Past Tense

Today marks my last day of Chinese New Year break, a day which I mark with an odd mixture of joy and remorse. It's been a very strange experience, flitting about with nothing to occupy my days but what I choose, a ragtag diet of books and movies and TV shows (and, yes, a trip to Thailand) supplanting my steady routine of classes and work. I haven't had this sort of a complete and total break since Christmas breaks in high school, and even then I was living at home, which meant my free time was snapped up to get the house ready for the deluge of people which always marks the holiday season for us. This break was different: it was a break.

And now it's over. I spent several hours today sitting in my favorite coffee shop nearby and hammering out a Powerpoint presentation for my lesson plan at Qingshan this week, featuring my trip to Thailand and a new lesson on the past tense: read, watched, played, went, rode, and saw. Patty thought the kids would like to see what I did over break, and I tried to make the slideshow a nice blend of my trip and the grammar, teaching the concepts and then heading each slide of my pictures with a sentence: "I went to the beach." "I went snorkeling." "I saw lots of fish." "I rode an elephant."

I like how the presentation turned out, and it felt good to sit down with a decided purpose in mind and work until it was finished. I've missed teaching, missed having a task set before me that I needed to finish. Especially since it took place in a coffee shop, it reminded me of being in college, which is (for me) a pleasant memory.

But now, these weeks of relaxation and exploration are a memory, too. They are all now set in the past tense, and I can't imagine I'll encounter a similar break again. Going forward, I'm no longer a student, and after this year I'll no longer be a teacher, either, leaving me in a standard job working standard hours, which notably exclude weeks-long breaks for holidays, Western or Taiwanese.

So am I excited to go back to school tomorrow, excited to meet my new students at Hanmin, see my co-teachers and students at Qingshan again and step back into my routines? Yes, absolutely yes. But even so, I can't help but feel a twinge of sadness as this break, and breaks in general, slips irrevocably into the past tense.