bad metaphor

As I mentioned in my last post, pretty soon E and I are going to be hopping the pond (that other one, filled with tsunamis and shit) to visit Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Though we’ve both kind of vaguely wanted to go on an Asia trip before this – even so far as considering teaching in Korea for a year, like all our other peers who don’t know what to do with their lives – our reasons for going now are twofold. 1) E is turning 30 soon and doesn’t want to officially turn “old” in the states and 2) we actually do have a number of friends who are teaching in Japan and Korea, and I have a battalion’s worth of aunties stationed in Vietnam. We won’t always have free housing and tour guides available in the places where we want to go, so we decided we needed to take advantage of these soon.

Now, for some odd reason, the “Vietnam” portion of the trip is making me the most nervous. Perhaps it’s because my Vietnamese is embarrassingly poor. I…well, I know the names of dishes my mom makes that I like. I can also say “sorry,” which will probably come in very handy. After that, I’m bracing for a chorus of “không biet nói Tieng Viet* Ha ha ha!!” Yeah, whatever, um, just put me and my boyfriend up for the night, mmm kay?

Maybe another reason is the traffic in Saigon:

Yeah. Um. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’m probably not going to see much of Saigon, beyond a narrow city block around the airport!

For awhile I was actually kind of reluctant to tell my parents that I was going. I’m not sure why, beyond just this vague apprehension of offending my father, who has offered to take me to Vietnam in the past year. I eventually told him, and then my mother, and from both parents I was kind of met by this…silence. I don’t know if it was shock or surprise that I wanted to go on my own, or what. I told my sister about this reaction.

“Well, I don’t know about Dad,” she said, “but I think Mom is worried you’re going to get kidnapped.”

What?! Oh, that’s right, it’s just my reliably paranoid mom. Apparently since I don’t speak the language, that makes me ripe for kidnapping. I have the intelligence and street smarts of a four year old, see, and I would just willingly climb into the back of a car with anyone, even if I didn’t understand what they were saying! My sister has been suggesting a trip to Vietnam for years, and my mother’s always put it off, claiming to be too busy. But since I’ve told Mom of my plans, she has started seriously thinking about using her minimal vacation time to come visit when I am there.
I’m touched and would actually be really thrilled about having my mom there, to show me around and stuff – but they just cut her hours at work! And she’ll have a grandbaby to come visit soon, as well! I can’t help but think of what Suze Orman would say.

And then there was the issue of telling one of the aunties, who we’d be staying with. For the longest time I hesitated about contacting this auntie, who I’ll call Auntie Needles because she taught me sewing lessons when I was little. I learned how to sew by making traditional Vietnamese style dresses for my troll doll. Back then she was known as the sternest of the aunties, and my cousins and I were a little scared of her. Sloppy hems and other transgressions were met with sharp scolding. But in retrospect, all that scolding resulted in what was probably the most well-dressed troll doll, ever. And when Auntie Needles tired of America and went back home to Vietnam, something changed in her demeanor – she relaxed, laughed, and seemed delighted even to have us noisy kids running around!

I haven’t seen this auntie since I was ten, so I really have no idea if she’s relapsed to her grumpy auntie ways. Or if she’d be happy to see me, or annoyed that this random stranger-like niece was contacting her out of the blue, to crash on her couch. Or if she even remembered English – hell, my Vietnamese has vastly deteriorated since I last spoke to her.

Our departure date for Japan is coming up very rapidly, so I finally got off my duff and emailed her. If she was going to be slightly annoyed at me trying to bum her couch, then it would follow that she’d be REALLY annoyed if I did so without advance notice.

Here was her response:

welcome you and your boyfriend,very happy.Ok you stay with me and uncle My .we are ready everything for you…I love you and hope see you soon

She’s family. Of course she’d welcome me! Sometimes it’s easy to forget, the way we live here in the states, drifting apart on our own little islands.

Still, I’m a little nervous about my upcoming reunion with Auntie Needles. I kind of wish I still had that troll doll.

*Translation: “you don’t know how to speak Vietnamese?” The one phrase I will never forget, as I’ve had it barked at me by disapproving relatives all my life. I had no idea how to write that, by the way, and am just guessing using an online translator.

Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and NPR music guru fame, posted a thing today about comments. Specifically, about the slew of nasty, awful comments that proliferate on sites like Youtube and what the proliferation of comments like these say, if anything, about us today. I’ve seen enough of these comments to just kind of mentally filter them out – kind of like how, during campus political season, my eyes just stop seeing sidewalk chalk on my way to work.

The worst I’ve seen, probably equivalent or even surpassing the terribleness of Youtube comments, have been on the website for my local paper. These are bad because the people behind these comments, if they are in fact different people and not just the same horrible misanthrope posting with multiple accounts…these people live in my town! My neighbors might be psychopath ultra arch-conservative assholes who actually believe that every homeless person, Mexican, and Topekan should be rounded up and shot! For that reason I never look below any news stories or commentaries that are vaguely political on the LJ World. Otherwise I’d be hyper suspicious and paranoid around half the people I saw on the street.

Occasionally, though, they are just so over the top ridiculous that you just can’t help but laugh. Here’s a news story about a cat who accidentally hitched a ride in a van to california, and made it back. Totally cute, innocuous fluff piece sans controversy, right?

WRONG. Somehow that still sparked a mean comment that led to a mini-flame war:

Why was this cat running about “at large”? There is a City leash law for cats. It really needs to be seriously enforced.

I’m pretty fed up with “kitty” urinating and defecating in my gardens; howling at other cats and other “tom catting around”…..and I don’t really care to read about “…they’re an outside pet….”. Nonsense. Keep your cats inside please or within your view at all times. That’s the law. Also, you’re welcome to come on over and clean all the feces your cats leave…..

I think there are, and always have been, people that are just naturally that cantankerous. Posting on the internet just makes it easier for these people to share that with the rest of the world, instead of just the few people that happen to stroll in front of their house and bear witness to their porch-hollerin’ tirades.

Because it just seems so much more overwhelming to write a full length entry:*

1. I’ve signed up to take the LSAT. This will be happening June 8th. Trying to study for it when I can – those logic puzzles are a doozy, but actually kind of fun to solve, in a perverse sort of way. I anticipate eating these words later.

2. My roommate Andy bought a house in North Lawrence, which is quickly becoming the Williamsburg of Lawrence – where hipsters and townies have fled, since townies-in-training are taking over East Lawrence. We go with the flow.

3. He closes on June 10th, which – from what we’ve been told – is record speed for a house closing, within three weeks of the original offer. Still – this is problematic because of the next item on the list…

4. …which is that Eli and I leave for a three-week Japan / Korea / Vietnam tripstravaganza on June 11th, in the wee hours of the morning, to catch our 6 a.m. flight!

5. We bought these tickets right before the swine flu outbreak. Americans, though easily excitable and prone to absorbing media frenzy, have the attention spans of fleas and are busy obsessing over Jon & Kate (seriously who cares?!) instead of swine flu these days. Our contact in Japan, however, has notified us that the panic has just started catching fire over there, and that we definitely cannot visit her school (she’s teaching there). We might need to wear masks when we’re out and about in her town. Good thing I’ve made a bunch!

6. We’ll be gone when the end of the fiscal year happens here at work. For those of you who have never had to deal with budget bureaucracies – this is when we have to make sure to use or encumber the funds we have been allocated, because the insane rule is this: use it or lose it. Because if you don’t use all your funds, clearly you don’t need this much, so you don’t need to have this amount allocated in future years, right? This year, it’s a bit different because of the economic crisis and the fact that we are looking at 2, 4, 5% cuts – and darker rumors I’m hearing bump that figure up to 9 or even 10%. So we definitely need to spend our money wisely now and anticipate major purchases that are needed, as opposed to just stock up on a ton of office supplies to use up the funds.

7. Unfortunately, the things that we really need require copious hoop-jumping to get. For instance: if your current copier happens to suck royally, and you have the funds to pay for a replacement – it’s not as simple as just purchasing the new one. You have to submit records of service calls, have someone to come out and assess the condition of the copier, and if it’s not broken, per se – then you’re stuck with it.

8. Though I have vastly improved my budgeting and accounting abilities since when I first started here, I still have this constant nagging fear: I’m going to screw up something, not be able to fix it because I’ll be trapped in some hellish Japanese swine-flu quarantine, I’ll put my department thousands of dollars in the hole for an unapproved or unencumbered purchase, and get fired.

9. Unbelievably stupid Facebook-related quasi-drama: I got ridiculously upset when E didn’t tell me about this birthday party that he was planning on going to this weekend. This girl Vicky is more his friend, but we’re both friends with her on Facebook. I saw him posting on Vicky’s wall (social networking sites make it so easy to snoop, but it was inadvertent, I swear!) about it, but he didn’t mention anything to me about it so I just assumed it was a “their circle of friends” type thing. Then another girl sent me a message, about some unrelated thing, and at the end mentioned: “see you at Vicky’s?” I haven’t a clue what is going on at Vicky’s, when, or where. I asked E about it, and got a super vague response: “I’m not sure, I think it’s Friday through Sunday? I think they’ll presume you’re coming along too.”

Presume? What?! No, that’s not actually an invitation. I didn’t get an invite to the event on Facebook, which is private, and Vicky didn’t message me. It might be the case that she just figured E would fill me in, but…he hasn’t. So maybe she just exclusively wanted their circle of friends to be there and no outsiders, which is fine – but I want to know! I feel overwhelmed already, I can’t just block out Friday through Sunday for a mystery event of some sort, to which I may or may not be welcome! I keep grilling E about details but he’s still vague, and I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t want me tagging along.

10. I am not the type of person who is okay with crashing events, uninvited. Some people are social butterflies and can pull shit like that off, but I can’t and I do not want a repeat of this awkward situation. AAARRRRGH. I’m not sure if I’m right to be as upset about this as I am. Maybe it’s mainly due to numbers 1 through 8 weighing on my mind. Or…am I mentally regressing, and am now thirteen years old again? I hated being thirteen! I don’t wanna go back to that time in my life, especially not now! Bah! That means I’d have to unearth all my old Nirvana cds and baggy T-shirts with “edgy” sayings and mope, at home, alone.

*NOTE: god, this did turn out to be a big long mental vomit post. Whoops.

I have an upset student in my office now, in the throes of a nervous breakdown. He’d written down the wrong day for his final, in a course in which he’d had an A. I couldn’t get a hold of the professor, but did manage to catch the TA, who said: “yikes, um, he’s gonna have to talk to the professor, I have no say in that call.”

I suspect he’ll be fine – I know the professor in question and she’s not merciless. But it’s really hard to communicate that to him, especially since I can’t really give him a guarantee, and it is entirely the prerogative of the professor to let him take a make-up exam. Who knows, maybe she had outlined a strict policy regarding no make-up exams, whatsoever. There is the issue of fairness to the students who did make sure to show up on time.

I definitely feel for the student, though – especially since this very situation did happen to me. I once showed up for a final on the wrong week, since for some reason my biology lab course was having its finals a whole two weeks earlier than everyone else’s. Like this student, I had written my exam date wrong, and once you write down a date on paper, it becomes difficult to unwrite it from your head. Especially when you’re trying to cram all this other nonsense on top of it!

Two observations: first, I’m not really sure how to deal with distraught students, or people in general. Should I try to talk him down, hover around and annoy him into not feeling sad anymore? Second, I am sexist because I feel even more bad for boys who cry. I guess I just assume boys have a harder time crying in public, which is true. I do feel pretty awkward when anyone I don’t know cries in front of me, regardless of gender. I opted to just give him some TP to blow his nose, and let him hang out in our office for awhile to compose himself. Hope that was enough, and he’s not leaping into the Kaw right now!

EDIT: Professor emailed, said not to panic and that student could take the final. Student bacon officially saved. Yay!