An Elephant of One's Own

For all those who are still literally shaking with laughter at the childish tantrums of the self-defined losers in the recent US elections, well, OK, I can raise a smile too, but it's a bit of a squiggly one. Obviously, living in Ecuador I'm only slightly less removed from the ripples of consequences than if I lived on Neptune (I refuse to entertain the possibility that either Trump or Clinton could pinpoint Ecuador on a map, though I'm willing to concede that Clinton would at least home in on the right latitude: she's a Wellesley girl, after all, and the name is a bit of a giveaway); there's bound to be some sort of butterfly effect, but not knowing what that will be prevents me from going all vaporous over it. Whether the OPEC per-barrel goes up (allowing the university where I work to buy some toilet paper) or down (forcing me to scavenge in bins behind Chinese restaurants) I guess really depends on which pussies yer man grabs and in which order, and I don'...

It's finally started to rain. My mind has, in consequence, woken up after a long hibernation. There's a little rivulet on the wall behind me descending from the pointless hole made for the dud air conditioning unit. Outside in the patio you can smell and feel on your skin the standing ovation of the flowers. (I just checked.) My son is so eerily like me, he even has trouble with maths. From the little I've read, there are two schools of thought in teaching maths: one, adhered to by my own teachers back in Primary, holds that you should make numbers and operations comprehensible to children by talking about pizzas, pencils and basketball teams; the other holds that this is a perversion of the sacred concept of number, which is but imperfectly adumbrated in nature, and that you should give it to them straight: the number three is not an abstraction arrived at from successive contemplation of little groups of things, on the contrary, the little groups of things a...

When it never rains, people go mad. That's what's happened to me. Maybe it's what's happened to everyone round these parts. But don't take me as an authority on people round these parts (or anywhere else), since though I've been here a good many years (what is it now? Twelve? Thirteen?) I still haven't quite given up on the original working plan I had when I came here, which was as in Procol Harum's Rum Tale: to "hide from the natives" and "live only on rum" (the reason being as stated clearly in the song). You can see me doing this between classes. Not the rum part, since I have to drive home later on, but the hiding part. I sneak round the back of the building and inhale dry woodland. That makes me less of an expert on people than someone who might, say, have conversations and stuff like that. I was never very good at having conversations. I listen to other people when they really let rip (generally at work dos in some commandeere...

By incoherent I mean trying to bung everything I can remember having thought in the last twelve hours into one post, to save time. One day I will actually do this properly, you know, plan what I'm going to say, put the coloured clothes in one basket and Tirant Lo Blanc in another, and all of that. First, my treacherous pulse rate and shaky hands: damn and tarnation. Today a Shoveaceous Cult member in a natty suit and a rather dog-eared Cassandra-type woman with a Puritan face came visiting. Apparently they wanted to flog us a "reading program" for a special low, low reduced price of one and a half thousand bucks. For that you get one or two hours a week of "training" for a year, at the end of which they guarantee (money back!) that you will read 2,000 words per minute with a hundred per cent testable recall rate. Since they themselves administer said "test" I don't see how they could fail, really: I mean, if I gave one of my students the word ...