Loose Leaves

Just a snippet.

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:56:13 GMT

So it looks like dinner tonight is gonna be... steamed sweet potatoes and instant noodles. Because apparently I am even too lazy to walk 10 minutes down the street and get some barbecue stuff, and oatmeal is for breakfasts. Needless to say, being in China changes the parameters of the "what do I have in the house?" food game a bit. I started to write a longer post about how living here is interacting with my cooking habits, but I haven't had the focus to finish it yet. So you get sweet potato and instant noodles instead.

Also, I'm turning old tomorrow (23!). Ever since I grew into enough time-sense to feel the lazy days of childhood slipping past and then receding behind me, I've always felt a bit melancholy on birthdays. But this year I actually don't mind as it will put an extra year between me and my students (I finally got an idea of their ages; the first years seem to be 18-19, meaning the sophomores are probably 19-20), thereby reassuring me a bit that I'm really okay for this job and no one is laughing behind my back. The last month or so has been the first time in many, many years that I've responded to questions about my age with "[Actual age]--but I'm really almost [one year older]!" I don't know if I'll do anything much to celebrate, though. I might wait until later in the week, because...

T's getting here on Wednesday night! Not really late, but late enough that I will probably find him at the airport, get us home via cab, and then immediately lose consciousness, since I usually go to bed at 10 on work nights--shocking, I know, for a night-owl like me. However, at least he's not arriving during some morning/afternoon when I have to work, which would suck because I've been really looking forward to being the airport welcoming committee. And I have Thursday afternoon off, so I can show him around a bit and then we can go out to eat and I will have my T. back at last...

So actually, perhaps I should put off making any of the real "Amy's Life In China" posts that I feel I like ought to have been writing, because I suspect that sharing my space and time with another person again is going to change some of the patterns my daily life has fallen into so far. Funny to think that I hadn't lived alone in over two years before I came out here. I really haven't been thinking of this as my first solo apartment, even though it has been, more or less. I also apparently haven't been thinking of the last few years as 'life with my boyfriend'; it's just been, you know... life. Okay, not that surprising, but it seems cohabitation hasn't really changed my image of myself as a fairly independent, even somewhat solitary person. Hopefully after a mere month on my own, I won't have to relearn how to cohabit (though I'm not really too worried).

Okay, should turn off the boiling water now. 再见(zaijian)!

中秋节快乐! (Zhongqiu Jie Kuai Le!)

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:21:24 GMT

I can't figure out which is worse, sucking it up and conceding that your Chinese vocabulary isn't very good, or trying to explain--using said limited vocabulary--that you're usually at least a bit better than this, if only you hadn't just had so much beer... ha. I guess that would make this both my first post from Qingdao and my first drunken post. Except that I'm not really drunk drunk, just sleepy and tipsy enough that it really was messing with my ability to recall words, dammit. This is because the school I work for just treated all the "wai jiao" (foreign teachers) to a Mid-Autumn/beginning of semester feast at a fancy restaurant with much tasty food, but also many toasts. "Ganbei" means "dry glass"--so basically similar to "bottoms up!"--except that when people say "ganbei!" they really mean it. Pity the sucker who's caught out with a full glass. I'm a huge lightweight, but fortunately Chinese beer isn't very strong, we were drinking out of small glasses, and I was drinking tea the whole time as well.

Anyway, now that I'm here and have had internet for a few days, it occurs to me that I should post something here, since I think there are at least a few friends who still read it. I'm running out of steam to actually write an update, though, due to the heavy dose of duck, seafood, and Qingdao pijiu (啤酒--beer), so for now I'll copy and paste from the email I sent my relatives to reassure them that I'd made it to these strange and foreign shores alive:

Anyway, hello from China. I got here in one piece (and didn't get kidnapped off to North Korea, so don't worry, Mom), and I'm now in Qingdao, Shandong Province, a city that one of my fellow English teachers, who's lived in the country for a few years now, described as "too shiny to really be China." It is indeed quite pretty in a lot of places. It's also on the coast, which means it's relatively less polluted--though earlier in the week we caught part of a typhoon, and the clarity of the air at the end of the two-day rainstorm made me realize it's still not all that clean most of the time.

The college I'm working for has put me up in a pretty decent apartment on one of its two campuses; my immediate neighbors are the rest of the language teachers from other countries, and the rest of the building is student dorms. I'm near a big outdoor market and within walking distance of the ocean. I've taught only two classes so far (my first one was cancelled because of the typhoon), but will have many more per week when the first-year students start in two weeks. I'm still trying to work out how I can be most useful to students who've studied English since elementary school and have all kinds of listening, grammar, and composition classes besides mine (I'm an "oral english") teacher, but still aren't fluent and have grammar and pronunciation problems. Do I focus on fluency, or try to teach my totally standard American accent (probably the best qualification I have for this job, honestly)? However, that's probably a pretty boring question to everyone else I'm sending this to.

My Chinese is good enough to unreasonably impress a lot of Chinese I've met, especially my students ("You studied our language in *America*? And you can garble out 'hello, my name is Amy'? Astounding!") but not really good enough for very much else without a lot of handwaving. However, the Qingdao accent is very close to standard Mandarin, so at least I can follow many conversations all right even if I can't chime in.

I haven't gone to as many restaurants as I'd like yet, partly because I don't like eating out alone, so I tend to go to sit-down places only when I'm with other people. However, everything I've eaten has been extremely tasty, for those of you who said you were worried about what I'd eat here. ; ) Qingdao is full of seafood. I have stayed away from the bulgy, brown, worm-like sea creatures I've seen in half the restaurant windows and street stands here, though...I don't even know what those things are called in English. [edit: I suspect those things--which seriously look a lot like dismembered penises in their live state, though there's no way I'd have described them thus in an email my grandmother might read--may have been part of a dish I ate tonight. I'm not sure and I didn't want to ask. Oh well, it was tasty.] And chicken heads. I'd have to be here a lot longer than a week before I'd venture chicken heads.

---

If you're reading this and want my mailing address or Skype username (just got it working! whee for free calling!), do let me know. Now I'm either going to read and make plans for tomorrow (my weekday off; I'm trying to explore new places whenever I have time), or just lose consciousness. We shall see.

Well.

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:07:05 GMT

I am leaving for China on Tuesday. How positively terrifying. Or exciting. Or both. We'll see.

Huh.

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:57:33 GMT

It seems I'm finally grown-up enough for Jane Austen.

(Only partly tongue-in-cheek!)

中国梦

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 21:52:05 GMT

Breaking livejournal silence (which has really the silence of laziness, nothing more drastic) to say that it looks like I actually will be going to China in a few weeks. Perhaps I'll start using this a bit more again when I have Exciting Life in Foreign Countries (okay, one country) to chronicle. We shall see. Right now I am waiting to get the invitation from the school that will allow me to get a Z visa. I would say 'sshh, nobody tell them that I have pretty much no teaching experience!' but I don't think they care; it's August, they needed to hire somebody before the school year starts, and they strike me as one of the Chinese schools that would be content so long as they managed to hire somebody breathing, conscious, and a native English speaker (I get the impression this isn't too uncommon). Then again, perhaps I'm underselling myself as usual.

If all goes well, I'll be in Qingdao, a medium-sized coastal city in Shandong with a lot of European architecture left over from the treaty-port era. That's the short version of everything I know about the place. Well, that and Qingdao=Tsingtao in the old postal romanization system--the Germans left their beer recipe as well as their buildings behind when they cleared out, evidently.

According to the current, somewhat vague plan, T. will be staying in Portland and Seattle for a month or two more, extricating himself from his current job and then getting trained for the new one that the Powers of Nepotism can get him in Qingdao. Then I'll be dragging him after me to a country where he doesn't speak a word of the language (at least at present). I feel sort of bad about this--not his coming, but the part where he admits it's not something he would even have considered doing if I wasn't so determined to go. But he also claims that that doesn't mean he won't enjoy it, and that at any rate it's highly preferable to ten months of a long-distance relationship plus more of his crappy data-entry job (which he only took to keep himself fed and housed until I graduated and we figured out where we wanted to go from there). I'm choosing to focus more on the first part of this thought; 'better than the alternative,' by itself, seems like a poor motive for expatriation, however temporary. But I also sort of want to see if our relationship can handle a big change of scene/circumstances--are we really up to being long-term in the real world sense, and not just as a college relationship? Since love makes me a raging optimist, I'm thinking (and hoping) yes, but as part of the exercise in being brave that this whole thing seems to be for me, I do want to find out for real.

Anyway, that's the plan: get visa, go to northern China, teach English to (more or less) community college students, hang out on beach, drag boyfriend along, and see what happens. Tourism and self-discovery ensue (maybe). If nothing else, I expect I'll really improve my Chinese, which was Motive Number One in the first place.

Fri, 11 May 2007 00:20:52 GMT

Done.

With Reed.

Forever. Holy shit.

(well, except for the library fines. and the no-doubt excruciatingly dull graduation ceremony. BUT.)

Eeep!

Thursday Afternoon Finals Blogging...

Thu, 10 May 2007 21:15:37 GMT

I hate timed essays. There! I said it. I wish I were (was?) done.

My mom is probably on the ground in PDX by now (she's coming out for the weekend and graduation). I bet she will take me to eat tasty food later. That's comforting, I guess.

Still! Grr!

good things/bad things

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:46:14 GMT

Bad: boyfriend with stomach bug means we both get to sleep pretty late (but at least I wasn't the one throwing up!)

Bad, very bad: dragging out of bed at 9:30, checking email, discovering that exam I thought was this afternoon was actually in the morning and had, in fact, already started.

Better: showing up just in time to not miss any of the listening section (it was a Chinese exam). Having enough time to finish everything despite having showed up about an hour late (most people left much earlier).

Good: learning that thesis advisor had been (kinda) bragging on me and my thesis defense to Chinese professor. Getting told, "Consider grad school." Flash back to rather flattering conversation about the thesis when I took it to advisor to get the final signtures yesterday. Try not to skip out of exam room. Leave building sort of bouncing. Weather is beautiful.

Bad: Coming home, vegging out halfheartedly for hours, and not getting anything at all done on the project I have to turn in at my last exam tomorrow afternoon, and which I have barely started. I'm sure I'm not the only one familiar with this feeling--stomach-clenching nervousnsee combined with an apparent total inability to just start writing. All I want to do is nap. I finished the damn thesis. It was a good thesis. Can't I be done now?

Roar!

Wed, 02 May 2007 21:16:04 GMT

If I have to walk through a HAIL STORM to get to my thesis orals, I am gonna be surly.

This weather is on notice! It has half an hour to blow itself out. Otherwise there will be consequences. Or something.

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:18:06 GMT

Am reading this book, and considering maybe reviewing it from my junior-cub-Sinologist's perspective when I'm done, b/c I liked the first one but was a little nervous about what would happen when they started traveling around in a place and time I happen to have studied rather a lot (so far so good, actually). However, I'm so overcome with giggleSquees that I kind of have to post right now...

...because apparently in Novik's universe, Li Bai was a dragon.

Thinking about it, I really would not like to meet a dragon with the drinking habits of the average Tang poet, actually. Plus I am pretty sure I recall that Li Bai was a bit mad already (i.e., before he was AU'd into a dragon). Interesting mental picture there. Does this mean that Meng Haoran and/or Du Fu, etc., were also dragons? Or aviators? Whee!

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:16:40 GMT

I have a sudden longing for...cupcakes. Of all the weird things. Maybe I will have time/inclination to bake this weekend. (Or maybe I will forget all about this--also a possibility.)

With no major, immediate and seemingly insurmountable deadlines hanging over my head, I am becoming terribly lazy and self-indulgent. Stupid, huh? On the other hand, having a little time to cook. read fiction, etc. now and then is maybe not a bad thing, even at the end of senior year. I made tasty vegan soup this weekend--oddly, homemade soup is the only kind of leftover food that picky me can count on actually wanting to use up, so it's good to make in big lots-- and carnivorous T. actually seemed to like it okay (it probably didn't hurt that I never used the V word). At any rate, much better than takeout and boxed mac & cheese, which we ate way too much of when I was furiously busy a few weeks ago. T. cooks too, btw, but he's rarely interested in trying out new recipes on his own, so when we don't have the stuff for one of his standbys (ie we haven't bought meat, usually) it tends to be either pasta or me improvising. And he does more dishes, which I can't stand doing.

totally sexxay AcademicSpeak

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:36:45 GMT

"the stage, along with the bodies and lives of the performers who inhabited it, was also the site of a different kind of drama, where the moral, social, and political anxieties of elites played out in public declarations and private relationships."

I like it when a really pleasing phrase just kind of gels on its own.

Now to, um, write most of the rest of the conclusion that it goes in.

Hahahaha. *twitch*

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:22:22 GMT

Heh, I suspect I look really strung-out today. Besides the paleness (lips too) and the huge eye-circles, I tend to get little shivers every now and then when I'm particularly sleep-deprived and stressed. Probably has more to do with low blood sugar than anything else, but I bet a little hand tremula is pretty visually effective.

So if you see me around, fear not, I haven't acquired a meth habit. Hell, I haven't even acquired a coffee-and-cigarettes habit.

I'm just high on life!

I will probably snatch a quick nap after class this afternoon, though, because I make a lot more typos when I get like this, as writing this post has reminded me. Also, apparently T. thinks he's getting sick. Huge amounts of vitamin C for me!

Also.

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:49:09 GMT

Now that I am writing in the handy thesis template Reed's computer geeks made for MS Word, I've developed kind of a bad habit--I'm constantly going back to the Table of Contents page and hitting "update field" to see how long everything is. "ooh, this chapter's over 20 pages now...boo, that one's awfully short" etc. I don't think I really need to update the ToC, like, every other paragraph. But nevertheless...

[ed. note: It is late, and although I often find it easier to write while sleepy (internal editor shuts up and lets me get stuff down, I can always edit it later)...apparently I need to bleed off a bunch of gratuitous ellipses into LJ entries so they don't end up in my formal writing... oh well, may as well go with it...
... ...
...
.
.
.]

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:52:14 GMT

Please tell me that I should not title my draft "Perils of the Pear Garden" *. Some things are too hokey to ever subject anybody else to, especially the people who will be grading the final product. Goofy alliteration and obscure references are definitely high on that list.

Of course, worrying about the title is really the last thing I should be doing right now, given the large swathes of actual content that remain unwritten...

long sigh

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:01:16 GMT

Well, I met with [advisor] and now feel a little less panicky. This doesn't reduce the vast amount of stuff I have to write (or my guilt over slacking my break away), but it does make me feel better knowing that my chapter divisions more or less make sense and that I won't get sent to sleep with the nutria at the bottom of the canyon if my draft is kinda crappy and rough-edged, so.

Maybe this means I can have a nap this afternoon. We'll see.

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:34:11 GMT

So, yes, dooooooooom.

Also, lately it has occurred to me that my entire Reed career has sort of been one long Ramona Quimby adventure: I really just want my teachers to love! me, even though I am really pretty average in most ways and neurotic in others, and I never go about it the right way. Which would explain why I am generally too stiff to ask for help when stuck, and instead just keep digging.

Now I am going to bed, b/c I am too sleepy to continue either contemplating my doom or actually getting stuff done.

Well, I take that back--I am never too sleepy to contemplate my own failures, alas. But I should still go to bed.

This is a whiny post. so.

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:00:16 GMT

Oh my god, I am the most horrible student ever. My advisor is going to kill me. Etc. etc. etc. whine. Want to see my amazing superpower of shooting myself in the foot by doing, seriously, practically no work over break? Yeah. urgh.

Okay, that's kind of bad.

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:07:48 GMT

T. and I went to bed around midnight last night. This morning my alarm woke me up at eightish, but I figured, what the hell, it's break and I can sleep in, yay! I reset the thing for 11 so it would remind me when it was time to get ready for work, in case I was noodling around and forgot. Then I went back to sleep for a bit.

I didn't wake up again until that 11:00 alarm. Ew. So much for not letting break eff up my sleep schedule.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:51:31 GMT

O lord. Midterm is too early for stupid all-nighters. I suck.

Here is a January picture of snow on bamboos, so I can pretend this is just oh-so-poetic scholarly deprivation, Chinese-style, and not the result of plain stupidity. I don't have time to look up the quote from Romance of the Western Chamber I'm thinking of right now, but you guys can take my word on it and I'll get back to you.

Those bamboos are in fact the ones outside my window. We don't get much light, but it's a nicer view than the parking lot.

Ooo-kay.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:41:17 GMT

I have cunningly put myself in the position of doing the start-writing-at-midnight-get-no-sleep thing not one but two nights in a row, unless I'm a lot speedier and better organized tomorrow than I usually am. I suspect this cannot end well.

God, I'm a crappy student sometimes. And yet--

and yet--

my thesis is kind of making me want to go to grad school. enough so that I've actually been wondering about my Reed GPA for practically the first time ever. I had a nightmare this morning about finding out I'd failed some classes freshman year and no one had told me.

Like with all speculations on this here journal about What The Hell Am I Doing After College, we'll see. At any rate I couldn't get an advanced degree in this stuff without learning a whole bunch of languages* first, so, er, not right away.

I finally saw a "Raise the Red Lantern" over the weekend and I sort of want to write a post about it, but that would be way too effective as a procrastination tool. Short version for now: it's like watching a two+ hour dramatization of the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, I Blame the Patriarchy style. Only with prettier costumes, I guess. I had a hard time going to sleep afterward. But good!

*defined as "any number of languages greater than what my mostly-monolingual American ass knows right now"

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 05:42:36 GMT

It occurs to me that wanting to sleep all the time even though I've been getting more or less enough sleep at night is probably a sign of something not-good. But I feel fine otherwise. Hmm. I thought I'd left the needing-more-than-eight-hours-a-night phase when I stopped growing, but.

LibraryThing!

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:27:05 GMT

Instead of doing actual work (boy, that phrase has been turning up a lot lately), I've been mucking around with LibraryThing. I made one for the books I actually own, and one for the thesis. Which is absolutely its own entity, yes, in case you were wondering. The me-one is pretty partial, but the thesis one is fairly complete. A few books didn't turn up in any of the catalogues I tried (not that I tried that hard if it didn't work the first few times), and obviously unpublished articles and dissertations and stuff couldn't be added, and I may be forgetting some things (I was copypasting ISBNs off the library website, about all I seem to be good for tonight).

And now some other Reedie is going to come along and be like "really? That's all?" and then I will cry and make lame excuses about my lack of foreign language skills. But in the meantime I'm going to bed.

EDIT: Hilariously, I may have actually found a useful book via the thesis's LibraryThing. Totally not a proportionate return on the time spent on it, but still. Never discount the power of the Internets!

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:03:28 GMT

I am knitting and being distracted by Internet stuff. I am not working on my thesis. I am not working on the thesis even though this is the one night of the week when I am absolutely and unarguably supposed to be working on it. I am not working on the thesis even though I was so careful to get my reading for tomorrow finished yesterday night so that I could work on thesis stuff today.

Lately, I just sort of want this to be over. I'm vain about my writing (some of it), but a lot of the time I kind of hate actually doing it. I hate it when I can't make all the pieces fit together neatly no matter how I wrack my brain over it and I hate trying to do what everyone tells me and just keep writing random bits until they decide to merge, no doubt in some way that will necessitate rewriting everyting anyway.

It should all go away. Then I can run away to China (maybe), hide out with T., and spend all my copious free time reading books of no academic value and making things until I feel like taxing my brain again.

Reading Weber on 'charismatic authority'

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:53:51 GMT

...and thinking of Harry Potter. Hah, you thought I was cured, didn't you. Evidently not entirely.

Also, T's uncle thinks he can get T. a job in China. This kinda forces my hand, as the China thing is really my fantasy, not his. We shall see if this means I actually start looking for jobs there. Of course, I'd have to find out where this hypothetical boyfriend-employment would be located, first. We'll see.