Blue Skies in Beijing

Proof!

For the past few days, the smog has been gone from Beijing.  Beijing is beautiful in the blue.  The temperature is hovering in the high eighties.  And school has begun.  

My days are beginning to fall into a normal schoolish pattern.  School stretches and swells outside of its normal boundaries in time, filling my non-school hours; after a two-day school week, it took me thirty-two cumulative hours of sleep over the weekend to recover enough for the current five-day week, and the last eight hours were full of troubled dreams.

So, business as usual for the first days of school.  Fortunately, I still love teaching.  I still love my students, whoever they are.  I can now confirm to you that freshmen are the same the world over (this morning I passed one fourteen year-old putting another fourteen year-old in a headlock whilst singing the "song that never ends") and teenagers are wonderful in China just as they are in Federal Way.

In fact, business is so as usual that I have very little to write.  I'm going to have to start house hunting soon, which is terrible.  I'm planning for Romeo and Juliet.  Really, the most interesting thing about me right now is that my childhood allergies came back when the smog went away.

(Which is kind of interesting.  Let's think about this:  the smog goes away and the pollen comes out and my face feels like it is simultaneously drying up and melting away.  Saturday was so bad I just wanted to crawl in a hole and die, which unfortunately coincided with a housing tour organized by the school.  Really, my face just feels WRONG right now.

So, this means three things.

1. The smog is actually usually so bad that it is killing the pollen.
2. So whatever is in the smog is probably pretty bad for me, too.
3. BUT I still prefer the smog because it doesn't make my face feel wrong.

All of this is worrying.)

So, as promised at the beginning of this blog, because the school year has begun I'm going to go back down to writing posts every other week instead of every week.  It's hard to have regular blog-worthy adventures when you're busy contemplating intertextuality and how to teach it to seventeen year-olds.  But I will keep my eyes and ears open, and I will see you in two weeks.