• Date:August 26th, 2010
• Time:10:49 pm
• Tags:Tags: accident, crash, cycling
• Comments:No Comments

Something that amazes me is how my average bike ride distances have increased over time. It’s to be expected, of course, that now, after cycling pretty regularly for about five months, I am riding longer than I did when I first started. Those first few bike rides were pretty short affairs, roughly ten kilometers or so. It steadily improved to ride around 15 km. I was happy at 15km for a while, it seemed like a pretty decent amount to try and ride four days a week. I was, after all, replacing my gym routine with cycling.

But something strange happened, I actually found myself wanting to do more. No, really, it is exercise and I wanted to do…more? This has never happened to me before and it reaffirms my belief that cycling is one of the most awesome things in the universe, because even still, after almost half a year, I still find myself wanting to do it, and wanting to do it more. After that 15km, I upped it to 20km. I would say this 20km distance was where it stayed the longest. Sometimes I’d go a little longer or a little shorter, but I was at that level for a while, and it seemed pretty good. It seemed like a nice distance to do in a day before work. There were a few times on the weekends where I did longer rides, but 20km seemed about right.

Then maybe a month and a half or so ago, I changed my standard route up again, trying to find more distance. I think that’s the hardest part. I’ve wanted to do more, but here in the city it’s hard to add distance without it being just crappy roads that are busy, congested, and have lots of stop lights that kill your flow. I try to find routes that aren’t too busy and allow for sustained riding without constantly having to stop. When I did my route change, I made it to 25km, and this seemed to be perfect. Hell, if I do it four times a week, it’s a nice 100km, which has a certain appeal to it.

More, more, I always want more! In the past few weeks, I’ve added more distance still. When I look for routes, before I had a silly notion of trying to avoid backtracking over the same road twice, just to give me some variety. And my new route still doesn’t directly backtrack, but it’s basically like doing flat switchbacks, there are three parallel roads/paths, I get to the end and just head back in the opposite direction. Doing this has allowed me to reach about a perfect 30km. That’s a pretty nice distance to be doing daily or every other day, even.

Obviously, it seems like my distance will keep going up, but I think perhaps for now I’ve reached something of a plateau. Originally, I liked to keep my trips in the sub-1 hour 30 minutes range, and now at 30km, it’s pushing it, I’ve even been going to around one hour forty minutes depending on traffic and whatnot. I definitely don’t think I’d ever want to take up more than two hours on weekday/workday rides, so there’s not that much room to go.

Plus, the 30km rides have been wearing me out, I must admit. That’s good of course–that’s what I want, but I feel it a lot more. I’m sure I will probably get used to it the longer I keep it up, but I’m certainly not there yet. I’ve done longer rides, but usually on a Sunday or whatever where I give myself a buffer zone of a few days to recuperate and I would go back down to my normal 20km ride or whatever after that. 30km at this frequency has been tough. Combined with my attempt at getting a better sleep schedule in the past week or so, I’ve got to admit I’ve probably been a bit more tired than I normally am, and depleted of my normal energy.

This finally caught up to me yesterday. I remember a long time ago–several years ago, in fact–I was reading about getting into riding motorcycles (don’t ask me why), and somewhere near the beginning, the author said something like, “One thing to keep in mind is that, it’s not a question of if, but when, you will take your first spill. It will happen eventually, everyone, even the best of us, will eventually go down. It happens.” I don’t know if the same maxim holds true with everyone when it comes to bicycle, but as you may have surmised, I had my first bicycle crash yesterday.

To be honest, I always thought that at some point the bad drivers here would hit me or somehow otherwise force me into a situation where I went down on the bicycle. It’s a mixed back, drivers in Taiwan are generally much less safe than they are back in the states. On the flip side, bicycle riding is much more common on streets here, so people at least sort of expect it and know how to deal with it, they’re not really treated that much differently from the much-pervasive moped. There have definitely been a few close calls here on my bicycle, and so I figured when it did happen, that would be why.

Unfortunately for my ego, I can’t claim that to be the case. I was all alone and solely responsible for this, on an isolated bike path, even. Although, I must say, I always had questioned the safety of this bike path. The path is part of a pretty big six-lane road, they have a path in each direction, which runs on a little island along the first and sixth lanes of the road. Confused? Basically, the first and sixth lanes on the road are for scooters in each direction, then, towards the center, there is the bike path, and then in the middle are the car lanes. The main problem with the path is that the actual paved part is quite narrow, barely two bikes wide. Maybe this was because they figured that people would go on the path that fits the correct direction of traffic, but as is often the case in Taiwan, people actually just go on whatever bike path suits them. And it’s not always bicycles, scooter drivers sometimes end up on them for some reason. The worst though is definitely pedestrians. Instead of walking on the sidewalks, they often end up on the path (I guess because it’s covered with trees and thus has shade?) and there is generally no regard for getting out of a cyclist’s way.

Of course, what makes any of this a real problem is that the paved path is elevated probably a good 8 or 9 inches from the surrounding earth. So basically, if for some reason you need to get off the path (to get around pedestrians, for example), you can’t just ride back onto the path. You’d actually have to stop and lift your bike back onto the path. At the very least, they should make the transition from ground to path curved, but as it is, there’s just this nice 8 inch flat wall.

My accident had to do with this design. The path for the most part is straight, but at one point there is a…I don’t know what to call it exactly, it’s like a green energy box or something, you know what I’m talking about?–in the way, so the path does a quick curve around it. Think of it sort of like a backwards-facing C, the path goes straight, then this backwards C around the energy box (which is only maybe 3 feet long, so it’s quick curve) and then continues along its previous straight path.

I was only about 2 km from home at the time, and I admit I was probably a bit tired. I definitely was going too fast, I was trying to beat the traffic signal at the next intersection, mostly because I did just want to get home! I don’t know exactly what happened, it was just a miscalculation, I went to hit that curve, and didn’t slow down/turn fast enough, and basically went off into the dirt towards the energy box thing on the inside of the curve, and when my front tire hit the wall of the path where it curved back around, I basically just stopped. Fortunately I didn’t flat out flip over the handlebars because I knew I was crashing and so I braked heavily and kinda fell into the best possible direction. But I still ended up with the bicycle basically on top of me. One of the bullhorn handlebars was completely crushed and there was dirt thrown up everywhere.

Adrenaline-infused, I got back up, gave everything a quick once over, and decided I better just act like it was no big deal and get home. I lifted the bike back up and hurried home. I’m a little proud to say that, I didn’t stop my GPS or anything during the trip and even with the accident and the recovery time, I still made my entire trip in 1 hour 36 minutes, pretty impressive! I managed to not let any blood, although I was pretty bruised up on my leg and my right knee from where I hit the ground. My arm was also quite sore, I guess from bracing for the impact. But nothing too bad.

I gave the bike a much more heavy inspection when I got home and everything was functioning fine after I reseated everything. I removed the broken handle, and fortunately I actually had a spare handy, so aside from a color mismatch, everything is fine on the bike. I actually did also bend and break the water bottle holder, but it still functions fine, if not better than before due to it actually being a bit tighter now, so everything seems fine. One handlebar and a bruised knee, along with a bruised ego. Not that bad of a price to pay.

I didn’t ride today mostly because Anne was in town, but tomorrow morning I plan to hit the roads again. To be honest, I might avoid that bike path for the time being and just stick to the normal road, but other than that, I’m looking forward to it all the same as I ever had. I hope I can go an extremely long time without having any sort of accidents, though, and I do consider myself very lucky that I escaped a potentially pretty bad situation with a pretty minimal amount of injury. I still love cycling, and hopefully now I’ve got of a better head to remember to always ride safely.

• Date:August 23rd, 2010
• Time:10:38 pm
• Tags:Tags: fuck everything forever, work
• Comments:No Comments

What did I say in my last post? Man, things just keep getting worse. I shouldn’t even write this for fear of having it somehow devolve further, which, after today, it just might.

So, you know how last Saturday was supposed to be my last Saturday working? Well, you know, as far as I knew, it was. I did my classes on Saturday, and even said goodbye to the students, thinking, “won’t see them again for a while.” It’s literally just past two, I’m done, and the supervisor comes up to me. He starts off, “Hunter, I know you were very clear with me, and I understand: You really don’t want to work on Saturdays. But, we still need someone to teach the Saturday afternoon class. We asked the new teacher at the other branch, and he’s okay with the morning class, but not the afternoon class.”

That’s pretty much it. You can guess where it went from there. At first I asked if it was just for a few more weeks, because I was under the impression that the class was over in three weeks anyway. He said it was, but then they were probably going to continue it for another semester or whatever. I can’t believe the class is really that important to them, but I guess they need whatever students they can get, and I suppose it does go for four hours total so they can probably milk a decent tuition from the parents. The shitty side is that the foreign teacher only gets one of those four hours, and that basically makes it a waste of time.

You know, I had rationalized it, I mean, I was disappointed, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. I said it was okay during summer because Anne’s not here anyway, but even after she’s here, it’s still probably not a bad thing. We are lazy, lazy people and nine times out of ten, even when she’s here, we waste our Saturdays and do nothing. The way I envisioned it in my mind, it’s not even that bad. We could wake up early on Saturday, I’d actually bother to shower and dress, we could have breakfast, I go to work at ten. She can stay at home and sleep or whatever, since she loves her sleep. Even if I get out at two with that shitty afternoon class, that’s not so bad, we still have a lot of the day left to do something, and I will actually be ready to go do something for once. That’s usually the biggest problem for us on the weekends, even if we manage to get up before noon, which is a big if, I’m usually in my boxer shorts until 5 PM or so. This way, I’d be home early in the afternoon all up and awake. Not so bad.

Plus, even with the fact that I am spending a decent amount of my day there yet only getting paid for three hours of classes, it’s still a nice chunk of change to bring home. Not to count my eggs before they hatch, but I did a quick estimate on Saturday about what my paycheck would be this month, and it is pretty amazing, even though I make less than I did at my previous job per hour, I’ve never had a paycheck as big as the one I should be getting for this month. I don’t really need the money, but it doesn’t hurt.

That’s how it stood, I was disappointed but not really surprised, and by Sunday I had kind of rationalized it all. I even asked him as we went over the schedule, “still Monday and Wednesday at the other branch?” “Yup, that’s the same.” I went on a nice bike ride on Sunday and was just like, “fuck it, this is enough of a weekend for me.” I was pretty happy.

I must admit, I decided that if I am to work every Saturday morning from here to eternity, I should probably start falling into a better sleep pattern. I used to go to bed and get up at reasonable hours, but lately it’s been slipping into something bad. I mean, I would get up and hit the gym and be home an hour before lunch in the past, but these days I’m lucky to go to bed by 2 AM and I’ve been forcing myself to get up at around 9:30 or 10, and being groggy the rest of the day. No more.

I went to bed at like 11 last night, but I know I didn’t actually fall asleep right away. The last numbers I remember in the clock were at least 12:30–so you know I definitely spent a decent amount of time tossing and turning. These changes take time. I woke up naturally at 7 AM today, I didn’t feel too tired, but I definitely got less than seven hours of sleep. I decided it was vital to wake up though, because that’s the kind of time I’d like to wake up at everyday, ideally. I even went to Kaohsiung to make a Costco run, and for once in my life, I managed to get on every train I wanted to, and got everything done on time. I was home at 12:30, which is pretty incredible when you think about the fact that I went shopping in a completely different city and all.

Tonight, I was definitely feeling it though, and as it is, if it seems like I am not writing in my super duper overly verbose way, it’s because I am making a conscious effort to get this out and done quickly–I don’t want to end up writing for 3+ hours till past midnight like I did last time. So sorry if I’m not up to my normal standards, whatever they may be.

To make things worse, I don’t even know if you could call it worse, but whatever. I was at the branch by my house today, and indeed, the supervisor there told me that the class with little kids would not be continuing (in fact, the student I wrote about has already moved up north to live with his mother), so guess what, “You’ll be working at your normal branch every day!” I don’t even know what that means, because I still have that one class on Wednesday that should keep me at Branch B, and I don’t know if they expect me to work at both in one day.

Although that might not be such a bad thing. I kinda thought this might happen (despite literally asking directly about it on Saturday and being told the complete fucking opposite), and the main problem is hours. Monday-Wednesday-Thursday would be all just half days at my normal branch. That’s too much, or rather too little, in terms of hours. While, at either branch right now, Wednesday would be a half day for us foreign teachers, on Monday and Thursday, as far as I know, there should be enough classes for a full day at the other branch (B), but at mine (A), they only have one class on each day.

Originally, I was going to ask if they could at least let me work at the branch by my house on either Monday or Thursday, and swap the new guy out for a half day there at the other branch. It’s only fair, if there is hourly shafting going on, why not at least have it be distributed? I don’t know, they would probably have some retarded reasoning as to why it wouldn’t happen, and if they did, I was going to throw a fit, I must admit (hey it rhymes!). The new guy said he wouldn’t mind at all, he said he “loved half days.”

But the more I think about it, that might have its own problems. If I’m only spending one day a week there at the other branch, I would really need to correct homework that day, which isn’t always possible. I guess if it were Mondays, I would always be able to correct it on Wednesdays, when I need to go back for my class of older kids. I don’t know. Actually, now suddenly as I write that, it seems to be a better option. Hmm. The other option, would be to work the earlier shift at Branch A on Wednesday (where they have a class), get on my scooter, drive to Branch B, and then teach my class of older kids. Cobbling a full day of work together from the two half days at each branch. It works because there are thirty minutes between the classes due to the different time schedules at each branch. But it would still be hectic and something of a pain to drive across the city and be ready to teach in a span of thirty minutes. But at least I wouldn’t have three half days a week.

Man, now that I’ve written this, demanding that they give me Mondays at the other branch and then having a half day on Wednesday seems to make more sense. I don’t know, we’ll see, I plan to talk to the supervisor at my branch about it tomorrow. Anyway, with this news, along with being really tired, I really think I was grumpy today–I was just in a shitty mood. During the last class, I kind of ran out of steam, and was just over it. I think the Chinese Teacher could tell, and she was actually bothering me by over-explaining everything in Chinese, which really gives me the vibe of “you didn’t do well enough explaining it in English.” Which, I admit, I probably didn’t, but we were strapped for time as it was, I’m a big follower these days of just doing the best you can in the time you have, because at the end of the day it’s more about the kids being comfortable using English than learning every intricacy of the grammar at age 10, but whatever. They’re trying hard, and even though it seems at times to be a bit too much, you can’t fault ‘em for that. Whoo, tangent. Let’s just say, I wasn’t in a great mood, and it probably didn’t result in the best teaching, and when my co-teacher decided to compensate for that, given my grumpiness, it just made me even grumpier.

Anyhow, I just went home straight after class. So I guess I have that homework to correct on Wednesday…kinda like what I am proposing. I was so over it. I originally wanted to title this “fuck everything, forever.” That’s just how I felt.

And then…wow, my old boss actually literally messaged me right now, as I am writing this paragraph, and he’s telling me about my work, if you can believe it. I can’t escape this cycle of shit, it seems! It’s everywhere I turn!

Not to give off the wrong impression, though, because in general I think am happy these days. I dislike my job, or at least many aspects of it, but I’ve managed to compartmentalize it into a very small corner of my life, I think. Does that make sense? Probably not.

I’m tired, so I don’t have time to write and put the whole story together. Instead, maybe I’ll just leave it on this. At my old job, when times were better, I really enjoyed it, and work was a lot more of my life. I even spent a lot more time there, my day revolved around work. A six day work week seemed unimaginable. Work was good, but it was also stopping me from living, to a certain degree. But now, I really dislike things about my work. Yet, I’m happy in life, and I’m able to shrink work down to a pretty small part of any given day, and six days a week doesn’t sound so bad, even though I’m not happy doing it. As long as I get paid, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Does this make sense? Am I worse off now? Or what? I don’t even know what the answer is, I don’t know if I’m whining about anything worth whining about.

I’ll write more later, and hopefully I can make it make sense.

• Date:August 20th, 2010
• Time:12:18 am
• Tags:Tags: work
• Comments:No Comments

Time and writing never really seemed to go well together for me. I have had a ton of updates brewing in my mind for this site, but somehow I just never sat down and wrote anything. I guess I actually did write on the fifth so I am not the worst human being imaginable, but that “eh, I’ll write tomorrow” mentality really does seem to mean that you end up writing nothing at all.

I guess on the plus side, waiting does sometimes allow me to write more of a complete, coherent narrative. That seems a little silly to say, though, since very rarely is a story ever “finished” when it comes to my slow, rambling complaints in life. Like, what I plan to write about now, I realize that, sure, I can tell you more today than I would have been able to tell you had I written it last week Monday, when the seed was first put into my head, but it could all change tomorrow regardless.

So anyway, work: part one million, two hundred thirty seven thousand, three hundred eighty nine. I know stuff can get confusing to those keeping score at home, so a quick preamble before I start: my school has two branches. For convenience’s sake, let’s call the one I started at, and the one I’ve been working at the longest Branch A. The other one I will give the entirely surprising name Branch B. As a quick recap, I started working at Branch A and pretty much worked their exclusively for a long time. There were a few instances of teachers at B having to take some leave and they had me fill in there before, but aside from a few isolated instances, I’ve been at A for my entire tenure with this company.

Then, a couple of months ago, one of the teachers at B needed to go home “for a few weeks” because of an illness in the family. Of course, this was just a ruse, he was really bailing on his contract for various reasons. So, while I was originally just supposed to work at B for a few weeks, it turned into a much more full-time gig. At first, I was working at B three days a week and at A, my “normal” branch, 2 days a week.

The next month, it was just one day a week at A. I was spending nearly all my time at B. This didn’t really bother me, for quite a few reasons. For one, Branch B is insanely close to my house. In fact, I originally had applied for a job there. Ironically enough, when I first started working at A, the teacher who would eventually bail on his contract was doing some classes there. We discussed the two branches, since B was his “home” branch, he told me that originally, it had been very convenient for him, but he had moved, and now he didn’t really care. He said it would be fine with him if we simply switched branches. I told the supervisor at my branch about how the other teacher and I could switch branches, and he just said something “well, maybe we’ll do that in the future, but don’t worry about it now,” and I didn’t, since it was literally my first week on the job and I didn’t think it was a big deal anyway.

So in a way, me working basically full time at the other branch was kind of a fulfilling of what I had originally wanted to do, even if it took the other teacher to basically quit.

To be honest, when I first started working there, at B, I saw it as a bit of a hassle, though. There are various hassles just associated with working at two different branches in general. I need to haul most of my teaching gear back and forth, or obtain duplicates of everything. Plus, homework and other paperwork has to be done sooner if you won’t be back to the branch for a week or whatever, or you have to make special trips back to a branch just to finish grading homework. B also starts classes a bit later, which also means you get out of work later. I think I’ve written about this all before, it’s only 20 minutes later, but the difference seems to be a lot larger. When I get off of work from B, the world seems to be pretty much in the process of shutting down for the night, while at A everything is still open and alive on the drive home.

But those are things I’ve gotten used to. There are other reasons I prefer to work at B, though, aside from the convenience factor. I know I am repeating myself here, as I have written about it before, but everyone at B is really friendly. I’m not saying A is unfriendly, they’re just more…”serious,” they don’t ever include the foreign teachers in conversations, they don’t even really bother to say hello or goodbye. At B, people will constantly joke with you, it’s a much more fun atmosphere, and yeah. So that’s another reason I was starting to get really comfortable there.

Finally, the last motivating factor for me starting to really prefer B in recent days has been regarding the potential future of each branch. Business isn’t great, and it seems that neither of these schools will last forever, but, as the long-time foreign teacher at B put it when I first started covering classes there, “Just looking at the numbers, I think this school [B] will last a little longer than that one [A].” Working purely at A, there are three days out of the week where they simply cannot offer a full day of work. We’re paid by the hour, and while I am a lazy guy, even I realize that’s simply not enough. Basically, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday would be half-days, and Tuesday and Friday would be full-time days, which adds up to 3.5 full-time days. Don’t get me wrong, in Taiwan at this type of job it’s not unheard of or even atypical to have one day of the week be a half-day, but only getting paid for 3.5 day’s worth of work after dragging myself in for 5 days seems to be a pretty lame prospect, even if you ignore the fact that I would also be making a lot less money. Half-days are less work, sure, but I still can’t ignore the fact that I do need to work on those days, so basically my entire day is ruined anyhow. If I have to go in for a day of work, I’d prefer for it to just be a full damn day, you know?

On the other hand, Branch B has enough classes for a full work week. I mean, five full days. It seems natural that I might want to opt for that.

Okay, so that’s the backstory. Wait, that’s the backstory? I’m so tired of writing. Anyway, this month, two teachers left, one of them forever, one of them for a month, so I had to go back to A a bit more, which was fine. I figured when the one teacher came back he’d go back to A and I would work most of my time at B, just as I had been doing previously. I have been working at A four days a week, including Saturdays, and at B just two days. Those two days were mostly because of special classes that required me to go to B.

One of them is a class of older students, I’ve written about that before, it’s a class taught exclusively by us foreigners and they’re fun because they’re “your” class, you manage it how you want, and the students are old enough that you can have real discussions in class, et cetera. I have that one day a week. Then, the other one was the one I just wrote about in the prior post, another class taught exclusively by foreigners, but this is the other end of the spectrum: really young kids where you just teach extremely basic stuff and goof off, which is two times a week. The older kid class was “my” class ever since the other teacher bailed, and the younger kid class became mine when another teacher at B decided to change jobs at the end of July.

Since this is already getting extremely long and I’m tired of writing already, but just want to finish this since I already started, I’ll try to cut to the chase a bit (yeah, right! here comes another thousand words!). Basically, I was at B last week Monday, teaching the class of little kids, when the supervisor at B started to chat with me. She said, “Next month, you will go back to [Branch A], right?” It was the first I had heard of it, and like I said, at B we often joke around, so I told her, “No one tells me anything! You’d know better than me, you and the supervisor at the other branch are the ones who make the schedule!” She said that the supervisor at A had said that they wanted me to be back there full-time starting in September, because while the teacher who took a month off would be returning, it would be only in a part-time capacity. I asked about these two classes that were currently keeping me at B. Actually, I flat out told her that I wanted to keep the class of older kids, because it had originally kinda been hoisted upon me when that other guy left, but in the following few months I had made it my own and it’s a really great group. I had long suspected that the class of younger kids wouldn’t be continuing, when I took the class over there were only five students, which isn’t much. She confirmed that it probably wouldn’t be continuing on.

Anyway, I was pretty bummed about probably having to go back to A full-time. It was made worse because, the next day, I went back to teach at Branch A, and everything just seemed depressing there. As I said earlier, I really wonder how much longer that place can stay in business, and it seemed like all the Chinese-speaking staff there are always talking in a not-too-happy way, but of course I never really know what is going on. For all I know, the school could be on the chopping block at the end of the month, or they could just be talking about how bad their dinner was last night. I went home that night determined to at least say something, to at least let them know that I really preferred to be at B. So when I went back to B the next day, I did so, I even explained about how way back when I started I had wanted to transfer there, I of course didn’t say anything about the bad business outlook, but more just spoke to the fact that it’s a lot more convenient for me and that I have seniority over the new guy there, so if anything, shouldn’t he be the one that has to bounce between branches?

The response I got really wasn’t too much of what I wanted. I was told I would probably be keeping my class of older kids at B, but otherwise, they wanted me at A. The word was that they didn’t want to have the new teacher at A, because I guess all the teachers that had left had left from B, and the staff at A felt they shouldn’t have to “deal with ‘the new guy’,” if that even makes sense. I guess it was sort of a compliment to me, they even thought that it might be better for the outlook of A if they had a more experienced teacher there. I couldn’t really argue with that, it made sense, even though it wasn’t what I wanted, but I did have difficulty believing it completely because I don’t really think I’m some amazing teacher or anything.

So that’s where it stood as of last week Wednesday. Things started to look up though, when I was back at A for the rest of last week, I saw that the schedule had been updated and that they had kept true to their word. They had originally asked me to work four weeks of Saturday classes while that guy took off for a month, but then when they found out that when he was coming back he’d only be doing part-time (which definitely did not include Saturday classes anymore), I was wondering if they were going to guilt me into just taking over those hours permanently. But, nope, the new guy had been scheduled to do it after my four weeks were finished. I still wasn’t entirely happy, heck, I was thinking that maybe if I would be working full-time at A for the time being I’d need to pick up those Saturday hours or else risk having a low amount of hours per week in terms of income.

Monday I go back to work at B, with the little kid class. The supervisor comes up to me and the new guy, and updates us on the September schedule. She tells me I’ll still be there at B on Monday and Wednesday, and then Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at A. “So, it’s the exact same thing as this month?” “Yup.” I was stoked. To make the deal even better, the little kid class would be continuing. So I’d be keeping a full schedule with fun and easy classes. Things were looking up. I was on cloud nine all day Monday, all the stress over the previous week had been wiped clean.

But it’s funny how things change on a dime. That evening, as I’m about to clock out, the supervisor comes back up to me. Apparently, now, one of the students in the little kid class wouldn’t be continuing. He’s a strange kid, he has no social skills because he never did any sort of kindergarten or anything. He lives with his grandma because his mother lives and works up north. His mom had come back down south over the weekend, and when she left, he didn’t stop crying for two days straight, so his family was now thinking that it would be best to send him to live with his mom, and thus he would not be continuing. Without him, since the class was already so small, there’s no way the class would be continuing.

I don’t really know what this means for me, yet. I mean, actually, for two weeks in September that class was going to be taking a break anyway, and yet I was still going to be working at B during that time, so it being closed shouldn’t automatically mean I will suddenly switch locations. But if they really want me at A, and one of the two classes that was keeping me at B on Monday and Wednesday is now gone, it seems more likely that I might be back at A. Either way, nothing is set in stone, yet. On Wednesday, the supervisor went to plead with the head boss to keep the class open even if the one student doesn’t return, but he said no, which was not unexpected. I have never seen the supervisor so sad, she looked visibly deflated and at times I thought she was even close to tears. Of course, there’s still a little time for that one student’s parents/grandparents to change their mind, but on Wednesday he was crying all day and actually had to go home early. Supposedly, it was just because he didn’t have an afternoon nap–but it’s not looking good for him to return.

Either way, if that class does get closed, I’ll be bummed. It’s a lot of fun, for one, especially now that I’m getting into the groove of it more. Also, from a more cynical/slacker point of view, it’s insanely easy, and actually has no homework, so it’s pretty much an awesome class when you consider I get paid the same amount for teaching 1.5 hours of that class as I do for teaching 2 hours of other classes. I mean, keep in mind that, not only is the class shorter, but it also consists of doing stuff like hopping around like a frog, slicing through the air to draw the alphabet, and just lots of other generally dumb, retarded, really fun things.

But it sounds like things might not be so rotten, if I can stay at Branch B for at least either Monday or Thursday (the two important days where Branch A can only offer half-days) and work a full-day there, along with my class of older kids on Wednesday, I will be pretty happy with everything. So, I’m trying to keep optimistic about it all.

Yet it’s difficult to sleep easily, because whenever I see the owners, they always look so stressed and unhappy, whenever they talk to the staff, I have no idea what they’re saying, but the conversations look far from pleasant. It’s like I tweeted a few days ago, it’s hard to be such a paranoid person in a society where you can’t speak the language around you. At least at my old school, the boss was an American who kinda kept me in the loop. I can’t just block it out and go along everyday blissfully unaware, yet I can’t really gleam much information since it’s all in a foreign language, so I’m left guessing and worrying. It’s easy to say that finally it seems like things have been worked out, but tomorrow I could go to work and find out something bad and new, hence that original preface I wrote up at the top about there never really being an end to this story.

It’s just the story up to here. And right now, it seems pretty good, although it might not be as good as it could have been. These days, I’ll take the victories I can get, though.

• Date:August 5th, 2010
• Time:04:27 pm
• Tags:Tags: new stuff, saturday, work
• Comments:No Comments

Hello, August 2010. I just felt like writing a quick update. Of course, knowing me, it will quickly devolve into a lengthy, rambling affair.

Work this month is, as was originally projected, quite busy. One of the guys who had been there for a long time finally moved on to another job, and the other guy who has been there for a long time went back home for four weeks, so they just have me and the new guy as full time workers. As I think I wrote about previously, which contradicted another thing I had written even more previously, I am working on Saturdays, while the guy is back in Canada, anyway. It didn’t matter much to me, since Anne isn’t here on Saturdays during summer.

So, yeah, last Saturday was my first time I really had to work on a weekend since I moved here. I guess one time before I had to go to my old school to watch a speech competition or whatnot, and I’ve definitely been to the office a few times on Saturdays to take care of paperwork or pick things up or something, but this was the first time I had to teach a class. Of course, Saturday classes are typically earlier in the morning, versus in afternoons or at night on weekdays, so that’s different. I had to set an alarm. I woke up at eight in the morning, if you can believe that.

The whole thing was pretty relaxed, though. It does feel different to be at work in the morning, maybe like your whole day isn’t over yet, so it’s not as bad. The sun’s still coming up, it’s got a good vibe. I just had one class from 10:30-12:30, not so bad. Big class, but they seem alright. There’s another class, a one hour “conversation” class that doesn’t use typical material and kind of is just free-form. Well, not really free-form, but it’s kind of just uncharted territory. The class is small, I think only 8 students, although only 6 were there last Saturday, and there’s like one student in the whole class that kind of talks, at all. So it’s basically like talking to yourself for an hour, which is kind of funny given that it’s a “conversation” class. So that’s from 1 to 2, and then I’m done. If it wasn’t for that conversation class, getting out at 12:30 would probably be not so bad at all, because there’s a 99% chance that on a typical given Saturday I wouldn’t usually be up/dressed by that time if I didn’t have work, so I would be out with half the day to go, already up and ready, with money earned to boot. Getting out at 2 does make it seem a bit more like your day is wasted already, although hey, that’s just me, I suppose. I went home and pissed the day away, but I probably would have done that anyway.

So that was new experience numero uno. Then, on Monday after a tragically short one-day weekend, I had to do yet another new thing (gasp!): a new type of class. The guy who finished up his contract used to teach it, it’s taught exclusively by the foreign teacher, if “taught” is even the right thing to describe what you do here. The kids are really young, too young for a formal classroom-type experience. You basically just try and teach them a simple Question-Answer type response thing and four vocabulary words in English per week, along with a very very small writing component (just ABCs), which is actually more of a coloring with markers component. There’s songs, incredibly simple games, and a lot of just random goofing around. I had never really done anything like it before.

It’s actually a lot of fun. I mean, first of all, it’s easy to prepare for, of course. The actual class time is 20 minutes shorter than other classes (I guess because little kids have shorter attention spans), but I still get paid for a normal 2-hour class. There’s also no homework to correct, another huge plus since these days homework has actually become my biggest point of contention, not the classes themselves. I know I used the term “free-form” for that conversation class above, but I think this one is actually a lot more deserving of that title. The first day on Monday was a little rough. Not only was it completely new to me (although I had watched it once before), it was a “review” day, which was kinda difficult since I don’t actually know that much of what they know, if that makes sense. I have no familiarity with the material, so they actually know the sentence structures better than I do. They don’t use books in the class so it’s kind of difficult to lean on that as a crutch.

Just yesterday, I taught it for the second time. Not only was I just more comfortable in general, but I also had some new material to teach, so that was fun. It’s weird though since it’s all oral, no book or writing (since they can’t really read!) on the board. You really have nothing to rely on or hide behind, which I never really thought I needed much of anyway, but it still is different. When I first started teaching, they drilled the importance of providing the basic patterns/sentences we’d be using for the day on the board for a visual indicator for children to remember, but now there’s nothing to point to, nothing for the students to look at when they forget what they’re supposed to say, etc.

Of course, they’re just little kids so they don’t really care anyway. All they want to do is play, all the time. Which is pretty much fine by me, since the games can be super simple, you can just goof off and have dumb fun, stuff that older kids would never appreciate. Like yesterday, I was supposed to teach “drink” words, like water, milk, tea, and juice. I brought in bottles of each vocab word. I was originally going to play “bowling” where they could roll the ball and knock down the bottles and whichever one they knocked down, they’d have to say “I like to drink ________,” but I didn’t even have time to do that. Instead they had fun just running around, pretending to drink whatever bottle I gave them, giving the drink to another student, things like that. It was quite funny.

The class is a bit of a workout, too. You’re doing a lot more running around, and at any time you can somehow have a mountain of kids climbing on you. The CT and I are like human jungle gyms, I had to actually pull students off my arms and legs to get out of the classroom at the breaktime. So yeah, that’s fun. I’m not sure how long the class will continue on for, I think it’s scheduled to be almost over, but it will be fun while it lasts.

So that’s about it. I guess I’ve gotten most of the big changes/new stuff out of the way. I guess there’s still the prospect of having to do an open house in the future, which is kind of a bummer and will be stressful for sure, but oh well. As for now, things seem to be pretty good.

The weather was super bad all of last week. And it’s been okay and hot this week, but just as I speak, storm clouds and thunder seem to have rolled in. It was funny, I was talking to Anne earlier today, and she said in Kaohsiung it was ugly but I had no idea what she was talking about, because I’m only a little north of there and the weather was as sunny and as hot as imaginable. But I guess it’s finally made its way up here, I hope I can make it to work and back before the rain starts falling, I doubt it though.

• Date:July 21st, 2010
• Time:12:01 am
• Tags:Tags: cycling, perspective, traffic
• Comments:No Comments

I often wonder how much my observations are just a matter of perspective and attitude, and how much of them are objective reality, if there is such a thing.

Today I went for my morning cycle, as I often do. But I immediately started to notice how bad the traffic was. I don’t mean purely that there was a lot of congestion on the roads, but that in general the other people on the road were…well, stupider than normal.

I should start off by saying that, one of the first words of advice given to me when I moved to Taiwan by my boss was: “When driving, don’t take it personally. Just learn to let it go.” Smart advice, because if you live in America and you think the drivers around you are bad, try coming to Taiwan sometime. On the one hand, you have to consider how big scooter culture is here, and how people on scooters just feel like they can do whatever they want, because the vehicles are small, can dart around quickly, and generally aren’t as “serious” as four-wheeled vehicles.

Thus, people driving mopeds often don’t obey the rules at all. Unless an intersection has special signaling, turning right on red is illegal here, yet nearly 99% of people do it. Of course. If you live here, you’ll quickly find yourself bending the little rules all the time, perhaps way more than you would back home in the States. It’s a very impatient, convenience-obsessed (it is the country with the highest per capita amount of convenience stores, after all) culture here. It’s even gotten to me. Like, I’m usually a big rule-abider to the point where you’d almost wonder if I’m Mormon, but I find I break these rules all the time. Maybe not to the point of driving like the locals, but I often break that no right on red rule, and especially around my house where I know the streets well, I’ll drive in a way that’s more convenient if not living by the rules of the road. Just tonight, after getting dinner, I drove on the wrong side of the road, since I would be turning left at the next intersection, it seemed silly to drive back on the right side, just to make a hard left turn. Left turns in scooters are not as easy as left turns with cars since scooters drive on the far right hand side of the lane. My action was no strange occurrence in this land, people drive going the wrong way all the time.

The popularity of driving scooters even influences car driving ability, I think. For one, any sort of licensing doesn’t happen until you’re 18 at the earliest. Which, I guess does wonders for keeping teenage driving fatalities down. But in the west, people start driving from 15 or 16 and, for those of us who survive that period, anyway, we have a few more years’ experience. People here, either in scooters or cars, won’t even start until they’re 18. But, even then, most will start on scooters. Driving cars, while becoming a lot more commonplace, isn’t nearly as common as driving them in America. I feel people here in general have a lot less experience with driving cars, and thus, when they get behind the wheel, there’s a lot more weirdness going on. It’s a combination of coming with a scooter mentality coupled with less experience in general.

And believe me, while by sheer numbers you see more people doing stupid things with mopeds, if we’re going by “total levels of retardedness/dangerousness”, I think car drivers definitely take the top honors. Maybe because cars have more potential raw killing power, but also because, when a scooter is driving slowly, you can typically weave around it, but when you have a person driving 10 kph on a narrow road you’re a lot more likely to notice it and be affected by it.

So anyway, that was my huge road conditions in Taiwan derail. My point was that driving here can be stressful, but it’s like that for nearly everyone, and so it’s probably best to just not let it get to you. If you’re a person who is easily inclined to fall into fits of road rage, prepare for an aneurysm a minute while on the roads here. I’ve become pretty good at letting minor traffic transgressions go, as a result. But when I am on my bicycle, it is a little different. For the most part, I carry that same mentality, but it is frustrating at times when people do really stupid things and as a result my cycling experience is brought to a halt.

Literally. Things that infuriate me the most…well, okay, things that infuriate me the most are situations where I could have been killed by someone else’s stupidity or whatever. Bicycles are the smallest fish on the roadways, and thus most susceptible to leading to the operator’s death. That stuff bothers me. But in a close second, I hate when I am unnecessarily forced to stop my bike. Like, okay, a red light, I can deal with, nothing to argue about there. But you’d be surprised.

For an example, something that happened today. There is a road here that goes under train tracks, which are on a bridge. About 30 slightly-inclined yards past the train tracks, there is an intersection. Well, people in Taiwan are obsessed with looking “white” and not getting any sun exposure at all. So, as I am heading up to this intersection, I can see it is a red light, so I need to stop anyway. But as I am turning into the bridge segment, which is a bit of a blind curve thanks to the bridge supports, I am suddenly brought to a stop. There’s a wall of people blocking the road, parked under the bridge so that they are in the shade. I have to slow down quickly, I didn’t even have time to downshift, and come to a stop behind all these people, who are mostly wearing enough protective clothing that there’s no way more than 1% of their skin would’ve been exposed to the sunlight anyway.

The way I see it is, to power this device I’m on, it’s my kinetic energy. It’s not easy. You can stop and go like an idiot, because you have either a pedal under your feet or a throttle on your handlebar that burns hydrocarbons to pull your ass up the hill. I get it. But for me, now I have lost all that energy I invested prematurely, and I also now have to climb up the hill rather than coast up it and lose the excess energy in the process.

Stuff like that, it really bothers me. So I have a different mentality while cycling, for sure, but in general I still let probably 99% of the retarded traffic situations I experience slide ride off my back. What can you do besides brake, gear down, and try again?

But today it got to me. It just seemed like something was in the air, and almost every driver was doing something so dumb that it boggled the mind. But like I said, I wonder if I was just in a bad mood or got bothered by the traffic early on and then was looking for every little annoying thing, or if people were genuinely driving shittier today.

I had one particularly bad experience. It was about at the halfway point of my ride, I was riding down the street. On my side of the road, there was a big delivery truck backing up. Not a huge deal, nor was he doing anything wrong. But in the other lane, there was a guy driving a scooter, right in the middle of the road. Which, as I mentioned earlier, scooters usually ride on the far right of the road, so it’s odd to see a scooter hugging the median. Suddenly, without warning, he just veers left, right into me, at full speed. I think he was looking for a shop or something, found it, and just turned across the street. Which normally wouldn’t have been huge, except blocking my path immediately in front of me was the backing up truck. I was basically being boxed in very rapidly by a scooter on my side and a truck in front. I guess the guy on the scooter didn’t see me.

You know, because gigantic white guys on white bicycles with neon blue bull horns and safety orange handlebar-mounted water bottles are often hard to see in broad daylight, but whatever. I had no choice but to brake heavily, and doing so caused my front shock absorbers to compress and apparently made my tire make heavy contact with my front fender.

Now, I’ve never really been particularly pleased with that front fender anyway. The bike shop installed it very loosely, which I guess is how the intended it to be, because after I first started riding, I attached two zip ties. The zip ties immobilized the fender, which would previously sway from side to side (negating its usefulness), and also they pulled the fender up higher, because otherwise it would make random contact with the wheel. But the first time I took my bicycle to get serviced, they removed those zip ties for some reason. I don’t get it, but whatever, I just put them back on. If I spoke Chinese I suppose I would just ask them, but eh.

Anyway, so when my tire hit the fender, it ripped the main screw/support structure loose. It’s hard to describe, but basically the fender was really lose, but was being held on by those two zip ties, so I couldn’t just take it off, since I didn’t have any sort of tools with me. Nor could I just re-tighten the screw. I tried to, with my hands, and it made the ride sort of bearable, in that it the fender was only sort of dragging against the front wheel the entire time. But, I had to stop four more times to tighten it up to that level on the ride back, because it kept loosening itself to the point where it was basically just laying on the front tire, obviously adding a ton of drag resistance and also just generally making a lot of noise and being really annoying. And I really had to stop, like park the bike and get off, in order to re-tighten it just so it was only dragging a little.

So, I had to deal with that on the whole ride back, and it just kept making me angrier and angrier. Needless to say, when I got home, I wasn’t in a great mood when it came to my attitudes about drivers out there. It seems like today was the worst day in terms of cycling on the busy roadways here, but I guess, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t so bad. Hell, I wasn’t hit or anything worse, just forced to brake and have a piece of my cycle come loose. Not a biggie.

Yet I am still drawn back to that question. I know that there is really no way that people were driving worse today. But I’m telling you, it really seemed like that was reality. I guess it helped me show much your perspective and attitude can really color your “reality.” Perhaps this will somehow be useful in the future, perhaps this experience will help me show how much things can change just by the way you look at it, or whatever.

But honestly, it’s hard to put that “life lesson learned” over the “oh my god I’m so fucking irritated” feelings in my head when I think about my bike ride today. Sometimes things are just like that.

Hopefully tomorrow’s ride will be better.

• Date:July 18th, 2010
• Time:11:13 pm
• Tags:Tags: amusement park, badtimes, goodtimes, janfusun fancyworld, lost voice, observation, rollercoaster, sick, sick day, work
• Comments:No Comments

I had to check a calendar today. I literally had no idea what day it was. Not even a ballpark. I should have known, because I paid my rent last week, but I don’t know, it’s all been a blur. There have been a few events worth writing about, like, oh, I don’t know, getting stuck in my bathroom a few weeks ago, or just about work in general, but somehow I’ve managed to put it all off. Like I said–a blur. Instead of working on that backlog, I’ll just talk more about recent events. I’d like to think I will eventually go back and tell those stories that I’ve missed, but I know the longer it’s been, the harder it is to write about. Whatever, I don’t want to rehash it now, I know the story well enough by now that it’s not like I need to put it to paper at the moment.

This past week has been fun. Well, sometimes I mean that genuinely, sometimes that is sarcastic. Both applied over this past week. I certainly stayed up late all last weekend, watching both the Final and 3rd Place World Cup matches, which both started around 2:30 AM here. Obviously not going to sleep until 4-5 AM is not the healthiest thing in the world, although both times I still let myself get plenty (7+ hours) of sleep. Yet I still found myself on Monday afternoon with a sore throat developing and I knew I was in for fun times.

Being sick is clearly no special occurrence for me here. I get sick like six times a year here, so it would normally be nothing special. The only problem is, because Anne and I have weird schedules over summer, we don’t have a lot of “days off” where we can go and do something special. I mean, it’s still a lot better that we can talk and see each other at all, compared to last year, but yeah, not as many chances to do something fun. Well, it just so happened that I had Wednesday off this week, because the class I normally teach every Wednesday was taking a one-week break. So we had planned to do something special.

Being the rollercoaster junkie that I am, and knowing that Taiwan actually has amusement parks with real coasters, I’ve wanted to go for a long time. And while I think Anne always seems to prefer going to a water park (something I’m not particularly a fan of), she has also mentioned this as a possibility for a while. So, we planned to go to an amusement park called Janfusun Fancyworld, which is kind of a silly name. They have a couple of good coasters there and it is also not terribly far from my house, so it seemed like a good plan for a day off.

Of course, now I was sick, so what was normally not a big deal was kind of potentially putting a damper on these plans. I knew it was stupid, but I couldn’t really foresee any other times in the next 1.5-2 months where we might actually get a whole day together to go do something, so we went ahead and decided to go on Wednesday, anyway. We went to sleep kind of late on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, just planning what the best course of action was for getting there.

Fortunately, we didn’t get up stupidly early because we had discounted tickets if we entered the park after noon, but still, I probably only got around five hours of sleep. I didn’t feel monumentally worse, but I certainly wasn’t getting better. We had breakfast, headed to the train station, forgot the tickets, missed the train we planned on, got into a fight about that, but eventually got over it as we always do. Even on the express train (versus the limited express we missed), it was still only like an hour and twenty minute train ride. The only bummer was that we would miss the shuttle bus and would have to pay for a taxi to get there. It was fine, this park isn’t like Disneyland where you can spend days there, the park closed sometime at night so the difference between getting there at 12:30 or getting there at 1 wasn’t a big deal.

I was still feeling pretty alright. The park is really out in the middle of nowhere. It’s up in the mountains, which is a…unique place for an amusement park. It’s actually quite beautiful, but it seemed like it might be a bit inaccessible. When we got there, it was super sunny and hot, and it was also pretty much dead. It really felt like we were at a closed park or something, I was a bit surprised that it was basically the middle of summer and it was so empty–shouldn’t this be the busy season?

We got in, and wandered around the mountain. I saw one of the two big coasters there, the “G5 Diving Machine,” which was quite impressive. It’s built into the side of the mountain, and it’s a nearly-vertical (89 degree) drop–which is basically the only type of coaster element that can still make me nervous. I decided not to hop on it right away, to save it for later. We did some more county fair/carnival type rides first, a scrambler-type thing, the swinging pirate ship, and even a little mini log flume. The flume was pretty funny, just because Taiwanese people do it differently. They wear raincoats on it. Like, the whole point of a log flume, at least in the west, is that you’re gonna get wet. Otherwise it’s a pretty sub-par ride at best, in my opinion. Still, about 90% of the people on the ride were decked out with raincoats. Especially since it was very hot, I can’t imagine that was the least bit comfortable, but whatever.

This whole time, I’m still feeling sick, but I’m rocking the Ricola and it’s all okay. We see this silly little bee ride that is basically…well, it’s just one of those simple county fair rides where the bees spin around in circles. Just for fun, we decided to ride (the park was dead so there was literally no line for anything, oftentimes when we walked up to the entrance the operator would directly let you on and run the ride just for you. The log flume was the only ride we really had to wait for all day). It’s such a dinky little ride, but I gotta admit, I started to feel really dizzy on it.

Which kind of bothered me. I mean, it wasn’t just my illness feeling worse, I was feeling…nauseous. Which made no sense to me, I’ve been on some of the wildest roller coasters in the world and I love them to death, I’ve never ever had a problem with motion sickness. I figured it was just a side effect of the cold I had, but I was a little paranoid, I hadn’t been on a thrill ride for a while, and I was thinking, “what if this is just a part of getting older? Suddenly I can’t ride any of the rides I love!” I told Anne afterwards that I wanted to get something to drink. I opted for a big bottle of Sprite that they were selling. Since it was so hot, I was hoping this could make me feel better and make the dizziness go away.

Next, we went on another carnival-type ride, I don’t know what the generic name for it is, but it’s basically like a pirate ship except the entire thing also spins on it’s central axis, so you’re swinging side to side but also spinning. I was excited to ride it, and it was fun at first. But then I started to feel sick. Really sick. Just in case you’re in suspense–I didn’t hurl. But it was the closest I have ever come to doing so at an amusement park. Which, I know it is pretty common for most folks to have this feeling after going on rides like this, but that’s the thing, I never do. I’m always good to go, I love it.

I sat down after that ride, just trying to feel better. Since we had time to kill where I just hoped things would clear up and improve for me, we decided to go on the ferris wheel. The ferris wheel at Janfusun Fancyworld is the biggest in Taiwan, and it is pretty cool. Unfortunately, and it pains me to admit it, even the slight motion of the ferris wheel was making me feel worse. I crave roller coasters and the slight rotation of a ferris wheel was making me wish I was at home in bed. We took a bunch of pictures while in there, and while I try to look like I’m okay and I’m happy, the truth is, I was still pretty damn close to throwing up the whole time.

It takes about 15 minutes to go around, and when we got off, I was very close to just going home. I felt really bad, not just physically, but also because it would be really lame. We came all this way, and we probably wouldn’t have an opportunity to do it again for a while, and here I was at like 2:30 in the afternoon about ready to throw in the towel. I was just too sick. I told Anne that, and she would have been okay with going home if I really was that sick, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. We decided to wander around the kid zone a bit, since it was indoor and air conditioned, before finally making that decision. When we got inside there, I noticed a water bottle vending machine and decided to hit one up. I hadn’t drank anything all morning except for that big thing of Sprite, and I noticed after that Sprite was when I started feeling really bad.

When that water hit my tongue, it was like drinking from the fountain of youth. Well, okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I was still sick, still a sore throat. But that dizziness started to clear immediately. I chugged it down. Got another bottle. It was the cure. I don’t know if that Sprite was poisoned or had something else wrong with it, or if it probably just wasn’t what my body wanted, being sick and being out in the hot midday sun for a few hours. But water was what it wanted. I felt great–again, relatively speaking–I was still sick but not in a way that was impairing my enjoyment of the rides.

In the kid zone, we did the “haunted house”, which is pretty funny if you’ve ever been to the haunted house in Disneyland or whatever. Actually, the “haunted house” at Janfusun was just a repurposed “funhouse” that we used to go in at the county fair. In fact, the outside was still themed to be “fun”–chocolate cake, candycanes, etc., not exactly very scary. It was a little disappointing though inside, because most of the “fun”/”scary” (however you look at it) elements weren’t even in action. Like, I remember the doorway spinning, or the floor with the rolling sliders from those old fair funhouses, they were all there but they glued them into a locked state, I guess probably because too many kids were getting injured. There were some random skeletons/skulls/ghosts to try and make it a bit scary, but overall it was more scary in how lame it was. The best part was how terrified Anne was the whole time, who was convinced that scary things were just around the corner (they never were).

After that, we did the merry go round, which I figured was a good test to see if the dizziness was still there. I rode it quite fine and felt great afterward, so I was quite happy. We did the kid coaster as well, which did have a small wait. It was nothing like the log flume, but we did have to wait about five minutes for a ride. Pretty cool that those are the only two times we really had to wait all day.

Feeling rejuvenated, but not sure how long it would last, we hit the other main coaster in the park, the “Floorless Coaster”. A pretty simple coaster with a layout that really reminds me of Viper (I’d love to see a track comparison), the only thing that made it special was the “floorless” aspect, which isn’t really too out of the ordinary. Still, we got to ride in the very front seats, no wait time at all, which was awesome. And even though there was nothing special about this coaster per se, it’s a pretty good ride, so no complaints, it was great to finally be back on a real coaster again–it’s been a long time.

By now the weather had turned kind of lame, but the rides were still running. We headed to G5, which was completely empty as well. It was scary, I must admit, because there was thunder, it was raining, and Anne and I were the only two people on it. Like I said, vertical drops are the only thing that really scare me at all on coasters, and it was like a 180-ft drop (into a tunnel, which always makes it even funner!) off the side of the mountain. When you climb the hill, do a little bank to the left, and then approach the drop, the train goes over the edge, and then breaks. Pointed there, in the middle of the front row, all alone, we hung for like three seconds–which they do on purpose to build the suspense. I admit, I had a “fuck, this is a mistake, shoulda just gone home!” moment, but before you know it the brake releases and you go dropping.

It was actually awesome. It was very smooth so it was a good experience that was over before you knew it. I really enjoyed it, I even got the picture of us printed, because I thought it was so funny. G5 Diving Machine gets a thumbs up in my book, although basically the drop is all you do (it’s a quick out and back)–if I had to wait a long time in line for it I would prefer the Floorless Coaster, just because it lasts a lot longer. No line, though? Pretty awesome.

By that point, we were thoroughly soaked from the rain, which had now started to come down pretty heavily. We hung out indoors for a while, debating if the weather would ever pass or if we should just head home. We did some “virtual reality” ride type thing, which was by far the most disappointing experience of the whole park. It’s one of those rides where you strap yourself into the seat and the whole seat moves. The seats actually had some good motion to them, but the quality of the film to match the motion was pretty bad. The screen itself was low quality, the room was much too bright as well so you could barely even see it at all. Plus, you could tell it was a 3D film (it had that slight fuzziness/doubleness that 3D movies have), but they didn’t give us any 3D glasses so it was really goofy when stuff “popped out” at you, or at least, the stuff you could tell that was designed to do so.

I was finally hungry, as when I was nauseous earlier, eating had been pretty far from my mind. On the way to the restaurant I wanted to go to, we did one of those “space shot” things (not sure if that’s the right term)–where you basically just get shot directly up the tower on a ring of seats, and then come back down. I don’t usually like those, but this one was actually good fun and I think in the future I’ll have no problems with those rides, either. We ate and the rain let up. It was starting to get dark, and we had pretty much done everything we wanted to by that point. While I didn’t feel especially sick, I was feeling really tired by that point. So we headed out, but on our way we hit the floorless coaster again. We must have ridden it at least three more times, because they let us stay on and keep riding. There were only two other kids at first, although finally on our last ride a big group of people showed up–and by “big group” I mean the train must have been almost half-full. Not too busy, that’s for sure.

Finally, we headed out. Another taxi ride back to the station was fun, thunder and lightening the whole time across the plains. We caught a limited express back, and I think we were back in Tainan around nine or so. The taxi driver on the way back said that the park has been really busy lately, but because the weather had been especially poor the day before we went, not many people were there. So, we got lucky, as the weather was only bad for part of the day. It kind of sucks that we had such an empty day and we couldn’t ride the rides more, because of my dizziness and later just general fatigue, but oh well. We can always visit again some other time in the off season.

Of course, the next day I had a million-ton headache and called in sick to work. It positively sucked. I was still debating going in on Friday, but I remembered I had an oral test, so I figured that would be easy, I might as well drag myself in. Of course, when I got there, I found out that, due to my sick day, they changed the schedule. They hired a new guy there and for some reason they really wanted to have him watch me teach a K class, which was fun. I was still recovering at best, and now instead of a lax day of sitting at my desk letting students do their oral test, I had to be super fun guy teaching a brand new class of little kids, all with someone watching. To make matters worse, I quickly discovered I basically had no voice. Not that I really care, but it is a little embarrassing when someone watches your class and you feel like you’re operating at maybe 30%. The good news was that it was Friday, so at least I didn’t have to keep rolling with my lame voice.

I took the weekend pretty easy, did almost nothing yesterday, and today I went to Costco, which was a nice little trip. I did my laundry and discovered yet another puncture on my bicycle, and so I got that repaired, and hopefully I can get back in that groove next week, since I basically did no exercise at all this past week.

And that’s about it, I suppose. I know this isn’t particularly well-written, it’s only 11:14 PM at the moment but I find myself tired for some reason, so I’m just trying to wrap it up. Well anyway, that should be a decent recap of the past week or so. Smell ya later.

• Date:June 30th, 2010
• Time:02:10 am
• Tags:Tags: pet store, relics, saturday, work
• Comments:No Comments

It’s been a while. Between the world cup, F1, and a million other little tiny excuses, I’ve somehow found myself neglecting things that I wished to do, one of them is writing in here. Since I doubt I will get a chance to write in here tomorrow, at least before the stroke of midnight, I might as well attempt to jot down a few of the things on my mind most recently, and conclude the month of June.

My sleep schedule got out of whack this weekend thanks in part to the USA-Ghana match that aired from 2:30 AM to 5:00 AM this past Saturday. I had a lot I wanted to do on Sunday, like do a long bike ride, do my laundry, and go to Kaohsiung to stock up on some basics. I hoped to not sleep in, yet I still only managed to wake up around noon on Sunday, feeling groggy as hell, and definitely not motivated. I ended up accomplishing exactly zero of the things listed above. In fact, only today I have managed to do my laundry. I did do a bike ride yesterday, but none in the past twenty-four hours. And I still haven’t gone to Kaohsiung, although I plan to do so tomorrow morning, assuming I don’t wake up too late from staying up and writing this. It’s kind of a lame cycle, because not only did I skip exercising today, but since I don’t have the ingredients to make my normal meals, I’ve been eating food that’s even worse. I mean, the food I make at home isn’t some amazing testament to health, but it’s not quite as bad as the MSG-laden fried rice that I end up ordering instead.

Monday I managed to wake up around ten. It’s a gradual change back to normality. I just had one class at work, it was a pretty easy deal. I felt pretty tired all day, especially after a noontime bike ride. I needed to get some new food for Anne’s mouse, since I am watching it while she is in Japan this week. The food she gave me is full of bugs, it’s really creepy, they look like ticks but I don’t know if they are. Why would ticks be living in dry rodent food–they can only obtain sustenance from blood as far as I know. Still, I can’t help but constantly feel like I am now being attacked by parasitic arachnids. Creepy little buggers.

The pet store I usually go to is way on the other side of town, at least in terms of driving home from work at that branch. If at all possible, I wanted to avoid having to drive there, especially because, like I said, I was feeling pretty tired. I asked my coworker, he said that there was a little pet shop near the school, and I kind of knew where it was, because I had ridden my bike past there several times. I definitely remembered it because there was a nice cardboard cutout of a cute girl advertising Science Diet dog food outside. Apparently sometimes my intense ability to hyperfocus on attractive females can have positive side effects, I suppose.

So after work I start off in that general direction. I know where the shop is, roughly, but I’m not exactly sure, so I kind of cruise down the road slowly on my scooter. Finally, I see it, but it’s on the other side of the road, and the road I am on has a bit of a concrete divider going down the middle, so I can’t immediately turn left. I notice that the pet store has a ton of big dog kennels and stuff outside, and in my mind I set a little flag of “stuff outside = pet shop” for when I am heading back in that direction. A hundred feet or so down the road, I reach the end of the street. Rather than do a U-Turn and head back up the road, I just pull off into a little parking lot on the side of the street. If I drove back to the pet store, I’d have to do another U-Turn at the end of the street in the opposite direction to get back in the direction of home, so I figure it’s easier to just backtrack that short distance on foot rather than have to drive laps around this dumb concrete divider in the middle of the road.

So I cross the street and start heading back towards where the pet store is. Like I said, I was feeling pretty tired at this point, and I wasn’t paying attention too well. I got to a place with a lot of stuff outside, and I turn to go in the door. Of course, it wasn’t the pet shop. It was some other shop. I have no idea what kind of shop it was, actually, because once I got inside, it was filled with a bunch of random odds and ends. Like, food. But also clothes. Hanging from the ceiling, for some reason. And then there were water thermoses. Is that the correct plural of thermos? There were a lot of thermoses in the window. It was kind of odd. You never know what kind of shop you’ll find in Taiwan. It was a pretty small, dingy store, tightly packed. With thermoses, food, and clothes. I don’t know.

Normally, I wouldn’t have even cared. I would have just turned around and acted the part of, “whoops, sorry, dumb foreigner in the wrong store, see ya!” But as soon as I set foot in this store, I realized that one of my students was in there with her mother. Meeting students outside of school is always hugely awkward, at least for me. There’s this weird pressure, many times parents will want their child to demonstrate their English skills, and of course since they are in essence paying my salary, I also should be able to perform and help showcase the kid’s English ability. In theory. That’s a lot of flowery language, basically as the foreign teacher, you’re a bit of a novelty to people here. They pay to have their children go to special schools just to learn English, so they want to see that perhaps their child could really talk to a foreigner, and so, “here’s a foreigner you know, Johnny! Go say hello to your English teacher, in English!” I doubt math cram school teachers have to do long division with their students if they happen to meet them in the street, but that’s the nature of teaching a second language, I suppose.

I was already in a bit of an awkward situation, having walked into this tiny little shop that I had no business being in. And now I had to at least acknowledge one of my students. To make matters even worse–which I admit is a bit of a hyperbolic term to use, but keep in mind I was tired so everything was a battle–this student in particular is perhaps the best at English in her class. I don’t know anything for certain, of course, but I get the vibe that her parents, or at least her mother, seems to be really into English. Like, I’ve always noticed that her mom takes great care to write her child’s first and last name in English on the inside of all her books, in nice, clean print. Most students don’t even know how to write their family name in English, and the parents are often worse! Her mother also always signs the homework, with an English signature, so obviously she is not one of those parents where you could walk up to their child, say “Bloo bloo a gaga meemo?!” and they would be none the wiser.

I just gave a cheery “Hello!” to both of them as I walked past them in the shop. And then I was faced with more of a dilemma. I had walked in there, but now I didn’t want to just leave right away, which to me would seem even weirder. Even though I had no reason to be in that shop, I had to feign interest, like I was looking for something. And so I did. I started looking through for the food shelves, picking up various items, inspecting them, and then even faking a little bit of disappointment, as if I had come in there with a specific goal in mind but the items I had been finding were not to my liking. To be honest, that store did have some interesting stuff. They had some western-style salad dressing there, which isn’t that common here. If there had been some ranch dressing there, I almost certainly would have bought it. Now wouldn’t that have been a fortunate coincidence, if I had walked in there accidentally but then had found something I liked?

Alas, it wasn’t to be. I looked around for another minute or so, before deciding it was safe to leave. Another friendly “bye-bye” as I hurried my body out of the tiny shop and headed to the real pet shop, which for future reference, is the second shop with things out on the street. After accidentally whacking an employee and almost knocking over a display case with my messenger bag (what a night, just get me home!) I got the mouse food, and got back on my scooter, headed for familiar territory.

That was Monday. Now, for today.

Work. It’s been…well, it’s been what it is, I suppose. Today was the final day of the first PG class I ever had. I have written about PG classes briefly in another post of mine, basically they are classes where only a foreigner teaches, you have a lot more discretion on how to run the class and in general it is “your” class. They’re really fun. Unfortunately, I think due to a combination of a shrinking class size and the fact that they wanted to free up my schedule at this branch, they decided to merge what’s left of my class with the other PG class at this branch, since they are basically at the same level, just taught on different days (and by different teachers). No one told me before last week, and even then, I had to ask about it, although I guess eventually they were planning on telling me.

It was kind of a bummer, things were improving in a lot of ways with those students. They had always been a troubled group, or so I’ve been told. There were a couple of really good students in there, and even the not so great ones were actually starting to talk and whatnot. Perhaps I am just being a bit sentimental, but I’ve been teaching this same group of students for the past twenty-four weeks, which is almost half a year, and when the schedule for the rest of the classes at my school make it so you might not see a given class for a month or more, this is one of the few groups of students I’ve really gotten to know well. I will definitely miss teaching some of them. Also, just from the perspective of my school, it’s not a good sign to be closing yet another class. Undoubtedly a few of the students won’t be able to switch to the other class just due to time constraints or whatever, so it’s just more students lost.

But now, as I mentioned, my schedule is a bit freer. These PG classes lock down the foreigner teachers’ schedules, since they need to teach that same class at the same time every week, so they can’t ever give us any other class in that block. The upshot of that is, I will now be working four days a week at the other branch, since I am no longer necessarily needed on Tuesdays at the main branch. It works for me, it gives me more time to finish correcting homework, and also it’s way closer to my house. So, today was my last Tuesday at my normal branch for a while. It’s a bit hard to consider it my “normal” branch when I’ll only be working there one day a week, but old habits die hard, I suppose.

Of course, everything will change again after July. In August, one of the foreigners is going on a four-week trip, and when he comes back he might only be working part time, and the other guy will straight up be gone, out of contract. So, who knows what August holds in store. Presumably I will have to hop back and forth between the two branches, again. Additionally, I “agreed” to work on Saturday during this time period. I really have no choice, despite my earlier post on the subject. The guy who works Saturday will be going back home, and as of right now they have no alternative–I will be [i]the only[/i] foreig teacher across the two branches. When they approached me about it, the teacher who makes the schedules started with, “I know you don’t really want to work on Saturday…” because, well, if you really forget, go ahead and read a few posts back on this very site.

I guess I’m just trying to be a team player. The school is already on hard times, I guess one more difficulty they don’t need is trying to find someone to teach on Saturday, although I was really firm in telling them it’s only okay with me for August. As much as I think a six day work week will literally destroy me, Anne and I may not be able to hang out on Saturdays anyway during most of summer vacation, so it’s not terrible. Plus, it’s more money. The one bummer is that I guess they’re opening a new class, and if I heard him correctly, it’s like from 1:00-2:00 PM on Saturday. The other class I’d be teaching is from like 10:00-12:00 I think. So basically it means being at work from ten till two on a Saturday. Total bummer. Maybe it’s not all bad, though. It’s motivation to get up and out in the world, which right now I desperately need, I can’t keep slacking off, so we’ll see how it goes.

At this point, I should just be grateful they’re offering me above minimum hours, eh? If I work an additional three hours on Saturdays, that will be me making more money than I ever have since moving here, so perhaps it will be interesting.

One last interesting roundup item I’d like to note. I guess the wife of the owner of the school will be watching classes at the main branch over the next few weeks, for some reason, I’m not quite sure–it’s just what I have gathered. I’m not even sure it’s her watching, but I think it is. That’s not that interesting in itself, although it strikes of the same desperation that happened at my old school (with some of the same key players involved) before it finally gave up the ghost. What I found interesting, though, was that the schedule they used to show when she would be watching was actually from the old school. I had no idea that form was even still in existence–why would any paperwork from that old place magically resurface? I used to stare at the same basic schedule outline on my desk for a year, and now seven months later, there it was again, pinned to the message board.

I couldn’t help but think it was even more of a bad sign, an omen of things to come. As what happened to the old place, it seems that it is inevitable at the new place, it’s only a matter of time, and the relic from the school of times past came to bear that bad news.

Bit of a downer to end on.

• Date:June 5th, 2010
• Time:11:02 pm
• Tags:Tags: bike, cycling, loop, saturday, Zhonghua, 中華路
• Comments:No Comments

I remember when I first moved here, my boss gave me a bunch of magazines about the city and the area. He also gave me a map, and was pointing out a bunch of things to me. He mentioned that 中華路 (Zhonghua Road for the Chinese-impaired!) formed a big loop around most of the city. It was very close to my house, and he said that if I ever got lost, if I could ever find that road, I could just drive along it and eventually get back home.

Well, needless to say, 中華路 always seemed pretty big. When I used to work at the old school, I traversed it every day, but just a small section of it. I always wonder what lay beyond the small part of it that I knew, since it’s a pretty major road. And the part I drove on had some pretty interesting stuff on it. I never really enjoyed recreationally driving my scooter, so I never really explored it much. I had walked various parts of it, but since it always seemed pretty big and busy I never went too far.

That changed once I got my bicycle. Since I am always looking for big open roads to travel, old Zhonghua was one of the first places I tried. I got to know the rest of the road better. At first I started heading south on the road, which was pretty alright. It’s pretty urban but then suddenly you hit the airport area and there’s a giant cemetery out there. It’s kind of creepy in a cool sort of way. Eventually, I ended up going north as well, which, when I figured out where it connected back up with other roads near Anping, I realized it was a pretty good route, especially as it also connects up to the riverside bike path up on the north end of town.

So yeah, I was pretty well acquainted with the northern part of the loop, as well as the eastern part as that is where I live. As for the southern and western part, for some reason, I never went too far in that direction. I’d get to that giant cemetery, which also happened to be the starting point for another road I knew, and rather than risk unknown waters I had always just taken that road I knew back into the city. This was pretty early on in my cycling days, and I had just never headed back in that direction because I had discovered better roads.

I’d estimate I had ridden about 90% of the entire 中華路 loop. But there was still that one little unknown part, the southwestern part. For some reason it always looked rather large on a map, and I just figured that if I actually rode down there it would be quite a long trip to come back all the way around. I wanted to do it, but since I was typically riding on the weekdays, where I had to worry about getting to work (and not being dead-tired) I had always put it off.

This weekend I knew I had a chance to go cycling and I knew that it was the perfect time to do the full loop. I woke up early this morning, pumped for a really long bike ride that would take me around the entire city. To be honest, one reason I had never gone in the one direction again was because generally there was a lot of traffic and signals, which obviously isn’t ideal for long bike rides. I prefer to find some long open stretches of road, but I was committed to doing this today just to say I had completely done it.

Like I said, I was thinking it was going to be long. I had done parts at a time, but never even half of the loop at one go, so I wasn’t quite sure how long of a ride it was going to be. I was thinking it might be a new long distance record for me. I even threw a granola bar into the little pouch on my bike, and drank a decent quantity of water before leaving to ensure that my bottle on my bike wouldn’t go dry too quickly. Also, I brought along an extra battery for my iPhone, since the GPS tends to suck down the battery quickly, and I was thinking if I was out there for a really long time I might actually need to juice it up again. After all of these special precautions and preparations, I was on my way.

It was a rather lovely morning, I do have to say. There was traffic, but it wasn’t especially bad. It had been ugly and rainy here towards the end of last week, but today was sunny. It was a little windy which is always a bummer when you have to fight the wind, but nothing too crazy. It was also a bit cooler than is typical, which is always great and appreciated. Altogether a pleasant Saturday morning.

I got going and everything was fine. I made it to the airport and the big cemetery and eventually I was at the crossroad where I had turned off before. “Ooh, this is exciting, new territory!” as I kept pounding on. It was…interesting, I guess. Actually, there wasn’t anything too special on the rest of that road heading South although it was kind of deserted and light with traffic so I wasn’t complaining. It was new, so that’s always good. I wondered how long it would go on for.

…And then I hit the turn to start heading up the western part of the loop. I wasn’t expecting this so soon, because it meant I was already more than halfway done with the new territory. I thought maybe I had messed up estimating the map, and that the western part I hadn’t done was larger than I thought. It…wasn’t. Another couple of kilometers and I knew exactly where I was, and before I knew it I was back in familiar territory. I didn’t immediately pull out my phone to see how far I had actually gone, I was hoping that perhaps even though it seemed rather quick, maybe I was riding extremely quick so I had covered a lot of distance or something. I knew that probably wasn’t the truth, since the stop-go nature of driving on that road with all the signals meant, if anything, my average speed was taking a big hit.

Eventually, I did check my phone, and I confirmed that, indeed my mileage was pretty low. As I made it back home, I found I had only traveled about 21.7 km. It isn’t a terrible amount, but considering on most days I’m averaging 23+ km, it’s on the low side of things. I felt pretty stupid that I had been so paranoid about it being a long trip and it ended up being shorter than my usual rides. I felt like I could have kept riding a bit longer, but I decided that perhaps I’ll just go out for another ride tomorrow and try to accomplish something more then, so I didn’t kill myself today.

So that’s pretty much what I accomplished today. At least I’ve done it, I’ve seen it all. So mark that one off the list. Now I just need to figure out where to ride tomorrow. I’m always in search of new places I can go where I can just ride for long distances uninterrupted by traffic, signals, or anything else lame. It’s the one downside of living in the city, I suppose.

Truth be told, probably because I got such a little amount of sleep last night, even though it’s only 11:04 pm and it wasn’t a very taxing bike ride, I still feel pretty damn tired right now. Crash early on the weekend, stay up late on the weekdays. Ah, the joys of having no life.

• Date:May 31st, 2010
• Time:11:16 pm
• Tags:Tags: book, goals, mother's day, publishing, writing
• Comments:1 Comment

I’ve got to get at least one more May post in. I need to write more, always write more.

I guess I can reveal it now, I was so nervous about the surprise being spoiled I pretty much kept it to myself. I had a project for my mom’s birthday and mother’s day that I was working on for a while. Since it was my mom’s fiftieth, I decided I wanted to write down fifty memories with her. Originally, I was trying to keep the scope of the writing rather small, just a few paragraphs for each memory, to keep it rather simple.

Due to procrastination on my part, I overshot my original goal of my mother’s birthday and instead aimed for mother’s day. It was a more achievable goal, but as I am wont to due, each memory started to get longer and longer, which made the project even more delayed. When I finally finished it, it was nearly 30,000 words long, before writing the preface, dedication, and table of contents. I really wanted it to be professional-looking, so I used Lulu to get it printed up. I made it a full-sized hardcover book with a dust jacket. Since I wanted the whole thing to be authentic, I designed the cover myself rather than using one of the available self-publishing templates, which was easily another 8-10 hours of work, but I thought it looked good.

I had never done anything like this before, so I was a bit nervous about how things would turn out. I ended up ordering a copy for myself and had one sent along to my mom. It was still technically before mother’s day at that point, but as I completed the order, I found out “print on demand” means “print in a few weeks.” They said it’d be 10-15 business days until it actually shipped. Alas, there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point, so I just went ahead with it.

Well, sure enough, a few weeks later, I got notification that the books shipped. Ironically, my copy reached me here in Taiwan via international mail faster than my mom’s copy reached her in Hawaii via FedEx ground. I was stunned with the results. I was totally nervous, especially about the dust jacket. Since I didn’t want to use their templates, I had to just measure everything myself and hope that all the folds and whatnot lined up perfectly. But hey, it looked perfect. Crisp, clear, and all in the right place. I don’t mean to toot my own horn too much, but externally, aside from missing a barcode and an ISBN in the back, it actually looks like a book you might find on a shelf in a bookstore.

Inside, too, everything turned out well. I wasn’t even sure if I had formatted the PDF correctly, and I was worried about the pages all turning out backwards or otherwise garbled. There was a place I used some Chinese characters, too, and that turned out fine. It was all there, exactly as I laid it out, and again, it looked like a real book. Everything turned out exactly as I wanted it to.

Well, at least visually. I wrote it at a fast pace, usually way late at night, so I knew there were tons of errors. I didn’t have time to proofread it at all, so it pretty much was printed in first draft form. This lead to many many typos, spelling errors, and grammatical nightmares. On top of that, when I dragged the text over from the original document to the document formatted to the right page size, there were a couple instances of paragraphs losing indentation, line-breaks, etc., which led to further errors. I even changed the font which apparently messed with spacing in a few instances–thanks OpenOffice! But those were all errors that occurred before I even sent it off to publishing, so everything that went wrong was my fault and I anticipated it.

Still, I’ve gotta say… I didn’t really expect the end result to be so epic. It’s like a real book…but those are my words on the page. It really is different somehow, the print is impossibly crisp and have this weight and clarity to them printed on the slightly cream-colored pages. There was something really special about it to me. Of course, I’ve always toyed with the notion of being a writer, it’s always just been a fantasy of mine. I still don’t know if I’ve made any more progress in the right direction, but this was something of an inspiring moment for me. Sure, it was just a bunch of words I had “published” myself, but still, it felt so good to see my words on the page like that. I would really like to have more of that feeling in the future, where I can see my name on the cover and spine, and flip it open to a random page that I penned myself.

Of course, the trick is to write something that more people than just my mother and myself would be interested in reading. And then also getting someone to pay you for those words. Still attempting to master those components, but this little experience has pushed me further in pursuing that angle than I have before.

The gift was well-received, once it finally got to her, which made it all worth it. I would have been happier to be there and see the expression on her face, but I think she was pretty darn impressed with what her son had managed to accomplish.

Now I just need a new writing project. One that might hopefully move me even closer to getting more readers and maybe even some money. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Any sort of project will do. Now to find it.

• Date:May 20th, 2010
• Time:03:56 am
• Tags:Tags: complaining, insomnia, sleep, uncertainty, Wednesday, work
• Comments:No Comments

I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. I know turning my computer back on and staring at a glaring LCD while writing this at 2:45 am probably isn’t the best antidote, but here I am regardless. I don’t know how much difference it would make anyway if I didn’t, and I felt like writing, so write I shall.

It’s odd. As I write this, I am yawning. I feel tired, but certainly not exhausted. Yet when I lie down and close my eyes, the sleep never comes. Sure, a lot of it is my inability to just clear my mind. Always thinking, wracking my brain with senseless thoughts and worry. I know that keeps me up. But even when I forcefully clear my mind. I can do it, I definitely took enough courses on mysticism to know how to blank out my mind for a short time, at least. Yet, somehow, after I’ve managed ten or fifteen minutes of this, I end up staring back at my clock glowing in the dark, counting the minutes and hours.

When I don’t get any exercise or do anything all day, I know why I can’t sleep. Yet, over the past three days I’ve cycled over 70 kilometers, and today I burned over a thousand calories doing so, so I don’t think I just have a big abundance of energy. Like I said, I’m not exhausted but I certainly did things today. I also know why I can’t sleep if I have a messed up sleep schedule. And while my schedule had been messed up last week pretty badly, it really seemed like things were getting back on track. I woke up at ten this morning, which isn’t super early but is early enough for me.

So what’s the problem? I’m yawning. Fall asleep, damnit! It’s probably the desire to fall asleep that stops it from happening, I just keep expecting to zonk out and it never happens and I start to think about how it sucks that I can’t sleep, how I will feel tired tomorrow, how I won’t get things done tomorrow, et cetera, and it’s just a vicious cycle.

Maybe that’s it. Hopefully writing something will drain my energy reserves closer to that exhausted state where no amount of brain process can keep you awake, although by then it will probably be around four in the morning and I’ll sleep until noon. Oh well.

Work. I love to write about work. Where to begin with, today? The school I work for has two branches. I believe I’ve written in the past that occasionally I’ve had to cover some classes at the other branch if one of the other foreign teachers takes a day off or whatnot. It’s the same at my branch, we’ve had them come and fill in for us at our branch… well, not for me, since I’ve never taken time off, but certainly for the other foreign teacher at my work. It’s not usually a big deal. The biggest deal was when one teacher went home for three weeks after his father passed away, and I did a fair amount of time at the other school.

Well, something similar happened. The other teacher had a grandfather that passed away, I guess, and when I got to work on Monday they told me he had gone back to the UK for a week, and asked if I could cover some classes at the other branch on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Just for this week. No big deal, I was totally fine with that. So, today (well technically yesterday, now) I head on into the other branch for the Wednesday class. I’m kind of looking forward to it since it’s just an easy one-off type of affair, it seems simple enough. I start to prepare for the day’s class, and about five minutes before the class starts, a little bit of an odd thing happens.

The head teacher there, I suppose you could call her a manager (I have no idea what her official title is) sits down next to me and says, “Hunter, I need to tell you something. We actually will need for you to work here more often. It turns out [the other teacher] isn’t going to be coming back. We just found this out two hours ago… so, for the time being, we need you to work every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday here. You’ll do half of your time at your branch and half your time here.” That was the gist of it, anyway. She really seemed pretty shocked about the whole thing.

It was odd, in a way I was kind of expecting it. On Monday night, after work my coworker (at my normal branch) and I got some food and we happened to discuss this now-gone teacher. I mentioned that he had to head back home for the funeral. My coworker oddly happened to say, “I ran into him on Sunday, and I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be with us. I mean, he’s still got time left on his contract, I think, but he’s just really unhappy about the compensation.” I guess the guy used to be an engineer and was used to a much larger salary. Still, it sounded like, if anything, he would simply not be renewing his contract.

Let me just say now that, even though this guy always seemed like an alright dude, it is pretty damn low. I mean, okay, so maybe he couldn’t wait a few more months for his contract to end. I actually remember when I first met him, he said he was about five months in on his contract, which by now would make it seem that at most he would have three months left, but probably about two. But maybe that’s impossible, maybe he has some other job offer now and he had to take it. Fine. At least give the school some warning. I mean, yes, you are technically skipping out on a contract, but they’re human beings and I have a feeling they’d be more understanding than not. Especially since my conversation at dinner on Monday seemed to hint at this guy’s dissatisfaction and his intention to leave, it seems certain that he knew he was not going to be around for much longer. It’s standard practice to give your two-week’s notice, and in this case, especially when you’ve signed a year-long contract, you can at least give them that much. Even if they did decide to enforce the contract penalty, which I really doubt they would if you’re not being a dick about it, I’m pretty sure it would be less than the amount of money he already earned this month that he will now likely not be paid since he decided to sever all ties. Even if the amounts were the same, you’d come out even and not have the weight of karma bringing you down, you know?

Clearly it’s bad for the school, and I lost a lot of respect for the guy today, not that it matters much now, I suppose. But that’s that. Naturally, I’m more worried about what it means for me. Like all things in my life, it seems like I have this weird dichotomy about how I should feel about it.

There are many many pros. The school is super close to my house, I originally wanted to work there because of that. I’ve said it before, it seems like everyone there is very, very friendly and nice, too. Those are the convenience pluses. The other big plus would be more hours. I know I’ve written before about it, but yeah, my branch is currently still having a problem giving us hours in the afternoon on Mondays and Thursdays, and I had no classes on Wednesdays, so I was getting really low on hours. As I wrote in my last post, I don’t really care that much about it, but a part of me knows I should care and that money earned today could help on a rainy day tomorrow, so if the opportunity is there, I might as well take it. Some part of me wants them to not even find a replacement teacher, because that means when it’s time for my contract renewal, they’ll definitely renew since with only three foreign teachers spread across the two branches, there will certainly be no shortage of hours.

Yet, I am always finding myself more dragged down by the cons. The hours of operation, for one. Even if it’s only 20 minutes difference, it seems like more, and getting out later is a bummer. As is the location, I know I listed it as a pro above, but actually, combined with the later quitting time, it seems like nothing is open and there just aren’t many dinner options after work. It sounds silly, I know! I guess, let’s say it is convenient in terms of distance to my house, but it doesn’t bring me through the heart of the city like my normal branch does, and everything just feels…dead, and quiet. I love that urban energy, I love how I can stop off for computer parts on my way home from work under the big LED signs at the train station, that kind of thing. Instead I get out later and I’m at the outskirts of the city. There’s something boring about that, I really can’t explain it well but I don’t like it. Maybe I need some sort of commute to make it feel like my life isn’t purely work/home. Pretty pathetic, but that’s just the way I roll.

I guess my major problem though is just a lack of a “base”. Splitting my time across two branches I just don’t think works well for me. I know some people love it, it breaks up the week and it makes things seem to go by quicker. But I’m certainly a boy of routine, and I never found myself feeling comfortable during those three weeks where I did what I am now scheduled to be doing for the indefinite future. It just doesn’t feel like my desk. I don’t have all my belongings. I don’t know where things are, et cetera. Sure, some of these things will go away with the more time I spend there, but it’s already a hassle, I forgot to bring some stuff to this branch, so I’m kind of working with a lighter teaching toolkit at the moment.

Another more realistic problem with the splitting of the week is homework. The way it works is, as I’ve already mentioned, typical classes are taught two times a week. So, you correct whatever homework you collect that day, and it has to be corrected before the next time the class is taught. If a class is Tuesday-Friday, for instance, and you teach it on Tuesday, you must have the homework corrected by Friday. It’s typically not a huge problem, since at minimum you have three days to get it done. At least, that’s how it works normally. But now, if I only spend half my time at any given branch, it means I’m not around to grade homework later. I already had to rush, yesterday, Tuesday, was my last day at my normal branch for the week. So I had to finish correcting all that homework on Tuesday night before I went home, because I wasn’t planning on making any trips back to that branch before Friday (the day it is due). It may not be a problem all the time, it really depends on how much there is. It was a rush on Tuesday for me, even though the homework was rather low-level stuff, it was a big class and so it was a big pile to rush through.

I don’t really like that at all, it’s just more stress. I can handle it for one week, and even for three weeks it was okay (although I actually had to go to work on a Saturday just to correct homework one time, something I definitely do not like and will not allow for it to become a routine). But if this is a long term thing, I know there’s no way I will always be able to finish the homework on time, and that means I have to give more (unpaid) time to drive around to other branches on days I don’t work there, possibly on the weekend, just to get that done. I don’t really know what the answer is, I don’t want to dump it onto the Chinese Teachers since it’s not their fault, but at the same time, I didn’t originally sign on to split my time between branches, and so I don’t like how they give you unrealistic expectations of having to give extra time (or even days) to rush to get stuff done.

Another downside is Wednesday. Again, I know that this is connected to the amount of hours I have and that it probably sounds extremely lazy, but I have grown rather accustomed to having Wednesdays off. I’m fine with having to cover a class there once in a while, but it now looks like that at the moment, I will now be working five days a week. How many times can I repeat it, I know that most people in the world work five days (or more) a week, and I actually did so for my entire first year, too. But what can I say? If the money isn’t the be-all end-all of my life here, I realized that it made my week a million times better, I could always look forward to that Wednesday break. It’s weird, because I will only have one class on Wednesday, which you would think makes it easier, but to me it just seems like a waste. I have some sort of mental problem where I just can’t relax or do something I want on a day if I have to do any sort of real work. Even if it’s just one tiny little class, late in the evening for literally less than two hours. It’s now too late. Wednesday is a wasted work day. If I’m going to go through the hassle of putting on presentable clothing, or just even making sure I get my ass out of bed and dressed in general, I would rather just work a full shift. I really don’t like one-class days. Go full or stay home, man. This is a huge bummer to me, I don’t care how lazy it seems.

To make things worse (depending on how you look at it, I guess I look at it pessimistically) the class that I taught today is a special type of class at our schools. They’re only taught by foreigners, and the foreigner largely makes it their “own” class, meaning you develop your own style and stuff. I actually really like it, don’t get me wrong, they are my favorite classes to teach. But, as the other foreign teacher said to me as we discussed the guy who bailed, he said, “it looks like you got [one of these special classes] out of it.” Meaning that, if I end up teaching it for any sort of real duration of time, there is a pretty high probability that it will remain mine in the future, especially since I don’t normally have classes at my regular branch on Wednesdays, either. Even if they hire a new teacher, if it’s like a month down the line, they might decide it would just be better to keep me teaching this class, rather than go through another shakeup, especially if the new teacher is a rookie. So I may have permanently lost my free Wednesdays, although I’m sure a lot of people in my position would be happy because, again, this is some form of job security and it guarantees a bigger paycheck every month. But I might be getting ahead of myself, maybe I will really just be a temporary teacher here, and they’ll swap in a new teacher if they get one. Who knows?

In the end, I guess it all comes down to how long this situation will persist. Like I said, a part of me hopes that they will just operate with three of us because at least that is some job security. On the other hand, it’s a relatively long time until my contract is up, so that’s a long time of this messed up schedule. So, I don’t really think this is a long-term solution, although maybe it is, maybe that’s just the reality of it all. They might realize that three isn’t enough but four is too many, and in that case, three is definitely the more cost-effective strategy for them. They were certainly acting like they were going to be looking for someone today though, so who knows. I might show up tomorrow and they will have already have found a replacement–it wouldn’t surprise me given the current economy and job market for English teachers here, but then again, I’ve heard of vacancies staying open for a long time, so I really don’t know what to think.

I guess I’ll just see as things progress. It’s still breaking news at the moment, so I probably shouldn’t lose sleep over it. But it looks like I did anyway, whoops. Well, it’s four in the morning now, perhaps I shall try again.