June 29, 2019 Twenty-Five Tips for Twenty-Five Years Recently, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday, and coincidentally, my first birthday in the states in three years. It was weird to say the least, realizing all that had happened in the last three hundred and sixty-five days. My twenty-fourth year was jam packed: living abroad, visiting home, traveling around the island of Taiwan, my first Chinese New Year, moving home, and so much more in between all of the aforementioned.
June 8, 2019 New Mental Push-Ups It’s Friday, April 26th. My alarm goes off at 4:30 AM, and I rise out of bed rather easily because this isn’t my first time getting up before the sun peaks above the horizon. I throw on my Aldi work t-shirt, a pair of beat up black jeans, and make sure my hair is tied back and I am relatively alert. Then I put on a podcast and go to make breakfast.
June 1, 2019 Copacetic Clare Tapping my foot against the tile floor, I checked the clock adjacent to the door. 2:58. Despite the exciting video that Mrs. Namira had put on during psychology, time was moving slower than sloths. And the more the narrator droned on about Sigmund Freud, the sleepier I got.
May 25, 2019 The Great Divide On the curb outside of Pine Elementary School, Annabelle sat tying her shoelaces. Her hair remained in the braids her mother had put in earlier that day. Over her shoulders, her backpack carried more textbooks than the day before, but for a rather exciting reason: it was the last day of fifth grade.
May 11, 2019 The Power of Words As children, we spend much of our days dreaming. We wake up, daydreaming about last night’s fantasies of candy houses and fairy tales. During class, our mind wanders away to worlds unknown and situations unseen, thinking of another time. And then, we return to our slumber, to our special worlds that only we know, until we have to wake and reenter reality.
May 4, 2019 What Friends Are For It’s weird to think that a little under two months ago, I was living in Taiwan still working as an English teacher. And now I am in Florida, working and mostly settled into a new pattern and a new set of routines. While so much has changed, I was recently reminded that really, when it comes down to it not that much has altered.
January 23, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: Health is Wealth When I came to Taiwan, I was fresh out of working job that involved manual labor, sometimes longer than eight hours a day and six days a week. In a word, I was exhausted. I spent the two weeks I gave myself off from the job laying around, catching up on all the things I didn’t have time to do when I was under the blazing sun. And like in years past, I seemed to gain back all that I had lost during the ten weeks I worked, and then some. And then couldn’t shake it off me.
January 13, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: How to Be Happy When I arrived in Taiwan in 2016 the second time, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I was all dimples at training when they explained the more tedious details of our duties as teachers. I grinned as we drove around Taipei, checking out the sights, getting our medical tests done so we could get health insurance, and I even cracked a smile when I moved into my apartment and ran some numbers to budget.
January 9, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: The Buzz About Buxibans Not less than twenty-four hours after touching down in Taipei the second time, I was sitting in a lecture hall among forty other men and women. Some of them were the same age as I was, while others were older with far more teaching credentials than I had. Exhaustion filled me, mostly because I’d spent much of the night chatting with my roommate and one of my now good friends, Rona, after she arrived as well. We awaited our training leaders to start what would be a week’s worth of learning how to teach and more about the HESS curriculum.
January 6, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: Blank Slate I’ve always loved travel, and my vacation in Taiwan in the spring of 2016 was a game changer. I can still remember the goosebumps I felt across my skin as we descended into Taoyuan Airport in Taipei. The first country I ever visited in Asia, and definitely not the last. Stepping off the plane, it was one of the only times in my life I felt completely anonymous. Everywhere I turned, Mandarin Chinese covered the signs and people spoke words I didn’t understand. Even today, I don’t understand everything entirely.
