Category: Notes and Confessions
-
9 Notes on Re-Entering Canada After Quite a Long Time Away
I have evaded jet lag! I have traveled four hundred bazillion light years from Shanghai to Vancouver to Vancouver Island, crossed the International Date Line, stayed up for 34 hours continuously during my journey and initial arrival, and seem to have righted my circadian rhythms unceremoniously and efficiently. I was in Vancouver over the weekend…
-
Notes on Going Home Again
One thing I’ve learned over the past seven years of blogging is to not post when you are sick, exhausted or pissed off. If you are sick or exhausted, it inevitably comes out in a strained, rather incoherent stream. If you are pissed off, the tone is all wrong and you’re likely to offend (even…
-
Baking in China (and other improvisational activities)
A few weeks ago, we came across a hand-me-down counter top oven on www.unclutterer.com and decided to test it. Not a toaster oven. Not a microwave oven. An oven oven. The kind that can, like, bake stuff and roast stuff and grill stuff. But I knew I was better off grilling in one of those…
-
14 Notes on teaching English in a Chinese university, in the middle of a quiet burnout and impending unemployment
1. Two weeks ago I renewed my gym membership, which I had let lapse about six months ago. Sometime last Autumn, I had figured that the five flights of stairs I had to climb 8 or so times a day between classroom and office were enough to keep me going through winter, combined with…
-
Breaking Free: The Karmic Irony Edition
Somewhere out there, Alanis Morrisette’s lawyer is counting the number of times today I have muttered something along the lines of, isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Somewhat akin to rain on your wedding day, or maybe finding a dozen forks when all you need is a knife, on the eve of being filmed for…
-
Notes on the First Anniversary of my 7th Blog
Origins I started this blog near the end of last April, impulsively, after I read the words ‘ephemera and detritus’ in a comment on a blog I’ve long since lost track of. Possibly from Salon’s now defunct Broadsheet. Rather than just noting it down and having a chortle over the awesomeness of the imagery as…
-
3 Short Scenes from the Chinese Classroom: Why I Probably Can Never Go Home Again
Scene 1. ‘Happy April Fish Day, teacher!’ My students are knee deep in plastic snack-sized dried fish wrappers. It’s April 1st. There’s a huge grocery bag three quarters full of unopened dried fish packets under one of the rows of desks. It was a gift from a friend of a friend in Fujian province.…
-
Blue Skies, Fake Britain and Imaginary Friends: It Gets Better (For Now)
Four days ago, I was quite dissatisfied with Shanghai and with living abroad in general. I wanted to go home to Canada, to go live in the forest and bake bread and raise goats and make really awesome goat cheese and to say, quite pleasantly, fuck it to this whole expat/travel lifestyle. I was fried.…
-
A Call To Arms (and Submissions): A New Series on Settledness and Restlessness
As you may have noticed, my posts recently have been flailing wildly back and forth on the subject of being settled in a place. It’s not just my posts that are contradicting themselves. I’m waffling on a daily basis, veering between quiet acceptance of being in Shanghai long term (-ish), with comfy familiar things around…
-
After thoughts: Notes on having settled whilst still unsettled
I was wrong. Last week, I declared with false confidence that I was settled and ready to stay in Shanghai for a few more years. Or maybe the better word would be ‘bracing myself’ or ‘girding my loins’ or ‘grudgingly acquiescing’ to staying put for a while and enjoying my job and my slow cooker…
-
Travelling Yourself Into a Corner: On Impulse Control and Unplanned Stability
It looks like we’re going to be here in Shanghai for a while. Doug has just signed a three year contract with his school; I have another year left on my two-year contract. We own a slow cooker, a full set of cutlery and several potted plants (which are somehow still alive), including one…
-
Notes on Genocidal Tourism in Cambodia
One of the emotionally complicating factors of constantly living in and travelling through countries with troubled pasts is that you will inevitably end up having many conversations with and interacting with people who had lived through that troubled past. And given that troubled pasts often involved death, betrayal, torture, imprisonment and whatnot, it’s a disconcerting…