Slow Recovery from Near Braindeath

By now you must be thinking “Is this guy ever going to finish the Philippines blog? That was months ago, What the hell?”. To that I say: Fair enough. Perhaps it is a lack of pictures that has kept me from moving on. Perhaps it was our tough stretch of games where we won, drew, and lost and found ourselves in a tie for first place (We are currently back in sole possession with two games to go). The real factor, however, has been the fact that my brain has completely melted due to grading essays and teaching classes. Going through stacks of papers written by high school Korean students has ummmmm….. I’m draw blank.

Finally, I finished and my brain is slowly recovering. Now I am ensconced (Hey! It’s coming back!) in my office chair staring at a computer pretending to work. It’s Friday and the semester is winding down. Since I found out that I would not be coming back to this school next year (a contractual impasse) the motivation to give assignments and grade papers has dwindled to somewhere between none whatsoever and zero. Lame duck status is a total motivation sucker, yet there is a certain load off my shoulders. With only five weeks of classes left there is no way another pile of essays is going to make their way to my desk and I can now shift my focus on more important things, like my last vacation and the next one.

Oh yes, the next one. After the end of the semester we have a break (actually, I won’t have any classes until the end of my contract) and I was tempted to go back to Bantayan, which was pretty much the most chilled place I’ve ever been. However, I have a list of places that I’ve wanted to visit and can’t in good conscience re-visit countries I’ve been to until I’ve seen all of the places on said list. Whew, that was a mouthful… just imagine grading or editing a version of that sentence written by a 16 year old Korean and you could see why I’m struggling to put words together.

‘The Tell Tale heart’ shows us what’s the care hypersensitivity. That spreads out at the Bronze Age. At that time, class society was started at first. Peoples have felt stress by a king. At Middle Age, peoples felt stress in other way. From that time money had the position that is king of the world. Peoples want a lot of money and rich. In the way, peoples felt stress that was occurred for their fault. This phenomenon had been going on 1941.

Take that, add four or five other paragraphs like it, and multiply by 150. Personally, I’m pleased that I had the self-control to not write “WHAT THE F**K ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” in the margin. On a side note, this particular anonymous student used the term “hypersensitivity” 12 times in five paragraphs and never once explained what it means or how it pertains to the story. Okay, I’ve got that off my chest and can now clear my head and move on. But where to go from here?

Islands. I need to get off of this metaphoric island that is my job and onto a real tropical one. Truthfully, if I had money I never would have left the last island. In Santa Fe, Bantayan life slowed down to less than a crawl. My days consisted of walking on the beach, swimming, reading, reading, reading, drinking cold San Miguels, and hanging out with the locals and expats. As much as I want to go back to this place I realize I can walk on the beach, swim, read, and drink somewhere else. So now I am reading up on another quiet island called Phu Quoc which will allow me to cross the final “must visit” destination off my list: Vietnam.

I hope that none of this island talk has led anyone to believe I was going to actually wrap up the Philippines. It’s not happening this day because I want to do Santa Fe justice. I have to do the Onde Inn justice. I must do Leon Uris justice. And most importantly, I have to honor the memory of two hogs. I just can’t pay proper tribute until I’m fully recovered from the trauma of reading those essays, which might require a quiet evening and a bottle of wine. In fairness I should say that not all of them were that confusing… some of them actually made sense. A few of them were very interesting. However, the majority of them fried my head to an extent where I’m nearly forget English-ee. Now that I’m done with them forever I can finally get back to the island… just not today.