A Travelogue and (occasional) Sketchblog
So here I am, finally in China. Sounds like a strange sentiment for someone who’s been living in the country for, already, the better part of a year, but it’s finally happened, along with much else since my last post.
The last stretch of my employment at Aston were a bit of a rush. The last [...]
I get listless at the end of things. I enter into a state of fugue a little earlier than I’d wish for, otherwise. I find myself with an overriding sense of there being little point to starting new projects on account of time or logistics; as far as I can see, I’ll just be packing [...]
It’s been a bit difficult to fire off entries lately, or at all, really. Things happen so fast here – on a daily basis, for the most part – that stopping to ruminate upon just one thing means I’m probably simultaneously leaving out three or four other things I could be writing about, or I’m [...]
Teaching. It’s… not me. I’ve thought about it for a bit – since I got here, really – and I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that I’ve got a lot of traits and skills that might make me like a teacher, but that’s not exactly my thing. My enthusiasm for the things here that [...]
It’s cold. It’s very very cold. It’s been hovering just above freezing since three days ago and there’s a couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s a damp cold of the likes that gets into your bones and doesn’t get out. Ever. My apartment, I’ve discovered, is little more than a hollow concrete shell [...]
I’m getting itchy. Like… under my skin. I’m getting tired of a bunch of things here – mainly my inability to form connections due to the language barrier, that damnable wall I hit every time I try to forge some new communication with someone, or when I have a question I want to ask but [...]
Somehow, Fried Squid-on-a-Plate is less appetizing than Fried Squid-on-a-Stick. Nevertheless:
Things have been quiet out of me lately because, in the last week or two, I’ve slipped into something of a state of normalcy. I work slightly irregular hours over the week, do my two 8 hour shifts on the weekends, then hide in my apartment [...]
…in my stomach, as we speak.
Which brings me to my next point:
I created life today. Not much of it, but after a bit of nagging, I managed to wrangle a new frying pan out of the powers that be at my school. The previous one both sucked as a cooking implement AND seemed to be [...]
I’ve discovered, recently, that 6 hours of sleep is an inefficient method of getting the requisite energy for teaching 6 hours of classes the next day. In fact, I have discovered, the energy to activity ratio is hardly 1:1. This, sadly, made today and yesterday a time wherein it, as they say, “sucked to be [...]
I ran into this a few weeks ago and only got around to watching it now:
(includes Tom Waits anecdote, be forewarned)
(It came highly recommended from a webcomic artist I enjoy)