i guess i should check the punctuation there. a question mark implies doubt, uncertainty (also the potential for some irony, but that's sort of lost since typing and/or reading yields nothing but other people's [perhaps slightly] skewed inner monologues, with none of the subtle nuances that only my speaking voice can provide). so yes, i am certain that this was the worst christmas ever.
imagine, if you will, that you work 5 days/week at a school in china. now imagine that you routinely work between 10-12 hours on each of those days. you don't mind this, actually. but what you do mind is spending so much time in the company of a handful of people for whom you have absolutely no respect or regard in general. i don't think i need to spend too much time differentiating the bad work apples from the good, as anyone reading this won't know what the fuck (or "who" the fuck, i should say) i'm talking about. but yeah, there are some retarded cunts that i work with. wow, i feel better.
sorry, back to this hypothetical situation that isn't actually hypothetical at all. we'll just call it my decidedly "subjective" christmas nightmare. anyway, back to that. for starters, no one died. that's not a bad thing. that's more a reminder to me that maybe all this fucking bullshit wasn't as bad as my melodrama will probably suggest.
my christmas started early, as i had an "open door" on sunday night. again with the "things that don't mean shit to people outside of ef." an open door means the parents of students in a particular class get to come and watch you teach their kids for about 20-25 minutes. 13 kids in this class. pretty low level. 8-9 being the average age. based on the body language of the parents alone, i could tell that i had some tough critics. for the next 30 minutes, i struggled through parents talking to their kids in chinese ("you don't understand") and touching their kids, while i was trying to convince their kids that there weren't any parents in the room and that they could understand. 13 Ss. 13 parents. makes for a crowded classroom. at the end of it all there were 3 mothers who were just nasty and had made up their minds to complain about anything. "the cd is too fast." "my kid doesn't understand you." "i don't understand you." "my kid just guesses what you mean by your body language." (*all translated by a chinese staff member). the best part was when a mother got upset about the fact that her kid did indeed write his lowercase i's correctly. she wasn't happy about the fact that she was wrong. i.e. she wasn't happy about the fact that her kid was writing exactly how he's supposed to. it's just funny because chinese has pinyin. plenty of i's there. there's not really an english i and a chinese i. or if there is, i wasn't aware of it. somebody educate me on that.
the point is, i had to hold back tears for damn near 20 minutes while a bunch of parents spoke vehemently (and nasally. that's not even the right word. i've yet to find the accurate adjective to describe the chinese language, particularly when spoken by a bunch of angry women debating the merits of their children's foreign english teacher. again, someone educate me on that one) against me in a language that i understand far less than korean. i heart long, inopportune parentheticals. just thought i'd share.
oh yeah, my gas is empty. that's not a metaphor, but it does contribute to my lack of holiday cheer. so i have no hot water. i haven't taken a shower in 4 days (soon to be 5). maybe this is information that i shouldn't divulge, but there's not really anyone around that i'm trying to impress by being, well, clean. i guess in the grand scheme of things 5 days isn't horrible (tibet=10 days, no shower). i'm sure that all the dirty people in far less-developed countries than the one in which i currently reside would agree with me there....the gas man cometh (tomorrow).
monday we had a huge christmas party at a fancy hotel. heaps of food and performances by the kids who had all paid an exorbitant amount of money to partake in both things. the worst part about that was that it was on my day off, but i still had to go spend time with the aforementioned assholes with whom i work. and instead of completing menial tasks that needed to be done, said cunts spent time dancing and/or applying copious amounts of makeup to prepare for the dance. i won't dwell too much on this, only to say that 1 of the 2 routines had absolutely nothing to do with christmas (which, as a westerner, i feel happy to grossly overvalue, as there are so very few western comforts around. and dammit, it is the most wonderful time of the year. i actually believe that.). their outfits were also completely inappropriate for a room full of children (a cold room, i might add). purple fringed halter tops and accompanying mini skirts. once, twice, three times a midriff exposed. gross. it was just strange to be surrounded by people who don't work as hard as i do, but who were more than happy to sit around on their asses at the party, eating western food (uhh, gummy sharks, anyone?) celebrating a holiday created, manipulated and thus cherished by the western world. the western world of which i'm a part, whether only in spirit and everything else about me other than mere geographic location.
so that was an all-day sort of a situation.
next day (my 2nd regular day off), had to be at the school at 7:30 am to go on a road trip to "chinawood." oh god. chinawood deserves it's own blog. and so it shall be....
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
spoiler alert
hmm. need to get back into the habit of this. it's just been hard to do since my home internet has been sporadic at best. rambling on and on in written form requires a certain degree of privacy, and i just don't seem to have that at work. not that i should expect to be able to do something non-work related whilst at my place of employment. makes sense, i suppose. but yes...work work work.
i should reckon long and hard about my current state of affairs. having said that, i've a feeling that this here blog is going to be an exercise in relative brevity by my standards (we'll judge the accuracy of this premonition by the word count at the end). i guess the main thing worth noting would be ef. it feels strange to be a cog in the wheel of such a huge machine.
seriously, wikipedia it. this is strange good for a majority of the time. except on sundays. sundays are the days when i feel like crying for no particular reason, but i guess there probably is a reason. the last day of my working week (mondays and tuesdays off) but in the grand scheme of things, this is an improvement. in korea i had at least 3 days/week that were like that, particularly in the latter months of my tenure there. that sounds very official. tenure. of course there are also jules and rory at ef, which changes everything for the better. living at work doesn't seem so miserable when you put it in the context of working with two of your favorite people. in fucking china. yeah, that's cool. so in that respect it was easier to be unhappy when it went unnoticed in korea (due to a palpable lack of friendly-type beings with whom to have regular discourse).
besides all the other glaring/obvious differences between the china and korea, the biggest one for me has been on the emotional front (yup, here she goes... i'm even going to contradict prior statements. i like to keep me on me's toes). constantly being in the company of people who just might give a shit about me means it's not quite as easy to lie about how i'm feeling, so as to spare them the sympathy/empathy (genuine or otherwise) they feel is due. sure, i did that a lot in korea (the wallowing and whatnot), it just so happened that i was alone most of the time. there was a lot less accountability for how i was feeling. crying willy nilly with no regard for how it affected others. simply because there was no way it could have. so even though i try to explain that things here are so much better than they were in korea, there weren't any actual humans who have been in both places with me for the past two years who can validate/corroborate that statement. no litmus test, as it were.
it feels sort of strange to admit that i'm not a chipper person. even stranger to realize that i'm okay with that. since i'm working out some "issues" here, i'll elaborate. what's puzzling me now is trying to recall if i've ever actually been deserving of any happy-go-lucky type qualifiers. or have i always been this sort of overly emotional chick who spends a good portion of her time (or at least more time than most normal humans) teetering on the verge of tears? i guess it doesn't really matter either way. it is worth noting that my tears are not always the result of depression or any other sort of hostile personality clouder. hmmm.
enough about that though...the other day there was a camel on the sidewalk. as if the fact that i have to enter a police precinct to actually get to my apartment building--the very epitome of communist chinese housing--isn't enough. of course i say my apartment's the epitome of something of which i had no prior notion. that's how i roll. but my "complex" is big (don't read into that, even though i wrapped it in quotes...) and concrete and has lots of palm trees. yup, the very image of communism. so yeah, across from the police entrance is a kindergarten, which is why i can only assume that's why there was a real, live camel hanging out on the sidewalk. kids and camels. just like metal and...magnets. i didn't take a picture with/of it, because somehow it only struck me as something odd enough to notice, but not odd enough to involve myself with beyond that.
besides the camel, there's really not much to report. oh yeah, i've been reading a lot. i say a lot, simply because it's the only thing i've really done consistently outside of work, besides drink. usually this "reading" involves going to starbucks (yeah, i know...evil). i figure that if i'm ever going to meet hot foreign dudes to "talk to" that aren't affiliated with my school, this most archetypal of western coffee chains is a good place to start. so far my quests have proven less than fruitful, as far as dude-scoping goes. if actual reading had ever been the point, then yes, i've "totally scored" on that front. fuck, heavy on the quotes today. finished a few books. the last of which was beneath the wheel. herman hesse. i think that i can safely say i have his whole story arc figured out: "i think i'll kill the main character, now that the reader has gotten good and attached to him." anyhoo, having read a few of his books now (most of which i [surprisingly] remember. sorry, siddhartha...), i'd have to say that the glass bead game is the bee's knees. i'm not exactly sure why i've dedicated a whole paragraph to a shoddy book report, but hey, why not.
fuck, i turned 30. in china. that seems noteworthy on two counts. hey, i ain't dead! hey, i live in china! make it three: hey, jules is here! she cooked chili at her crib. lots of folks came over, circle of death ensued. although we ditched the game early to depart for ktv. i say ktv like it should mean something to anyone outside of china. ktv's akin to karaoke, except you can sing in your own private room. it's sort of what we do around these parts. so yup. ktv and chili. east meets west. i guess east met west, since that was last week.
i have nothing else to say at this juncture. i must sleep and mentally prepare myself for early morning munchkins. there's a little dude in my first class (joey) who confuses /t/ and /k/. so instead of saying "it's a snake" he says "it's a snate." he's still convinced that pronouncing loudly means pronouncing more correcter. and with that heart-warming anecdote, i'm spent.
oh shit, about that dream i mentioned in the last post...there's really not much more worth mentioning. manute bol sums it up.
i should reckon long and hard about my current state of affairs. having said that, i've a feeling that this here blog is going to be an exercise in relative brevity by my standards (we'll judge the accuracy of this premonition by the word count at the end). i guess the main thing worth noting would be ef. it feels strange to be a cog in the wheel of such a huge machine.
seriously, wikipedia it. this is strange good for a majority of the time. except on sundays. sundays are the days when i feel like crying for no particular reason, but i guess there probably is a reason. the last day of my working week (mondays and tuesdays off) but in the grand scheme of things, this is an improvement. in korea i had at least 3 days/week that were like that, particularly in the latter months of my tenure there. that sounds very official. tenure. of course there are also jules and rory at ef, which changes everything for the better. living at work doesn't seem so miserable when you put it in the context of working with two of your favorite people. in fucking china. yeah, that's cool. so in that respect it was easier to be unhappy when it went unnoticed in korea (due to a palpable lack of friendly-type beings with whom to have regular discourse).
besides all the other glaring/obvious differences between the china and korea, the biggest one for me has been on the emotional front (yup, here she goes... i'm even going to contradict prior statements. i like to keep me on me's toes). constantly being in the company of people who just might give a shit about me means it's not quite as easy to lie about how i'm feeling, so as to spare them the sympathy/empathy (genuine or otherwise) they feel is due. sure, i did that a lot in korea (the wallowing and whatnot), it just so happened that i was alone most of the time. there was a lot less accountability for how i was feeling. crying willy nilly with no regard for how it affected others. simply because there was no way it could have. so even though i try to explain that things here are so much better than they were in korea, there weren't any actual humans who have been in both places with me for the past two years who can validate/corroborate that statement. no litmus test, as it were.
it feels sort of strange to admit that i'm not a chipper person. even stranger to realize that i'm okay with that. since i'm working out some "issues" here, i'll elaborate. what's puzzling me now is trying to recall if i've ever actually been deserving of any happy-go-lucky type qualifiers. or have i always been this sort of overly emotional chick who spends a good portion of her time (or at least more time than most normal humans) teetering on the verge of tears? i guess it doesn't really matter either way. it is worth noting that my tears are not always the result of depression or any other sort of hostile personality clouder. hmmm.
enough about that though...the other day there was a camel on the sidewalk. as if the fact that i have to enter a police precinct to actually get to my apartment building--the very epitome of communist chinese housing--isn't enough. of course i say my apartment's the epitome of something of which i had no prior notion. that's how i roll. but my "complex" is big (don't read into that, even though i wrapped it in quotes...) and concrete and has lots of palm trees. yup, the very image of communism. so yeah, across from the police entrance is a kindergarten, which is why i can only assume that's why there was a real, live camel hanging out on the sidewalk. kids and camels. just like metal and...magnets. i didn't take a picture with/of it, because somehow it only struck me as something odd enough to notice, but not odd enough to involve myself with beyond that.
besides the camel, there's really not much to report. oh yeah, i've been reading a lot. i say a lot, simply because it's the only thing i've really done consistently outside of work, besides drink. usually this "reading" involves going to starbucks (yeah, i know...evil). i figure that if i'm ever going to meet hot foreign dudes to "talk to" that aren't affiliated with my school, this most archetypal of western coffee chains is a good place to start. so far my quests have proven less than fruitful, as far as dude-scoping goes. if actual reading had ever been the point, then yes, i've "totally scored" on that front. fuck, heavy on the quotes today. finished a few books. the last of which was beneath the wheel. herman hesse. i think that i can safely say i have his whole story arc figured out: "i think i'll kill the main character, now that the reader has gotten good and attached to him." anyhoo, having read a few of his books now (most of which i [surprisingly] remember. sorry, siddhartha...), i'd have to say that the glass bead game is the bee's knees. i'm not exactly sure why i've dedicated a whole paragraph to a shoddy book report, but hey, why not.
fuck, i turned 30. in china. that seems noteworthy on two counts. hey, i ain't dead! hey, i live in china! make it three: hey, jules is here! she cooked chili at her crib. lots of folks came over, circle of death ensued. although we ditched the game early to depart for ktv. i say ktv like it should mean something to anyone outside of china. ktv's akin to karaoke, except you can sing in your own private room. it's sort of what we do around these parts. so yup. ktv and chili. east meets west. i guess east met west, since that was last week.
i have nothing else to say at this juncture. i must sleep and mentally prepare myself for early morning munchkins. there's a little dude in my first class (joey) who confuses /t/ and /k/. so instead of saying "it's a snake" he says "it's a snate." he's still convinced that pronouncing loudly means pronouncing more correcter. and with that heart-warming anecdote, i'm spent.
oh shit, about that dream i mentioned in the last post...there's really not much more worth mentioning. manute bol sums it up.
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