Remember me?
Well it has been a while since I have done this, and I feel a bit rusty, so hang on and I will try to fart another of these damn things out, maybe even as misspelled and rambly as the ding dang thing used to be.
So what the hell happened?
I taught in China, which is where I started the first one at willsanderschinaadventure.com. Look it up, it's a real hoot. So then I got back to America was all useless for a spell, the sub prime dudes messed up the works that year so I couldn't find a job, my room mate figured I wasn't looking and was getting sick of covering the rent and everyone was mad at me. I was looking but the jobs weren't there and further it was my fault that I got myself into this fix and she had every right to be upset, upset being a slight underselling of her take on things. And everyone was mad at me, the funny thing about not doing anything right is you get the feeling you can't do anything right. I wound up working at a doggie day care run by super angry lesbian cop who loved dogs because she could yell at them sternly as if they had been guilty of speeding. The woman had recently bought the place and I had never seen her pet one of the four dogs that were bringing what little money the place was generating in. She towered over them frowning, her hair looking like a butch military version of Rip Taylor's toupee. She used to yell 'STOOOOLLLP' with the L sound at the end the way some people say the word 'cop'. We had one dog who was so stupid he ate rocks, for real we couldn't let him out because he ate rocks which would kill him. When he was inside he ran full speed at the wall over and over again and we had to stop him from doing that too, poor thing. Darwin would have had no answer for what we have done to our house pets, and here was one who had clearly been lavished with chew toys and love, yet deep down understood his uselessness having been cheated out of survival of the fittest and therefore yurned for a quick death which never came. I thought of offering him a little doggie noose, but he was so darn cute, plus he was bound to figure it out for himself sooner or later.
That place promised me four shifts a week which became three which pretty quickly turned into don't call us we'll call you. For months both myself and the lesbian cop pretended I was still her loyal employee even though I hadn't worked a shift in all that time. I would call in the morning, be told there was no work but don't make plans for Thursday. Thursday might just be the day the business turns itself around. Finally she got her assistant to call me and call it what it was, which was fine. I worked as a waiter and got shit canned after two weeks. That place was run by my best friends, still they fired me and I don't blame them in the slightest. I had no idea what I was doing and less of an idea that I was doing it badly.
The stress was getting worse by the day, hopelessness set in like dry rot, and people started avoiding me all together. I house sat for a friend and somehow managed to lose a set of keys which included the only key he had to one of his cars. I tried to fix a clog in his sink and wound up messing up his entire pluming. I made plans with people and then immediately forgot that I had done so, and when they became angry that I didn't show up I still didn't remember. I was cracking up, I was losing it, I was further gone than I ever have been before. The isolation in China had fried my personal skills. The massive shock of returning to my own country had been so much more difficult than going to Asia had been in the first place. I started losing track of time and days. My brain was going, I felt unable to handle the smallest tasks, the walls were closing in, some people who loved me stuck by me, some had had enough. Of those who turned their backs here we are five years later only a very important precious few have come back.
And at night, every night, I dreamed that I was floating in a purple night over jungles and landscapes that were cut into rice paddies. I would swoop down into valleys of rice paddies and sing. I remember landing in a dream in a field where I was surrounded by people singing in a hushed chorus. The song went like this
And the wind blew, how the wind blew, and the wind blew, how the wind blew
over and over again. It was the wind I had been riding through the sky, and the dream logic told me that it was the wind that had carried me away from my country in the first place, the wind that had carried me across China, through the loneliness of being the only white face in a sea of Chinese. It was the wind that picked me up after I had been attacked and beaten at a train station for reasons I never learned. It was the wind that had carried me and the back pack my grandma gave me through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia (endlessindonesia) and back to China again. It was something I trusted, it was the me that I was learning to trust, even though I never had before, it was the pride I had in what I had done and the fear of doing anything else ever again. Each night the dream sang this song to me, each night reminding me that I was in the wrong country. I knew, more each day, that it was time to return to Asia, and so the wind blew, how the wind blew.
I wound up back in Indonesia. I taught in Surabaya for three amazing years. It was a great time and hard to leave. I saw beaches and tan women who smiled at me. ME! I rode a motorcycle for a week to Bali and gunned it through mountains filled with monkeys. I lived life like a man with a week left. Brits, Aussies, and Canadians and I thundered through tall boy beers. I played drums after work and planned trips to places 90% of the humans alive will never ever understand the beauty of. Sorry folks, I try to be humble but I went to some amazing fucking spots. And the people there were the greatest.
The whole time I thought about the next step would be. I could have married someone and set up camp there forever and been quite happy. I would have never had any money, but what else is new. I tried to get a job as a senior teacher, but didn't get it. I not only didn't get it, but I found out that I didn't get it the first week of my third contract. I think had I known I wouldn't be getting the promotion I wouldn't have gone for year three, but year three was nice. Not as nice as year two but still pretty amazing. The whole time I started thinking about Hong Kong. I had gone there twice before, and I was still sort of in love with it. Something about the old meeting the new, the Asian street food along with the modern flash. It was a place that had lived in my imagination since I was a little kid and me and my buddy Adam found out about Jackie Chan on a TV show called the incredibly strange film show. That show changed my life by they way. I remember they had one on John Waters and one on Fred Olen Ray. I had loved the kung fu flicks but especially the brutal action films that came out of there in the late 80's and early 90's. It is China without all the difficulty of being in China. I tried to find a job there, but kept running into the same old 'MA' requirement to teach there.
So I got to thinking about grad school.
I had a year in Vermont at SIT and have almost completely finished my MA in TESOL, which means I could get better jobs.It was an amazing year, tons of study, great folks up in Vermont, snow and syrup. I love and understand language but still have difficulty learning them. I crammed as much information in to my brain as I could and drank lots of great local beers. I went to Morocco for two months, and I wrote blogs about that on the Indonesia site. I understand teaching, I understand langauge, and I am ready to go do it.
I am heading out to Hong Kong Friday. Cool huh? I will be working with the British Council, which has very high standards, so I am nervous.
Friends, I don't know how many years I plan to ramble, it has already been five. But I hope people know that I am growing, even though you never see me I feel like a different person than the one who left. I hope you understand that I can't stay in one place, not now that I have tasted the road. I hope you will remember me. I hope you will read this blog I have just started. Here we go again, blog believers.
W
Well it has been a while since I have done this, and I feel a bit rusty, so hang on and I will try to fart another of these damn things out, maybe even as misspelled and rambly as the ding dang thing used to be.
So what the hell happened?
I taught in China, which is where I started the first one at willsanderschinaadventure.com. Look it up, it's a real hoot. So then I got back to America was all useless for a spell, the sub prime dudes messed up the works that year so I couldn't find a job, my room mate figured I wasn't looking and was getting sick of covering the rent and everyone was mad at me. I was looking but the jobs weren't there and further it was my fault that I got myself into this fix and she had every right to be upset, upset being a slight underselling of her take on things. And everyone was mad at me, the funny thing about not doing anything right is you get the feeling you can't do anything right. I wound up working at a doggie day care run by super angry lesbian cop who loved dogs because she could yell at them sternly as if they had been guilty of speeding. The woman had recently bought the place and I had never seen her pet one of the four dogs that were bringing what little money the place was generating in. She towered over them frowning, her hair looking like a butch military version of Rip Taylor's toupee. She used to yell 'STOOOOLLLP' with the L sound at the end the way some people say the word 'cop'. We had one dog who was so stupid he ate rocks, for real we couldn't let him out because he ate rocks which would kill him. When he was inside he ran full speed at the wall over and over again and we had to stop him from doing that too, poor thing. Darwin would have had no answer for what we have done to our house pets, and here was one who had clearly been lavished with chew toys and love, yet deep down understood his uselessness having been cheated out of survival of the fittest and therefore yurned for a quick death which never came. I thought of offering him a little doggie noose, but he was so darn cute, plus he was bound to figure it out for himself sooner or later.
That place promised me four shifts a week which became three which pretty quickly turned into don't call us we'll call you. For months both myself and the lesbian cop pretended I was still her loyal employee even though I hadn't worked a shift in all that time. I would call in the morning, be told there was no work but don't make plans for Thursday. Thursday might just be the day the business turns itself around. Finally she got her assistant to call me and call it what it was, which was fine. I worked as a waiter and got shit canned after two weeks. That place was run by my best friends, still they fired me and I don't blame them in the slightest. I had no idea what I was doing and less of an idea that I was doing it badly.
The stress was getting worse by the day, hopelessness set in like dry rot, and people started avoiding me all together. I house sat for a friend and somehow managed to lose a set of keys which included the only key he had to one of his cars. I tried to fix a clog in his sink and wound up messing up his entire pluming. I made plans with people and then immediately forgot that I had done so, and when they became angry that I didn't show up I still didn't remember. I was cracking up, I was losing it, I was further gone than I ever have been before. The isolation in China had fried my personal skills. The massive shock of returning to my own country had been so much more difficult than going to Asia had been in the first place. I started losing track of time and days. My brain was going, I felt unable to handle the smallest tasks, the walls were closing in, some people who loved me stuck by me, some had had enough. Of those who turned their backs here we are five years later only a very important precious few have come back.
And at night, every night, I dreamed that I was floating in a purple night over jungles and landscapes that were cut into rice paddies. I would swoop down into valleys of rice paddies and sing. I remember landing in a dream in a field where I was surrounded by people singing in a hushed chorus. The song went like this
And the wind blew, how the wind blew, and the wind blew, how the wind blew
over and over again. It was the wind I had been riding through the sky, and the dream logic told me that it was the wind that had carried me away from my country in the first place, the wind that had carried me across China, through the loneliness of being the only white face in a sea of Chinese. It was the wind that picked me up after I had been attacked and beaten at a train station for reasons I never learned. It was the wind that had carried me and the back pack my grandma gave me through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia (endlessindonesia) and back to China again. It was something I trusted, it was the me that I was learning to trust, even though I never had before, it was the pride I had in what I had done and the fear of doing anything else ever again. Each night the dream sang this song to me, each night reminding me that I was in the wrong country. I knew, more each day, that it was time to return to Asia, and so the wind blew, how the wind blew.
I wound up back in Indonesia. I taught in Surabaya for three amazing years. It was a great time and hard to leave. I saw beaches and tan women who smiled at me. ME! I rode a motorcycle for a week to Bali and gunned it through mountains filled with monkeys. I lived life like a man with a week left. Brits, Aussies, and Canadians and I thundered through tall boy beers. I played drums after work and planned trips to places 90% of the humans alive will never ever understand the beauty of. Sorry folks, I try to be humble but I went to some amazing fucking spots. And the people there were the greatest.
The whole time I thought about the next step would be. I could have married someone and set up camp there forever and been quite happy. I would have never had any money, but what else is new. I tried to get a job as a senior teacher, but didn't get it. I not only didn't get it, but I found out that I didn't get it the first week of my third contract. I think had I known I wouldn't be getting the promotion I wouldn't have gone for year three, but year three was nice. Not as nice as year two but still pretty amazing. The whole time I started thinking about Hong Kong. I had gone there twice before, and I was still sort of in love with it. Something about the old meeting the new, the Asian street food along with the modern flash. It was a place that had lived in my imagination since I was a little kid and me and my buddy Adam found out about Jackie Chan on a TV show called the incredibly strange film show. That show changed my life by they way. I remember they had one on John Waters and one on Fred Olen Ray. I had loved the kung fu flicks but especially the brutal action films that came out of there in the late 80's and early 90's. It is China without all the difficulty of being in China. I tried to find a job there, but kept running into the same old 'MA' requirement to teach there.
So I got to thinking about grad school.
I had a year in Vermont at SIT and have almost completely finished my MA in TESOL, which means I could get better jobs.It was an amazing year, tons of study, great folks up in Vermont, snow and syrup. I love and understand language but still have difficulty learning them. I crammed as much information in to my brain as I could and drank lots of great local beers. I went to Morocco for two months, and I wrote blogs about that on the Indonesia site. I understand teaching, I understand langauge, and I am ready to go do it.
I am heading out to Hong Kong Friday. Cool huh? I will be working with the British Council, which has very high standards, so I am nervous.
Friends, I don't know how many years I plan to ramble, it has already been five. But I hope people know that I am growing, even though you never see me I feel like a different person than the one who left. I hope you understand that I can't stay in one place, not now that I have tasted the road. I hope you will remember me. I hope you will read this blog I have just started. Here we go again, blog believers.
W
Love you man. Happy trails!
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