The Unauthorized Biography of Jack Bauer

3610 kilometers later I am back from Poland. The trip had a little of everything which will probably (not) be written down in later posts, at least that's what I'll say for now.

Highlights
-packing completely wasted
-travelling on one hour of sleep in two days
- sleeping on a sloop just outside of Nowhere, Poland
- Sailing for three days on two boats named, Szpunk and Gimli.
- eating immense quantities of meatballs and perogies, bbq's, wild duck...etc.
- Vodka!
- seeing Soviet era architecture first hand while driving on roads that the Nazis build to invade the USSR.
- almost willfully running down Pilgrims at a one of the five most important Catholic sanctuaries in the world...almost
- going shot for shot with a room full of Polish musicians and not collapsing, while concurrently teaching them the words to various Police songs...meaning they now know my personal version of 'Englishman in New York'.
- Auschwitz
- Hiking in the Tatry Mountains on the Poland, Slovakia border
- driving from Poland to Venice in one go...through a vicious thunderstorm in the Alps, in a Golf...awesome.
- finally using my SLR camera.
- Cannes...dahlings. La. La. La.
- Wine tasting in southern France at a vineyard 165 years older than the US.

3610 kilometers, 2243 miles. All in a Gold Golf across the continent. Pretty cool way to cap my time in Europe I think.

Ever since Joe, Al, Susie and I took a bus from Sevilla to the tiny beach town of Matalascañas in 2002 Joe, Al and I have been in love with Spanish beaches. It was the first time, for me at least, that I had been to a topless beach except it was Spain so it was just a beach. It was also early March and since most Spanish people don't even consider the beach as a possiblilty until June we had the sand to ourselves. That is, until two glorious Spanish women sat down about 20 yards from us, relieved themselves of their tops and left Joe, Al and I to try to drool as inconspicously as possible and Susie to roll her eyes and be generally exasperated for the rest of the afternoon.

La Malvarossa, the city beach in Valencia, is Matalascañas times whatever you want. So whenever I go down to the beach the first thing I do is a cursory recon of the population and pick a spot that doesn't have too many people around it or at the very least, that they're not too cumbersome to the view. Last week I met Nico and sat down near a group of Argentinians and I think there were some Italians to our left. There was one girl who came afterwards though who could have walked out of a Bond film, or a Streets video for 'Fit but you know it'. Because she was, and she did. She got there shortly after Nico and everything she did when she wasn't just lying down was conscious of the fact that every male pair of eyes within range were trained on her. The girl was a vision, but completely aloof, content to walk amongst the mortals but loathe to acknowlege us.

A little while later Nico and I were hitting a ball back and forth with some paddles and she came walking by to get a bottle of water from the beach hut behind us. She passed us with a slight flick of her hair as her only recognition of our presence. I quickly formulated a plan to snatch this girl out of the clouds and bring her back to the world of the living. I intended to 'mishit' the ball when she came back past us and maybe just put it near her so that she could toss it back to Nico, I could nod and say 'perdon' and we could both see if she was human and smile or speak. So just as she passed behind Nico I hit the ball so that it would land a few feet in front of her so she could easily stop and return it to us.

The little blue rubber ball left my paddle in a soft graceful arc, dissappeared into the sky, drifted to the left of Nico perfectly just out of his reach, and plunked dead center in the middle of her forehead. It was the consummate shot.

She straightened up, completely startled because while she knew we were there, hitting a ball back and forth, she was too ensconced in her aura of perfection to notice the ball coming for her head. It didn't hurt her because it was a soft ball and I really couldn't have hit it more accurately or gently. When she realized what had happened her nose crinkled up and she looked like she wanted to burn holes through Nico with her eyes. It was adorable. I raised my hand and said, 'Sorry 'bout that' (Lo siento, eh?), trying as hard as I could to hold back the laughter. She bent down to pick up the ball, tossed it back to Nico and walked back to her blanket with both feet now firmly on the ground and the slightest beginnings of an indignant grin on her face. As soon as her back was to us I collapsed on the ground laughing, amazed at the luck of that shot. It was hilarious to replay the sequence in my head and imagine what she was thinking, 'I'm cool, I'm cool, I'm cool, PLUNK, what the fuck!?, hmph...hehe, no..hmph...'

We continued playing for a while and our girl packed up and decided to leave. She came past us and Nico made a point of putting the ball under the paddle on the sand and I tucked mine under my arm. He couldn't really hold his laughter and nodded to her and turned his head. I waved and smiled. She gave me a grin and kept walking, no longer aloof and all the prettier for it.

I don't often write to my congressman because his name is Virgil Goode and he's a rank and file Republican so there's not really much point. If I had a Democratic representative I would probably be writing to him/her once a month because he'd would surely be caving into minority pressure and voting for something to take away civil liberties or some kind of oversight, because that's what Democrats seem to do these days.

Well, lacking a Democrat to chastise I figured I'd give ol' Virgil a email that surely won't even get to a computer in his building, much less his office. Because what the house just passed is really just a disgrace to democracy.

here it is...

Dear Representative Goode,


The Congress' recent 'yes' vote to pass the new FISA legislation stripping that office of its oversight powers is deeply troubling. I do not believe that freedom and security are a zero-sum game; a belief the White House and the Republican party seem to espouse wholeheartedly. Constitutional checks and balances should not be seen as an impediment to the stablilty and security of our nation, rather, they are the foundation of our way of life. Every step we take away from civil liberties is a step we take towards the victory of those who wish to do us harm for it is our way of life they seek to destroy, not our lives themselves. I urge you vote to repeal this action when it comes back up for a vote in six months. It is far easier to give up freedoms in times of fear than it is to regain them in times of regret.

Yours Sincerely,

Ian C. Nicoll

There has been a lot happening lately...not in Valencia because it's August and nothing happens in Valencia in August, but with me personally. I'm now able to count my time left in Spain in weeks. As in, I'm here this week, next week until Friday when I go to Poland and then a little less than a week when I get back. I've moved out of the only neighborhood I've ever called home in Spain and out of the apartment that I've been in for two years now. We named it la Cueva lovingly at first then despairingly towards the end. Like any place, it took on the mood of its occupants. When everybody was getting along it was a great place to be but when there was tension the lack of natural light and well, space was just a little bit soul-crushing. In other words it could be home or it could be Martin Sheen's hotel room from Apocalypse Now.

For all intents and purposes I'm also finished working until I find a job in the US. My August workload consists of one hour a day until the 15th and is more of a way to force myself to get up and do something with my day rather than dick around in my friend's apartment in my underwear waiting for my iPod to finish charging. July was much busier and I was working an almost full schedule coming out to about 35 teaching hours a week. The first part of the day was 6 and 7 year olds who were a lot more fun than I expected them to be. I got them to make weather machines to learn cloudy, rainy, snowy, sunny, out of construction paper. We finished and a kid in the back by the window pointed his outside and expectantly pushed the 'snowy' button. Obviously, nothing happened. So he turns around and tells me that his doesn't work to which the girl sitting next to him replies, 'Well, yeah...it's paper'. Another girl who comes from an Opus Dei family of 7! accused me of committing a mortal sin when I suggested that we include bug's blood on the menu for the restaurant unit as a drink option. Her morning snack one day was a olive oil and salt sandwich. Summer vacations with that family must be fan-TAS-tic.

With the end of summer school also came the end of my tenure at the English House and that means I no longer work for Mark who would be the strangest boss I've ever had only if Lester didn't exist. I said goodbye to a lot of private students who I got to know so well I 'almost' felt bad about taking their money to sit down and have an enjoyable conversation in English. They all said really nice things to me and thanked me profusely for the classes. It's good to know that once I've gotten pretty good at this job I'm tired of it and want to do something else.

The other thing (and I'm sorry for this rambling post, but when it's been so long since I've sat down and written anything it's hard to keep it focused) is that while I'm almost heartbroken to be leaving Valencia the fact that I just can't stay makes it easier to be sure I've made the right decision. Three years of ESL teaching seems to be about the point of no return. Teachers who decide to stay on and extend their professional limbo will be in it for life and while I'd love to stay in Valencia I refuse to do it as teacher trapped in the profession by lack of work papers. I've gotten to the point that I've got almost as many good friends here as I have back in the US but they're all moving along with their lives and have started new non-teaching jobs or are getting their masters in something related. It's one thing to be an ESL grunt with a support group of other ESL grunts but quite another to be in it more or less on your own.

The second aspect of why I don't have a choice about coming home is family. I´m at least 600 euros away from the east coast at all times here. The grandparents are getting along into their eighties and even though it's completely shitty to have to think about it this way, I want to spend as much time with them as I can...while I can.

The third and finalish aspect is Sara. We broke up at the end of January but worked on things until mid-April. Seven months might seem like I should have just moved along by now and if it had happened in the US I probably would have by now. It's a little different when you're in the country you moved to to be with the girl. When it first happened I had bought my plane ticket home in my head and was on my way back to a traditional support group of friends an family and distance. I don't think anyone would have blamed me if I had taken that path but I couldn't do it that way. I couldn't let that be what Spain was for me. Sara was a huge part of my experience here, the biggest part without a doubt, but I was forced to redefine what this country means to me. So I decided to stay and focus on acheiving goals of my own. I sat the DELE spanish exam, the results of which I should find out by the end of the week. I got to know my friends here again and was blown away by the quality they showed towards me. I moved past the anger, self-doubt, pain and dissapointment that comes along with this experience in large part due to their help and I think that I can walk away from her now with respect for myself and for Sara. That's something that has taken a long time to be able to say and because I can say it I know that it's sorta time for me to go.

Go here to see it though....http://icoopern.vox.com


It's 75% certain to be worth your time.

Hey, I'm going to phase out my livejournal, like I hadn't pretty much done that already in the past month. I'm switching over to Vox.com because it has an RSS feed option and you can post pictures and music and the like for free. It looks like an overall better page. So I'll post notes from there to my facebook page and if you want to subscribe to my Vox page please do. I've cross posted my last one from here over there as well.

Adios livejournal!! (unless no one comes over to look at my new page then I'll probably be back)

The new page IS http://icoopern.vox.com pretty simple huh?

In between trying to figure out where I'm going to stay for the first two weeks of August, how I'm going to pay for my plane tickets back to the US in September, how I'm going to get all of my stuff across the Atlantic and what my schedule is going to look like for July, I've been surprisingly not busy. Of course that means that all of this stuff that I have "to do" remains so and the ample cushion of time I had at the beginning of June is quickly slipping away into July which is dangerously close to August and being out of time.

So what am I doing instead of taking care of pressing business? (and we can add, research places to apply for jobs in the US to that list) I'm trying to enjoy the rest of my time in Spain. That time will be two and a half months come tomorrow, Friday the 15th. Later this month is the festival of San Juan, mercifully falling on a Saturday this year. San Juan is the biggest beach party this side of Rio or Daytona and involves, unsurprisingly, fires on the beach and jumping over waves at midnight. The rest of the time is spent drinking, watching people jump over or into their fires and trying to avoid doing the same thing yourself. I have the last week of June off as a break between regular academy and summer school. Fellow MWC alum, DANA, a real teacher, is coming to Spain in July so hopefully and we're going to meet up either here or in Madrid. Then August will be hot and humid and full of packing and deciding what comes back with me and what goes to the dumpsters for the hippies to scavenge and put in their filthy apartments.

Then, on August 17th, I fly to Warsaw and somehow get up to the north of Poland to stay a week with my friend Tomek at his summer house there. The last week of August will be spent driving his newly purchased vehicle back through Europe to Valencia by way of Auschwitz, Austria, northern Italy, Monaco, France and back into Spain via Barcelona. Then I'm here for another three days or so in which I have to somehow figure out a way to say goodbye to Sara that won't leave me a quivering mess on the floor and get on a plane to go home to the US for good. At least until I get the US ambassadorship to Spain.

I've never been a big proponent of living on past glories, I just don't think it's a healthy way to live and it's a great way to get stuck in a rut and never make any real progress in your life again, see Billy Ray Cyrus.  It's always struck me a little strange when you see someone's old room in their parent's house that's been made into a little shrine to their childhood.  I guess it's nice for some grown-up kids to come back home and have their old room sort of vacuum packed for them but I just don't see the appeal.  It's not their room anymore and keeping someone else's stuff in a place that they no longer are just makes it impossible for anyone to really feel at home there.  I get a little weirded out when I stay in someone's 'guest' room packed with little league trophies or 4-H 3rd place and honorable mention ribbons.  I came home from my second year of college and my room had been converted into my dad's home office, which was fine until he started waking me up at 730am to come in and print something or write some pre-breakfast emails.  I like it now though because when I come home (which isn't that often) I'm not immersed in my old high-school self.  My image of my room at home for the past three years has been boxes in the corner, my Mary Washington diploma on the wall and my old alarm clock on the nightstand, and an open suitcase on the floor.  It's enough.  I remember what I did in high school, I think my parents do too.  All the important certificates and things are in a scrapbook somewhere so there's no point in forcing nostalgia on everyone who walks into the place.

This brings me to the point of this entry.  Forced nostalgia and living completely and totally in the past.  Wrapping yourself in a cocoon of old memorabilia and photos, putting furniture in the corner that probably used to be yours 20 years ago like an astro-turf chair, and slowly driving yourself insane because of it.  Well because of that and an immense amount of drugs.  I'm talking about the proprietor of a bar here in Valencia that we call Olga's because I think the lady that owns it is named Olga.  The sign on the door is a Russian word that's about 15 letters long and probably unpronouncable.  It's the strangest bar I've ever been to.  I'm trying to think of something that would start to come close to the flat out oddness of that place..............and I can't.  People only go there because it's open until the early hours of the morning and is right around the corner from El Carmen (a really popular nightspot).  We walked up to the place and the bars were drawn across the door but not locked so I knocked, "Estas abierto?"

"Siiiiiiiiiiii".  Until then I didn't know it was possible to say "si" with a Russian accent...but it is.  We squeezed past the bars and I closed the door behind me, and instantly fell into Olga's good graces as she spent about five minutes going on about how polite I was and how no one has any manners anymore which might have been kind of nice to hear had it not been coming from a 60 year old lunatic dressed in a WWII paratrooper's jumpsuit, complete with helmet and goggles.  One hundred and ten percent batshit insane this lady is. 

Now I didn't realize this at first because she doesn't look like a ballerina anymore, not in the jumpsuit anyway, but when I was sitting on my astroturf covered couch sipping my beer at 5am I started to look around at the photographs and drawings covering every inch of wallspace in the bar.  THEY'RE ALL OF HER.  Every single one.  There's even a hand drawn caricature of her as tweety bird.  It's bizarre and exceedingly unsettling.  I sort of whispered to my friend Minal to confirm this because the place is small enough that you have to whisper if you don't want anyone else anywhere in the bar to hear you.  Two more people walked in and didn't close the door behind them.  I saw Olga yell at them and point at me a few times, apparently as an example of someone who knows how to close a door. 

She's a mean person.  There were only four other people there and she spent the entire night drinking a glass of vodka and insulting this poor Spanish guy who, for reasons that until the end of time will remain between him and God, was trying to pick her up.  Minal and I decided to call it a night when she broke into song, in Russian, with some old dance steps interspersed then demanded that we applaud with one hand.  My head can only handle so much nonsense in one night and that just pirouetted right past my limit.  So when I went up to pay for the four miniature beers we'd ordered and the bartender said, "20 euros", all I could do was laugh, give him my money, and get out of there with the remnants of my sanity.  I'm going to have to come back just once more to take a picture so people will believe me when I tell this story again.  Until then though....

Riddle me this;

Ever wondered what happens when you dump a quarter gallon of white latex paint into a pond full of fish? Neither had I, until this precise situation presented itself to me at one day at work landscaping while emptying the boathouse. In fact that very question presided over my entire being shortly after I handed a gallon of white latex paint to Ben (co-worker), who passed it to Ryan (co-worker 2)...who put two hands firmly on both sides of the can.

Or so it seemed...

…until the can pivoted over an invisible fulcrum and plunged to the planks below. Ok, maaaybe it didn't help that we were tossing the cans instead of handing them to each other. The point is, as any self respecting sport playing male or female should know, that if you can get two hands on a ball/frisbee/gymnastics bar/can of paint, you should damn well be able to catch it. Ryan couldn't or maybe he just didn't, (no he couldn’t). Either way there was white paint glugging out of the can all over the dock, seeping through the slats into the water below.

Well, fuck.

Instincts kicked in, first get rid of the evidence. We poured water over the still wet paint, which didn't do a thing. I found paint thinner and doused the mess with it, combined with scrubbing and rinsing we started to get the paint off of the dock. Then we ran into an entirely foreseeable but altogether unforeseen predicament. Murky white clouds started to diffuse into the pond from both ends of the boathouse and dock. Bright hopes for escaping this mistake blame free began to dim like a Baghdad power grid. Naturally, I washed my hands of all responsibility and blamed Ryan (who can't go a full week without breaking something or someone). After all, it was his fault. Nevermind the fact that emptying a boathouse by tossing cans of paint, not all the same weight, 1920’s fire brigade style was bound to end up badly. Add the point that misleading warnings preceded each toss, "this one's really light!" or "full can coming!" almost always signaling the opposite reality. Yep, it was Ryan's fault...he had two hands on the can.

Now, to answer the query I posed earlier in this post. When you dump a quarter gallon of white latex paint into a relatively small pond filled with fish, it spreads; right on the surface too, coating everything like we had Exxon-Valdez written across our shirts. After about 30 minutes the paint slick had spread out to cover about a quarter of the pond. A quarter gallon of paint for a quarter pond...sounds about right. The pond is not large by any means but it isn't exactly small either. It covers a little less than an acre of land. The unfortunate thing about this pond is that the Gillenwater's house has a big bay window in the back with a crystal clear view of it. Mrs. Gillenwater was home, and we had recently cleared trees at the bottom of the hill as if to give her a better view of our (Ryan's) mess. By an amazing stroke of luck she had puttered out of the house and taken her turquoise Ford Windstar into town to run some errands before the paint spread out to cover a third of the pond and really get obvious. By an even more amazing turn, Mr. Gillenwater was in Baltimore.

By morning on Friday the paint had diffused through the entire pond, which may have been a slightly lighter shade of green, about the same color as Mrs. Gillenwater’s van now that I think about it. No one noticed water’s new hue and I guess the paint gradually sunk to the bottom over time. Even Lester seemed oblivious and this is a man who can tell if someone has driven into the gravel parking lot in between the time he leaves in the afternoon and arrives in the morning. No fish were floating at the surface, including the rare albino catfish that lives in pond. Although I have a feeling that the pond's new rarity may be finding a non-albino catfish.

This was in the Washington Post today...I disagreed and sent an email to the author. I've included it after the lj cut. Really a whole lot of nonsense from this lady I think.



Mother Of All Blunders

By Kathleen Parker
hareSaturday, April 7, 2007; Page A13

On any given day, one isn't likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug -- not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.






Ms. Parker,


I was watching Ahmadinejad's speech and that quote struck a chord
with me as well. It angered me to see that young mother sitting in
Iranian custody being forced to apologize for her actions, actions
that she was forced to take under orders in the British Army.
However, I have a different take on the matter than you. I have a
problem with the way you have framed this issue in your editorial.
You seem to suggest that the west, as a society, sends its women to
war and has lost the will to protect them, that it has gotten to such
a point that a male soldier would listen to the screams of rape and
torture inflicted upon a female soldier with ambivalence. I
understand that your broader point is that you disagree with women in
the army and think that it reflects an unhealthy trend in society to
blur or even erase the line between the sexes.

Ahmadinejad berated the West for putting their women in harm's way and
tearing them away from their children at home. This ignores two huge
points, the first being that Britain runs an all-volunteer military,
as does the United States. Conscription hasn't existed in Britain in
any form since 1960 and "Even today, volunteer members of the armed
forces have a right to claim discharge on the grounds of a
conscientious objection developed since enlistment".
(http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/st_conscription_l.html)
Seaman Turney was no more forced to fight for Britain or to be put
into harm's way than you were forced to type and submit your editorial
for publication.

Secondly, it is the height of hypocrisy for Iran to lecture the west
on their treatment of women. You brush over this in your article by
saying, "Just because we may not "feel" humiliated doesn't mean we're
not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we're wimps. While
the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Muslim men "rescue"
women and drape them in floral hijabs. We can debate whether they're
right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won't change the way
we're perceived", but it is a point that is central to this argument.
For Ahmadinejad to stand with his back to a society that denies
education to women and where honor killings are a part of daily life
and look at Britain and wag his finger would be laughable if it wasn't
so sad.

There is a gulf between the two shores of thought on which Britain and
Iran stand. This event isn't going to bring them any closer together
nor will it push them any further apart than they already are. It's
just another example of the distance between the thinking of our
relatively free society and fantasy world Ahmadinejad inhabits where
he thinks that capturing the mother of a three year-old and
humiliating her on a world stage will teach anyone a lesson in gender
equality. I didn't think anyone would listen to him. It appears,
however, that you did.

Sincerely,

Ian Nicoll



PS... I don't know what kind of individual pressure these hostages
were under but I couldn't believe they had opened themselves up to be
used as such a tool for propoganda as they did. My grandfather was a
prisoner of war in Germany from 1944-1945 and I don't remember him
writing any letters of apology for incursions into German territory.
The standard instructions to soldiers upon capture is to give no
information about yourself but "name, rank and serial number". If
these sailors had simply stated their names, ranks and serial numbers
then they would have lost all propaganda value to Ahmadinejad. It is
very difficult to portray a soldier as an unwilling pawn of an
imperial nation when they follow the protocol set by that nation. It
is unfair to blame the sailors because we just don't know the pressure
Iran put on them.