It seems fitting, in light of the numbers, to recall a year which has passed with blinding speed.
- I have flown, driven, or bussed almost 10,000 miles.
- I drink Nescafe on a daily basis.
- I still miss good beer, avocado-smothered burgers, real fries and Thai food. But the longing has lessened.
- I still miss home. One of my students asked me how long it will have been by the time I go back. Two years, I said. His face dropped--respect? disbelief? a brief admission of my insanity? That's a long time, he said. Yeah, I nodded slowly, not really smiling. It is a long time. And some little sensation of home--apple crisp, the pond, and a smile--flitted through me, and immediately, right there in the classroom, I could have started balling like an infant. Could have. But somehow averted it and didn't.
- I can detect a yabancı from twenty yards away.
- I have been conditioned into Izmir's general modesty about clothing and am scandalized when I see the rare excess of thigh, or a tank top displaying a tattooed shoulder, or (this only happened one time) a white dress through which one can clearly determine a thong.
- In general I have less pride. I'm no longer overwhelmed with sadness or embarrassment at being an obvious fool, with clearly limited communication skills. I just laugh, smile, draw a picture or point to a word in my dictionary and somehow manage to get by.
- In general I have more pride. My presence as a teacher has grown tremendously. I will be a good teacher, dammit. If that means that I play charades or use my horrible art skills, or embarrass myself otherwise to convey the meaning of verbs, adjectives or nouns, so be it. But they will realize that I am giving it my all.
- Either I can bullshit better, or I understand English more than I did before. Nine months ago I couldn't tell a grammar lie to save my life. In fact, I repeatedly fell on my face with horrifying clarity. Three days ago one of my students asked me why "Six bed dorm room" had no plural "s" on "bed." I don't fucking know! I looked at it for less than a second--"Because 'six bed' is an adjective here and there are special rules for plural when a noun is an adjective." She nodded, pacified: The guru had delivered a satisfactory answer. But sure enough, I checked a Wikipedia entry later and buried amidst horrible linguistics jargon I found a bit about compound adjectives having special rules for plural. But I'd never studied it before...
- I'm learning how to relax. Balancing my intense work ethic is the fierce determination to sit on a beach and do nothing productive for six or seven hours. In university, I couldn't have such a simple separation of church and state, as it were. Work and fun constantly bled into each other. But especially over the past couple months, I've been able to establish boundaries.
- I can't change my students. They've grown up in an intensely patriarchal society and women are here where America was in (get ready for a huge, over-generalization that is very likely FALSE because I wasn't even alive and can't really know about...) the 1960s. I haven't had that many problems but there is the occasionally open, mocking, sexist student who finds the picture of the female pilot or female chef amusing. Or the students' general repulsion by Chinese and Japanese food. Or their claims that Indians are dirty and Bollywood films have strange dancing. What can I do? Isms (racism, sexism, age-ism) exist and I can't single-handedly eradicate them from my classroom. I just roll my eyes, or raise my eyebrow, and move on with whatever I was doing.
- I have even less of an idea of "what I'm going to do when I grow up" than I did before, but this year has shown me that I'm going to age faster than I thought I would.
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