Noise

With apologies to my favorite first sentence of all time:  I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Okay, not quite.  I write this sitting in the Beijing airport.  I'm at Gate E31, preparing to board a 13+ hour flight back to the United States for Christmas.  This place is all glass and chrome and marble: the wall to my right slants out like the main branch of the Seattle library, and if I look to my left I can see the little airport train scooting along through another massive wall of windows.  There's a yellow charging station next to me, with strict instructions to "keep children away from the socket," but it doesn't work.  I tried.  If I didn't have headphones on right now, I'd be listening to the same three Christmas songs on repeat; as it is, I'm listening to a combination of Jessie J, New Orleans jazz standards played on the harpsichord, and the Mikado.  I really hope my iPhone doesn't run out of batteries.

YAWP

You guys, I'm tired.  It's been a long week.

(This is the part where the teacher lists everything they have to do, expecting everyone to be impressed, and then starts to hyperventilate because it turns out listing everything you have to do is pretty stressful.  If you've heard it all before, skip to paragraph 10.  If you want to pinpoint the exact moment where my voice starts to shift up an octave and I reach for a paper bag, start at paragraph 7.)

This Sunday, I wrote four letters of recommendation, which took about six hours.  I was pretty proud of myself, and sure that I'd be a) in good shape and b) rested for the week to come.

On Monday, I taught for 160 minutes, supervised during lunch, met with a student about his Personal Project during the second half of lunch, graded an assessment that had been handed in late, moderated short stories with another tenth grade teacher, wrote another letter of recommendation, worked on some tenth grade curriculum stuff, and planned my lessons about five minutes before they happened.

Bicycles

A few weeks ago, I bought a bicycle.  It was a sort-of impulse buy -- I was actually in the shopping complex as moral support for a friend who was buying paint (and why would anyone bring me to help buy paint? It shows a tremendous amount of faith in my decision-making abilities), and while we were there we wandered into Decathlon, the Chinese equivalent of -- well, I'm not even quite sure.  It's something like a combination of Big Five Sporting Goods and Target and REI, and it has bicycles, and I bought one, and it was delivered two days later.

I say it was a "sort-of" impulse buy because I've actually been planning to buy a bike since I arrived in Beijing.  A confluence of forces -- exhaustion, cash flow issues, a quiet but intense terror of riding a bike in a city -- had kept me from doing it so far, but there was I at Decathlon and there was a beautiful olive green cruiser with my name on it right in front of me and clearly, it was time.

Two Books

Melodrama warning:  This is about the two books that saved my life.

I should so not be writing a blog post right now.  It's late, and I have a lot of work to do tomorrow (and tonight, still!), but I assembled a shelfie on Dan Savage's instructions and put it on Facebook, and now I can't stop thinking about these books that saved my life, so now you're going to hear about them.

I read them both the same summer, when I was living in Thessaloniki and ostensibly doing research on the relationship between Greek Jews and Greek Christians during the early 20th century.  That research ended up requiring fluency in Greek, Hebrew, and Ladino (or Judeo-Espanol), and it became clear to me quickly that I'd bitten off more than I could linguistically chew.  I spoke no Hebrew or Ladino, and my Greek was conversational at best.

Anticipation Dreams

There are two nights each year through which I'm consistently unable to sleep peacefully: Christmas Eve and the night before the first day of school. 

The night before Christmas morning is a predictable one, right?  Especially for a little kid.  Buzzing with the anticipation of opening my presents the following morning, I'd have four to five dreams before morning finally came.  One year -- maybe when I was in fourth grade? -- each dream set forth a number of quests that needed to be completed before I could open my presents, each task more convoluted and labyrinthine than the last, until finally I would get to my presents, rip open the first one --

and wake up.

Interlude: Grafton Prison

He must be about sixty years old, an African American man of average height with a neat, grizzled beard.  He has glasses perched on his nose and speaks quietly but with assurance, and there's no mistaking the immense power in his frame, his voice, and his mind.

He looks to the circle of other inmates, all seated in a (sort of) cheery, be-muraled cinderblock room in Grafton Prison.  It is late July in Ohio, it is not air conditioned, and it is hot.  We munch on popcorn and drink lemonade (-flavored Kool-Aid).

Tour of the Homeland, Part One: New York City

You guys.  This city.

There is literally nothing that I could say about New York City that hasn't already been said by authors and movie stars and artists far more profound and witty and articulate than I.  That said, I'm obviously going to write about it anyway, because, well, BECAUSE, okay?  So there.

So, how was China?

On my last day in Beijing, I took the subway to meet friends for dinner.  It had just rained but was otherwise a beautiful night: the Air Quality Index was low, and the sky was clear and dark.  On the way to the subway, I was hyperaware of my surroundings:  there was the little old man with the equally tiny (unleashed) dog, the young girls (women?) strolling together in meticulously chosen outfits, the grandparents playing with their grinning grandchild.  I dipped into the Wu-Mart (the Fred Meyer of Beijing) to see if they had ribbon, but was disappointed; I bypassed the McDonalds and hopped lightly out of the way of the car driving on the sidewalk.  

It all felt so wonderfully normal, and I thought of myself at the beginning of my time here: out in the suburbs, too scared to take public transportation, with nary a Chinese word to my name.  Things have changed.

Limits

Last week, I went on a three-day sea kayaking trip for school.  The day before we left, the kids and I piled into a basement classroom to get prepared for kayaking on the ocean, and in doing so we watched a video put forth by the New Zealand Wilderness Somebody-or-other that gave us five rules to follow for a safe outdoorsy trip.  The rules were as follows:

1.  Plan your trip.
2.  Check the weather.
3.  Tell somebody.
4.  Know your limits.
5.  Take sufficient supplies.

Hm, I thought.  Know your limits, huh?

Requiem

Right now, according to Bloomberg News, there are 268 people trapped in a sunken ferry off the coast of South Korea.  28 more people have been confirmed dead.  Of the estimated 475 people on board, 325 of them were high school students in the eleventh grade, on a school trip.  This means that almost half -- and probably more -- of the missing were teenagers.  And given that the ship sank about two days ago, we can probably assume that those we've been counting as missing can be added to the ranks of the dead.

We should mourn every death, I know.  There were fathers and mothers and grandparents on that boat, as well as grown-up sons and daughters and nieces and nephews.  But I can't stop thinking:  how does a school come back from the death of over half of its junior class? 

Rivers in China

I have published a thousand blog posts in my head in the past two months.  I've been tossing around writing ideas based on things like:

• animals in Beijing (where ARE they?)
• a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris with my mom over Chinese New Year
• what it was like to come back to Beijing and a week of horrible pollution AFTER a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris
• feeling disgustingly behind on learning Chinese
• going to Singapore, and how it is NOT A REAL PLACE, OKAY?
• and traffic patterns.

I even started an entry about schools, and how I've spent my life thinking of school buildings as an extension of my home.  Really!  It's about four paragraphs long so far, and will include an anecdote about how I was recently thrown out of a cab in the middle of the street (tears and snot streaming down my face) after flying into Beijing on a red-eye.  One of these days, I'll finish it.

Re-entry

I've been putting off writing this post for, oh, the last three weeks or so.  I kept thinking that if I could only wait to feel better, less unhinged, less slightly completely insane, then I'd be able to write about my re-entry to Beijing with poise and grace.  I'd wink sideways at my insecurities and chuckle at my follies and be totally mature and adult and sane.

And to some extent, that's true.  I feel pretty sane now, mostly because of the end of the semester and some extremely therapeutic Days Of Fun with some extremely excellent people.  But the fact is that the last few weeks have been difficult, and I still don't feel completely settled.  Something about re-entry has pitched me tumbling up into the air and shaken me hard.