shoo shoo negativity

I’ve been a bit on the negative side lately. Not too much all the time and just a little sometimes but there’s been a definite trend. Being the self–reflective, positive person that I am, I’m back in the offensive now to squash that negativity out of my life. Now, there’s a place for it I’m sure, and there are times (especially for females who might be at a certain stage of their hormonal cycle) where people feel a bit down. That’s fine. Repeat after me. That’s fine. But with love, infinite love, towards ourselves and others we can continue to grow and progress. I don’t know if happiness is an option, but putting ourselves in a position whereby we are happy is an option. Notice, I didn’t say, where we can be happy. Because of course all of us have the potential for that. (Yes, everyone.) Happiness is not in my future or my past. My past is memories, my future is non-existent. It doesn’t matter one bit whether I have been happy or whether I will be happy. I don’t know if I can say right now: I choose to be happy. The statement sounds a bit paradoxical to me. It makes more sense, to me, to ask myself: is there any reason not to be happy right now? because that brings me back to my present and then everything follows suit: I make myself aware and I appreciate. I become grateful.

So on that note here are a few things that have made me feel grateful.
W. going to the supermarket and getting a little something for me saying: just so that you know you’re appreciated.
S. saying that he feels the need to tell me that he feels very comfortable talking to me.
E. thanking me for being a good listener.
My students for being great just by being themselves.
Dinner invitation from a colleague at the Japanese school and a lovely night with his wife and another colleague.
The sea for being magical.
P. for saying “thank you”.
My colleagues for their kind words and for being who they are.
Special guest star: the universe for making everything work.

Winter Swimming Club

It’s time for another meeting of the Winter Swimming Club.
One of our three members was gone for a couple of weeks and in the meantime the weather’s gone a bit less cold so now five degrees celcius in the daytime feels positively toasty. Lovely day init? I find myself telling people even though there’s only one English person around for whom “init” makes sense. It’s all about context you see. Words live in sentences which live in languages and five degrees celcius is great. More than great. It’s warm. I’m sure the sea will be freezing but I’m staying delusional. I know my toes and fingers will be numb for hours afterwards and that I will have to go round the shed to get naked (in compartments) to get dressed again and it’ll take forever for my body temperature to go up. But I would have enjoyed a rigorous swim in the sea and will get to pat myself in the back for being slightly insane at times. I will conveniently forget how freezing the sea was as soon as possible in order to do it again soon.
And then it will get colder and colder and when it gets to more than minus five I will be grateful for practising the art of forgetting. Providing the club is still on…

UPDATE:
Fucking hell the water was freezing. My scalp hurt, my body hurt, my skin was tingling with pain throughout. But it was refreshing and best of all apparently I was impressive. The Chinese winter swimmer were impressed with my swimming technique that was “professional” and with the amount of time spent in the water. Which means of course that in a few days, on Friday, when we go to swim again I’ll have to continue with the brave act as I’m fighting hypothermia in the water…

in the middle, everything is possible

Part of growing up may be coming to terms with the fact that sometimes things are neither excellent nor horrible. Either exterme puts me in a state of inertia. But here I am, in a city I like but don’t love, with people I’m friendly with but not friends with, with a job I enjoy but don’t feel fully satisfied by (due to external reasons mainly, parents and lack of control in my teaching). And what a great learning opportunity this is. I have to pursue friendships. Slowly but surely, this is happening though I have a long way to go. I have to figure out ways to improve my job satisfaction. I’m taking initiative though the Chinese management is not used to that and are not sure how to respond. I have to take even better care of myself. I’m in that magical mid-point of the wave where anything that happens I have to make happen.
And on this particular sunny day, when the cold has given way and an opportunity to open the windows to let some fresh air in, anything is possible.

normal everyday stuff in long rambling sentences

40

I didn’t want to leave the house this morning and told myself off for setting myself to have a bad day and then told myself off for telling myself off. When I get the urge to chastise myself (which I have a natural tendency for), I try to direct this in observation. Maybe a chuckle, maybe an aknowledgement of what’s there. Sometimes, I catch myself laughing at my mind: oh you silly mind, what have you come up with this time? Sometimes, I catch a thought and am surprised, like a morning past when I woke up pissed off at my parents and thought what the fuck? Why should this be the first self–aware thought of the day?

Anyway, after all that meta–thought and coffee, it was high time I went to school. It was a bloody mess. Two parents observations and no teaching assistant for the first lesson. My teaching assistant has been coming late for the past three weeks and I haven’t really complained or given her grief about it but this was the last lesson and I wanted both of us to be on the same page. She comes in 25 minutes late ready to complain about being sick and I cut her off (with my incredible mind that is the don’t–bother look). It’s all done and over and I have twenty minutes for the next lesson, yet another parents observation and again no teaching assistant. I’m getting pissed off. Pms? Possible, I’m late, though with the morning after pill causing me to have a period double feature maybe I’m not late but then again I’m getting paranoid that maybe due to communication breakdown I didn’t get the right dosage and I’m preggers. All of this running in the background of the mind as I’m consciously getting irritated at the total communication breakdown at my school. I rush upstairs and nearly trip. A clumsy person always, I’ve become much less clumsy the last year or two and I think it’s become I’m more self–aware and at ease with myself. I notice now that I tend to trip more and be more clumsy when my mind is scattered (or my hip is dislocated). So I nearly trip on the stairs and think to myself that I really must pull myself together. But then, to make matters worse, my kids are all over the place. They must have detected my state, little buggers. I love them to bits and they love me too but today, they were distracted and boisterous. Good for them. That’s why I enjoy this class so much but today I was possibly less patient with them. And then, I got a crier. Again. Last time this happened (to an overly sensitive girl whose mum has a history of complaining), parents complained that I was being “too serious” in the class. Right, you tell me that to my face when you see me going on with my kids: I am a lion! I am a snake! impersonating said animals. Back to the crier. Boy has fight with boy, I see him kick boy, I tell him off and give him his third sad face which means oh my! a sad face on his report. He starts crying, crying, crying, shouting, shouting, shouting. He was like a wild animal! Fuck. I have to send him out of the class to cool down which means all the parents gather round him, the staff gather round him and I’m thinking, what the fuck not again!, and then it’s all a huge mess and the parents have to come in to watch the lesson and the newly re-introduced student is fucking up this cool game because he won’t cooperate and this game requires class cooperation and I forget the homework reports downstairs so at the end of the lesson I have to go down to get them and they’re all scattering already and one of the parents took my extra one for a missing student and I was asking myself: have I given them all reports? And I walk in the staff room wondering if I should make more copies of the report mumbling to myself and think “Fuck it”. Well, I thought it and said it and everyone was staring at me and I asked: have I been talking to myself? To which I’m told “yes, you said ‘fuck it’” and was asked why I was being aggressive and I said “oh, everyday normal things” and was encouraged to share and I said “it doesn’t matter, I’ll internalise now” and I meant it jokingly but was told off for internalising things because I shouldn’t bottle things up or something and someone else said “yes, it’s bad internalisation” and I asked “what does that mean” in a sarcastic tone thinking that doesn’t make sense, internalisation is not bad or good, bottling up usually is but not the act of internalising per se but thankfully this time I didn’t elaborate. I let the guys carry on telling me that I shouldn’t be internalising things and didn’t breathe a word of the category errors they were making, nor did I engage in any meaningful conversation about this and advice such as: don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff. (I’m not sweating it! Just having a hectic morning. Leave me alone! screamed my mind but I shut up again.) I had my lunch, I went outside, I had two cigarettes and it started snowing and I was the only one that seemed to notice. All around me people were doing normal stuff in a normal way, but I was happy it was snowing and the mood broke though it took me all day to fully recover from what was my morning.

solitary students

I remember that as a child I had to learn the multiplication table and that it took me a very long time to learn it. The reason was that I have always been an introverted learner. I don’t mean an introverted person (but that too) but that as a learner I need to process information at my own pace and time. This means I’m naturally weak at group brainstorming (unless I’m leading) because I’m not that good at thinking on my feet. I’m good at improvising but that’s because I know what to do with what I know and have a strong imagination. I’m not good at learning in groups or by having someone show me how to do something and then have them guide me. I’d rather be told what I need to know, or better yet, to be shown where I can access the information I need in order to learn/understand/do something and then work on my own until I figure it out. So as child, I learned better if I was left alone. In fact, I was a vocal student in primary school and my teachers were happy to have me in the class during school inspections because I knew stuff. But I became very stubborn and inflexible if I felt I was being pushed.
As a child, I had to go all the way to the front of the classroom and recite the multiplication table and that scared me and I always froze. My dad tried to help me and we were meant to learn it together. This put me under enormous pressure and I still remember how scared I was and how difficult it was for me to actually learn the damn table. My dad would ask: what’s 7 times 7? what’s 12 times 11? And I was supposed to interact with him and give him the answers and we were meant to do this in real time. This simply wasn’t how I learned.

And now as a teacher I wonder if I’m doing the same to those few students who learn like I do. The school system favours extroverted learners and group work. As a teacher I try to ensure that every student in the classroom is learning and so I examine their performance in a number of ways, one of which is by trying to get them to show me what they know. And I cringe at the thought that I’m harming some of them by making them externalise their knowledge in a way that’s unnatural to them. And perhaps even discouraging.

Sometimes I’m so concerned with making sure that no student is left behind that I forget that some students need to be left alone (and how do I discern those from the ones that maybe do need a little more encouraging?) Aside: doesn’t this sound a bit like an answer to the notorious interview question: what’s your biggest flaw at x, or, what do you need to work on?

here for me

39

I thought I was writing to let you know
I am here for you
because I understand where you’ve been.

My brother mentioned last summer
half in joke half in observation
that I was a depressive person.

He meant that I am a melancholic person
prone to bouts of darkness
but I mentioned in passing that he was right
that I have been depressed and in passing
his face showed surprise but
he must have known
I must have told him somehow before I told him.

I thought I was writing to let you know
I am here for you
because I understand where you’ve been
to offer a helping hand and open paths
to communicate through shared experienced
but I realised that was bullshit when I felt relief
that you believed me and you told me you were there for me and told me about the wonders of drugs that make you feel like normal people feel.

No, I will not drug myself because I live in the land of faeries anyway.
My brother was wrong. I’m not a depressive person.
I have been depressed but that’s not me.
That’s me in between selves.
Taking a break.
Anhiliating the self to start again,
a blank slate.
I’m a happy trippy hippy.
I stop to marvel at amazing feats of engineering: spider webs and modernist buildings.
I enjoy life.
I’m like a child or an idiot
talking to cats and dancing on the street on the way to work.
I laugh at myself all the time and people talk to me
they tell me of cheating husbands and things that they are ashamed about
because I don’t judge.
I’m a powerful person and I love and help the best I can and I have dropped the arrogance I carried and this makes me better.

But I wasn’t writing to offer you help
I was writing to let you know that you are there for me because you understand where I’ve been
to let you know.

SF story

I wrote a short SF story and submitted it to a competition. I never heard back which I take it means my entry wasn’t taken up. But, at least I wrote something with the explicit purpose of publishing it and at least it’s a start. Before Isaac Asimov became the awesome SF author that he was, he received many a rejection letters. He kept at it, under the well known guidance and support of John W. Campbell and it’s a good thing he did! So, to many more rejections to come : ) Here is my first entry. It’s meant to be set 100 years in the past which was meant to deal with the environment and ecology but I thought it’d be much cheesier and cool if the aliens came instead:

Some people expected the aliens to come. For most, it would have been a shock if the Maker hadn’t severed emotional responses to those unable to make the transition. The Maker almost never interfered in the evolution of a species but all linear time lines converged on this one: humanity was doomed. The damage to their planet was too severe and the humans’ development too slow to allow for any collective action that could have reversed the deterioration of their habitat and their souls.

From those who made it, some opted to join the census. They then became part of the universe’s library of Anomalous Species Before The Transition. Their consciousness could not transcend their bodily limitations but at least it could be maintained. Choice for body ownership was free.
There was at any rate no guarantee that anyone from the selected would (could) transcend their body. This required hard work and training.

The humans lived in linear time and their bodies’ lifetime was extended approximately every fifty years, for as long as needed. Three generations later, a few managed to master the lower arts: telepathy, telekinesis, empathy. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. A transitioning life form was assigned the humans as part of its own training. It used dreams and the subconscious to train them. In their dreams, humans learned how to eliminate the Ego through meditation. The dream sessions were sometimes brutal. There was a history of collective and individual pain that had to be embraced before any progress could be made. A minority, who were still attached to their bodies, violently resisted the life form’s training. They became schizophrenics and had to join the census. But many humans perceived it as a guardian angel. For others still, it was a completely internalised voice which spoke to their hearts and told them Truth. Those made the most progress.

It was the year 2119 for the humans, and they were one step closer to becoming Gods.