Dirty Tea Towels

I guess Wednesday is as good a day as any to engage in a little self-flagellation and record my progress. Excuses abound for my dismal performance this week.

I've given up on drinking full time and have cut down drastically on my social life, but the quality of my work isn't really something I can sacrifice to accomplish the rest of my goals. Summer teaching started yesterday and I'm still tackling it with tea-fueled fury. I drank four cups of 信阳毛尖 tea before class this morning and unleashed a barrage of devastating Expo English on my unsuspecting second-graders. Oh boy we had fun. Two more hours with them tomorrow, and on top of planning for that lesson I have a Life Club tonight (sort of a "teach whatever to whoever shows up" class). My weekday first-grader class has double for the summer, so I have to write two lesson plans for them a week and I still haven't planned my six classes this weekend. The elephant in the room is the huge pile of ungraded papers (starting from a month or two before I went back to Denver) that I need to burn through with a red pen before my impending parents meetings. Monday I decided I was going to stay in the office and work through lunch on Tuesday. I was hungry on Tuesday so I went home to eat, telling myself I'd get cracking on Wednesday. Today I went to Renato's house and went home for lunch again and I really have no honest idea when all of this is going to get done. Probably Friday, which sucks because it's my only day off and that's when I wanted to get to all of the other stuff I'd been procrastinating.

It's been hot as hell this week, so I haven't lifted or ridden my bike or even done much walking. Just crossing the street turns my head into a sweat hydrant. The lazy fat kid voice inside of me is convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with working out with the air conditioner on and the human side of me refuses to turn off the air conditioner. It's a nasty little impasse.

I did get to some math on Monday and I spent a lot of yesterday picking up useful Chinese and practicing using my modals, so not all is lost. Tomorrow I do actually need to get ahead on work work so I can spend Friday looking through schools, catching up on some international dev. reading, mathifying (still stuck on that one problem) and drinking borderline unhealthy amounts of tea.

Photo by peruisay

There's a mission statement in here somewhere

Welcome to my blog. Hopefully it's longer lived than the last few I've started and abruptly stopped. One constituted semi-drunken rants about things that pissed me off in China (mostly foreigners). My good friend Renato and I were going to start a blog dedicated to making fun of foreign journalists and their awkward attempts at covering China, but we got stuck on coming up with a good name.

This blog isn't really dedicated to anything specific, which might just give it some legs. I'm going to use it as a way to publicly collect my thoughts and keep track of the projects I've started now that I'm in my second year teaching in China. Among them:

-Researching graduate programs in international development, economics and development economics.

-Reacquainting myself with higher math, specifically what I'll need in an econ grad program.

-Improving my Chinese. I want to become semi-literate (at least reading and typing) and more conversational.

-Working towards a healthy body and healthy mind. Insane amounts of tea and my trusty weight machine are my starting points.

Along the way I'll also be discussing the ups and downs of the newfound more sober me, China, development, teaching, my awesome bike (it's awesome...you'll see), cooking and whatever else crosses my mind. Comments and feedback are way welcome.

Also, anyone interested in ESL teaching in China should check out Renato's awesome blog.