Blah

Today is a blah day.  I feel fat, my a/c is giving me congestion problems, I'm wearing dirty clothes because I've been too lazy to wash my clothes by hand, and nothing sounds better than sitting on my bed-turned-couch all day sipping tea and reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation.  But here I am, dressed for school (sans that horrific and HOT jilbab), typing on my blog and trying to think of games to play so I don't have to teach.

Thursdays are always blah days.  My classes on Thursday are really bad.  The students are unruly, discipline is nonexistent, and I spend most of my time waiting for them to be quiet.  Here's an example:

A few months ago, I was doing an activity with this class that lets them talk and move around a lot.  Unbeknownst to them, I'm always trying to find fun, energetic activities to connect to the lesson to accommodate their, well, spunk.  It doesn't seem to matter what I do because I can't keep control of these students no matter what.  And it's not just me - my co-teacher gave up on them before I even got here!  A class usually has one or two bad students that rile up the class.  Bond with them and your golden.  But when a class of 43 students has 15 boys who would've been in alternative school in America at the age of 7, there's really no chance.  Especially if you can't speak the same language.  And when any form of discipline results in cheering and clapping from their cohorts, it all seems pretty pointless.

So on this particular day, we were doing an activity.  The time was up and I needed them to sit down.  Despite my many efforts of speaking to individual students, yelling over the noise, and attempting my pathetic teacher staredown, nothing worked.  So finally I thought, "Hey, they just can't see me.  I'll pull a soapbox!"  And I stood on my chair to make the announcement.

Did this work?  NO!  I got their attention all right.  They heard me speaking and they looked around to see me standing on the chair.  For just one fleeting moment I thought I'd achieved success.  And then a Dead Poet's Society scene unfolded.  Only instead of me being the thought-provoking Robin Williams and my students feeling inspired by my wit, intelligence, and compassion, they jumped on their desks and started shouting at me and each other.  I suppose it would be more accurate to liken it to the crucifixion trial of Jesus.

That's why I hate Thursdays.

Tales of Tails

Today I walked into class and was immediately met with a horrible, death-like stench.  I asked the students to sweep the floor, hoping it was some rotten food that could be removed after a short cleaning session.  As I supervised the girls (boys don't clean, of course) who were pushing around the scraps of paper, food wrappers, mothballs (don't ask), grains of rice, and food crumbs with the broom, I discovered the culprit.  A group of boys was crouched in the corner.  They surrounded the supply cabinet and, while laughing and whispering in Indonesian, kept poking at something inside.  I peered over their shoulders and saw, with great surprise, a cat curled up inside the cabinet with six newborn kittens drinking milk from her teats.  She had given birth the night before and stayed in the stinky, nasty, birthy rags she curled up in before.  Yuck!

Cats are everywhere.  Big ones, little ones, yellow ones, black ones, fat ones, starving ones, and oh-so-pregnant! ones.  Maybe one out of 20 cats has a full tail.  The rest have a variation of bobbed, zig-zagged, crimped, and just plain funky.  Many a night we've spent discussing the possible causes of this strange disappearance.  The Indonesians insist that the cats are born this way, but we see as many kittens as we do cats and the kittens keep their tails for at least the first five or six weeks.  The kittens born in my classroom had full kitten-sized tails.  So where do they go?

Speculation ranges from spontaneous detachment to traffic mishaps to cat fights to incest.  There is compelling evidence for all four.  Never fear!  I will outline all of them.

Spontaneous detachment seems quite likely given the whole mystery surrounding this issue.  One day it's there, the next it isn't!  As I said, compelling evidence.

Given the commonly displayed crimped and zig-zagged tails we see, many of them violently bent at a right angle, I think it is safe to assume that these cats have encountered a fair amount of violence in their pathetic lives.  Since the staple food in an Indonesian cat's diet is rice, we can all imagine what a food scarcity they are facing.  Everywhere they go, they prowl around with hungry, sunken eyes, ribs showing through their patchy fur, and a little too much alleycat swagger in their walk.  They circle the cast-aside banana leaves full of unwanted rice and threaten any fellow cat from stealing their prize.  Needless to say, a loud food-fight RAAEEEEERRRRRRR is all too regular in schools, in restaurants, and in my trash bags.  And when they're not fighting for food or giving birth inside my classroom's supply cabinet, they're darting through traffic in search of food or a suitable kitten-birthing cabinet.  I'll never forget the time I was driving to the grocery store on my motorcycle and saw a roadkill cat in the middle of the road.  It's fur was matted with blood, it's tail bent into the air like a flag pole, and it's eyes had popped out of its head, blowing around on the road, held on only by the bloody strings still attached inside the eye sockets.  Not the best thing to see on your way to buy food, let me tell you!

Finally we have the incest theory.  As soon as my friend suggested it, everything suddenly made sense.  All the cats at my friends' dorm never leave.  There are three females and one male (lucky guy) nicknamed Garfield for the uncanny resemblance (both in size and laziness - the only time we've ever seen him move is to impregnate a member of his harem).  We've spoiled their boom-boom on many an occasion and even interrupted what I will always believe was a cat rape.  This male cat has impregnated each of the females at least four times since I've been in Medan.  And now their kittens are cats and making their own kittens.  Who's the daddy?  None other than Garfield.

This same scenario occurs at my school and in my neighborhood.  The same males are impregnating the females, then they impregnate their children, their grandchildren, and even their great-grandchildren.  And people say cats are intelligent!

Boundaries, Anyone?

My latest conversation with an Indonesian cab driver:

Him:  How old are you?
Me: 28.
Him:  How long have you lived in Indonesia?
Me:  8 months.
Him:  Who do you live with?
Me:  My husband.
Him:  Where is he from?
Me:  America.
Him:  How long have you been married?
Me: 8 years.
Him:  Do you have any children?
Me: No, we're still waiting a long time yet.
Him:  Oh, so you're a career woman.
Me:  Yes.
Him:  Good good. (thinking)  So what do you use?
Me:  What do you mean?
Him:  Do you use condoms?  Do you eat pills?  How do you not have children?