Unformed stools

Before I left, my doctor told me to start popping pills if I made three of these:

Ever since I ate that chicken kebab the other night, my carpentry's really gone to shit. Now, where did I pack that Immodium AD?

Rzeka Wisła

I gave my first truly awful lesson yesterday.

My debut last week was bad enough. It rattled me to the core. I cried about the damned thing. I spent the evening alone in my room dwelling on it. But it was my first stab at teaching. I really believed that my subsequent classes couldn't (and wouldn't) get much worse.

I was wrong.

Yesterday's lesson - a 40 minute debacle - was horrible. Everything that could have gone wrong not only went wrong, but went to shit.

For the three hours after class, nothing registered in my mind. I was temporarily a vegetable. I couldn't talk or think straight or eat or really do much of anything but stare at the wall and wonder how everything went to shit. How did it happen?

Going to shit is a cumulative process. It all starts with one mundane detail going to shit and the shit snowballs. Once that shitty snowball really gets rolling, it's almost impossible to stop. It picks up momentum until it's screaming down the hill and then it crushes you, leaving you lying there in pieces on the bottom, wondering how the hell to put yourself back together and get back to the top.

I'm still at the bottom of the hill, lying there in pieces. Today has not been an improvement from yesterday. My nudge-nudge all-smiles classmates are now distant and not so friendly anymore. It's like I've got the plague and I might screw up their lessons if they get too close.

There are moments before class where first floor windows beckon me to open them and leap, leap out onto the grass and run, run, run until there's no city left, until I'm up in the hills with the goats and the old maids, where I'll never have to dry heave into a trash can again. In these moments, I must remind myself that I'm in Poland because I want to be here. I am teaching - even though my skin blanches and my body shudders at the thought of it - because I saw myself spiraling down, down, irretrievably down the vortex of mediocrity and this was the only way out short of joining the military and having to cut my hair. I'm here in Poland, down on my hands and knees licking the toilet seat clean because I want to learn languages, because languages are one of two things I am genuinely interested in (the other is metaphysics, but you can't exactly sell that on the street).

I am fascinated with languages. I want to know them. This is my way of doing it. One toilet seat at a time.

Muzyka polska

Every time I walk into the 24-hour delicatessen on the corner of Ulica Batorego, they are playing music that belongs in the next Tarantino film. I'll come in around two in the morning and pick up my usual Nutella, muesli, and uncarbonated water. Then, I'll wait in the queue while "House of the Rising Sun" by Eric Burdon and The Animals runs its course. Another favorite of mine is "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie. I could feel the cameras on me when they played that one. Last night, "One Night in Bangkok" came on and with a prepackaged kielbasa sausage in my hand, it was passably surreal.

There is no formula for Tarantino music, but I've found that certain oldies make for good impulse shopping scenes. Turbulent 60's rock in a convenience store really does it for me. Very Tarantinoesque. Sometimes it's tough not to whip out my glock, kick over a pyramid of canned beans and rob the place.

The radio stations here favor a mixture of 70's prog rock, 80's power ballads, and contemporary Pole-pop. You'll hear "Nights in White Satin" followed by "Take My Breath Away" followed by some techno-polka piece of shit with synth accordion solos. In short, Polish radio is almost lethally eclectic and I do not recommend it to anyone.

Sting is wildly popular here, as are Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. I suppose pillow talk rock will prevail in a culture that has been ravaged for decades by the trampling hooves of Nazi Socialism and Communism. How many Poles can even stomach Wagner? In the wake of eighty years of almost uninterrupted oppression, who wouldn't want to put on the Bodyguard soundtrack and have a nice bubble bath?

Keith 0, Poland 0

Last Friday - upon the completion of a 23-year light labor sentence served in the suburban gulags of the American Midwest - I caught a one-way flight to Krakow with no set plans to return. Equipped with six words of pidgin Polish and not a day of teaching experience to my name, I enrolled in a program to teach me how to teach Poles English. The course lasts four weeks - and then what? More than likely, I will hobo around for a few months and then instantly freeze to death when winter blasts across Poland like a liquid nitrogen cabbage fart.

For now, I live in an apartment two blocks from Krakow's thousand year-old Stare Miasto ("old city," in typically understated Polish) with two shimmering she-Britons in their early 20s. This has necessitated eliminating several personal quirks from my daily routine, such as walking around in the buff, ritualistically clogging the toilet every hour on the hour, and leaving half-empty glasses of milk sitting on windowsills for weeks at a time. By the end of my stay, I would like for my roommates to believe that America is a utopia of curly-headed mumblers who on Tuesdays and Thursdays wear t-shirts promoting bands that probably don't exist.

In the meanwhile, I have expanded my Polish vocabulary to include sixteen words, two of them profanities. This may not seem impressive considering that I've been in Krakow for nearly a week, but any linguist with an associates degree will tell you: Polish is not derived from Latin or Greek, but from the hissing and frothing of the dreaded Polish Baby-Eater, a baby-eating forest opossum whose centuries-long reign of baby eating and unprovoked pranking forced 13th century Poland - out of sheer terror - to adopt the beast's spitting cacophony as its official language.

On my fourth day here, I witnessed a massive anti-gay demonstration. Several hundred Christian soldiers turned out in the main square, marching and chanting "Krakow is not gay!" - "Man + woman = A true couple!" - "Men can't have babies!" - "Eliminate the deviants!" But even this must have gotten boring after a couple of hours, because many of the protesters skipped out early to pelt homosexuals with rocks. Long live Catholic Poland.

This weekend was Labor Day. Everyone in Poland will be drunk until Christmas. My roommate Sara and I were walking back from lunch when we were caught up in a potato farmer parade. A pair of gigantic black amplifiers two feet from our heads suddenly exploded with polka music thumping offbeats loud enough to knock Belarus into the Baltic Sea. Several men in straw hats darted past with wheelbarrows full of potatoes. A throng of boy scouts swirled around us, executing perfectly synchronized pirouettes. A herd of moped drivers sputtered about in listless figure eights. I will never understand those ten minutes of my life.

But for as bizarre as it is here in Poland, it is never hard for me to find some out-of-context American garbage that makes me want to seek exile in Kyrgyzstan. After class on Friday, my British mates and I were aching for a pint, so we walked across town to a joint called Rooster. Not long into the meal, it occurred to me that we had passed through a transatlantic wormhole and that we were eating at the Hooter's in Omaha. The waitresses were wearing lycra shorts and lycra tubetops and I'm pretty sure the burger I ate was made of lycra, too. Rusted out mufflers and American license plates hung from the woodgrain walls and if I weren't served a side dish of very oily cabbage ... if the TVs weren't playing Premier League matches ... if the name on my waitress's trampy dogtag weren't "Bożena" ... I swear I would have pulled my hair out and eaten it right there and then.

My friend Peter - in all respects a fine Welshman - remarked, "Ay, Keith. I really like the atmosphere in this place. Look at all those license plates on the walls!" I could see his enthusiasm was genuine. He'd never seen anything like this before. I nodded sadly and glanced down at the menu. Maybe I'd order a Bud Light.

Poland: A Cursory Examination

Poland: is 94% Catholic. The other 6% are Catholic.

Polish: A social experiment funded by Post Cereals where 50 million people are armed with de-voweled boxes of Alpha-Bits and encouraged to drink heavily and make up their own language.

Official Unit of Currency: Old Woman Wearing Babushka.

National Letter: L with a line through it.

"Butterfly" by Crazy Town: National anthem.

Polish women: Mostly adorable, sometimes actually men.

Minorities: Oil.

Poles: Water.

Pizza: Well-liked.

Motorists: Brazenly homicidal.

Bikers: Brazenly homicidal.

Pigeons: Brazenly homicidal.

Pedestrians: Obviously suicidal.

Sounds of neighbors having very loud Polish sex: Inescapable.

Threat of foreign invasion from any direction: Constant.