06:20 am greencastle, july 5; 07:20 pm taipei, july 5

...so almost half the stuff that i wrote on my hand rubbed off as i neglected to write a post until now. uhh...ah, well. i can remember all but two things, which were small and (hopefully) not extremely significant.

my first day of class was yesterday--teaching, that is. actually, yesterday i was just a t.a., and it was pretty cool. in fact, the normal teacher is this awesome canadian girl. she doesn't speak any chinese (you know, besides a few generic phrases, such as thanks, okay, bye, etc.), but she knows how to work with kids extremely well. she looks korean or something, but i didn't ask, and like a junior or senior in college. we were chatting, and she thought i was in college (not the first to be so confused, but the youngest). well, we were both mistaken; she's 28, has been teaching for a few years, and this is her second summer teaching (at least poetry, our class) here in taiwan; and, of course, i'm still a high schooler. *sigh*. wish i were as good with kids as she is; today, when i had to lead a conversation "class" of two on my own, things went extremely slowly. i kept finding myself at a loss for stuff about which to takl. see...they practically refused to speak any english at all, these two girls that i was teaching (twelve and eleven years old), and they kept trying to talk to eachother in chinese. but what ended up happening very often was them saying something in chinese, me asking them to describe it in english, and them drawing it on the white board...ah, well. i'll try to think of something better for tomorrow. uhh...so not a lot of interesting stuff happened there. but yesterday's class was fun--the poetry, that is. and that notebook that i had to keep? well, daisy showed me somebody else's old one so's to give me an idea of what to write myself, but that other one was just some notes on a chapter of an abridged frankenstein...so i ended up keeping something of a log of what happened. well...i'll see if daisy likes it sometime soon--before thursday, that is. meh. uhh...really nothing much else of interesting to say on that subject.

oh, wait. the elevators that bring me up to the fourth floor of the building in which the cram school resides are barely describably cool. that is, all four walls are covered in mirrors. i think it's a great touch.

later on yesterday, (as gus comes back from a four hour distraction, chock full of fun, food, and firefox) my mom and i were picked up by one of her old grad school friends, who then grabbed another one, and they had a thing at the first's place. well, the son of another friend also came along; ben. ben's about...uhh...eight years older than me? six? something between that? yeah, i think eight's about right. well...these people were all definitely very cool. turns out the one that had us over to his place for dinner and general hanging out is a consultant (or something that makes a ton of money; really nice apartment and an extremely western-styled, new lexus), and his brother does acupuncture. so, of course, all of us got a bit of advice from him, and he had these really small circular sticky pad things with little ball bearings of some sort (like a millimeter in diameter) that he put on certain acupuncture points on hands/arms after a bit of blood pressure inspection and diagnosis. hah...not surprisingly, he says i'm overworked and should try to have better sleep habits. well...at least it's nothing unexpectedly bad. interesting, though. another one of my mom's old classmates is now working for a software company of some sort, currently designing a graphics program--which is very, very cool. shortly after i saw it booted up, i thought, "oh, man, tyler would flip out if he saw this." it must be pc and mac compatible, at least, because he had a dell (running, mostly), but the interface for the entire program was mac style--the red, yellow, and green buttons in the top right, silver and rounded-corners theme, file/folder tree just like preview or something. needless to say, it worked really well, too. to use this program, one simply grabs a folder of pictures and chooses a style--then they all go by as a slideshow, scrolling or panning or whatever as per that layout. wow, though. just a few: sheets hung up to dry, as transparent as you want, with the pictures on the sheets, and a picture of your choice in the background; camera inside a 3-d cube, panning around with pictures on each wall (you can change the color of the cube and, presumably, the margins); pictures growing from the center and fading in while zooming, covering up old ones, still smoothly flowing off-screen; et multae ceterae. there were hundreds, and they were still designing more--but that's just the pro version. he's also working on a version for the mass public, one with much simpler versions (and far fewer) of the layouts (or whatever you want to call them). oh, all that, and the fact that he had a shortcut to google earth on his desktop impressed me to no end. well...and that, as i later learned, he has four children, one of whom (the oldest, a son) has been blind since birth, but is still wanting to go into computer sciences. amazing.

lesse...and ben? he's very cool. i met his father last summer when i was in california. ben's a sociology major from berkeley, but came to taiwan as a christian missionary shortly after school, pledging (or signing on, or agreeing to, i'm not entirely sure what to call it) two years--and 22 of those months've passed. he kept talking like he's really enjoying his work, though, so that's good; he spends most of his time studying the bible and preparing stuff to teach youngsters (read: high school and under) about god, faith, and everything. we talked to a fair extent about religion (of course), but it wasn't really awkward or anything; when i did with john, briefly, it rather was, but this time, it was more like talking to mark or jeff about religion; they're cool and have their beliefs, totally willing to share and back, but accepting of others' and willing to actually discuss. nobody like...that *one* thread long ago in the forum, which perhaps only john and tyler had ever seen--and i doubt either of them had read through the final post. ah, well...theology is interesting, but to me, it really isn't much more than that. oh, and, of course, ben speaks impeccable english and fluent mandarin--if it weren't for a handful of times in which he asked for the meaning of a word or phrase, i'd say he'd grown up in asia. no accent, either. and--most importantly of all--he has a gmail. unfortunately, he doesn't use it...he's one of the sad few who are wary of the ad filters. *sigh*...well, not a lot that can be done about that.

...and then when i got back to the apartment (you know, at like midnight--just past, though, actually), i discovered a new addition to the immediately present family: carl. carl's barney's younger older brother--that is, he has two (julian, the other), and carl is the younger of the two; middle child. so barney' like a year and a half behind me, but carl's about two up on me. goes to school in california or something; i think that's what it is, but i'm not positive. perhaps...also berkeley? not sure, don't put any money on that--unless it's against me. but so we ended up going upstairs (after chatting for a long while with the whole family on the fourth floor) and gaming for a few hours before i came back down to sleep. uhh...smash bros. i was distinctly winning for a long time at the beginning (*cough* more than barney's and carl's kills combined *cough* *cough* and winning the matches *cough*), but then we turned handicaps on...and i hurt a lot. wow...so you realize that when you're at three and marth, and another person is at seven and falcon, a fully charged b-attack does nothing even at 200% damage? about two thirds of the arena; that was it. at three hundred, a single smash attack still couldn't do it. fortunately, that only lasted two or three rounds--but only because i suicided (my character, that is...) to be the first to die. by that time, i was getting very, very few kills, and carl's kills were almost worryingly approaching mine--almost.

...which about ends last sleep-wake cycle. today (yes, it's still just a few before tomorrow!)...not a lot happened. met my mom for lunch, but that fell through because it took us so long to finally get out of place (*cough cough*). wait...no, that smash bros. ended up happening this morning; yesterday, when we went upstairs, the three of us just ended up doing each our own separate things on compies (hrm...yeah, sure, that word works.). and my class ended up being pushed back an hour. and it'll be so in the future, too...but just half the delay. meh. not a problem. uhh...oh, then this afternoon, my mom and i went out and got a successful meal in, and i had some extraordinary coconut ice cream. which also happened to come in a coconut. like, full to the brim. very both impressive and enjoyable; i'll definitely have to go back to that restaurant. and...that's pretty much it. two days in one post, but two of the (probably) least filled. nice, though. nice.