"Beard watching."
The title of this entry is a quote from Obamnis, one of my Level 1 students, when I asked the class what activities made them feel happy or relaxed. Just as I was imagining him staring intently at pictures of Santa Claus for hours on end, he repeated himself and I realized that he was referring not to human facial hair, but to feathered animals that are often capable of flight. Laughter and a brief pronunciation lesson followed.
Three weeks into the semester, I'm thoroughly enjoying my classes and all of the students in them. There are a few old familiar faces in my Level 2 class, and a lot of people who are ready and willing to ask crucial questions or step forward when I need volunteers. One of the returning students has really come out of her shell since last semeser, and if she can practice good study habits for the next several weeks, she'll have no trouble passing. It's encouraging to see students grow and develop so greatly, and it makes for much more interesting classes.
This semester's Level 1 class, however, deserves special attention. It's a relatively small class, consisting of one student from Palestine, one from Pakistan, one from China, and the rest from Mexico, Honduras, Cuba, and various South American countries. In addition to the aforementioned (if occasionally unintentional) bits of humor, they show remarkable chemistry, often asking each other questions to elicit conversation, urging quiet classmates to speak up, and giving encouragement to those who lack confidence. They aren't afraid to broach controversial or thought-provoking topics, either - we've already discussed Donald Trump, world peace, and interracial and interfaith marriages, and I have no doubt that more such discussions will follow. They delivered some very strong and spirited group presentations about traditional holidays in their home countries on Thursday, which they spruced up with videos such as this Saudi commercial for Ramadan. I am not and almost certainly never will be a Muslim, but the acts of kindness in the video were very moving to watch, and I think fewer people would regard Muslims with suspicion and distrust if they saw this side of Islam more often.
And if anyone who reads this wants to accuse me of having sympathy for a religion and/or cultural group that is wholly undeserving of sympathy, kindly remove yourself from my friends list. All of the Muslims I've met in the United States have been friendly, well-meaning, peace-loving people who are trying to live their lives as best they know how, and I'm not going to tell them that their path is wrong simply because I follow a different path. That, dear readers, is what it means to be tolerant.
In other work-related news, things are going rather well. I've been revising tests and course guidelines (i.e. instructor cheatsheets) when I'm not in class, and have tentatively staked out a desk I can use to keep office hours, grade papers, and take care of administrivia in the afternoons. All four of the permanent full-time positions in my program have been posted, and I've applied for every one of them, so all I need to do now is wait and see how many clones of myself I'll need to make.
The storage unit I've been using since I moved back to Houston raised its rates this month, so in the interests of saving money and consolidating all of my belongings as I prepare for an inevitable move, I've been selling off a lot of things I no longer need. Half Price Books gave me $33 for a box of old textbooks and anthologies, $8 of which I immediately spent on a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy (which I started reading, but came nowhere close to finishing, back when Dannan and I were roommates). I still have quite a few books left to sell, and I've also decided to divest myself of my AD&D accessories - I have a lot of fond memories of 2nd Edition (and Spelljammer in particular, which is now in Garan's tender care), but I don't expect to find anyone else who plays or has played it in the foreseeable future. If and when I start role-playing again, it looks like I'll be playing either Pathfinder or 5th Edition, unless my group has a taste for exotic and less-known tabletop RPGs. I'm also going to make another attempt to sell off my Magic cards, which I've used only once since I got back from South Korea. Most of them will be worth slightly less than their weight in dirt, but I have at least one that will fetch a high price.
Things I will be keeping include my PS4, for which I purchased No Man's Sky about three weeks ago. It's almost unfathomably vast: with over 18 quintillion planets to explore, we wouldn't see everything the game has to offer even if everyone on Earth started playing the game and each player discovered 2 billion unique planets. The planets themselves take quite some time to explore, as I learned when I spent more than 8 hours gallivanting around my starting planet - a temperate world rich in forests and Chrysonite and populated by a variety of different lifeforms - and still didn't come anywhere close to discovering everything on it (as evinced by the fact that there was one lifeform I never saw). The game rewards exploration with units (i.e. money) and new recipes for weapon, suit, and ship upgrades, though the size of your personal and ship inventories puts a strict limit on how quickly you can raise money until you're able to afford suit capacity upgrades and larger ships. Aside from that, the only story in the game is the story that you as the player create through your travels. Within the first minute of starting, the game lets you choose to either follow the packaged plot or explore freely, and I've been using the loose guidance of the plot to amass a small fortune, build and fuel a warp drive for my ship, and learn more than 300 words of various alien languages, which has allowed me to become engaged to a Vy'keen I've never met. I'm not sure if I'll still be playing the game months from now, but right now, it's a good way to lose myself in a vast, alien universe when I have nothing more important I need to do.
Work on the novel continues irregularly. Almost all of the ideas are there; it's just a matter of figuring out the order in which things happen and then making them real by putting fingers to keyboard. The creative impulse is an exciting thing.
At the moment, however, I am most excited about next Saturday, when Amy and I will travel to Austin for Wizard World Comic Con. I look forward to wearing the costume I put together, which I think will please one of the special guests. Rest assured, dear readers, that plenty of pictures will be taken that day.
Three weeks into the semester, I'm thoroughly enjoying my classes and all of the students in them. There are a few old familiar faces in my Level 2 class, and a lot of people who are ready and willing to ask crucial questions or step forward when I need volunteers. One of the returning students has really come out of her shell since last semeser, and if she can practice good study habits for the next several weeks, she'll have no trouble passing. It's encouraging to see students grow and develop so greatly, and it makes for much more interesting classes.
This semester's Level 1 class, however, deserves special attention. It's a relatively small class, consisting of one student from Palestine, one from Pakistan, one from China, and the rest from Mexico, Honduras, Cuba, and various South American countries. In addition to the aforementioned (if occasionally unintentional) bits of humor, they show remarkable chemistry, often asking each other questions to elicit conversation, urging quiet classmates to speak up, and giving encouragement to those who lack confidence. They aren't afraid to broach controversial or thought-provoking topics, either - we've already discussed Donald Trump, world peace, and interracial and interfaith marriages, and I have no doubt that more such discussions will follow. They delivered some very strong and spirited group presentations about traditional holidays in their home countries on Thursday, which they spruced up with videos such as this Saudi commercial for Ramadan. I am not and almost certainly never will be a Muslim, but the acts of kindness in the video were very moving to watch, and I think fewer people would regard Muslims with suspicion and distrust if they saw this side of Islam more often.
And if anyone who reads this wants to accuse me of having sympathy for a religion and/or cultural group that is wholly undeserving of sympathy, kindly remove yourself from my friends list. All of the Muslims I've met in the United States have been friendly, well-meaning, peace-loving people who are trying to live their lives as best they know how, and I'm not going to tell them that their path is wrong simply because I follow a different path. That, dear readers, is what it means to be tolerant.
In other work-related news, things are going rather well. I've been revising tests and course guidelines (i.e. instructor cheatsheets) when I'm not in class, and have tentatively staked out a desk I can use to keep office hours, grade papers, and take care of administrivia in the afternoons. All four of the permanent full-time positions in my program have been posted, and I've applied for every one of them, so all I need to do now is wait and see how many clones of myself I'll need to make.
The storage unit I've been using since I moved back to Houston raised its rates this month, so in the interests of saving money and consolidating all of my belongings as I prepare for an inevitable move, I've been selling off a lot of things I no longer need. Half Price Books gave me $33 for a box of old textbooks and anthologies, $8 of which I immediately spent on a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy (which I started reading, but came nowhere close to finishing, back when Dannan and I were roommates). I still have quite a few books left to sell, and I've also decided to divest myself of my AD&D accessories - I have a lot of fond memories of 2nd Edition (and Spelljammer in particular, which is now in Garan's tender care), but I don't expect to find anyone else who plays or has played it in the foreseeable future. If and when I start role-playing again, it looks like I'll be playing either Pathfinder or 5th Edition, unless my group has a taste for exotic and less-known tabletop RPGs. I'm also going to make another attempt to sell off my Magic cards, which I've used only once since I got back from South Korea. Most of them will be worth slightly less than their weight in dirt, but I have at least one that will fetch a high price.
Things I will be keeping include my PS4, for which I purchased No Man's Sky about three weeks ago. It's almost unfathomably vast: with over 18 quintillion planets to explore, we wouldn't see everything the game has to offer even if everyone on Earth started playing the game and each player discovered 2 billion unique planets. The planets themselves take quite some time to explore, as I learned when I spent more than 8 hours gallivanting around my starting planet - a temperate world rich in forests and Chrysonite and populated by a variety of different lifeforms - and still didn't come anywhere close to discovering everything on it (as evinced by the fact that there was one lifeform I never saw). The game rewards exploration with units (i.e. money) and new recipes for weapon, suit, and ship upgrades, though the size of your personal and ship inventories puts a strict limit on how quickly you can raise money until you're able to afford suit capacity upgrades and larger ships. Aside from that, the only story in the game is the story that you as the player create through your travels. Within the first minute of starting, the game lets you choose to either follow the packaged plot or explore freely, and I've been using the loose guidance of the plot to amass a small fortune, build and fuel a warp drive for my ship, and learn more than 300 words of various alien languages, which has allowed me to become engaged to a Vy'keen I've never met. I'm not sure if I'll still be playing the game months from now, but right now, it's a good way to lose myself in a vast, alien universe when I have nothing more important I need to do.
Work on the novel continues irregularly. Almost all of the ideas are there; it's just a matter of figuring out the order in which things happen and then making them real by putting fingers to keyboard. The creative impulse is an exciting thing.
At the moment, however, I am most excited about next Saturday, when Amy and I will travel to Austin for Wizard World Comic Con. I look forward to wearing the costume I put together, which I think will please one of the special guests. Rest assured, dear readers, that plenty of pictures will be taken that day.