Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

Camp finished last week. I suppose I should have been updating more often; letting you all in on the inner workings of the summer camp lifestyle, but I didn't. Honestly, I could have cared less about this camp than any of the previous ones I have worked at. In previous years I found myself stressing out and making an effort to be liked by the children and to teach them english properly. This year, camp was just a means to an end, and that end was the paycheck. About half-way through the camp I realized 2 things: 1) I really didn't like this batch of kids. 2) Yelling all day was starting to take a toll on my voice. I admit that I freaked out a bit about my voice. After a year of not being able to sing, my vocal therapist had finally told me that I was doing well enough to start again. A month later, because of some stupid kids, I was running into a sore throat. If the children had had any interest in learning English then perhaps it would have been a different story, but they di...

13-15 year old boys should be confined to prison cells made of cold shower stalls. I would tell you all to lock up your daughters, except that the girls are equally inappropriate, though in a different way. It's odd. guys will tell you comments about themselves that you wish they would keep secret (I have heard the word "masturbation" more times here than the rest of my life combined, and lets remember that most of my friends are celibate 20-somethings...). The girls don't comment on themselves as much as they do about others (half-joking with guys about the aesthetics of their posteriors or that they want to bear their children). So maybe we just need to lock everyone up in individual cold shower stalls... miles and miles from each other. Having a large group of pretty female camp counselors doesn't help things. This is mostly because they equate small stature and beardlessness to innocence. But then at night I can hear the boys rating the counselors'... var...

Summer is here again. The air is heavy with the kind of heat that distorts distant roads. Those hot roads that slowly seep through the rubber soles of your shoes and roast your feet. Then you walk around barefoot on cold tiles or shady grass, or plunge them over the side of the pool. The landscape, once made of growing grass is now a snare cockleburs and sticker-patches, waiting to hitch a ride on the unsuspecting passerby. And as the season implacably moves into July, I have entered my own sticker-patch. I have entered a world of pubescent passions and anxieties, of linguistic impossibilities, of being overworked and underpaid... I am at summer camp , once again. Last year I was in Burgos, land of blood sausage, cathedrals and unseasonable cold. This year, as I was two years ago, I am in Ciudad Real; in the middle of La Mancha, and I am beginning to see why it's most famous resident, Don Quijote, was doomed to go mad. All is dry and hot. Your sweat dries on your skin before it f...

the setup It has been an exciting couple of weeks. The Eurocup has been in full swing once again. For my foreign readers who live under rocks and have no concept of european sports, the Eurocup is essentially the same thing as the World Cup except that, well, you got it, it is only among European nations. Recently, some mexicans friends of the family were here, and they said that they actually favored the Eurocup more than the World Cup and certainly more than the American Cup because they said that the overall quality of the teams was better. It makes sense, in the Eurocup you don't have to limit the number of European teams to make room for crappy teams like Saudi Arabia or Trinidad and Tobago. Now, in these kinds of competitions, Spain is always one of the favorites numerically, but not in reality. Spain always ranks among FIFA's top 5 teams in the world. And yet, it is notorious for getting booted out of any competition at the quarter finals stage (if that!). Despite being ...