There is no privileged perspective

The first real day of school has come and gone and I am left here to reflect on all that has happened within the past couple of days, including my all expenses paid trip to Bucuresti last weekend for an MRI scan and the holly water the priests used to bless the students and teachers during our assembly which got in my eye, causing me to sneeze and frighten parents.

Today was a day of firsts for everyone, especially myself, as school gradually came to a start around 8:12. I remember asking my counterpart when we should head up to class as we were sipping coffee in the teachers lounge. She looked up at the smoke filled ceiling as if waiting for a sign.

“Not yet,” she whispered into her coffee

In my youth I always wondered what types of mysteries and wild amusements were kept out of my reach within the inaccessible boundaries of the ‘Teachers Lounge”. It turns out that it was just the absence of kids like myself who made the teachers lounge so sacred as well as a place where every vice can be nurtured and frustration vented. A wonderful magical place where shots of liquor and coffee flow like wine and the thick wall of smoke makes navigation funny and confusing.

Classes seemed to go smoothly considering nothing had been planned, not by me but my counterpart who I am supposed to work with. Lesson plans aren’t in style at the moment and I will eventually receive a workbook to use as a guide for my classes, but in the mean time I have to improvise. The students aren’t used to talking in class, this isn’t the way the education systems works here in Romania. Usually the teacher reads from a book or writes on the black board and the kids are supposed to absorb the information some how and score well on tests. They are very shy and reserved when it comes to any form of class participation, so I made sure to get the high school kids to all stand up and dance in a circle for my amusement before starting the days lesson. We played ‘coffee pot’, a game where I think of a verb and the students ask questions to discover what it is, saying ‘coffee pot’ in place of that verb.

“Do you ‘coffee pot’ in the morning?” – yes
“Do you ‘coffee pot’ alone?” – yes
“Do you ‘coffee pot’ in the bathroom?” – always
“Brush your teeth!?” – you got it

The assembly that rang in the new school year was about as pointless as putting lipstick on a pig. We all stood for 2 hours inside our little gymnasium as the school director then the mayor then the priests each took turns mumbling into a mic connected to a little karaoke speaker while kids played on their cell phones. The whole spectacle ended with the priests praying for the kids to pass all their tests, culminating in the singsong voices of the priests reciting some Latin verse as they flicked holy water at us, which somehow got into my eye and irritated the hell out of it.

Before all of this school stuff began I was in Buchuresti for the weekend because of a headache that would not go away. Our Doctor, Dr. Dan, asked that I come to the headquarters and have some test done, including an MRI. I had a whole day of doctor visits and finally my appointment for the MRI came and I was more then anxious to get it over with. The room containing the machine was white with a lone plant in between two large industrial sized freezer doors with ominous signs indicating incomprehensible dangers with for those with metal attached to their body. The machine was inside, a huge bulk of white, shaped like an engine turbine with a bed in the center. I was to lie on this body-sized bed and not move for 20 minutes while the magnets did their job. Up to this point I had not even begun to think about whether I was nervous or not, but as they put special noise cancelling headphones on then locked my face in place and as the mechanical sounds of my sterile white bed in this pure white room hummed into action slowly sliding me into a tube just big enough for my frame to enter, I realized I was naked under this medical costume and a bit nervous. Immediately I had an itch on my nose that I could nothing about and I felt claustrophobic just laying inside this tube no further then 5 inches from my face. Then the frequencies began and a whole new set of challenges presented themselves. Tones were set into my skull deep inside my brain, I could feel them humming and vibrating bits of information to the big machine around me. It began with three low bursts followed by three light ticks for what seemed like an hour, I used the pulses that were being shot into my brain as a beat for a rap that I was trying to freestyle. I didn’t get too far because the machine let it really rip as it pumped a low frequency then as if slowing turning up the dial let me feel every tone humanly possible culminating in an almost polyphonic kaleidoscope of tones, my brain felt tampered with, I was dumb struck.

I wonder how much the whole day would have cost had I been back in Washington. Lets see, a private doctors check-up, an eye exam, two chauffeured trips including one to an MRI, which required a team of 2 doctors and 3 nurses. Plus my transportation and hotel was paid for including daily per diem. All for a migraine it turns out. I remember when I was sick in Naples, Italy, with food poisoning and the doctors fixed me up after they fed me intravenously for my severe dehydration and gave me medication. The room had about 10 others coughing and barfing and the doctor was smoking a cigarette as he took my temperature but at least it was free. I also remember back in Tacoma when I had food poisoning again a year later (what’s the deal?) and Ashley drove me to a hospital that did the very same procedures but I was smacked with a 1,400-dollar doctors bill.