Berning Bridges

It's really strange to witness the beginning of a general election from overseas. After the last guy got elected in 2016, I was like

and got the fuck out of the United States. But it wasn't just Trump. I left the United States for a whole slew of reasons, and it's difficult to narrow it down to just one so here's the lot:

1. Trump does not represent what I stand for as an American.

2. Taking the above into account, I don't trust Trump to do the right thing for me as an American citizen, a woman, an insulin dependent diabetic, an alcoholic, a student loan debtor, and a democrat. I list "democrat" because the recent onslaught of diplomatic shenanigans and blame games brought to you by president Fuck Face.

3. In the Czech Republic, I don't make enough money after the exchange rate to pay off my student loans. I'm essentially saving myself $30,000 if I continue to live here for another 15 years.

4. Considering the on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea, I feel safer in the European continent rather than on the west coast of the United States. While I'm closer to the actual Motherland, it sort of eases me that Putin and Trump go at it real dry behind our backs so I don't think there's any real danger.

5. The cost of living in Seattle has turned from expensive to fucking atrocious. I like living alone and I'm past the point in my life where I can live with a person who isn't putting it in me on the regular.

Part of the research I did before I moved to Brno was all of the bureaucratic red tape I would have to go through, but not just on the Czech side. I wanted to see what happened to my drivers license, my permanent address, and my opportunity to vote. I wasn't renouncing my citizenship and declaring war on the United States (yet) so my rights as a voter are recognized overseas. I thought "hey in four years, we could probably fix this."

"Fix this" is pretty vague when it comes to the assertive action needed with the burgeoning clusterfuck of what's currently going on in the White House. Trump said a while back "if you don't like it here, you can leave." The guy didn't have to tell me twice, plus I was already gone. I waved to him but I don't think he saw it.

I've been able to continue supporting Bernie from abroad. He was my first choice in 2016 because he speaks to my issues directly and he's been fighting for me since before my existence. Some call him a career politician, but I don't see a problem with that. He's made it his life's work to help Americans, the people of Vermont, and those who are timelessly marginalized by the right. It would be different if he was taking corporate money or was in cahoots with billionaires, but he isn't. And he's not just going to take care of me. He's also going to take care of you, no matter who you are, and I can get behind that.

But I don't consider myself a "Bernie bro," and to be honest, I don't think I've actually ever encountered one in real life or on the internet. The people or trolls who have been described as intentionally argumentative, biased, blind, angry, and stubborn remain elusive to me. There's a huge difference between the people whose first choice for president is Bernie Sanders and the people who become militant and extremist with his cause. Supposedly people have had the displeasure of encountering Bernie bros, and I'm not discounting their experiences. It might be because of the company I keep or the things I choose to expose myself to, but I think they might just be passionate idiots who occasionally enjoy a good political circle jerk.

Part of the reason why my support of Bernie has remained consistent is because of his democratic opponents. I really did like Elizabeth Warren and I don't think she's the corporate criminal who people are making her out to be. She still has yet to endorse any one person in the race and it would flip everyone out of she endorsed Bernie, but I don't think she will. She still has connections to the establishment, the same establishment of lying dog-faced pony soldier candidate Joe Biden.

I had to get someone over the age of 65 to explain to me what the fuck a lying dog-faced pony soldier is because that's the world that Joe Biden lives in, an unrelatable John Wayne hellscape with mysteriously grandiose stories about the weird neighbors in the 1950s. Biden looks like he could get in a fight with a parakeet and barely live to tell about it. 

But Joe Biden scares me, and not because of his linguistic gaffs that have surfaced as a result of the mainstream media. He scares me because even though his attitude isn't exactly like Trump's, he won't have my best interests in mind. He has a horrible track record with women, the LGBT community, pro-war senate votes, the criminal justice system, and marijuana use on a federal level. Every candidate at one point or another has said "we need to combat prescription drug prices." Cool. Agreed. But I don't think Biden has spent enough time with real Americans who have real medical issues. His son had cancer and his son died of cancer, but the Bidens aren't facing the reality of having to choose between life-saving medication or paying rent, going to Mexico to buy medication, starting a GoFundMe to afford required medication and care, or seeking out cheaper medication that's intended for dogs. After analyzing some sources/tweets, it became clear that if Biden were the democratic nominee, I wouldn't be able to return to the United States because Trump would run rings around that guy (although sign me up for those debates because they're going to be a fucking riot). Living in the Czech Republic isn't what I signed up for, but this is my life now. Ideally I'd like to go back to living where I was before because even though it's stupid expensive, I miss the life I had in Seattle. A Bernie Sanders presidency is my best bet to returning home and ending this whimsical saga abroad. 

But people have their concerns about Bernie, too. He had an emergency stent put in but he got right back on the campaign trail. He remains mentally lucid, aware, and doesn't say anything off book that would put him in hot water. There's also this rampant fear of communism within the older communities in the United States. Communism has never been an issue in my lifetime, and it continues to not be while I live in a former Soviet satellite state. The Dubya administration bolstered their efforts in making terrorism the new fear instead of communism. We had terror alert levels, commemorative 9/11 plates, and additional precautionary measures in every FAA security line at every goddamn airport, which made stand up comedy infinitely worse for a number of years. And now every Trump supporter who lived through McCarthyism can return to using communism as a fear tactic. (I do want to point out that communism is a political system and socialism is an economic system because some dudes in my Facebook feed constantly like to disagree despite the evidence and testimonials). But in 2008 we elected the guy with a middle name of Middle Eastern descent, so maybe one day we can have hope again.

The one concern I have with Bernie is that I'm not sure about his expertise in handling foreign policy. He's a career anti-war guy and I completely agree with that. However, when it comes to participating in negotiations, diplomacy, and other events on the world stage, I don't know if he could do it. He's a guy who would definitely be able to take care of things at home, and maybe that's what the United States needs. Maybe we need someone to focus on fixing shit at home instead of barging our way into other country's issues like it's our national past time. Maybe we can actually fix this.

If Biden gets enough delegates to receive the democratic nomination, I'll vote for him. I've seen people say "he's just democratic Trump!" and while there's some truth to that, I think Biden would be able to approach other nations of the world with more tact and grace instead of crashing into a fake painting on the side of a rock like Wile E. Coyote each and every time. If Biden's the nominee, I think it would be a complete disaster. But those debates though...

I don't like waiting out the results of this election because it really does determine my future as an American living abroad. Usually when there's been any developments made with the primaries or coronavirus, I find out about it when I wake up and the majority of the people I know are making their way to bed. I'm hoping that the states whose primaries are held today can see what a difference their choices will make now that it's down to Bernie, Biden, and dark horse Tulsi Gabbard. 

Ahoj, Bratislava

Soooo it’s been a while, maybe even longer since the release of that shitty song by Staind. The New Year has produced multiple job opportunities, never-ending Central European bureaucracy, comedy shows, and my first jaunt to Slovakia.

And I'm still waiting to hear about my visa.

But during this seemingly infinite waiting period, I’ve taken two teaching jobs that are happily withholding my pay until I can become a legal Czech employee. They don’t have to pay me until further notice so I’m basically working for free, and hooooo boy do they know it. My schedule went from sleeping most of the day and going down a rabbit hole of late 90s Saturday Night Live videos to mapping out an entire timetable of trams and busses for my assignments all over Brno and its dingy yet incredibly charming suburbs.

I’m traveling to different companies in the metro area to help employees with their conversational skills, business English, and strange grammar unique to my native tongue. Most of the students I encounter are very intent on the idea that their English isn’t great but really it’s the opposite. I swear I had someone tell me, “My goodness, I am astonished at your surprise because I do believe my English is quite terrible!” but they aren’t speaking like a Soviet caveman. They’re actually speaking very well, better than me in some cases. I usually spend 45 to 90 minutes trying to produce some semblance of a lesson plan that revolves around discussing current events, politics, movies or other popular American media, and common dialogue from their place of work, but also HOW we discuss them. But what surprises me is that during every lesson, my students become so curious how a thirty-something woman from a booming yet not beaming country like the United States ended up in a place like Brno.

Brno has roughly 400,000 people. It’s been described to me as St. Paul without Minneapolis. There are enough people here to cause a very slight delay during morning traffic or a decent back up in any store in the mall on Sunday. Trams during peak hours are full and standing room only. This city as a pulse, and the only thing that would for sure kill it or at least slow its resting heart rate is something like Amazon becoming a budding and brooding feature. So when students ask me, “Why here?”, I usually respond with something that promotes the differences in cost of living while not having to live somewhere like Terre Haute, Indiana. I also explain that I’ve been through the Czech Republic before and liked it enough to move my life here. I’m not sure I have the balls (I don’t) to throw a dart at a map and expatriate to places like Kiribati or Lhasa or Ushuaia in Southern Argentina. But here I can live inside former communist architecture while practicing peaceful democratic resistance. Oh and that whole health insurance thing, too.

So right now, even though I come prepared each week with a loose lesson plan that can often derail like it did today when I had to explain the origin of the phrase “don’t drink the Koolaid,” my students are vastly interested in me and what I’m doing in the second biggest city in the Czech Republic. They also tend to ask me, “Why not Prague?” Prague seemed incredibly romantic at first. If I was going to write my own Eat, Pray, Love bullshit novel, my journey would probably start in Prague. The city (and most of the country) has amazingly preserved architecture. It wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War so a lot of the streets and flats and businesses are decades old and still in seamless operation. Prague carries a lot of the business in the Czech Republic but it isn’t all smokestacks and concrete. When I think of people in Prague, I imagine a woman wearing a silk bathrobe looking out her tall windows, tall windows that are emulated in the US because we can’t have things that are genuinely old so we destroy new places to purposefully make them look old. She has one of those stupid chunky blankets with the giant yarn draped around her. It’s snowing. There’s a dog outside leaving tiny footprints on the cobblestone sidewalk as a young boy chases muž’s best friend. The woman in the window snuggles her face into the giant yarn catastrophe while her gorgeous husband swoops in from behind her while carrying the smallest fucking espresso cup you’ve ever seen. She receives the bright white cup and saucer from within her Pinterest cape as they giggle over the idea of reading Faust in their giant sleigh bed in front of an exposed brick backdrop for the rest of the day. That’s Prague.

Brno is much more industrial, as are other cities here like Ostrava, Olomouc, and Plzen, so it leaves people wondering why I chose cooling towers over historical bridges. In short, it’s cheaper. But most of the expats in CZ are based in Prague, yet out in Brno it feels less like a vacation and more like an ongoing journey. If you live in Prague, you can go days without needing to speak Czech because everyone in your bubble speaks some derivation of English. I wanted to be around Czech people, not people who want to be around Czech people. I feel like a resident here. Somedays in Seattle I felt more like a tourist due to barely leaving the house during the throes of depression and anxious bullshit.

Teaching currently has me busy for roughly four days a week. I have some breaks midday and some downtime before hustling across town with a different set of folders for a different set of students. The nice part being is that if I notify the schools far enough in advance, I can take time off for comedy. This past weekend I ventured to Bratislava, Slovakia for a comedy show, my first time to the other half of the previous state of Czechoslovakia. Bratislava is a grungier version of Brno that could stand a good pressure washing. The city of 420,000 people is the largest in Slovakia and it is proving to be somewhat of a booming new metropolis. Slovakia is also on the Euro which catches people off guard. Surely the Czech Republic is on the Euro if Slovakia is, right? Wrong. CZ is on the Czech Koruna (crown) while Slovakia became a loose cannon and confused the fuck out of everyone by switching over to the popular Westernized currency. I exchanged money at the train station before I left, and two hours later, I walked off the train and onto a movie set designed for Liev Schreiber or Elijah Wood to extract their vengeance on the surrounding community for a betrayal of past generations. People think CZ is in Eastern Europe when really it’s in Central Europe, but Bratislava flirts with that misinformation much more, especially when people are confusing it with Slovenia.

Every European city east of Berlin has a section commonly referred to as “Old Town,” a four or five block district in or near the city center. At least one large church, forged statues and sculptures, and outdoor markets are picturesque both in person and on the overpriced postcards sold within the area. Bratislava’s Old Town is a nexus of hidden passageways featuring popular pubs, souvenir stores, flower shops, and coffee and wine bars. I’m not using the Oxford comma between “coffee” and “wine bars” because they are constantly featured together under one business. There’s a good intermingling of the old country’s hardened Slovaks enjoying their nightly pinot noir with younger travelers who wanted a piece of cake and tea (me). Since I arrived in the city at 4pm on a Sunday, a lot of businesses were closed and I only had roughly an hour of daylight remaining to take pictures, so I walked around and got lost in the caverns of brick and doors that weren’t rectangular in shape.

A few photos from my visit

The comedy show I was in took place at Goblin’s Pub, a dungeon-esque pub with plenty of beer and zero cell service. Upon arriving, I encountered a group of Irish dudes who were actually swinging their beer mugs from side to side with their arms around each other while they sang/yelled old Irish folk songs. Groups of football clubs, rugby teams, and bachelor parties will often come to Central and Eastern Europe to get their drink on because it’s so much cheaper. I was an economic drunk and 40 cents for a beer was nothing to sneeze at. I wrote out a setlist, similar to the setlist I was working off of the night before in Brno. I’m having a tough time deciding when to compromise my comedy. When I say that, I mean I don’t know whether to give the people what they want, which happens to be easy stereotypes and blanket statements, or do the comedy I really want to do and know I’m capable of. I want to have some measure of integrity without leaning towards an entire setlist of Blue Collar Comedy style jokes and tag lines. My set at Goblin’s was like most of my other sets in Europe; people like me and my enthusiasm, but if it’s not slightly off color in a way they want it to be, they’ll smile and have this sort of Resting Czech Face that I proceed to pander to for the remainder of my stage time. Doing 25 minutes is incredibly easy for me. Being confident in the jokes I’m telling to an audience expecting a certain style of humor is difficult.

I left the venue and hopped Bratislava’s tram back to the train station, took the train back to Brno, missed the night bus home, and called a Liftago, our version of Uber. My driver seemed happy I was communicating in broken Czech and he compromised with me by speaking some broken English in return. I checked my blood sugar when I got home realized my levels weren’t as predictable as they usually are. If I ever get sick or stressed, I can usually see it in my blood sugars before I actually feel or sense the onset of it coming. And by the time I had woken up a few hours later after falling asleep during an embarrassing Vikings loss, I was definitely sick. I had mono at 16 and ever since then I’ve been prone to sinus infections. I maybe get two to three a year where there’s a tremendous pressure in my sinuses, I feel and sound like I’m underwater, my neck and shoulders ache a bit, and I can’t focus. On Monday this week I was supposed to start at another school but had to defer my start since a) I’m not an asshole and don’t want to get other people sick, and b) talking for six hours a day while running all around the city by public transit wasn’t an option. I pretty much slept for three days and ended up being really hard on myself. I was supposed to start a new job and my body let me down, thus letting my employer down. I want to be ready and capable and worthy of work but this stupid sinus business wasn’t exactly allowing me to do just that. I felt worthless, not working and wanting to get better while trying to simultaneously practice the act of patience. And I fucking hate being sick. I turn into a swearing three-year-old sailor who has seen some shit, so much shit they can’t even drink anymore. Kitty and I slept and drank soup and as much water as we could, and today I’m almost back to 100%.

Today was my first day back teaching in four days and I learned that I was not the only teacher who was sick this week. Classes were cancelled, moved around, delayed, and rescheduled due to most of us combatting some type of a pseudo-plague. My Thursday class is my favorite. They’re a bunch of young dads who understand my puns and are eager to talk about politics, current events, traveling, and generic smalltalk used in getting to know one another. The 90 minutes goes by quickly and I don’t feel like it’s work because I’m learning, too. The second round of the presidential election in CZ is tomorrow. People throughout the country will pull their little grocery carts behind them while seeking to uphold the tenets of democracy or bring the country down to the level at which I left the United States. They told me about their candidates and the voting process. Brno (and the rest of the country I’m assuming) has a system that is similar to precincts, districts, and counties. People vote on a Friday by using paper and pen at a polling station, most often located in a school, and the results are then tabulated until the next morning on Saturday. I told them about the US having fifty different states, which means having fifty different sets of laws for how people vote. I explained the mail-in process for the state of Washington and how ballots are tracked and counted before the election. The two countries honestly don’t seem that different, and there has been an overwhelming turn out to support the guy who is more like a combination of Hillary and Bernie than President Fuckface (fingers crossed). One of the main areas of debate right now in CZ is the issue of "immigration." One tough thing about understanding the accuracy of politics and political views here is that the terms “immigrant,” “migrant,” “foreigner,” and “refugee” are all used interchangeably, so I went over the differences with my students and they agreed with their correct usage:

foreigner:

anyone who is of a different nationality or ethnicity than the place they are in presently

immigrant:

a person of a different citizenship or nationality legally seeking rights and citizenship in another country

migrant:

a person who is moving to a new country in seek of work, can be done legally or illegally, and is an economic based decision

and

refugee:

a person seeking asylum by escaping their country of citizenship due to political reasons (war is most common).

This class has been fun and valuable to me. In some ways, it feels like I’m getting paid to learn about my new home and the varying political climates by age group and geography.

My little victories are important here. I’ve had a master list of things I’ll eventually need to take care of, and today I got to cross of a major one: open a Czech bank account. Two banks have turned me away because I need to bring a Czech interpreter with me, even though I was told this in English. From my understanding, they don’t want to have a foreigner (refer to the above) signing a document if they can’t fully understand it. So today I went to a bank whose website is in both Czech and English and not by way of Google Chrome. It took about a half hour and the Czech banker was patient with my English and we both used Google Translate to ensure our definitions of terms were the same. Victory! I’ll get my “contactless card” in about two to three weeks. I’ve seen the magic of the contactless card at various stores: you’re supposed to hover the card over a hub and it will register as a physical swipe, but people end up needing to tap the hub numerous times and sometimes outright slam on it in frustration for it to register. Contactless!

So it’s after midnight. Tonight I had the energy to cook so I made this eggplant tomato basil…mash. I don’t know what to call it. Half the time I cook I’m coming up with something where all the flavors and textures are good but it doesn’t have a real name. I also put pepitas, capers, and cranberries in it and I shredded super good gouda on top. I’m going to be super farty tomorrow. Hopefully next week will be better than this week. I’m excited to officially have employment and an actual schedule. It will take some time to adjust and I’m just happy I don’t have to watch the fucking Pro Bowl this weekend at an absurd hour to distract me from doing great things. Oh yeah, and speaking of which,

Fuck you, Tom Brady!