Dude I've been having nightmares about getting dumped by all my private students for being a bad teacher. Oh the uncertainty. I'm trying to show my student everything this book we're reading has to offer but how do you teach someone to think?

Looking through books about English grammar in the library, I stumbled across a book called "Teaching in Taiwan: The Underground Guide". It's full-on vintage, from like 1986. In 20 years not that much has changed except that Taiwan is now better than Japan for pay. It tells you how to get a job, how to not get screwed, and how to actually teach. You little beauty :-) It has a little section on culture shock, and this is the part I found most interesting. Symptoms of culture shock include

compulsive eating
constant fear of being cheated
negative stereotyping of the local population

Dude, I was a textbook case. I am heaving a big sigh of relief because it means I'm not the only one who came here and turned into a Fat Paranoid Racist for six months.

Everything has changed. I knew it would but I didn't know when. 

In other news, I seem to have lost a little weight thanks to the 7-11 salad diet, which consists of two cherry tomatoes, five bits of lettuce, 10 shreds of carrot, and a few corn kernels for lunch, complemented by a can of tuna at 10:15pm when my body screams out for some food and I drive down to the Welcome mart before 11pm when the gates shut and there won't be another chance to go and get food. Gone are the days when my bedroom was five metres away from the pantry cupboard.

In other news my Chinese really stinks now but it's alright, there are ups and downs with it. I've initiated Operation Make Lots of Chinese Friends, You Idiot and it's slowly getting under way.  
  ¶ 14:34 0 Comments

  I found a new spot to have a fag in the dorms last night. There are whole buildings that are empty but the corridors are still open and it's soooo scary inside. I think the dorms would make a perfect setting for a horror movie. Revenge of the disgruntled concubine. Or the Guan Mama (the old lady who acts like a mother to all the girls) Strikes Back. We got a new roommate today.

I would like to announce to the world that my sister Gretellia promised about nine years ago that we would go to New York when she was 30 and I was 21. She is already 30 next year so I think we should all start saving and fulfill our little deal otherwise we will have to live with bitter regret from failing to uphold a 10 year promise. Hm? Hm?

I would also like to thank every ONE who responded to the public survey. Every ONE has won a luxury trip to West Gosford Shopping Centre. Package includes bus fare, screaming toddler, old tattered flip-flops, and a carton of Longbeach Milds. Congratulations.
  ¶ 16:43 0 Comments

  I have two things to say today:
1. My eyebrows are itchy because the stylist lady from last week shaped them with a little eyebrow razor instead of tweezers.
2. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. Cry cry cry! 
  ¶ 18:11 0 Comments

  I went to KTV with the girls from the Wu Fong school today. There was a strict no English songs policy so I muttered out a few Wang Fei songs coz I knew the melody. We were there for like five hours. We went at noon. It was strange going in the middle of the day completely sober because I have come to associate KTV with being way drunk and staying there till the sun rises, or close. It was all very wholesome. I think my Chinese has regressed though. I was forgetting words and stuff, it was hairy scary man. Oops.

The summer semester has been going for two weeks. I spent the first two weeks moving around classes trying to sort out times and levels etc and ended up learning zilch. And I've been focusing on work and how to teach English and making plans etc. I had two privates on Thursday. One is a young girl that lived in NZ for ages so she is excellent and just wants to concentrate on writing. Sick! I read the book she wants to study and I liked it and I'm thinking wow dude I get to get paid to talk about a book for an hour! Then I had an older lady who I'll be teaching for three hours a week. She wants to talk about current affairs and that's it so once again I get to Exist and be paid for it. We talked about Iraq and the Korean soldier who was executed. I told her about the 101st ammendment: All men are born equal, some just more than others. She's a smart lady who knows her stuff and I like her. Set!

 

  ¶ 22:41 0 Comments

  PUBLIC SURVEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
This is a spelling question. Please leave a comment telling me what you reckon it is.
 
Do you spell it as travelling or traveling? 
 
I think it's supposed to be one L but I told my student last night there were two, just coz it looked right. But she studied English at uni and by the sounds of things she knows more than I do. My Times dictionary says there are two l's but my character geneology one says there's only one. The Times one was pretty cheap though. And I think there's  some kind of oh what do you call it,  "grammar rule" that I don't know about.
 
Competent or Incompetent English teacher: You be the judge!
 
 

 

  ¶ 18:09 0 Comments

  It's amazing what you are INcapable of achieving when you DO believe in yourself. Although there is a difference between being cocky and believing yourself. The big commercial ended up being another promo video, which means I'm still not a humongous star. The video was this big giant company pretending to close a deal with four white faces ooops I mean four foreigners and as far as I know they give out copies to staff so they can take them home and watch them when they're bored. We got paid heaps but I went all cocky and stuff coz this photographer guy kept taking my photo, it was pycho, it clicked everytime I frickin smiled and I'm like come on dude if you're going to go crazy either give me some money or make me a humongous star or make me a date with the sexy director guy. So I walked around going yeah man I am the best. After that the agent lady said her friend wanted me for another job and my head grew so large that the scooter wobbled a little and we nearly drove into a bus.

We were on our way to this audition I saw on Tealit. I still looked like a thirty year old business woman but you were supposed to look sporty. So we turned up and sat down in the little waiting room. The two guys next to me looked like models and I thought sh/t am I supposed to be here? Then I said hi to them and they ignored me and then I thought well I've seen it all before but still, does being a model or just a handsome guy emotionally hardened by auditions make it alright to be a rude f/ck? I decided to wait it out anyway seeing as though I had already bothered to call them up and make an appointment. They posted the ad on Tealit, after all, so it seemed anyone was welcome. The ad never said anything about Only Snobs Who Conform to Certain Standards of Beauty are Allowed. This was just about when my big squashy head started deflating fast: The casting woman walked out, asked who I was, I told her about the appointment, and she said there was no appointment. This lady was not much into the whole face-saving thing. I think she's over it. She basically told me to get lost. She took my name and height anyway, asked me which "agent" sent me, and I'm thinking like newsflash you whore, you advertised it on Tealit. WHO is wasting WHOSE time here? [Swearing swearing swearing] She said the problem was you had to be in sporty gear. I was in jeans and a shirt. The problem was the old-hag hair do. Was it really necessary to be rude here? So yeah there went my fantastic movie-star day.

Then we went back to Cathy's house to change my hair for another "audition". As the last "audition" turned out to be a snapshot for a little promo video, I figured this one would be the same deal. No no no, this was a real one where I had to talk to a video camera and tell the world how wonderful this baby stroller was. Thanks for telling me, Cathy. So yeah I blew that and right in front of me the guy was like "Please send me some more girls" etc and I had the sh.ts bigtime because I was cocky enough to think I already had the job. I walked out like a spoilt princess and didn't even say good bye to him or look at him. I thought my goodness what's come over me. But I did take into account that I had no sleep the night before coz I accidentally had a really strong cup of coffee at 10pm and that I was stressing out that the bus wouldn't make it back to Taichung in time to get back into the CTF (Concubine Training Facility).

Cathy is a cool chick though. She said her dad was a chef but he wanted to spend more time with the family so he now runs a chicken stand on the road. We stopped and said hello and he gave me free dinner. She is also very laid back and I got along with her quite well.
I got home in time and crashed out really really fast.


  ¶ 14:03 0 Comments

  The Other in Japanese Advertising
Millie R. Creighton
 
"To a large extent representations particularly of whites, but also of blacks and other Asians, have reinforced their otherness, thus serving to reaffirm the homogeneous unity and uniqueness upon which Japanese identity is largely based. The imaging of white foreigners in Japanese advertising reflects the dichotomised role of gaijin (Caucasions) in Japan. They tend to be either objects of glorified attention or conversely a standard of negative traits. In either case they are often stripped of individual idenitity and their own personalities; encountered and experienced as representative gaijin rather than real individuals... Much of Japanese advertising is a performance of visual imagery, and appropriately these foreigners are simple misemono, 'spectacles' or 'things to look at.'
 
"This attitude was frequently attributed to a sort of ignorance arising among a people who have had few possibilities of interaction with other cultural groups... Images of foreigners are fantasy depictions, attention-getters, flights of fancy... Although abundant, these representations tend not to bring any deeper understanding of the outside world. Their very abundance often gives the false impression that Japan is largely open to the outside world and to foreigners."
 
pg. 155 Occidentalism: Images of the West 



  ¶ 15:46 0 Comments

  Whoo hoo I got the commercial job. It's funny though because I wanted it more for the cash than the chance to become a big star factor. No like really I did. I can finish stressing now about working etc because I've found this private student who wants three hours a week yay and the good kindy job is definitely happening. Dude, if all goes well, I may never have to work in a bushiban. (A bushiban is where kids who should be at home with their families are forced to sit in a dark boring class room  till 9 at night learning English they're mostly never going to use,  who don't know why they're there, and don't want to be there, and the point is, they are all a bunch of little shits.) You beauty!
 
Curtis is leaving for Canada tomorrow, the last of the Mohicans dude, everyone's gone now, except Polish Elizabeth, me, Carolyn, and Qili and Tatania. And Chris'll still be here, with his cute friend from the north of England.
  ¶ 15:35 0 Comments

  On Sunday Carolyn, Emily, Zai Huan and I went to Yuemei fun park. It was good fun. I hadn't been on ride for a few years so it was mad. I can't believe Australia's Wonderland closed down. In the line for the snowy-river rampage-esque ride I was having an anti-staring day so I was going absolutely schizo waiting in that 1.5 hour line. It's bad when you're stuck and have no way of escaping it - everywhere you look there is a bunch of people just standing there staring at you. So anyway I decided to take a photo of the crowd staring back at us and it turned out pretty well. This will be the most valuable souvenir I bring back from Taiwan! "This is me drinking tea, and this is me on a mountain, and this is the staring that happens every day, which if I live here any longer is going to turn me into an antisocial recluse who only goes out at night."

Last night I watched dvds at Lily's then I met Carolyn while Emily was on her date with the German guy from the Pig Pen. First I was going to go, then I wasn't, then I did, then Curtis decided to 'abort' because I kept changing my mind. Lily thinks I'm indecisive too. Hello, it's not my fault I'm a Gemini. Then I stayed at Lily's because of the MOTHER F?CKING CURFEW. I would like to tell the world that Lily has a talent for drawing manga but she like me does not know what to do with her life. I say, draw manga! I reckon she could get a little column in one of the expat magazines, totally. And it could be all about being culture shocked and shitty about the little things.   ¶ 17:25 0 Comments

  Being a cripple in Hong Kong

As I walked through customs this local dude in the uniform checked out my bandages (one on each toe except for three, on tops of feet, around right knuckles, elbow, and upper arm), smiled and said "bad luck". I had also started holding my arm at a right angle as if I had broken it or something and eventually it started hurting to move it.

At about two in the morning I found a little hotel to stay at. i watched a little tv and crashed out. The next day I lay on the bed for the whole day watching tv and slowly changing the bandages. I didn't go out until I went to meet Mum. The lady came to tell me to check out, and I opened the door about five centimetres and handed her some money and apologised for being so rude, but I was a disgusting pussy stinking mess. She must have thought I was shooting up or something. Gauze was sticking to the wounds and I had to peel it off again. I have always said that no matter how hard I try, I can never walk as slowly as a Taiwanese xiaojie. Well, I peeled the gauze of my arm so slowly that I reckon I wouldn't make such a bad neurosurgeon if I really wanted to. I did like, a centimetre every half hour.

Then I went to meet Mum. We had dinner, then I went back to the little hotel. That night, the third night, just like the nurse warned, was when the real pain came. I don't know where it came from. It was the kind of pain where you can't stop panting and then you start to panic and you freak out and cry and wonder how it could be so painful. It went through my whole arm. I took a second panamax, waited half an hour, then took a third, then I finally crashed out. Mum was down the road but I had no way of contacting her or anything. That was shite.

The next day we had breakfast at McDonalds and I told Mum about last night's little hell session and then she said I should stay at her hotel. I'm like "hell yeah!" And dude, she paid for it too. She got a retirement package or something. She therefore got to have a good squiz at the damage and help me change the bandages etc... you know, mothers are good at that stuff. I'm glad too, coz I could not wrap my arm up on my own.

Jane Smith wins $50 for her submission of Being a Cripple in Hong Kong. Thanks, Jane! -Take 5 ed's.  ¶ 17:34 0 Comments

  Dude! Just as I realised I needed something exciting to happen I get a phone call from this talent agency telling me to go to an audition on Monday. How cool! I'm supposed to dress as a business woman. I had to be a business woman in the mistubishi ad. I think it's safe to say that, so early in my illustrious career, I'm being type-cast!!! Hahaha.


  ¶ 23:29 0 Comments

  Yesterday Starbucks wasn't serving hot coffee because of the water stoppage. They were serving iced coffees though. Noone seems to know why the water has actually stopped. Something must have broken, like an important pipe or something, but people seem to bypass the whole 'why' thing when talking about the stoppage. Lots of people can't have showers although luckily Camp X-ray has a big tank.
I have class from one to three now so I will be reverting to the old ways ie lying around till there's no sleep left to be had. Last night I went to Chubby's for pub quiz and had a salad. My salad diet is going pretty well. Anyway I had to leave at 10:30 again which really gives me the bananas. I'm like man I have 18 minutes to finish this beer dude and then I drive home thinking I still have to wait a couple of hours till I can go to sleep because my roomies will be chatting on msn for a long while still as seems to be custom around here.
Oh my three new roommates are all great. They are all super-pleased to have a laowai in their very own room. Last semester it was keep-to-yourself style so I just got used to doing my own thing be it read 24*7 magazine or write letters to my dad or learn the odd Chinese character, open the odd textbook... now it's like we're always on the verge of a conversation which is great although I don't know what to do when I'm in a quiet mood.

Two Months Till The Scholarship Ends: What Am I Going to do Next??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Stay in Taiwan and reluctantly teach bad English and wait for the casting agency to eventually make me a humongous star.
Go home and enrol in some random TAFE course like furniture design or beginners Arabic and just do whatever, hang out with my niece and nephew
Go to Thailand and read on the beach
Go to Hong Kong and become mistress of some outlandishly wealthy dude and just do it, live the high life for a while and do exciting stuff like become a humongous star.

I will give Rotary a speech about Australia. Oh I saw the five-millionth artical in the China Post today about Kangaroos. This one was about how they're hopping right into Canberra to find fresh grass. I think the last article about Australia I read was about how a dog pulled his master out from under a fallen tree on a farm somewhere. The one before that was about crocodiles. Dude, it's like Australia is a frickin enormous zoo where humans live among the kangaroos, who are in total control of the media. I think I'll make my speech about the history of kangaroos in Australia and their ultimate impact on the human race.

Kangaroos have inhabited Australia for more than two million years and hop around. In 1952, the first Kangaroo to rescue a small child from danger was awarded with alot of fresh grass to eat. Kangaroos are often sited in the bush and are strange. Kangaroos hop around and eat grass. Once when my dad took us skiing, we camped in the bush. My sister and I fed a kangaroo an entire loaf of bread and we got in big trouble. The kangaroos came right up to us and ate it out of our hands. There were some really big ones who looked as if they could have saved little kids from peril. Others looked as if one kick would have knocked us out. Kangaroos often dangle their paws in front of them while they hop around, and every year we have an international competition to find who can say "You have kangaroos" and do the best imitation of a foreigner imitating a kangaroo. Kangaroos are strange because they look different. I once ate kangaroo meat at the revolving restaurant in Sydney. It is supposed to be a delicacy but there are so many kangaroos now that they are being culled and I believe the best thing to do would be to replace beef with kangaroo meat seeing as though cows ruin the land while kangaroos just do their own thing. They are strange. Thankyou. Applause...

  ¶ 22:46 0 Comments

  How I came to be in Taiwan

It all started the day I arrived home from Germany. I spent all day wishing I could go back to the airport and fly somewhere else again. So anyway I finished my HSC and went to uni. I enrolled in Chinese, Arabic, Psych, and something else. Arab World studies. So anyway, it was the first Friday of the year, and we had our first tute with Mr Keenan. While everyone was chatting before class a girl who was repeating the first unit told us about the dude that came first in Chinese, got a scholarship, then went to China, where noone understood him because his tones were messy.
So anyway THAT was the day I became determined to a) come first in Chinese, b) get a scholarship and c) go to China (and finally go overseas again) 0h and d) make sure I understood tones!.

This is what ran through my head everyday for the next year:
Come first=scholarship to China
with absolutely no variables or additional factors

From that day I was a character-learning machine, a little on the obsessive side, learning everything three times over to ace every test, until I forgot why I originally chose Chinese. It was the perfect plan. What a great place uni was - study hard, which was doable, and go overseas! It turned out what I was doing was called 'perfectionist performance'. Also, for a while I was suspected of deceiving them about previous Chinese learning experience, which is a big no-no in the Chinese studies department. So anyway, I ended up coming first but lo and behold I had in fact forgotten why I was doing it. Total cliche I know! Also, the marks for my other subjects were average coz all I cared about was acing Chinese.

At the beginning of second year, some scholarship applications came out, including the Taiwan MOE one. I knew absolutely nothing about it, only that it began with S and ended with cholarship. That was it. It had "plane ticket" written all over it. I also had no idea that competition was low - I expected there to be some level of glory involved so that I could show it off to the skeptical members of my family. The application was very involved, and time was running out, and because I believed it was competitive (sad, so sad), I decided not to bother. A week before the deadline a friend said I would get it if I applied so I made the last minute decision to go and get the HIV tests and the references and look up schools on the internet. I handed it all in and still believed there was some uncertainty to it all. So I totally forgot about Taiwan and never bothered to actually think about what kind of a place it was, which were the best schools, what people did there etc. In May I got an email from the TECO office saying "congratulations your application's been accepted". To me, it read "You are fantastic, and for this reason, we are rewarding you with a year of Chinese study in Taiwan." I rang people and screamed and cried and did the big hoorah and said "I got it, I got it!" like it was totally unexpected. It was the overnight-star routine. I was an official Scholarship Student! And more importantly, I was finally going back to the airport. It was an external scholarship, but I was invited to a fancy gathering for scholarship recipients within the uni. I had no idea about how sad it all must have looked from the outside.

It has been good to break away. A few of the biggest things I've half-learnt are a) how to take it easy b) not give a sh/t about prizes/glory c) figure out priorities. The last time Martin told me to "enjoy myself" was I swear the last time anyone will ever tell me that. Other stuff like half-understanding Chinese culture and speaking Chinese have come as added extras. Pretty decent ones, I'd say!
That's my confession of the week. Days of Our Lives theme song, and CUT!  ¶ 22:44 0 Comments

  The day after I got back from Hong Kong the typhoon came to Taichung. I basically stayed in my room for two days only going out for food. It was unnerving to hear branches breaking off trees etc but my roommates were like whatever. After it had cleared there was crap everywhere - branches and other bits of trees were all over the place. I finally got the battery for my scooter replaced. Scott and Jill leave tomorrow morning, for good, so last night they kept me out to join in the festivities. It was 10:30, so I had half an hour to get home, and I had thirty seconds to decide whether I wanted to go home, get sleep, and save money, or stay out a bit later, spend money, and end up sleeping somewhere else. Man I am not used to this dorm situation. I decided to go home, but just before I reached Tunghai, with 10 minutes to spare before the doors to the dorm closed forever, they called me and made me turn around and come back. I didn't mind though. But it was against my better judgement. We went to a new bar so it was half worth it. Then we went to FM where Jill got really drunk. I played with this thing hanging on the wall where you flick these round things and try to make them land in the Smirnoff bottle, like pinball. I got one in. Then I got busy reading the local expat literature. The Voice is sucky and blatantly politically biased although this one article with a photo of some slums hanging over a river near the train tracks down in the seedy part of town was interesting. The gap between rich and poor they said is pretty big in Taiwan. Then Scott came over and asked in a Russian accent why I was over there being antisocial and I told him about how I read "The Introvert Advantage" and how I was now "embracing my introversion."
At dinner there was this cool girl from the US who has lived here for years. She was in a scooter accident and you can see all the metal work in her elbow sticking out of her skin a bit. She got screwed over afterwards. (And here I am hoping I get compensated for the $200 I spent at the hospital!). Taiwan is like this: when you go to a mediating session to sort this kind of stuff out, rather than bring a lawyer, you bring your gangster friends. Lawyers don't do sh/t apparently. Then your gangster friends do a bit of a settlement and that's it. It helps to have cop friends too. So the moral of the story is, if you're going to ride a scooter on these psychotic roads, make sure you have a license and health insurance, or better gangster friends than the person that nearly kills you does.   ¶ 22:07 0 Comments

  Hong Kong is a nice place. For the first two nights I stayed at a little hotel which I thought was only $5 a night because I got the exchange rate totally wrong. I'm like wow this place is a bargain when in fact it was about ten times that and I really didn't have a clue. Then Mum forked out so I could spend the other three nights at their hotel. We went to the Peak and Stanley markets. When I eventually buy an appartment in every major city of the world, my HK appartment will be in Stanley. We also went to the giant buddha. That dude is huge! We also happened to be in Hong Kong for the hottest day of the year, and the democracy demonstrations. I went to the park for a piece of the action and bought a t-shirt to sell on eBay in 50 years.

  ¶ 14:08 0 Comments