If you have known me for any length of time, you are probably aware of my long standing aversion to cell phones. My boycott was ended when I was given a Blackberry by Global Action (see the for sale ad) a few years ago. Since, I have become much more accepting of them as a necessary evil, but today I can honestly say that I love my phone.
We were doing a presentation on the ills of smoking at a school in the village of Voikova today and I needed a restroom. I was guided to the teachers' facility and upon entering, was greeted with the view below...
Not that interesting...until you look closer. On the window sill is an open book with pages visibly missing. 
Upon even closer inspection, you may see that the paper in the trash can directly below is suspiciously similar to that of the missing pages. I did a sanitary and discrete check to verify that my suspicions were correct and was vindicated. To summarize for the slower folks...in the teachers' restroom they are using some piece of Russian/Ukrainian literature for toilet paper...the teachers, for the love of Pete!!!!I hope you all enjoyed this brief glimpse into my life here and my twisted way of dealing with it.
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Oh my gosh Matt this was hilarious! I personally have had to use paper from some novel while going to the bathroom in Russia (only because I couldn't find my kleenax in my back pack!).....not as comfortable as Charmin! Turns out, one of the kids at the orphanage we were at took my tissue from my back pack...and my chapstick..and my gum...and my deck of cards....oh the list goes on. I love bathroom stories...Give us more! :-)
ReplyDeleteI'll see if I can find a copy of An Inconvenient Truth. Maybe a shipload of 'em. Reduce, re-use, re-cycle. See if we can't start cleaning something up around here...
ReplyDeleteNICE!
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that you guys use up these great lines on my posts?!? You're clever enough to pull some stuff together on your own sites...Just kidding, thanks for the comments and I love the idea.
Titles to also consider shipping are:
ReplyDeleteDeliverance
Gone With the Wind
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity's Rainbow
Things Fall Apart
The Sound and the Fury
Play it as it Lays
Naked Lunch
Lord of the Flies
Well, no one probably knows who I am (Mark Pollard's wife and blog-surfer) but as a high school teacher, I have to stand up for Things Fall Apart and Lord of the Flies as two very good novels to teach. They impacted my students and made them think.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love Gone with the Wind myself--it was my grandma and I's book to read.
However, after teaching simultaneous Steinbeck this fall, I'd ship The Pearl and Grapes of Wrath.
I'll add anything by Michener to the list of things to clean up the ship. Everything he wrote has a high wipe-per-book ratio.
ReplyDeleteI hope both of you teachers know that you are exempt from this statement, but obviously public education failed me. I recognize embarrassingly few of those titles....and I am a fairly avid reader!
ReplyDeleteAmanda, thanks for your input! Without much reading material over here, at this point I'd take Steinbeck.
I am glad you said that Matt -- I don't know if I have read any of the books (even the ones that I recognize)
ReplyDeleteOh, oh, Michener! While I recognize the great number of pages, I must admit, reading Michener novels got me through a lot of night shifts at the Chugwater Super 8.
ReplyDeleteI understand if you don't recognize the titles, especially if you attended the C. Springs school system. Mark wouldn't recognize them either.
My students volunteer that they'd also like to ship Dickens, but I won't let 'em.
Dickens always made me want to take a ship - at sea or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, widely-read literary works need not be great, only popular among influential people. The epic poem Beowulf was not the most popular piece of literature in its day though it is the bane of high school seniors across the USA. Its current popularity lies in the fact that the one (and only one) copy of the manuscript intrigued a professor who was compiling a textbook at the time. There are literally hundreds of copies of "The Dream of the Rood" from the first milennium (in Old English, like Beowulf), but few read it because it was not placed in such a prominent position by a textbook compiler.
Someday, future generations may find lots of books from Oprah's book club, but that doesn't mean they're the best literature.