Edeka.11: As stated above, the best Good Thing about this particular Thursday is that I am not dead and have, in fact, decided to start blogging again. Included in this Good Thing is: A) Precious laptop fixed (Did you know there’s no Apple store in Thailand? Well, there isn’t. Not even Bangkok.), and B) Moved back to the US.

What? you may be asking. I thought you lived in Thailand… and liked it there and stuff? Isn’t this a travel blog?

To answer those in order:

1. I moved back to the US. San Francisco, specifically; I’m crashing with my brother while I find a job and a place to live.
2. I did. Then I moved back.
3. I love Thailand. It’s not like I’ll never go back. It was just time to come home.
4. No.

Moving on…

Dodeka.12: I’ve officially kicked my physical dependency on caffeine! I’m super excited about this… as excited as I can get in my still vaguely groggy state. But at least I’m past the headache stage.

Seriously, if/when you/your kids/friends/relations are overworking themselves in the effort to pay their massive student loans, warn them of the impending migraines when they start downing 6-12 shots of espresso a day. The funny thing about my caffeine addiction is that I’ve been been addicted for essentially my entire life, but it was only after my phase of 6-12 daily shots that I had to deal with the caffeine headache. Seriously, I went through about a week of horrible headaches+nausea+oversleeping just to get back down to one shot of espresso/cup of coffee a day. Ever since then, every time I’ve cut back on caffeine I’ve had to suffer through the wretched withdrawals.

It’s not worth it. Trust me. Celebrate non-addiction to caffeine!

Dekatria.13: I like to cook! Cooking in Thailand really got me used to using fresh ingredients (and only paying a dollar for a week’s worth of vegetables), and now that I’m back home I’ve been able to keep this up. I’m not sure anything I make is particularly delicious (at least not to anyone but me) because I tend to cook by buying a lot of things I like and throwing them together. Come to think of it, that’s probably why I have so much fun!

Notes: Quinoa is awesome. Also cabbage. Newly discovered: cabbage is delicious in omelets. I’m not kidding.

Dekatessera.14: I finally got rid of a cough I had for well over a month (more like two months). Actually, I haven’t totally beaten it yet. Turns out my cough is caused by a post-nasal drip that is the result of… drumroll, please… allergies.

That’s right, allergies of all things. WTF, mate? I’ve never had allergies before. And since I’ve never had allergies before, I had to trek all the way out to a free clinic (on my birthday, no less!) to discover that while I thought I was dying of consumption (er… tuberculosis; I may read too much classical literature), I was actually just having an exacerbated allergic reaction to… pollen? Dust? No idea.

How anti-climactic.

Still, definitely a Good Thing that my Evil Cough of Doom can be solved with the help of one daily off-brand Claritin pill. I try to wait for the cough to come back before taking the pill, and thus far it keeps coming back every 30 hours or so. Alas. Cough not dead yet, but beaten into submission, and that is definitely good enough for me.

* * *

There we have it. I’m really going to try to start posting regularly again, but until then, as always, please feel free to share your Good Things too.

You’ve been warned.

* * *

Charlie Sheen is a selfish, narcissistic, abusive asshole.

CBS cut off the end of this season of Two and a Half Men, and his response was:

I urge all my beautiful and loyal fans who embraced this show for almost a decade to walk with me side-by-side as we march up the steps of justice to right this unconscionable wrong.

Charlie Sheen wants YOU to “march up the steps of justice” to right the “unconscionable wrong” of his show’s season being cut off early.

People are sacrificing their lives for freedom in Libya. People are fighting for their basic human rights across the Middle East and Africa. Trust me, Charlie Sheen, missing a few episodes of your television show is not an “unconscionable wrong”.

An unconscionable wrong is that you are getting press attention while they are sacrificing everything to overthrow their dictators.

Yeodeol.8: Yesterday there was a rainstorm and I got to drive home in it on my motorbike!

The most important thing to understand about this rainstorm is that I’d been waiting for it for some two weeks. It had been so humid, so hot and sticky. Every morning I’d wake up, look outside, and think that it would rain that day. But by noon it always cleared off and just left a hot, sticky afternoon for us to bake in. Grr.

Yesterday, though, it finally happened. The sky turned that crazy apocalyptic storm color, the wind picked up, and as I was finishing up in the office after school, the heavens opened upon us.

Thankfully it didn’t get to the point that the office started flooding (that happened during the rainy season!), but it definitely wasn’t letting up by the time four o’clock rolled around. I gave it a few more minutes, trying to stall, but eventually I accepted that Mother Nature had destined me for driving home in the rain.

The thing is, I actually really love driving my motorbike in the rain. I am the girl who deliberately went for a drive directly into a rainstorm during the rainy season. No poncho, no jacket, nothing. I may as well have been swimming. It. Was. Awesome.

So it wasn’t so much that the idea of driving in the rain was bothering me. It was more that I was still in my work clothes, plus my food would get wet, bla bla bla – all those boring, sensible things you tell yourself when you start to feel like you’re supposed to be a real grownup.

But once I got out there, the old magic was back. The thing I really love about playing or driving in the rain is that it’s like making your life a pool party. It’s your regular life (errands, driving), but it’s also playing in the water! What’s not to love? Add in the fact that it’s a pool party where you don’t have to worry about how you look in a bathing suit and it becomes absolute perfection. (Yes, I still have those old, tired body image hangups. Life sucks, doesn’t it? Go play in the rain!)

Ahop.9: I totally had a political discussion with a friend on Facebook during which we:

• Exchanged views using calm, non-combative language,
• Debated upon points of dissension thoughtfully,
• Retained our senses of humor, and
• Finished by agreeing to jointly read and/or watch Watchmen.

That’s right, fellow USians: It’s possible to have a reasonable political discussion in which you disagree with a person without actually trying to do physical or verbal violence upon them.

Who knew???

Yeol.10: It’s been kind of a crappy week, but I still found two new things to add to my list of Good Things plus I’ve officially hit number ten! Additionally, I’ve been meeting my exercise goals for the most part (I’m only lagging behind on weekends), and although I lapsed and smoked on a Super Horrible Very Bad Day, I have not had a cigarette since. Bam!

So, anyone out there have any other Good Things to share?

I spend hours every day reading news, blogs, tweets, status updates, etc. ad nauseum – but I never commented until a couple months ago when I decided that I wanted more than five people to read my blog.

This year I’ve kind of half-heartedly thought about breaking out of my lurkdom by joining things. (I sound super enthusiastic, no?) Every time I tell myself I’m going to do it, though, I think that maybe I should just wait and see how I do before I post anything about it. However, I’ve come to realize that this is stupid, because journeys make interesting stories, not destinations.

Thus, I’ve decided to just go for it. There are three things I’ve really been excited about doing this year: Post a Week, One Little Word, and Books I Should Have Read in School but Didn’t. I don’t know if I’m going to meet my goals. I don’t know if I’m going to like being a joiner. Sometimes I think it might be better to keep talking to myself.

Oh, well. I guess being a hermit on the internet really takes introversion too far.

Post a Week is easy. I’m following The Daily Post, and I think I’ll be okay trying to post every week. I had wavered on joining at all, but after my latest two-week drought (shorter than previously, at least!), I decided I could probably use the extra motivation. Hopefully I’ll be able to post more than once a week most of the time, but daily posting? No way. I think I would die.

* * *

One Little Word might be a little harder to implement, if only because it’s so vague in the goals. I’m not signing up for the class (I get paid in baht! It’s plenty over here, but not so much in dollars), so that’s going to make it more difficult. Even though I can’t take the class, I’m still going to set the goal of doing a project around my word each month and posting something about it here so as to hold myself accountable.

My word for 2011 is action. For a long time I’ve been spinning my wheels and avoiding doing the things that really matter to me. I think about things a lot, but follow-through is not my strong point.

Now, you might say that someone who picked up and moved to Thailand a year ago seems to have “action” down pat – but the truth is, things like being a nomad, starting new jobs, etc. aren’t scary things for me. It’s not better or worse than other lifestyles (trust me, there have been more days than I can count where I wished I’d found a place to call home); this is just the what I’m doing. I’ve mostly been moving things around to keep up this game where it looks like I’m doing a lot when I’m still avoiding the things that really matter, like pursuing my dreams and writing and building relationships with people. Action, for me, is about turning that trend around and starting to do the things that are actually important.

* * *

This is probably my most favorite online challenge ever. Not only do I love reading, but I love reading classics… Come to think of it, next year I should probably find a modern literature reading challenge instead. I’m totally shooting for the Literature Professor ranking, which means reading 12 books in 2011.

…Which also means I should be finishing up Book 2 by now if I want to stay on schedule, which I am definitely not. I’m starting with Middlemarch by George Eliot, and I’m about halfway through it. I’ve started some of the other books on my list before as well, so I think that’ll help me move along as I find more time to read. My biggest problem is that I’m spending way too much time staring at screens as it is and finding hard copies of English books in Thailand is no easy feat. What I really want is a Kindle with their e-ink screen, but remember that thing about getting paid in baht? That applies to electronic toys too.

Here’s the rest of my list in no particular order (links favor Project Gutenberg because that’s where I’m downloading most of these and because it rocks my socks off):

• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Republic by Plato
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A few notes on this list:

1) Obviously I favor socio-political texts. Some of those tomes are going to be difficult to get through, but I think the self-education well worth it. Most of the socio-political books were on my list for this year anyway.

2) The list is tilted towards male writers for two reasons: A) Traditionally in Western culture, the men have been writing the books. B) I’ve already read most of the female-written work I would put on a list like this (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice). In fact, last year I had a Jane Austen self-challenge, wherein I read pretty much her complete works for the first time. (And seriously, for those who never bothered to read Jane Austen… they are totally worth it. HIGH-larious.)

3) I have two Dickens books because I decided that ending the year with A Christmas Carol after reading all my heavy socio-political tomes would be awesome. And it will be.

* * *

So there we have it. 2011, the year I started Joining Things. Coincidentally, also the year that will mark my tenth since high school. Ooh, spooky.

I’m sure you know what happens next.

Because any time you have lead in like that, you know that what comes next is the camera sitting in a box for ten months.

To be fair, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I took my camera out and had a lot of fun teaching myself some basics of photo composition, but I’ve still been entirely dependent on the auto features – taking the “SLR” right out of my expensive digital camera.

I’ve finally managed to sit down and read things like my camera manual and a couple photography tutorials, though, and it’s all because I hopped onto my motorbike and headed out to Khlong Tha Dan Dam (the largest RCC dam in the world!).

Hopping onto my motorbike and heading anywhere (with camera in tow) is a fairly common occurrence with me: I love driving my bike; I love back country roads; and I love nature. It’s not hard to make the connections, and that’s one of the reasons I love living in this lush province.

I should’ve known, too, that it would be the dam that would help me cross over into actual photography. I love this dam! Something about the location is just numinous and amazing.

The drive there is glorious, both beautiful and peaceful. I actually discovered my preferred route to the dam by myself on one of my first countryside explorations, and I’m so glad I did because it’s way nicer than taking the highway. It’s full of overhanging trees and cool shade opening up into bright sunlight and quiet rice paddies. The whole time you’re getting closer to the mountain, alternately seeing it in the distance and then following a curve in the road so that it’s hidden from view. You pass through a sleepy little village and without any warning, the whole dam is laid bare before you.

But the best part of the trip is still ahead of you on the drive up the mountain. It’s a short enough drive that it doesn’t get cumbersome, while also being twisty and curvy enough to keep your interest. Add in just a few places where it gets steep enough to make a Kansas plains girl such as myself a little nervous and you have the perfect drive.

Then you get to the top and see this:

So the dam is pretty special under any circumstances, but for some reason on this particular day the sun also decided to play a game with me. I’m not sure if it was a hide and seek game, or if the sun was just being an attention whore. But I just couldn’t stop taking these blown out pictures of how the sun was playing with my light quality.

Suddenly, I started to feel like a photographer.

I started taking pictures like mad, of all sorts of things. I took pictures of stairs!

And boats!

It wasn’t until I was turning back to leave that The Picture presented itself. The Picture is why I’m writing this post today, why I spent all day reinvigorating my Flickr, why I opened my camera manual. The Picture convinced me that I may not be a half-bad photographer after all.

(Um… So that lead in may have been a bit much, even for The Picture. I also want to say that The Picture convinced me to open my camera manual because I wanted to be able to take pictures that were both beautiful and technically excellent. The Picture, I think, achieves beauty, but it is certainly an amateur photo. Don’t be expecting anything like the National Geographic photographers, okay? I’m still new to this. I hadn’t opened my camera manual, people.)

There was a pretty healthy breeze going that day, and I noticed when I was walking back that one of the flags effectively blocked the sun and created a nice corona effect. It took a couple different flags for me to find one that would unfurl properly (stupid inanimate objects just don’t respond to direction), but I finally managed to set up this shot.

I’m still not sure how I managed to take a picture that makes me think of both Thai nationalism and the Star Spangled Banner, but… I think that’s why I like it so much, come to that.

You’ve heard of the more grammatically correct Your Mom jokes.

Now it’s time to introduce my very own… My Mom Jokes.

My Mom Jokes are special because… Oh, wait – I don’t have a mom! (Oh, snap!)

Considering I currently have about five rather inconsistent readers, I’m pretty sure that at least four of them know I don’t have a mom. For my other random reader who happened to stumble onto this blog from some other, most likely funnier, place:

I don’t have a mom.

Whew, I’m glad I got that off my chest.

It goes like this: my mother decided she was over the whole “having a family” thing and chose to chill out in Korea (being Korean, this was a logical choice for her) while my dad and brother and I moved back to the glorious US of A.

Basically, My Mom Would Be a Fob (fresh off the boat), but then she decided to get right back on said boat.

Being half-Asian human, though, I was grateful to learn that I was pretty much destined to spend hours in therapy because of my mother. In fact, the Tiger Mom craze just made me reflect that if my mother had stuck around, I probably would’ve logged the same number of hours in therapy – and I’d likely have been pushed into being a lawyer after all.

It comes out even, though, because if I was a lawyer I probably would’ve been able to actually afford the therapy.

Not having a mom is a little different than not having a dad, though, as far as society is concerned. And it’s super mega different from having Two Parents Who Are Actually Life Partners (…do those people exist anymore?). We’re used to Deadbeat Dads as one of the more common childhood traumas. We’re not used to Missing Mamas. It makes you go, “Huh.” It may give you a twitch.

IT MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK WE’RE DEALING WITH THE END OF THE MATERNAL INSTINCT AS WE KNOW IT, LIKE WHOA.

But it’s okay! I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t actually break civilization. (That was our education system in the US. I know it’d be funnier if I blamed a person, but I really hate the blame game.)

Get ready to heave a big ol’ sigh of relief, because my dad recently revealed to me the pin holding this whole mystery together. Why did my mother leave? Is she the first of many mothers who will defy nature and abandon their babies? Who will be revealed as the true villain in our saga?

Stay tuned in next week to find out the answers to all these questions and more!

…

…

…

See, here I am in Thailand, and I went crazy missing kimchi. Funnily enough, I never got addicted to kimchi until I moved to Seattle a few years ago. See what I lost from not having a mom?!

(I come by my love of fermented cabbage from both sides, though: between my mother and my mostly German paternal antecedents, I’m doomed to a multi-pronged cabbage addiction, all sauerkraut and kimchi, all the time.)

Luckily for me, my dad came to the rescue and took me to a Korean restaurant in Pattaya. And as we were sitting there chowing down on our millions of little dishes, he said, “You know, your mother knew when she was pregnant with you because it put her off kimchi. She couldn’t keep it down at all when she was pregnant.”

My first thought: Damn, no wonder she left us!

So there we are. Mystery solved. My mother didn’t herald the end of times; she just reacted like any rational Korean whose kimchi was being taken from her! Koreans were willing to pay four times the normal price for a head of cabbage because it’s their staple food!

The lesson here: Don’t be taking no kimchi from Koreans. They will leave you. They’d probably cut you too.

***

Note: For those of you who have a hard time laughing at my trauma, think of it this way: I grew up as The Girl Without a Mother. You could say I had a scarlet M on my chest. People congratulated me on having common politeness because of course, any child raised by one of those awful others, those, those men, would not know what manners were. I also had to buy my very first pads and tampons by myself.

There will just never come a time when that’s not funny.

The result? I was nearly trampled over by children whose heads barely reach my waist.

“Teacher Donna! Teacher Donna!” I felt like Caesar.

“Teacher, I’m sad!” <cute little cry face> This has become their favorite joke with me since I taught them simple feeling words. They say they’re sad, mime tears… and grin the whole time.

“Teacher, X is sad!” And then they like to get me to comfort anyone who actually is sad. (In case you didn’t notice, names have been changed to protect the wee little innocent ones.)

“Teacher, high five!” “Teacher, high ten!” “Teacher, high one!” I’ve already discussed how awesome high fives are, but after awhile they become slightly less entertaining, for both me and the kids. So of course I upgraded them to high tens, and then at some point I needed to be quiet and thus introduced high one. But read on to Dos to discover how one of my students used high fingers to prove she’s smarter than I am.

Cinco.5: Over the course of the school year, I’ve taught my students more about numbers than hand slaps. The hand slaps are possibly the most useful because they’re fun, but my students can also count 0-30 in English, and recognize and write 1-10. But we haven’t really gotten into any mad number skills beyond that–we’re just starting to introduce basic addition.

(Keep in mind that my students started primarily at age 4, not at 5 like in the US, and they have at least two years in kindergarten. I’m not sure, but I think we’re actually pretty close to where you’d find a corresponding pre-K class in the US.)

I kept them counting and kept them switching around between high fives, tens, and ones. So when one of my five year old students (one of my spongier students; she soaks up all knowledge) came up to me and held up two fingers, one on each hand, I was puzzled to say the least.

“High two,” she prompted me.

“High two,” I agreed, acting for all the world like I knew what was going on.

She added a finger to each hand and did a quick count. “High four,” she announced. I nodded.

“High fi–” Hmm. We both looked and counted together: “One, two, three, four, five–high six!”

We grinned and counted again. “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven–high eight; high ten!”

My five year old student taught herself to count by twos using the High Five Method. I could go into a long thing about the importance of play or how self-directed learning rocks… But instead, I’m just going to say that she also taught this to the rest of the class, so yesterday when my students were so glad I’d returned from My Harrowing Absence of One Morning, I was also greeted with, “High two! High four! High six! High eight! High ten!”

Seis.6: Now, I love it when my students prove that some of my educational philosophies are right on track, but… C’mon, I got pwned by five year old. It had never even occurred to me to start counting by twos in the high five game. So when Lifehacker turned me on to Lumosity, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m totally addicted to the brain-training games (plus I’ve discovered that I can actually feel my brain during these exercises–they do, in fact, feel like exercise!), and I can rest assured that the next time a five year old shows me what’s what, I will at least be able to catch on more quickly.

Siete.7: I made a second Good Things post on time and everything! You may also have noticed that while I’m changing the language that I’m counting in, I’m adding all my Good Things cumulatively. This means that by the end of 2011, I’ll have a count of hopefully at least a few hundred Good Things that happened this year. I’d keep talking about it, but that’s so uplifty I just vomited a little in my mouth. Time to rinse out that saccharine sweet taste with a good wholesome shot of whiskey. Hasta!

Believe me, I know. If it was Thursday, I would be rounding up my class and taking them to the bathroom right about now. Good Thing #1: It’s Saturday, and I got to sleep in, workout, and meditate this morning!

Point number song (2): You may have noticed that after really-really thinking I would start doing a weekly Rad Roundup, I… didn’t.

And where do those two things collide? In introducing Good Things Thursday, of course!

(I really super promise not to stay so frakking cheery.)

The last several days, I’ve been really down on things that are, well, downers. I have, in fact, asked why we can’t start focusing more on the things we do well and/or the ways we can improve the things we suck at. It’s so much more motivating than focusing on the negative, and it seems that I’m not the only one in the Feel Good Movement.

It hit me last night that what I really wanted to do on a weekly basis was force myself to slow down and focus on the good things. You can go to a million places to get lists of links. (Personally, I follow Flavorwire thanks to the recommendation of my good friend HEJB.) What I want to do here is take a day to talk about Good Things, whether they’re from my own life or internet-land.

I cannot claim ownership of the Good Things idea, however. I mean, I’m sure there are millions of people before me who have chosen to focus on the good, and possibly even list them. However, this specific idea was born way back (seven years ago) in my college days.

I was a theatre major, having given the big old finger to all those people who told me I should be lawyer, and the show was Jesus Christ Superstar. Somehow this show just became a Feel Good experience for all involved – and I should know, because I was pretty tangentially connected to the production. I was merely one of the multimedia techs (that’s a fancy way of saying I worked a projector), and I actually had to leave halfway through the performance run because my grandmother passed away.

Good Things is something the JCS cast used to do before every rehearsal. After they’d finished their warm-ups, they’d all stand in a circle and each person would say something good that had happened since the last rehearsal.

Personally, I feel like this was the key to the Feel Good experience that was JCS, and I remember talking to a lot of my friends in the cast and crew who felt the same way. It was a great way for everyone to come together and spread some good vibes. So here we are, several years later, and I’m starting my own celebration of Good Things. We’ll move it to Thursday this coming week, but I wanted to start right away because I’m still in a super-cheery mood. (Hurrah!)

I’m keeping the numbering system I started with my Rad Roundups, so this week we’ll number in… French! Without further ado, I bring you:

Good Things Thursday I

Un.1: This morning what made me super happy (besides sleeping in, exercise, and meditation) was my breakfast of dragon fruit or pitaya. Apparently this fruit is native to Central America, but since Thailand introduced it to me, I will forever think of it as a Thai fruit. It’s automatically cheerful because it’s hot pink!

It’s also amazingly easy to prepare for consumption (which is probably why I enjoy it for weekend mornings when I don’t feel like doing anything). Just cut it in half…

And then get rid of that bright but not-so-tasty skin.

And there you have it, deliciousness!

I love the dragon fruit for its light, not-too-sweet, almost nutty flavor. It vaguely reminds me of kiwi. Plus, for interested parties my Thai assistant teacher assured me it helps you lose weight.

Deux.2: The United States of Awesome totally gets at the heart of why I wanted to start Good Things Thursdays in the first place. In fact, I like it so much that I’m actually thinking of following her despite my personal boycott of Tumblr (we’ll talk about that another time).

Trois.3: Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is apparently not as abhorrent as the WSJ would have us believe! While this is a huge downer if you’re looking at it from a “What the hell is wrong with the US media?” perspective, it becomes a huge Good Thing when you think about it another way.

This is really a story about how a woman wrote a book and became insta-famous for detailing what appeared to be her near-abuse of her own children – and teaching us how to do the same! But it turns out it’s actually the story of how she got pwned by her thirteen year-old daughter, long before any of us got het up about the whole thing. Now that’s pretty damn cool.

So what are the Good Things in your own life?

We’re not learning.

We’re not empathetic.

We’re not, we’re not, we’re not.

All three of these articles have been published in the last two days. How is it that in the last two days, researchers have found three totally separate things that this generation apparently fails at?

Granted, I’m on the oldish end of the generation being talked about here, but if you look at generational studies, I’m more of a Millennial than an Xer (having been born in the cusp years), so that’s who I’m identifying with.

What’s really interesting to me, though, is the question of who exactly this particular blame game is geared towards. (And let’s not fool ourselves that this is anything but a blame game. In fact, in the article on our lack of empathy one of the subheadings is, “What’s to blame?”)

At first I got all pissy, thinking that the elder generation(s) were once again talking about how shitty we are while conveniently forgetting who was at the helm (and who was underage or just transitioning to adulthood) while the US went to hell in a handbasket over the last decade or so. (The first draft of this post consisted primarily of me saying, “Fuck you.”)

Then I thought about the tone of the articles and the research some more. This is really just as much a story of those generations blaming themselves for doing a crappy job of leading and teaching us. “We didn’t even manage to teach them empathy!” they seem to be wailing.

So this seems to be a double-edged blame game, or what we could also call Blame Game Xtreme: Blame for All! (I appreciate generosity as much as anyone else, but really, you can keep your blame in your own black heart.)

Blame Game Xtreme, Round 1:

• Let’s blame the elder generation for not adequately teaching the values our society holds dear.
• Let’s blame the younger generation for not rising above the elder generation’s bad example.
• Let’s blame the conservatives/liberals for trying to force their ideology into our schools, media, art, etc.
• Let’s blame China for growing too fast.
• Let’s blame the older, mostly dead generations because they’re not here to defend themselves.
• Let’s blame puppies. Because anything that cute must be diabolically evil.

This is ridiculous, people. I’m tired of studies showing how we fail. I want more studies on the work that will help us not fail.

Let’s forget the blame and start the work. The work always starts with you. As Confucius said:

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.

It all starts with us and every decision we make every day. Are you playing the blame game or are you setting your heart right?

* * *

PS-I posted on my blog two days in a row! I think that’s a first.

And stared at me.

At that moment, I seriously contemplated walking out of the classroom and down to the English Program office, gathering up everything I owned, and leaving. I wasn’t even just thinking of going back to my house to have a good cry and pity party over my absolute failure as a teacher; I was honestly considering packing up all my belongings and preparing to leave Thailand to head back to the US within a week.

Perhaps I was being a bit melodramatic, but I’d already had a really long week and it’s only hump day.

Actually, I had a really long weekend that segued into a really long week. After a few seemingly innocuous events snowballed into an avalanche, I found myself at rock bottom over the weekend, ready to give up on everything. All the work I’ve been doing on myself, all the progress I’ve made, I was ready to tear it all down. I was ready to give up on people, on myself, on any type of meaningful life in general. Seriously, this was the bottom of the bottom, and I got there astonishingly fast and with only the tiniest of pushes.

But then the universe did this amazing thing. It didn’t let me give up.

There I was, sitting around feeling sorry for myself, and the universe just slapped me upside the head like a tough-love mama setting her children straight. For some inexplicable reason, the slap came through Facebook, specifically from a link a friend of mine posted to a TED Talks video of Brené Brown called The Power of Vulnerability.

At first I thought, No way. This is not the universe talking to me about not giving up. Why would the universe come at me with some uplifty talk when it knows I hate that stuff? Still, I found myself compelled to watch it. Why not give the universe a shot? I thought. I don’t have to watch the whole thing if she gets too huggy and uplifty.

I knew the universe was right when I discovered that Brené Brown hates uplifty stuff as much as I do, and after watching the twenty minute video, I was honestly crying (something I haven’t confessed to doing in pretty much my entire life). Somehow the universe had arranged things so that my friend on another continent would post this video and I would see it exactly when I needed to see it the most. How can you avoid crying when the universe provides you with such compelling evidence that you are not alone when you’re at your absolute loneliest?

Needless to say, I found new strength and hope. I was able to move forward in a positive way, and things started to look up. I had a good talk with a friend and downloaded Brené Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection from Amazon*. I felt on top of the world, since obviously I was important enough for the universe to arrange a too-cool-to-be-coincidental intervention for me.

And then I got sick.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I get sick, I descend into what I call “sick fog”. Nothing gets in or out of my brain. I loll about and feel martyred if I manage to accomplish the smallest of tasks, like making myself soup. While being sick didn’t exactly make me descend directly back down to the bottom, putting my brain on hold didn’t make it very easy to implement being more compassionate, courageous, and connected.

I dragged myself to school anyway, feeling like Mother Teresa for my efforts. My morning with my kindergarten class actually went pretty well, but my afternoon class was <cue scary music> Second Grade.

The second grade class in our English Program is notoriously difficult. Despite the fact that it’s their second year in a full-time English Program, very few of them can understand much English. There’s a gang of boys who pretty much hate school and just want to run around like crazies (and don’t speak or understand any English). They get the whole class riled up, and then it’s just downhill from there. I only have these guys once a week, so that adds to the challenge of setting expectations and holding them accountable.

Having the second grade class while in sick fog was enough to make me feel like I was better than Mother Teresa.

And so there we were. They were staring at me, clearly at a total loss about how to proceed with their activity (making board games! See, I try to do fun, creative things with my classes!). I wanted to die, or at least give up and make my melodramatic exit.

Somehow, I dragged myself out of the sick fog and back to my feet, mostly because it would have been worse to burst into tears right there in front of my class. I managed to get them started on their activity.

When I checked in on them again, I realized most of the groups still didn’t understand (albeit in different ways for each group).

I sat there watching them all proceed in various directions of wrong, and then I just turned to my Thai assistant teacher and said, “This class always makes me feel like the worst teacher in the world. They never seem to understand, and if they never understand, that has to be on me. I’m their teacher. It’s my job to make them understand.”

Granted, I didn’t expect her to understand more than half of what I was saying, but that was perhaps the first time in my life that I openly expressed a personal fear of mine to someone who wasn’t a super best friend–and sworn to secrecy.

I let myself be vulnerable. Which, according to Brené Brown, is at the heart of living wholeheartedly, at being able to love, at being courageous, compassionate, and connected. It’s the key to all that uplifty crap, and I totally did it. And then I did it again by blogging about it. I’m on a roll.

I kick Mother Teresa’s ass in lovingkindness.

* * *

*Did you know you can download a Kindle app for your computer? I only made this discovery recently, but it’s marvelous when you’re an ocean away from your favorite bookstores… or pretty much any English-language bookstores, for that matter.