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.

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?

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.

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.

Walking down the street I see a child holding a balloon on a string watching it dance to the wind. My face instantly lifts. I feel thankful for working with children because I remember how easy it is to enjoy life since everything is pretty much amazing as in: incredible, awe inspiring, strange, note worthy. For a number of reasons, fatigue, information overload, preservation of sanity, ignorance, lack of observation, and so on and so forth we become grumpy teenagers and plunge deep into misery (well some of us do, and many more just into apathy) and then we somewhat recover as adults only to discover we’ve lost that pure joy of life we had as children. Perhaps there is even no awareness of this loss. We think it’s normal to walk about living in our minds (well, I live in my mind) worrying about being late for work, rent, what she meant when she said this at work and whatever else people worry about. Life basically. That’s it. We worry about life which is not something most children worry about since they just get on with it. Sometimes they pick a balloon and play with it and they can play for hours. Sometimes they throw a tandrum because their mum used their special soap (real story, told to me yesterday). But whatever it is, they experience the moment fully, most of the time and make us a little bit better though I’m not sure what happens for them to become the unhappy adult counterparts they will in most probability become. In any case, thanks four year old for helping me out of a mindless moment to witness the marvel of a balloon flowing with the wind and your intrinsic enjoyment of that.

I had one of those moments today where the voice that runs the commentary in my head bypassed security. I’ve been formally trained in philosophy for six years and it’s always been natural for me to hear and detect inconsistencies or to want to qualify everything endlessly because there is at least the metaphysical possibility that the universe is built such a way that it would allow for a statement to be true and other such anal things. I’ve learned to suppress this and just shut up and nowadays I’m proud of myself for answering “I’m good” to “How are you?” even though that’s just wrong. This has been a big step for me. I still get into trouble because when pushed I will absolutely refuse to say I’m in a position to know x, y, z, because usually I’m not but most people fail to see the underlying motivation behind my refusals and take me to be saying something I’m not. I think people do that a lot because they skip on all the qualifications I add to give myself loopholes so that I don’t actually have to commit to much. Where the fuck was I? Ah yes. Well, today I didn’t automatically censor myself and ended up giving a speal on how this guy made a category mistake. I actually used that term. To be fair he started it by making a seemingly smart remark in response to a valid, sarcastic offhand remark in response to this recording of a guy chanting (and here I ask you to remember that I work at a language school in China): I am a chair, I am a bed, I am a sofa… So guy one says: Decide what you are! Are you a chair, a sofa, or a bed? You can’t be all of those things… To which guy two responds by: Well, I am a father, a son… which is when I interrupt, well, the inner voice interrupts to say: Well, that’s a category mistake. And then I start lecturing about what descriptions of yourself give a list of properties you can simultaneously have and still be you and descriptions of who you essentially are exclude you being some other way. For example, if you’re a chair perhaps you can’t also be a bed. That kind of thing. As I’m rambling I realise I’m lecturing (which guy one didn’t mind at all, having a “what she said” look) but I feel embarrassed at this and say something like “I should shut up now, the philosopher in me got out” and go off to make photocopies of a handout about making an animal out of shapes and describing said animal. The main problem is that I don’t really like guy 2 and he very often says stupid things or smart things that are really not necessary to say and I don’t want to be hostile. Because I am and I have a way of showing such things sometimes without fully realise I’m doing it. I think he likes being right but doesn’t like being wrong and he was sulking all day after this. (I think he was, maybe I’m being paranoid but who cares.) But if the voice got outed more I’d be a very obnoxious person all the time since the commentary is pretty much on all the time and often targets fallacious statements.

For today’s debate society I thought I’d try philosophy since in the past the subjects were boring and people weren’t interested. I thought Ethics would do the trick since thought experiments about killing and letting die always get people going (at least they do so for philosophy students). So I go for the classic: you’re driving a train and you have to choose between going left/right to kill one/five people VS. you’re driving a train and five people will die unless you push that fattie right in front of the train and save them. Everyone spoke and we actually had a debate. But people thought questions like that were very weird and that no one really ever bothers with such things. Hmm… Maybe next time I can raise questions about the existence of the external world and do some sceptical arguments and keep narrowing down until we get to debating the existence of everyday medium sized objects like chairs and tables and then perhaps the existence or not of things like holes and gaps between objects… Wouldn’t it be great if we got talking about that?

My boobs are kind of huge. Well, some people call them “big”, others “huge” and as a Chinese colleague who saw me naked in the showers (common) after bellydancing dance said: Wow, your friends are rich. Anyway, I’ve come to terms with their size and don’t really notice it anymore and also understand that they suit my body better than how a smaller pair would. So, whatever. However, my bra size does change and this is inconvenient because bras for big boobs are expensive and when you have boobs my size you have to wear the right size. And by the way, way too many women don’t wear the right size and I can spot them a mile off and it makes a huge difference to wear a proper bra and I don’t get it why some people will spend a fortune on clothes and ruin the whole presentation by forgetting about the foundations. Rambling on, when I passed through London this summer, I discovered that my bra sized changed and I now have an awkward size that’s not widely stocked. I manage to get two bras, one of which is very summery and not good to wear under winter clothes, mostly, or during/close to my period when my boobs somewhat grow. So I’ve been wearing one bra much more than any other because that’s the best fit. Internet shopping it is. I browse bras, choose shitloads and the only one bikini in my size (for when summer comes, to avoid paying the delivery charge twice). Then begins the elimination process. The bikini is way too expensive and I remove it thinking that it will either come on sale or something else will come up that will be cheaper even if I have to pay more to have it delivered to China. Then, one by one, I dismiss the pretty bras, sexy bras, and whatnot and stick with the sensible, useful ones. Then, I ask myself if I really, truly, really, have to incur this cost and I go fetch my old bras that are a back size too big, get a pair of scissors, and remove some fabric to make the back size smaller. I did an OK job, I don’t need to buy new bras, and I were, well, very reasonable. Then again, I spent a small fortune today (relatively speaking) buying mature cheddar cheese, tobasco sauce, digestives knock–offs, ground coffee, which are all luxury items in China. So something had to give.

On a completely irrelevant note as is everything in this corner of my universe, learning Chinese is cool. Aspects of it are incredibly difficult to a Westerner, but others so much easier than having to learn French or Spanish, for example. The language is logical and it’s easy to extrapolate and go about guessing what a word you haven’t been explicitly taught will be and how to phrase things and construct sentences. The grammar is for the most part straightforward. And the language is very poetic. Every pictogram has a story, and words are laced with metaphor. There’s also a lot of meaning reinforcement through repetition, for example you might say “beautiful” by saying: “beautiful beautiful”, putting two synonyms together. But I haven’t got to the best part yet. This is the only language I’ve written in where my handwriting is considered beautiful! I’d never have thought it possible. But there you have it.

Winter is coming. It’s about 3 degrees celcius at night and will drop below freezing tomorrow night. About 7 degrees during the day. I’m wearing my coat tomorrow because I can’t pretend it’s still warm enough to get by on a jacket. I’m also wearing my maxi wooly coat dress, the one I inherited from my mum that in London I would wear when it got really really cold and then usually I wouldn’t need a coat to wear with. But I was freezing today and until I adjust, I’ll be bundled up. Nearly a year in sub–tropical climate (China is huge huge huge) has made me less tolerant of the cold. But I’m excited. (Must buy gloves! I’ve got the coldest hands ever.) And I finally see the point of thermal underwear and will get me some.