Who Wore It Better? Mid-Life Crisis Edition

Checking in quickly for an early, special edition of Who Wore It Best?

This year, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt, those high wattage movie star besties so dear to my Gen X heart, all starred in awards-conversation films featuring a full-fledged middle-age-turning-to-later-years What Is My Life's Work? crisis, with a bonus shared plot point of Who Does This Young Whippersnapper Think S/He Is? 

And I loved all of them. 

Only F1 has ended up with Oscar nominations, so Brad is going to have to carry this particular torch through the home stretch ("Wait for the straightaway!") but the Golden Globes did acknowledge George and Julia too. 

Jay Kelly - Hollywood, fake friends, Europe, awards, acting, sincerity, trains, career-spanning montage 

After the Hunt - academia, fake friends, pontificating, marriage, relationships, advisors, group think, ivory tower, identity, was-s/he-just-using-me? 

F1 - racing, real friends, fake fans, managers, family, co-workers, team building, car building, media, corporate sponsors, mavericks, mistakes, Europe, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi, casino, podium finish, lessons learned 

Who Wore It Best?  

I LOVE THEM ALL 

#swan 

Completed Category: Documentary Shorts

Friends, enemies, countrypeople, et. al., it's one of those years where I'm going to insist that you absolutely need to watch the Documentary Shorts. 

Documentary Short Film
Instruments of a Beating Heart
Incident
I Am Ready, Warden
The Only Girl In The Orchestra 
Death By Numbers

This year we have: life, death, death, life, and death.

Issues include: racism, death penalty, killing of civilians by police, school shootings, sexism, grief, the meaning of life, creating art, and overcoming obstacles. 

You can see the Doc Shorts in select theatres this week and honestly, yes, it's worth dropping whatever you have to do or have scheduled the next few days.  Seriously, get a babysitter, take the afternoon off work, skip your church group - or heck, gather up and bring your church group - and hie thee to the cinema. 

Now, this is certainly a viewer-discretion-is-advised situation, but on the other hand, this is documentation of real life, and nobody really exercised discretion to prevent the real-life people from having to witness and/or experience terrible things up to and including being shot and killed. 

For those who cannot get to the cinema, please watch the ones that are available at home via streaming. Here is the link to Incident, which should be required viewing for you, your family, your neighbors, your friends, your enemies, and whoever else you can find strolling blithely around this Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW65ChIjur4 

Incident depicts the killing of a Black man by police in Chicago, and the things the officers both instinctively and calculatedly say and do in the minutes following the incident.  I want this one to win. I think it might. I've never seen a Doc Short quite like it, the way it uses and split screens the various body camera and CCTV camera footage. 

I Am Ready, Warden depicts the lead-up to the execution date for a death row inmate, with input from the condemned man, his murder victim's son, his own son, a church lady who has become his adopted godmother, and a Texas government official. I also want this one to win. It could. It crafts this story so, so, so very well. The "cast" of characters really immerse you in the swirling realities of one man's sentence to death. 

Death By Numbers  depicts the written and spoken reflections of Sam Fuentes,  one of the survivors who was injured in the Parkland, Florida school shooting a few years back as she prepares to testify and speaks to the killer at the sentencing and victim impact statement days in court. She's a great writer. I hope she continues to heal and survive, and to gift us with her words.  I mourn the friends and teachers she lost that day as well as everything that has been taken from her and from other dead and living school shooting victims.  

One of the "feel-good" ones of the bunch is The Only Girl In the Orchestra, uplifting despite the gasp-out-loud sexism and affecting consideration of questions of what should we do with our lives? I recommend it for anyone who has: played music, listened to music, lived in New York, lived as an artist, admired a family member, admired a teacher, watched classic Westerns (no, seriously), touched a stringed instrument, moved a piano, or celebrated the gift of being alive.  It's on Netflix. 

The other feel-good one is Instruments of a Beating Heart, despite the occasional kids crying after either not getting a part they auditioned for or making mistakes as they rehearse the parts they did get. This is an adorable slice of life little film about 7-year-olds preparing to perform "Ode to Joy" with tambourines and whatnot for the incoming first graders at their school in Japan. I adore it. I recommend it to anyone who has ever tried to do something, failed, or succeeded.  It's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRW0auOiqm4 

Order I want them to win:  THIS IS SO HARD
Maybe Incident or I Am Ready, Warden, then Instruments of a Beating Heart, as those three are such interestingly crafted documentary observances, and then the other two which are also A+ content if a bit more traditional let's-follow-this-person storytelling -- Death By Numbers  and The Only Girl In The Orchestra.  I will not be mad when any of these five win, except for the part where the other four have to not win.  

Order I think they will win:  I DON'T KNOW I said this is hard!!!!!! maybe Incident? 

Completed Category: Actor In A Leading Role

 I watched The Holdovers and thus completed three more categories.  Let's talk about one of them. 

Who should win? Who will win? What order did I see them in? Let's start there; the order I saw the films was Oppenheimer, Maestro, American Fiction, Rustin, The Holdovers. So like many, I've had Cillian Murphy in my head the longest, and yes wow did he carry that film! Can we make the compelling case for any of the others? 

BRADLEY COOPER, Maestro:  Er...yes. We can make a case for Bradley. And I also think a lot of people just, like, WANT him to win an Oscar. However, Maestro was a little strange and I'm not entirely sold. As I mentioned in my Actress In A Leading Role post, I would want Carey to win if not for Annette Bening. Bradley though .. there was just a lot going on and some of it was so - well. so much.  I know he gave the performance and film his all. But do we really need people to write, direct, and star in their films? Is this necessary?  With anyone I mean. Warren Beatty or whoever. Who else does this? Orson Welles? Most overrated film of all time. Woody Allen? No one needs him at all whatsoever. Just, like, pick a lane, men. Anyway, am I saying that Bradley's performance could have been better/different had he not been directing the film? I don't know, maybe. But am I saying it could have moved me more? Yes. 

COLMAN DOMINGO, Rustin: He's in two nominated films this year! There are a couple of people pulling doubles like that. I enjoyed Rustin, and he absolutely carried us through that film. It's kind of a feel-good movie, even though it depicts a lot of crucial moments of mid-20th century U.S. history.  I happened to hear his Fresh Air interview in December, right at the beginning of awards season, and it was interesting how he talked about capturing Bayard Rustin's mannerisms, invented accent, teeth, etc.  I applaud this performance but don't think he's going to win.  Are the Obamas coming to the Oscars this year or what? 

PAUL GIAMATTI, The Holdovers:  I had an issue with this film that almost had me ready to give up on it - we'll get to that on Best Picture day - but it wasn't Giamatti's performance. On the other hand, it's an interesting degree of difficulty here. Like on one hand, you might think, "He's playing a version of himself." Or does he just make it seem like that? Hmmm, interesting.  And he also sustains us through the film because it's a lot of quiet talking scenes in the same rooms - until it's not, of course - and he keeps us interested. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he's supposed to be unlikable?  I of course liked him - but I also dislike people, the bitter world, those who blow off their history studies, and so forth. 

I just realized that there's a whole thing about his nose for Maestro, and the teeth in Rustin, and then a recurring thing about his eyes in The Holdovers. Huh. What does it all mean?  (Nothing.) 

CILLIAN MURPHY, Oppenheimer:  He plays him at different life stages, different innocence/guilt stages (mostly guilt, but...), different pithy lines that take someone else down a notch. Awards-wise, I think the overall appreciation for this well done film helps him AND that he helps this well done film. The only thing I'd say is that there are also so many other people in it - it's one of those hey! him! and him! everybody's in this! movies, and so you wonder if that detracts in any way.  Probably not. Just more co-star friends to vote and campaign for you. 

JEFFREY WRIGHT, American Fiction: I love him in this.  Yet another beleaguered teacher, and so many great moments to show disdain for the lunacy that takes hold of all around him, but also so many different interpersonal relationships. It's like, each beat of this film is about how the next person to waltz in and out of the scene is going to interact with him and his words. Liked the book, liked the movie, liked his performance. 

See? I don't know.  I might have been swayed by the GGlobes and the way so many reacted to that into thinking it's all about Oppenheimer, including here. But the order I think they will likely win is: 

Cillian 
Bradley 
Jeffrey
Paul
Colman

I could be so wrong though!  Order I want them to win?  SO much harder. Can't do it. 

What do you think?  

Birthday Bloggage: Reflection Time!

Tomorrow, yikes!, is my birthday. I don't want to say I've been depressed, exactly, about this approaching birthday, but I have at least been nigh on discomfited, mostly along the lines of "why the !@#$%&* haven't I accomplished everything I wanted to have accomplished by now?!"

But that's never a really useful birthday-approaching thought process, now is it?

So I decided to give myself some good advice: "Accentuate the positive!" (so original, I know), and to take said good advice from myself, that is to say, to think about things that I DID do during the past year.

Some things I did while I was (*) years old:

• Worked on the writing of three new books -- yes, I now have three books in active progress.
  Negative spin: I have so many works in progress and haven't finished any of them.
  Positive spin: I have put into action THREE new book ideas and made progress on all of them! 
• Wrote a bunch of songs.
  Negative spin: What am I going to do with them? And they might all be terrible.
  Positive spin: Holy shite I've been writing songs! Like, lots of songs! I've discovered this whole new part of myself over the past nine months. It's incredible and I seriously don't know what to make of it, but I'm digging it. 
• Traveled all around the Midwest and even some other parts of the U.S., with no small number of road trips during the last year, having driven to: Iowa (twice), Nebraska, Wisconsin (several times), Michigan, Indiana, and we mustn't forget St. Louis for the total solar eclipse which was AWESOME and, related to the point above, was the genesis of the first song I wrote, an eclipse metaphor about the universe/love/life that just kind of poured out of my brain while I was sitting on the highway in post-eclipse traffic trying to drive back to Chicago.
  Negative spin: I didn't get to go on the Habitat for Humanity trip to Prince Edward Island I'd been planning to attend. Positive spin: So f-ing what? I got to see family, friends, three weddings, and the super-cool eclipse event that was apparently the opening of a new chapter in my life. 
• Lost weight - I finally shed all those back-in-the-U.S.A pounds.
  Negative spin: Don't really have one. Except that so many of my clothes are too unwearably big, ha! 
• Took even more classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music aka my second home these days, adding to my regular weekly guitar class several more including guitar fingerboard theory, vocal techniques (twice), songwriting (see above!), and perhaps foremost in my joy the Modern Country Ensemble, which I enjoy so thoroughly that I am now taking it for a fifth session in a row. It is a joy and a treasure, and every sixteen weeks we perform a real live gig. My Monday nights at the Old Town School are such a given, and now Tuesdays too...
  Negative spin: I'm busy. Positive spin: I love it. 
• Became a regular volunteer at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which enables me to afford everything I just mentioned in the previous point.
  Negative spin: Yup, really busy. Positive spin: I love it. 
• Made new friends. Building community is hard enough when adults stay put, and I gallivant about the world so much that I may have had it even harder, plus I actually really need solitude and seriously carve out time each week to be alone, but whether it was the whole staying-in-one-place-for-three+-years thing, or the whole hanging-out-with-music-people and hanging-out-with-books-people and hanging-out-with-yoga-people things, I have definitely made actual new friends during the past year, which is interesting and nice. I mean, I'm disgusted with so much of humanity (negativity!) that it's rather nice if rare when I find humans I like (positivity, check it!) 
• Finished my Prez Bio reading up through Dubya, which technically is the completion of my Prez Bios reading project, which you'll recall was launched during Dubya's administration and was called Reading a Biography of Every President In Order, To See Where We Went Wrong. Of course, since then we have gone even wronger, and I am going to also read books about Obama (after which point the presidency dies and my project dies with it so don't you even dare suggest...) but I did technically make it to the "end" of what I set out to do. Finally!
  Negative spin: What took me so long? Positive spin: I did that! 
• Speaking of books, some of the great ones I read this past year: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe et. al., Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment by Robert Wright, American Plays of the New Woman ed. by Keith Newlin, and La vida util de Pilo Polilla  by Vivian Mansour Manzur, along with a bunch of other good and some not-so-good ones, AND I recently led in my local store the book group discussion of The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, which was the inaugural selection of the Barnes & Noble nationwide book club. 
• Found interesting English/ESL teaching work with some non-profits, mostly teaching immigrants, which led me to discover how much more enjoyable it is to teach these classes as opposed to the for-profit school for which I'd been working (and which I swear drove me to drink) the previous couple of years here in Chicago. That was interesting to learn.
  Negative spin: I seriously didn't want to go back to the classroom at all... Positive spin: Work. Work earns money. Work accomplishes things. Work it. 
• Speaking of work, at all three of the part-time jobs that I had one year ago and still have, I have had my accomplishments recognized with different positions/training/new responsibilities kind of things. Negative spin: They weren't promotions to full-time massive-money-making career ops. Positive spin: Employers recognize that I am smart and do things.

And ya know, those are just a.) the easily listable things b.)that I'm willing to discuss on a public blog. I have also done other things on philosophical, personal, introspective, and psychological levels that either aren't as quantifiable or easy to notate or don't really need to be delineated here or whatever. But my point is - it was quite a year, now that I stop to think about it.

AND I saw Indigo Girls perform four times during it, plus Emily Saliers' solo show. So there. Not to mention dozens of other bands and singers, and totally I didn't mention how much new music I came to know about because of Spotify. I even succumbed to Spotify Premium this year. Consider me thoroughly Spotified. . 

AND I saw a bunch of good movies. 

AND I spent so much quality time with my kittens like you would not believe. 

AND I de-cluttered my closet and got rid of clothes I don't wear anymore and got rid of some other stuff around the house, too.

AND I continued to discover new restaurants and happy hours and hiking (walking) spots around Chicago and to look at the Lake on a regular basis. 

So although I did not in fact really conquer life, the universe, and everything in the ways I had planned to do... I did other things instead! 

Let's see what the next year brings. 

One More Day Before the Storm

As Macbeth said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."  

But I do believe that tomorrow, Monday, December 19th, will in fact signify something.

The future, which occurs after the present

I've had this super-weird confluence of personal, professional, and political timing, which all seem to be coming to a frothy head tomorrow. So, when I woke up today (Sunday, December 18th) and Facebook was offering up Fb memories of our three-years-ago trip to Hong Kong Disney, I decided this image of me at Tomorrowland says something important.

Tomorrow means hope. It's not all gloom and doom creeping in at a petty pace, Macbeth. Now, Macbeth is my boy (i.e. favorite Shakespeare tragedy) and he certainly has it right that there are fools and poor players all around us strutting and fretting (ahem TheDnldWTFTrumpface ahem). But the very notion of tomorrow brings hope, as one of my OTHER favorite plays of all time reminds us. So, so, so much hope for the wretches whom Macbeth might call "walking shadows" as they contemplate revolution in Les Misérables:

"There's a new world for the winning/Do you hear the people sing?"

When the Electoral College meets tomorrow, will they hear? Will they do the right thing, the moral thing, the Constitutional thing, and use their best judgment to cast their votes, which means casting them so that TheDnldWTFTrumpface does not ascend to the presidency?

While that's happening politically, I also personally have a huge and emotional development tomorrow in my professional life. (No, the electors aren't going to elect me...that I know of!) One era is coming to an end, due in large part to reduction-in-force layoffs that came slamming into one of my gigs, but not entirely due to that, as I have seized upon a blessing-in-disguise opportunity to do some stuff when this particular new little era of mine dawns. AND, just to compound the personal/professional/tomorrow timing of it all, the last month and a half has been a whirlwind, a mighty and fierce whirlwind, of me working two and a half jobs, laying groundwork, and figuring out lots of big stuff, and all this has been happening since Monday, November 7, the first "One Day More," which led us to the horrible Tuesday, November 8 election day or more accurately the horrible Wednesday, November 9 Day After. So for one month and a half I have been in this intense stirring up of life and time (working every day, sometimes two jobs, plus other events, with no time to think but just go go go with eyes on the prize), with big developments, and meanwhile this parallel thing happening of Trumpface and the end of the world and the burgeoning fight for the #ElectoralCollegeExMachina moment we all need and then after a particularly intense last burst of the 36 hours from 11 a.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Saturday where I was just everywhere serving three or more masters and just go go go went went went I came home and rested.

Sleeping deeply.

And waking up today to Facebook memories of Tomorrowland and the imminence of tomorrow, December 19, when one big thing ends in my personal life, AND there is one superbig chance for the whole world in political life.

Sing it, Les Misérables:

"Tomorrow is the judgment day
Tomorrow we'll discover what our god in heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more."

Readin' and 'Rithmetic and 'Ridin' the Bus:A School Reform Debate

OK, I am pretty sure the anti-testing debate has just jumped the shark.

During the 9 o'clock hour every morning, I invariably end up changing from WBEZ, our Chicago public radio station, to WXRT, for the simple reason that a call-in talk show occurs on WBEZ at that hour and I cannot bear the insipid things that people say. Even some of the "experts" on this particular show tend to be local heroes at best, who could use a bit more expertise. Today, I was in the other room doing other stuff and the 9' o'clock hour got going with WBEZ still playing through the speakers, so I was privileged to hear an "expert" (about Chicago, school boards, local policy, something, who knows?) responding to a (teenage?) young lady about what is being taught in schools in low-income neighborhoods, specifically responding to the point of whether it was a good idea to be teaching Mandarin Chinese when students' main problem on any given day is getting bus fare together to get to school and they have no intention of ever traveling to China.

(And yes, I realize there are SO many problems with the logic of that question that it's hard to know where to begin: it's not an either/or thing, education is a process of learning how to learn, languages are helpful for brain development, how do you know China isn't going to take over your neighborhood, you don't need to have travel plans to benefit from learning a language, kids should not have to worry about bus fare at all because they should be walking or biking or on a freakin' free yellow school bus for the love of goodness sakes alive... etc.  But that's not even the point. It's what happened next.)

So this "expert," who ends all of her sentences? and clauses? with an upward intonation? that sounds really freakin' stupid and annoying??? tells us about how the mayor is definitely concerned with this issue and about the importance of being sure we are teaching life skills in the classroom and not just (and I quote!) "reading and math" and other things that are on the standardized tests.

Oh - my - !@#$%%^* - god - are - we -ever - doomed.  Yes, yes we are.

To paraphrase Mr. Keating*, we don't learn math and reading because they are on standardized tests. We learn math and reading because they ARE the skills of life and the essential functioning needed to participate in human society. (Or, really, even if you want to drop out of human society, so that you can produce your manifesto and whatnot when you go psycho and also to calculate your requirements for feeding yourself when you're off the grid. So, yeah. Math and reading.)

*I refer, of course, to Dead Poets Society, when Robin Williams' character tells his students: "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race."

And we will use math and reading to do things throughout our life. Some of us will use math and reading to do truly great things, but even those of us who are not DaVinci, Jefferson, Curie, Hawking, et. al., can also do wonderful things during our lives because we are educated. We can make the world better, and we can make ourselves better.

I understand that the whole school testing thing has its issues. The main one, however, is not that we are testing our students once a year. (Even six-year-olds!) The issue is that society, in its perpetual love affair with statistics, thinks it can boil everything down to a number, and that it can then make all decisions about whether a school is "failing" based on a number which is based on a bunch of tests' numbers, instead of using standardized tests to, you know, compare students to a standard and check out what sorts of basic things have been learned/not learned.

Really, there is more to say about standardized testing than is going to be said here in one blog entry, but rest assured, I am a language teacher. I am a HUGE proponent of recognizing multiple intelligences and teaching things using visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other interactive methods. This is not about that.

This is about the fact that people have so thoroughly lost their minds at the very notion of testing that they now, without batting an eyelash, jabber on the thoughtful public radio program about whether we need to rethink our emphasis on math and reading and those other pesky aspects of life that also happen to be examined on standardized tests.

And Brian wonders why I insist on changing the station to 'XRT mid-morning?!  Please, society. Touch that dial.

And it was all yellow...or some of it was yellow

Yesterday one of my (adult, Chinese) students in a group lesson checked with me to be sure she had the word "yellow" correct -- to describe her skin, she explained, motioning to her arm and then touching the skin there. Yellow skin, right? I explained that although she was right, we probably wouldn't say that anymore because it sounds derogatory. Now, before all you I'm-too-good-for-political-correctness people start rehearsing the pithy comment you're going to make about this post, please read the whole thing and realize I'm still setting up the context. Just pay attention for two seconds; it won't kill ya.

Well, the table of curious students asked me, how would you describe it, then? I told them, realizing even before the words were out of my mouth that it was going to sound weird, that someone in the U.S. might say "Asian." Sure enough, a few of them laughed. Asian? That certainly wouldn't tell them anything. What about the color?

I said we had really moved away from describing skin color, and moved toward describing various ethnic groups, usually based on geography, e.g. of Asian heritage, of African heritage, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, etc. in place of describing skin color. OK, she said, but just Asian? Well, I said, no, I mean, I might describe someone with more detail, like, "She's short, Chinese, with long black hair and dark round eyes" or something like that.  And to be fair, ye PC naysayer, is it really so much better to describe Han Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese as "yellow" without having any clue about their ethnic and national origins, than it would be to say "Asian" without having a clue about their ethnic and national origins?

But here's the rub, about "yellow":  Well, they asked me, then what if someone is Chinese but has white skin? Because some of us have white skin, they pointed out.

THIS, my naysayers, is getting to the point. Now you can start firing those comment cylinders. What this student means by white skin is not what you mean by white skin in the good ol' U.S.A.  When you see someone of Asian heritage that is first and foremost what you see. You aren't going to describe her skin as white, even if she is a porcelain geisha. So don't get too high and mighty. I was reminded of discussions in Cuba with my friends about the "blancos" and "negros" there, and how in a fierce discussion about racism one night, I was fascinated to discover that people were "white" in Cuba who would be checking a different box in the U.S.A.

I told my student that if we were specifying, we would probably say "light-skinned Chinese" or "dark-skinned Chinese" person, that people often talk about light-skinned and dark-skined Latinos, too. Of course, that's still only two options, but it would definitely sound more polite and acceptable, I think, in our usage than "yellow." Then they asked me, doesn't "dark-skinned" mean "black"? And by the way, they asked, can you say "black"?  I told them that dark-skinned doesn't always mean black, and that they could say black, usually, and that there are some who have made the term into a proper identifier, Black, to be capitalized, and so forth. Black, I said, sounds different in our accepted societal discourse than yellow and red, with regard to skin color. I can't think of any modern situation in which someone randomly says "yellow" or "red" in a non-pejorative way.  There are just so many other and more precise ways to describe people, so as a lover of language and words I have a lot of better choices. But what do you call the American Indian/not red person, they asked?  Indian is OK, I said, in a lot of tribal and American Indian Movement (AIM)-type activist circles, especially.  You could also say Native American. My students know what "native" means because we expats are sold to them as "native speakers" of English. They thought about this term. "You know," I said, "native - because, well, they were in America first."  And so we were back to heritage.

Obviously, skin color intertwines with heritage in so many ways ... but I think we would do well to divorce the color from the ethnicity if we want to be able to precisely describe people. But the question is, why do we need to be able to precisely describe people's skin color? Does it matter, really? What if there were a box on our driver licenses, next to hair color, eye color, and weight? Did there used to be?

I think it is foolishly naive and really wishful thinking to make the whole "we're color blind and racism doesn't exist unless you make it exist" argument. That's just hogwash. We all think about race and have ideas about race embedded in our minds--it matters what we choose to do with those ideas, though. But what I'm specifically interested in and curious about lately are the blurring, overlapping lines among skin colors and ethnic identities and nations. Why do we in the U.S. tie so many ethnicities to geographic locations and boundary lines drawn in the sand?  This causes so many problems. I recently finished reading David K. Shipler's book Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land and through all the messed up messed-up-ness of that conflict, I kept coming back to thinking about how fixated the Israeli Jews were/are on making a nation state for their "people." Why? That seems to be the crux of the problem, no? Why does an ethnic group of people have to have a state only for them?  Don't we see this same idea in raging conflicts in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sudan, etc.? Sure, you can argue that colonial terrorist imperialists drawing the lines in the sand to form nations didn't help things any, either, but why?  Athenian, Spartan, Abyssinian, Khmer, Cham, Navajo, Inuit... Greek? Cambodian?  Why not have an ethnicity and a nationality? Why do we blur them? And how  many years will it take until United States-ian can become an ethnic identity? 1,000? More? Less? Will it ever do so? I need the biologists to weigh in, here.

So if you think being an English teacher is all fun and games, well...OK, never mind, maybe you actually didn't think that.

Independent Nations

Well, another 4th of July has come and gone. I have now spent the U.S.A. Independence Day in five different countries, and it's always fun to gather with a few "fellow Americans" when in some far-flung spot on the globe and rustle up some patriotic feelings, or at least some hot dogs and beer. Actually, we rustled up fajitas for dinner last night, at one of Guangzhou's Irish pubs, in a gathering of folks that included nationals of the U.S.A., Canada, Scotland, New Zealand, and China. I suppose that in itself is very "American dreamy" in some viewpoint or other. I might add that I drank Dos Equis. Hey, I don't always celebrate the 4th in the land formerly known as Canton, but when I do...they are sometimes out of the Pure Blonde Ale that was actually my first choice order.

 

Earlier in the evening I had a small cup of Budweiser during our beer toast (!) to the U.S. at work, as I taught a little "4th of July hour" for the students. We had a bit of history (why 1776? why split off from England -- what's wrong with them?  why are there 50 stars and 13 stripes? etc.), a little bit of vocabulary (eagle, Statue of Liberty, White House, basically a collage of U.S.A.-like images), a bit of totally differing perspectives (they don't think of Guam as anywhere near China and in fact said "But it's much closer to Japan than here" whereas I think of Guam as "about the same distance" from Hong Kong/Japan -- and I'm living closer to Guam now than I ever have before), and a little bit of arguing when I busted out the Budweiser. "That's not an American beer!" they protested. I mean, first of all, oh-so-appreciative students, you're welcome. Right?!  Secondly, my boss just offered to get something simple for the 4th of July and I said, hey, why not Budweiser? But, see, they actually bottle some Budweiser right here in China. (Hence it being easily available without having to seek out a specialty store with a vast imported beer selection.) So my students were completely prepared to sit there and talk about how it's not an American beer. But, I mean, it is. Coca-Cola bottles stuff all over the world (they were among the first to "think globally, act locally")  but it's still an "American product," no? Or McDonald's and KFC -- also everywhere, here. It was so weird. It's freaking Budweiser. I'm sure many people have accused Budweiser of many things, but I never thought anyone would ever accuse it of being Chinese.

 

It all makes you think, doesn't it, in this globally connected economy and internet of ours? What does it mean to be anything? I hate the co-opting of "American," which actually refers to two entire continents, so I phrase my question thus: "What does it mean to be United Statesian?"

 

 

 

 

Guangzhou and permanence and skies

I've been having technical issues recently - it may be time for a new laptop - and that is why the posting schedule has been yet again thrown off. Sorry! 

Five months of living in Guangzhou. Seven months remain. How does Guangzhou compare to the other places I have lived and taught?

Well, Korea in general is easier in a few ways than China in general, as far as just living there goes. In Korea, an expat teacher feels s/he can pretty much do whatever s/he wants all the time. This is largely true, within reason, but the problem is that so very many expat teachers -- so very many twentysomethings the world over, of course -- lose their focus on that "within reason" part. In China, I don't have the same sense of abandon that I can do whatever I want and that everything will be conveniently somehow available. Many, many things are here, sure, in terms of food, fashion, transport, technology, etc. But, I do have to put forth what I perceive as more effort as opposed to the ease of daily life. It is also so much easier to become functionally literate in Korean, and being unable to read everything around me is really, really, really annoying -- almost as annoying as being unable to find an affordable literacy/reading/writing class here.  Living in Mexico is on a whole other planet from the Asian bewildering-days experiences. I mean, living in Mexico is not even exotic or particularly "different" from my Southwest U.S. heritage, geography-climate-food-wise -- plus, Spanish is easy, being in North America is easy, eating is cheap and delicious and easy, and basically everything except cockroaches is easy there. But, you don't get paid enough money to live or do anything much, so you definitely finding yourself wanting to head back to Asia.

Job-wise, I much much much prefer my current gig to all of my other ESL teaching jobs, mainly for the reasons of hours worked per week, the materials and curriculum provided, and the fabulous adult students as compared to the cat-herding atmosphere of teaching five or six or seven classes of Korean kids and 'tweens all day.  I loathed the split shifts in Mexico and the only problem here is that we have had a very recent development in which they have changed all the foreign teachers from five to six-day schedules for the summer (and possibly beyond). Needless to say, we are livid at having our "weekends" (two days off in a row) taken away. My 26 hours of work are now spread across six days, so I've got time to organize my life and do things, but can't take weekend trips for three months -- or possibly more -- which is so lame.

Food is easy and cheap here. Not quite as cheap as Mexico, more vegetable options than Korea (and far less seaweed, thank you very much! said the allergic-to-seaweed-lady), not much English on menus, lots of pictures though, and in Guangzhou, plenty of Western, Indian, and other foreign restaurants including multiple expat-filled pubs and taverns.

But am I planning to stay in Guangzhou past this year? No. One might wonder why, since I seem to like the job and whatnot. Yesterday, it hit me quite strongly while I was running, the reason why I won't be here forever. As I ran through my neighborhood of tall, gray, skyscrapers, "Useless Desires" came on my running play list and Patty Griffin sang that wonderful line of hers, "The sky turns to fire/against the telephone wire..."  I looked around me and realized that in the gray Guangzhou rainy season haze and the utter lack of expansive view, I haven't seen that sight in ages! For that alone, I will hie myself to a good ol' open space to wander and ramble again in my lifetime.

How to learn a language without really trying

The short answer: you can't.

The longer answer: you still can't, but I'll talk about it in more paragraphs. Ever since I have started trotting off to teach English in Asian countries, one of the most common questions from friends back home has been more of an assumption than a question. They'll ask if I speak Korean, or, now I guess, Chinese, but they seem kind of surprised to learn that the answer is no, that I am not fluent, not by a long shot, in these languages of countries where I have lived.

And by the way, I am the person who likes studying languages, who has always liked studying languages, who got the highest of my high grades in high-school German and French, who took Polish for a semester in college just 'cause, who regularly reads newspapers and books in French and Spanish and is always looking for simple German books, who has taken Korean and Mandarin classes while living abroad,. etc. etc. The spirit is willing, indeed! One of my friends said to me the first time I lived in Korea, after a few months of my being there, "If I know you, you're speaking better Korean than the Koreans by now." But I wasn't, and I still don't, and here's why: when you teach English abroad, you often find yourself working full-time in an English speaking environment, immersing your students, disciplining the children who speak in their native language. Even at my current job, teaching adults, there's an English-only policy that is indeed enforced.

Most people don't understand.how very much of my day is spent speaking English. Add to that the fact that I live with an English-speaker, and the tendency of expat teacher communities to be separate from locals in nightlife, poetry readings, arts, etc.. and you have a recipe for being nowhere near fluent in the official language of your country.

Yes, I believe you should try. You should take a class (I'm doing that) and listen to the language in various media and study a bit on your own and jabber with people in your daily encounters. I got really proficient at store/taxi/ticket counter Korean!  As it happens, I would try to learn Mandarin even if I didn't feel compelled to, because I like language and languages. I just invite you to consider how good of a football player you would be if you hung around watching football practice for a year, or how well you would play the violin if you worked in the box office of symphony hall.  News flash: language is a skill. It totally needs to be practiced to be acquired, just like a sport or musical instrument. You might have a talent for it, but you still have to pick up the equipment and do something to bring out that talent.  Living abroad gives you chances to practice a language, of course! But not 24/7.  Not when you are teaching English and being paid not to speak any other language.

I would also invite you to consider how a person from Honduras or Ecuador living in Phoenix who gets a job as a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant and speaks in Spanish with a bunch of co-workers every day and then goes home to Spanish-speaking roommates might not magically become fluent in English overnight. Just putting that out there.

That said, my goal for June is to ramp up my language study. The first four months here were busy, chaotic, and full of out-of-town commitments. I plan to spend most of the summer right here in Guangzhou, and I am going to improve my Mandarin when I am not working. Let's check in come August and see how I did!

And so this is 1/3 of the year,and what have I done?

Blog! Blog o' mine! Here I am. I am so sorry, little bloglet, to have neglected you so, but I was stuck behind this big ol' wall* and I've only just found my way out and back to you, oh dear little blog. And readers. Readers! There you are, reading the blog, because I have come back, and it is nice to be with you again. What, the readers must be breathlessly asking themselves, has life on the other side of the wall been like? This is indeed a question to be answered. But where to begin?
*(a wall of fuego, as they say) 

Today it has been four months since Brian and I boarded the plane that would take us across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong, from where we would hie ourselves up the road a piece to our new home for another year of teachin'-in-Asia. As I mentioned in my last post before disappearing, we accepted a job in Guangzhou, also formerly known as Canton by ye olde foreign westerners, and so it has come to pass that we are now living in the Pearl River Delta and learning the ins and outs of life in this big, crowded, brightly lit, restaurant- and skyscraper-filled metropolis. It has also come to pass that we have learned very few of the linguistic ins and outs ... but more on that in a later post devoted to language troubles.

In fact, our first four months of living in China have been an insane whirlwind of taking forever to get settled and kind of being forced to travel all the time, thus dragging out even more the time it takes to get settled. I know, poor us, right? Oh, we've just been forced to take these international vacations, boo-hoo... but seriously, I would not plan it this way if I had my scheduling druthers. First and foremost, this is because I am a complete and total save-the-best-for-last kind of gal, and I would much much much much much rather start out my year contract in Asia by diving into weeks of work work work and then, a few months in, start having holidays, and I would take my annual leave vacation and my long holidays as late in the year as possible, whereas we of course had quite the opposite by arriving in January because that meant Spring Festival was right around the corner.

• February / Spring Festival / Lunar New Year / The Philippines

Therefore, we had to start planning a vacation before we even had internet in our apartment and practically before we even had an apartment and definitely before we had received our first paycheck. This is not as easy as it looks, my friends! But the alternative would be to sit at home for our 9 days off in a row (shudder to think!) and furthermore to squander the biggest holiday of the year. It would be like moving to the U.S. on December 5th and not figuring out what to do with yourself for Christmas break. Unheard of! But because of the aforementioned lack of even one paycheck, we had to plot this carefully, and that's where Expedia saved us by popping up in my inbox with a last-minute deal from Hong Kong to Manila, and so we were off to the Philippines for the Lunar New Year holiday, and we rang in the Year of the Snake on the beach at Boracay, followed up by a few days of strolling around Manila. And we planned the whole thing using Starbucks' wi-fi. (This concludes your corporate shout-outs paragraph.)

• March / Hong Kong 

Of course, this meant we had now passed through Hong Kong multiple times without ever being able to really stop and smell the Hong Kong roses; we just kept arriving and departing at the airport and the Guangzhou-Kowloon train station and even riding the subway and having lunch at an Indian restaurant or grabbing a coffee but not getting to explore the city. The city a mere couple of hours down the road from us, this fabulously exciting, beloved-by-every-traveler, one-of-the-greatest-cities-on-Earth city. And so it was time for a proper trip, a "weekend" in Hong Kong (our weekend actually being on Wednesday and Thursday, due to our work schedule - but also we don't work until 6 p.m. on Fridays, which is awesome). So we got back on the train and spent a couple of days checking out all the glories of Victoria Peak and Victoria Harbour, Tsim Sha Tsui and Admiralty, happy hour in Causeway Bay, the steep and winding streets, the dim sum, the laser light show, the art museum, the tailors who whip up a custom-fit suit in 24 hours or less, and not least of all the markets and shops and street of kitchen supplies where Brian had his sights set on wok shopping. In fact, Brian had basically been talking about buying a wok since the day we had our first job interview for this China gig back in Mexico in September, and he had determined that a particular street in Hong Kong would be the best place to procure a wok, and so procure it he did, along with some other wok-cooking utensil essentials including a knife that had to be checked as luggage on the train back to Mainland China. Since we had traveled with only our backpacks, the authorities took the big ol' chopping knife -- one of those rectangular deals that you might have seen being whipped around on a "But wait there's more!" infomercial in years gone by -- and wrapped it in newspaper and put a little tag around it and off it went down the luggage conveyor belt, to be retrieved by us back in Guangzhou.

• April / Macau

And back in Guangzhou, we had another holiday on the way. I really wanted to catch my breath, get into a routine, attend my Wednesday ("Saturday") morning Chinese class more regularly, and start saving up some freakin' money, but instead we had to decide what to do for Tomb-Sweeping Day on April 3rd, which gave us a three-day "weekend" April 2-3-4. The obvious answer, of course, was to head to the other kinda-sorta-China-but-you-cross-a-border-to-get-there Special Administrative Region hereabouts, that being Macau. And I am here to tell you that Macau. Is. Awesome!  So much awesome is the Macau! It was Portugese, you know, or perhaps you don't, seeing as Macau kind of flies under the radar in terms of Places the World Often Jabbers About, but like Hong Kong, it, too, has reverted to being part of China. Sort of. This is actually an ongoing debate, as to whether it counts as going to another country when we go through immigration to Hong Kong and Macau. All I know is that Macau now offers the following: cobblestone streets, Portugese egg tarts and other ridiculously delicious cheap food, and gambling galore! "The Vegas of the East," they say. (They who? I don't know.) Massive big name casinos -- Wynn, Venetian, MGM Grand, you name it, and I have rarely enjoyed wandering around any city for two days quite as much as I enjoyed wandering around Macau. Oh, yes, I will be back there.

• April Redux / Vietnam 

But no rest for the weary!! Because now our company was suggesting - strongly suggesting - that if anyone would please like to take a couple of days of unpaid leave during the month of April then we should definitely take them. Please do so. Please. And maybe some teachers might be forced to reduce hours if we didn't get enough volunteers, please, and thanks. What's an English-teaching couple to do, but realize that May 1st is going to be YET ANOTHER holiday (Labor Day/International Workers' Day -- you can thank Grover Cleveland for it not being celebrated on that day in the U.S.) and therefore if one were to take a mere three days of unpaid leave (highly appreciated by one's regional director!) and switch one's days off in the previous week, one would find oneself with eight consecutive days off that are clearly meant for one to travel to Vietnam...? And so, there we were again, eking out a budget for tickets, hotel, visa, etc. in order to not lose this time-off opportunity (I know, I know, such problems...but SERIOUSLY why did this all have to be in our first three and a half months?)  and then we were off to Hanoi! By the way, if you have yet to look at a map, Guangzhou is very close to Vietnam -- closer to Hanoi than to either Shanghai or Beijing, for example. Anyway, Vietnam just may have been the most revelatory trip yet, largely because of Sapa. Holy cripes! This mountain destination is ten kinds of amazing, and I can't believe that before whipping out Lonely Planet Southeast Asia on a Shoestring I had never even heard of it. All I know is that a wise man would do a lot less dropping of bombs on northern Vietnam, and a lot more sitting in a hotel on the Sapa hillside sipping his beverage of choice and staring at the stunning view.

Which brings us to mid-May. Which means it's our birthday month! Which means that Brian and I totally have to spend another weekend in Hong Kong, right? (Right?!) I mean, what else would one do for one's birthday when one lives a mere two-hour, $24-ish dollar train ride from the H-K? So that's where we'll be. Next week. And then I am going to just absolutely sit still for a minute and ... plan my celebration of the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival.

Meanwhile, you want to know what it could possibly be like to live in China. Isn't it an interesting question? Sure it is. However, I'm so close to the situation that I'm having a hard time at the moment figuring out what to talk about. But now that I'm back on the blog (praise be!) I will happily answer all your questions. So what are they? I would love to know what you want to know about life in Guangzhou. Ask and ye shall receive -- especially if you ask in the form of a comment here -- because the blog is back! Check in every Monday and Thursday for all the latest and greatest Linda Without Borders happenings. Although lately it feels like a more appropriate name might be Linda With Lots and Lots of Borders to Cross...

Drink to the bird!

Next stop, China! Actually, that's not really true. First we have to stop in Los Angeles, which delights me exceedingly because I get to bid farewell to the USA in (my true home?) California. I'm kind of excited that my international comings and goings of late have included these random little California stopovers, because I can pretend that it is a cosmic sign that I should live in L.A. again once I finish teaching English in Asia. I mean, I plan to return to California anyway, but all of those who know me know that I like nothing more than a little cosmic sign from the universe affirming my random decisions. The problem, of course, is that I also want to live in Chicago when I return from Asia, because I'm not quite finished with Chicago, and this doesn't even address the fact that I still want to live in Boston as well as New York. (See a pattern here? I like the places I've lived. Not to mention the other places I love and in which I want to live but haven't got around to yet like Atlanta and San Francisco and Washington D.C., and that's just in the U.S., because I also have so many places abroad still to dwell in..,.)

I digress. I fully intend to do another stint in Chicago and then hie myself to L.A., where I belong, but first! First, I must go to China!

Brian and I have been to China twice. The first trip was in September 2011, and we did the whole Great Wall/Beijing/Shanghai thing. Loved it. (Really loved all the rooftop bars, in both of those cities. I am a China convert based on the rooftop bars alone. Nothing tops a rooftop bar.) (Literally, I suppose.) Then in January 2012, after we had finished our spectacular Habitat for Humanity experience in Cambodia, we visited southern China "on our way" to Thailand. (It's really not that much of a stretch - check the map. Just kind of a little roundabout circle. OK, oval. Oval-like blob shape.) For our southern/south central China experience we hit up Kunming, Jianshui, Chongking, the Yangzi River cruise (this was our key goal/achievement for that trip), Wuhan, and Guangzhou. Many of these places delighted us. One of the places that delighted us was Guangzhou. And guess what? That's where we're headed now.

So, the English teaching adventure continues, and for those of you who don't know anything about Guangzhou, China, here are some fun facts:

• It's the third largest city in China. (Population: 12 million+. Estimated metropolitan megalopolis area population: 40 million.) 
• It's on the Pearl River delta. 
• That means it's down the road (about 80 miles) from Hong Kong and Macau. Yeah, NOW you totally want to visit us. I knew it! 
• You might know it as "Canton," the former/Western name. You know, as in Cantonese cooking...Cantonese language (that other Chinese language you hear about that's not Mandarin)...or, as Wadsworth famously tells Mrs. Peacock in the fabulous movie Clue, "And monkeys' brains, though popular in Cantonese cuisine, are not often to be found in Washington D.C.!" 
• I am not going to eat any monkeys' brains.
• It has among other things: a nice, modern, eight-line Metro transport system that we love; river cruises; skyscrapers; lots of business; lots of expats; universities; etc. 
• The Canton Tower is there. It's tall. 
• Sister cities include Fukuoka, Japan (another place we love) and -- wait for it -- Los Angeles! 

And so we're off. I would kindly ask of my peeps in the United States that you please not start a war with China while I am living there, please, and thank you. Or, you know, any other time either. Because war is dumb, as I may have mentioned before. 

I yield the blog to the Pulitzer-winning poet gentleman Edwin Arlington Robinson for a few lines about life and departures: 

"...The bird is on the wing, the poet says, 

And you and I have said it here before. 

Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light

The jug that he had gone so far to fill,

And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood,

Since you propose it, I believe I will." 

                       ---------E.A. Robinson, from "Mr. Flood's Party"

Querétaro with six weeks to go

It's a relaxing Friday evening at home. I've got the baseball game on TV (trying to decide which of the Atlanta Braves' recent playoff nemeses to root against, San Francisco or St. Louis?) and I'm attending to various tasks, both functional and creative, on my to-do list.  I'm also rather enjoying some cookies that I bought at the Mercado Escobedo earlier today. I have time to get a bit of writing and reading done.  All in all, like I said, a relaxing Friday evening at home.

And that's the weird part. We've had so many homes over the past few years, and in so many different countries, to boot! I've always moved a lot (home ownership and settling down are maybe the last two things on my list of life priorities) but I've also enjoyed my recent periods of (what passes for) stability of two to four years in the same place, in Brooklyn and in Boston. (Hmmm, B----n, coincidence? Perhaps I'm destined to settle down in ... Bhutan! Or Bahrain. Maybe Berlin?)

We've had some really great homes during these years of galvanting, Brian and I have. Even our short-term homes, like Baan Suwaan in Phuket, Thailand. (There's that B------n theme again, although in that case it's the name of the hotel/apartments.)  I wanted to stay in Baan Suwaan forever! If we hadn't made post-Phuket plans, like with an already booked plane ticket, we would very likely have kicked it there for a few months. Ahhh, Phuket.

Our main apartment in Andong, Korea was awesome, too. We really dug living in Ok-Dong (Ok-Dong kitties! and the restaurants, my goodness) and if we hadn't been moved to the new and improved digs above the new Avalon school location, we just might have been persuaded to re-up for one more year teaching at Avalon.

And Chicago...sigh. I miss living there a lot. Our apartment was in the Best. Location. Ever! (thanks, Sara and Houston) and I loved it, and I did all sorts of things and I barely scratched the surface of that city in one year. I mean, we are definitely planning to go back, but when I start thinking about Chicago I start getting really depressed, because it reminds me that there is such a big world to live in and I just want to live in all of it. I want to live in the U.S. (in Chicago, and L.A., and New York, and Boston, and sometimes Tucson and Atlanta and D.C. as well) and I want to live outside the U.S. (ZOMG! So many choices!!!)   Why is that so much to ask?

I'm sure you can tell why I'm thinking about these things. Our Mexican time is ticking, and with only six weeks until my Next Big Move, I have definitely started getting that mix of thrill and anxiety that comes with determining just what exactly the Next Big Move is.

Meanwhile, let's review. What are some of the things I have most enjoyed about living in Querétaro 

1. The PLAZAS!  We live right across the street from Querétaro's Centro Historico area, which is thanks to Brian ensuring he got us a great pad in this area, when he was here for two weeks before I came, so kudos to Brian! I love, love, love strolling across the street and wandering around the andadores amid the colored colonial architecture. I love that there is pretty much always an event happening on the Plaza de Armas -- music, art, literature, crafts, concerts, festivals, performances of some sort, all the time. And that doesn't even mention the other plazas I love, like the Jardín Zenea or "our" plaza, the one on our cross street of Ezequiel Montes, with the fountain and light show and dramatic opera-like music.  Yay, plazas!

2. The food - obviously. And I can't even try to summarize it all here, but let's just say I was clearly meant to come to Querétaro because their local specialty, enchiladas queretanas, are cheese enchiladas with potatoes. I mean, this basically screams "Linda! Eat me!"

3. It's the little things, but I sure do like it when people as they leave a restaurant/cafe say "Buen provecho!" to the other patrons who are still eating. Brian and I are pretty proud of ourselves every time we provecho our fellow diners on our way out. 

4. I could keep talking about food and restaurants for a long time, so let me just give a few shout-outs: Tacos Tucson. Our dearly departed guajolotes/enchiladas queretanas place that seems to have recently closed. Bisquets. Cafe del Fondo. Tacos El Pata. Cafeto. Tacos Goyo. Other street tacos places and holes in the wall and little random discoveries. ChilaKing (do I have that right? our local chilaquiles spot). THE BLUE MASA GORDITAS PLACE!!!! Yes, I am shouting. None of you have really lived, because you haven't been to the blue masa gorditas place. 

5. The Arcos. That's what we call Querétaro's aqueduct, because of its many 20-meter high brick arches. It's awesome. It's a symbol of the city. I see it all the time. I dig it. 

That's just a taste. I have not been a prolific blogger from Querétaro, for reasons that I shall elaborate upon once I'm out of here, but just so you know: if you're on the fence about coming to Querétaro, I do recommend it. Bring an appetite. 

Printing! And other stuff!

Today I visited Querétaro's Museo Nacional de Artes Graficas, aka MUNAG. I would translate that for you, except that if you speak English and you can't reasonably figure out what that translates to, then I don't really have a lot of sympathy for you, to be honest. Anyway, the coolest thing about this museum is that it contains the oldest printing press of the American continent(s). It's from 1539 ish. I couldn't believe I got to just stand there looking at it and I could even touch it. It is made of wood and has a giant screw in the middle (I mean, really big) that twisted to press the plates. It was cool. I like printing presses. So revolutionary!

In fact, this museum had lots of information about the history of printing in Mexico, both pre-Hispanic and during the colonial terrorist period and during the independence century and the revolution and so forth. There were stone and wood (I think) and maybe clay stamps and other tools that were used centuries ago by the indigenous peoples, and there were lots of old things and lots of information about the various printers who did their thing during the 1500s or 1600s, sometimes infuriating the Catholic powers that be. There was a list of which kind of books were unacceptable to the Church and which were acceptable. The acceptable list was about a fifth as long as the other list.

All in all it was a nice museum visit, and it's located in a beautiful old courtyardy colonial architecturey house in the Historic Centro. It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in downtown Querétaro, as usual.

The rest of my day has consisted of a lot of reading (newspapers, my new Borges book) (in Spanish, btw!) and catching up and watching the Yankees lose (always a good time) and so on.

Seven more weeks in Querétaro! I might have to start a serious countdown of things that remain, Like, only three more annoying Friday evening shift/Saturday morning shifts...only 42 more car rides that have the potential to make me want to stab myself in the eyeballs with a toothpick ...definitely fewer than 50 possible days on which I will have to deal with cockroaches...and so on. But then my countdown is also a little sad, considered from the other perspective: only six more weekends to galavant...and fewer than 50 days on which to eat all this delicious cheap delicious delicious cheap delicious food.  I kind of want to eat enchiladas queretanas every day for the next seven weeks. And also everything else.

It's the Final Countdown

OK, well, maybe that's a little premature. But we could possibly go with the home stretch?

I am officially past my 2/3 point in Mexico; in fact, I have been for a few days. There was some consideration of us staying longer than six months in Mexico (answer: no) but now here we are with imminent November staring us in the face, demanding to know what's next.

You, too, may be wondering what's next. Since we are still hashing out details of our potential next gig and it is not exactly set in stone, I shall refrain from blogging about it in a lot of detail at the moment. Suffice it to say, we are probably going to head to that other thorn-in-the-side-of-'MURRica country that perennially pisses off people who hold weird-conservative-isolationist-they-took-our-jobs-but-I-shop-at-Walmart-at-least-I-know-I'm-free-to-guzzle-gas-and-64-ounce-sodas viewpoints.

Meanwhile, eight weeks remain for me here. Eight weeks, people! Eight!  Do you even realize how many things I have left to cross of my Querétaro things-to-do-list?!  Not to mention how many more times I need to go do karaoke. 

We crossed off one thing from our to-do list on Saturday: we took a walk around Querétaro's local pyramid, El Cerrito, which was built and added on to over a few hundred years 1,000 - 1,500 years ago. Seriously, that is some oooooooold stuff there, people. It's actually in Queretaro, too -- we just ride the city bus for 25 mintues and don't really leave the city, but just across from a little foothill neighborhood and some shops and a taco stand, there it is, the entrance to the zona arqueologia containing this massively old group of Toltec structures and plazas where skulls and other things have been found in the past.  Here's the Wikipedia link, if you're interested. 

Eight weeks left! That's all. I'm still startled by this. I have to get cracking! 

Dial 'M' for Manual

Recently, I agreed to come to Mexico without knowing that once I got here I would have to drive a car with a manual transmission, aka a stick shift, in order to fulfill the duties I had promised to fulfill while here (notably left out of the pre-arrival instructions, I might add). I am of the opinion that it is difficult for someone who has driven many, many, many automatic transmission cars to unlearn two decades of habits, i.e., driving without having to worry about a !@#%* clutch and without thinking about in which @$%&*! gear the car finds itself.

Now, it is not strictly true that I have "never driven a stick." Back in the day, I had three and a half experiences behind the wheels of not-automatic-transmission cars. Click here for more on that history. But it is certainly true that I did not know how to drive a stick. Fast forward to Mexico, where I quickly learned how very little understanding the clutch-down-gas-up-clutch-up-gas-down idea in theory actually helps one know how to deal with this beast. I was a wee bit skeptical about Brian's assurance that he could teach anyone to drive a stick in a day. (Why must we put numbers on these things? How about a week of lessons? A month? )  But time was ticking and the Boss Men were all like, "Hasn't she learned to drive that thing yet?" after exactly twenty minutes of my rambling around in circles ovals in a quiet, cobblestone-y bit of Queretaro. Fun fact: we saw a student driver in an actual Escuela de Manejar (Driving School) car go by on the same oval. But with less stopping and starting. At least we knew we had instinctively picked a good spot, but I was not picking this up and couldn't even get up to third/the speed I thought was required for third, and did I mention that I stalled a lot? I wasn't entirely sure how to stop any other way.

That was a Saturday. On Tuesday, we headed to a different cobblestone neighborhood, with longer streets, more turns, and fewer people. Maybe this physical change of setting worked, or maybe it was the Beck Weathers (Left for Dead) (as in, on Everest) refrain running through my head: "I was in deep shit, and the cavalry wasn't coming" but one way or another under driving coach Brian's instructive guidance I started doing things like stopping, starting from a stopped position, driving in third, and I even turned around once. But I still had, you know, fears. And I stalled. That pesky clutch! Why do I have to press it down so much? And why couldn't I appreciate the virtues of neutral, as preached by my driving coach? These were the existential quandaries with which I was presented. At any rate, we had actual progress, which we reported to the Boss Men.

Then came Thursday. I had the car to myself while I waited for Brian and one of the Boss Men to come out of a place of business, and they suggested I drive the car around the parking lot and the totally empty wide street in front of it. I did, but the chugging in second made no sense to me. And then I had to reverse into a parking spot, and I couldn't, and then I saw a nice man getting his briefcase out of his car, and, you know, sometimes I have these moments where I am overwhelmed by humanity and I want to express my intense compassion and good will to all humankind and this man was just going to work in Mexico and somehow watching him made me realize that I was a horrible idiot because aren't we all lucky to even have jobs? and livelihoods? and limbs, come to think of it?  And I could have real problems, such as being beheaded by a drug cartel or something, and here I was lamenting my stupid stick shift(less) fate and that just made me even more upset, because recognizing idiocy, while important, is not always helpful and productive.

The Boss Man recognized my fragile state and said that they could pay for an actual Escuela de Manejar for me (I had wished out loud for this solution days before, I would like on the record...I mean, the Boss Men are the ones who needed me to drive, after all) but then when he called a few schools and got the prices he wondered about me trying one more lesson with Brian instead, which we had planned to do anyway, Brian and me, and so on Friday it was back to the cobblestones, only this time I was also allowed to drive on the real pavement street (in fourth!) and I also learned to shift into neutral when slowing/rolling, and I tackled speed bumps. No, actually, that's really important because there are tons of speed bumps in Queretaro, like on random busy wide fast city streets.  Anyway, after that lesson and bit of progress I decided to drive the car back to the Boss Men on the freeway's frontage road (which here in Mexico is more like two lanes of the highway off to the right and separated by a median, but with pull-outs to shopping centers, and a slightly slower speed of traffic). Only Brian somehow convinced me to get on the actual highway highway, probably by shouting (but in a friendly way), "Get on the highway!" to which I replied, "I don't want to!" to which he replied "Do it anyway!" and in the heat of the moment I did, which was my baptism by fire. Fire and fifth gear.

Really, things went fine, and I even managed to pull out of a stuck right exiting lane back into the traffic and also to do my first traffic circles and basically to just astound myself that I had in fact progressed to actual driving of this thing. Now, this week, I have begun driving without the coach, much to the happiness of all parties involved, I suppose.

I have had to explain to some of our fellow English teacher peeps around these parts, many of whom are from England, exactly why I don't didn't drive a manual transmission already. Oh, those wacky Europeans. Don't they know that in MURRica, we have loads of automatic transmissions? Why, the only people who buy stick shifts, in my perception, are just -- what would you say? -- gearheads. People who are just really into, well, cars, and that is so not me. My idea of buying a car is: "Is it blue? Four doors? Bumper to bumper warranty? Where do I sign?"  I suppose also there are the totally flashy sports car people--aren't those usually stick shifts so they can rev the engine a lot? Or people who reallllly want to save $2000 off the MSRP, although I would personally sacrifice power windows over automatic transmission.  But never ever ever in the U.S. would you find a company car that multiple co-workers will have to drive, or a rental car, or any kind of general, shared vehicle that is not an automatic.

I have several friends who say now and who have said in years past that driving a stick shift is more "fun" "interesting" "exciting" etc.  They say that driving an automatic is "boring" and that there is "nothing to do with your hands." Well, except for the one hand that we hope is on the steering wheel, presumably. I have never had that problem. First and foremost, there's this little thing called a radio, but besides that I don't generally spend my driving time looking for something to "do" with my various body parts. Driving time is thinking time!

The way I see it, I just don't understand why anyone bothers with a manual transmission now that the automatic transmission has been invented. I mean, it's like the rotary phone. First, that was what we had, and it didn't seem cumbersome, but now it is antiquated. Rotary phones still have their place (like prop departments) and manual transmissions still have their place (race tracks, I suppose) but for anyone to just go out and buy one for their daily use seems silly. It seems like those early push button phones, not cordless but the ones that still rested in a cradle and all, that had an option to switch between "dial" and "pulse" when calling a number. Remember those? Like, the "pulse" would mimic the lengthy rotary sound after each button push. There was absolutely no reason for this, that I can see, other than to placate the people clinging to a bygone area.

But now I am one of you people, at least out of necessity, along for the ride.

Phuket is not a vulgar city! Day 61 of our Southeast Asia Odyssey

OK, let's be clear about one thing. You pronounce Phuket like this:  pooh-KETT.  It's funny (to me) that it hadn't even occurred to me that people unfamiliar with it initially read it as f**k it. Ha ha and all, but the first time someone posted a wisecrack about pronouncing it that way, it took me a while to figure out what they were saying. I guess I've just thought of it as (winnie-the-)pooh-KETT or the somewhat mispronounced foo-KETT for as long as I've known of its existence.

Anyway, here's what I think about Phuket, which everyone is now saying correctly in their heads as they read this, right? I think Phuket is awesome. I rather enjoy living in Phuket town, and I am sad that our CELTA course and therefore our time here are coming to an end.

Brian and I chose Phuket as the place to get our CELTA teaching qualification because we had our eyes on Thailand for cheap living and beach proximity during the four-week course. It has worked out great. Because there are two of us splitting the rent, we were able to snag a pretty nice accommodation (no SE Asia backpacker flophouse for us) with a lovely pool and a cute room with a balcony. I highly recommend Baan Suwantawe's monthly room rental to anyone coming to Phuket town.

Also, there is absolutely no shortage of restaurants in this little city. Within walking distance we have oodles of noodles, roti, dim sum, curries, fried chicken, rice, pad thai, tom yum (sp?) and Phuket specialties and pork and appetizers and soups and that's not even mentioning the coffee shops and plentiful Western food, this being a travelers' destination and all. We eat out cheaply and deliciously for all our meals (even though we do have a refrigerator and microwave in the Baan Suwantawe room) and we spend like $2-5 per meal. It's so great to be in southeast Asia.

Unfortunately, despite how great it is to be in Southeast Asia, we are in fact almost done with our time in Phuket. We will not stay in this city teaching right at the moment, although I could possible end up back here in the future. We are looking at a few job opportunities and think a different country is on the horizon. (Well, obviously, there are many countries on the horizon, if you want to look at it literally, but you know what I mean.)

Meanwhile, we have one more weekend to enjoy the beaches of Phuket. We spend Monday-Friday in Phuket town, and on Saturdays and Sundays we head to the water. We have enjoyed the beaches of Patong, Karon, Kata, Nai Harn, and glimpses of Rawai, plus a boat trip to Ao Phang Nga and "James Bond Island."  We have looked up at the Big Buddha on the mountaintop and looked out at the sunset from Phromthep Cape. All in all, I give Phuket two thumbs up, and there is nothing whatsoever f**k-it about the place! Well, except for the occasional cockroach that stampedes across the sidewalk at night, coming awfully close to my flip-flop bared feet. But at least there are a few lizards scurrying around to make up for it.

In which I interview myself about 2011

Time for a 2011 recap as we head into 2012!  What do you mean, January 31st doesn't still count as "heading into 2012"? Whatever. It's still January, that's all I have to say. Oooh, not true! I also have to say, in my defense, that I have for the last three weeks been hanging out in places decidedly more concerned with the Chinese New Year than the January 1st new year. So I am entitled to only get around to doing this questionnaire, which I got from multiple bloggers, now. All right, let's look back:

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
A whole lot! I visited new places and flew around the world with Brian - I'd been alone on most of my previous long-haul flights in life (symbolism intended in that statement). Also, I finally won NaNoWriMo.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Apparently my resolutions for 2011 were to acquire the Southern belle ability to speak my mind or tell people off without "being angry," and to read more books and travel to more countries than I did in 2011. Well. I did in fact make my Goodreads goal of reading 44 books in 2011, check! I traveled to the same number of countries in 2011 as 2010 - four, but one of those I moved to (Korea), and I took two trips to another (Japan), so on the whole I think we can say I traveled more, since two of the 2010s (England and Ireland) were just stopovers anyway. (My other two 2011 countries were China and at the end there Cambodia.) As for the Southern belle ability, I still covet it, but there were multiple times -multiple!- in 2011 that I successfully bit my tongue when listening to someone and responded diplomatically instead of arguing. It's a start. 

Duh, of course I will make resolutions for 2012! Writing and exercising more, as usual. Four books per month.  Visit four more countries. And one more that I'm forgetting now. I'll think of it.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?


My sister welcomed #4, Kristen, so of course that is the closest. Some friends gave birth, too! It was a good year for babies.  (I suppose that's what happens when the previous four years have all been spent attending multiple weddings…)

4. Did anyone close to you die?
In 2011, no, although my family and I were still reeling in some ways from Grandpa’s late 2010 death.  Aaron, a good friend of Brian’s from Michigan, whom I got to know a little bit through Brian and his crew during the last couple years, also passed away.

5. What countries did you visit?
Well, Korea again, as we moved there on Jan 1, 2011. Japan (twice), China, and Cambodia.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Willpower, the ability to set boundaries and convey my sense of urgency without starting quarrels, and a way for full-time freelancers and independent contractors and unmarried people (i.e., me and thousands like me) to have health insurance that the rest of the U.S. has through their employers or spouses’ employers.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
January 1 because Brian and I moved to Korea together. My birthday because it was a Friday the 13^th, and those are my favorites! June 27^th because my aforementioned niece was born on my friend Mo’s birthday. August 18th because we climbed Mt. Fuji. Actually, to be honest, that is more etched in my head as the Thursday of our week in Japan and I had to double check the date.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Mt. Fuji? Completing my teaching contract? Making myself act in a play again? Learning some Korean? Creating a book swap for Andong? I guess just coming back to live in Korea and having it work out really well. 

9. What was your biggest failure?
Demand Studios. I don’t want to talk about it.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I was barely ever sick at all - one or two colds. Nothing at all like the first time I was in Korea! A few little minor injuries that would make me skip working out for a couple days.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My Nike indoor exercise shoes for kickboxing class. I adore them with all of my being.

12. Where did most of your money go?
China. But not the way people in the U.S. funnel it to China, through WalMart. I mean directly on site! Well, and all the plane tickets I bought to various Chinese cities. 

13. What did you get really excited about?

China. And Japan. And galmegi.

14. What song will always remind you of 2011?
"Like a G6," "Please Be My Baby" (Britney), Rihanna's stupid sex in the air song, and anything else that played over and over and over at kickboxing. And I.U.!

 

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:

Happier or sadder?  I think about the same. Thinner or fatter?  Unfortunately, about the same. I lost weight when we got to Korea, then gained it back. Brian cooks too much, too well. :)
Richer or poorer?
Just the eensiest bit richer. Only because I went from freelancing to having the teaching job, but really, just the teeniest little bit so don't get too excited, folks. (That means you, income-based student loan repayment.)

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?


Write.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Drink. 


18. How did you spend Christmas?
On a plane. Seoul - Hong Kong - Bangkok - Phnom Penh, ending with a delightful Merry Christmas nightcap in a riverfront bar.  I love Phnom Penh, and I love Cambodia.

19. What was your favorite TV program?

Cuh-rim-i-nal Ma-eend-dz. That's how it's announced on Korean SkyHD TV, where Brian and I discovered it, learned to love it, and began craving it during 2011. We are so excited that there are still many more episodes for us to see!

20. What were your favorite books of the year?

Reasonable Creatures by Katha Pollitt. Everyone should read this book. Everyone. Yes, you too. If you are reading my blog, you should read that book. Your friends who aren't reading my blog should read it as well, so buy an extra copy for one of them. Also, I loved Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, W. Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up and Jose Saramago's Blindness. Do I need to note that none of these came out in 2011? 
.

21. What was your favorite music from this year?


Anything and everything, as long as we were singing it in the no-rae-bang!

22. What were your favorite films of the year?

If these count because I saw them in 2011: True Grit, Eat Pray Love, and The Green Zone.  Out of movies that came out in 2011, it would have to be Moneyball, because I don't think it's Super 8. I definitely didn't see enough movies this year.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

It was a Friday the 13th, that's all that matters!  And I had a one-track mind: noraebang. 

 

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

More noraebang, Less of the b.s. noraebang resistance among the expat English teachers. It really bugs me when they do that. 

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

 Outsourced! I finally accomplished my lifelong dream of getting a personal shopper to go buy clothes for me. Actually, it was just once, but Jody and Brian totally went around Seoul and scored me some shirts, dresses, skirts, etc. and all I had to do was pay them. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this all the time. I definitely want to repeat this in 2012. I am interested in having more/different/cuter clothes, but I am not interested in making the effort to pick them out. If I ever move to within striking distance of your city, do let me know if you are interested in my personal shopper position.

26. What kept you sane?

N/A

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.


We need to bring back protective tariffs in place of income taxes, and stop this love affair with free trade. I have learned an incredible lot about this from reading my prez bios (I'm now on #18, Grant.)  I wish Michael Moore, the #Occupy peeps, and other people who care about the disaster that is the U.S. would listen to my reason and start promoting this idea far and wide. National boundaries as jingoistic lines in the sand are stupid, but as a place to collect tariffs they are genius, because economically-tax wise we are all divided up by country, for convenience. If we have tariffs, then we can stop blabbering about tax cuts and increases all the time (freeing our government to actually get some work done), and greedy corporations can stop f***ing everyone up by taking all their jobs out of the country, because it would no longer be cheaper for the companies to do that, because they would have to actually fairly pay to bring all the stuff in. NO MORE FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS! I watched with interest as some in Korea tried to stop the Korea-U.S. FTA. Sigh. 

All righty then, so that's 2011. On to 2012! Or, you know. The rest of it. How was January for you? I missed a bunch of it on this blog because I was in China.