coco-latte

Currently drinking:

Coconut milk in coffee. WOW! A perfect dairy-free alternative to cow's milk or cream... and it's delish! Like a coconut latte!

ESL kids say the cutest things!

Today I parted my hair a different way, and a particularly blonde streak was more obvious around my face.

A student asked me, (after conferring in Chinese with his classmates to see if anyone knew how to properly word the question and much giggling) "Teacher, did you paint your hair?"

sitting with grief

We sat together on the dark wood floor, lounging in danceresque stretches, limbs sprawled. Outside, past her balcony, the afternoon slowly lost its light and the room grew shadowy. Her home--their home--was beautiful, comfortable, with painted walls and pretty objects found on trips around the world. To the side of the living room, Japanese sliding doors opened to reveal two bedrooms. Hers was painted a soft lavender and a lamp inside was casting a hazy glow over her bed and the pictures on the walls. The other bedroom was already empty, save for a pile of boxes in the corner.

We had made plans a week ago to hang out yesterday. We are new friends, but have too much in common not to be. I found out when I was almost to her house that her roommate had died on Saturday in the hospital after a short illness. I shrank inside myself on the bus, feeling like I wanted to go home and not see her in her grief--not be touched by the tragedy. I was surprised that she still wanted to see me. I told her she didn't need to entertain me, that I would fully understand if she wanted to cancel our plans, but she said it was okay and would meet me at the subway near her home.

I felt heavy and hesitant. I'd just been expecting an afternoon at the botanical gardens, drinking tea and talking about teaching yoga to kids--sharing ideas and anecdotes. Suddenly, I was being invited into a house where now there was just one, a too-quiet house now half empty, and being asked to sit with a person in deep pain... in shock, probably. Am I good with death? Pain? With comforting someone I hardly know? Should I bring a flower? How would I act? Do I want to think about a dead person all day, in their house? I took a deep breath and realized I could choose to be uncomfortable with the situation, or I could simply sit with her--either listening to her memories of her best friend, or talking about things that are worlds away from here, to draw her attention elsewhere.

We did a little of both. It was sweet and sad. I stayed all afternoon.


It wasn't the day I'd expected, but I'm thankful that I was able to be present for her and hold the space together, remembering and honoring.

are you brave?

A few days ago, my first-graders learned the word "brave" (via a story about firefighters, naturally). I asked some of them, individually, whether or not they are brave--just curious about their answers.

Teacher Elly: Sam, are you brave?
Sam: (stretching and yawning) Um, no.
Teacher Elly: Why don't you feel brave?
Sam: (just shrugs, not at all concerned with the issue of being brave)

I'm puzzled. I have not been a teacher in America or done surveys of Yankee schoolchildren, but from what I know of American kids, being brave is an essential bragging point--whether or not you are actually brave. I ask a few more kids. No luck, no one is brave.

Then I ask Brian. He's a little older and smarter than most of the kids in the class and the other children look up to him. Another recent development in Brian's life is that he has a girlfriend who is also in my class--Sadie. They are 8 years old. And not ashamed--they sit by each other and get all sparkly and smiley when other kids tease them about liking each other. So I thought, maybe Brian would want to come off as brave in front of his sweetie.

Teacher Elly: So Brian, you're brave, right?
Brian: (takes a deep breath and shakes his head vehemently NO!)
Teacher Elly: When do you feel afraid?

At this point, Brian is blushing pink and his eyes are twinkling. He just turns and points at Sadie, affectionately accusing her. He says (nearly hyperventilating) "When I see her....!"

At this point, he loses the ability to communicate in English so he keeps pointing at Sadie, then thumps his hand over his chest quickly, then makes a swooping up and down movement with his hand. (My) translation: When I see Sadie, I get scared, my heart starts beating out of my chest and I feel like I am flying and falling in love.

I (biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn't burst out laughing) told Brian I thought it was actually quite brave of him to tell the whole classroom how he felt.

There are different kinds of people in this world. There are different kinds of brave.

that darn cat

A few weeks ago, I took Olive to get spayed. It was not a happy event for either of us. I wrote this email to my family five days after her surgery. My emails to my family are usually given the subject line "coffee chat" with the date, but this one was named after another drink...


To: Mom and Dad, Grant, Maria, Brittany, and Josef
Date: Friday, September 10, 10:12 AM
Subject: martini-chat


Forget coffee. I need a martini to go with my Olive. Sheesh, what a day.

So after her spay-day (Monday), she came home wearing a blue plastic Elizabethan collar to prevent her from getting at the stitches. And for a day, it was fine... she was too knocked out and drugged up to attempt anything. But clearly, neither I nor the vet had taken into account the fact that Olive can channel Houdini at her will, and that she is more flexible than a Chinese acrobat...

Tuesday night I got home from work and found her, SANS (that means WITHOUT in French, folks!) E-collar, sprawled out on the couch and LICKING away like her belly was an ice cream cone! I squealed, horrified that upon closer inspection I would come face to face with her intestines. She looked up and said, "Really, did you think I was going to wear that fashion disaster on my neck all day? Ha!" Thankfully, everything seemed to have held together and I put the collar back on--she was cursing me the whole time.

Monday and Tuesday night, I slept on the couch with her, because the bed is too high for her to safely jump down from and I wanted to make sure I could help her get water or go to the bathroom. It was like having a newborn, I'd assume, as I was up 3 or 4 times both nights and felt miserable during the days.

Last night, around 9:30, as I was barely conscious after an extremely crazy baby-yoga class (that's a different story, one that I might need coffee before telling!), I noticed that her stitches did not look good. It almost looked like they had been pulled out by tiny, nimble claws! AAAHHH! I scrambled to bundle her up in her carrying bag and run down to the vet clinic (which, conveniently, is located in the strip mall on the first floor of my building) before they closed at ten.

Sho'nuff, she had an infection. The vet said she'd have to stay there overnight so he could re-suture the wound. My heart sank. She hates it in there, and of course hates the vet, and also hates the mongrel-cat they keep as a pet. It's one of those smush-faced cats, nearly the size of a Bengal tiger and shaved like a lion. I'd be terrified of him if I were even a head shorter.

At least I slept well last night, in my own bed and not worrying about her too much.

This morning I went down to pick her up at 10:30, but the nurse said the vet wasn't in until 11:30. I guess I misunderstood... "ten" is shih and "eleven" is shih-i. Silly me!

When I returned at the correct time, the vet went upstairs to get her. The mongrel/tiger/wolverine followed him. For the next 5 minutes, I could hear my baby screeeeaming and crying from upstairs. I had to fight back the tears and the urge to run upstairs and rescue her from the vet and/or his Frankenfeline. What could he be doing?! Re-stitching her last minute without numbing the area first? AAAAH!

He finally brought her down... she was still hollering and her fur was practically snowing down from her terrified body. He explained that he was taking off the bandage. Wow. He told me that she had to leave these stitches in for ten days more (we were supposed to get the old ones out this Monday) and that she may have some "EEE-dem-uh" (how he pronounced "edema") from the procedure. She also got a bigger E-collar, this time in hot orange, so she resembles a wobbly, upturned construction cone.

As soon as we got home, she started trying to get to the stitches. She has a way of sitting, human-like, with her legs out and her body upright, spine curved forward and she can easily reach the stitches both with her paws, and by using the edge of her e-collar to scratch at them. I pet her and played with her string to distract her, but as soon as I stopped, she would attack her wound again. I started to panic, because on Fridays I have to work from 1:30 to 9:00. I envisioned myself coming home to find her ripped apart at her own paws! No!

She calmed down a bit and was resting on the couch when I left, but an hour after work started I was still really worried so I told my boss, who said I should go home immediately to check on her and bring her back with me.

I had twenty minutes between my first two classes. I biked home, first stopping in the vet clinic to pick up a package of pet-diaper-pads (I know... ridiculous) so she could stay in her carrying bag (I know... ridiculous) all day at work where I could keep an eye on her (I know... ridiculous). As I opened the vet's door, a little sausage-pup SHOT out of the door and ran towards the street! Great! I did NOT have time to be at fault for letting someone else's dachsund get flattened by traffic! I took off running after him, all the way across the street and through a parking lot, into a grocery store where he actually found his master! So weird. I ran back, bought the $12 pack of glorified newspapers and hurried up to get Olive. She was still sleeping! Good. I bundled her up, grabbed some food and a water dish, a towel, and put her in her carrying bag in the front basket of my bike. She meowed the whole way to class. I made it back just 4 minutes after my class started--I would've been on time if it weren't for that escaping dog situation!

For the next 90 minutes, from under my desk, she mewed, cried and hissed. As you can imagine, the kids were beyond thrilled and could talk of nothing else, erupting in giggles every time she yowled. I put a board across the front of my desk so she could have a little space, and finally, before my third class, she fell asleep on the towel. She stayed quiet and snoozed from 5:30-9. I let the kids take peeks at her one by one after they finished quizzes, etc.--it was a good motivator. Toward the end of my last class (older students) I let her out and she wandered around the classroom. (I did ask the kids if any of them were allergic... they all said no and even if they were, they were so taken with her that they would've lied, I think! Can you IMAGINE me being able to do that if I were a teacher in the U.S.? Mom? Maria??) After checking out the room, she positioned herself front and center, under the whiteboard, looking disdainfully around at my students. (I think she decided to take the opportunity to job-shadow me). The kids looked up "olive" in the Chinese dictionary and called her "Gan Lan Xiao Jie" (Miss Olive).

Now we're at home; she's sleeping on her blanket on the couch, I have a full belly (hadn't eaten all day!) and it's Friday night. All is well. And despite losing sleep, running around like a chicken with my head cut off and worrying about her all week, I wouldn't trade the little pickle for anything! She's added so much sweetness to my life and I'm honored to take care of this one piece of God's creation.

Happy Friday to all of you,

"olive you" (just mouth the words, you'll get it!) :)

elly

 P

 P.S. (from Sep.28) Olive is totally fine, all healed up, coneless, and back to all her old shenanigans.

je manque...

Being an expat can be wonderful. Over the past two years, I've fallen in love with so many aspects of the lifestyle--the excitement, constantly being challenged and stimulated, the interesting places and people, and so much more. I often feel hypersensitive to the world around me--more aware than I might need to be in a familiar, comfortable environment. Every part of me is straining to understand what's around me, grasping for clues that can help me move through situations where I don't fully understand the language, social cues, traditions, religious beliefs, and gender roles that color the human interactions going on around me.

Accomplishing day-to-day tasks within a foreign environment, even things as small as going to the bank or post office, leave me with a sense of  achievement. And bigger things I've done--like finding and renting an apartment, taking the initiative to meet people and begin friendships, or developing curriculum for preschool yoga classes in a cross-cultural, ESL setting--really make me see how being here has pushed me in a lot of good ways.

However, in the same way that the highs are higher, the lows are also lower. While small things can make me feel accomplished, other small things can totally exhaust/frustrate/infuriate me. Things just take a lot more energy.

All this--both the good and the bad--inevitably wears a person out from time to time! It's when I'm feeling a lot of this extreme up and and down that I feel the most "homesick." Wikipedia says:

Homesickness is the distress or impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from the specific home environment or attachment objects. The term is in origin a loan translation of nostalgia, a learned term coined in Baroque Period medicine. The Oxford English Dictionary describes homesickness as a feeling one has when missing home. Feelings of longing are often accompanied by anxiety and depression. These symptoms may range from mild to severe. Homesickness frequently occurs when one travels and may be exacerbated by unfamiliar environments or foreign cultural contexts. 

Over time, I've come to be able to notice when I'm coming down with a bout of the homesickies, and also have found what cures work best for me when I'm missing my family/home/friends/Iowa/Chicago/the USA/Western Civilization.  So here are my very scientific, tested and guaranteed-to-help... 

TOP FIVE HOMESICKNESS REMEDIES 

in no particular order

1. Books. I spent hours on Saturday wandering around a huge bookstore in Taipei that has the most English books I've seen in place anywhere in Taiwan. I read titles, look at covers, browse pages, and inhale the scent of ink and paper. I float happily from Magazines to Classics to History to Religion to Arts to Health and Fitness to Languages, accumulating a stack in my arms of the books I realize I can't live without. Saturday I left with three books and three magazines. Financially, I justify these purchases as necessary for preserving both my sanity and my intellectual well-being (my day-to-day life does not expose me to higher thought in properly spoken English).

2. Animals. Specifically now, my precious kitten, Olive. However, even before she came to live with me, I loved visiting pet shops or having friendly interaction with other people's pets. Animals are just easier than humans... there's no language barrier or cultural misunderstanding. Animals trustingly invite us into their space and accept us with playfulness, inquisitiveness and sweetness--not seeing what color we are or judging our cultural baggage. I've been delighted by cats for as long as I can remember, and they make familiar companions for me, reminding me of all the pet cats I've had since I was a toddler. I love their mannerisms, the way they move with grace and intention, their independence. Adopting Olive made my house here a home. She follows me around, greets me with sleepy meows when I get home from work, and even does her cat-stretches next to me on my mat while I'm practicing yoga.

3. Yoga. Having had a physical practice for most of my life--whether ballet, running, pilates or yoga--movement and breathing and getting into my body makes me feel more at home than almost anything else. With traveling and moving as much as I have in the past ten years, I've learned to make a nurturing yoga practice a constant. Living out of suitcases--a year here, a year there--doesn't give me a sense of "home base," so I achieve that groundedness by making my body my home. Whether I find myself in the concrete jungle of a city in Taiwan, the frozen prairies of Iowa, or a quiet Costa Rican beach, as I begin to breathe through the fluid movements of my body, I am home.

4. Starbucks. Yes, I know that they are corporate and cliche and everything, and when I'm in the US I go to locally owned, unique coffeeshops. Unfortunately, Taiwan's coffee culture is not quite there yet and there are no other options unless I want to drink something that tastes like cabbage-water. (I will give Taiwan its full deserved glory for having incredible tea, which they grow and produce themselves--they are masters! But I want coffee.) When I go into a Starbuck's, I know what I'm going to get and what it will taste like, and sitting in a Starbuck's anywhere in the world is pretty much a homogenous experience, so I can lose myself in a book and a latte listening to Miles Davis under soft lighting and not have any idea whether I'm in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago or Seoul or Taipei.

5. Skype/Facebook/Email/Blogs/Internet in General. This is an obvious one... I don't know how expats did it 20 years ago before all of this stuff was invented! I love knowing that I'm a few clicks away from communication with my friends and family, news from home, pictures, and anything I'm missing about my culture--from catching up on trashy celebrity gossip to being able to listen to lectures given by professors at my alma mater. I even "shop" at Target(.com) sometimes!

So... are you ever homesick? Even if you live at "home," you can always be nostalgic for another time in your life or other places you've left bits of your heart, or loved ones who are far away. What are your cures?

wind

in the trail of a typhoon, there is wind. typhoon fanapi has blown over taiwan, headed toward the mainland. the swirling rains have passed, but not the winds. my windows rattle and whistle, and from time to time i hear something heavy blow down the street, far below me.

i venture out after being shut in all weekend. the wind pushes and pulls me as i walk, and it's perfect. i am not afraid; i feel comforted by the wind.

wind reminds me of home, where the midwest's open prairies are vulnerable to gusts all year round. in summer, tornadic winds flatten fields, rip ancient trees to splinters and send chickens tumbling across the barnyard. in winter, the bitterly cold wind can make the snow fly from earth to the sky and sculpt twenty-foot high snow dunes overnight.

i stop on the sidewalk, letting the typhoon's winds pick me up, rip my hair out of its ponytail and suck the breath from my lungs. closing my eyes, i ride the wind, weightless. flocks of leaves from distant, unseen trees tap me on the shoulders. aside from the siren-song of the wind, the city is quiet for once. and, except for the faint scent of the pacific ocean which has been carried inland on fanapi's wings, i could be home.