Stefany and Tania, photos and passports, students and wrestlers.
For Stefany: a reply to your request for the story of the lost passport, plus stuff about the trouble photos can get you into with mean students and mean wrestlers. And a nod to Tania. And a poem.
The wonderful Palmieri family. Former students of mine, sisters Tania (left) and Stefany are with their parents.
Stefany, you asked on MySpace (I loathe MySpace) about the story of the lost passport, since you have been reading my nutty LJ entries posted since January. Well, it's been told so often BUT, anyway, ho-hum, here it comes again.
In April of 2001 I ran a trip to Italy for students, my last ever. I sometimes refer to it as the trip from hell because of cancelled flights, barely-made connections, wayward luggage, an asshole moderator from the other school we were with, etc.
One student (Drew Cordeiro, from Tania's class of 2003) lost his passport. It simply disappeared on the tour bus while we were leaving Venice. It may have fallen into the bus heating vent; it may have been dropped elsewhere. The Wicked Witch of the West may have taken it and sold it to buy sexual lubricants for the entire coven. We don't know.
In Florence the following day, a free day for all the gang, I had to accompany the student to the U.S. Consulate to begin applying for a new one. We had to report the loss to the Italian police, get a new photo taken, return to the consulate for paperwork. BUT...the consulate was closing for the afternoon! So, we had a nice gourmet three-hour lunch at Antico Barile. When we returned to the consulate it was of course closing again for the day!
So we did the only logical thing: we went to Pisa, because, like one Dillon, Drew had a Leaning Tower of Pisa fetish. The next day we had to return while the group went off Assisi. We got the replacement passport, went by train to Assisi to rejoin the group. In the evening some students hoisted Drew up with his new passport in hand in celebration of his regained citizenship.
Now this narrative will take a sharp turn. If you have perused this journal, you have seen that I am a compulsive photo-taker. Sometimes that can be good, sometimes for a teacher that can cause problems. In 2001 I took a photo of a girl (and plenty of other kids) during spirit week. A month later, when she was worried about her grade in my class, she enlisted the help of her parents in getting out of my class by claiming that I had stalked her for the purpose of taking photos of her to masturbate with as well as showing dirty pictures in class while discussing Dante's Inferno...actually the famed illustrations of Gustave Doré. Her real goal was to get out of a class she wasn't doing well in. The administration strongly backed me, but the agony I went through because of her viciousness was one of the factors coaxing me into early retirement two months later.
Just today, photos I took and posted on a backyard wrestling website garnered the commentaries of a couple of posters that I was an old creep Italian teacher who had taken a lot of photos of one particular student. So I deleted all the nice photos and genial comments I had made, and I shall never return there again. If I do nice things for a friend that are going to be construed as perversions by his acquaintances, then I had better re-examine everything I do, since no additional good deed is likely to go unpunished. I have had some bad similar experiences with that sort of thing in the past month or two. I don't predict anything like that here on LJ...hopefully.
Now the positive. I had a great breakfast yesterday with Mike Coutts and I already posted about that. I had a terrific broiled Arctic char at Hemenway's today with a dry Stoli martini, and that, together with the messages of one nice Stefany and one nice Tania, have ultimately turned my day into a good one.
I end with a poem for Stefany and Tania:
Stefany would not accept "Stefania"
to rhyme with her sister's Tania.
For this she truly had a mahnia
that drove me nearly insahnia!
The wonderful Palmieri family. Former students of mine, sisters Tania (left) and Stefany are with their parents.
Stefany, you asked on MySpace (I loathe MySpace) about the story of the lost passport, since you have been reading my nutty LJ entries posted since January. Well, it's been told so often BUT, anyway, ho-hum, here it comes again.
In April of 2001 I ran a trip to Italy for students, my last ever. I sometimes refer to it as the trip from hell because of cancelled flights, barely-made connections, wayward luggage, an asshole moderator from the other school we were with, etc.
One student (Drew Cordeiro, from Tania's class of 2003) lost his passport. It simply disappeared on the tour bus while we were leaving Venice. It may have fallen into the bus heating vent; it may have been dropped elsewhere. The Wicked Witch of the West may have taken it and sold it to buy sexual lubricants for the entire coven. We don't know.
In Florence the following day, a free day for all the gang, I had to accompany the student to the U.S. Consulate to begin applying for a new one. We had to report the loss to the Italian police, get a new photo taken, return to the consulate for paperwork. BUT...the consulate was closing for the afternoon! So, we had a nice gourmet three-hour lunch at Antico Barile. When we returned to the consulate it was of course closing again for the day!
So we did the only logical thing: we went to Pisa, because, like one Dillon, Drew had a Leaning Tower of Pisa fetish. The next day we had to return while the group went off Assisi. We got the replacement passport, went by train to Assisi to rejoin the group. In the evening some students hoisted Drew up with his new passport in hand in celebration of his regained citizenship.
Now this narrative will take a sharp turn. If you have perused this journal, you have seen that I am a compulsive photo-taker. Sometimes that can be good, sometimes for a teacher that can cause problems. In 2001 I took a photo of a girl (and plenty of other kids) during spirit week. A month later, when she was worried about her grade in my class, she enlisted the help of her parents in getting out of my class by claiming that I had stalked her for the purpose of taking photos of her to masturbate with as well as showing dirty pictures in class while discussing Dante's Inferno...actually the famed illustrations of Gustave Doré. Her real goal was to get out of a class she wasn't doing well in. The administration strongly backed me, but the agony I went through because of her viciousness was one of the factors coaxing me into early retirement two months later.
Just today, photos I took and posted on a backyard wrestling website garnered the commentaries of a couple of posters that I was an old creep Italian teacher who had taken a lot of photos of one particular student. So I deleted all the nice photos and genial comments I had made, and I shall never return there again. If I do nice things for a friend that are going to be construed as perversions by his acquaintances, then I had better re-examine everything I do, since no additional good deed is likely to go unpunished. I have had some bad similar experiences with that sort of thing in the past month or two. I don't predict anything like that here on LJ...hopefully.
Now the positive. I had a great breakfast yesterday with Mike Coutts and I already posted about that. I had a terrific broiled Arctic char at Hemenway's today with a dry Stoli martini, and that, together with the messages of one nice Stefany and one nice Tania, have ultimately turned my day into a good one.
I end with a poem for Stefany and Tania:
Stefany would not accept "Stefania"
to rhyme with her sister's Tania.
For this she truly had a mahnia
that drove me nearly insahnia!