Shakespeare is Banana

I have to admit, my Vietnamese let me down.  When Lee looked at me and said, in English, that she didn’t like Shakespeare because “Shakespeare is banana,” I actually assumed she was at a loss for a suitably insulting English word, and banana was the best she could come up with.  Of course, I should have remembered that, 1) Lee is never at a loss for words, and 2) in Vietnamese, calling something “chuoi” was a pretty hip put-down.  Oh, well.  Sometimes I’m not that quick on the uptake.

    Shakespeare was not banana.  I admit, Shakespeare can be very difficult for the uninitiated to read, and I further admit that much of what the Bard wrote has been around for so long and talked about so much that the body of work is practically a cliche generating machine.  But it is not banana.  I don’t think Shakespeare is banana for the same reason I don’t think Star Trek, Star Wars, and Superman are banana.

    Everyone needs to develop their own critical measuring sticks.  Some critics believe they can actually distinguish art from garbage.  I’m not nearly so vain.  For me, achieving non-banana status is all about becoming a part of the collective unconscious of humanity.   When everyone knows about something, when everyone can quote from something, when there is evidence, everywhere, that this particular thing is laced into everyone’s brains as surely and as permanently as the knowledge that touching fire is bad, then it is not banana.

    I think we’ve become pretty jaded about what my or may not be banana.  People have ceased to appreciate not only talent, but also effort.  To me, the effort is everything – the love put into the enterprise of creation.  Take music, as an example.  I can’t sing, can’t play a musical instrument, can’t even really use my ears to distinguish why one classical symphony is considered a masterpiece while another is mundane.  If the guy sitting next to me can play guitar, and he says, “Hey, check out this song I wrote,” I am predisposed to the idea that whatever comes next is most certainly not banana, because it is, in the final analysis, a helluva lot better than I could do.  At the same time, I’m offended by people who can scarcely write a decent e-mail but might willy-nilly call one of my unpublished novels banana.  Like the guy with the guitar could say to me, “If you don’t like it, show me you can do better.”

    If the artist perserveres, if they are prolific, if the world recognizes and remembers the work, then it is not banana.  The art that exists for as short a time and is forgotten as quickly as my last lesson on the present simple, is perhaps banana.  I believe, quite firmly, that a thousand years from now, when some alien race with space travel capabilities discovers the remains of our (banana) civilization, they are not going to discover jack about me, you, or anyone we know.  Shakespeare, however, they may unearth.  If the three-fingered fellows with the bulging eyes who communicate telepathically and can travel faster-than-light will be examining something a million years from now, it is not banana.

    Bananas rot very quickly.  It is thus Shakespeare’s staying power that declares him, quite profoundly and clearly, as un-banana as it gets.

    (Perhaps Ly’s problem stems from something about Shakesepeare that was said in one of the very banana to some, brilliant to me, Star Trek films.  It was a Klingon warrior (the Klingons were an alien, war-like race with their own language and really cool looking spaceships) who pointed it out:

     “Shakesepare is best read in the original Klingon.”)

Sources of Inspiration

    As a teacher, I owe everything to Mr. Weiss.  Mr. Weiss was my English teacher from fifth grade to eighth grade.  He was an old man, even then, and now he’s not with us anymore.  Despite his age, he was an imposing figure, and his primary tool in the classroom was domination through fear.  In fact, most of his students did their homework and participated in his lessons because they were terrified of him.  He walked with a limp, and told us it was because he’d been on the deck of a battleship in World War II, when a bomb hit the deck beside him, failed to explode, bounced, and tore open his thigh.  I believed it.  Some few of us, myself included, actually did our work not out of fear, but because we were so desperate for one word of praise, or even a faint smile from under his bushy moustache, that we’d do anything to get it.  Even homework.

    I was quite the screw-up in High School, and in fact only remember two of my High School teachers: Ms. McKulskie (and I don’t remember how to spell her name) because she was HOT, and Mr. Storch, because he did three very funny things, and because he reminded me of Mr. Weiss.

    One day I was sitting in Mr. Storch’s class, and I was daydreaming.  He taught Astronomy (my High School was one of the few in the world with its own Planetarium and a full-fledged Zeiss projector) and the subject always left me dreaming of becoming a starship captain and flying to other planets, like on Star Trek.  My eyes were everywhere except where they should have been, and they wandered up into the upper corner of the room above the blackboard, where they noticed a small sign.  It read:  “If you are looking up here, you are not paying attention.”  I burst out laughing.  The sign had really gotten me, nailed me, as I was most assuredly not paying attention.  Classy, I thought.  Years later, I put the same sign up in my classroom at IS 93 in New York, and week after week students would come to me and say, “Hey, Mr., you got me.”

    On another occassion, I asked Mr. Storch if he had the time.  He looked at his wrist, at his watch, and said, “Yes, Mr. Soffer, I do.”  And then he walked away without telling me what time it was.

    Another time, he walked past me while I was sitting on the floor in a hallway at school, doing nothing as was my habit back then.  He looked down at me, shook his head, and said, “Mr. Soffer, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

    Yeah, I don’t remember much about High School, and didn’t learn much there.  But Mr. Storch’s disdain, which might as well have been coming from Mr. Weiss, was probably the factor that made me realize I was screwing things up, and allowed me to get my life back together, so I could actually get to University.  And, not surprisingly, I know more about astronomy than any three normal people put together.

    It was at University that I met Mr. Rutigliano.  As a teacher, I’m probably more similar to Mr. Rutigliano than either Mr. Storch or Mr. Weiss as, like me, Rutigliano probably didn’t know much about much.  But he knew how to get his students interested, and how to make his class fun, and I learned a lot from him.  In fact, I went to Italy with him twice, and actually managed to get credits towards graduation for sitting in fabulous gardens in Siena, drinking wine, and talking about not much of anything.  Siena is my second favorite city in the world, right after Hanoi.  In the future, maybe I’ll blog about Siena.  It’s a medieval city, lost in time, oblivious to the way the world has changed in the last thousand years.

    The other teacher at University that I remember was George Sideris.  He was younger than Mr. Storch or Mr. Weiss, but on his way to becoming them.  He taught science, and did it mostly through slides – photographs he’d taken himself and/or stolen from somewhere, that showed the most interesting things about the natural world from the most creative angles.  When George taught me astronomy, I let him see everything Mr. Storch had burned into my brain, and George ended up thinking I was a pretty smart kid.  I took a trip with George (we didn’t call him Mr. Sideris) to Georgia and Florida for a course called, “The Ecology of Sub-Tropical America – Fieldwork” or something like that.  A lot of nights spent in sweaty swamps, trying to learn how to identify different kinds of birds.  It was a week out of time, where I saw the most beautiful parts of America, sat on the most amazing beaches, and watched sunsets I will never forget.  I even rowed a canoe past a hungry looking crocodile.  Or maybe it was an alligator.  Sorry, George.

    From traditional to modern then, they were Mr. Weiss, Mr. Storch, Mr. Rutigliano, and George.  They had something similar running through them, some vein that, as a teacher, I try to tap into.

    At any rate, Mr. Weiss’s methods were harsh and old-fashioned.  He taught a lot of grammar, gave a lot of homework, and he made us write.  A lot.  In fact, any writing ability I may have, I owe to Mr. Weiss.  What I hated most was memorizing poetry.  He’d give us a poem, make us memorize it, and then make us stand up in front of the class and do theatrical presentations of the poem.  One of the poems, “The Snowman’s Resolution” by Aileen Fisher, I still remember word-for-word in its entirety to this day, for some reason.

    When I became a teacher, I met another incarnation of Mr. Weiss in Mr. Moreno, one of the senior English teachers at the school were I worked my rookie years.  Mr. Moreno was my mentor (all new teachers in New York get a mentor to help them over the rough spots).  Sadly, he didn’t have much time for mentoring me.  The school had recently changed over to some very modern teaching methodologies which I hated because they were different from Mr. Weiss’s methods and Mr. Moreno hated because they were different from his methods.  Still, I was new and eager to please and so I dove into those new methods and tried to learn them.  Moreno’s reaction was to say that I seemed to have a good handle on all that new fangled garbage, and thus had little need of him.  It wasn’t true.  I wish I could have said, “Look, man, you remind me of my hero, Mr. Weiss, and I want to learn everything you have to teach me, even if this crazy school won’t really let me use it.”  But I never said that.  Instead, I left Mr. Moreno in a dusty room filled with ill-used grammar books and spent most of my time in the world of teaching through “real literature.”

    Mr. Weiss, Mr. Storch, and Mr. Moreno were all cut from the same cloth.  They were also all over fifty when I met them. (Gee, Mr. Storch, you looked over fifty – I hope you were.)  I’m not yet over fifty, and maybe that’s why I haven’t become them yet.  I’m still trying to make my students “like” me, which is something neither of those three educators gave a good god-damn about.  Of course, in the worlds of those three teachers, they had all the power.  The students had to be there, had to pass if they wanted a future, and thus had to endure some pretty harsh and often unfriendly-seeming treatment.

    In contrast, my students here in Hanoi pay to study with me, and that makes them customers.  Customers and prisoners are too different things, and more often that not it seems that having them “like” me is more important to their signing up again then actually teaching them anything.  Still, I do my best to “force” my students to learn, while at the same time being friendly and entertaining.  It’s a painful irony that if I changed my methods into something more “Weissian” I’d at once do a better job teaching them and at the same time see them running for the hills.

    What then is that vein that these most memorable teachers tapped into?  It has something to do with authority, something to do with honesty, something do with a total absence of ego (let me repeat again that none of these teachers gave a damn what their students thought of them), something to do with knowledge, and something to do with love.  Maybe the last element there is the most important.  They didn’t love their students – that’s not the issue.  They loved teaching.  You felt it, because their lessons were always well prepared, their syllabi well organized, their lectures never boring, their assignments never busy-work.  They were experts in their fields, and that meant that if you weren’t lazy, they could pass on some of that expertise to you.

    What has me thinking about all of this is Thanh.  Yesterday, she spent a moment after class to give me some websites where I could download the software to put a Vietnamese-English dictionary into my O2.  It was nice of her to do that, and I felt kind of touched.  It left me wondering if Thanh was fond of me, or just being nice.  And if she is fond of me, then why?  Because I’m doing a good job teaching her, or because I wiggle my ears, smile a lot, and do goofy things?

    In the final analysis, I think we forget the teachers who become our “friends” very quickly.  It’s the ones who force us to actually learn something that we never forget, that we, in fact, remember for as long as we carry the knowledge they gave us.  If you’d met me in seventh grade and asked me what I thought of Mr. Weiss I would’ve said, “He’s old, ugly, has bad breath, and I hate his guts.”  Now, all these years later, I remember him with such fondness he might as well have been my father.

    Right now, there are a lot of Vietnamese students of English who will probably tell you, “Craig?  Yeah, he’s really funny.  He’s nice.  I love his class.”  But maybe in the future there will be other Vietnamese students who say, “Craig?  He’s old, ugly, has bad breath, and I hated his guts when I was his student.  But you know what?  He sure did teach me a lot of English.”

    If it happens that way, I’ll take it.  In the long run, being someone’s Mr. Weiss is a lot more rewarding than just being “funny.”  Hmm, after all this rambling, I’m probably going to give a lot of homework tonight, smile a lot less in class, and really hammer you if it seems you still “don’t get it.”  If I do, forgive me.  I’m just trying to be more like my sources of inspiration.

Womans Day

Yesterday was one of those strange days, where I couldn’t do anything right (that doesn’t make it strange, that’s pretty normal) and everyone else around me seemed to be having a great day (that’s not abnormal either) and a strange cloud of sparkling purple mist followed me everywhere (that’s not weird, either, as it’s rather a complete bit of fiction) and I was frankly more than a little glad when it ended.  Despite this fact, many good things happened.

    In Upper Intermediate class, my lesson kind of tanked, as I wanted to “do some grammar” as it were, despite my personal belief that teaching grammar, as grammar, out of context as it were, is about the most boring thing in the Universe.  So there I am, tanking, when we review the exquisite placement of the adverb in the sentence “I just called to say I love you.”

    “Mr. Hung,” I say, recalling that Mr. Hung had mentioned being a good singer, “I don’t suppose you know the song ‘I just called to say I love you’ and might consider singing a few bars?”  Well, this question is not nearly as obnoxious in Vietnam – where everyone can sing except me – as it might have been in America.  But still, what was I thinking?

    I certainly wasn’t thinking it was Woman’s Day, which is why Hung’s answer took me rather by surprise.  “Well, actually, I haven’t prepared that song.  I have, however, prepared three other songs, complete with a class set of photocopies of the lyrics, which I’d like to sing to all the women in the class.”

    I smiled.  Upper Intermediate, I told myself.  No way on Earth it could be sarcasm – not at that level.  The next thought I had was, “No!  I will teach more boring grammar, and you will keep your songs to yourself!”  Of course, I didn’t say that, either.  The next thought I had was, “Had this not come up, this calling to say I love you thing, would we have ever found out about Hung’s plan to sing?” but I didn’t ask that either.  And so Hung serenaded the women in the class, I kept my mouth shut, and escaped from having to bore anyone to death any further.  As Hung sang, I marvelled at the realization that some people actually have real talents (as opposed to just being able to wiggle their oversized ears) and vowed to reward this very patient class with some kind of rip-roaringly interesting debate, role-play, skit, drama, talk-alot kinda thingamabobby lesson next time.  Or maybe I’ll just let Hung sing some more.  He’s quite good.

    After that, I had 30 minutes to eat some com chien bo, which wasn’t as good this time as any of the last 42 times I’ve eaten it, and then off to SAT class.  I had a sense of foreboding about that lesson, too, as I couldn’t recall if the example passages I planned to use to revise my lesson on “Question Stems That Mean This Question is as Hard as Beating Darth Vader in a Lightsaber Duel” were brand new, or ones I’d given the class already but hadn’t gone over.  Whatever.  Off I went.  Of course, the class had seen them before, and I had to explain that although they’d seen them before they were still useful for teaching what I’d planned to teach (especially since 60% of the class is new students anyway).  That only happened though, after I’d spent entirely too much time trying to fire-up thirteen exhuasted thirteen year olds (or thereabouts) for a fiery debate on whether or not virtual reality technology was the salvation of mankind or the devil’s tool for bringing us all to our knees.  Why, you might ask, were we talking about that?  Well, there was this interesting article in the NY Times that had some of the vocabulary words from that day’s list and … well … real reading is part of the program for improving their reading scores and … well … well … because I frankly enjoy debating things like virtual reality – will it mean I won’t need a ‘real’ wife?

    Did anything good happen in that lesson?  Well, yeah.  Apparently, one of my male students got a love letter during the class, presumably from one of my female students, and – if it weren’t for the fact that he was as tired as I was (probably because he got a perfect score on the vocabulary quiz – yeah, you go, boy!) he’d have finished blogging about it already, instead of just posting some kind of little tease thing and the promise of more later.  I’m excited to learn the rest of that story as all of the young girls in that class are not only super-intelligent (!) but … well … Vietnamese, and you know what that means.  So, at least somebody had a good day.  Hope he finishes the post soon.

    I should do that.  I should post little tease thingies instead of long winded entries.  I could start entries like, “The Ten Students I Secretly Love the Most” and then never finish them.  Cruel, cruel isn’t it?  Anyway, it was that kind of day.  Everyone else is singing and getting love notes, and I’m stumbing around teaching grammar to classes that want to spend the whole lesson speaking, and talking about virtual reality with classes that should be spending the whole lesson … practicing grammar for the SAT test?  Ugh.

    Anyway, there was one bright spot.  One of my friends who isn’t speaking to me right now (and how many friends aren’t on that list these days?), decided that she was speaking to me long enough to stop by and give me a really beautiful scarf to keep me warm in the winter.  This was nice, aside from the ominous implication (to the insanely paranoid) hidden in the fact that actual cold weather is hardly around the corner, and I certainly hope we’ll be speaking to each other long before it arrives.

    What have we learned?  People who can sing are cool.  No one under the age of 16 thinks there’s anything ominous in the rapid approach of technology that will allow countless millions of people to simultaneously spend entire evenings virtually being married to Britney Spears.  I’m old enough that at least one of my under-25 friends is afraid I’m going to “catch my death” this winter, as my grandmother used to say.

    On a side-note, my Vietnamese was really off today too.  I don’t think I said a single thing to a single person in that language that made one lick of sense.  Lastly, as I’m having certain problems in the area of liquid assets, cash flow, and lifestyle capitalization these days, just about no one got anything from me for Woman’s Day.

    So let me just say here, Happy Woman’s Day everybody.

    Final thought: There should be a form of the Doctor’s Hyppocratic Oath for Teachers.  It should be:  “I Shalt Bore No One To Death.”

    Ugh.  I’m going back to bed.

Full House

The first thing I noticed in class yesterday was that there were a lot of students.  A lot.  OE has a rule (I know, I made it) that we don’t have more than 16 students in one class.  I believe this lets us provide the highest quality to all students.  I insist that my teachers know each student personally, not just their names but all about their lives, and that they realize that our students study with us because English is important to them, so we have to take good care of them.  Having those personal relationships is hard enough, but if you have too many students, it becomes impossible.  So yesterday, I knew I was in trouble when I had to give my chair to Thuy, who came in late.  Last time I counted there were 16 chairs in that room.  Uh, oh.  17 students!  So I checked the attendance register, added some new names, and saw that there were … oh, my god!  19 students!  Chet luon!

   How did this happen?  Because I’m bad at following rules, obviously.  But seriously, how?  Well, there was the guy who’s going to Singapore and only wants to study for four weeks and wanted to be in my class.  There was Hang, who was in the intermediate class that recently became this upper intermediate class, and  has now just come home from America.  Couldn’t turn her away, could I?  Then there was Quynh, who used to work for me, and could only fit this class into her schedule.  And Duy, who studied with me two years ago and just came back!  And Quoc Anh from the SAT class who wanted more speaking practice and … well … uh, oh

    This class has Ms. Giao in it, who is very intelligent and very good at following rules, so I got really nervous when she leaned over to Ms. Ha and whispered something in Vietnamese that was along the lines of, “Damn, there’re a lot of people in this class now!”

    Of course, I used to teach 34 kids at a time in New York, and I had good relationships with all of them, so I can handle 19.  I mean, I can.  I think.  But, it’s not in keeping with OE’s rule.  Then there’s the Vietnamese penchant for being absent … a lot … which means I’ll almost never have more than 15 anyway … but still, I can’t ignore this issue. I’ll have to discuss it with the group.  Maybe some of these students secretly find me incredibly boring and want to go study with Brian or Mike anyway.  Brian is smarter than I am (he’s really smart, and a great writer – but comes across as down-in-the-dumps a bit) and Mike is funnier than I am.  Of course, the problem here is that I love each and every student in this class, and I’d be really sad if any of them jumped ship.

    Yesterday, Thanh seemed kind of down.  Maybe she thinks I make too many jokes about my big ears and finds me tiresome.  But Thanh and Nhung are friends, so if Thanh transfers to another class, Nhung will be sad.  Maybe then Nhung will leave.  And if Thanh and Nhung leave, then Giao and Thuy might follow them, and Vu Quynh too, and maybe even Ms. Ha since they’re all kind of friends now.  I have to be careful here.  If one student leaves it could cause a chain reaction. I could end up teaching to an empty room.

    Add to all of this that yesterday’s lesson focused on a reading – an article by Bill Bryson that was really hard to understand.  We got to discuss a lot of important concepts, like the importance of ferretting out the meaning between the lines in most English writing.  It’s important to show students that they can read something, understand all of the words, but still not “get it.”  That’s what we worked on.  “Getting it.”  I’m afraid by the end of the lesson all anyone had got was a headache.

    Oh well.  Another funny thing was Hien was absent yesterday.  If she’d come, I wouldn’t have had enough chairs.  But I like Hien – like I like all my students – so I still wish she’d been there.  I’m not worried.  I’m sure I’ll solve this problem so that everyone is getting the quality education they’ve paid for.  After all, that’s my job.

Ode to My Laptop and My Toe

Oh laptop.

Oh toe.

Why did you have to meet?

Oh laptop when you fell

Why were you aiming for my feet?

Oh laptop with your case so hard

Oh toe that has no nail

Occupy one space you did

and turn my face so pale.

I parked my bike at cafe Ong

Old man or bumblebee I’ve never known

And when down the iron kickstand went

 so did the laptop most hellbent.

Hewlett Packard new meaning do you give

to terms like RAM and bytes

Who knew that Packard packed a wallop so

heretofore most unbeknowest to my toe.

So home I went for medical aid

and to my rescue teacher Rom did come.

One look he took at toe with nail no more

that he didst quickly look away

and say

Shit, man, that really sucks.

Indeed, indeed, I did agree,

then gauze and tape and bandaids gaveth he

and fix my toe did I.

Then off to work I went

shoeless and in pain

to hear my co-workers lament again

what a clumsy oaf I am

and ever just so lame.

In Advanced Workshop class today

I smiled at Minh Ha.

And looketh did she at my bloodsoaked toe

and encouraged me to far away remain.

Ah, toe.

Would that you were the worst of my problems at this time.

But as you throb and ache

another problem doth await

a greater pain yet to abate.

Honey.  Come back and fix my toe.

TV Commercial

    Yesterday I ran Duong’s motorbike over my foot.  I was pulling it out of the house for her, after hearing an excellent report on the progress of our English club.   I forgot to put up the kickstand and it ripped my toenail right off.  Blood. Lots of it.  Everywhere.  Pain.  Excruciating.  It was a nice end to an already absolutely couldn’t get worse weekend.

    So today, I went to work attired as usual (button down shirt, tie, slacks), and my three year old, bought them in the old quarter, sandals.  Because I can’t put on socks and I certainly can’t put on the super-skinny much too small Vietnamese-made shoes I usually wear.  I figured, no big deal.  I’d walk around with my big, gauze-bandage wrapped, iron-spike savaged, rapidly turning purple toe sticking out and people would tease me a little.

    But it was not to be so simple today.  It turned out I had to make a TV commercial for VTC.  The part where they interviewed me wasn’t so bad, as only my lousy Vietnamese could embarrass me.  But then they wanted to film me in class.  Teaching.  Walking around.  Or limping, in my case.

    “Please don’t film my foot,” I kept wanting to say.  How on Earth can you explain to people that you don’t usually teach in sandals, after you’ve already been shown on television teaching in a pair of ratty old sandals?

    I don’t teach in sandals.  Please believe me.

    That’s all I have for today.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write about the utterly misearble state of my personal life.  Or perhaps something more cheerful.  Maybe I’ll even post a picture of my toe.  It’s really, really gross.

Love

Young people often ask me questions about love.  Apparently, being a fairly old guy who has lived on both sides of the planet gives me some expertise on the subject.  Or maybe people just ask everyone and anyone about love, letting all the opinions they get bubble around in their brain with all the quixotic unfinality of a sunspot.  I don’t know.  They ask though, and so I have to give them answers.

The most important thing, of course, is to separate love from physical attraction.  Thinking someone is hot is not love.  I wouldn’t call it ‘lust’ as that word has such a negative connotation, and being attracted to hot looking people is hardly negative; in fact, it’s quite natural.  But thinking someone is hot is definitely not love, even if you hook up with this hot person and start taking them out for ice cream.

Some people think that love means wanting to be beside someone forever.  Not being able to imagine being without them, let’s say.  This isn’t love either.  This is the state of affairs that arises when the feeling that person B is hot combines with person A’s own insecurities and fear of being alone.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all the romantic notions of what love might be – the sense of wanting to be with someone forever, the sense that someone is more important to us than we are to ourselves, the belief that we would readily sacrifice our lives for this other person – all of these romantic notions are born of passion, not love.

At this stage of my life, I’ve come to believe that Love is a decidedly unromantic emotion, one that most closely resembles committment.  Love means saying that this one other human being will be important to me, and will continue to be important to me, regardless of circumstances both external to the relationship and internal to it.  It is a decision to place upon another person an importance that we will not allow to change regardless of their behavior or actions.  In other words, we say, “This is My partner” and we leave it at that.  Through an act of will, we don’t allow ourselves to have or desire other partners and we don’t change our way of viewing this other person, regardless of the circumstances that arise, either through third-party forces, or through this person’s own actions.

Now, you may be thinking that I’m crazy.  I mean, if you love someone and they start treating you like garbage, obviously the logical thing to do is to stop loving them.  But in my opinion, you can’t do that.  If you’re able to stop loving them, then it wasn’t love.  It was that business from a few paragraphs above, where you think this person is really hot.  If you’re just attracted to someone – physically or emotionally – then it’s reasonably easy to stop.  Love, though, comes from you.  It’s your permanent committment to this person.

My definition of love explains a lot of strange cases that don’t stand up when only the “he/she’s really hot” factor is at work.  For example, we see many couples where there is a radical age difference, or one of the parties in the couple is quite unattractive by even the most forgiving of standards.  Yet somehow, they appear to love each other.  More telling, however, is the case where a love continues regardless of circumstances that would clearly put an end to any affection born of lesser emotions.  For example, the case where a man goes to prison and his wife remains faithful and devoted to him through all the years they are apart, and regardless of the crime of which he was accused.  And most telling of all is the case where one of the parties to a couple decides to leave the other, to break-up, to end the relationship, and the other party in the couple just goes on loving that person, waiting for them to come back, wishing nothing but the best for the person.

This kind of love is very hard for those who have never experienced it to understand.  We meet someone who is in love with someone who doesn’t care about him/her, has already abandoned him/her, has already gotten involved with someone else, and yet our friend continues to love that person.  Our friend has flipped some kind of mental switch, pushed some kind of mental button, and made the irreversible and unchanging decision that they love that person.  Circumstances notwithstanding.

When time apart, when distance apart, when the actions and behaviors of the other party have no affect whatsoever on our feelings, that, perhaps, is love.  It’s extremely rare, as people will tell anyone in this state or condition that they are crazy.  “Get over it,” they’ll say.  “She’s gone.”  “Move on, man.”  Stuff like that.

What they don’t understand is that this kind of love is not connected in any way to the actuality of the person.  It’s connected to their potentiality – to what they could have been, to what the relationship could have been like, if things had gone better.

We do terrible things to the people we love.  We disappoint them, we abandon them, we hurt them through our actions, and often we effect their psychology without even knowing we’re doing it.  We plant little seeds in their minds through the things we say and through our actions, and when those seeds take route and sprout into nasty weeds, we blame everyone but ourselves.

Love requires a gentle hand, a steadiness of purpose, a conviction of its justifications, and, most of all, a committment to its permanency.  Fireworks are just passion.  Tear-filled lonely nights are just insecurity.  True love, if it exists, is rock steady, unchanging, and unassailable.

True love then is also, perhaps, sometimes a very, very lonely thing.

Life used to be incredibly boring.  Get up, go to work, come home, hit the internet, watch some TV, moan and groan about how I should do some writing, or do some exercise, and then go to sleep.  Boring.  Chan wa.  To spice it up, I did what everybody does these days: I played video games!  I had an X-Box and a Playstation 2 and a computer.  I loved Soul Calibur for the Playstation, Halo for the X-Box, and Diablo for my computer.  Hacking, slashing, fighting, shooting, killing, spinning, flipping, diving.  I was a lord of pixelized blood-shedding, a master of carnage, a crier of havoc who would let slip the digital dogs of war at the drop of a hat.

When I didn’t feel like wasting any electricity, I played pencil and paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  For years, from the comfort of some friend’s or other’s dining room table, I travelled the myriad planes of existence, slid along sidereal timelines, teleported into foreboding castles, and put coutnless – and I mean countless – servants of evil to the sword.

As I look back on things, I realize that given the number of times I was personally involved with saving the universe, it’s amazing I ever had time to go to University or become a teacher.

However, even with all of those entertainment outlets, it somehow wasn’t enough to fill the mammoth vats of full time I seemed to have, so I also read comic books.  By the hundreds.  Every month.  Spiderman.  X-Men.  Avengers.  Thor.  Iron Man.  Captain America.  Dozens of others.  When I wasn’t saving the Universe myself, I saved it vicariously through some superhero or other.  Very little of my free time was spent doing anything other than saving the Universe, which is ok since, obviously, saving the Universe is important.

Then I came to Vietnam.  I haven’t played a video game, or a role-playing game, or read a comic book since.  And yet, I feel my life is filled with more adventure than it ever was before.  Somehow, when you live all your life in one place, it tends to become extra-ordinarily mundane and sedate.  My life was completely lacking in adventure, so I had to russle up imaginary adventure whenever I could and however I could.  Here in Vietnam, though, it’s completely different.  Once I hop on my motorbike, the adventure begins.  Everywhere I go is filled with excitement, every street I drive down filled with the immediate peril of annihilation in a head-on collision.

As everyone knows, no one saves the Universe out of altruism.  Heroes save the Universe for the chicks.  For the imperlied princesses, imprisoned goddesses, unfairly treated fairies, and fallen angels.  And Hanoi is filled with these.  A princess on every Piaggio as it were.

The thought this leaves me with is that everyone who spends huge amounts of time playing games should make certain to take a step back long enough to do a quick check and make sure that they haven’t stopped living their real lives.  If Hanoi has taught me one thing it’s that you can miss a lot of adventure and excitement sitting on your living room couch.

I love my life in Hanoi, because it’s like something you might read about in a book.  It’s a pretty cool thing when you do a little self-analysis and realize that you’ve become … almost anyway … an action hero!  And if not an action hero, then at least an explorer or adventurer.

Now, where’d I leave that sword…?

Hiring

Hiring new staff is absoultely no fun at all.  You know, you want to find good people, but good people always have good jobs already, or high salary requirements, or what have you.  A company is truly only as good as its employees, and my company has some really great people.  Still, I need more, and finding them isn’t easy.  Anyway, that’s what’s on my plate for today – looking for more great people to come to work for me.

I’ll try to update the wordpress blog with something a lot more interesting than this very soon.

Motobike Time

Hanoi is the city of motorbikes, and its high time I bought one.  I’m going to write about motorbikes today on the wordpress blog, so check it out.  If anybody has any suggestions or advice on the subject of motorbikes, please share with me.  I’m gearing up to buy one now.  More at wordpress!

Busy, Busy, Busy

So busy,  haven’t had a chance to write anything worthwhile for the wordpress blog.  Work is going well, all my classes are fun these days.   I think it’s time for some more “western food” lessons, like the one in this pic when my elementary class got to try out good ol’ breakfast cereal – the only breakfast that’s faster and easier than instant noodles.

My SAT class has grown with the addition of a few new students, and that bunch of kids continue to impress me.  My new Upper Intermediate class is also a really nice group, and I think that class is going to be a lot of fun.  My Advanced Workshop students are writing horror stories now … if any of them are particularly good, maybe I’ll post them here or on the wordpress blog.  And my Elementary class seems to have come a long way  – those students are reading and understanding fairly difficult stories now, including a recent one about a genetically engineered monster terrorizing families around Loch Ness in Scotland.  Pretty cool.

If time permits and anything interesting comes up, I’ll update the wordpress blog.  If not … excerpts from advanced workshop horror stories coming soon.