January 11th, 2016

10:04 am

I kept turning over and going back to sleep, such that I expected to wake up to darkness and a wasted day. But no, it's still early, and a beautiful blue sky greets me through my window.

Ignore the smokestack in the distance. (You don't actually see it from a reclined position.)

I'm a big fan of this "sleeping on a hard surface" thing. And I had some sweet dreams, notwithstanding a zombie invasion or two.

So yesterday I neglected to write early in the morning because my required arrival time is 9am. "Everybody's working on the weekend", that's the phrase, right? (I'm aware that isn't the phrase)

I ran into my coworker Leo- one of the Chinese teachers, he spent some time studying in Halifax. Besides the exchange of pleasantries, he flashed a work badge at the entrance to Roosevelt Plaza, bringing me along for the ride- so I didn't have to wait outside in the cold.

I had to prepare an English Corner today. Despite the repaired projector, I didn't get any pictures or video ready for it. Part of the reason was that I wasted my time on Facebook, and then I was answering some students questions, and then the computer just didn't co-opererate when I needed it to. Which is a shame, because I was planning to speak about Rob Ford, and there are some excellent videos of the guy. I didn't think about it too much, I had a successful English Corner without pictures before, I'm sure today would be no different (it was different).

I think I only had the one class to teach before lunch- besides the two adults there was this sweet kid Bill who was very bright, he zipped off the question prompts "who, what, when, where, why" - he did a lot of work in the class. Hopefully he had a little fun too.

Went to lunch with Adeel and Bradley at a Food Bazzar separate from where I usually go, on the other end of Roosevelt Plaza. And it's way nicer. What?

You need a different card, so I was all set to get a new one, but Bradley waved me off and bought me lunch. Hmm this is way too much free food. It's really helping me out, but the guilt factor is high. We got a sort of boxed Korean lunch thing, there was rice with an egg on top, somewhat breaded or, I don't know, becrumb-ed chicken, some spicy lettuce-y bits (was it some kimchi? no one mentioned what it was...) and some regular lettuce-y bits. All of which was covered in some artfully drawn lines of a white sauce.

I mean, more artfully than I could perhaps do.

We discussed house parties/diner parties in the west versus going out culture here, as well as passive aggression. I may have a problem with talking about subjects that are too advanced for the level of English I'm working with. For a prime example, see my upcoming English Corner on Rob Ford.

English Corner time. I walk in, go to the board, and plot myself a timeline for the, well, lecture, "Rob Ford: - Who was he before he became Mayor? -How did he get elected? -Accomplishments in office - Gaffes - World wide reception - The next election and beyond"

I was pretty happy with this, honestly, impromptu framing- and if this was me giving a presentation in almost any other scenario it would have gone amazing. I spoke for about 42 minutes going through my bullet points above, stopping to explain terms as I went along. 

But I needed to speak for 60 minutes. So that's my first problem. I was dangling in the wind for longer than I'd like. What did I even talk about to fill in the rest of the time? Yeesh, it was rough.

Also, they generally didn't care about municipal politics in Toronto. And they look at me like I'M the weird one.

At one point, definitely after the 42 minute mark, I asked the class how it worked in Dalian. Who was in charge of Dalian? But that didn't go anywhere- no one knew the answer. Maybe this is one of those cities that are run by a computer in a cave somewhere, one paradoxical question away from a CPU meltdown and total anarchy on the streets.

*Looks at the streets* Uh, it may have aleady happened.

I wasn't really over the bumming out of the previous day, and now I knew this English Corner didn't go over well. So I was feeling pretty low energy at this point.

Stella asked if I was free to talk soon, and it was pretty clear she wanted to discuss my English Corner. I tried not to get apprehensive, but the "can we talk" phrase has never been good. I should probably tell her how rough a phrasing that is to hear.

I taught another class about stress and intonation, and while I still admitted my difficulties with finding the stress in sentences, I also pointed out how the stress can change in a sentence depending on the situation. Of course after saying that, the next line in the lesson plan itself says that the stress can change depending on the situation. So, I owed the lesson plan an apology, it knows what it's doing. Armed with this safety net, I ventured to actually act like I knew what I was talking about and we searched for the stressed words in a one page sketch about a parent and child.

I passed around a four paragraph portion of the "I Have a Dream" speech (er, unless that's the whole thing..) and everyone had a turn reading a paragraph. I knew this would be tough, but the third paragraph was obviously the most difficult, and I gave it to the weakest student. By the time I realized that's how the paragraphs would be distributed in the class I thought it was too late to change things without making it obvious that I was trying to go easy on that one student. So, deep end for her it is.

Maybe I should have read the speech first, so they could hear me and try to imitate how I performed it. That would probably have made sense, but if we ran out of time could you imagine if the only person that got a chance to read the speech out loud was the teacher? That'd be no good. I read for them afterwards, and they all sort of went "Aahh". They, as absurd as it sounds, really enjoyed listening to me read it.

Man, maybe I could make English Corner just me reading an English book to them? That would be the sweetest deal in the world.

I talked with Leo, waiting for Stella to be free- though it seemed there was an expectation for me to stay until uh, whenever, an hour after my last class was, when the place closed for the day. Which is fine, makes sense, it's just that I hadn't been told that specifically. Finally, Stella was actually just leaving and I specifically asked her what was up- she seemed embarrassed, and she buttered me up with "the students like your accent and they like you" (the first being mostly an accident of where I was born, and the second being somewhat irrelevant to whether or not I do a good job at work) "but that your choice of English Corner topics are..."

Yes, not interesting. 

During my 18 minutes of dangling in the wind I straight up asked them what they wanted to hear- the thing I heard most (not that there was a lot of volunteered topics here) was that they just wanted to hear stories. I promised them some stories about Spider-Man.

I walked out the door behind Leo and Stella- they seemed to only realize I might be walking in their direction after the fact, so I thought I might be intruding on a romantic interlude or somesuch. So I went in the opposite direction to explore the basement level of Mykal- it seems the basement level of all these shopping centers is where all the grocery stores are. I found some oatmeal, almost a decent sized package, but it's still crazy expensive. They import it in from Australia. There's a kangaroo on  the package.

Guys, oatmeal is so good for you, maybe lay off the white rice for a bit, huh? Eh? Maybe?

Crossing the street, I explored the grocery store, Carrefour, in that basement. The entrance had security, which pointed at me to put my water bottle into my backpack- I complied, though it's a sucky quality of plastic, I was worried it might warp or something and I wouldn't be able to open it later without the bottle exploding. That may sound like something that wouldn't happen, well, it happened to me with another bottle... actually, I didn't even get it open, it just started leaking water from the top and I couldn't get enough purchase to unscrew it after the fact. I just dumped the bottle in the garbage.

Ah, but, that didn't happen this time, it's all good.

There's a secret upper level to Carrefour that it didn't look like I could escape from- entrance only. Connecting the upper and lower levels is a movator, stairless-escalator, that I think is running a little faster than I'm used to, I jerked back further than I would have anticipated, and could have easily fallen. I didn't, but I'm prepared to accept the existence of a universe where I could have fallen there.

Finally escaping, I journeyed north through the wind to my apartment. That moment there was the coldest I've been all this winter so far, getting that biting into my face coldness.

Back in my apartment, I didn't feel like writing at all, I just wanted to sleep. But I also didn't want to set that kind of precedent for the year (have I missed writing at all yet this year? I don't think so, but maybe I said differently in an earlier post..) so I thought I would just start, get the key bits out. To my surprise, I got into the groove and ended up doing the entire post I wanted to write- or at any rate, I was very satisfied with the amount of work that I'd put into it.

And that's it. 11:31 am. I'll do some push ups, brush some teeth, grab some white rice somewhere, and then I think I'll spend my day walking south. See what I find.

Wish me luck, have a good day