I Thought College Was Over

It was three years ago exactly, to this day, that I graduated college. I didn't even go to the ceremony, so glad was I to have finally obtained my degree after six and a half years of consistent screwing around with classes I didn't need. I just went home after class and mentally closed that chapter in my life.

Strange, but...sometimes I don't feel like that much has changed. I still feel like a sick and starving college student working menial jobs and spending 8 hours a day on a college campus...eating Ramen noodles for every meal...and questioning if what I'm doing now is really gonna be all that useful 10 years from now..

...LOL!

The Ultimate Cat Food Serendipity

There is a cat that lives nearby my apartment. I've sort of befriended it, which means it thinks it can follow me around meowing. Like Siamese cats, Cambodian cats have very loud, obnoxious voices and are very vocal towards humans. So, to get it to shut up, I've been feeding it baby cat food left over from that one time when I had the baby sparrow.

I don't have a balcony-proof bowl, so I put the baby cat food into an old piece of tupperware and left it on the balcony for the cat to consume at will.

Now for you to understand why the next part happens, you need to know that the landlady has a maid who cleans up the balconies sometimes. Although this means I have less work to do myself, the maid inevitably comes at 7:45 in the morning, just as I am leaving for work. And there is no fixed schedule--sometimes she doesn't show up for weeks, and sometimes she shows up on two consecutive days. Then I have to either step all over her while she's scrubbing the floor, or else wait inside the apartment till she goes away. It's always very inconvenient.

This morning, I discovered her bent over on my balcony at 7:45 as I was trying to get downstairs. Then, as I rounded the corner at the bottom of the steps, I saw that she had commandeered my tupperware full of catfood. It was sitting with her other belongings. I wasn't sure if she intended to steal it or not, but I, for one, wasn't about to let it happen.

Running late for school already, and unwilling to climb back over her to get inside my house, I took the cat food with me to school.

I probably looked fairly ridiculous carrying a lidless piece of tupperware half-filled with cat food five blocks to school, but that didn't really occur to me at the time. I was saving that food from an untimely disappearance, dammit! My world was back in order, and nothing else mattered.

Of course this meant I was stuck carrying baby cat food around to each of my classes.

I found it made a pretty good conversation piece, and had students write about why a teacher would bring baby cat food to school. Certain that I would use it to illustrate a point, they developed elaborate theories as to why it was sitting on my desk. It was pretty funny when they found out that, like my propensity to walk around barefoot, there wasn't actually any reason for it.

Baby cat food is also pretty good for making people leave me alone. Case in point: I was sitting around during break and a student came up to me demanding "English practice with a foreigner".

Me: OK, but I charge for it.

Him: Are you a student or a teacher here?

Me: I said, You have to pay me if you want English Practice. No free lessons.

Him: I bet you're a teacher!

Me: I charge for English lessons, OK?

Him: So how long have you been in Cambodia?

Me: * ! * Would you like some American food? It's REALLY GOOD.

I also found out that cat food can be used as a disciplinary measure. Like lumps of coal, it was distributed to noisier members of my "special" class, who were then forced to eat it. In all, I'd say it was pretty serendipitously wonderful.

The glorious adventure of the baby cat food came to a somewhat inglorious end when, on my way home, I inexplicably dropped the tupperware and the little pellets spilled all over the parking lot of Sacombank.

Day 25: Why I Will Never Be Able to Hold Down A Real Job

I regret to inform you that it is once again exam week. I had to fail a student today, who blithely decided it was time to pull out his cell phone and start flipping through it, mid-exam. He said his brother had sent him a text message. Despite the fact that I repeatedly said never to do this for any reason, and despite the fact that he signed a waiver that says being caught with anything that can be used for cheating will give you an automatic zero, he still thought I was going to think this was OK. It wasn't.

I told you how women in authority are.

Now I have lots and lots of papers to grade over the next 48 hours. But lest you think I am going to complain about that, I'd actually like to tick off a few reasons why I will never be able to hold down a job in the real world, or even work at another institution.

• I have no "boss" per se, other than the head of department, and our interactions are generally limited to him asking if I'd like to cover another class
• I have a three hour lunch break, guaranteed
• I often start 10 minutes late and/or leave early, and it doesn't matter as long as I teach them what they need to know
• I control my own curricula beyond the requisite textbooks--and if I don't have any creative ideas, I can just go straight out of the book
• I can call in sick at the last minute and not catch any hell for it
• I can enforce or not enforce whatever rules I want
• I can gab away for 90 minutes about absolutely nothing and call it a lesson
• I can force people to write outlines with titles like "Monsters: An Identification Guide" or "Bombs: We Can Prevent Them from Exploding"
• We can do zany things like draw pictures, put on plays, and hold classroom olympics
• I don't have to have to call anyone "Sir" or "Ma'am" or tolerate any rudeness
• Paperwork consists of signing the attendance sheet (which is also how they know to pay me for working that day)
• "Going home early" is an incentive to make people work harder, faster.

So you can see why I sometimes ask myself: How will I ever be able to hold down another job?

The answer: I WON'T.

Now, if only I could get more ink from that durn bureaucracy...

Close Encounters of the Cambodian Kind

I have two favorite restaurants in Phnom Penh. By strange coincidence, both of them are blue: The Blue Pumpkin and The Blue Dolphin.

The Blue Dolphin is a family/bar-girl run restaurant with cheap delicious food. It's not air-conditioned, but they have comfy wicker chairs, chocolate shakes, free water, and the girls who work there are really nice. It's really close to my house, too.

The Blue Pumpkin is farther away, but is really chic. You can go in with your laptop and work for hours and hours in the air-conditioned, free-WiFi, comfy-white-couched environment. The problem is that you get charged Western prices for all the food (some of which, like the Pumelo-pork salad, is worth it).

The people at Blue Pumpkin, by the way, hate me. Every time I go in, I always wind up doing something douchey: I break a glass, I leave dirty footprints on the couch, I buy a glass of water and then sit there for seven hours without buying anything else, I start fights over the cost of their food, my friend falls asleep and snores loudly, etc. Sometimes, I annoy them simply because they think they've got me figured out.

Them: "I know! You want cinnamon ice-cream, right? Like how you've ordered for the last 27 days in a row!"

Me: "LOL!!! Today I want PASSION FRUIT ice cream!" And that's annoying of me. I am truly the Blue Pumpkin's problem child.

So, I decided to give them a break from my demanding, contrarian ways and hit up the Blue Dolphin instead. In doing so, I got a lesson on the Cambodian concept of personal space. Or lack thereof.

I came in with a mass of final exams. For some time, I contentedly sat and graded them in the cool, fan-generated breeze.

Suddenly, I became aware of a green-shirted presence.

Looking up, I saw that one of the girls had, like an angel of death, materialized over my left shoulder. She was intently watching me work.

There was nothing left to do but acknowledge her presence.

This made it impossible to work, but. . .okaaay. . .

Then, for reasons still unfathomable to me, she bent down, hugged me, and proceeded to rest her hands more or less permanently on my shoulders. Her eyes were fixed on my exams, and I was trapped like a rat.

Eventually, after I crammed the exams back in their envelope and began pointedly drinking my glass of water, she wandered away. But I didn't dare take the exams back out. Not a chance.

Because grading English exams is the most fascinating thing anyone could possibly do--except when you're the teacher that has to grade them!*

*In front of an adoring audience to boot...