Tuesday Night Chatter

Welcome back to Tuesday Night Chatter! I've been thinking about this a lot since I decided to do it last week and thought I'd try something....readership on Pixie Dust Chronicle is up (are you a member yet? Oh you aren't? What are you waiting for?), and I thought it could be fun -- or not -- to use this series to interact with you, my dear readers.

So here's the deal: is there anything you want to know about living here that I'm not addressing? Questions about anything, about me or the blog, my mission or the moon, this adventure or past ones or future ones? Ask it in the comments and I'll try to answer it in the next week's issue of Tuesday Night Chatter. If there are no questions, I will assume that I have done such a good job that I have actually covered everything, and will just continue on my merry way as before, but it could be fun! Ask away, my friends!!

So what's on my mind tonight?

I'm thinking a lot about private tutoring, and specifically my four-year-old. His mom is the sweetest and most patient woman imaginable, hiring a young twenty something with no formal teaching training to spend time with her kid, but -- what I sort of thought would be a 'spend time with the kid and talk to him' has turned into a 'sit down and teach him for one hour.'

Now, I don't mind learning, and I don't mind the pay. But I'm wondering if it's worth it. Do I spend the time and the energy to become a good preschool teacher, when teaching is neither my expected career nor -- more importantly -- my passion, just because the pay is good and the job regular?

I think you know where I'm leaning, even though to ditch the job may be considered stupid. Hey, I've done stupider things in my life.

I'm also thinking it's too darn hot (you can all say, "well, what were you expecting???" now). Of course I knew, and don't expect it to change any time soon, but nevertheless after a certain point it gets tiring to be constantly sweaty and unattractive.

What else...I really need to do dishes, as I've developed the terrible habit of putting them off until the next day and since 'the next day's have been blurring into each other at a speed that can only be described as remarkable, they tend to pile up. I also need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow morning; another function of the time passing this fast is that I'm never exactly sure what day it is.

It's so interesting, living here. One of my other private tutoring clients, and probably my favorite because of her motivation, is Chinese, and sometimes we just halt the lesson to talk about the different cultures. Like tonight, how Chinese people apparently don't touch each other and how she finds it very strange that the French kiss each other all the time.

I brought that up -- I think -- because it's just one example among thousands of how I'm becoming so aware of my westernness, and what the east really is -- or at least what I perceive it to be. I do feel like a 'foreigner', constantly and sometimes uncomfortably aware of my own otherness. I wonder if that will ever go away, or if in six months I'll still feel like I stick out like a sore thumb as much -- and I don't really mean in looks.

I guess the past couple weeks have been a struggle, though I don't like using that word because it adds a color I don't mean to paint with. This week especially I've been on the "now what" side of things -- if I'm being very honest, I did come with a vision of westernizing the dance here, and have found out from all sides that that's not in fact what I should be doing at all. So now I have to figure out what's next, what's left, what to sell and what to keep, and what, really, the hell I am doing here.

Like I said. I've done stupider things.

Tonight's chatter has been a bit more philosophical than I really intended, but it does reflect what I'm thinking besides the inanities of dishes, a few hundred mosquito bites, and being constantly disgustingly sweaty. I have, after a full ten days, learned how to use my new phone (also the most basic model you could get), my visa has been extended, and I am still dubiously waiting for the Post Office to deliver a few very important items. My brief and somewhat alarming spell of being allergic to my apartment seems to have passed, and I seem to be manifesting my homesickness by being constantly hungry.

As I said, leave questions in the comments. Expect the usual serious and pointed blog posts (I don't think I'm kidding myself...), that is until next week this time and I can blast you with the more plebeian aspects of existence.

PS. The fruitseller update is that this week I got a free bagful of berries to go with the usual haul of apples, bananas, mangosteen, a grapefruit, and something I suspect to be a pomegranate (the seeds of which she dumped into my hand to try before I decided to take one, then threw in a second to make the weight an even kilo.) I think I like this woman...

PPS. Last time at the Supermarket I bought some normal instant coffee, having at last finished the 3-in-1 crap I had before -- only to discover that either I have the proportions totally skewed or this stuff is even more crap than the previous incarnation. Whoops.