How It's All Gonna Be
29 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Prologue
They call it the Middle Kingdom.
Right now, I wait for paperwork. It is the only thing holding me back. I expect that everything will be in order by the middle of August, Year of the Ox. Until then I dream. Though not in China yet, anticipation, planning, and great expectations are all just as important to me as the actual experience of being there. Right now, I think about the students I will teach at a university in Hunan province.
The university says that I will teach literature. They welcome me create my own curriculum and to supplement their text book with from my own library. This is very exciting since teaching literature in a university setting will be a vastly different experience than that afforded to most ESL teachers in China—most of whom toil for private schools utilizing workbooks that focus on business rather than the humanities. My only hope is that this tragedy is within my skill to mend as I believe science, technology, business and law–all interesting and essential human endeavors–all these are meaningless without a solid foundation in the humanities.
Grandiose Visions of a Migrant Worker
29 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Prologue
Born in the Year of the Dragon, the day Viking I landed on Mars, and about one year before the original Star Wars film hit the big screens, it is only natural that I would be forever restless, dreaming, and yearning to ramble beyond the borders of my country.
I am just another migrant worker dreaming of a better life. Just as one of my teachers had dreamed of a better life. He went into the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts. He found something useful there. Something inspirational. His experiment at Walden Pond taught us how to advance confidently in the direction of our dreams. So that is what I am doing. And all the world is Walden Pond.
Every couple years I get the urge to conduct similar experiments. I have heard stories of men bicycling across continents in order to awaken from the ashes a new fire, renew what once was broken, and bring light to darkness. So too I go again into the world to reinvent, to tinker, to remix the song of myself. Somebody from my alma mater said something about revolting every generation. That was back in a slower, gentler time: a time of gentlemen farmers, cultured yeomanry, and a vast frontier ripe for exploration. Now there are no more blank spaces on the map, yet inexplicably the same old conflicts manifest and things fall apart so fast everything new is already obsolete. So I revolt every couple years so I can see with fresh eyes.
Confessions of a Hyperbole Abuser
26 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Prologue
I have this condition. Something within compels me to wander with mournful tread. Everything once strange in life becomes familiar, ritual becomes routine, and life the antithesis of zen marks the time when you are but a bell toll away from the walking dead. Beyond these dust clouds kicked up by the masses of men there lies man’s greatest pleasure galloping ahead beneath azure skies.
So when another gap year loomed ahead I plotted my escape. Playing the waiting game in a stately Victorian on West Main Street in Smethport, Pennsylvania—the home of the ghost of Ralph Crossmire, America’s First Christmas Store, and Wooly Willy–would be like being strapped down on a stone table beneath a scythe swinging from the ceiling like a pendulum. So I researched my options. A Facebook advert said I could earn my Counterterrorism Degree. And twenty miles away McDonald’s was hiring all shifts. But in the end, the most appealing choice was biking and hitchhiking from Calais to Cathay.
