Down the Rabbit Hole

There's a very small chance typing this on Giancarlo will be less annoying than using a French keyboard. However, this way I get to do it for free at Macca's.

This is my fifth day in Paris. I feel as though I'm in my own personal Wonderland. There's art. There are landmarks and history I've wanted to experience for more than half my life. There are flowers and trees and spring weather and waterways that don't smell of the sea. Hills. Good food...it's kinda been a walk down memory lane as I've eaten Korean, Vietnamese,Indian, and Thai (don't worry, I ate French at a restaurant with chansons last night, belting out tunes I didn't know - and one I did, although I'm glad they didn't ask me HOW I knew it, because I would've been embarassed to admit it was because of Moulin Rouge.)

I've seen the Eiffel tower. I took the stairs to le deuxieme etage and the elevator from there to the top. I've stood in a very long line to get into the Musee d'Orsay, and was second in line to get into the Louvre. You should probably be aware by now that when left to my own devices I can become very...interesting...and if I get around to it, I kept track of my random thoughts at the Louvre, just for your entertainment (that's just the kind of friend I am). Saw the inside of Notre Dame, but not the towers (yet), and the Arc de Triomphe. Yesterday it rained, but I explored a little, read in a cafe, and had that dinner, and when I left, the view across the city of lights from the top of the hill was enough to take your breath away.

There's still quite a few things I need to do, but Socrates arrives in a few hours for the next two days, and it will be nice to have a partner in crime. Stay tuned for part deux.

The Show Must Go On

"Inside my heart is breaking,
My makeup may be flaking,
but my smile still stays on..."

It doesn't seem right to me that while my own little egocentric universe is falling apart that the world is filled with butterflies and skies clear enough to see the mountains. My last couple of times leaving Korea it pissed rain, and that seems more like it. Socrates has left the building. It has been a couple of very long days, and they weren't exactly pleasant, fun times, but on the other hand, I've lost my best friend, and I'd rather spend my last day with him in tedium than not at all. However, I do wish it hadn't come to this, wish the school hadn't driven him to the point where he felt like the townsfolk were after him with pitchforks.

I'm pleased to report that I'm pretty much through with the hyperventilating stage of my grief, but I still gotta say that this is the part of the mercenary educator lifestyle that I hate. How many of you have I stayed up with in a cleaning/packing vigil? How many of you have stayed up with me? Saying goodbye time and time again sucks the big one - but Bronte had a saying about how the fact that it hurts is just a testament to how much the friendship means, and I'm glad to say that I've had the kind of friendships I've had, even when it rips my guts out to let you go (yes, you...Sara, Wilmarie, Bronte, John, Belinda, Tori, and probably a few that are skipping my mind right now). You mean the world to me, literally, because without you the world wouldn't have had meaning these last five years.

So now I have a day to catch up on my sleep and clean up the APT before going to Paris. Time to put on some of that really gay 80's music Socrates loaded onto Giancarlo Wednesday night and rock the house.

It's the End of the World As We Know It...

...except that I don't feel fine.

My Partner in Crime here has gone and shot off his mouth at the wrong time in the wrong way to the wrong person, and he is not long for this world (by this world, of course, I mean the Twilight Zone world that is RAK). I'm more than a little bit upset, which my friend, who I am officially nicknaming (retroactively) Socrates (for his propensity towards pissing people off with his honesty, stubborness, and inquisitiveness), assures me is unnecessary. Luckily I had already had the, "I'm kinda feeling restless," conversation with my Dark Lord and Master, who has told me I have to finish out my contract, and since he still holds the lease on my soul, I sort of have to do what he tells me. Otherwise I can't promise I wouldn't cut and run. Here's why: I don't really like people, and I don't like going through that awkward period in which you are stuck with each other, but it's out of necessity, rather than genuine liking. And I especially dislike getting to know people when if we're on unequal footing (ie, one of us is more knowledgeable about the territory...that just doesn't seem like friendship to me, at least not for a good long while). Have I been on that rant before? Well, anyways, I figure if I have to get used to a whole new bunch of jackasses anyway...

No. My Dark Lord told me no.

This could be good for me. I will probably have far fewer late Thursday nights in places that are not conducive to being a good little Mormon girl. I will probably be better at keeping the Sabbath, staying til the end of church. I might actually get some work done towards an illustration portfolio, or spend more time dancing. I might try to be a better friend to some people here that I haven't been motivated to spend much time with. But you know what? I don't care how good it turns out to be for me. One day will become the next, one sand dune will melt into the other, because there isn't anything waiting in it for me except more work, more anklebiters, more friends that I only bother with because my best friend is gone.

You Turn the Screws

I don't really suffer from stress...I'm more of a carrier...but now I'm stressed. Sheikh Rattlen Roll wants to know that we are spending his money wisely, so he has called in the Grand Inquisition - an audit team led by this harpy who last time she came around got the old principal sacked.

I bet she eats art teachers for breakfast.

Anyways, my stress level over this visit has been mounting throughout the last month. That sick day I took last week? It wasn't a total sick day...I actually went in for a couple of hours because my head of school had a brainwave about my schedule and I was supposed to discuss it with her. This is the person responsible for pulling me out of the KG classes after three months, and who, a month later, informed me that I needed a certain number of contact hours in my schedule...a number I was no longer achieving because I was no longer teaching KG and didn't want to take any more time away from the classroom teachers. And this individual told me pretty much point blank that if I didn't make up the hours and the auditors wanted to know why they needed a lower primary art teacher, she would have to concede that they didn't. Well, my Head's brainwave was this: I'm going to be teaching KG again. Both year groups. Every week.

Ayayay.

So in addition to trying to get my classroom sorted out and my schedule sorted out I've been trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with them and trying to make it look good enough so that if the Harpy stops in while I'm teaching, she goes, "Oooh! Aaah!" And I have not been entirely sure that was going to happen. So I went in today - a SATURDAY, for the second week in a row, what is to become of me??? - to try and figure things out. And this is what I came up with:

I'm going to do something that looks cool. F*ck the PYP. The Harpy doesn't give a rat's ass about PYP.

Not that I actually feel much better. I've still got the Sunday Night Panic in a pretty bad way, and am hoping Socrates will actually follow through and go on a walk with me tonight, because I need my mind taken off this. He did a pretty good job of talking me down before I left the school. Here's something that I sometimes forget - there are two kinds of people in the world: those that blame themselves, and those that blame others. He reminded me of this by telling me to turn it back on my Head if my teaching is brought into question, and tell the Harpy that I have been messed around quite a bit in the last couple of months. See, I am one of those that always blames themselves. I feel like I have yet to become comfortable with the PYP, and I am not satisfied with the work my students have done this year. I like to have control, I like things to look good, and I have had to give up a large portion of my control because the PYP is supposed to be student-driven. Meh. But there are other factors that go into the equation, and that's something I need to remember.

More to the point, as my friend Poonam has pointed out, "It is in Lord's hands." I need to have a little more faith here. It would not be the end of the world if RAKESS decided my services were no longer needed. It is a great big world out there, and if I can't get a job with an international school, I can always get a job teaching English, or I can go back to the states, and in a couple of years, I'd have the experience I'd need to move up to a DODDS school. Whatever happens in the next two weeks, I know that my Heavenly Father will take care of me.

Losing Control

The good news is, I've got the remote con back for my projector. The bad news is, it took me all evening to check the last place I would look...

Today was a bit of a wash. My partner in crime was in Dubai trawling for jobs, so I really didn't have anything exciting to do today. I went to church for the first time this week in the Mormonmobile. Yes, that's right: the Mormonmobile. One of the plethora of Mormon RAKESS teachers decided it would be a GREAT idea for us to engage one of the school vans to take us to church and back every Friday. I'll admit it has its good sides - like the fact that we leave (approximately) a half hour after the meetings end, rather than, oh, two hours, and it only costs 15 dirhams each. But on the other hand, I'm enclosed with even more people but less legroom. Oh, and I spent the entire ride back entertaining the Heusners' three year-old. Sometimes the fact that every child loves me can be a burden. However, since I had to teach Sunday School this week and didn't have the money to rent a car or take a taxi, I took - for the first time in my life - the church bus.

I should have started reading my next lesson when I got home. Socrates once told me that the elder Vigliotti girl is too smart to be Mormon, and while I disagree because I've known some fricking smart Mormon kids, she is definitely going to keep me on my toes. But no - I got home and went to the computer, where I'd downloaded the first episode of the last season of Lost, got it on the memory stick, and plugged it into the projector, only to realize I had no idea where my remote con was. I started to turn the living room upside down, but I was lethargic in spite of the fact that I slept through sacrament meeting. Also, I was fasting, and as the locals will tell you, sleep is a great way to make the experience more pleasant! So I slept about two hours this afternoon, and woke up to look around for the remote again, and, failing to find it, went in search of food and a few things from Carrefour.

One of the things was alternatives to "fizzy drinks." I keep failing to give them up, but I'm going to try again. Don't ask why. I like coke. Maybe I'll just become a social drinker - I'll go on my Thursday night binges once a week. I kind of like that idea. In the meantime, I've got Tang. Orange tang for the nostalgia of it and fresh baked crybabies in my great-mom's house as a child, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that it comes in mango and pineapple and I think one other flavor, as well.

The other thing was ice cream, which seems to have survived in spite of the fact that I forgot to put it away for...uhmmmm...two hours after I got home. I finally gave up on finding the remote and managed to manually load Lost. Five minutes before the end, Socrates called me back and so I had to restart it since I haven't figured out how to pause or fast-forward the damn thing manually, and let it play through again until it got to the right spot. Then I started looking for the remote again, incidentally finding the ice cream was sitting on the counter. I was upending furniture, which apparently involves me tripping backwards over my upside-down end table (again, I found myself cursing the fact that no one was there to be amused by it and/or be in awe of the fact that I managed to do so gracefully and with a minimum of self-damage - MAD NINJA SKILLS!!!) when my eye landed on the bag of cheetos I munched on throughout my sick day, and I thought, "Surely not." Surely so. There on top of the cheetos was my remote con, a little cheesy but none the worse for wear. Yeah. That's what my day has been like.

Yesterday I had my first sick day in five years. I probably could have toughed it out, but I didn't. Sometimes you just need to stay home and take care of yourself. So I did, and it was good.

Masalaam

This morning saw me sending the Evil One off to the Dubai airport in a bright pink taxi with a female Romanian driver. This afternoon saw me dragging my sick ass out of bed long enough to take the money she didn't have on her downstairs for her driver. Yes, I am now sad as well as sick.

It was a really good weekend, so good that come Saturday night I found myself having the Back-In-RAK blues again. I got turned around a lot, but Evil and Socrates both have excellent map reading skills, so we always got where we needed to be, although consequently I did spend a lot on SALIK tolls. We went to church and she got to experience white people giving talks again (ie, longer than 5 minutes), Filipinos singing along softly to a solo intermediate hymn, and MY fabulous youth Sunday school lesson (honestly? probably the most enjoyable calling I've had in a very long time). We went from there to Dubai Mall where we met Socrates (probably the most disorienting, surreal moment during my travels abroad...seeing Evil in a foreign land I've gotten used to, but having two completely unrelated yet significantly important individuals from different eras in my life meet up as if it ain't no thang in a mall in Dubai??? A small bit trippy, teacher, to say the least).
We returned our Burj Khalifa tickets (grr), had lunch,
experienced the wonders of a North American level bookstore in the reading desert that is Arabia, and went on our merry way to see the Palm Jumeirah...or to drive out to Atlantis, take a look around, see the lobby's Chihuly, and walk past the guard onto the back veranda...or rather, I did, Socrates failed the "pretend you belong here" test by incorrectly answering that most crucial of questions, "Are you staying at the hotel?" (he who hesitate is lost!), and the Evil One didn't even try. We met up again later for dinner and attempted to go out dancing or something, but the music at Long's "School Disco" was not the 80's pop tunes advertised in Time Out and somebody had jetlag, so we left Socrates to his own devices sometime around midnight.

We got up and did some shopping at the Mall of the Emirates where Socrates met us before we departed for RAK (via Festival City - I needed frames from IKEA, and I promised Evil Gourmet Burgers for lunch). The rental, Socrates' Mazda 3 from last fall, was making some interesting sounds and motions, but when he popped into the gas station for drinks just past Sharjah, I made Evil say a prayer (I also made her bless the food last night - as she pointed out, I have been making her say the prayers for most of our long association), and we made it home okay, even with the pit stop at Spinney's for ingredients for Greek night. Returning the car was a bit of drama - at first the woman checking it over had the wrong sheet, and I panicked a little bit because she thought the scratches and dings were my fault. Also, I had a lot of SALIK tolls from driving up and down Sheikh Zayed and over the Garhoud bridge so much...made me miss staying in Mankhool and taking taxis. But all in all, a good time.

Yesterday I was not feeling well, and when Stephanie suggested I leave as soon as my classes were finished, I complied. And when I got home, I chose to do my resting at the beach with Evil. In fact, the beach was so restful that we decided to cancel my little dinner party, eat a late lunch, and have Greek for dinner all by ourselves, and on our sunset walk back from Hilton, we had to agree that this had been an excellent plan. We spent quite a bit of time sitting in my living room, reading our separate books. This probably seems like a boring way to spend time together, but it's just the way we are. Actually, all of our girlfriends have been known to do this from time to time; I think it's one of the reasons we all get along so well. Later I made moussaka, dolmades, tzatziki, and Greek salad, which turned out to be a lot of food for two people, and I anticipate eating it for the rest of the week (oh, darn). And, eventually, it was time for bed, and now, after an afternoon of sleeping, vomiting, and diarrhea, it is time for the same. And all I can say is, Evil better bid on somewhere this go-round that I can get a job teaching, because it would be FANTASTIC to have the dynamic duo in action year-round, although I'm not sure anywhere in the world is ready for it.

Glinda comes to Kiamo Ko

I'm at the Dubai airport. While the international adventures of the Great One and the Evil One (part three) have not quite yet begun, my adventures for the night are well under way (go ahead...ask me about Socrates' powers of distraction). At any rate, it promises to be a great weekend, but blogging on Giancarlo is taxing my patience so I'm gonna wrap this up.