Burn flag, burn!

These are Occupy Oakland protestors burning a flag that they took from the Oakland City Hall on January 28, 2012. It was very refreshing to see people with as much contempt for this country as I have. I have a little U.S. flag in my apartment; I’ve had it on display forever; I’m not sure why.

The cocksuckers at U.S. Customs fucked with me at the airport – I mean they really tried to fuck with me and humiliate me. They asked me questions that were none of their fucking business. They rifled through every inch of my shit – even the dust they inspected. I am still missing something as a result of those slimy, Nazi fuckers fucking with my shit. When I got home from the airport I felt like burning my flag and posting it on my blog. I never had enough motivation to do it. The nylon that the flag was made out of was probably toxic, and I didn’t want to set off a smoke alarm. And it was just too much of a hassle to burn it outdoors and photograph it. I think I will let the Oakland protesters be my flag burning surrogates.

I don’t think that their flag burning was a good idea though. Most Americans don’t understand why anyone would not be loyal to this asshole country. It’s okay for a loser like me to burn a flag or to feel good about a flag burning, because nobody gives a shit about what I think. The flag burners, as much as I love them, are idiots. It’s a very bad way to get a political message across.

No more hope, but plenty of scorched earth

Pequot Museum parking lot.

You beat me world -- in Hungary.

Hungary was not to blame.

Budapest was merely the location of the battlefield.

Blinded by arrogance, the victors don’t yet realize whom they are dealing with.

While I mount my scorched earth offensive in Europe against idiots, I take money away from idiots at poker tables. Idiots never feel that they have to study their subject. That is their weakness, and I am exploiting it.

I no longer have a future. Hungary was my last stand. It doesn’t bother me too much; I’m too involved in the day to day operations of making bastards pay.

Just another day in paradise

Dear Barbara,

I play No-limit Hold'em -- and yes, it is similar to Russian Roulette. If you're not careful you can easily lose vast sums of money before you even know what hit you, and then your life is over. I have never lost vast sums of money playing poker, but I imagine it's a lot like failing your last CELTA lesson. One minute you have a life, and then the next minute you've failed and all your dreams disintegrate right before your eyes like burning paper. You are still alive and breathing, but you are effectively dead. After I write this e-mail I'm going to go book another date to go to the casino. They usually let me stay at their hotel for free during the winter, but they're all booked up and I will have to pay $70 to stay for the night. I really hate paying for the hotel when I'm at the casino, but I'll do it because I'm bored and miserable. Who knows, maybe I'll win enough to cover my expenses. I don't get to the casino that much anymore. Maybe four times a year. It's a long drive. I hate driving back at night. I don't see well at night. I hate the dark country roads near the casino. Everyone tailgates me because I drive the speed limit. In Budapest you have casinos everywhere, but they don't offer live poker with other players; they want you to bet against the house in games of chance, which is like throwing your money away; I find this sort of thing very insidious.

I'm beginning to get used to the United States again; I'm not saying I like it, but I'm getting used to it. It's nice to be able to communicate in my own language. Hungary is a wine country. The wine is good in Hungary, but I am a beer drinker -- The United States is a beer country, and I am a product of its culture. The beer in Hungary is not very good. Before I arrived in Hungary I thought I was going to be in beer heaven because I would be able to drink a wide selection of the imports from beer countries like the Czech Republic and Germany. The German imports in Hungary absolutely sucked, and I could find much better Czech beers in the U.S. than I could in Hungary. I could find good cheep beer domestic beer in the U.S. In Hungary I couldn't even find a six pack of beer. In the U.S. you can buy beer buy the six pack, the 24 pack case -- even the 30 pack case. In the U.S. we cater to the alcoholic. We make it easy and cheap to drink your life away. It is it is an alcoholic's paradise. Hungarians may live in a capitalism system, but they really have no clue how it works. I hope to God that Hungary never figures out capitalism, for if they do, they will become assholes like us.

Restaurants in the United States serve much fresher food than they do Hungary. One of my biggest complaints about Hungary was that the food  in restaurants was not fresh and was way too salty. Restaurant food in the U.S. is so expensive that I've only eaten out once since I've arrived. In Hungary I always ate out. When I got back to the U.S. I was dying for a good cappuccino, but you cannot find good cappuccino in U.S. The cappuccino in the U.S. sucks. The best cappuccino in the U.S. is worse than the worst cappuccino in Hungary. But, weirdly, after a while the desire for a good cappuccino subsides and you don't even think about it -- you don't even order cappuccinos. You just get used to the way things are. The U.S. is a miserable, crap country, vacant of culture and soul, but the longer you stay here, the less you realize it. You just become numb and passive after a while, like other Americans.

Have you seen Erika's son in person? I saw his photos on facebook. He looks like such a cutie. I envy Erika. My niece is terrifically cute too. She's two years old. She sent me a drawing. It is horrible. I'm not sure what to do with it.

I'm attaching a photo. Please tell me what it means. I suspect it is a political ad and the person who wrote the comments on it in pen was making an anti-semitic remark. Am I right?

I'm going to try to call you this weekend. You can tell me about your financial struggles then. I need to ask you about The Hungarian Society of Massachusetts.  http://www.bostonhungarians.org I miss Hungarians; I miss their beautiful and kind faces; I need to find someone who will make me some transylvanian goulash;  I'm dying for this. (They don't have Hungarian restaurants here.) I'd do anything for some transylvanian goulash; I'd do anything for a good Hungarian woman too, but I'm unemployed, so I don't even let that thought cross my mind.

The woman from Szeged

Dear LA Woman,

BTW, I've starting blogging again. Yes, this is after I told all my readers, except for you, to fuck themselves. I've published two e-mails to this Hungarian woman, Erika. She was in my class, really sweet and hot, and somewhere in her early thirties. I of course tried to get to know her better. In a move somewhat ruthlessly criticized by Hedi as being unmanly, I asked Erika to help me to buy some food in a Hungarian restaurant. I chose to indirectly ask her out for lunch. This is just the way I prefer to operate, especially if I have to deal with the person if they reject me. Erika just gave me this strange look and didn't answer the question. I was not sure she understand what I was asking, but I said nothing more. For the next for weeks I sort of gave her the cold shoulder. Any woman who was too good for me, well, she could just fuck herself! I learned later, from Erika that she had a husband and a kid. I was a little surprised because, unlike the other women in the class, who were all married with children, she never talked about her family. It didn't occur to me to look for a wedding ring. I don't have a lot of experience with asking out women whom I do not meet online. Then, one day I was going out with my other Hungarian friend from the course, Barbara, and Barbara was friends with Erika, and Barbara asked if she could take Erika along. So we went out and had something to eat. Barbara asked me how my trip to Szeged was. (Szeged is a city in Hungary about 120 miles south of Budapest, on the Serbian border.) I told them that I had cancelled my trip to Szeged because Aniko, the woman whom I had met through OkayCupid, had decided to abort our relationship. (I'm not sure if "relationship" is the right word, for we had never formally declared it as such.) Well, Erika became very interested in me after that. There was something about my having this relationship with this woman from Szeged that I think fascinated her. I think that my wanting to have relationships with mysterious Hungarian women somehow made me okay. I said in my OkayCupid ad that while I did not have a drop of Hungarian blood, I wanted to be as Hungarian as I could be; it was the truth.

I think I will publish this post in my blog too. Take care.

I hope you're okay.

Dickie

I fought the CELTA, and the CELTA won

Hi Erika,

Well, most of my cultural shock has worn off -- English spoken around me feels normal now, and I am slowly but surely getting used to how ugly people are in the United States -- but I am still in shock, and it hasn't worn off. Leaving Hungary was like being exiled from the only place I had ever felt comfortable in. I failed the CELTA. Please do not tell anyone! I have told Barbara. You are the only two people I am telling this to. It was not that big a surprise. I requested an appeal from IH Budapest; it was denied. They said I could file a complaint with CELTA. In the form it says:

"When Cambridge ESOL receives the signed complaint form, we will forward it to the centre, who will be asked to provide a formal response to the issues you have raised."

An egregious error in this form stopped me cold. A "centre" is not a person. The correct pronoun is of course "which." I have decided not to waste my time and file a complaint or an appeal with CELTA. Due to a learning disability that I have, I cannot understand verbal instructions and, since the course provided hardly any written instructions on how to do things or any examples, I was completely lost. I don't know if I could ever get into the CELTA mindset, but they gave me no avenue for attaining this mindset. I do however understand English very well, as I have studied it extensively. The director of IH Budapest in his letter to me denying my appeal made a grammatical error. Grammatical errors litter their documentation and recommended reading. It is sad and pathetic. I'll never win with these people; they don't respect English. Had Eszter taken the time to properly study English grammar, she probably would not have given me two novel units language to teach that are not categorized together: "Have to" and "should." I expected these students to be familiar with these items based on the difficulty level of that goddamned textbook Eszter game me, with questions such as "You don't have to wash melon before you eat it," which completely threw these poor Hungarians. You should wash melons before you eat them, because slicing into them exposes the inside of the melon to the bacteria on the outside, carried in by the knife. But I don't think the authors of the textbook knew this. I was hoping my poor students didn't know this. Sometime I still torture myself about this lesson. Shouldn't I have prepared two lessons -- one based on the complicated and ambiguous material Eszter wanted me to use, and the other a fallback lesson, in case Eszter either didn't know what she was doing or was purposely trying to fail me? But I think about it, and I think, where was the time to develop two lesson supposed to come from, and even if I did manage to come up with a second fallback lesson, how was I supposed to teach two, very complicated, novel units of grammar that shouldn't be grouped together in a ten minute teach session? I know that probably everyone else in that course could have figured out some way to present that material in a lesson that would satisfy Eszter. I just did not know how. I just couldn't get into the CELTA mindset. That lesson will haunt me forever. I'll probably think about it every day for the rest of my life, for if I had survived the lesson, I might've passed. My whole future rode on that one lesson. I am going to abort teaching English. There is no future without that certificate. I will be forever stuck in the United States, forced to take menial, low-paying jobs. I have no real options now. I am still in Boston. I hate Boston. I hate this lousy joke of a country. What I need to do is find someone in some CELTA center, whom I can bribe. I'm not fully serious, but I'm sure there is someone somewhere in that rotten and exploitative institution who will take a bribe; you just have to find the person.

Yes, I know about Gábor and Anna being so shocked, for I got an e-mail from that nosy Anna bitching and moaning about her grade and asking me how I did. Anna must be taking some serious hallucinogenic drugs to think that she was worthy of some special grade. I don't like Anna. Anna is much worse than Judit. I don't hate Judit. Judit is not duplicitous like Anna. One thing that annoyed the crap out of me about Anna was that she started using this big cowbell during her teaching practice to alert students that time was up. She started doing this under Eszter. Eszter said nothing. Eszter has no issue with infantilizing students. I found this to be very insulting to the poor Hungarian students. Anna is not Hungarian; maybe this is why she was so insensitive to them.

I was surprised that Gábor didn't get a better grade. Gábor lacked charisma, but was a teaching machine. I hated Gábor, but only because I envied him. His English was slightly off, though not as off as Eszter's. Maybe it was his English; maybe it wasn't. It doesn't matter. I don't understand why students in the CELTA program got so competitive and crazy when they would give us those silly competitive games during the input sessions. I hated those competitive activities. They weren’t learning. Employers are not going to give a crap what your grade is. They're going to be concerned with more practical things, like how much teaching experience you have.

"Dwarf" is correct, though I think that the preferred term nowadays is "little person." I suspect that little people, in general, are better people than normal-sized people, as they have suffered. People who have suffered tend to be better people. I hope that you land the job with this little person. In the United States you would not be that short. In the United States I am average height. In Hungary I was dwarfed by giants. I had never seen people who were so tall. This is not something that I liked about Hungary at all. 

Take care.

Dickie

Back in the United States, and no longer in Kansas

View of the Danube from Gellért Hill in Buda, Hungary on a rainy, foggy day. The right side of the river is Pest.

Hi Erika,

I got a cultural shock when I arrived in Hungary, and I got a cultural shock coming back to the United States. When boarding the plane in London, people were speaking in somewhat ugly, Germanic sounding language. I was familiar with this language -- I knew the words, as it was English, but I heard it for the first time as a foreign language. Something seemed very wrong because people were not speaking the beautiful Hungarian that, while I understood hardly any of, I was comfortable with. And the people boarding the plane were so ugly. I had never seen so many ugly people before in one place. In Hungary, hardly anyone is ugly. Hungarians are incredibly beautiful people. I was not used to looking at people who were not beautiful. It was shocking. (There are of course exceptions like Eszter. Don't believe the crap I said in front of Zozo about Eszter being beautiful. Eszter does not look very Hungarian to me; she looks Germanic.)

When I got to Boston, Customs really, really fucked with me. They of course had nothing on me, but they interrogated me, asked horribly personal questions, and looked through every inch of my luggage -- even the dust they inspected. Finally, after clearing Customs, exhausted and really pissed off, having two suitcases, one in each hand, I ran to the bus that would take me to a train, that would take me to my apartment. The rear doors of the bus were open, so I hopped on with all my luggage, and the bus driver closed the door while I was half way in. I managed to squirm in, dazed and confused by why anyone would do something like that. A passenger said to me, "You have to pay." I had to pay? Then I finally realized that I was no longer in Budapest. In Boston, like every place in the U.S., you pay the bus driver up front. They open the rear doors in order to let people out.

I was in a big department store in the U.S. called BJ's. A woman was getting annoyed and frustrated with her son, because her son wanted to wander around. That is what children do; it is in their nature. Very rarely do parents get annoyed with their children like that in Hungary. People love the hell out their children in Hungary. Americans do not understand children. Children in the U.S. are often treated much in the way you might treat luggage. You lug your luggage around, and it is a hassle. In BJ's when I wanted to get around people in crowded aisles, I would have to resist the urge to say "bocsánat." Something seemed horribly wrong to be living in universe where you don't say "bocsánatot kérek" to get people out of your way.

Yesterday, when I was driving on the hi-way at night, I thought about the view from Gellért Hill and all the places and people and things I missed about my Buda. It was of course not "my" Buda, but it was the only place I had ever know that felt like home. I cried.

This is probably my last post, assholes

My life has taken on a new trajectory. In a few months I will be living many thousands of miles away.

I now have to protect my privacy for professional reasons. I will be disabling or deleting this blog within a month or so. I may start a new blog, where I will be more vigilant about protecting my privacy.

The enemies that I’ve made as a result of this blog will be very happy about this move, as it means that my posts will not continue to embarrass them. I am still not sure what to do about Wediko. I am considering shaking the motherfuckers down for their domain name – I can certainly use the money; I also might just continue to embarrass them. I haven’t decided yet.

It’s highly dubious if I have many regular readers, if any. I would like to say that I hate all of you, with exception to L.A. Woman, for whom I love. (But it is not a romantic love, don’t worry.)

At a certain point I had prevented people from commenting because of all the trolls and assholes posting their brain farts on my blog. About a year later, I turned the commenting back on, but restricted it to blogspot members only. There hasn’t been one comment since. This, to me, says a lot about the human race -- what fucking shits you all are, in that you can only squeeze out your reeking brain farts when you can do so easily and anonymously.

I think you are all fucking scum. And I have one word of caution for you men not living in the U.S: You’re days of pussy may be coming to an end, for your woman may be fucked by me, and I intend to dish out the best fucks that your woman has ever had.

Tables are turning motherfuckers; time that I got mine. And I’m not only after your woman, and in a much better position to take your woman -- I’m also going to take your job, because I’m probably a lot smarter than you are, I work a lot harder, and I don’t take shit for granted. And when I’ve taken your job, I ‘m not going to feel guilty. And I’m going to hope that you end up hanging yourself over your sudden loss of pussy and revenue. You will feel lonely. It will rot your soul -- your entire being. Most of you assholes, who think you are so fucking superior to me, would probably not last a day in my shoes. I hope you get the chance to see the world as I do. I hope it is your woman and your job that I take. I hope, dear reader, that I fuck you real good, for you probably have it coming.

Have a shitty life, scumbags.

Kevorkian dead. Good riddance, scumbag

Kevorkian snuffed someone I knew – she was not terminally ill. Don’t believe everything you hear about Kevorkian, even if it happens to come from so-called humanitarians and liberals and progressives. He was fucking cocksucker.

The Kevorkian freak showing off his “suicide machine” in 1991.

Dr. Death in his later years