the paths that your eyes wander down

conversation from yesterday at the kuos.
i hadn't seen mr. wang or mr. whatever his name is in 2 or 3 weeks, and mr. whatever brought me an iced coffee and tiramisu.

mr. kuo: megan! mr. wang and mr. chen here to see you!
mr. wang: megan! i love you! will you kiss me?
me: long time no see! where have you been?
..i start to survey the scene and notice that their eyes are all a little squinty and they're all toasted.
anyway i try to sit between mr. kuo and mr. chen, but mr. chen is smoking, so i have to sit by mr. wang. mr. kuo gets up to give me the tiramisu and coffee
mr. kuo: mr. chen give you cake and coffee!
me: yahooo thank you, tiramisu is my favorite
mr. wang: megan, i love you. will you kiss me?
me: ni hen lao de ren han wo hen piao liang han chong ming (you are old and i am pretty and smart)
mrs. chan was hovering behind me nervously laughing the whole time. they're all harmless but it's new to me to have an old man declaring his love to me every 5 seconds. mr. kuo always apologizes to me the next day

i'm going to find/kill the mosquito that's loose somewhere in my room and then go to sleep. i'm almost finished with joy luck club which i think is cute and even better because it has lots of stuff about asian culture that's funnier when you're living here. jerry said he didn't like it in the past but i think he could appreciate it more now than he can at least try to read some of their weird pinyin where the author tried to phonetically spell a chinese word.

it's supposed to warm up tomorrow. fingers crossed. i think all of this cold, dreary weather has gotten me a little down. i've been missing my friends and home in general this week. ..how many girls get pep talks from their moms that involve the words 'existential aloneness?'

Remind yourself that you are well loved and not alone. It is the feeling of separateness- existential aloneness that hits us sometimes in the pit of our stomach. You aren't without true support. Really.

guess you get used to somebody

it's weird being in your early 20s. you get so used to being in school and always having another grade ahead of you and the same routine year after year without a whole lot of decisions to make, and then all of the sudden you've graduated from college and your whole life is up to you. what job will you do? where will you live? what will you do with your free time? what are you looking forward to?

[these pictures are from my 'i love this' design folder]
i'm relatively happy with the decisions i've made so far. there's just always the nagging feeling that you could be doing more or helping people or doing something that's making more of a difference. teaching kids is really rewarding though. as much as we complain about not being 'real teachers', i think the work i'm doing here is worthwhile. if nothing else, my kids say 'please' and 'thank you' without thinking about it.
this afternoon i woke up at one o'clockkk! i remember turning off my alarm at 9:30 and then i just went back to sleep and it was dreary and cold out, and i knew when i looked at the clock it could be any time between 10 and 2, but what a waste of a morning! the day felt so short since i had to leave for class at 4. on the other hand, i got up at 7 for a year for my job in the real world and i enjoy having the option of sleeping in until 1 if my body wants to. especially on those days when your bed is sooo comfy and warm.

looking forward to.. BLT's tomorrow. seeing my favorite class on thursday afternoon. not teaching on saturday! tomb sweeping holiday.

he's a tramp, but they love him

i woke up to it being pretty warm in here at 27 C. what is that? somewhere in the high 70s? 80. then it was lovely all day until i got done teaching my first class at 6 and i walked by an open door and it was FREEEEZING. my thermostat says it's 18 in my room right now but it's reaaally cold outside. wunderground says 11 (52) right now and a high of 14 (57) tomorrow. BRRR.

i'm in a slump this week. i've been contemplating what to do after my contract is up in july and there seem to be too many options with no clear frontrunner.
be an au pair in europe
teach in taoyuan another year
teach in another city in taiwan
teach in another country
go to grad school for something environmental
try to find a job in austin
go back and get a teaching certificate and teach at a real school in the US
the problem is that i think i realized where my teaching limits lie. yesterday when my kids couldn't read and i didn't know how to help them, i remembered that i'm not a real teacher. we aren't trained, we don't know effective teaching strategies, and any success we have is pretty much based on luck and natural gifts and talents. ..so the idea of "teaching" more kids doesn't sound reaaaally good.

although today my classes were really good in terms of the level of fun. my first class had a lesson that involved some kids making a snow man, so i brought in this little blow up snowman we had in the dorm and had them write a new vocab word on a piece of paper, make a ball out of it and then they had to hit the snowman, pick up a ball and make a sentence with the word inside. it was fun/crazy.
in my second class, we're learning how to describe people and things so i gave them each a page of a magazine with someone on it and they had to describe their person while the class guessed which one it was. i think we were all excited to use materials that didn't come from the red book. it can get really old.
the lesson tonight is..
tom: who is that new boy?
sandy: which boy, tom?
tom: that fat boy
sandy: oh, that's billy briggs.
teacher: open your desk and give me that apple, billy!
billy: i'm sorry, miss williams. i am hungry.

awful!

men and machines

whew! little panic attack. being without the internet makes me ansy, but when my actual computer is broken, i go crazy. everyone else's internet was fine but mine wasn't working.. and my computer kept saying 'tcp/ip connection unable to connect' and none of the forums were helping. but i just restarted my computer a million times and when i came back downstairs to my room, another internet connection magically appeared in my network connections and it worked.

i'm sure it would be been alright eventually but the thought of toting my computer to a computer store downtown [when i don't have a bag/backpack it fits in easily and it's been rainy the last few days] and then to try to communicate my problem tp people who may or may not have spoken much english was overwhelming 5 minutes ago.

other than that, today was easy. chinese, latini's, a long nap and then 3.5 hours of class tonight. in my second class, we could hear chris screaming out QAs in the class beside us, so our class answered back through the wall. we thought it was pretty funny but he said his class just thought we were being weird.

i'm going to just sit and decompress for a bit.

something to think about:
You have a brain tumor. Though there is no discomfort at the moment, this tumor would unquestionably kill you in six months. However, your life can (and will) be saved by an operation, but the incision will leave you significantly less intelligent, less logical, and with a terrible memory. The surgery is in two weeks. How do you spend the next 14 days?

..i think that one would be better if it gave you the choice between living for 6 months after the surgery or just for 2 weeks with a regular mind. otherwise you're just thinking about what you'd like to do before you die. although i guess we would all choose 2 weeks.

bring what i am able

guess what's new at 7-11. arizona green tea!! mannn i love that stuff so much. my dad used to buy me the big jugs of it and i could go through about 1 a week. now we have it in those big big cans at 7-11.
it's an anomaly because they actually did a really good job changing it to fit the asian market while keeping it friendly for foreigners. the packaging is the same but everything is in english and chinese. i meant to take a picture of it the other day but i forgot and the cleaning lady emptied the recycling today so i'm out of luck.
i just hope enough taiwanese poeple buy it to keep them in business over here. it's not like there's any shortage of fresh green tea.

well i don't know if it's the recent influx of couples or what, but i'm starting to feel the single girl lonliness creeping in on me. i've given my friends the whole 'it's good to be young and independent and detatched' speech a million times (and it is) but the truth is that it's more fun to share your experiences with someone else. and i'm a chatty kind of girl, you know. i like to have someone to chat to. so i'm going to put a relationship back on my radar and see what happens.

i'm also having kind of a weird too many options issue. the job market in the US is looking pretty bleak so i'm trying to figure out what i want to do in july when my year here is up. picking up and moving to taiwan and just doing it has really given me the sense that i can do whatever i'd like to do, but i just don't know what i want to do.
keep working on my chinese and teach in china for a year? korea? japan? be an au pair in europe? go to grad school? but what for? and i missed the deadlines for fall of '09 so what would i do until spring? try to find a job in the US?

i'm glad i still have 5 months to figure it out, but i'm just not sure.

just settled down for a long winter's nap

i really want to go to sleep so here are the key points:
-lesley bought a super warm jacket the other day and i was soo cold yesterday that i went to buy one just like it this morning. hers is like burgundy red and mine is kind of a pretty medium blue. they're lined with a gray, down shell that unzips if you want to wear it on its own, and then the outside is like a warm rain jacket. it was toasty on the scooter today

-i got my scooter! i rode it around after class tonight because it needed gas. they delivered it on empty, the chums. you would think if someone buys a scooter from you, you could at least put 100NT worth of gas in it. they did wash it and put a new basket on it for me though. that was nice.
it drives well. the throttle doesn't have as much play as steve's does, so i had to adjust to a quick takeoff. and the brakes are good and strong. so i'm happy. glad to be mobile. yoga, here i come.

-i laid down the law in my yellow book class that speaks mostly chinese. i told them i had come too far for them to speak chinese in my class. i haven't seen my family in 5 months, i don't have good mexican food, i dont get to sleep in my own bed, and it's just rude for them to waste my time and theirs. so i instituted a strict no chinese policy. first they lose their stickers (which we use as bait) and on the third strike, they take a note home with them telling their mom that they spoke chinese all during class, and they have to get it signed and bring it back to me. and we didn't play a game at the beginning.
it worked like a charm. so i was thrilled. it's hard for me to be the bad cop.

time for bed. i'm too toasty in bed to go down in my jammies and take a picture of my scooter, so i'll show you tomorrow.