I swiped this from a college friend’s Google Chat status line, but oh my god, it’s the most amazing commercial I’ve ever seen in my life.
Friends
Stuff to Look At
Stuff to Read
forced relaxation
Friday, May 30, 2008
Damn, I’m having a nice night. By the end of this week, I was starting to feel like I was going to absolutely explode, all spikes protuding and all bile spewing forth. But I had the sense to give myself a total night off, and now I’m feeling just fine. I had the bright idea to ask a coworker to let me borrow his keyboard, and I spent a few hours messing around, and now I feel sooooooo much better.
There are two things that still really HURT about moving to China. I still miss my cats on a daily basis (you can take a crazy cat lady away from her cats, but you can’t … no, that sentence doesn’t work. Anyway, the point is that I’m going to be a crazy cat lady no matter what, and I’d give up a leg to snorgle with my kitties for a few minutes), and I really, really, really miss my piano. I’ve gone to the music store a few times and tried to play, but only wound up getting horribly depressed about forgetting practically everything I knew. But all by myself with just a keyboard and nothing but time, a lot of it started coming back, and it felt SO good to get my hands on some keys without anyone around.
I spent my first two years out of college working on the Ballade in G minor by Chopin, which is a ridiculous, difficult piece that I’d been advised against trying to learn. It’s completely beyond my ability, but I learned the bastard anyway, and by last summer I’d finally gotten it to the point that I was willing to play it in front of other people. Honestly, learning that piece is one of the things I’m the most proud of in my entire life. It’s, well, really, really rocky after seven months away from the piano, of course, but I satisfied myself that it wasn’t completely gone forever, and there are so many tiny little moments in that piece that feel SO GOOD to play.
I’m not any kind of a serious pianist - I do play, and I enjoy it enough to do it every day when I’ve got access to a piano, but that particular piece is special as all hell to me. I get into it in a way that I don’t really get into anything else. And I know I don’t play it as well as it should be played, but it makes me feel so damned good. It’s as over-the-top, loud, hyperemotional, stormy, and bipolar as I would be if I could disable the regulator between my mouth and my brain, and when I’m playing it I feel like it’s a chance to finally try to scream everything I’m too shy, insecure, whatever to say in words.
And Chopin… I’ve had a passionate imaginary relationship with that man ever since my junior year of college. I know it’s cliche to love Chopin, but when it comes down to it, I’m a walking cliche and I don’t mind that. I can defend him well enough - the music he wrote was NOT melodramatic pap, he was actually one of the most important things to happen to the piano since Bach - but at the end of the day, it’s just his melodies that knock me over and make me stop caring about anything else in the world.
Um, yeah, that’s it. I’m going to dance around in my pjs for a bit, then watch some tv, then drink a beer, and go to bed. I LOVE being a grown up, you know? Am I the only one who’s developmentally behind enough to still have moments where I remember how AWESOME it is that I can eat ice cream for breakfast if I want to, turn up my music and dance about like a fool whenever I feel like it, or book exotic vacations to tropical destinations all by myself? After six and a half years of technical adulthood, I’m still not over that.
torch and stress fit
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The torch came through Nanjing today, practically right outside my school. The powers that be dictated that class would remain in session, which was a joke - I trotted down to my 10:00 to find four unhappy looking students in a class of twenty-five. Chris was out of class, though, and he got pictures, if you’re interested. I hinted as strongly as I could that maybe those four should tell me they needed an extended toilet break or something, WINK NUDGE, because I felt awful for them, but they elected to stay and do absolutely nothing, and then watch their classmates return beaming and suffering no disciplinary consequences.
Class was a little bit of a zoo after everyone got back. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the extent of my students’ patriotism (and my students are well-educated, relatively liberal kids), and the Olympics are a HUGE point of personal and national pride. They returned from the street positively glowing with happiness and excitement (while the five of us glumly made the rounds to see the pictures and feel sorry for ourselves).
On a different note, I’m starting to feel really worn out and overworked. One of my classes is seriously struggling, and the only way I know to help is to take a really muscular approach that involves a lot of from-scratch materials. My other class is on the opposite end of the spectrum – they’re too advanced for the textbook we’re using, and so I’m spending hours and hours trying to figure out a way to work something challenging into easy material – which also comes straight from scratch. That class is also HUGE, and I keep winding up with stacks and stacks of things to grade. Plus I keep having students ask me for things, which is great - I’m glad that they trust me enough to do that. But still. Compiling lists of the most important lower level works of English literature, teaching the international phonetic alphabet, or helping someone hunt down nurse and doctor costumes add to the list of things to do.
It doesn’t help that I’ve overloaded myself with personal projects again. I’m currently running a schedule that includes an average of two hours of class preparation, plus up to an hour of daily grading, at least one of hour of self-taught Chinese writing (usually winds up being two), thirty minutes of guitar practice, and I’m trying to write more. I hate to whine about my blog’s quality, but it just seems like it used to be a lot more interesting, and blog time equaled happy time. I’d like to get back to that – not because I think this is a fantastic site or anything, but just because I used to enjoy it so much, and I’m starting to feel like all of my creativity is slowly draining out of me in a death spasm of IELTS essays and staff meetings. But it just seems like I never have time to really sit down and come up with something GOOD and INTERESTING to say. I wrote a huge post on the ecological significance of elephants yesterday, but got too tired to find enough links to round it out, and now it’s sitting in the drafts folder along with the epic post I’ve been trying to finish about the local punk scene, a half-finished essay about jumping into the deep end of ESL, the beginnings of what I thought was shaping up to be a pretty good piece about the things I hear out my window, etc.
I had it in my head that moving to China and working twenty hours a week would give me more time to work on personal crap, but it seems like I have so much less free time here than I did in the states. This probably has to do with cultural difficulty – at home, it wasn’t such an event to buy toilet paper or mail a letter, but here these things warrant their own bullet point on a to-do list. That’s ok, I’m just feeling like I’m in a position where I HAVE to find some down time, and I can’t figure out how to do it without compromising my integrity as a teacher or without losing a lot of hard work I’ve put into characters and guitar.
I’ve felt like this before (in China and in the US), and it never lasts forever. I just wish I could find a way to accomplish the things I want to accomplish without being a total stress freak case and maintain some semblance of a social life. I just feel like I can’t calm down. I keep having to force myself to stop worrying about things long enough to have a snack or watch a movie. There’s always something I *should* be doing, and it seems like I’ve got a list of things I need to do running in my head from the second I wake up to the second I fall asleep. BLAGGGGHHHH, and it’s only Tuesday.
Aiee, done, sorry. Just needed to vent.
I’ll end on a funny note. Today in my golden class, there was a section on polite language. I elicited some examples - please, thank you, excuse me, etc. and then asked for some examples of rude behavior. I was going for things like “hey you,” pointing, spitting, stuff like that. Instead I got a VOLLEY of profanity that positively made me blush, and I’ve been known to use some pretty raunchy language myself (this class is also composed of hard-working, overachieving angels). They definitely hit George Carlin’s seven, plus an astonishing variety of sexual terminology, compound words, and full collocations. I have to say, though, I was most impressed that they knew the word “skank.” I tell you, that class is totally ready for America.
Here are some pictures.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
(Oh you best believe I bought the opportunity for ridiculous dressup pictures…)
college, characters
Sunday, May 25, 2008
I graduated from Carleton College, which is a small liberal arts school in rural Minnesota. I clarify this because so few people in the states have ever heard of it. The conversation usually goes like this:
“Where’d you go to school?”
[brightly] “Carleton!”
[blank stare]
“It’s in Minnesota.”
[further blank stare until the other person comes up with the only thing they can think of to say] “Is it cold there?”
And I’m always tempted to say that, no, actually, it’s a secret tropical paradise that the natives are covering up by lying about snot-freezing subzero temperatures in order to scare tourists away. Anyway, I tell you this because I want you to understand why I almost passed out when one of my students asked me if I knew anything about it. It turns out that this student wants to apply to Carleton. I found this out yesterday, and I’ve already emailed admissions, burned her a CD of my Carleton pictures, printed out the application for her, and started drafting a letter of recommendation in my head. Exciting times.
In other news, I’m closing in on 100 Mandarin characters (this is emphatically no where near enough for me to be able to read anything, but it’s 100 more characters more than I knew before). I’ve been really bad about teaching myself Chinese. You’d think I’d be a little more motivated to work on that, what with living in China and all, but I can’t seem to stay focused on it for more than a couple of days at a time. But I’ve started getting really into characters. I guess that makes sense for me. I’m the sort of person who’d be perfectly happy if I went mute and had to use written language to communicate. I think I’d be happier, more social, and easier to get to know if I could just type everything I wanted to say. So maybe I was wrong to think that spoken Mandarin should be my first priority.
It’s really time-consuming and doesn’t make a lot of sense in my western brain. Sometimes there’s some logic to the character configuration - for example, the character for xue2 combines the character for “child” and the character for “roof” in such a way that you can read it as a child studying in a building. But then again, here’s a direct quote from my book regarding the character mei2 (not have): “The full form combines water with [phonetic symbol] to give the idea of death by drowning, or ‘not have’. ???? Also, mei3 means “beautiful.” It’s a combination of the characters “big” and “sheep.”
I’ve had to more than triple the number of figures I had to learn to write in English in order to write a handful of very simple sentences in Mandarin, and it’s been incredibly time consuming, but it’s a surprising amount of fun. It’s like having a couple of hours of art time every day. And every once in a while, I’ll see something I recognize on the street (”Oh, that store has something to do with a door!”).
And I’m really telling the internet about this because I’m locked into some sort of perpetual gold star quest. Be proud of me! I did something! I want to be special! etc.
the earthquake
Thursday, May 15, 2008
First of all, clearly, I’m still alive. It was weird being on the other end of that social phonemenon that causes people to make an instant connection between a catastrophe and the one person they know anywhere remotely near it. I was really touched by the concern, but WOW is Sichuan a long way away from Nanjing.
[some of the links in this post contain horribly upsetting photos]
I’ve got to say, though, that I’m really proud of my host country for its response. To my knowledge, nothing’s been covered up, hushed, or otherwise restrained, and I’m glad to see that. I realize that the decision to be so forthright about the devastation was probably a politically calculated one, but nevertheless - way to be, China. I sincerely hope that the government’s rapid response and transparent reporting of the quake provides a solid precedent for the future. From the above article from the New York Times:
Dali Yang, the director of the East Asian Institute in Singapore, said the government might have come to the realization that openness and accountability could bolster its legitimacy and counter growing anger over corruption, rising inflation and the disparity between the urban rich and the rural poor.
“I think their response to this disaster shows they can act, and they can care,” he said. “They seem to be aware that a disaster like this can pull the country together and bring them support.”
China’s had a really bad year. From protests to train wrecks to completely improbable blizzards, and now this. The news coming out of the area keeps getting worse and worse. The idea that nearly 20,000 people could be going about business as usual one minute and gone the next is something that I can’t really process. Please, if you’ve got the means, send a donation - thousands of people are homeless and grieving. And the only silver lining I can come up with is that at least they’re not in Myanmar, which is run by psychotic monsters. As unimaginably awful as the news out of Sichuan is, what’s happening in Myanmar is beyond disgusting and inexcusable.
In case you were wondering, Chengdu (in Sichuan Province) has a huge panda reserve, and the pandas are fine. And yes, I’m appropriately disgusted with myself for thinking about that as quickly as I did.
I’ve felt like I should post something about this since it happened, and I’ve been putting it off. I really am scared to talk about things that aren’t comfortably centered on myself. And believe it or not, that’s not entirely the result of egotism (although I’ll never deny that I suffer from that). I’m really afraid of publicly digging into things I don’t really understand, and with something like this, it feels really cheap and insincere for me to be blogging about the deaths of more people than I’ve personally known in my entire life on my new company laptop in my comfy, air-conditioned room with food, water, a bathroom, and a reasonable prediction as to what’s going to happen to me tomorrow. But what happened was absolutely fucking awful, and I guess I need to add my voice to everyone else’s. I’m going to give money as soon as I have some, but the only other thing I can do is let it be known that I am paying attention and hope that that counts for something. Does that make any sense?
hypochondria
Sunday, May 11, 2008
I am a RAGING hypochondriac, and you’d think that being aware of my condition would somewhat alleviate it, but no. I’m the girl who had her roommate drive her to the ER late at night due to swollen lymph nodes that I managed to convince myself were rapidly developing masses which would eventually block my air passages, had panic attacks over caffeine-induced heart palpitations (which, of course, made said palpitations worse), etc. I’m sort of in awe of the healthy human body, considering how many things can go horribly wrong with it, and I guess it just seems highly improbable to me that something ISN’T horribly wrong. Does that make sense?
Anyway, since moving to China, which is a BAD place to be spastic about one’s health, I have:
- convinced myself I’d suffered brain damage after drunkenly tumbling off a dance floor
- entertained the notions of SARS and bird flu during the couple of nasty colds I’ve suffered
- memorably panicked after a spectacular commencement of my menstrual cycle in a bar and started wailing to my friends that my kidneys were failing (said friends deserved a medal for how understanding they were about that one)
- had a strep scare
- had a flu scare
- had the usual round of cancer scares (see swollen lymph node episode referenced above)
Weird minor health issues are a whole new game here, though, since going to the doctor is considerably more of an ordeal when you can’t understand what anyone’s saying. It’s also a good idea to pay attention to one’s body and take care of it as best you can. Unfortunately, “paying attention” in my brain is the same process as “blowing things wildly out of proportion.”
So a few days ago I developed a small canker sore in a really uncomfortable place between my gums and my cheek (canker sores are gross, but not communicable). Saturday night we went to Castle Bar to see a show (which I mean to write about at some point), and it started hurting pretty bad. My jaw swelled up a bit, and after confirming that yes, my face was a little swollen, it went from “I’ve got an irritating minor problem” to “OH MY GOD MY JAW IS GOING TO ROT OFF AND I’LL NEVER SMILE, SPEAK, OR EAT AGAIN.” I bore it bravely without complaining for about twenty minutes (and offered many congratulations to myself for such unheard of stoicism), but before the end of the night, I was about to start weeping and thought I would have to sequester myself away and pray that I wasn’t dead due to blood poisoning before the morning.
And the end of this remarkably uninteresting story is that I found a really good cure for those things that’s not nearly as painful as ambesol or any of the other medications. I swished some whiskey around in my mouth for thirty seconds, and I could barely even feel it anymore. So, now you know, if you ever find yourself in need.
back to work
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Well, it’s Tuesday, and as a coworker put it, it’s like vacation never happened. However, I’ve got two new classes this term, I’ve lost the horrible IELTS classes that I had no idea how to teach and constituted five extremely painful hours of my workweek, and I’ve got most of my afternoons off. I’m happy with it.
On Monday, we had a group of new students arrive from one of our feeder schools. My boss asked me to run up to say hi to them really quickly, so I obediently trotted up to the second floor into a room full of students and their parents. Some of the Chinese staff were speaking to them about rules and what-have-you (I’m guessing), and one of them turned to me and said, “Oh, Anne, you will make a speech now?” and gestured to the front of the front of the room. So, instead of spontaneously combusting on the spot, as I would have done a mere six months ago, by god, I went up there and made a freaking welcome speech on the fly.
If you want to learn how to roll with punches, teaching in China is like boot camp for that. Starting this term has been a nice little progress check for me. I went into my new class today with a very rigorous introductory lesson plan, and the students knew it all. So I was doing the educational tap dance of a teacher with no idea what to do next, and it was fine - I didn’t feel like I needed to cry in the shower afterwards or anything. Also, this class is something else. First of all, there are twenty-six of them, and I’m used to groups of fifteen or less, and their English is extremely good. I’m teaching out of a textbook that’s going to be almost entirely review for them. And oh thank you lord there are so many girls in there. As of the end of last term, I’d had a total of three female students, and one class that was entirely male. That was fine, but I’ve got to admit that I’m excited about having a stronger female presence in one of my classrooms.
Here’s a bizarre article from Radar Magazine we read in the Manila Airport about a guy who posed as a ten year old and sent letters to incarcerated serial killers (and Clarence Darrow, Larry Flynt, and a few others). It’s creepy and hypnotic.
That’s all I’ve got.
Philippines Madness
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Ok, we took over 800 pictures and I would be being extremely unreasonable if I expected you to read everything I just wrote, but it’s here if you want it- first there’s an overview of where we stayed, and then it’s chronological. And if you want a better written version of the whole thing, chris has it. Enjoy!
snorkeling pictures - you should really look at these.
Boracay, the Philippines - short version
Saturday, May 3, 2008
The island of Boracay is about 7 km long and shaped like a drumstick. White Beach covers most of one side of the skinny leg part (Bulabong Beach is on the other side – maybe a six minute walk if you’re taking your time). White Beach is a Resort Area, which emphatic caps, and there’s no way around the crowd and the noise. However, there’s a reason for the crowd – it’s an absolutely gorgeous beach. The water looks and feels like a swimming pool, and it’s easily the clearest body of water I’ve ever seen in my life. I kept being surprised when I swallowed, inhaled, or got water in my eyes to feel that it was in fact salt water. And the sand is undeniably special. Chris compared it to flour, which is spot on. It’s white and soft and feels fantastic between your toes, provided you don’t get gnawed on by the termites that live in it and gave us itchy painful feet after prolonged exposure.
The entire beach front is lined with restaurants, bars, and hotels, most of which are expensive (on a Chinese salary) but decent. It’s about as well done as a beach resort strip can be done – it looks NICE, there’s no condo high rise, and in spite of a devastating lack of trash cans, it was impressively clean. Clean enough to walk out of the hotel barefoot to go searching for dinner. Most of the restaurants have tables and seating a few feet away from the shore, and it’s really, really, really nice to sip on a mango margarita and watch the waves and the rampant fire dancers.
The food’s also incredible, especially if you’re coming from China - mango shakes (DELICIOUS), crepes, hummus, feta cheese… these are things I haven’t had in my life for a while, and it was GOOD to have them back temporarily. I also tried to drink some young coconut juice (buko), but it was really warm and I thought it was sort of nasty.
The island is also almost unnervingly wholesome. Chris commented that it wasn’t a very druggy place at all, and Disney World came to mind a few times. Of course, there are a ton of security officers walking around with shotguns, so that might have something to do with it. That said, though, the security guys are really, really nice - when a beggar tried us at a restaurant, the cop just said, “maybe next time,” instead of rudely moving him along. We also bought a can of sardines for a friendly stray kitten and the cops helped us feed her and we got the impression that they’d been taking care of her for a while. Speaking of which, there are a lot of feral cats and dogs running around. As a general rule, the cats seem to fare better than the dogs, and all of them seem to know how to work a tourist site - they’re all pretty friendly.
The blessing and the curse of White Beach is its easy access to whatever you want to do. Blessing: you have something you want, and within five minutes someone offers to sell it to you. Curse: when you’re just trying to go swimming or walk down the beach, within five minutes about fifty thousand people have tried to sell you something. “Sir, ma’am, sunglasses?” “Ma’am, necklace?” “Jetski?” “No thank you.” “ATV? Parasail? Sailing boat?” They’re incredibly relentless, even when you’re clearly sitting down eating a meal they’ll give you a try. “Massage? Watch? Mangos?” It gets old extremely fast.
On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to find people to get you doing what you want to do. Our friends Leif and Lily rode a dune buggy up a mountain, and we wanted to try it, and it was just a matter of stepping outside and waiting for someone to offer it to us. You can also get a really nice and relatively secluded walk down the beach if you get right along the shoreline away from all the noise, lights, and tourist industry.
So I wouldn’t say White Beach is a bad place to stay. I actually liked it a lot better than the megaresorts we saw. Those places do a lot of things for you that are not even remotely difficult to do by yourself, and what’s the point of paying extra money for a swimming pool when the ocean is right in front of you? However, that said, if you stay at White Beach, I’d advise you to get off it as fast as you can, because there’s soooooo much to the island that isn’t all thumping bass and people pushing goods and services on you. It’s all easy to get to, also, either on foot or by tricycle. My favorite beach was Puka Beach, which had no hotels or restaurants on it, and only the occasional kid stopping by to see if you’re interested in some ice cream. Bulabong Beach was sort of nifty, but it’s not a good strolling spot or really much of a swimming place. If you’re into kiteboarding or windsurfing (I don’t even really know the difference), that’s where you should go, though. Really, as far as I could tell, any part of the island that isn’t White Beach is peaceful, pretty, and worth seeing.
If I had actually planned this trip in advance, I would have started with an island hopping tour (we did it on our last day). You can sail all the way around the island and see some places you can only get to from a boat and scope out all of the beaches. We saw some AWESOME rocks and tiny islands we didn’t get a chance to explore that didn’t seem hard to get to at all.
Make no mistake, Boracay is as touristy as it gets, but at the same time, there’s a lot of stuff to do that’s amazing, wherever you are, and the beaches are absolutely incredible. While you can rest assured that you’re being ripped off every time you take out your wallet, it’s almost worth it for how easy and close everything is.
I also learned exactly one word of Tagalog - for most of the trip I thought “mabuhay” was just the Tagalog version of “aloha,” but it’s actually cooler, as I learned from the in-flight magazine on the way back to Manila. It’s the imperative form of the verb “live,” and it’s used as hello, goodbye, welcome, congratulations, thank you, cheers, etc.