near-weekend update

Mentally, still not feeling very good. My Chilean friend at school is still pissing me off. After another conversation today which made me angry but she seemed to enjoy, combined with someone telling me weeks ago that she was jealous, I think she's playing a Chilean cultural game between men and women. I don't have any other way to explain the information I have, her incredible level of non-listening, or the looks on her face at various points in the conversation. Obviously I don't know what role I'm supposed to play, so I'm going to start ignoring her pushing. If her feelings are actually hurt about something, to hell with her, she can figure out how to talk about it like a North American.

But, hey! I get to teach aikido! Jorge is going out of town for the long weekend of the 9th-11th, so I'm teaching on Tuesday the 12th, and if I'm not busy, Saturday the 9th. I love teaching aikido, and I don't get to do it very often, because Aikido West has approximately 762634672 people with higher rank and more experience, in line to teach ahead of me. Seriously, it's absurd. In most parts of the world a 4th-degree black belt will be giving a seminar and it'll be a big weekend thing; at Aikido West, we'll have 3 of them discussing which of them takes over the Sunday morning class if the instructor doesn't show up.

Some people don't like teaching aikido, which seems as strange to me as people who like teaching Chilean high school students. (There aren't a lot of those. It should be clear that I love my kids, but even the Chilean teachers are regularly pretty frustrated with their work, and you know how it is for me.) Some folks hate being the focus of attention, or feel they don't have anything worth saying, or don't feel they can teach in a way that works, or who knows what else.

Tomorrow makes 7 weeks until I'm done teaching, and today is 4 weeks until Anna visits. The time is ticking down.

it's nice to have an impact

A trio of the friendliest girls from 1-C (which is saying a lot) caught up to me in the hallway today. Javiera started peppering me with questions.

"Teacher, you're leaving in seven weeks?"
"Well, in seven weeks I finish teaching. Then I leave Chile three weeks after that."

"And you're not coming back?"
"Nope, it's time for me to go home."

Javiera switched to English. "I miss you. I am sad."

"Aw, thanks. And hey, good English!"
"Yes!"

Daaawwww.

grrrr rip snarl

You all know very well that I'm not one to accuse people of being too observant. But really, after I've been communicating in good Spanish with you for 5 months, and conspicuously improving, is it really that surprising when I understand the gist of the conversation? Apparently so.

So in addition to not listening to me when I talk, people also seem to assume I don't understand what they're saying. Being dismissed from both ends is pretty rough, and I think this inner tension I feel--and the occasional snapping at people and raising my voice--is the long-forgotten feeling of being past the end of my considerable patience, off the reservation into Irritation, with forays into Anger. Not being heard is a particular raw nerve for me: there are a handful of people at home that I keep at arm's length because they're so wrapped up in the stories in their heads that I can't get enough of a genuine response (to my actions or speech) to feel like we're dealing with the same reality. It's really draining when people don't respond to who you are.

One of my teacher friends was further pushing me by insisting that I play and sing a song on the guitar at some gathering in 10 days. That's something that is hard for me even with a lot of practice, and (at least the way I received it) she not only refused to respect my unwillingness to do it, but she was making it out to be something that a "real friend" would do. She may just have been doing a standard Chilean thing that a Chilean would receive differently, but as I keep having to explain to people, and it should be pretty obvious at this point, I'm not Chilean. Sensing that I was about to raise my voice and get snarly to get my point across--and knowing that while she was pushing pretty hard, she surely wasn't doing anything mean-spirited--I took a breath, smiled, and said I'd see her later.

I'm home right now, writing about this, and listening to some sweet songs by the Wailin' Jennies, and suddenly I can see and feel how hard and spiky and tense I am right now, compared to how I am at home. It turns out that being open, patient, and gentle is completely unsustainable without a safe space to rest, open up, and be heard by other people.

We need each other. Who knew?

I still have patience for my kids: they need that from me, and I feel like they respond more clearly to the person I am, through the language barrier. But I've been shutting out the adults for the past several weeks, because I don't have any energy to meet them where they are, when I'm the only one trying to cover the distance.

This will pass. Everything does.

good packing choices: electronics

I'm home today with some sinus pressure and a beautiful and unseasonably cold rainy day, and before going back to sleep, I was sorting through the computer stuff I brought. It's all worked so well that I thought I might make a list.

• Asus Eee PC 1005PE - This is a fantastic little netbook. Under Windows it actually gets the 11-hour battery life, and the keyboard is great. I usually use Linux on it, which works quite well. The new ones are even shinier, with dual-core processors.
• Flash memory thumb drives - 2x8GB and 1x4GB. These are great for sharing and printing documents--Chileans all have them (they're called pendrive in Spanish, which few people seem to notice is a loanword). I use one for shuttling documents around, and one will boot Linux if something goes wrong. (I would like to have such a thing for Windows, but I think it doesn't exist.) And then one more, just in case, and it was $12.
• USB SD card reader - Haven't actually needed it since the Asus has a card reader built-in, but I'm glad I have it.
• Secure Digital flash memory cards - I have 2x2GB, 1x1GB, and 1x256MB. I used a 2GB for my camera, but having spares is handy: the 256MB is now in my old camera, and combined with the SD card reader, these can serve the same functions as thumb drives. Also, incredibly cheap. (The 2GB cards are actually tiny MicroSD cards in full-size SD adapters.)
• iPod Nano - Actually, the battery on this is about dead and I haven't used it at all.
• Kodak EasyShare C813 - Oh, man. This was a step up from my years-old Canon digital--and only $60 off Woot.com--but what a crappy camera. I finally replaced it with my incredibly drool-tastic Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7, which has a gigantic Leica lens and sees better in the dark than I do. Don't buy the Kodak if you can buy anything nicer.

Except for the Kodak, everything has been rock-solid reliable and really useful. I should have brought more dress shirts, but hey, at least I can plan for technology.

Cartagena the janitor

One of the janitors at school is named Cartagena. There's something weird going on with me and the janitors, because a couple of times, one has said to another, "Heheh, that's Cartagena's friend," with a meaningful, knowing glance, and then they both laugh. Cartagena himself does seem to act a little odd around me.

Odd or not, I'm pretty sure he's lazy, based on what his boss has said and how often he cleans my classroom, which is never. If I find the boss and ask, he'll send someone by. Usually it's only a problem after school events, when my room gets used as a dressing room (which is totally okay, it's just full of trash afterward). Last week when I summoned someone to sweep up, Cartagena stopped by at the end of the day. (This is the best translation I can give. The janitors have a working-class dialect that I have a really hard time understanding.)

"Hey, the room's nice and clean, yeah?"

"Yes! Thank you, it looks great."

"You know, this room is supposed to stay locked, but you have to leave it unlocked so I can clean it." [My room is usually locked.]

"Yeah, but even when I leave it unlocked, you don't clean it."

"Well, you got me there!"

At least we've all got a sense of humor about it, and we both had a good chuckle.

(Curiously, at bemused moments like that, I feel like my father: often he will find a matter-of-fact humor in the most obtuse bureaucratic delays or maddening organizational inefficiencies. We talked a lot about government and politics when I was growing up, and at least once, when I expressed incredulity at some lunatic expression of American democracy, he just chuckled and said, "Well, no one does it quite like we do.")

I am clueless

Lunch today was a chard soup, but something went wrong, and it was...wrong, somehow. Not inedible, but unpleasantly sour. It was fine enough with a bunch of salt and pepper, and the fried potatoes.

I was eating alone, and Ximena stopped in the hallway and asked how the chard was.

"Well, it's fine."

"Oh. Huh. Yeah."

"No, I mean, it's--"
"Ya, ya."

"It's fine with the potatoes."
"No, don't worry about it."

Dinnertime rolled around. Normally dinner on weekends is the same food as lunch, but there was a sudden new soup (which tasted as good as normal). Ximena put it on the table with her finger to her lips.

I looked at her quizzically. She kept her finger to her lips and made some waving sounds, as though I shouldn't mention it to Oscar. Though Oscar came in a few minutes later with a salad.

What just happened? Did I insult somebody or get overly picky? It seems clear they also knew something went wrong with the chard.

Who knows?

having an off week

Not feeling very good this week: I went to school bright and early in the morning, only to come home before my first class started, unable to face how much energy I was going to need for teaching. I'd woken up at 4am for no discernible reason and didn't really get back to sleep.

The sleep during the day helped a lot, and today I went in and taught my two classes, but aikido class informed me that my lack of energy isn't a mental thing--I think my mental funk is coming from whatever's going on with the rest of my body. That's nice as far as it validates my inability to figure out what I was cranky about.

I am feeling a little unhappy with my teaching, because in some ways I feel like I've taught my kids up to what I know how to do as a teacher, and now they're ready to move past that, and I can't quite figure out how to do it. I found a way to teach vocabulary and dialogue questions that works for them, but now they're about ready for some grammar stuff, and I have no idea how to make it interactive, so they'll be able to practice and internalize it.

It's hard to do difficult things without the skills and training for it.

In the meantime, I'm going to sleep a lot.