confirmed

I am officially moving to China for 10 months to teach English, starting September 1st. Wow.

This summer will go by so fast...one month home to work, one month in NYC for the ESL certification course, one more month at home to work, and then China. I am so excited.

China!

Last week, I was offered a job...in CHINA! My Chinese teacher asked me if I would like her to give my name to her friend in China, who is the director of a pretty large language school near Beijing, so I agreed and within a couple days this director had asked for my resume and offered me a job. I can hardly believe it happened that quickly. I am so used to applying for half a dozen summer jobs in the US, hearing back from none of them, and not getting definite answers even after calling in to inquire. It feels so strange that this is happening so fast, but I am excited about the possibility! I haven't accepted the job yet, but I am talking to my family about it and asking as many questions about it as I can think of. Two girls who live on my hall are going to teach in China with New Day, so they would be pretty near by. Who would have thought I'd have to move to China to hang out with college friends?

So, I am excited about graduating now for several reasons:

1. Being finished with final exams. Forever.

2. Living in New York this summer to get the ESL Certificate.

3. Going to China to teach English to 6-12 year-olds.

I can hardly believe how fast this is all happening. Hopefully by the end of this week, I will know for sure whether I will accept the job, and then start planning from there. I think it would be a really wonderful experience, and I am excited that I would be able to keep learning Chinese after college--the school provides three hours of Mandarin lessons per week for the foreign teachers there. I would be living in an apartment building with teachers from the UK, Australia, Ukraine, USA, and Japan. I have no idea what that would be like, but I am kind of beside myself with excitement thinking about it.

Usually I would be worried and frantically trying to plan how things will work out, but I'm not anxious about it at all. If God is taking me there, He's going to take me there, and I am just going to go one day at a time and trust that He knows what He's doing. It's nice not being in control, when I actually realize that I'm not.

Here is a little Chinglish, just for fun:

the heron

The water sifts through it,

That wild beak laid open

For fish in the hollows;

One of them rests in dark water

Beneath his feet.

I wake in my unease and

Envy his patience, his

Absence of forethought at night,

The time where I lie awake,

The least of my thoughts great in my mind.

I lie down again, and

He makes no sound;

The fish go calmly by.

saundy

Last night, I drove down to the Pittsburgh airport to pick up my really good friend Saundy, who's been in Costa Rica teaching for the past two months. She's there on a tourist visa, so she has to come back every 90 days...which makes me happy, because next time she comes back, I'll have graduated and left. :( Her mom, Louise, rode with me, and we passed the hour and a half talking and trying to see through the snowy windshield. Yes. It snowed again...just as I was getting fully convinced that spring was here.

It was a good adventure though, and I had fun talking with Louise on the way down and then to Saundy on the way back up. Her flight came in after 12 am, and I didn't really feel like driving around for half an hour waiting for her to come outside, so I sat by the terminal in my car waiting. There were no parking signs everywhere, so I tried to look inconspicuous...however you do that. But, it didn't really work, because an airport cop came up to me and told me to shove along, and then looked suspiciously at my Virginia license plates. So I shoved along so that I could loop back around, and of course that's when Saundy called me. The poor girl was wearing capris, sandals, and a short sleeve shirt, because it was 95 degrees when she left Costa Rica this morning!

I am so glad that I got to see her, because I'm going home on Easter break tomorrow morning. Saundy's spending the night in my room, because my dear roommate (who I already miss) is in Florida for softball spring training. This roommate also forgot to sign the checklist on our door that verifies we do not have illegal things in our room, because they will check and fine us for them over Easter break, if we happen to have any. So, I will have to figure out how to forge her signature. Shh.

summer reading

Yup, I'm posting a summer reading list already. Except it's not so much a summer reading list as a post-graduation thing, with all the time that I'm going to have from neither being in school nor being gainfully employed. Just kidding. :)

I'm going to a school in Manhattan for a month (more about that later), but besides that, this summer looks like a good time for lots of reading. And working, because I really do want to find a job and move out on my own.

Here is my list--some are repeats, but most aren't:

The Brothers Karamazov

Notes from the Underground, both by Dostoevsky

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

Surprised By Joy by C.S. Lewis

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays by Walker Percy

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Confessions by St. Augustine

some party this is, juno

On Tuesday afternoons, I usually put in a good 2 hours grading very short response papers or quizzes for my advisor, who I TA for. The classes I usually grade things for are the Lit classes that everyone is required to take, so the answers I get to some of these quizzes are pretty hilarious sometimes. You can tell when someone has Spark-noted or just plain not read something. Which, face it, everyone is guilty of sometimes. But really, when you start getting answers like "Shakespeare wrote around 500 BC" you start to wonder. Some people just draw little pictures instead of answers--one guy responded to a question about Don Quixote saying "I don't know...but here's a spider," and there it was.

I had a moment today, when I was reading through the 50th response paper about whether Dido should or shouldn't have been put into a different circle in Dante's hell for being suicidal, when a certain phrase jumped out at me. It was describing Dido and Aeneas' moment in the cave, ahem. It was this: "the gods threw together a quick celebration when they were in the cave together during the storm." I don't know if this is actually funny, or if it was just the way the wording drew pictures in my mind, but I thought it was hysterical.

I started picturing a bunch of gods saying to each other "oh, SHOOT Juno! You forgot to get the party hats! Where are the balloons? What about ice-cream cake? We are really going to have to throw this party together in a hurry...quick, reserve a cave." "Whatever Venus, you're just angry that you forgot the candles." Yeah.

perfectionism

I often see specially made fraternity shirts around campus with this written on the back, and it always makes me giggle: "Grove City College...where your best hasn't been good enough since 1876." Just a little pretext for my perfectionism rant.

I wonder sometimes how normal it is to be highly embarrassed about a short story or paper or essay you've written, or at least embarrassed about sending it in to be read by someone. No matter how many times you've edited, changed, or reworked whatever it is. I am cringing within myself thinking of The Quad editors reading the short story that I wrote last semester for Creative Writing. I like the story. I mean, I like it pretty well. I didn't want to send anything else in to see if it would get accepted, just this. But man, I already feel silly for having to send in a second copy because last night I remembered that I changed a name within the story but didn't remember to change it everywhere in the story. What's hilarious is that the senior and junior editors are two really good friends of mine, so I shouldn't be that embarrassed, but I'm still recoiling within myself at my typos. Oh well. I would like to experience some sort of satisfaction after writing something, and I do once I've spent a lot of time on something that I care about, but reading it two months later usually makes me cringe again, just a little. I guess all I can do is keep on trying, and realize that editing is 75% of good writing, or some other large percentage. That's what I've been told, anyway.

Starting next week, I'm going to be copy-editing for The Collegian and the first edition of the Law Society's Law Journal, which should be pretty interesting. I've been copy-editing for The Quad since last semester, and I have really enjoyed that. Editing things for typographical errors is exhilarating for me, which is probably weird. But the thing about it that helps keep it interesting is that most of the material I read is enjoyable...which might not be the case so much for the Law Journal. I have an article to edit for that this week and I have no idea what to expect. Maybe it will be great, who knows. I'm glad though that I'm getting a pretty good range of material to edit...law articles, newspaper articles, and literary essays, stories, and poems. I hope that it will help me out when I try to find a job this summer. I've been looking at all the entry-level publishing jobs I can find.

Okay, so in line with this whole perfectionism topic, I just had to let you know that I re-edited this post twice, just now. I crack myself up. Oh dear.