes" answer

1 point for each "sometimes" answer

0 points for each "no" answer

For question 22, give yourself:

1000 points for a "yes" answer

0 points for a "maybe" or "no" answer

0 - 20 points == It would seem that your are far too sane to enjoy the EFL lifestyle. I'm sure that your local Kinko's Copy Shop or Starbucks would be happy to have you, however.

21 - 44 points == You show some signs of being able to adapt well to the EFL lifestyle. If you were to say, increase your daily alcohol intake and perhaps cut yourself off from your friends and family for a while, you might begin to fit the profile.

1000 or more points == Congratulations pal. You're a natural.

English For Special Needs (Or: Do I STUTTER?)

2011-03-01T18:37:00.000+03:00

So I actually saw THE KING'S SPEECH and liked it pretty well, although of course British films without gangsters or zombies in them usually bore me to death.

Coincidentally, I'm teaching classes on Communication now, about half of which involves teaching the students to do short presentations, and I've got a kind-heated stutterer in my class.

Now apparently he's mostly conquered his stutter in Arabic; but when he tries to speak in English it comes roaring back. I have actually seen this before, with a Russian guy I taught in New York, and once (God help us all) in a Spanish class I took in college.

So with the help of THE KING'S SPEECH I advised the kid about breathing, taking pauses and "bouncing" onto difficult consonant sounds, and with that, along with my logical step-by-step approach to teaching them to do presentations, he's pretty happy with his progress.

(A lot of the teachers apparently just say, "Okay tomorrow you do a five-minute presentation on whatever", without much in the way of preliminaries. Sadistic, that.)

I've never seen any professional literature on the subject of second-language teaching for people with special needs -- uh, not that I've actually looked for it -- but this is definitely a field for the future. Perhaps I'll be a pioneer in it.

(Never mind the people who need psychologists more than English teachers -- and there were plenty of those. Let's stick with talking about specific learning disorders here.)

More than once I've had strong suspicions that I've been teaching people with dyslexia or some other kind of "special learning need" or whatever -- but there have been some more profound and obvious challenges.

There was an individual female student trying to learn English who had cerebral palsy, or something similar, when I worked in Russia. Never had to teach her and of course I was aghast that they would even ask anybody to try; that's WAY out of our pay-grade.

I had a woman in one class in Russia who clearly had Asperger's or some other kind of autism spectrum disorder, and had a lot of trouble communicating naturally -- again, whatever progress she'd made in her native language was lost when trying to speak in English.

Teaching children is hard enough, but when I worked teaching 2-4 year olds at a day-care in Phuket, to be brutally frank, some of the children seemed so profoundly "special need"-ed that 100 years ago they probably would have been suffocated at birth or chained up in the basement.

They just toss them in with the others, but what are they going to do, turn down their entrance money? Not likely. Language Fuck School back in Russia would take money from Martian or deaf-mutes alike and tell them they had trained specialists available. Then toss them in a room with some poor back-packer kid and hope for the best.

So, just another day in the thankless, difficult life of an English teacher. . .

Part of The Problem: or Yankee Go Home

2011-02-25T00:41:00.000+03:00

I grew up in the Dirty South, back in the 70's and 80's, so unsurprisingly I was exposed to quite a bit of racism.

One time I was driving around with a friend of mine, and he was scathingly castigating all the black people sitting on the porches of their cheap houses, drinking beer out of 40 oz bottles.

You know all the epithets; I don't need to repeat them here.

Then, we drove to his cheap apartment, where we proceeded to sit on the porch and get drunk on 40 oz bottles of beer, with various strippers and unemployed would-be musicians we knew.

One of the strangest (and seemingly fastest-growing) breed of English teachers are these kind of odd tea-bagger/survivalist/conspiracy theorist/ tax protester types.

Convinced that some kind of vast political conspiracy to enslave the people is about to happen in England and America, these geniuses move to oases of individual freedom. . . like Russia, China, and the Middle East.

I hope just writing that down as a sentence shows how fucking stupid that is.

I'm willing to put up with bitching about this or that President, this or that theory about FEMA internment camps or chemtrails or fluoridated water or whatever. You can't really argue with such people about such things.

But one thing I REALLY hate is the expats in other country who relentless bitch about how their home country has been ruined by immigration.

I'm not going to go into all the arguments "fer and agin" immigration -- leave that to the Huffington Post and whoever.

I'm just going to point out that protesting immigration into your country, BY (or while) MOVING TO ANOTHER COUNTRY TO WORK, is the most hypocritical fucking thing you could possibly do.

It's like protesting violent crime by shooting people randomly in the street, or protesting world hunger by going on a hunger strike.

YOU HAVE BECOME THE PROBLEM, not the solution. You have moved to another country, where you are very likely not completely legally employed or paying taxes, and TAKEN A JOB AWAY FROM A LOCAL, in a situation where their unemployment rate is most likely much higher than back in America and England. You have taken an apartment from a local, and possibly a woman, as well, though of course we know HER motivation.

(And if you think there aren't locals who can teach English as well or better than you -- you are again, completely fucking wrong.)

While organized gangs of criminal expat English teachers are as of yet unheard of, I could give you a lengthy list of the crimes I have seen them commit, mostly but not limited to drug use and dealing, vandalism and public drunkenness. Cases of sexual assault are well documented. (Here is but one.)

"Oh yeah but that's not me!" Yeah, well neither is it most of the immigrants you're bitching about, dickweed.

So, please, goofballs -- go do what you always claim the immigrants should do -- go home and work to fix the problems in your own country. Become a police officer, or a social worker, or -- and here's a brilliant idea -- teach English to immigrants back in your home country to help them better assimilate and get decent legal work.

Hell, go check yourself into a FEMA internment camp. It's about as logical as bitching about immigrants while living abroad.

Rock On

2011-02-23T22:20:00.000+03:00

I'd say, "It can't happen here!" but the poor teachers in Egypt and Libya were probably saying the same thing, until it happened. Nothing bad ever happens -- until something bad happens, as Grandma X used to say.

Nonetheless, things seems to be under control here. The King made Saturday a public holiday, as well as making plans to give out $35 billion in public aid. They've already started construction on a new,bigger English Language Center behind the existing ELC building.

Yet minor disruptions persist in my otherwise tranquil sunny existence --

I was riding my bike last weekend down a quiet residential street and a little kid started running after me throwing rocks. A little kid -- maybe 6 or 7. Given the poor aim and the small size of the rocks, I just ignored him.

But he kept it up, running after me shouting for nearly the entire block.

Not particularly angry or anything, I nonetheless decided to teach him a lesson in diplomatic relations, and got off my bike and ran screaming back up the street after him. Bellowing like a madman, I sprinted after him and his friends, who ran as fast as their little legs would carry them towards the nearest mosque.

Satisfied, I got back on my bicycle.

They came out again, throwing more rocks -- again, at age 6 or 7, you probably can't throw a rock big enough to hurt me, and my hat and wraparound Oakleys protected my head and eyes -- so I got off the bike again and ran screaming straight at them. Again they scurried away.

I learned these strategies dealing with stray dogs in Russia.

Strategically, this was not a good idea at all, I admit. Their brothers or fathers could be nearby and decide to teach ME a lesson in diplomatic relations.

But in fact a guy in a nearby shop came out, laughing a bit at the spectacle, which he seemed to understand was a joke.

To Travel Hopelessly

2011-02-21T21:01:00.000+03:00

Enormous natural and man-made disasters, huge country-rending demonstrations and food riots, terrorism and war, general economic malaise, and airline service which grows ever more humiliating, invasive, uncomfortable and inefficient.

It's all falling to pieces faster than Patsy Cline ever did.

Can't imagine why anyone would travel at all, unless they lived in Saudi Arabia and had to go abroad to see a woman.

Very contrary to my expectations, The Girlfriend has at this point proved herself loyal and long-suffering -- a year and a half now. She devotedly Skypes me and (perhaps less mysteriously) goes on week-long holidays with me every 8 or 9 weeks. (Of course there was the month-long shackup during the summer.)

So last week we met in Sharjah in the Emirates. (It's the coast near Dubai.)

It was pleasant, especially insofar as there were no enormous natural or man-made disasters, huge country-rending demonstrations and food riots, nor terrorism and war.

(And the economic malaise just meant, for us, that stuff wasn't too expensive.)

The only problem was the other Russian tourists at the resort -- many of them re-routed from Egypt due to the massive country-rending demonstrations there.

The Russians are the new Ugly Americans, as the Americans are all too scared and broke to travel now. Now it's the Russian tourists who scream at the waiters and demand changes in the food offerings, all sunburned and wearing inappropriately small swimsuits and annoyingly loud colors, smoking in the non-smoking sections and letting their bratty children run around unatended.

"You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long." -- Marcus Aurelius

You Say You Want a Revolution, Well, You Know. . .

2011-02-02T12:01:00.000+03:00

Massive protests in Tunisia, leading to massive protests in Egypt, leading to changes in government and other Gulf countries scrambling to assauge their citizens by slashing taxes, subsidizing food prices, and even, in the case of Kuwait, giving cash bribes of $5000 or so to all citizens.

And here? Well, it's hard to get any impression of unrest, because I live in a very quiet suburb that kind of doubles as a sometimes would-be beach resort.

In fact, that's kind of why I'm here. The place I work is an enormous government subsidized project to provide education and vocational training to the many many young men who might otherwise turn to drugs and extremism.

English Teacher X -- your first line of defense.

Anyway, as I mentioned, there are still little kids who throw rocks at us when we bike through the working-class neighborhood (mostly cops and soldiers) near the supermarket.

I was at the supermarket last week, and chained it to the railing outside, as always, and saw some shady-looking kids, eight or nine years old, stink-eying me as they walked outside.

I kept my eye on them as I walked in and they walked out - they lingered by my bicycle. I'd been warned by colleagues that bikes tended to get vandalized outside this supermarket, so I went back to shoo them away.

Then I saw that they were waiting for a friend -- who was in a wheelchair. The kid had practically nothing below his waist.

I figured they probably had other concerns than vandalizing my bike, and went into the supermarket.

When I came out of the supermarket about twenty minutes later, my bicycle seat was gone.

I darted around the corner and scanned the area. How far could a kid in a wheelchair get? It astounded me.

I wondered if they were going to use if for something, or just dump it somewhere. I checked the nearby garbage cans and didn't find anything.

I unlocked the bike and walked it home.

A few days later I got a new bicycle seat and went to the supermarket on an evening which was, uncharacteristically for here, dark and rainy.

Locking the bike up, I considered that it was unlikely they could attack again so soon, particularly on a rainy night -- but I went ahead and ran the cable of the bike lock through the metal brackets of the new bicycle seat.

When I came out of the supermarket twenty minutes later, the bicycle seat was on the ground, dangling from the cable. No children, in wheelchairs or otherwise, were in sight.

(As far as disgusting stories with alcohol and whores here in the Middle East -- there are a few, but I'm not at liberty to divulge them at the moment.)

Disgusting Bar-Room Conversation Part 4

2011-01-22T07:40:00.002+03:00

This is, I suppose, as bad as it gets. . .

The disgusting Australian bastard in question was one of a type that in the 90's infested Thailand and the Phillipines in large numbers -- burly, bald, middle-aged, leering, arms covered with blurred tattoos, living in Southeast Asia on some type of pension or dodgy disability payment, married to a small leathery-skinned woman.

He was one of a number of guys there who, having no particular need of the money, worked mainly to get away from their wives for a few hours.

In short, all the worst stereotypes you can think of when you think of foreigners in Southeast ASia.

Whatever happened to him, I fortunately have no idea.

Disgusting Bar-Room Conversations, Part 3

2011-01-18T18:28:00.001+03:00

Funnily enough, this was a conversation we had with a Russian girl, not a Frumpy English Teacher type.

Naturally this conversation lead into the subject of lifetime total number of sex-partners; I was 32 or so at the time and the number, including blowjobs and various other everything-but sex acts, couldn't possibly have been higher than 50, but I said, "Well, let's see -- I've been having sex since I was 16 -- 3 or 4 different girls on average per year, I don't know, 60 or 70."

The two Russian chicks-- die-hard English groupies, both of whom were only 19 -- conversed animatedly in Russian for a second, and then began laughing. "Probably about 60 for her," said the blonde one. "She's probably has more than 100," said the brunette one.

We expressed skepticism. They offered some graphic details. They had been going to nighclubs every weeekend since they were 15, where they almost always had sex with somebody afterwards, and spent at least 2 to 4 weeks abroad during the summer, in Turkey or Greece, where they had sex with considerable numbers more.

I wonder which number I had been. . .

Let me emphasize -- this was back in 2002, and from what I hear that kind of 90's sexual revolution stuff is over in Russia -- that sort of R and B music video "I'm way too cool to fuck" attitude is in now.

Anyway, both of them were married by the time they were 22 anyway, so what's the big deal.

Disgusting Bar-Room Conversations, Part 2

2011-01-16T16:14:00.001+03:00

I hope you can read the punchline okay, as well as noticing the changes in time at the top; obviously the point here is to track the increasing vulgarity of an evening's conversation.

It's a compendium of such conversations obviously, but the recurring joke about peeing in someone's butt, and the possibility of doing so, was from Russia around 2003 - 2004, thanks to English Teacher R.

As a sidenote, we were at that time so cut off from the internet, or at least fast internet, that none of us had heard of Max Hardcore, who has committed that, and many other, vile acts to video.

While we prided ourselves on our worldliness as well as our vulgarity, we would soon be schooled in such things by 22-year-olds with a lengthy internet history: I'd never even heard of the Donkey Punch until they told me about it in 2005.

Another sidenote: I don't know why, but I always end up drinking at bars and cafes where they never clean the bottles off the tables. This was in both Thailand and Russia. If you need pictoral evidence that I'm not exaggerating, here's a blurry cameraphone picture from 2006 or so.

Disgusting Bar-room Conversation Number 1

2011-01-15T10:58:00.000+03:00

This was the first cartoon I drew about disgusting bar-room conversations, but it certainly wasn't the first disgusting bar-room conversation I had. (In fact one of the first ones was the Gonorrhea of the Eyes cartoon in this entry.)

This was in Prague in 2000; the primary womanizer in that case, last I heard, is now happily married there to a Czech girl. (Although last I heard means about 5 years ago.)

I suppose bar-room conversations of university students, or of young men who are police officers, firefighters, stockbrokers or such, are just as joyfully misogynistic, perverted and profane. . . I wouldn't really know, other than from films like COMPANY OF MEN and shows like RESCUE ME. But English teachers abroad seem to particularly revel in this kind of thing.

Anyway -- free-spirited high-living Byronic heroes, or juvenile scatology-obsessed misogynists? You be the judge.

Current Events; or, Not Even With a Bag Over Her Head

2011-01-07T14:11:00.000+03:00

Click this link to read about

Some horsey-faced middle-aged American woman wrote a blog about all the sex and drugs at the international law firm she was working at in Moscow, and got fired for her troubles.

and what's more -- she banged Russian DUDES? Yeecch! Clearly some self-esteem issues.

The fact that "expats" get drunk and fuck a lot is hardly news to anybody with half a brain in their head. Hemingway and Somerset Maugham were writing about that back in the 20's and 30's. It's not just Moscow -- "expat culture" anywhere, from Dubai to Hong Kong, from Bangkok to Rio, is equally dissipated.

The biggest danger is thinking that your experiences are somehow remarkable. (I plead guilty.)

While I suppose English teachers are expats, per se, I don't think of them when I think of that term; "expat" means engineers and lawyers and all those high-dollar riffraff. There's a second ring that consists of embassy employees and military types who have slightly more restrictions on what they do and where they go; and then there's the outer circle of foreigners working abroad that consists of English teachers, scuba diving instructors, Filipino housemaids, pirates, sex slaves, etc.

The point to notice here -- she was working for a law firm and making more than six figures a year. As an English teacher in Moscow you are very lucky even to make five figures a year. So please -- don't read this and send me a letter about how you want advice about working in Moscow as an English teacher. Go to fucking law school.

The State of X

2011-01-05T19:50:00.000+03:00

Two months without sex.

(Or touching or kissing a woman, etc.)

You could do that, couldn't you? Sure. It's not so difficult.

The semester starts at the end of September -- our first one-week holiday is at the end of November. Our second one-week holiday is at the beginning of February. There's another in the middle of April.

Then we get a 2.5 month holiday beginning in July.

So, two months, maybe ten weeks, without a woman. Except on the other side of a computer screen.

Difficult?

Well.

Most of the time I don't think about it, you know. Sometimes I even forget to masturbate for several days at a time.

Then I masturbate non-stop for a few days, sometimes three or four times a day.

Undoubtedly there are misadventures to get into here -- if only in the capital -- where bootleg hooch and overweight Canadians chicks roam. Or of course in Bahrain or Dubai.

But I avoid them. My job and life are pretty drama free.

Alone in the desert like Obi Wan Kenobi, waiting. . .

God Bless Us Every One: Christmas in Russia 2004

2010-12-23T11:48:00.000+03:00

Merry Retro-X Christmas . . . a tale from the alcohol-soaked days of Russia 2004. Strangely this is the only time I can remember I was late for a class because of alcohol. PLEASE NOTE: This might as well have taken place on another planet, compared to what Russia, Russians and private language schools are like nowadays.

VODKABERG, RUSSIA 2004

December 25th rolled around and the management of my school was showing unprecedented Christmas spirit.

They decided to throw us a Christmas party.

This was unheard of, as I said. In the four years that I had worked there, the extent of celebrating Christmas was a plastic Christmas tree in the hallway with some cheap lights wrapped around it blinking feebly. No gifts, no Christmas bonuses -- nothing like that, of course, but they did at least give us a holiday.

We were allowed to take the 25th off, if we wanted, but that isn't actually Christmas in Russia -- Russian Christmas is on January 7th, and the whole country is pretty much drunk from December 30th until January 8th. So most of us just worked on December 25th and then started our two-week holiday a couple days later.

The extent of this fabulous Christmas extravaganza was nothing much -- each class (and we all, at that time had two classes in the evening -- 4:45 to 7:00 and 7:15 to 9:30) got a box of chocolates, a dozen or so mandarin oranges, and some little canapes or something, some ham and olive and cheese things on toothpicks.

And also, each class got two bottles of champagne.

A lot of our students don't drink, but plenty of them do. Those who didn't drink insured that there was plenty of champagne for those of us who did.

The 4:45 to 7:00 classes were jolly enough -- we had a trivia quiz about Santa Claus and read "The Night Before Christmas" and so on. By 7:15, the teachers were all fairly drunk, and the second class featured a much livelier bunch of students, many of whom were coming from Christmas parties at their universities and offices.

By eight o clock someone had broken out a bottle of vodka. By nine o clock we were forcing the collected group of our students to sing "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Many did this enthusiastically. A few embarrassedly snuck out of the building for more sober climes.

Administration came in around nine to ascertain everyone was having a good time, and then they left the building.

Bad move.

By nine-thirty all the kill-joys had left and approximately twenty students and three teachers were in one of the upstairs rooms dancing with the lights off to Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin and drinking champagne like it was going out of style.

We ran out of alcohol around ten.

I went to the security guard's office and told him I needed something from the office and took the key. I opened the inner office and stole one of the two cases of cheap local champagne that was in there and took it back to the room.

This was greeted with a general cheer.

I spent most of the evening talking and dancing with a student that I had a bit of a crush on.

I should point out that at that point in my teaching career, I avoided hitting on students. Unless they asked me out first. Or unless they were really good-looking.

And this girl qualified as that. Long curly brown hair and huge green eyes, a mischievous smile and a body that seemed nothing but curves. She'd been smiling at me in the hallways so I finally took the opportunity to get acquainted with her.

I drunkenly slobbered over her, trying to be charming, until eleven or so, when she said her ride was here and she had to go. I escorted her out into the snow to the waiting Mercedes, after getting her mobile phone number. Mercedes -- boyfriend, I figured, but what the hell, she obviously liked me.

When I got back to the party, English Teacher R said to me, "You'd hardly believe she's 15, would you?"

I just stared at him, hoping he was joking.

He saw my look and laughed. "I was hitting on her before you got here, and then English Teacher R2 told me. He's her teacher in Level One, I guess he'd know."

"But. . . but. . ."

"Well, the age of consent is like 14 here anyway, I hear."

"But. . . "

I started dancing with another student of mine, who I knew was 22.

By eleven thirty, everybody was quite drunk and the party was moving back and forth between two rooms. A student was out puking in the snow and English Teacher R fell down the steps, cutting his cheek.

The security guard finally told us we had to leave at twelve.

The party was getting restless at that point anyway; some wanted to go home, others wanted to go to a nightclub. As usual there was disagreement over which nightclub to go to.

I knew where I was going however -- the House of Pain.

The House of Pain (as we call it) is a large university-student-oriented nightclub in our humble city of Vodkaberg, noted for being about the cheapest place in town.

Consequently it's also one of the liveliest -- probably one of the most violent, too, but you take the good with the bad.

The nickname comes not only from the potential for getting your head beaten in by drunken young men, but also the cheap quality vodka -- actually just methylated spirit and water -- which leads to crippling hangovers and, in at least one case, skin rashes and lymphatic problems. (The affected teacher was told by the doctor at the clinic that he frequently saw patients poisoned by cheap vodka from this club.)

I went there to meet the Mormons.

Two young Mormon missionaries had been hanging around with us for the last three months. We'd seen them on the street once, me and African Student S, and they'd struck up a conversation. We were wary of being converted, at first, but quickly saw they just wanted to know more about the city.

We soon discovered that their devotion to the missionary cause was marginal at best -- they just wanted to have the experience of living in exotic Russia. They started hanging around with us, at our house parties and nightclubs, and it was easy for them because there was a general curfew for missionaries after 9:00pm, so they didn't have to worry about seeing anybody from the Church.

They started out slow; first playing pool for money. Then one of them would drink a beer or two. Then the other started drinking beer; then they both started drinking vodka and absinthe and chasing ass along with the rest of us. Even took them to some gay bars and that sort of thing.

They were both like 19, compared to my 35 at the time.

"Dear boys," I would say to them paternally, in my best Dr. Smith from LOST IN SPACE imitation. "Dear, dear boys." They called me "Daddio" and "Uncle" which I just loved.

I tended to be their guide to the nightlife because the other teachers in town either had girlfriends or were married.

I was relentlessly single. I can pass for rather younger than I am, I should say, and I'm terribly immature anyway, so we usually had a ball together.

Somebody drove me to the House of Pain to meet them and African Student S.

While I was there I blacked out.

I suppose we drank vodka. We always did. The champagne had hit me hard; not something I drank very often.

The evening must have ended around 7:00am because I have a vague memory of the lights coming on in the night club. Always a bad feeling.

I also have a vague memory of making out with somebody, around that time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a guy because I remember a fairly good sized breast.

I came back to consciousness the next day at around two o clock. I had a class at three, an individual student, a rich man, and I managed to stagger into his office, stinking of alcohol, at three-thirty.

I apologized and said I had over-imbibed at the Christmas party. In a magnificent display of rich guy sarcasm, the rich guy said not to worry about it, and then at the end of the lesson gave me $100.

I nodded and mumbled through the lesson, then went out onto the street. It was snowing but not too cold -- just a bit below freezing. At four-thirty, the sun was already starting to go down. Light grey was changing to dark grey.

I wasn't even hungover yet -- I was still drunk. But my body was racked with all the toxins in the cheap vodka. I bought a bottle of beer and walked up to the school as I drank it, full of a general feeling of dread. I'd forgotten my gloves there, and I felt a need to see what kind of damage we'd caused.

The old security guard -- perhaps that's the wrong word -- he's an old man on a pension, perhaps caretaker is better -- was outside the building, and he laughed when he saw me staggering up.

"Haha! You guys were DRUNK last night!" he said, in Russian.

I nodded dumbly and walked inside, saying I'd forgotten my gloves.

The place was trashed. Spilled champagne covered the floors, which were stickier than a porno video booth on 42nd street. Corks and plastic stoppers and empty champagne bottles were strewn about the classrooms, along with the flayed flesh of orange peels. Obscene pictures had been drawn on all the whiteboards, and someone had vomited all over the side of the men's toilet.

I was goggle-eyed as I approached the caretaker.

"Can I help you clean up?" I asked humbly, in Russian.

He just laughed and patted me on the back. "Merry Christmas," he said in English.

I erased the obscene pictures on the whiteboard before I left.

I went out and bought another beer and walked over to English Teacher M's apartment, where the Christmas goose was cooking and the others were already drinking again.

There are pictures of me on this day, bleary eyed and swollen-faced, eyes rolling in different directions, clutching alcohol bottles and a trollop with equal passion.

Needless to say, that was the last Christmas party that our school threw. Amazingly I didn't get in trouble for it -- English Teacher R did. Since he had the cut on his face, everyone assumed he was the trouble maker.

God bless us every one.

The Message Bored

2010-12-15T11:23:00.000+03:00

Ah, the year 2002. (Sometimes I feel like the Highlander in his room full of memorobilia, remembering something that happened 300 years ago.) A Russia without advertising everywhere. . . the original English Teacher X website.

Here today, I present (or re-present) one of the first things that I wrote for my first attempt at a website in its Angelfire incarnation, at the end of the cold winter of 2002.

This was before blogs, before facebook, before myspace, and WAY before twitter -- and I was writing on a huge clunky Pentium 1 desktop that a student had given me. (For some reason, the color function had been turned off and everything was in black, white, and shades of grey. That's why the colors are so strange on that original website -- I couldn't see them.)

Anyway, the only big well-known site about English teaching abroad was Dave's ESL cafe, which had a well-trafficked message board. I found it to be a huge monument to misinformation, whining, and hypocrisy. Negative posts were often quickly deleted in those days.

I wanted to make a real uncensored message board -- and I actually had it up in a couple of forms for a while, but at the time couldn't find a good one that didn't immediately get filled up with spam and even viruses.

So I made a fake one, while I was working on the real ones, which can be seen here:

The original fake message board on the Angelfire Website

A slightly better looking version from the later website, in the wayback machine archives.

It's one of the few things I've ever written that actually made me laugh out loud -- of course, that doesn't mean you're going to . . . but I think I very accurately captured the bombastic yet completely anonymous and shady feel of an ESL message board.

There are two stories there -- the first is a flame-war between Charles Pangolin, a DOS in the Phillipines, and an employee named Robert "Snake" Pliskin (a none-to-subtle homage there -- if you don't get it, do a Google search and then go see one of the most awesome films ever made.) The second involves the Candide-like misadventures of a bright-eyed idealistic young newbie in Thailand and the Phillipines.

Somebody suggested in the comments that I do some fiction? Well, this is the closest you're probably going to get to that.

Prior to about 2002, there actually used to be so few people on Dave's message boards that they were vertically linear -- there would be a list of posts, straight down the page, which you could post on, generally without registering. Check it out via the Wayback Machine, here.

Dave's Message Board in 2000:

At little research there reveals that Dave changed to the current registration type board in 2004 -- I know that's when I started spamming as Charles Pangolin, with extremely funny results -- regrettably they don't seem to be stored in the archives and are thus lost in time.

The fake message board attempts to replicate, not very succesfully, the look of the old linear type board.

I suppose I could make a fake message board that looked real, easily enough, but, now, who cares. . .

Tourist X

2010-12-12T19:44:00.000+03:00

I had an acquaintance who worked in a photo-developing place. This was back in the 90's, of course, before digital photography made that job as obsolete as buggy whips and lava lamps.

He kept a massive photo album of copies of pictures he'd stolen.

This was referred to loosely as "The Tome of Agony."

These little glimpses into people's lives were fascinating and terrifying in a way the current carefully planned reams of photos on Myspace or Facebook are not -- the amateur porn (much more than you'd think, of that, went into commercial film developing places), the pictures of profoundly unattractive or overweight or deformed people smiling cheerfully for the camera, the pictures of people who'd been in accidents or assaults and for insurance, legal or just sentimental reasons, had photographed it.

There was a special section reserved for photos of birthday parties of hydrocephalic children.

Anyway, to get to the point:

One section consisted of dozens of identical photos of people on vacation. Separate people, at separate times, making the exact same photos. Again and again and again

There must have been five dozen pictures of grinning tourists standing alone between the legs of the Eiffel Tower, for example.

"Did they all think they were the first person to make this picture," my friend pondered. "Because the look on their faces suggests so."

As Tyler Durden says -- You are not special. You are not a beautiful unique snowflake. You are not special. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

Travelling always makes me think of that now.

Especially thought of it as I stumbled around Jordan with the Girlfriend, a couple of weeks ago. She missed a connection and arrived a day late -- we went to Aqaba, where I suppose I should be grateful for the last few chances to see Red Sea coral before all of it dies, and the magnificent ancient city of Petra, where we paid $80 each to get in and jockeyed for camera angles free of tourists before Girlfreind got hot and tired and we left after 5 hours.

We slapped Dead Sea mud all over each other at a resort there, and wandered the crowded streets and ate shawarmas and chicken in Amman, which seemed to have more heavy smokers even thanRussia.

There are pictures of me at Petra in a plaid shirt, cargo shorts, a white ball hat, and sunglasses and sandals. I look like a complete middle-aged tourist, lacking only a fanny pack.

(Of course I own a fanny pack -- I've had the same one since my first backpacking trip in 1992. Haven't worn it in a while. It's older than most of the people in the Top 40 these days. Uh, is there still such a thing as the Top 40? Maybe I should say "Most Popular on Itunes" or whatever. )

Next trip is in February -- Girlfriend wants to go to Goa in India. (My last trip to India in 1994 -- during which I incessantly wore my fanny pack -- ended with me catching the stomach parasite giardia and losing about 20 kg in weight.)

The Thanksgiving Porno Story

2010-11-24T11:55:00.003+03:00

A little more Retro X for you. Obviously, the first comment would be that it DIDN'T happen on Thanksgiving day, 2004, because that would have been a Thursday, and we were working. It happened on the Sunday after.

We tried to celebrate all Western holidays in as stereotypically a way as possible -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, Easter -- in those innocent days before fast Internet. The mere fact that we were watching video cassettes and not DVDs should tell you something.

As a side note -- somebody once asked why all the English teacher icon/hommunculous figures were always frowning. This person missed the point entirely -- the frown indicates a bad hangover.