Slavic Shenanigans: Part One

Happy Administrative Professionals Day! Apparently. I looked up at my calendar before I started writing this (to get the date) and I realized that we are now assigning holidays to random professions. Hm. Well, I'm going to make my own days. April 28th is now Lumberjack Day. April 29th is now Gas Station Attendant Day (this holiday will be huge in New Jersey - the entire state will shut down and every now and again, anarchy will ensue). April 30th? Jizz Moppa Day. I mean, it's the worst job Rik could possibly think of, I think they deserve a day to recognize their efforts in keeping your porno theatres clean and jizz-free. I'll think of the rest later, I guess. In my opinion, of course, podriatists would deserve something like a whole week - they have to not only look at, but touch nasty-ass feet all day. I can't think of a worse occupation. I'd rather be a jizz moppa.

Anyhow, this is the first installment of writing down the ridiculous shit that goes on in my Russian class. I'm in the intensive track for Russian, meaning I take a year's worth of Russian in one semester. That also means that I have my Russian class four times a week, two hours per class. That's 8 hours of Russki goodness each week. So as you might expect, a lot of ricidulous shit happens during our classes.

Today, we were talking about holidays, and what particular people do on their favorite holidays. Considering my family doesn't really celebrate too many holidays, I said New Years was my favorite holiday. My professor then asked me to describe my New Year's celebration. Well, I don't really have a set thing that I do on New Years, so I just explained what I did this past New Year. I needed to know a word though... "bacon." Any of you who have spent time around Lokys, Liepa, or even Aras, will know why this is true. The professor called on me to tell about my New Year's party, and the first thing I do is ask, "Kak pa-russkiy... 'bacon?'" [How do I say 'bacon' in Russian?] Not only that, but I had to explain why bacon was such an integral part to our New Year's party. So here I was, explaining, IN RUSSIAN, Lithuanians' legendary love of bacon, which, apparently, my Ukrainian professor was fully aware of anyhow. When all she wanted me to do was talk about some kind of conventional holiday celebration.

Maybe people reading this won't find it funny, and maybe you had to be there, but fuck off, it's my site. That's the first notable thing that happened in class today. The second was as follows:

Classmate: "How do you say 'fun' in Russian?"
Professor: "What? We don't have 'fun.'"

Russians don't have 'fun.' They have drunken stupors.

Third piece of ridiculousness on the day came from one of my classmates, who is an idiot.

Professor: "Shto vash samuy lubimi praznik?" [What's your favorite holiday?]
Idiot: "Deyn' veteranov." [Veteran's Day]
Professor: "Shto?" [What?]

We then had to go around again, saying what meal we ate for that holiday, and then went around again, saying what kind of things we did. My professor called him out for being an idiot - basically because when (not if) the proctor asks him that question on his Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), he will be screwed because they will say "Oh, that's weird, explain why that's your favorite holiday..." Fucking idiot. That's not even the worst of it. When it was his turn to talk about his holiday, he tried to look up how to say "we decorate our house," in some dictionary he had. A side note. Trying to use a Russian to English dictionary is death. They are never right. For example, the word for "food" in our textbook's back-of-the-book dictionary actually means "nutrition." So people end up saying, "We have lots of nutrition at our parties." Okay. Tangent completed. Anyway, through the idiocy of using a Russian to English dictionary, the kid ended up answering the question of "What do you do for Veterans' Day?" by saying "We renovate our house."

The whole idea behind the way GW teaches Russian is to force you to use the words you know, and to use them correctly, rather than to grab a dictionary and just try to plow your way through, making grammatical mistakes and cultural faux pas's along the way. Dictionaries are virtually forbidden, for good reason. It only makes sense that an idiot like this guy would attempt such asininity. Then later on, when asked again what he did for his favorite holiday, he found a translated Chekhov short story in the textbook, and pulled out the phrase for "to feel negatively about capital punishment," and responded that that's what he and his family did on Veterans' Day. Thinking it was funny. This is what this kid does. Wastes the time of the rest of us. We're all better than him at Russian, and he still thinks he's good enough at it to merit wasting our time with his cretinism.

During the whole thing, a few of my classmates were laughing at him. Not with him, at him, but he thought people actually found him funny. I look across the table and to the left from me, and friggin' Pierogi Girl is laughing for some reason, and I think to myself "Stop laughing, it's just encouraging him to be stupid." Except instead of thinking it, I belted it out, full volume. People found this more funny than the kid's retardedity, so I guess that's good, but dammit, don't waste my class time unless you've actually worked hard enough to deserve the opportunity to say stupid shit!

I've given this kid a chance. We were kind of friends for a while back in first semester, but now he's just descended into a pit of egotism, thinking that he doesn't have to bother with homework, thinking he doesn't have to try in class, but also thinking he's good at Russian. Not to mention that he makes up stupidass stories about our old professor. Admittedly, our first-semester professor was eccentric (and angry... coming from me, this means something). But this kid has some kind of completely non-sexual infatuation with our old professor. He comes into class saying "Oh man, I bet [the professor] sits at home, and shouts DAAALLLZHZHHHHA!! at his kids all day," or "I saw [him] on the street today, and he was pedaling his bike at, like, a million RPM, like this..." as he makes some stupid noise and acts out what an angry bike rider would look like. As I said, I gave him a chance, but now he makes me want to bring a crowbar to class. Or better yet, some kind of trained large animal.

Homer: "Financial panther, eh..."
(goes into dream)
Banker Guy: Mr. Simpson, you are a dollar overdrawn.
Homer: GET HIM SHEEBA!!!
(panther mauls banker on command)