If you could do anything...

...what would you do? I feel like this is a fairly common question for people; it's used as a check-your-heart exercise to see if you're pursuing what really matters to you, and as the days of my grant rush towards their termination point, I find myself mulling it over, to somewhat surprising results.

If I could do anything in the world, what would I do? I would be an actress.

Depending on how long you've known me (or if you know me at all), you may know that when I was growing up, acting was my thing. At age 5, my mom tells me, I memorized the lead part's lines in a church musical--before the auditions. Not surprisingly, since I was 5, I lost that particular part to a 12-year-old, but it did little to dampen my desire. From age 5 till age 18, my happiest moments were on stage. Church musicals, a middle-school Shakespeare troupe, a variety of plays and musicals in high school; I couldn't get enough.

Then college hit, bringing with it the realization that, in the real world, you just don't have enough time to act when your hours are eaten up working to pay for tuition, room, and board, and throwing yourself entirely into your studies and preparing yourself for the real world. In the real world, there are very few successful actors; without the perfect cocktail of superhuman talent, beauty, and connections, most would-be actors spend the vast majority of their lives waiting tables. I knew that going into college, and I'm an optimist only up to the point where my in-bred pragmatism comes into play. So, my last performance was 5 years ago.

And, truth be told, I mourn for it. Whenever I go to a play, I ache to be, not just sitting in the audience, but up on the stage. So much of myself comes from my years in the theater: my ability to project my voice when needed (I've refused microphone usage this entire year), my silent footsteps (born from years of creeping around backstage as I wait for an entrance cue), my deep love of Shakespeare. I find myself thinking about the fact that I'm the right age now to play the ingenue roles; I find myself thinking that my lifelong frustration with looking younger than I am would come in handy now if I ever wanted to audition for the role of a teenager; I find myself daydreaming, in short, that I could do this. I long to return to theater.

But, again, pragmatism prevails. Ironically, though, it prevails on a sliding scale. What would I most like to do? Act. Do I think that would actually work out for me? No. What would I next most like to do? Write. Do I think that would actually work out for me? Possibly, but let's throw in a contingency plan just in case. What would I next most like to do? Edit. Do I think that would actually work out for me? Yes, I think it just might. If I work at it hard enough.

But here's the flaw in my logic: editing jobs are still incredibly hard to come by. Publishing, indeed, was cited by the New York Times (in this excellent article) as one of the stereotypical so-called "lottery industries"--fields with any number of applicants clamoring for a shot at a very few spots doing the job they love. Publishing was listed right alongside acting, with the only difference being that those who make it as actors get paid more. Well gee, that's encouraging.

But this is not a post informing you of my new intention to run off to LA or NYC to try to make it big as an actor. (Though, ironically, I may be headed to NYC to do the same thing as an editor.) Because, regardless of my love for it, the reasons that I shelved it as an ambition still hold. I have no delusions of grandeur there, much as I wish I did. I picked writing, and editing, because I think I have a comparatively better shot there of doing something I still love, and getting paid for it--if not as much as others monetarily, at least in the knowledge that I'm doing something I love. Even if that something isn't the thing I love the most.

In the meantime, I'm going to start looking into community theaters. Because if you love doing something, why should not getting paid for doing it stop you?

Reflections

I've been doing a lot of them lately, and I expect I'll be doing a lot more as my time here winds down. Some for Fulbright, some for myself; some big, some miniscule. Might as well get used to it. In any case, here are a few more.

Today was our last Fulbright workshop. For it, the new Director General of the Education Bureau turned up to present all of the ETAs and LETs with a Certificate of Appreciation, and to give the ETAs a faux-glass clear engraved award. Then we passed a microphone around praising each other (all well-deserved, truly, and at least 100 times over) for a bit. Then things devolved into what my brain kept telling me was best described as a s***storm. Honestly, I tried to think of better words for it to keep from writing that--but they're just not there.

See, our end-of-the-year banquet was unceremoniously cancelled last week. Everyone was disappointed, and disappointment soon turned into person after person saying the same thing--we need a time to hang out and say goodbye--and asking why we couldn't have it. And, while this might not be too bad if it were just a group of ETAs and LETs, it wasn't; rather, the group included the absolutely wonderful and sweet local Education Bureau--you know, those people who probably had to make this call, but without having any choice but to do so. It was awkward.

Eventually we quit complaining and pulled together a plan for something resembling a potluck--and why it took a good half hour to get to that conclusion, I'll never know--but the needlessly combative middle of the workshop was absurdly uncomfortable, though also in a way the "perfect" close to a year that began with such stress back in August. I'm sure the potluck will be fun, though.

On an entirely unrelated note, I've been thinking lately about NaNoWriMo. For those in the know, yes, I am aware we are nowhere near November; for those not in the know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's an American-based community whose members devote themselves to completing a 50,000-word novel in the month of November.

I have never tried it; I've never considered that I would have time. I have friends who've done NaNoWriMo, and it's a lot of work; it's an understood thing among those who do that many people revert to copying song lyrics or other such text into their "novels" in order to keep up on the word count.

So what's my revelation on all this? Oh, only that I've essentially been doing a nonfiction version of NaNoWriMo for the past 10 months, that all. Seriously. In order to hit 50,000 words in a month, you have to write about 1,600 words a day--sound about like a blog post to you? OK, in all honesty I'm probably under 50,000 a month, but I bet I'm consistently hitting around 30,000, on average. Every. Single. Month. And, my occasionally pathetic asides aside, I have at least yet to resort to lyric copying!

So who knows, maybe this November I'll take up the fiction gauntlet for a bit. Can't be worse than finding material for a daily blog!

Inventing Boxes, Checking Them Off

I had quite a pleasant day, all told. As it burns down, now, I feel accomplished and happy to have got so much done. There's only one problem: I didn't.

I've probably mentioned it on here before, but I'm a list person. When I have a lot to do, or I start feeling overwhelmed, I break down what I have to do into steps, write the steps down with a little empty box next to them, and get to work checking those babies off. And when I check them off, oh, how accomplished and happy I feel. So yes, in other words, I might be a bit type A.

Where this system fails, though, is that I'm the person who determines what gets written down. Further, each box is just a box; regardless of the size or relative importance of the task, it falls simply into the categories of "done" or "not done." So what happens when I just want to get the great little feeling of having done something? I invent new things to do, of course!

So, what did I do today? I chopped my article-writing bit into three new elements, and finished two (yay!). I vacuumed my room (yay!). I sorted through all the paperwork in my room and got rid of half of it (yay!). I reorganized my bedside drawer (yay!). And what did I not do? Either of the bigger-picture boxes I'd originally slotted for today: finish ALL of the five parts of my article-writing, and finish and submit my final report for Fulbright. Those boxes are still empty.

But, psychologically speaking, who cares? My boxes are checked, hooray!

*SIDE NOTE: Really, though, this system does still work: smaller bits at a time get accomplished, but the little high each of those finishings give me is usually enough to inspire me to work through the next, rather than get bogged down by the hugeness of the entire task. Just give it another day or two.*

Writing woes

I had something to say today. I swear I did. Just a few hours ago I was at my computer doing something else entirely unrelated (working on a graduation speech for one of my schools, actually), and I was like "oh, I can write that in my blog today!" I followed up that thought by glancing through my current 7-day spread of posts on my blog, and getting excited that my last really worthless post would move to the archives once I posted today. (Yesterday's doesn't fall into that category because, come on, movies!)

But now, here I am, writing once again about the troubles of writing. And I know that no one, myself included, wants to read this stuff. These posts seem to be multiplying these days, a fact I'm none too proud of.

Part of it is, undoubtedly, that I've just been here long enough and written enough posts that I'm running out of topics for daily posting. But, lest you think it is just me being lazy, I need to point out now that I'm also simultaneously working on four other writing projects of various lengths and importance (including the aforementioned speech), so at least my pledge to write something daily is in full force, and likely in greater force than it has been at any other point of this year.

So that's where my creativity's going. Sorry it's not showing up here.

But hey, look! A silly picture of me wearing lens-less pink glasses whose earpieces are made of pens! A belated birthday present from a student. :)

Blinking cursor

It's one of those days: the days I regret having compelled myself to write a blog post--daily. Writer's block is a common enough problem, I know, and I've written about it before (but I'm not giving you the links, both because I am too lazy to find them and because I doubt you'd want to read that drivel again anyway), and it multiplies like rabbits (I told you I'm stumped for creativity here, what'd you expect but another cliche?) when you have something that is neither interesting to others nor pertinent to your daily life on your mind.

In this case, the future. And, more specifically, the time period two months from now when I will find myself suddenly Fulbright grant-less, surviving on my savings until I land a so-called "real" job, preferably one involving editing. The logistics of those are complicated at best, and the question of how to best arrange them is  what I've been stewing on today.

Ironically, though, now that I've gotten started talking about my writer's block, I have a topic--tada!--and it even neatly ties together the first two paragraphs: daily posts are a terrible idea. Why? Well, allow my old writer's block friend, the list, tell you...

1. You run out of ideas! Seriously, NO one's life is interesting enough to be written about on a daily basis, and mine is even less so. What did I do today? Hmm, I went to school, taught, hung out with my coworkers, came home, ate dinner, went to Chinese class, went to the gym, went to an ATM, came home, researched copyediting jobs. I'm sorry, dear readers, that I can't give you back the time you spent reading that last worthless sentence...

I'm sorry, also, for the fact that...

2. You make dozens of stupid mistakes! As a creative writing graduate/writing tutor/editorial intern/newspaper editor/English teacher/overall grammar nerd/writer, I would say I've gained a pretty thorough understanding of the English language and, by extension, the errors it often contains. My job often depends on catching them; heck, you know that job stuff I talked about earlier? Yeah, those potential jobs would consist entirely of catching writing errors. I love doing it.

...except when it's in my own writing. But the thing is, it often is, especially in first draft mode. Something else I learned as a creative writing student/writing tutor/editorial intern/newspaper editor/English teacher/overall grammar nerd/writer is that your first draft always sucks. It just does! I would even go so far as to say it's supposed to, up to a point. The purpose of your first draft is not perfection; the purpose of your first draft is to get your ideas on paper and in a rough semblance of how you want them to be. It's not until you hit the later drafts that you start fixing things and aiming for perfect.

But see, here's the thing about daily blog posts: they're all first drafts. They have to be! This post I'm writing right now, I began at roughly 1am; when I finish it, I'm going to hit post, close my laptop, and go to bed. Tomorrow, I know, I'll pick up my computer again and re-read what I wrote, only to discover scores of little errors--the errors I hate, the errors I want to make my living correcting. But there they sit, staring me in the face in my own writing. It's just the nature of the beast!

3. You end up writing entire posts on the phenomena surrounding writing.

'Nuf said.

This is just to say

This is just to say

I have lived
in Taiwan
for 9 months
together

And that
I'm now missing;
pondering
my homeland.

Believe me
it is not easy
so long
and so far

(This is also just to say that I like William Carlos Williams, and writing imitatios. Here are some others I wrote a year ago now.)

Back to the Basics

I've come to realize that I'm one of those people who love the basics. When I read, I often pick up the classics: basic. When I go shopping, I pick clothes with bold colors and classic styles: basic. When I think of a great day, I think of a day without a schedule, involving such things as sleep, good coffee, good books, good company: basic. In fact, in most things, from daily activities to theology, I'm a big fan of Occam's razor.

It's somewhat of an ironic fact about me, really: I love details, I love finding tiny errors and correcting them--I want to be an editor, after all; yet, at the same time, what I long for is simplicity.

Which means today was lovely. After an early wake-up call and trip to the airport to say goodbye to Kaitlin, who had an unfortunately long trip home ahead of her (it's midnight here and we left for the airport at 6am, but she still has another 6 hours to go, by my count), I slumped home on the MRT and went back to sleep for a few hours. When I awoke, I was met with the happy news that Rachel had waited for me to go to Costco, and at Costco I found some good ol' fashioned American basics like cheese, wheat bread, and chips and salsa. To round out my trip, I couldn't resist going for one of Costco's signature hot dogs. Pork instead of beef here, but still SO good.

I then got home and discovered that my rotisserie chicken had gone back a little too basic, in my own humble opinion:

It had a head still. True reaction.

I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for my first tutoring session tonight, with a young man named Hal whose father is a homeroom teacher at Hanmin. And, by preparing, I mean writing out a general outline of things we should do, and then re-reading the first chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and writing a bunch of reading comprehension questions on the content. Nothing more basic than one of my favorite books of all time!

Except perhaps the tutoring itself. I arrived at the cafe early and grabbed a cup of delicious coffee, and when Hal got there, we got down to work--on his writing and almost solely his writing. It was so much fun! I spent three years in college as a writing tutor, doing what I could for students' full length papers in little half hour segments; working on others' papers is a matter of course for me. But half hour sessions are not nearly enough to fully address all the issues in a paper, as I learned today, as Hal and I took a full hour and a half to pore over his two paragraph practice test essay.

It was glorious: all the skills I've honed over the past few years, but expanded out into a fuller time frame that allowed us to take a piece of writing from draft stage through a full work-up of structure and grammar (subjunctive mood played a key role in today's lesson) to rewrites of specific sentences to re-copying the whole thing in corrected form, allowing Hal to walk away with an example for future works. I loved it: back to the basics of English tutoring, and tutoring itself.

At home, an HBO series of Matt Damon movies (I caught the very strange and confusing second half of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and then the entirety of the also confusing and certainly not basic but, for me, intriguing The Adjustment Bureau, which led to an abortive convoluted theological conversation with Analicia which did, in fact, help to inspire this post) served as a nice break from some of the ridiculousness they've been showing lately, and after it finished I had the treat of listening to a podcast by the great Judah Smith, who always challenges me with his fantastic ability to bring everything back to the utmost basic of Christian faith: Jesus.

I love complex thought; I love teasing out inconsistencies and exploring convoluted new notions. I love experiencing new things. But that's just it: even when I'm delving into extraordinarily complicated notions, I do it with the intent of smoothing out the wrinkles and revealing the bigger picture, clean and pressed through the action of delving. I see complications as a juicy challenge on the way to clarity.

Because, to me, as much fun as labyrinthine experiences are, all those in the maze really have the same goal: to get out of the twists and turns--to get back to the basics.

Blinking cursor

Some days, when I sit down to write, that's all I see: a blinking cursor. Today is one of those days.

And sometimes, when this happens, I have some sort of clever answer for my writers' block, something like a list, or a video or even a link to a cool article.

But alas, today I have nothing. At all. Really. Yet, as my self-made vow requires, today I am posting a blog nonetheless. Because that's what writing is about: pushing past the block and writing anyway.

Writing something, anyway. But, this time, not much.

Midterms and Dreams

Never before have I been so enthusiastic about such a horrible concept as midterms. They're great! Hanmin is currently in the midst of a week of them, in which all students have to take tests measuring how they're doing in five core subjects.

As you may imagine, this takes up a good chunk of their days. As you may also have imagined, this means I have a good chunk more of free time this week.

So what did I do today? I went to school--at 10:50 am--and was obscenely early. My co-teacher had told me I would be needed at 11:05, so I planned on being a little early, and once I got there, I realized that class didn't actually start until 11:15. (A small detail which I really should have remembered, considering that that's the same time that particular class starts every day...)

At 11:15, we began teaching class--which was nothing special, until the towards the end. The new unit we're teaching is called "I want to be a doctor!" (insert snide remark about all parents' hopes and dreams for their kids being indoctrinated into them here), and Maggie and I had decided to have them make their own worksheet about what profession they wanted to have. At the top, they were supposed to write their name, and "I want to be a _________ when I grow up;" at the bottom, they were supposed to draw a picture of it.

The choices we had just learned to fill the gaping vacuum of possibility were "doctor," "nurse," "cook," "driver," "farmer," and "worker" (I tried to clarify this one with "road worker" and "construction worker," which is what the picture actually showed but that just got complicated). But, as the kids were intent on their back-and-forth gaze between their papers and the board, I thought of how few of these kids would actually want to have one of those six jobs, and how boring that would be for grading.

So I started an alternate list, based on whatever occupations I could think of on the spur of the moment and which I thought some kids might like and be able to write: businessman/businesswoman (hard to write, but also hard to ignore), fire fighter, police officer, lawyer, teacher. But of course, even these didn't even begin to scratch the surface of these kids' dreams.

Soon, the questions were pouring in, with Maggie serving as an intermediary, describing jobs until I could identify the English names for the kids. "He wants to work with computers..." "Like fixing them?" "No, like making the programs..." "Computer programmer!"

Vet! Painter! Artist! Soccer player! The diversity just kept flooding in. My favorite moment came when one of our high-level English students, who is also a fantastic artist, began asking Maggie about something to do with "衣服" (yifu--clothes), and I was able to skip the translation phase and go straight to the prognosis: "fashion designer!"

I left the class feeling inspired by all the kids' enthusiasm for all of the things they dream they'll do when they grow up. It led into a conversation between Maggie and I in which we recalled what we wanted to do when we were growing up--Maggie wanted to be a businesswoman, I wanted to be (at various times) a vet, a research scientist (animal behaviorist--who wouldn't want to chase animals through the woods and study them?!), and an architect--and it was interesting to see what we have actually become: a teacher and a teaching assistant/aspiring author and editor.

And then I went home. Yep, a single class is all I taught today: woo midterms! Had a pretty great rest of the day, too, inspired by my lovely 5th graders: bought some long-put-off-but-necessary items at Carrefour (cutting boards, hair dryer, another utensil set, bottled coffee--necessary so my beans don't run out), read a bit, talked to my wonderful friend Lindsey on Skype, did some cleaning, ran to the stationary store, did some more decorating in my room (hooray for bulletin boards that actually have stuff on them!), and considered going to the gym. That last one didn't happen BUT I did put in some quality looking-for-a-good-work-out-routine-online time.

Ah, midterms. Love the ample time you give me to dream big dreams, just like those of my 5th graders.