Cool things.

It seems I’m not a very faithful blogger, posting only when the mood strikes me, but I have reason to post so infrequently. Not because I’m down in the dumps—-really, I’m not. I’m on a great upward swing in my teaching career and am carving out a path for myself in which I feel confident and calm. This past week I’ve been wrapped up in creating a film of my class and just this morning we had our Premiere.

This first half of the year, we’ve been studying ancient India and in the last three or so weeks, we’ve been working on The Ramayana, the story about Rama and Sita and their great love, separation, and reunion. It’s a bit like the story of me and Dennis when I was in Brazil, minus the ten-headed demon, a talking monkey, and all the other stuff. So the kids had to memorize a bunch of lines, we filmed them, and then Dennis gave up his entire Sunday to edit it all together so I could preview it at school on Monday to make sure it worked. It did, of course, and this morning at 8:35, I walked into a room full of parents who were eagerly awaiting the screening. My kids were jittering with nervous energy, excited (or not) to see themselves on the screen, and when it was all said and done, I think both the kids and the parents were happy. BIG exhale.

Now it’s onto China and sadly, I know nothing about it. So this vacation, I will be studying up on the basics—something like a thousand or so years of history—so that I can share it with my students when we come back from break. I’m sure, because it always happens this way, I’ll freak out after the first week because I’ll realize just how little I know and how much effort it will take to teach the kids, but, like I’ll good teachers, I’ll do my best and hope they pick up at least a little of what I lay down.

It’s hard to believe this is the last week of school before winter holidays. The week before the end of school in Brazil I think things felt a little more calm—kids started trickling out of school to go on extended vacations with their families (even though the break was already a month long) and we wrapped up major projects and whatnot. I feel as though this week has come upon us too suddenly, as if I will be cut off mid-sentence and made to wait two weeks before being able to finish.

An interesting thing happened on the train today, something that brought me back to Brazil in a very funny way. At Grand Central, I boarded the 7 train to take me back home. I sat down across from the German equivalent of Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Chris Elliot, and a very pretty Ralph Fiennes (not that Ralph Fiennes isn’t pretty, but this guy on the train was too pretty, almost impossibly pretty. Not hot, mind you, but disturbingly pretty.) They blabbed back and forth in German the whole time and I sat staring at them, mostly to figure out which actors they most closely resembled so I could write about them later on the blog. It occurred to me after a while that I was staring at them. I guess that means I’m not aware when I’m staring, but that’s beside the point. It struck me that I was staring at them because their language caught my attention. That I noticed them based on their German made me then drift off into the Land of Celebrity Look-Alikes, and then it occurred to me that I had been in the exact same situation on trains in Brazil, but on the other side.

This is not to say that people stared at me in Brazil because they were trying to figure out which celebrity I look like. That’s actually impossible because I don’t look like anyone. But on the train in Sao Paulo, trying to get from Estacao Tiete out to Avenida Paulista (where the closest Starbucks was, of course) I can’t tell you how many people stared at our group of English speakers. I used to get a kick out of how my language called attention to people on SP trains, and how I felt so different and obvious. Like I was in a fishbowl of sorts. I never really considered what it was the people were thinking while staring, only that they were staring. I used to feel insulted almost, and I remember calling Brazil a staring culture. I remember feeling eyes rest on me because I thought I was different and that didn’t sit easy with me.

But tonight, when I caught myself staring, I smiled. I smiled because I finally knew about the staring. I wasn’t staring because I thought these four guys were different. Their language had triggered for me other thoughts and I stared while lost in those other thoughts. Nevermind the fact that two of them had severe underbites and that the other two were wearing the exact same army green jacket. I found myself on the other side of the coin tonight. How interesting it is that language is the thing that got me there.