This is one day out of my working life in Slovakia. This is why I don’t really need a holiday. I have arranged my life as an endless vacation

I get up at 5 am.

I listen to On Contact with Chris Hedges while I get ready. I send the video to one of my best students so we can discus it. It’s about our toxic self-involved culture with its emphasis on looking good in picture. Everyone trying to be some sort of celebrity in some way.

I walk over to a bank to meet my first student of the day. The lesson starts at 7 am. He wants to have the lesson before he starts working. We talk about the economy for 90 minutes. It’s challenging and interesting to hear his viewpoints. His main drive is that the economy should be fair. This topic is too big to really cover in a 90 minute lesson, so I suggest we continue with it next time. I note that we talked about fairness today, but strictly within the current capitalist system. Where we seem to disagree is that I think consumers contribute to poor working conditions because we want cheap products. We want people to have a decent salary, but we don’t want to pay for products. This is a paradox that’s rather hard to solve. And if we don’t buy products then the current economic system would collapse.

On foot I march – for lack of a better word – to the next company where I teach.

I have three different groups here. All women.

With one lady I discuss her interesting family situation.

With one other lady – one my favorites – I spend more than double the amount of time I am actually paid for, but I don’t care. She doesn’t have a lot of work and I have some time. We cover psychology, Gestalt therapy and some issues she’s struggling with. She’s one of the few students who is interested in hearing about my life and always asks good questions. I teach her about 60 slang words, but mostly we debate on psychology. She brings up a concept she has in mind of reforming our relationship culture. She feels men and women should not be living together and that people should have multiple partners. I point out that she seems to be waiting for society to change so she can start living like that. I tell her that there’s nothing to stop her from arranging her life like that even now. She says this is true, but that she has some internal block.

She’s one of the nicest people I know and to look at her calms me down. Why go to Rhodos if I can look at her. Her curly hair is wildy more breath taking than any kind of speck of nature anywhere on this planet. On top of all she’s got a fun sense of humor. I got her the book of bunny suicides today. She brought me plums. A lady like her is like an oasis in this intellectual-spiritual desert that is known as Slovakia.

The next student meets me at my home. She is well-read and no stranger to documentaries. The entire lesson is devoted to Albert Speer, the nazi who said sorry. When my wife hears about this she thinks – yet again – that I have finally lost my mind, but she admits that the student was very satisfied. She bumbed into the student on her way out. I mean, this student likes to get to the bottom of things.

The next student also comes to my home. On a Monday all my students are women, except for the one at the bank. In general Slovak women are far more willing to expand their knowledge and skill set than Slovak men. There are of course plenty of Slovak men who want to improve themselves, but Slovaks females are in general just more determined to build a life than Slovak men.

This student has an excellent command of Dutch. We talk mainly about ecology. We both come to the conclusion that we are both not very willing to do much for the environment. I try to eat as vegan as my masochism allows and I kinda, yes, kinda, try to not buy too much plastic, and I go on foot everywhere I can, but that’s probably where it ends. I agree with George Carlin that perhaps human beings were only created by nature in order to create plastic. The planet will be just fine if humans go extinct by their own stupidity.

It’s the end of the day and this was a CALM day. I’ve made 110 euro. On a regular Monday I make 155 euro. This is not counting the money I make through the website you are currently on.

I’m not tired. During all my classes I made a bigger effort than is really required of me, just because I want to.

I do not have a life that I want to escape from, so I don’t need a holiday.

The only thing that exhausts me is the administrative part and the fact that I have to travel outside of Bratislava as well.

I have zero need to go to Rhodos as am sure a tree in Rhodos looks like a tree, water is wet there and the sun is warm. Am sure my Greek brothers and sisters are the same pernicious, selfish, defensive, greedy, fleshy transport for psychopathic genetic trash you can meet anywhere else in the world. When it comes to Rhodos I’m entirely satisfied with the information provided on its Wikipedia page. Hell, I may even read a book on Rhodos, or at least a book on the Greek economy, as I’ve done several times in the past. If I care about Greece at all, it’s because I’d like to know more about its economic crisis which was created and exacerbated by the moneyed elite in Europe.

So no, I don’t want to go on holiday. When I was 18 a psychiatrist told my parents I would build my life around my hobbies and I did.

When I see people wasting money and time on some island, I don’t know whether I should cry or laugh or quickly open a German documentary so I don’t have to think about ludicrous human acitivities. Call me autistic if you like. I suppose I’m totally autistic, but not when I choose not to be.

I wish to thank this otherwise insanely immoral world for paying me to do what I would be doing anyway, so I can buy food that I did not need to grow, clothes I don’t need to make and infrastructure I did not need to construct.

What’s amazing about our current system is that you can make all these things appear just through words. My currency is words.

It’s a lot of fun. And I feel less and less guilty about my privileged situation. You know why? Because when you were cycling, mountain climbing, boozing, dancing, rope skipping, I was being made fun of because I missed my bus stop because I was studying Latin.

Und ich glaube nicht, dass die Gegner, die damals noch gelacht haben, heute auch noch lachen