Grasping for Closure

I know my blog ended abruptly.  I was recently chastised by a ex-reader of this, my first endeavor into the world of public soul-spilling for neither continuing or sufficiently ending my blog.  I will defend myself.

The reasons I wrote the blog no longer exist.

• I no longer need to detail my adventures in Australia.   
• I no longer need to scrounge for American Companionship via the inter-web.
• I just didn't feel like writing it anymore.

The blog was just as much for me as it was for letting Mama Stone know every couple of days that I was still alive.  It was for informing many of my friends as eloquently as possible of the misadventures of King Duncan or Ollie the Android.  It was a way for me to verbalize my frustration at culture, student teaching, French Student Teachers (a situation I find myself in constantly, regardless of country) and of course Nicki Minaj. I needed the blog for mental and emotional support as much as it needs me to actually exist.  It's the most personalized my writing has ever been in that sense.  Perhaps the writing was better or worse for it, but I can't get around the fact that, after pouring in a significant amount of thought and time into such a silly thing, I felt like I needed some closure. 

Ultimately the truth shows that this blog was not really about keeping you all informed, or striving to attain some great internet literary status.  It was about keeping me sane.  Mission accomplished.  

To all my friends back in Australia who might stumble across this final post, I do miss you.  I had an amazing time which is due, not to the fact that I was having an adventure in a foreign land, but because I got to meet some pretty genuinely interesting and caring people.  If you are reading this, then chances are that includes you.  

My life is exceptionally unexciting right now, though things are coming around.  Living in a fixer-upper with two (soon to be three) other guys can only yield so many good stories so, soon there will be a new blog up detailing our current misadventures.  It will be co-authored and it will be uninteresting and poorly written.  It is for us, not for you.  Still, you are welcome to read it.  Read it.  Please.  I love the little graph that shows how many people read it. 

So, this is the last post for the blog: Better or Worse than Nicki Minaj.  My battles against poor pop-music will continue.  My quest for truth and love has only just begun.  Come along, won't you?

Cheers,
John Melmoth


P.S.
Nicki Minaj is still literally my least favorite famous person ever. 

End of Ze World: A Prologue

The end is nigh.  

In five hours I will be on a plane.  By the time most of you read this, I will already be on a plane.  I really have too much to write about, too many humorous stories of five minute interactions I could stretch out into paragraphs and paragraphs... maybe even a full-length feature film.  But as my blogging has gone in the past, I pick one minor and rather uninteresting topic, throw in a few puns or clever descriptions and do my best to get a few chuckles out of the few Russians, Canadians and Hungarians reading this. 

I am spending my last few hours in Australia fighting off sleep, drinking chocolate coffee drinks, watching a wonderful series called "Black Books" and wondering what to make of the last three months of my life.  That last part might take a while.  I will try to recap some major motifs from the last few months.  Consider this the prologue to the upcoming series of final posting.

Oh heavenly days I cannot wait to be done with this blog.  Writing has, at times, felt like what I imagine spiders who get their legs pulled off by terrible children with freckles feel like.

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, French Student Teacher is completely behind me.  But the idea of the French Student Teacher will always be in front of me.  You know what I mean.  Don't you?

Student Teaching is done.  I had a very warm goodbye from the staff.  Cards, cake and a farewell speech written by my cooperating teacher and who left sick.  I ended up giving my own farewell speech, really a bit of foreshadowing for when I will inevitably give my own eulogy due to a lack of interest and attendance.

I visited a class of grade 2 and 3 students.  They asked for my email, pulled my mustache and sang a farewell song to me.

People have asked me if I am excited to go home.  They have asked if I will miss Australia or what I rate my overall experience here.  If it was worth it or if I will come back.

The answers are: yes, yes, 9/10,  yes and yes if I can.  

I don't know what else to write at this time, except that above all things I have a bittersweet taste at the back of my mouth.  I will miss the people here and I long for the feeling Michigan dirt has on my feet.

If you read this, I will either see you soon, or never see you again.  Neither of those are sure things and sorry for the blunt honesty, but whether or not I see or don't see you again things will turn out alright.

Cheers,
Melmoth

Ice Shall Cover the Desert

I recently spent three full days in Melbourne city with four adults supervising fifty-five students.  The entire experience was better than Nicki Minaj though, like any experience there were moments that were worse than that woman whose voice has such a knack for grinding my gears, like sand... sand just gets everywhere. 

I noticed some things, I witnessed some things and I took part in some things.  I will do my best to include only the most interesting in this post.

The first day was the longest day.  Up early for school and a long bus ride into the city, followed by the house rules of the hotel.  By 11:00 AM it felt like a full day had passed.  That tends to happen when you are directed, guided and instructed.  Even as a chaperon I felt exhausted with the amount of information pumped into my brain.  Perhaps the students weren't as affected, simply because they only had to worry about themselves (which they followed through with perfection, every one of them) and not a group of veins bursting- with-hormones teens hopped up on adventure and American television.

Regardless, the first day is a blur of shops, bedazzled clothing, shoes on sale for 130 dollars, the weight of guilt from a homeless shelter visit and the sights of a tower nearly 300 meters tall.  I may take time to unpack the visit to the homeless "shelter."  Really a church trying to figure things out and help people, though their methods are a bit unorthodox.  Later perhaps.

Day two went the quickest due largely in part to the evening activity of ice-skating. This was the time I let myself be a student rather than an adult, at least in shifting towards the front of the line to snag a pair of skates.  It wasn't until I sat down, my Canadian friend Byron suggested I traded them in for hockey skates, as he had done.  At the counter, the staff member of the largest ice skating complex in Melbourne (dare I say Australia!?) eyed me suspiciously, mustache and all, and asked if I was with the school.  "Why yes, I'm on staff" I replied with a shrug of my flannel draped shoulders.  More hesitation from behind the counter.  I couldn't see his hands.  They could have been fingering a silent alarm, or a sawed-off shotgun considering how nervous he looked.  "Hey kids!  Is this guy one of your teachers?!"  He shouted towards the dozen students in line.  A unanimous "yes." rang out and he ordered a skate grunt to retrieve a pair of 11's, while apologizing to me thrice with "...I just had to make sure, ya know..."

We also had to wear helmets.  As Byron said, "It just feels so right!"

I can tell you really want to know why I loved skating so much.  I still can only half skate backwards.  I still can only half stop.  I still am kind of fast and mostly stable.  Compared to the Australians, I was like Michael Gretzky, three time curling champion!  But even this was not the reason I will always remember skating in Australia.

I am in a country where I feel as though I mostly fit in.  I feel that people mostly like me, at the least they pretend to like me to my face.  While I was shredding that ice like a every Parmesan cheese grader advertises it can shred Parmesan cheese, I felt like everyone was back in Michigan with me, rather than me being in Australia with everyone else.  I didn't feel home, but it is the closest I have gotten to feeling at home in Australia, to even feeling known or understood.  The simple pleasure of moving on the ice (and oh when the Zamboni freshened the ice) carried me thousands of miles and made me fall in love like I haven't felt since...

The final day of the trip was the students "Amazing Race."  The other teachers and myself wandered, shopped and ate food.  For an hour and a half Byron and I sat in the garden at St. Patrick's Cathedral and asked students theological and philosophical questions as part of the race challenge. 

Here is an overhead shot of St. Patrick's

I will not include the questions here because that is a great way to start a string of arguments involving people wanting to be right.  If you want to hear what kind of questions an America exchange student and an ex-Canadian now Australian ex-youth pastor asked 9th grade students while sitting in the garden of a beautiful cathedral, you can ask me for them and I'll send them along, also including the answers and why your answers are wrong. "Dead wrong."

Tomorrow I dine on Crocodile Pie.

Cheers,
Melmoth

And let me tell you, that ice-skating was better than Nicki Minaj more so than anything else I have written about.

The Edge of the Guest House

I remember my dad telling me a story about the phrase Eureka!; this phrase must always be declared as an exclamation.  

I am not sure if I asked where the phrase Eureka came from, or if he had read it in the paper, or made it up to entertain me, as many fathers should continue to do.  I do know that I will never attempt to validate or refute the story's authenticity.  I would rather be wrong for the rest of my life then tarnish, even if menially and superficially, the memory and story my father gave me.

Some scientist... a forefront thinker.  I forget who.  I know it is someone obvious like Galileo, or Plato, or Da Vinci, was floating in a bath tub pondering something about things floating and mass and the idea of displacement. 

(It is amazing how much we remember and how much we forget all at the same time.  I remember so much more than I realized by simply typing out the introduction to the story, but cannot recall the main character's name!)

He suddenly had an epiphany, as most people who are remembered or half-remembered do.  He immediately jumped up out of the tub and, in a flurry of white scientist beard and eyes sunken in wrinkles he ran down the street to screaming his wife's name "Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!" stark naked for all Glycon and Zeus to see, oozing with jealousy. 

And so, Galivincto solved a problem that had been giving him quite the itch and is remembered for his catch-phrase as well as his ability to run through a street naked and be remembered as a hero.

Today I asked another teacher what they missed most about Australia when they spent a few months working in England.  Three things stood out.  The first was space: Australia is to England as an Obese American is to an Irish midget.  

Too far...?

The food.  An obvious one here.  How huge a role food plays in our lives, and how little notice we give to eating it, and how little thought we put into not eating it and all the time in between.  Yet it is always on our minds.


I don't know what I would do if I couldn't eat.  I know what I couldn't do if I couldn't eat.  I couldn't do a lot of things.  I suppose I could decompose if I couldn't eat.  I like eating.  We all do.  I had McDonalds for the first time in Australia today.  It tasted like America and boy was it the worst way for me to feel like I was at home.

The third thing was just a sort of mishmash of missing the familiarity of the soil and all the things you do on the piece of soil you are most comfortable with. 

Sitting in an internationally focused "Guest House" hostel, I feel more at home than I have yet in Australia.  Perhaps because Melbourne on the surface is a big city like Grand Rapids or Chicago or Indianapolis.  Perhaps it's because I have thousands of Ronald McDonald calories sinking my gut through the bed mattress like an anchor cutting through sea water.  Maybe it's because I am flying home in seven days and everything but my body is already there. 

I don't know what I will miss most about Australia, and I don't know what I currently miss most about America. I will exclude missing people in my "What did/do you miss most" scenarios.  Missing people is a given.  


I do know that when I am not at the mountains, whether Rocky, Smokey or Appalachy, I miss the mountains.   I know that I miss moving East to West, following the sun and the trails walked ten generations ago.  I know I miss feeling family through the walls of rooms, or in their car as they drive home from work.  I miss knowing where police prefer to sit, and which gas stations give their donuts away at a certain time.

When I figure out exactly what it is I miss which may very well be what makes us all human then maybe I will be able to get away with running down the street naked, shouting my wife's name.  I am sure if I ever figure it out I'll be old and close to death.

Cheers,
Melmoth 

Instructions on the Bathroom Wall

A million to one.  Those are the odds I just made up that a shark will attack and or eat you when you are swimming, surfing or body boarding.  Every time an individual enters the water they have a million to one shot that a shark is going to ram into their body, eyes rolled back with their pointy teeth bulging into bones.

For those of you unfamiliar with odds... imagine you are a gladiator fighting in an arena.  In order to be given you freedom you have to beat a certain amount of guys.  The almighty Caesar points at you and bellows, "You must fight off one million mans, or all your base are belong to us!"

In all reality, the odds are probably more like ten million mans against one man.  Often people use the phrase of comparison that may sound something like, "Dude, that was a drive in movie night of biblical proportions!"  Well, if we want to go Biblical proportions on man versus man odds, Samson killed 5000.  One of David's Mighty Men killed 800.   Anyone in the Bible kill a million people?  Nope.  Do people get eaten by sharks?  Yup.  So a lot of people are swimming.  More than a million, or ten million a year.

What I am trying to say is that, it could happen to you, but it won't happen to you... it shouldn't happen to you.  What I am really trying to say is that fear is to paper as logic is to rock.

So would I rather take my chances putting my meager life savings on the roulette wheel or swim every day of summer in the ocean?  That would only up my odds of coming into unsavory contact with a meat eating aquatic monster to around ninety mans against a million mans.

I say, "Let it ride Black Thirteen!"

I did manage to stay in the water for an extended period of time, and even tried surfing.  I now know the literal definition of "catching a wave" though I was unable to trap one myself.  I came close, but they are so dang slippery.  Like an squid's head.

After my blessedly uneventful foray in the waves, I took a walk down the beach and found a mini-peninsula between two coves where the waves crashed into each other at more or less right angles.  They would barrel through one another like a relentless game of "Red Rover" and continue on into the ocean.  They left behind a sort of crisscross "X" of ripply waters full of sand and wood bits that moved like crawling bugs as the waves receded, pulling everything back only to smash it all on the shore moments later.  It was peaceful and made me think of Isidora.

On the way out, I stopped in the bathroom.  For men, peeing takes place in a long, chest high metallic trough. At eye level were the words, in a fat black marker, "Stand up on the step and piss in the urinal."

I took a picture and followed said directions.

Cheers,
Melmoth


PS
By request, here is the photo.