A Lack

A little more than a year ago, I posted about the South Korean ferry sinking.  That tragedy immobilized me.  I didn't cry, but I raged; I walked around with a sick, rotten feeling sunk deep in my stomach.  I'd never lost a student before, and I couldn't fathom losing an entire junior class.

Now there's an empty chair in my classroom.

We all know why it's empty.  The sixteen of us -- fifteen of us -- have been in this classroom since August of 2013, when we first came together for 11th Grade Language & Literature.  I've loved this class dearly for the last year and a half, despite the bizarre gender ratio:  thirteen boys and three girls.

Two girls. 

The Living and the Dead

With the usual apologizes to Dodie Smith:  I write this sitting next to a saltwater pool in Cambodia.  A waterfall patters into it from a balcony above.  Surrounding the pool are a mixture of trees:  palms, bougainvillea, bamboo.  Some trees I can't identify, but they are by turns gnarled and youthful in appearance, with dusty dark and spiderweb-like fresh green leaves.  Two large earthenware pots are full of water and lotus flowers.  Enclosing the pool (beyond the trees) are the white-and-wooden walls of the boutique hotel we are staying in; with their orange roof tiles and dark wooden balconies, these buildings manage to exude an aura both cozy and sleek.  Black and orangey-cream tiles line the floor of the bar to my left in a checkerboard pattern.  A red Chinese lantern hangs from one of the taller trees, and in the pool, a medium-sized rubber yellow deer floats exhaustedly, happily, incongruously, on its side.

Today, I turned down what will probably be my only chance to see Angkor Wat.  On what will probably be my last day ever in Siem Reap (my aunt and I take the boat to Phnom Penh tomorrow), I spent most of the day inside, asleep.

Let me explain.

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.