Monday, April 28, 2014

Do I really have time? No. BUT THAT WON'T STOP ME!!!

Dang man it's been about 2 months since I posted. Crazy. To be honest, I've been really busy. "But David, you've been playing games with us every weekend!" Ok fine. That's literally the only free time I've had though and I've decided I prefer to use my free time on games. If ever I get 2 days in a row where I have free time, that's usually where I squeeze in a blog post. That has somehow actually not happened since my last post. Actually it's still not happening now, but I decided I need to really make tome time. I don't know what the time will say on this post because I plan to be working on it in pieces throughout the week. If there are spelling errors, I blame my fat fingers because typing on my phone is hard (yeah I'm actually trying to type on the subway haha). I don't plan on making this a short post (it covers 2 months) so strap in and enjoy!

Work:
As I said last post, I got only first graders this year (which means sophomores, they're in the first year at our school though). It's the same amount of lessons to prepare per week (four) but it's harder this year. Last year, one type of class got 2 lessons a week and the other type of class also got 2 lessons. This year, one of our classes gets 1 lesson per week and another type gets 3 lessons per week. Finding ways to fill 3 lessons per week has been one challenge and managing to make a good lesson when we only see a class once a week has also been a challenge. Again though I do like the work, it's just that there's a lot of it. In addition to that, we have the usual stuff like helping with clubs, translating exams, and basically everything that the regular teachers don't want to do/the non-native speakers aren't qualified to do. Also there's my middle school lessons and night class. In total, I'm producing about 9 hours of lessons per week, 5 on my own and 4 in collaboration with Brandon. I do enjoy being busy though because it distracts me from my life. If I can get depressing for a moment, I realized recently when I had one totally free day that I hadn't really had much time to myself since Grandpa died. I used that day to take his picture to visit the new Costco that they built the next town over. Really quickly on the note of Grandpa, I'm going to maybe make a post here at the beginning of May sometime on the topic of him and it's mostly going to be things I don't want to forget. Don't feel obligated to read it, especially after what I'm putting you through in this post.

So total work is pretty busy. With the regular classes plus my night class (basically English speaking for proficiency exams and now English culture starting this week) as well as middle school and then helping tutor the economics club at school, I've kept super busy. It's bad and nice at the same time. At the very least, I'm getting credit for being such a hard worker. It is keeping me from one thing though...

My life:
I don't have one, moving on

No actually, my life:
Ok I was kidding. I hang out with Brandon a lot these days. The Chinese teachers are busy, so I don't hang out with them much anymore, but I do see them all the time. We'll all hang out again someday when we're less busy. I've seen the Chinese teacher that moved away to Seoul a couple times and that's always nice. She has a good place in Seoul and I've crashed there a couple times. It's nice on a Friday night because it means I don't have to suffer the 1.5 hour trip home on a late Friday night plus I get to hang out and feel social. I also have gotten drinks with people from my Korean class exactly 2 times. Other than that, my social life these days consists of hanging out with you guys online (which don't get me wrong, is my favorite way to pass the time) or playing Planetside 2 with Brandon in a PC bang. There's a cute girl that works there and I'm trying to convince him to ask her out, but I think he thinks she's interested in me? I have no idea. Either way, it's not terribly important. Maybe it is, I have no idea. I'm just there to play Planetside 2 >___>. If you'll permit me to be depressing, since the weather has been getting nice, I've begun lamenting the fact that I'm single again. Perhaps someday I'll do something about that. In the meantime, I have work to do!

Korean Class:
My Korean has been coming along well. I'm at a point where I know a sufficient amount of grammar, but I'm really lacking in vocabulary. I have all these things I want to say, but I just lack the words to say it. It's kind of frustrating that I know the grammar, yet a 5-year-old can still say things better than me. It's a slow climb, but I'm getting better every week. I recently had a revelation in class that I'm the only person in my class of 6 that lives outside of one district of Seoul. We all knew that I lived the farthest away and that I was the only one that lived outside of Seoul, but we just found out last week that the other 5 people all live within 20 minutes of each other and within 20 minutes of the school. As a person with a 3-hour round trip commute, I hate them =___=

Other fun things:
Last month, I managed to find time to go get my driver's license. Even though I haven't used it to drive a car yet and I have no immediate plans to do so, I was really happy to get it. I just like the idea that if I wanted to drive, I could.

I tore a muscle in my calf last month. It was pretty interesting how I did it in that I was asleep when it happened. I woke up at around 6:30 one morning to a loud pop sound coming from the foot of my bed, followed by a lot of pain in my leg. Thinking it was a leg cramp, I went through the motions to get rid of it, which made the leg hurt more. After a little bit, the pain subsided a bit which was enough for me to go back to sleep (not because I'm so bad-ass that I ignore pain, but because I'm so kick-ass at sleeping). Anyway, I wound up standing and teaching on that leg all day before I realized at the end of the day that it still really hurt. By the time I decided to go to a doctor, they were all closed. I wound up doing the only sensible thing left, diagnosing myself on WebMD (it was pretty clear what happened though) and trying to take care of it as needed. That turned out to be a fine enough solution as my injury fortunately wasn't as severe as it could have been. It's totally fine now (as far as I know). At the very least, this self-fix has turned out much better than the two times I broke my toes and tried to wrap them up myself (and now they're both slightly crooked :/ ).

I got a new haircut recently and now I use product in my hair (wax? hair wax? I have no idea what to call it, they just call it wax here). My new hairstyle is based off a picture of Harrison Ford that I saw online recently. It's the shortest my hair has been since that year in high school that I got a buzz cut. But it doesn't look like I have cancer and it's actually decently long so I do like it. I'll try to get a picture up on facebook sometime if I ever get around to it. The reason I bring this up is because with the new hairstyle, I decided it looks better without glasses. That was kind of the tipping point for me to look at alternatives to glasses. My eye doctor says I am not a good candidate for lasik, but I'm a great candidate for contact lenses. Based on that continued assertion and pretty much everyone in this country saying I look better without glasses, I'm now considering contact lenses. Mom (who wore contacts for about 20 years) is currently helping me to figure it out.

"David one of the top 3 things you did in the last TWO MONTHS was CONSIDERING getting contacts."

I know, that should show you perfectly how boring my life is at the moment. I kinda like it this way though. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

So I'm gonna make that post about Grandpa probably around the first weekend in May. It's mostly stuff I want myself to remember before I forget someday (I'll never forget, but I want to be safe). Then I'll get back to my (attempted) usual schedule of posting at the end of the month (so the end of next May).

Until then, peace out everybody!