Tyranny of the Majority

I am what happens when a not-informed-enough-person tries to vote.

My absentee ballot came the other day, and I wanted to mail it off tomorrow. I've cast my ballots for the state constitutional amendments that I could look up (yes to the environment, no to making explicit private property owner's rights to groundwater).

I'm voting Obama (surprise surprise) and am abstaining from most other local elections and issues on the grounds that I'm not living in Ohio ever again and am too far removed from the issues. Other reasons to abstain: I think voting along party lines will destroy our country, votesmart.org is down, and I want to get this ballot sent off in time.

The one exception to my abstention: I am voting AGAINST Pat Tiberi for Representative to Congress. Why? Because when I was in 8th grade we got into an argument over flag burning at a school assembly. He said it was un-American, I said it was a legitimate form of protest. Then he told me "I used to think like you, but I think you'll understand when you're older."

and... I still think he's an asshole.

For everyone and anyone out there reading this, don't forget to vote! It's important, it's sexy, and it's American.

Love and Basketball

They play trailers for this show on my ride home.

Can anybody tell me: why is basketball so popular in Taiwan when most of its people are at a physical disadvantage?

that's the last you'll hear from me, at least for the weekend.

Everything is Fine, Nothing is Ruined

Last night:

My right arm spontaneously began to ache around 11:30 pm. The pain was dull, yet deep and potent. It felt like my bones were trying to burrow their way out of my arm. The pain kept me from sleeping twice--once when I was trying to fall asleep, and once when I woke up (it was excruciating!) at 4 am. I blame it for making me late to work today, not that anyone noticed.

Today:

I got acupuncture. To tell the truth, I'd been waiting for an ailment to crop up so I could finally use my National Health Insurance for some unapproved-by-the-scientific-community cure of the Eastern medicine variety. For only 100 NTD, no less!

The doctor who treated me wore converse sneakers, jeans, and a Chinese-style button down shirt. No white labcoat. The nurses wore dresses that looked like a cross between a nurse's uniform and a qipao. Did I mention that the dresses were pink?

My check-in conversation went like this:

Doctor: What's wrong
Me: My arm hurts. The whole thing
Doctor: Are you afraid of acupuncture?

The nurse inserted 8 finger-length needles halfway into my arm so that about 2 inches remained exposed. It didn't hurt--the needles were thin and until someone told me they were halfway in, I had assumed that they barely penetrated the surface of my skin. Which explains why I expected them to fall out when she fastened a bunch of alligator clips to the needles and wired them to a switchboard.

Then she turned on the electricity.

If you've ever sent a series of electric pulses through your body, you'd probably agree that it produces a strange sensation. I could feel the muscles twitching violently, yet watching my bicep visibly convulse without any effort on my part made it seem like it wasn't really my arm, just some science experiment.

After my 15 minutes of playing Frankenstein were up, he pointed a steamer at my arm, cracked my back, and plastered some Chinese herbal medicine to my neck and tailbone so that the only position I can assume is "upright."

If I drop anything on the floor, I'm done for.

Ride On, Ride On

I had my first truly Taiwanese bus ride today--a ride worthy of my mother's stories riding to school in a tightly packed vehicle. Today the bus that brought me home from school was so crammed with people that a kid actually fell out of the car when the door folded open to let me on.

Eye Spy

On my daily commute, I see:

1. Pimple-faced teens in day-glow tracksuits congregate in every available space on the subway, frantically cramming before a long day at school.



2. The man across from me looks miserable. He probably works for China Steel and is therefore overworked and underpaid.



3. When I grow bored of looking at everyone else, I look at my backpack. It is orange but turning gray around the seams where all the dust gathers.



4. Sometimes I think that people avoid looking at me because I am also dirty all the time. This feels like proof:


Now that I take the bus in the mornings, though, things are different. The seats keep everyone looking forward so no one sees anything but the road ahead and the back of whoever sits in front of them. No chance of eye contact, no chance to feel shunned. The interior of the bus is old and, like me, coated in a fine layer of dirt. My self-esteem has skyrocketed since I made the switch.

When Life Gives You Lemons

Apple-picking is a tradition I look forward to every fall--I love the clean air in the orchards, stressing as my friends tease me for getting lost, and of course, eating crisp apples right off the trees (while thinking about how my mom would freak out if she knew about my habit of consuming unwashed fruit). I'd say it's part of American tradition, at least in temperate parts of the country. A year ago, some friends and I went apple picking for my friend Ben's 21st birthday. His 22nd birthday just passed yesterday (thanks for the reminder, facebook!) and the memory made me a little homesick.

THEN

It's now October, but the fact has barely registered in my brain. At the current time of 10:34 pm, it's 84 degrees Fahrenheit in Kaohsiung. It was way hotter than that during the day.

Thanks to its reliably hot climate, Taiwan produces some of the best fruit in the world. A trip to the fruit market is like staring at a nutritious candy shelf. The mangos, the guavas, the pineapples, the plums (oh! I could go on and on!) are all so vibrantly hued it seems unnatural to the American eye. Yet, there is a serious paucity of good apples in this place. A truly delicious apple requires a significant drop in temperature in order to come into being. Taiwanese apples are neither tart nor crisp, just sweet. I blame the weather.

Today, one of the LETs took a group of us to the Meinong Hakka village (aka a series of gift shops in the county neighboring Kaohsiung). After lunch, we had the option of going to the Hakka Cultural Museum or going lemon picking on her farm. I pushed for lemon-picking, thinking it would ease the homesickness. Now that was wishful thinking. Plucking tree-ripened apples in the crisp Fall air is nothing like trying to rip a lemon off a branch and wishing to god I had brought an umbrella for some shade. And let's not get started on trying to eat a lemon right off the tree.

NOW

Alas, I think I complain too much. If I weren't a little homesick, this would have been fun. At the very least, there is a pile of lemons on my kitchen table just waiting to be squished into lemonade.

The Big Joke??

Thanks to Matt Akamatsu for sending me this blogpost from a former ESL teacher in Japan and long-term Japanese Resident. It doesn't exactly sum up my experience, but I think it gets at some of the tension we foreign teachers encounter as we attempt to teach English. Should we do our best to make our students the best English speakers possible, even if it requires us to make class no fun? Or should we try to make class fun so that they will be more interested in English in general at the expense of building a more solid linguistic foundation?

And if you think it's possible to do both at once, please let me know because I sure need the help.

Excerpt from
"Is ESL in Japan a big joke?"

Nick Ramsay on October 3rd, 2006

You’ve got two kinds of schools in Japan, the English Conversation eikaiwa schools, and juku, or cram schools. Eikaiwa are where the foreigners like myself teach, while juku are heads down, study, study, study, Japanese teacher-led classes. Although English lessons at juku focus soley on reading and writing English, I always thought that eikaiwa were equally important for learning communication. Now, though, I’m changing my mind…

After disciplining one of my elementary school students for atrocious behaviour, his mother kicked up at an enormous fuss.

“This isn’t a school!”, she said. “We don’t pay this money for you to discipline our children! They come here to have fun! If I wanted my child to learn English then I’d send him to juku!”