Wormhole

Some things just disappear into mind-numbing nothingness. Today featured several of those things for several different reasons. Let's just catalog them, shall we?

1. My sleep schedule. Let's just throw this one out there: it's currently 2am. Why am I up? Because I woke up today just before noon. And why did I wake up just before noon? Because I went to bed last night just before 4am. And why did I go to bed just before 4am? Because I took a long nap Friday afternoon. And why did I take a long nap? Because I had to wake up early Friday morning, and I had gone to bed just before 1am. And why did I go to bed just before 1am? Because I had gotten up just before noon.

The end of my week, every week: it's just completely, totally screwed up. Also, it makes Mondays (and Friday), Hell.

2. My work ethic. What did I do today? Ummm.....

3. My decision-making ability. Today, my original planned productivity was to be centered around choosing and booking a hostel for Australia. However, as I've noted before, my ability to choose such a place utterly sucks. I have had it narrowed down to four for over a week now, have asked several people's opinion on the subject, and have still not found a way to pick. It's a wormhole of too much information.

Cue today. I did pick a hostel, sort of--like 85% sure now--but I haven't booked. Why? Well, because I realized that to book a hostel, I need to know what nights I'm staying there, and to know that, I need to know what nights I won't be, and to do that, I need to know when I'll be on a boat at the reef, and to do that, I need to know what company I'll be going through, and to do that, I'll have to pick one.

And, incidentally, the picking may require me to go through my hostel to get the best deal...

4. My evening. Like I said, it's past 2am. The last productive--or even semi productive--thing I did was at least three hours ago. What have I been doing in the meantime? Watching Youtube videos. Several of which did, in fact, involve wormholes as part of their conceits, and which did, themselves, form a wormhole into which my evening was sucked. Here are a few, to illustrate the wormhole effect for you:

 

 

 

No, for those who hear an accent and stop paying attention, those are not the same guy (or rather, the first three are the same and second two are the same), but they are friends, and both quite hilarious and relatively famous Youtube Vloggers. Also, if you haven't watched "Alex reads Twilight" (the last clip), do so immediately if you want to see the horrible deadening effect those books have on actual human readers. Also, it's funny.

So those were the items being sucked into my wormhole of a day. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did! Or, you know, hope you remember to wave to the time that slowly seeps out of you as you watch them... :)

Back to Normal

Dan and Danny left this morning sometime after I did, and I was instantly plunged back into my occasionally unrelenting (oxymoron, I know) schedule. And today was one of the unrelenting ones.

I've often meant to detail my schedule on here to give you a glimpse into my actual day-to-day life, and I suppose I have done that in snippets so far, but now let me just give you the timetable I follow every other Wednesday.

6:45am -- Wake up and get ready for the day, assuming I remembered to shower the night before (otherwise, the alarm is set for 6:20am)
7:20am -- Leave for Han-Min, on the expectation that it will take a good 10 or 15 minutes longer than a normal day, as I will have to fight through the morning rush all trying to get to Siaogang by 8am
7:50am -- Arrive at Han-Min, with any luck
8:00am -- Begin Morning English! I switch off teaching this with Alison and Maggie, and we teach 5 classes of a single grade every week; by the end of the semester, we will have seen every class once and we'll start over again. Today Maggie and I taught a new dialogue for our first "middle grade" group of 4th graders; first times always have a few bumps, but overall, it went pretty well.
8:30am -- Begin the awkward hour break before my next class, usually rendered un-awkward by a coffee/tea trip with Maggie and/or Alison. Today it went by really quickly, thanks to a few great conversations with both of them and the fact that we used the time to plan for our Halloween lesson plans. Going to be great, by the way!
9:30am -- First *real* class of the day; all adorable 5th graders with Maggie on Wednesdays.
12:00pm -- Lunch. My last class of the three I teach on Wednesdays bring me my lunch in the teachers' office, where I thank them in English and they, without fail, giggle a response and run away. Love it. :) Another highlight of lunch is always sitting and talking with Maggie, Alison, and Fiona, the other English teacher at Hanmin; our desks are close together and we just sit and chat and teach each other new vocabulary. It's fantastic.
12:30pm ish -- Lesson plan time! Alison and Maggie and I plan for next week
1:00/1:30pm -- Go home to pick stuff up if I have time (I did today); if not, straight to Sanmin for our massive LET-ETA-Fonda-Alex-Education Bureau people-Dr. Sun meeting!
2:00pm -- Here begins our meeting.
4:00pm (if we're lucky) -- Here ends our meeting. Nothing much of importance happens in between.
4:25pm -- We (ETAs) finish our post-meeting meeting with Fonda and Alex, and either quickly run home for stuff if there wasn't time before (this option would make us late) or run out for food at the local market and/or 7-11. Oh, the nutritious dinners we eat on Wednesdays...
5:10pm -- Chinese class begins. "Surprisingly," we make horrible students on these days...
7:10pm ish -- Chinese class ends.
7:40pm ish -- Rachel and I reach the gym (if we coordinated and have managed to conquer our exhaustion--which didn't happen today)
8:40pm ish -- Rachel and I head home, where I drop exhausted onto whatever flat surface I see first.

I know that, in writing this, I'm inviting comparisons from people who routinely work 14 hour days etc, and I have no answer for that. I'm just sharing my day.

Friday

Well that title is simultaneously the most blatantly obvious statement of all time and it managed to get the song by Rebecca Black stuck in my head. But it is, nonetheless, an apt description of how I feel right now--it's Friday!

And I'm spending my Friday night sitting on the couch in my apartment, watching movies and eating junk food. Because sometimes, you just need a day like that. (Or at least that's what we're telling ourselves.)

But fortunately, we're currently watching The Holiday--way out of season, I know--but I'm watching the scenes of the snow-covered southern English countryside and realizing afresh just how much I want to go there next on my travels. So maybe I'll use this time to gain inspiration to keep working on my application. :)

After school (which was pretty great, though the 5th graders were rather too noisy in their appreciation of the vocabulary matching game), I got home just in time to get a call from Rachel asking if I wanted to go to lunch with her and her LET, Karen. I'd met Karen at the orientation and loved chatting with her then; today was no different!

Karen took us to a lovely Japanese restaurant owned by her family (she introduced us to several, who were there--and were, if I remember her introductions correctly, were her 6th and 7th aunts? Big family!), and it was absolutely deLICious. Here are some photos of us and the wonderful spread:

...and keep in mind that this wasn't all of it.

Pictured behind the hand rolls: tempura shrimp. Possibly the best thing I ate all lunch...hard to tell, though. So yummy!

Other than that, nothing terribly exciting, provocative or insightful happened today. I worked on my application, watched TV, hung out with Karina, who came over for a few hours, and pretty much just rehearsed my role as a couch potato.

And that's it! Another reason my posts are getting shorter: my life is settling into a routine, and with routine comes a lack of new experiences to write about. SO, if you have things you want to know more about, just let me know!

For now, I'm going to enjoy my lazy Friday.

Free time

I have free time now. It's an odd concept, after eight years of "higher" education. Okay, so high school isn't really higher education, but my high school experience was at least as intense as my college one. If I think about it (which I have), I haven't had free time as a regular part of my life since middle school: there's always been a job (or jobs), or homework, or other obligations. And sure, now I'm still in the process of at least one application for next year, but by comparison, my days are suddenly free as a bird.

Take today, for instance. Granted, it's a Saturday, which is typically somewhat of a down-day anyway, but when I sit down to think about what I did, I come up with very little. I got up around noon (in my defense, I was up till 2:30), at which point I discovered that a former ETA had come over to collect her stuff and was hanging out and chatting. I got ready for the day, ate breakfast, made coffee and ran down to 7-11 for almond milk to put in it. I emailed someone at SPU about sponsoring my one application for next year. I read some articles online. I watched part of Lord of the Rings on TV. Karina came over and we got food, then made a run to Ikea and Carrefour. I reassembled my room using stuff bought on this trip. Karina and I sat for a while at the Cultural Center.

And that was my day! It's now midnight, and I've done maybe 3 productive things: sent that email, bought stuff at Ikea and Carrefour, put the stuff in my room. Not a lot to show for a good 12 hours, really.

But that's okay here! I don't HAVE that much to do! Even during the week, I teach 19 periods of 5th and 6th graders, plus 1 period of Morning English for all grades, and that might be it--I'm supposed to have 15 more hours at the schools, but so far the administrators and teachers at both schools haven't come up with things for me to do other than focus on my teaching. I'll be taking Chinese soon to help fill the hours, too. And after eight years of working steadily for the mass majority of my waking hours, it's nice to have a little break, especially while in a new city and learning a new language--I am so fortunate to be here and to actually have the time I will need to take full advantage of that. I can't wait to wander around the city and explore both the physical and cultural aspects of Kaohsiung while trying out my young Chinese skills.

In the mean time, I get nice little down days in which all I do all day is send an email and buy and make curtains. Here's the final result, by the way--just need wall decorations now and my room will be finished!

The curtains aren't perfect, but at least they're clean. And I bought purple ribbon to tie them back with when I want a little sun!

Training Wheels

Something tells me this every day thing is only going to get more difficult as the year wears on. So really, this post is mostly just a quick update on my mostly uneventful day.

We did more co-teaching today, and it went MUCH better than yesterday. My co-teacher, Patty, is pretty quiet one-on-one, but I discovered today that she absolutely blossoms in front of a group of kids! It was great! We started out with a little interactive dialogue about us riding bikes/scooters, and she took off "on her scooter" to pretend to ram into the front row of students! It got them laughing and engaged, which is NOT easy to do.

Our time management was a little better, too--we got through all the vocabulary several times, played a game, and learned and practiced our sentence patterns (How do you go to school? I go to school by ________.); though we didn't quite make it to our last two activities, due in part to a time-eating magnet malfunctioning, it was a massive improvement over yesterday.

And now our co-teaching practice is over! Later this week we visit our own schools; next week, school starts. Time to actually prove ourselves, not just practice on hand-selected summer camp kids who know everything already. 

I got my schedule today for Han-Min and Qing-Shan; it looks pretty sweet. My longest day is Monday, 9:30-3:00; Tuesday I only work 9:30-noon; Wednesday I have flag raising at 8:00 (early, but at least only once a week!), then teach 9:30-noon; Thursday I start late and work 11-4, and Friday is 8:40-noon. I officially love a (part-time teaching assistant) teacher's schedule!

Tomorrow we have a later start at Sanmin, which is good since I'm pretty sure we don't have much to do. Like I said, we finished co-teaching; we also finished, in my mind, talking about co-teaching: each 20-minute class was followed by a 20-minute discussion time, and we had a big-group discussion each afternoon, too. I don't really know what else there is to say, but I guess we'll find out!

In other news, there's still some drama going on in the ranks...hopefully it will all be happily settled soon. Also, we're going to take our scooter driver's license tests this week. Also, I'm going to the States this weekend. Yeah, just for the weekend. So that should be interesting!

And that's it, for now!