January 25th, 2016

2:20 am

And let's keep catching up with my days. Sunday! The 24th! Being written about on the morning of the 26th! Again, that date at the top is a lie conforming to an obsessive compulsion to keep a tidy sequence to the titles of my posts. It does also tell you when each post takes place... so long as you remember it's the day before.

Having determined the cause of my leg skin issue, coldness and exposure, I added a new step to my morning preparedness ritual. After my shower I not only moisturized the face and hands, but also the lower legs, before throwing on the long johns.

These long johns are hilarious- they stretch, so as I'm putting them on I get half way and think- this is the dumbest thing, these don't fit, how did I think these would fit?- but I kept pulling at it, and got into them. And not only do they emphasize the sweet contours of my legs, but there's this resistance to the bend-unbend kick back at the knee motion, as well as a bit of heaviness to them, that makes me think they'd be a ton of fun to run in. 

Big thanks to Dany for helping me there.

I also wore an additional layer of shirt, added one of my button-up shirts to the mix, which looks professional underneath my sweater with the collar poking out. It does, I'm not being sarcastic.

Let's see, what else happened that day...  taught a first class beginner level lesson that was grammar heavy, and so I was nervous about giving them bad information and getting them started on the wrong foot. But beginner isn't actually the first level, just the first level they learn from foreign teachers, and they were okay with grammar stuff. I ALSO re-taught that private intermediate level 1 class that I had run through the day before, but it went much smoother this time around. Always have to get that practice run out.

Stella and I both had to use the photocopier (did this actually happen on Saturday?) and she mentioned about not liking some classes, not feeling like teaching at the moment. I replied "I hear that." because clearly I forgot I was in China. After she asked what I meant I explained it's like a shorter way of saying "I hear you, I understand you." so Stella was happy to have learned that. I told her it was a far more modern phrase then the word she had asked me about earlier- "dreadful".

Belinda approached me with some questions about Canada, she said she wanted to study there in the future, and I was happy to help. She shared with the class the day before that last year she spent three months in Paris and Rome, which is super cool, but I mention because when I told her about U of T I mentioned it was also really expensive and she responded that she wasn't worried about that. (I'm told that the classes at Web are kind of expensive- am I teaching a bunch of rich kids? Probably.) I invited her over to my side of the desk so I could show her some pictures of Vancouver, the Calgary Stampede ("why are they called cowboys if they ride horses?" I'm glad you asked!), Toronto, U of T, the ROM, the Science Center, the Toronto reference library, and the Exhibition grounds. She seemed very interested, but I may have made a mistake in having her on my side of the desk- the same sketch browser that allows me access to google search all these things (as well as access to youtube and facebook) also pops up a LOT of ads- they're usually inocuous (sp?) adverstisements for russian brides, but TODAY was the day it decided, you know what? no, today you get the harder erection ad.

Why can't all days be nice and quiet russian bride days?

It was a small thing (phrasing) tucked away in the corner, so I clicked it off as quick as I could. It's not ENTIRELY impossible that she didn't notice it- the regular internet browser in China has a fair number of ads as well, safer for work, but hopefully enough to desensitize people to their presence, just like ads in the west.

Well, that was traumatizing for me. I hope kids are as jaded here as in Canada. There's some hope- condoms are sold at every register at Carrefour. I mentioned that fact to Leo before and he said "population control".

I sent a message to Jordan about calling Grandpa for me, I had an upsetting dream where I apologized for leaving him alone and he told me it was okay. I still wanted Jordan to call though.

I stumbled across a facebook thread arguing about Gillian Anderson's sallary. One guy was of course swimming against the current of public opinion and getting a lot of flack for it- I have this maybe bad habit of, if I see one person versus a crowd, to jump onto the side of the one person, so I "helped" by saying this was just his opinion and they didn't have to resort to assumptions about his character and whatnot. I was told, in a very polite but hugely condescending manner, that I was tone policing and it was (to shorten things to a word) unkind. My initial impulse was to apologize, but I considered first, and decided that instead I would just thank her for the polite response and promise to read (not actually for the first time) Jennifer Lawrence's essay on getting paid less in Hollywood, as well as a number of other links she sent my way.

I was sent a private message from the person to whose defence I jumped, thanking me for my efforts on his behalf. I told him I saw the point he was trying to make, but that he could probably have expressed it better.

For my part, I feel very strongly about fair and equal pay- in pretty much any field other than acting, especially where it concerns people making millions of dollars for acting in a movie. I don't see anyone talking about Harrison Ford getting paid so much more than his co-stars for appearing in Star Wars, because we expect salaries in the movie business to vary depending on the person and the negotiating team. So we already expect unequal pay for movies- should Fischer and Ford get the same dollar amount per second of screen time (considering how much screen time she got, maybe they did...)- is it right? Frankly, the amount of money big names like Ford and, yes, Lawrence, make on movies is obscene and wildly disproportionate to the amount of work they do. Yes, actors work hard. No, they do not work THAT hard.

The men and women behind the scenes deserve a bigger slice of the movie pie, and I would very much like to see our energies spent on that, or on the more generalized fair pay for whatever you do, rather than worry about a producer's(or whoever makes this call) opinion that Gillian Anderson isn't as vital a component of the X-Files team as Duchovny and could therefore lowball the price, and Anderson's initial negotiating team that agreed with this producer's evaluation of Anderson's worth.

Okay, okay, sorry, I ranted pretty hard just now. At least I didn't get to my thoughts on the tone-policing thing. Send your angry letters to Brian Williams, care of NBC... (doing that, now old, Jon Stewart bit)

All right, well, now that I've lost most of my audience over this I may as well stop writing, but eh, maybe if I say something silly I can win back the crowd.

Oh, wait, I just remembered I can win back the crowd through shameless pandering! Yeah, so Dany was doing his English Corner, he opened with a game that required everyone to get up out of their chairs and stand in a circle (Dany: "I'm don't think this is what a circle looks like." Isaac: "Not in the wide open spaces of Columbia, sure, but here..." Dany: "Right, right.") where the audience basically had to remember their number and listen to when it was called. It was slightly more complicated than that, but that's the gist. It took a little while to get started, but eventually people caught on. After that set up game, Dany got into his English corner in earnest (sp?) where he would start with "Once upon a time..." then go sequentially through peoples numbers assigned in the last game, each person adding something to the story (thankfully they didn't have to repeat the whole thing, like in some horrible games). People were looking really confused, so I walked up and said "why don't we give an example of how it's done?" so I went:

"Once upon a time... there was a brave princess..." (And I felt satisfied to subvert gender norms in a place where gender norms are REALLY a thing)

And Dany continued: "who was married to a shy prince, and..." (I forget whether or not he said married, but someone later added talk of a divorce, so there you go. I looked at the white board later on and saw written "the prince=the devil" which was hilarious. Maybe this class was more like progressive Toronto than I thought...)

Let's see, what else did I do that day...

There was a class on "Speculating" where we read some sci-fi stuff and understand what that was all about. They had no issue understanding cloning, everyone knew what Jurassic Park was, but matter transportation was tough, they were less clear about Star Trek. So much for Roddenberry's(sp?) utopian vision. Right, George Takei is Japanese- I guess there wasn't much of a Chinese connection on this show. Adam joined us, slightly late, and I told him I was glad he was there, he's a funny guy- and he didn't disappoint. I'll tell you what I mean.

So the last exercise for the speculating class was to take these sentences "what would happen if...." and then have everyone give answers. For the question "what would happen if cars ran on milk?" Adam said they wouldn't have wheels.

Whaaat?

Then I realized what he meant- that cars would travel in rivers of milk! Amazing!! That's a (mostly) totally valid interpretation of that phrase! I told the class they could give their answers either as though we were talking about using a gas can full of milk to power our vehicles OR we were talking about car/boat hybrids that travelled in rivers of milk. I know which universe I'd rather live in. The living nightmare of the lactose intolerant. The milk riverbanks rife with people curdled* into balls, clutching at their stomachs.

*See what I did there with "curdled"? Like curds? Milk? Ah, what do you know about what's funny.

Whenever lunch was, I went with Thomas, a quiet kid who smiles with his whole face whenever I see him, who has this faint moustache and about three whirls of chin hair- we invited Dany, but after waiting a few minutes he decided to let us go on while he worked out something with Vicky.

So up to Food Bazzar we went, and, yeah, this may be when I had the stuff I described in my last post to eat. Which means the day before I had... something, plus a watermelon cup, and I crashed Adeel and Molly's lunch break where they were eating sandwiches that Molly had made. But yeah, that was then, this is later then. 

Thomas and I are looking for a place to eat, and I see a table with some other Web students, one of which was Eilsa, who you will remember from my post labelled January 22nd that I said I would have lunch with (I had to check my archives for the correct spelling of her name as well as to check which date that was. That's right, I have archives. Be impressed.), and there was an empty chair! So I told Thomas we should give that a shot, went over and asked to join them. There were very happy to have me I think- I insisted Thomas sit down on the empty chair before he attempted to bolt from a table of three girls and then we grabbed an extra chair for me, tucked in so I wasn't TOO in the way of the people walking around.

This counts as a social situation, so I definitely choked on my food a bit. One day that won't happen. (If you remember me talking about that post on the 23rd, congrats, and I apologize for the reminder. I wanted to just write "One day." and it would have been a callback to that post, but then thought, ugh, fine, let's spell out the whole sentence for those that wouldn't know what I was going on about.)

I asked whether or not Thomas and Eilsa knew each other- it seems they go to the same school. Also seated with us was Amy and I was introduced to Lily (this makes two Lily's at Web). I mentioned that if I was born a girl I'd have been named "Emily", which I thought of because I thought Lily and Emily sounded similar, but this sentence was hugely confusing to everyone. No, see, IF I was born a girl, THEN I'd have been named "Emily".

Ooohh. Now they get it.

In turn, I got confused by a mention of "genes" and thought they were talking about "jeans" so I mentioned the word "homophones" which first had them say "homosexual" and then, after looking it up, thought I was comparing their word, uh, I don't know how it's spelled, but it sounds like a particular n-word, yeah, and comparing it to the n-word.

Yes, that's right, I'll (barely) read it out of Twain and Larsen in a university classroom setting, but otherwise there are basically two words that are verbotten- and the second one isn't even all that bad, all things considered. I'll leave it to your imagination which word it is- I'll give you a hint, it ain't fuck.

Regardless, it was a nice lunch, and I hope Thomas enjoyed... well, I hope he didn't mind that we sat with some other people.

Let's see, what else, my last salon class was called "Let's Talk About It" and sitting right next to my spot at the table was, to my left, Thomas, and to my right, Mars. Yes, Mars! I love that name- of course I told him that again. Other classmates were Belinda, this one girl I've taught a few times and I'm feeling bad about having forgotten her name right now, plus three people I didn't know, one being a guy named Li Bin which was unusual enough to remember.

Which in itself reminds me of that one beginners class I had earlier that included a "Ting Ting", which, as far as assumed English names go, I didn't like. The lesson plan suggested getting introduced and asking about names, and like a putz I had to throw in my two cents, so when I got to Ting Ting, what else could I say? "It's a very unique name!" 

She genuinely thanked me, and I was greatful for the language barrier.

But back to this "Let's Talk About It" class- we had a tough exercise where I wrote "I am a hotel." on the board and they had to make it make sense by adding a word. It was pretty fun, the first girl to answer said "I am NOT a hotel." and everyone laughed. And of course it was a perfect answer. Belinda had some trouble with the exercise, and I tried to lob some easy ones her way, but it just wasn't her game.

We repeated the exercise with "I told the dustbin." where this time you could add two words. Embarassingly, the only solution I had required the use of quotation marks and making it a piece of dialogue, which I told everyone was cheating. Fortunately another girl figured out a great answer that left the door open for a pattern that could be followed by everybody, so we moved on soon after that.

Then everyone had to give a quick 90 second speech on a topic chosen out of the lesson plan- I was going to assign them, but Thomas really wasn't feeling "Trees and Plants" so I just passed the book around and let people pick what they liked. I remember what they were since I wrote them down at the time, let's see... in clockwise order the topics were "Sports", "Trees and Plants" (way to go, Li Bin! Taking up the sword!), "Sundays", "Health", "Food", "Holidays" and "Cars" for Mars.

That's pretty good, right- it's getting close to 40 hours since this class took place and I've still got it. Well, I'm impressed. I know, I know, I'll come back when I've got everyones names down.

I made Mars go first since he picked last, then Thomas volunteered, followed by Li Bin. Then "Holidays" (uh, I know it isn't "Kate" or "Christina", because I thought that was it before looking at the class list... this is rough), then Belinda went, talking about food. She ended up talking about something called a "jelly" which I guess is either gelatin or a pudding of some kind. She was wrapping up her speech when she was telling us about throwing the remainder of a jelly after a day had passed in the... and she was stuck. I was about to write the word "garbage" on the board when she looked up and almost shouted "dustbin!" She was pleased with herself, and I was happy too- I told her that getting stuck on a word and then finding a replacement is exactly the kind of thing you have to do all the time and she found a great answer.

Next was "Health" who mostly talked about wanting to lose weight by eating vegetables- okay, follow up question, which vegetables? "Uhhh.... corn? That's it."

That's actually pretty funny.

Finally, "Sundays" did a great job- a couple of times she used the "repeat the sentences over and over. And over and over" type of rhetorical device, which I said was great because, not only does that give you time to think about what you want to say next, but, because you were specifically talking about something being repetitive and monotonous, it actually reinforced your message. She wrapped it all up by saying (I have to paraphrase, my memory isn't that good) that she is too busy and so she doesn't really have Sundays. A great button to the telling, she's a natural story-teller!

That's basically it. Some teachers/foreign teachers were talking about some get together, so obviously I felt left out there. I said good-bye to everyone, headed to Carrefour for another jug of water- this time stopping to fit it in my backpack because I was going to keep my hands firmly in my pockets.

Was it a warmer night out, or did the long johns/extra shirt combo keep me comfortable? How should I know? Probably the latter option I guess.

Other than writing posts, playing Candy Crush, taking medicine and eating sugar covered tiny apples, I think that's everything for Sunday.

Monday was short, but interesting. I'll tell you about it later though. - 5:50 am