Polish Halloween

No time to write.
We’re getting ready for Polish Halloween.

Pictures from Poland – Autumn 2012

Some pre-Halloween fun

Harvest festival displays

Should we be concerned that “Baba” is pulling the plow?

And I was so inspired by this display that I cook some zupa ogórkowa.

It was delicious, if I do say so myself.

Refresh my memory

I had the opportunity to go to my 20th high school class reunion. That’s right. I’ve been out of high school twenty years and thank goodness for that.
Quite a few of my friends in Poland wanted to know if the reunion was like in American movies. I have to say yes and no. I wasn’t nervous or anything like in the movies. There wasn’t anyone I was dying to see or anyone I wanted to prove something to like in the movies. I was most worried that I wouldn’t remember somebody’s name (it happened) or somebody at all (it happened too – I was an exceptionally unobservant teenager).
Misiu was happy to go with me. He was also happy about the $2.50 bottled beer. His one comment looking around the room was, “Jeezus. That’s what 38 can look like”. In the case of some of my classmates, 38 can look pretty darn good and in the case of some others….well, better not mention it.
We circulated around the room and basically had the same conversation with 75 different people (and they had the same with us).
Quite a few of my classmates already knew  that I live in Poland (thanks Facebook) so the next obvious question was “What’s it like there?” which is exactly what I would have asked in the same situation.
One of my former classmates, not wanting to admit he had no idea where Poland was asked, “Refresh my memory. Where is Poland again?” I really do not mind this kind of question. I don’t get all in an uproar that somebody doesn’t know where Poland is…but in this case I was surprised because the question-asker is in the military, in the air force I think he said, and is trying to get transferred to the base in Germany. Don’t they have classes in military history? I told him that if he gets transferred to Germany Poland will be his closest neighbor to the East.
The stereotype says that Americans are uninformed and/or uninterested in the world around them. I found that many people were uninformed but given the opportunity to ask, were very interested in Poland. It was I who had difficulty in answering the question. What is it like in Poland? Well, I had 75 tries to fine-tune my reply.
I started with some lame comment like - “The old things are really old and the new things are brand new. And uhh, we have Mcdonald’s.” How did I win awards for public speaking? Seriously.
I basically said that Poland is a normal country. We drive on the right. We have 4 seasons. The people are nice, etc. and then I mentioned that we have socialized health care.
Please join me at my HS Class of 1992 20th Reunion.
Chris (totally cool girl from high school who for some reason lives in Poland and is married to some hot Polish guy who thinks Heineken for 2 bucks 50 cents per bottle is cheap)
Classmates (from various walks of life, all cool, most educated, ok one missing 4 front teeth on the top and 2 on the bottom but the rest pretty normal American folks)

Chris: Yeah, Poland is pretty normal. We have socialized health care.

The room goes silent.

Classmate: So how’s that work?

Chris (enjoying all eyes on her):Well, you pay a tax and you can go to the doctor and you don’t pay out of pocket.

Jaws drop. Then a wave of questions. Chris answers them all easily because they are all just different versions of the same question…starting with…

Amazed classmate: Soooo, you or your kid gets sick, what do you do?

Chris: You go to the family doctor.

Another amazed classmate who had earlier admitted to not visiting the dentist in over 20 years: And do you have to pay?

Chris: No.

Classmate: What about after hours?

Chris: You go to the after hours doctor.

Classmate: Do you have to pay?

Chris: No.

Classmate: What about at night or on holidays?

Chris: You go to the ER.

Classmate: What about when you have a baby?

Chris: There’s no additional charge.

Classmate: What about a hip replacement or something like that?

Chris: It’s not a perfect system. You have to wait but it is theoretically possible to get it under NFZ.

Classmate: What if you lose your job?

Chris: You and your children keep your coverage (and around we go…)

Classmate: Wow. That must be nice not to have to worry about your kids going to the doctor.

Chris: It is.

Classmate: But it comes at a cost.

Chris: Yeah, in taxes.

Classmate: No, you have to live under the socialist regime.

Chris: Yes, yes, the socialist regime.

So greetings to you, my red comrades out there and enjoy your life under the socialist regime.

Bang, Bang

America is a gun culture. That is without a doubt. If you live in a gun culture, you may not even notice it. When you leave it (and come back again), that’s when you feel its prominence.

As a child it was perfectly normal that we had guns at home. My father has a large gun cabinet containing all sorts of guns, but the majority are hunting rifles including his prized (and completely useless) muzzle-loader. Maybe I should explain that my father is not a cult leader defending his compound from the authorities. It is all much less sinister than that. I’m from rural Pennsylvania where hunting is a very popular sport and practically everybody I know has a gun of some sort as well as a gun cabinet or even a gun safe at home. This particular gun cabinet of my father’s is as tasteful as a gun cabinet can be but has remained a point of contention in my parents’ marriage as it doesn’t exactly “go” with my mother’s decor. Anyhow, it just has always been there and it still is there. Oh, what an inheritance I will have. I pretty much ignored the cabinet and its contents growing up. My father tried to interest me in shooting several times throughout my childhood. I wasn’t into it, so he gave up.
I will mention here that the keys to the “gun” part of the gun cabinet are locked in the bottom part of the cabinet. The keys to the bottom part of the cabinet are locked in a safe along with the keys to the Harley. And the ammo…I have no idea where that is kept. If we wanted to shoot something just like that, well, good luck. It would take us a good half an hour to get ourselves set up. I know because one year around Thanksgiving my father thought it would be a good idea to try to shoot a turkey from the flock of turkeys that had wandered into our yard. By the time he unlocked everything and realized that he didn’t have any ammo, those poor birds were long gone. And if we wanted to shoot an intruder, well, we would have to break the glass of the cabinet and then beat the intruder with the butt of a rifle.
When I moved from home to start my teaching career, I still was not far from guns, just a different kind of gun use. The school where I worked had a metal detector. It wasn’t for detecting belt buckles.
At my class reunion, one of my classmate’s husbands tried desperately to convince us that it is much safer if everyone carries a gun. He, himself, had decided to leave his gun at home, well, because he was drinking and he thought it best. He was chagrined when we didn’t congratulate him on the wisdom of his decision. He was absolutely sure that the Batman movie theatre killer would not have shot, killed and injured so many people if everyone had had guns. My argument was that the Batman movie theatre killer would not have shot anyone if no one had a gun. He proceeded to explain to me the error of my logic…and the conversation went around and around and around. Then he added some false statistics concerning some “European” countries and when I told him that we live in this mysterious place called “Europe”, he changed his tune. Misiu stated quite rationally that it is hard to kill a whole cinema of people with only a knife, even a big one, and we left it at that.
We were in America on vacation for 6 weeks and we managed to not get shot, on purpose or by accident, so I consider that a success. We had a lot of time to do what we wanted so I read a lot of books and tried to watch some TV (it is difficult to do with all those commercials). Our local library supplied me with an excellent selection of John Irving’s. I started with “Last night in Twisted River” which couldn’t have been written without a gun culture. That book couldn’t be set in Poland.  Same goes for “The World According to Garp” and practically all the other books I read and the films I watched.
The news each evening was horrifying. The shootings. The people carrying guns. And as an aside, the fires…wood-framed homes catch on fire quite frequently. Who would’ve thought?
Sometimes I think what I would do if the Germans or the Russians attacked Poland. (I usually have such thoughts when I am in my village house with the kids at night and I think about the German family who had to move out of my house years ago and the Polish family who moved in. I get weird thoughts at night.) How would I defend my family? We don’t own a gun. We have 2 axes and a pretty wonky pitchfork, but that’s all. And then I think about the probability of this scenario -my family standing alone against foreign invasion. What if the freedom of Poland depended on me and my shooting ability? Poland would be in deep shyte, if that were the case.
The way we behave in these cultures is different. I don’t behave as if someone could shoot me here in Poland. There in the US, I do. But who am I to question the right to bear arms protected in the United States Constitution? I’m just one, small person who would prefer to not get shot.
A quote from a nytimes article

Every day 80 Americans die from gunshots and an additional 120 are wounded, according to a 2006 article in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Those 80 Americans left their homes in the morning and went to work, or to school, or to a movie, or for a walk in their own neighborhood, and never returned. Whether they were dead on arrival or died later on in the hospital, 80 people’s normal day ended on a slab in the morgue, and there’s nothing any of us can do to get those people back.

And that is the human cost of our Second Amendment right. In my opinion, the cost is too high.

So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence — the lucky survivors — as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country’s blind embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it’s playing out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country.

The nytimes article quoted above was written by Theresa Brown, an oncology nurse and the author of “Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between.”

Spalone Suchary

I cannot tell jokes. Not even suchary*. I “burn” every joke even the lame ones. So I guess that makes my jokes spalone suchary, hee, hee burned toast.
C’mon, I do my best but I’m no Karol Strasburger.
I usually remember the punch lines though. However, I remember only the punch line and then proceed to burn the joke.
Do you know the jokes to these punch lines?

Wot morda (вот морда)

Zmuś się

Once and only once was I able to pull off a joke telling hat trick. It was at a party. I made up the joke myself. The butt of the joke was our supervisor. Everyone laughed. It was my first and last successful joke.
Here’s the joke told right before my one, perfect joke.

A lady goes to the doctor with a frog on her head. The doctor asks what’s wrong. The frog replies, “I’ve got something stuck to my ass.”

OK, total suchar. I know.
Here’s my joke.

Our supervisor goes to the doctor with a frog on his head. The doctor asks what’s wrong.

Long pause. The crowd leans in with anticipation. My perfect comedic timing is working its magic.
My workmates shout, “What did the frog say?!”

I don’t know, but our supervisor said, “I’m not paying”.

And I bask in the glory of the perfectly executed joke. (Our supervisor was a notorious cheapskate).
Ah, never to be repeated again.
*Suchary or sucharki are actually hard toast/biscuits, but in slang a suchar is a totally lame joke. Yeah, I’m down with the kids.

www.wolnoscodreligii.pl

As some of you know, the topic of religion and the role of religion in the public sphere is very close to my heart. Here’s my opinion in a nutshell. I feel that we shouldn’t press our religious or spiritual beliefs onto others. I believe that we should respect one another. I feel that many “believers” don’t realize that my lack of “belief” is in fact a “belief”. What I most strongly believe is that my right to not believe is just as valid as their right to believe. Whew, that’s a lot of “believing” in one paragraph.
Living in a quite religious country, I have learned when to keep my mouth shut (well, most of the time, well some of the time, ok, I’m getting better at it). I don’t talk about religion with people who seem to be sensitive about the issue. Just recently a new student, an IT guy in his early 30s, asked me if I was Catholic. I replied that I am not. Long story short, he’s going to pray for my salvation from eternal damnation…as is his right. He is an example of why many agnostics and atheists just keep their mouths shut and sometimes “turn the other cheek”. Not everyone is so kind and promises to pray for you when they find out that you don’t believe.* Why should I be embarrassed to say that I’m a non-believer? Hence, the billboard above which reassures me that I am not alone. (Don’t believe in God? You’re not alone.)
The next billboard states, “I don’t kill. I don’t steal. I don’t believe.” This message really hit me hard and here is why. My mother-in-law has disowned me. It happened about 6 months ago. We haven’t seen each other or spoken since, neither has my husband or my children. I’ve been debating if I should, could, would write something about it or not. The crux of it is that we are not going to christen our children and my mother-in-law finally asked why. Long story short, my mother-in-law said some horrible things to me and then I began defending myself and explaining what a good person I am – how I am a good wife and mother, how I help out at school and in the community. And then I realized what I was doing. I was trying to explain to someone that I am a good human being. What for? Even now, here, I feel the need to explain to you that I live a full life, that my family is part of the community, that my children know a lot about world religions, that we are good people. I will never, ever explain myself like that again to anybody…not even at the pearly gates.
*I also don’t like the phrases such as non-believer. I believe in something, just not what they believe in. The use of non-believer suggests that what the “believers” believe in is the one, true way and we “non-believers” are bereft of any of our beliefs or spirituality or even morality for that matter. But alas, I cannot find another way to phrase it, so I will stick with believers and non-believers.

Sponge Bob or Violetta Villas?

We need to come up with 4 Halloween costumes….I know, Halloween is more than a month away, but when you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate Halloween, dawdling on your costumes does not pay off. And everybody knows that I LOVE HALLOWEEN!
If you didn’t know that, well,
I LOVE HALLOWEEN!
So here comes the 4th annual “Bring Halloween to the Poles”.
The kids have a closet full of costumes already. They will figure something out, but what about us? What about the adults?
There are a few directions we could go…
First, we could go the obvious old-school route – clown, mummy, witch, pumpkin. Those costumes would be understood by all.
We could also go the famous-person route – Elvis, Violetta Villas, the Pope, Doda – except the kids won’t know who we are supposed to be. And I’m not so sure my neighbors would appreciate Las Vegas Villas with a sky-high blonde baroque wig in a princess gown dragging 9 pluszowy doggies behind her on a leash accompanied by the Pope, a Disney Princess and Spider-man.


Maybe this wig for Villas?

or this one?

nope, I think this one…

And I couldn’t forget about Misiu…I wanna rock! ROCK!

Another way to go would be some kid’s characters – Sponge Bob, the little Mermaid, some superhero. Everybody can dig those costumes.

We were also thinking of some professions – doctor, nurse, police officer, something like that. Misiu, however, cannot just be a doctor or a priest. His costume has to make some social commentary. His doctor costume must be accompanied by a fist full of money. His priest costume, now after the latest scandal, would have to include a can of whipped cream.
Traditionally, Misiu likes all costume ideas as long as we put the word sexy (or naughty or even slutty) in front of the name.


Nurse? What a boring idea but Naughty Nurse? Not too bad.
Witch? How cliche, but Sexy Witch? I told Misiu that the kids wouldn’t even know what I was supposed to be. He said that was ok, the daddies would get it.

Happy Pre-Halloween!