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....
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