Like Riding A Bicycle (But Not How You Think)

In Which I Delve Into The Realms Of The Heart

I haven't written anything on here having much to do with emotions. There are a number of reasons for that. Some of you (if, that is, there are any of you left reading this) think of emotions as the telltale signs of weakness and it has seemed more important to avoid the jeering than to put down an accurate account of the way I'm being affected by the world around me, for example. I initially intended my famigerations to be famigerations and deal only with my perceptions of my new environs, as objectively as I could put them down. And there is a little part of me that has wondered whether my emotions are valid, and whether they're even acceptable as inclusions in a blog I share with whoever wants to read it.

On reflection, though, the above pretensions are - well, pretensions. I've said before that I think of emotions as a valid set of data, so why keep them from my writing? Particularly as I now find myself wanting very much to articulate some of the emotions that have taken hold of me in the last five months. I just don't know if I have the vocabulary to do so.

Better wordsmiths than I have spent lifetimes trying to describe the feeling of being in love, and the truth of the matter seems to be that it is, in fact, everything that all of them have said.

When you're learning to ride a bike, everyone keeps telling you, "Keep your balance! Push the pedals! Have confidence! And you're thinking, "Screw you!" You're thinking "This isn't working. How come I'm not getting it? What's wrong with me? I'm so stupid! Every kid on my block already knows how to ride a bike." And then one day you get on your bike and it just happens. And suddenly all the advice makes sense. You even feel a little stupid for having felt so stupid.

Well. Yes. He got off the plane and it all just fell into place. The last two weeks have slid by like amber beads on a string, clicking into each other and turning the light golden. We were a little worried because we're fairly lucid people and we know our probabilities, and nothing seemed to be going wrong. We were both sick, it's true, with one ailment after another for the majority of his visit, but it didn't matter.

He left yesterday, and the gaping loneliness I expected has been almost completely obliterated by the joy of just knowing he exists. I am ridiculously happy.

The Future Cometh

In Which The Next Few Months Are Outlined

Happy 2010, everyone! I've been dreadful about this blog of late, but rest assured that my life is going swimmingly. This is actually a more auspicious statement than you might think, given my history with swimming. Life is good in the Land of Me.

A brief overview:

January brings the end of my first semester with Columbia, and I am still much happier there than I was at Kojen. We're having a celebration near the end of the month, and then starting winter classes. The winter classes go for a couple of weeks before they end to make way for Chinese New Year.

Over Chinese New Year I am going to head for Australia to visit the esteemed Teacher Thomas with whom I became friends last year. You may remember him from a sunburned trip to Kenting. We're going to visit Darwin. I have no real idea what this trip will be like. Wish me luck.

When I return, it will be to a new semester and social studies instead of science with my then-4B class. I don't yet know what our readers will be - I hope they're good.

At the end of March, the very excellent Jacob Ela will be arriving for a much-anticipated visit. Anyone who has advice about what to see, please do not hesitate to speak up.

This is what the next several months hold for me. I hope they are delightful for all of you, too.

跟我自己 or With Me Alone

In Which There Are Changes And Journeys

I purchased new glasses a few weeks ago.  You can see the new glasses over there on the right.  They're photo-greys, which is convenient, and also represent the first time I've substantially changed the style of my eyewear in about ten years.

Anyway, while I was at the ocudoc's (I really want to make a joke about Doc Oc, here), I naturally got my prescription checked and readjusted.  They did this with the most fascinating tool I've seen in a while.  Glasses.  But not just any glasses.  Spectacularly Victorian spectacles.  Naturally, I had to try them on, and I convinced Sarah to do so as well.  The results were, perhaps, predictable.

Katy's father and step-mother are here, and we went on a few tours in the early part of the week.  I think they plan to do more, but I'm occupied with work and can't join them.  The first few were lovely, though, and I was glad to be able to go.  We first went to a little temple in a name-of-which-I've-forgotten place.  It was charming, in a gaudy sort of way, although I have still not gotten used to seeing the swastikas everywhere.  Then we made a trip to Yeliu, which was lovely.  Very weird, but lovely.  There were rock formations of sandstone that looked like morel mushrooms, and little round holes in the rock shore that made for very nice rock pools.  We didn't stay nearly long enough, but it was drizzling and we had a tourist shop to get to, so we left.  I got a lot of pictures out of it, though, and Katy and I think we'd like to go back some time.  The famous bit of rock there is called The Queen's Head, and Danny, our guide, told us that it will be gone within twenty years.  Poor girl's head will snap right off when her neck gets too thin.  He also told a story about a noble (but poor, naturally) fisherman who saw some kids swimming in the ocean thereabouts and a storm came up and the kids started drowning, so the fisherman jumped in to save them.  He managed to save one before drowning himself, so the government at the time, wishing to present itself well, paid for the fisherman's five children to attend school.  This is a very Chinese story.

We went on another tour that same day to a little rest-stop-ish place where we looked at the waves and admired the strange stone jacks that were apparently keeping typhoons at bay, but it was a bit of a let-down after the bizarre formations of Yeliu.  Then we went to Jiufen (9 shares), an old gold mining town that's since turned into an artists' village.

The next day we took a trip to Yilan and saw some really fascinating cultural stuff, the best of which was a trio of musicians (later with a singer) playing music which I will try to upload here.

This one contains the trio of musicians: one was playing a hammer dulcimer, one a mandolin of some kind, and one that looked like an autoharp, but a very large one that was tuned by moving around little pyramids under the strings.

Let me know if you'd like to see the other one - I know these get pretty hard for people to load if they've a lot of video or images.

Anyway, the Williams family took off on Monday morning, and we are back to normal before the next visitor shows up.

The New Year (Part The Second)

In Which Eastern Holidays Are Experienced, And More Visitors Come To Town

People ask me, with relative frequency, "How's Taiwan?"  I never know what to say to this.  When people ask "How was your day?" or "How is the food?" acceptable answers include "Fine," "Good," "Delicious," "Started out great, but it's raining a lot now," or possibly "Lovely, but I wish it weren't so pink."  I don't know how to encapsulate Taiwan in a single phrase or sentence, and I know better than to believe that anyone asking so flippantly wants a full blown dissertation of an explanation.  I suppose I could direct any and all inquiries here, but that seems a bit arrogant and presumptuous.

Taiwan - Taipei, really - is a city in which I'm living, like any other city I've inhabited.  It is a place, to me, not a tourist destination, and certainly not something I can break apart and offer to people who want it in convenient chunks.  I can only approximate my experience of this city in carefully thought-out and nevertheless longwinded and untidy parcels.  I cannot make them stand alone, because they are part of something much larger that even I don't have a handle on.

Katy's parents came for the week of Chinese New Year, which is the major holiday here.  It's a bit like Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one, and while the actual celebration is an Eve and a Day, the vacation time lasts all week.  The Roads (Hi, guys) arrived on the Friday before the holiday, late in the evening, so Katy went to collect them while I conducted my last A10 class. (I will miss them, but they're being combined with another class for A11 and transferred to another teacher.  The class next door to the A10 never got along with their teacher, so I have rescued them from one another.)  

I got home on Friday in time to welcome the Roads family back from the airport (sans Paul, who is still in Spain), but I had to get up for my Saturday morning class, so I went to bed.  I think they crashed shortly thereafter.  I didn't see a lot of them over the week, since Katy took them south to see the rest of Taiwan - or some of it, anyway - and to have some family time, but it helped solidify the difficulty we (or I, anyway) face when asked to be an interface between representatives from the home we came from and the home we share now.  I didn't feel nearly adequately prepared to show the city off, because to me it is just where I live.  I remember my grandmother saying similar things about Chicago (Hi, Grandma), and about being eternally startled when she saw tourists there.  Since I'm not here for tourism, I can't see the city in that light.  

Apart from feeling woefully unprepared, the week went well.  It was good to see Katy's family, and very nice to have a week off.  Although, I confess that I missed my students.  I spent Chinese New Year's Eve at the home of one of my co-teachers.  Her family was very nice, and there was a lot of food.  After dinner, she and I and another of our co-teachers went to a night market, bought fire crackers, and lit them off in an empty lot until someone told us to stop.  I discovered I don't much like fire crackers, although I'll admit to being a total girl and enjoying the sparklers.  (What? They were pretty!)

While Katy and her parents were in the South, I slept a lot, and went to Sebastian's house one evening for a very enjoyable bit of conversation and friendly banter with his friend Michael and himself.  Sebastian was one of the people in China via the program I used, and it's nice to see him on occasion.  I also went to the National Palace Museum again with Yu-Cheng.  I think I could spend a long time there for several days (or perhaps weeks, or months) in a row without knowing everything it could teach me.  When the Family Roads returned to Taipei, I joined them at Taipei 101.  We went up to the very top and wandered about, looking at the ridiculous golden sculptures of ants and butterflies, and peering out the windows at the city below, which drifted in and out of fog as the light faded.  We had dinner in a restaurant with a similar view, a floor or two below (although we had to go all the way down to the bottom again and take a different elevator to get back up to the restaurant).  The food was quite good, and we returned home well-fed and sleepy.

They spent the rest of their time in Taipei seeing the sights, and I spent my last day of freedom trying to get in as much rest as possible before the next morning.  The winter classes are ending tomorrow, and it will be nice to have the ability to wake up at 7:30 without an alarm, instead of at 8 with one.  I don't pretend to understand the way my subconscious rules my sleep schedule.

I am now back into the swing of teaching, and it's going pretty well.  There have been no spectacular successes (or failures, fortunately), but I am beginning to feel more confident at the front of the classroom.  The A7 class that I just took over seems quite nice, although hopelessly adolescent.  Adolescence is something I can commiserate with, however, having fallen prey to the disease myself not so long ago, and they seem willing to cooperate.  This week I taught them about "What a day!" and "Such an idiot!" and "So much money that he could buy the Earth."  They are to write an adventure story for me by next week.  I look forward to reading the submissions.  One of the ideas submitted was "turned tiny and climbed into the principal's underpants."  I'll keep you posted.

Katy and I are reading the Lord of the Rings.  We've gotten about 1/4 of the way through the first book.  It is a delight to see her reactions to things I have always considered established parts of my personal history.  It's a little like reading it for the first time again myself.  This is why I love reading to people, why I love teaching.

And speaking of teaching, I'll be starting to volunteer at an orphanage on Sundays for the next couple of months.  I know, I know, just when I've managed to get Sundays off, I take up a volunteer position.  But this is by my own choice, not because I've been half-tricked into it.  It is for one hour every week, tutoring an 11 year old boy who has been adopted by an English speaking family so that he'll be able to communicate at least a little when he reaches his destination.  Reading this over, I realize I sound nauseatingly ... well, nice, but it is something I genuinely find myself looking forward to.  I am not doing it because it would be the right thing to do, but because it appeals to me.  I like the kids I work with, and I am downright delighted to have this opportunity.  Don't hold it against me.

The Visitor

In which Hobbes Sees Our Lives Up Close (Poor Thing)

Hobbes flew in on the evening of Saturday the third.  Katy and I took a bus (a very posh bus) to the airport.  We were both excited, and reminisced about our own arrival.  Katy made a welcome sign in Chinese.  We held it up through various stages of excitement, anticipation, hope, and then weariness at entirely the wrong terminal for a while, before figuring out that there was a much bigger terminal accessible by sky train (creepily deserted, but effective).  We collected a somewhat worried Hobbes and found our bus back. 

We came back to our apartment and more or less slept immediately that first night.  The next morning I had a one-on-one class at School 8, so we met up afterwards and had dinner at a very nice little noodle place next to Da'an park.  After eating, we went to to see the flowers again.  Katy and Hobbes hadn't seen the show yet, so we wandered around for a bit and tried the candied tomatoes (Hobbes was a fan).  I saw some sections of the display I hadn't come across yet, but went home pretty quickly afterward due to exhaustion.  Katy and Hobbes split off and went to find dinner and the meditation group.

The week was, for me, a blur.  I left on Monday morning to do some editing, met Hobbes and Katy at the vegetarian buffet that I frequent, took Hobbes with me to the School 8 area, and deposited her at a Starbucks with instructions to meet me there after I was done with my classes.  I unfortunately (and unusually) had two that day - a regular class and a make-up.  I picked up Hobbes at 9:10ish and we made our way back to the Linsen area.  On Tuesday Hobbes and Katy went up to do some walking in the northern area of Taipei, while I prepped for my Tuesday class and graded their homework.  They had an oral quiz, and all did pretty well, apart from the two girls who have been entirely uninterested in the whole class.  

Wednesday morning Hobbes and I went to walk around the area with the art park and the art museum.  The art park was closed, but we finally made it into the Story House.  Weird stuff.  It was, when we went, housing a display of television and newspaper advertisements for nine or ten Taiwanese brandnames.  Soap, soy sauce, snake oil, stationary, toothpaste (see hei ren for a somewhat amusing history), and the necessary overpriced gift shop.  No photos were allowed in the building.  After my Sanchong class, Hobbes hung out at home until both Katy and I returned from our classes (another unusual thing - I had another make-up class on Wednesday).  On Thursday Hobbes took herself around and saw the touristy bits of Taipei - Taipei 101, etc - while Katy and I had class and editing.  I got done at 7 on Thursday, after a somewhat disturbing class in which one student was upset and wouldn't tell me why, and met Hobbes at the Taipei Main Station where we got some dinner and hit up the cultural gift shop for "hey, I've been to Taiwan" gifts for the folks back home, I presume.  I tried to find a trinket with the Taipei Railroad symbol on it, but the only one available was a hiddeous little alien figure with the symbol for a head.  Anyone wishing to take up metalsmithing is welcome to send me a Taipei Railroad symbol necklace.  Perhaps I'll find an arc-welder.

Friday morning we headed to the Peace Park area.  It was a pretty park, and we had lunch before-hand at another vegetarian buffet that was quite tasty.  The Peace Park (2-28 Park) commemorates an incident on February 28, 1947.  We wandered around until both of our cameras lost batteries, and then I had to go into work.  I dropped Hobbes off at the Starbucks again, and she uploaded her photos while I taught a couple of classes.  I finished my classes at ten, by which time Katy and Hobbes had eaten dinner at a little restaurant somewhere in the Da'an area.  We all met up back at our apartment and Hobbes and I stayed up while Katy took a nap.  We left the apartment to find transportation to the airport at 4 AM.  The busses weren't running yet, but we were approached by an extra-enthusiastic taxi driver who insisted that he could take us there.

The taxi driver was very nice, in spite of our initial suspicions.  He charged a bit less than the others (we considered the possibility that it might be a scam), and he was non-intrusive for the duration of the forty-minute ride.  He played a CD quietly and let us be giddy from exhaustion in the back seat.  At the end of the ride, we noticed that the music had a lot of harmonics in common with ABBA, and no sooner had that occured to us then a Chinese version of Gimme Gimme Gimme came on.  I asked him to write down the name of the guy singing, and he pulled one better and gave us the CD.  It turns out to be a CD he burned, and written on the disc are the words "hǎo tīng de gē."

We arrived at the airport at about 5:00.  It was deserted.  There was no one at the check-in desk, and after some peering blearily around, we discovered that it would not open until 6:15.  So we sat down in the waiting area and variously went to sleep (Katy), noticed our surroundings (Hobbes), or fought an all-consuming battle against startlingly heavy eyelids (me).  The staff got there promptly at 6:15, and Hobbes checked in and we hugged our goodbyes, then Katy and I made our way back to the terminal from which the busses left.  On our way to the sky-train, we ran into a young mother with a kid on her hip, one on the way, and a touchingly devoted husband who was having trouble with their metric ton of luggage.  We helped them get their baggage together and listened to her spout "Ai-o!"s and gratitude.  We made the bus and I spent most of the trip back staring vacantly at the seat in front of me.  When we got home, I made myself a cup of tea and promptly fell asleep before being able to drink it.