Thursday, December 01, 2005
Christmas carols and roommate troubles
It’s Thursday afternoon, and I have just finished eating lunch and dessert—spaghetti and Principe cookies with hot chocolate. (Marissa, I am addicted to those cookies now, too.)
I was working on my lesson plans for tomorrow, but I think I am done now. I always prepare too much stuff, thinking the students will be able to do a lot more than they really end up doing. It’s better to be over-prepared than under-prepared, but it also shows that I have too high expectations for them, as always…. This week is going better, though. For the next few days we are just going to review some things I have taught so far in preparation for their English exams next week (which I just found out I have to write and administer). That means we are playing games to practice, and everyone always enjoys that (unless their team loses, of course). Luckily, I am quite practiced in playing various English games with children; teaching in Taiwan was fabulous for that.
Today was the first Thursday of the month—the day everyone in the school goes to mass together. We pile up into vans and cars and go to a church that’s under construction. The principal wanted me to sing “Silent Night” today at the end of the service, but I was totally unprepared for this request—what if I don’t really know the words and get stuck halfway? So I said no, that I don’t know all the lyrics. It’s not really true—I know the words to the first verse, but that’s typical of me to be under-confident in myself. Probably singing all by myself into a microphone in front of the entire school and some parents and the priest would’ve made me forget them. I have terrible stage-fright. At my senior recital at college I completely forgot how to play the easiest piece I had, and I sat there at the piano playing the first few measures and then totally blanking. Finally I just played the next song, because I couldn’t remember that one.
I do love to sing the songs with the kids, though. If the kids knew the song already, and if I’d had more warning, I’d have sung it in church today, but I haven’t taught the song yet. I actually really like to sing, even though I don’t sing all that well. (Many of you may know this already.) I am teaching the kids to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” right now. I wanted to get them to do some swing dancing to it, but it might be too much to ask at such a late stage. They are having their posada on Dec. 15 and will be performing various songs then. I am very ambitious and planning to teach them “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” as well. I wish we could do “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (with interjections such as “like a light bulb!”), “Over the River and Through the Woods,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful,” too, but that is just insane.
I can’t believe this is me writing so enthusiastically about Christmas songs. I thought I hated Christmas songs. I guess it’s because back home, once Thanksgiving is over, all you hear on the radio and in stores are Christmas songs, and by the time it’s Christmas I just want to scream if I have to hear “Jingle Bell Rock” one more time. But here in Arandas, I am the only one subjecting people to “Jingle Bell Rock” (at least in English) or “Come All Ye Faithful,” so it’s totally acceptable!
Christmas carols also remind me of the time I went caroling with friends from middle school, and we carried lit candles, and my hair caught on fire while we were singing a song to some old neighbors. They also remind me of high school orchestra gigs playing songs to some old men in a trailer or humiliating ourselves in the center of Park Mall.
But anyway, the kids love singing, and it helps their English. I am having all kinds of crazy ideas for songs to teach them once Christmas is over. For the brief group exercises, I want to teach the Hokey-Pokey, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” They can also learn songs with finger play, like “The Itsy-bitsy Spider,” “Little Cabin in the Woods,” and “Where is Thumbkin.” One of my students brought in a CD of mostly Beatles songs and I am supposing she wants to learn some of them in class. I was listening to them and imagining them performing “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da”—isn’t that strange? All of a sudden these songs take on a whole new meaning if you to teach them to kids. A song I never really liked before turns into something extremely fun.
I find myself dreaming of teaching, or lying in bed after waking up and coming up with some idea for teaching. Today after my nap I was huddled in my blankets (because it’s damned cold in my apartment—northern exposure and absolutely no direct sunlight), and I found myself obsessing about something or other I have to do tomorrow at school. I think after I finish writing this, I’ll draw some pictures for the song posters I have to make, or else I’ll worry so much about them that I won’t be able to sleep well.
Lucky for me this week, I haven’t had to deal with my roommate bringing her friends over in the evenings while I’m trying to work or sleep. Last week I told her that I sometimes need to go to bed at 11, so I’d prefer to have it quiet around here. She had a friend over again one night this week, and they ended up whispering in the living room and then chatting in the stairwell outside the apartment for a long time. I feel kind of bad about it, but the situation is not ideal for either of us….
Some of you may not know that I even had a roommate. The story is that I was too much of a wimp to say no to my boss when she asked if I’d mind if the niece of her associate moved in with me. She was afraid I’d be too lonely living here all by myself. I didn’t feel I could say no because my boss pays for my apartment, and it’s got two bedrooms, and obviously I don’t use one of the bedrooms. I had this feeling like I should forget being nice or feeling bad—it’s in my contract that I get paid housing, so I shouldn’t feel like they’re doing me any huge favors or anything—but I just could not do it. (The term to use in Chinese is precisely buhao yisi, and I’m sorry I can’t translate this, but it’s like I wouldn’t be giving my boss “face.”) I thought, maybe it’ll be good to have someone else here, and maybe she’ll be able to contribute to furnishing the apartment, and maybe I’ll also meet more people through her. It didn’t seem to weigh too heavily that I have had a lot of trouble living with other people in the past, because I’m not an easy person to live with. (As Luis said, knowing how much people can annoy me, I would be better off without a roommate.) I just thought I should be more positive and everything would turn out fine.
When I finally met her and she came to look at the apartment a few weeks ago, I was having a really bad day at school, and she and her friend really got on my nerves. They were running about the apartment and, without even asking if they could enter my bedroom, walked right in and stood out on the balcony and raved about it. It’s not like I wouldn’t have let them into my bedroom, but I found it annoying that they didn’t even think to ask. They also didn’t try to slow down their speech or adjust their language in any way when they realized I couldn’t understand them very well. It did not bode well for me, but I found it even more difficult to say no now that she had seen the apartment and said she liked it a lot and wanted to move in the next day. What do you say? “No, I’ve changed my mind, sorry.” I just couldn’t do it.
I made my bed and now I have to lie in it.
The first week I really thought everything would be fine. She took me to her friends’ apartment nearby, and we hung out. I had lunch with them there a couple times, and we ate out for dinner a couple times. Her friends were a bit crazy, but I had fun talking with them. Her best friend, the girl who came with my roommate the first day, turned out to be very cool about talking with me, and I still enjoy chatting with her when I see her. They are, however, all around 21 years old, students at the teacher-training school, and they seem less mature than my now 20-year-old friend Rocio. This is explained by the fact that this is the first time they’ve lived away from their families, and they are going kind of wild. They play their music loudly at all hours of the night, sing along loudly and shout obscenities without caring whether their door is open or whether they might be disturbing their neighbors. This inconsideration seems to be a theme with them. The lot of them come over to my apartment shouting in the stairwell, and they leave the door open while talking loudly, even if it’s 11 or 12. Never mind that my neighbors all have kids or babies and go to bed early. It really grated on me especially if I was trying to work. They’d come over and chat with me and I’d get nervous about finishing my work and getting enough sleep. So finally I had the talk with my roommate.
I was not honest from the outset, though, and the situation is very strange. She lives here as if subject to my whims, because it’s technically my apartment and she doesn’t pay rent. I have acquired all the furniture that did not come with the apartment, and I bought all the cleaning supplies and dishes, and she has not contributed anything except to her own bedroom, so it feels even less like we really share the apartment. I also admit to lording over the living room. I bought the desk so I use it, and I also do other work at the dining table (a horrendous plastic thing that looks like it came from a cervezeria). Of course, it’s not like she does any work anyway. But she and her friends even had the nerve to make jokes about how rich I am because I bought a fridge and living room furniture and have a laptop. “You’re really rich, aren’t you?” they asked. Um, no, really, I’m not, I protest, but I doubt they believe me. Of course I make more money than they or most of the teachers at my school do, and she’s living with me because she can’t afford to pay rent anywhere, so yeah, I guess I am rich.
The truth is, though, that I have been less than welcoming to her, and this makes living together feel even stranger. But I often feel like she is just using me. For the past three years she has been living with my boss, where she had a 10 p.m. curfew and never got to hang out with her friends at night. Now she gets to come home whenever she wants, bring home whomever she wants, and she’ll put up with me lording over the apartment, because the fact is I’m doing her a huge favor. However, I should have told the truth from the start—that I prefer to live on my own, or with someone I know I get along with, like Julia O., who’ll be coming to Mexico in January for a few months, and who might end up staying with me sometimes.
At the suggestion of friends from my school who know this girl from her time as a helper in the kindergarten class there, I have now told on my roommate. I told my boss Monday while we were driving back from the book fair in Guadalajara, that my roommate receives gentlemen visitors, who sometimes stay very late. Only one of these guys is suspect, of course, but the news did not go over well with my boss, who feels responsible for her, especially because—news to me—my roommate’s father doesn’t even know that she is living with me instead of my boss (presumably because he’d never allow it, for obvious reasons). My boss was shocked. This is a very, very conservative town. Young people live with their families till they marry, much as they do in Taiwan. My roommate is supposed by all her family to be a chaste and well-behaved young woman. I am not saying that she is not, but right now I do not want to be responsible for her. Now that I know my boss feels she would be blamed should anything socially unacceptable happen to my roommate (unplanned pregnancy, for instance), I feel less inclined to take any responsibility for her (and I never planned on taking any responsibility for her whatsoever anyway). Being extremely conspicuous as the only Chinese-American English teacher in town—and as Julia O. pointed out, the representative of three foreign nations (the U.S., China, and Japan—because everyone here thinks I’m Japanese)—I don’t want to develop a bad reputation in town or in my building, disturbing my neighbors with noise and various late-night gentlemen callers. My boss said she would recommend to her associate that my roommate move back in with my boss.
Now I am waiting for the fallout. The only signs so far that anyone in my roommate’s family knows the shocking news are that my roommate and I have been avoiding each other, and that she sends me text messages to let me know whether she’ll be home late, which is always. I am, of course, prepared to receive dirty looks and cold shoulders from her and her friends. I feel pretty bad because I allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted granted it didn’t disturb my sleep, even assured her at the beginning, when she asked me, that I wouldn’t tell my boss anything that would get her in trouble, and now I’ve gone and told on her. But I’m not going to lie to my boss or the person who pays me (my roommate’s aunt) if they ask me if my roommate is “behaving,” and I already hid a lot from them already. My boss is even upset with me a little that I didn’t tell her about this earlier and allowed it to go on for a while. My excuse is that I didn’t realize how serious it was, how implicated both my roommate and I would be if we often had male visitors, how culpable I would be if anything happened to my roommate. I said that it’s none of my business what she does, that she’s the only one responsible for what she does.
Now I feel annoyed that in fact, yes, it’s my business, and yes, I’m responsible. Actually, I rather resent having had this person foisted upon me and finding out that I am something of a chaperone or babysitter. How was I supposed to know that I should report any untoward behavior to my boss? I’m not used to living in such a small, conservative society.
But yeah, it was my fault for saying yes to something I didn’t even want in the first place.
I did a tarot card reading on this a while ago, and it was pretty accurate. (I know some of you groan to hear this.) It said I would face an ethical dilemma. I had no idea how difficult a problem it would become, and just how much ethics would be involved. There’s the loyalty issue—to whom am I loyal, my boss or my roommate? I have betrayed both of them in some way, because they both trusted me to act in a particular way. And there’s the issue of being true to myself, as well. Shouldn’t I have listened to my misgivings and taken a stand for myself from the beginning? Then none of this extremely messy stuff would have happened; I wouldn’t have upset both my roommate and my boss. That’s the lesson I learned the hard way.
Maybe it’s better in the future if I just live on my own….
I was working on my lesson plans for tomorrow, but I think I am done now. I always prepare too much stuff, thinking the students will be able to do a lot more than they really end up doing. It’s better to be over-prepared than under-prepared, but it also shows that I have too high expectations for them, as always…. This week is going better, though. For the next few days we are just going to review some things I have taught so far in preparation for their English exams next week (which I just found out I have to write and administer). That means we are playing games to practice, and everyone always enjoys that (unless their team loses, of course). Luckily, I am quite practiced in playing various English games with children; teaching in Taiwan was fabulous for that.
Today was the first Thursday of the month—the day everyone in the school goes to mass together. We pile up into vans and cars and go to a church that’s under construction. The principal wanted me to sing “Silent Night” today at the end of the service, but I was totally unprepared for this request—what if I don’t really know the words and get stuck halfway? So I said no, that I don’t know all the lyrics. It’s not really true—I know the words to the first verse, but that’s typical of me to be under-confident in myself. Probably singing all by myself into a microphone in front of the entire school and some parents and the priest would’ve made me forget them. I have terrible stage-fright. At my senior recital at college I completely forgot how to play the easiest piece I had, and I sat there at the piano playing the first few measures and then totally blanking. Finally I just played the next song, because I couldn’t remember that one.
I do love to sing the songs with the kids, though. If the kids knew the song already, and if I’d had more warning, I’d have sung it in church today, but I haven’t taught the song yet. I actually really like to sing, even though I don’t sing all that well. (Many of you may know this already.) I am teaching the kids to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” right now. I wanted to get them to do some swing dancing to it, but it might be too much to ask at such a late stage. They are having their posada on Dec. 15 and will be performing various songs then. I am very ambitious and planning to teach them “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” as well. I wish we could do “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (with interjections such as “like a light bulb!”), “Over the River and Through the Woods,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful,” too, but that is just insane.
I can’t believe this is me writing so enthusiastically about Christmas songs. I thought I hated Christmas songs. I guess it’s because back home, once Thanksgiving is over, all you hear on the radio and in stores are Christmas songs, and by the time it’s Christmas I just want to scream if I have to hear “Jingle Bell Rock” one more time. But here in Arandas, I am the only one subjecting people to “Jingle Bell Rock” (at least in English) or “Come All Ye Faithful,” so it’s totally acceptable!
Christmas carols also remind me of the time I went caroling with friends from middle school, and we carried lit candles, and my hair caught on fire while we were singing a song to some old neighbors. They also remind me of high school orchestra gigs playing songs to some old men in a trailer or humiliating ourselves in the center of Park Mall.
But anyway, the kids love singing, and it helps their English. I am having all kinds of crazy ideas for songs to teach them once Christmas is over. For the brief group exercises, I want to teach the Hokey-Pokey, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” They can also learn songs with finger play, like “The Itsy-bitsy Spider,” “Little Cabin in the Woods,” and “Where is Thumbkin.” One of my students brought in a CD of mostly Beatles songs and I am supposing she wants to learn some of them in class. I was listening to them and imagining them performing “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da”—isn’t that strange? All of a sudden these songs take on a whole new meaning if you to teach them to kids. A song I never really liked before turns into something extremely fun.
I find myself dreaming of teaching, or lying in bed after waking up and coming up with some idea for teaching. Today after my nap I was huddled in my blankets (because it’s damned cold in my apartment—northern exposure and absolutely no direct sunlight), and I found myself obsessing about something or other I have to do tomorrow at school. I think after I finish writing this, I’ll draw some pictures for the song posters I have to make, or else I’ll worry so much about them that I won’t be able to sleep well.
Lucky for me this week, I haven’t had to deal with my roommate bringing her friends over in the evenings while I’m trying to work or sleep. Last week I told her that I sometimes need to go to bed at 11, so I’d prefer to have it quiet around here. She had a friend over again one night this week, and they ended up whispering in the living room and then chatting in the stairwell outside the apartment for a long time. I feel kind of bad about it, but the situation is not ideal for either of us….
Some of you may not know that I even had a roommate. The story is that I was too much of a wimp to say no to my boss when she asked if I’d mind if the niece of her associate moved in with me. She was afraid I’d be too lonely living here all by myself. I didn’t feel I could say no because my boss pays for my apartment, and it’s got two bedrooms, and obviously I don’t use one of the bedrooms. I had this feeling like I should forget being nice or feeling bad—it’s in my contract that I get paid housing, so I shouldn’t feel like they’re doing me any huge favors or anything—but I just could not do it. (The term to use in Chinese is precisely buhao yisi, and I’m sorry I can’t translate this, but it’s like I wouldn’t be giving my boss “face.”) I thought, maybe it’ll be good to have someone else here, and maybe she’ll be able to contribute to furnishing the apartment, and maybe I’ll also meet more people through her. It didn’t seem to weigh too heavily that I have had a lot of trouble living with other people in the past, because I’m not an easy person to live with. (As Luis said, knowing how much people can annoy me, I would be better off without a roommate.) I just thought I should be more positive and everything would turn out fine.
When I finally met her and she came to look at the apartment a few weeks ago, I was having a really bad day at school, and she and her friend really got on my nerves. They were running about the apartment and, without even asking if they could enter my bedroom, walked right in and stood out on the balcony and raved about it. It’s not like I wouldn’t have let them into my bedroom, but I found it annoying that they didn’t even think to ask. They also didn’t try to slow down their speech or adjust their language in any way when they realized I couldn’t understand them very well. It did not bode well for me, but I found it even more difficult to say no now that she had seen the apartment and said she liked it a lot and wanted to move in the next day. What do you say? “No, I’ve changed my mind, sorry.” I just couldn’t do it.
I made my bed and now I have to lie in it.
The first week I really thought everything would be fine. She took me to her friends’ apartment nearby, and we hung out. I had lunch with them there a couple times, and we ate out for dinner a couple times. Her friends were a bit crazy, but I had fun talking with them. Her best friend, the girl who came with my roommate the first day, turned out to be very cool about talking with me, and I still enjoy chatting with her when I see her. They are, however, all around 21 years old, students at the teacher-training school, and they seem less mature than my now 20-year-old friend Rocio. This is explained by the fact that this is the first time they’ve lived away from their families, and they are going kind of wild. They play their music loudly at all hours of the night, sing along loudly and shout obscenities without caring whether their door is open or whether they might be disturbing their neighbors. This inconsideration seems to be a theme with them. The lot of them come over to my apartment shouting in the stairwell, and they leave the door open while talking loudly, even if it’s 11 or 12. Never mind that my neighbors all have kids or babies and go to bed early. It really grated on me especially if I was trying to work. They’d come over and chat with me and I’d get nervous about finishing my work and getting enough sleep. So finally I had the talk with my roommate.
I was not honest from the outset, though, and the situation is very strange. She lives here as if subject to my whims, because it’s technically my apartment and she doesn’t pay rent. I have acquired all the furniture that did not come with the apartment, and I bought all the cleaning supplies and dishes, and she has not contributed anything except to her own bedroom, so it feels even less like we really share the apartment. I also admit to lording over the living room. I bought the desk so I use it, and I also do other work at the dining table (a horrendous plastic thing that looks like it came from a cervezeria). Of course, it’s not like she does any work anyway. But she and her friends even had the nerve to make jokes about how rich I am because I bought a fridge and living room furniture and have a laptop. “You’re really rich, aren’t you?” they asked. Um, no, really, I’m not, I protest, but I doubt they believe me. Of course I make more money than they or most of the teachers at my school do, and she’s living with me because she can’t afford to pay rent anywhere, so yeah, I guess I am rich.
The truth is, though, that I have been less than welcoming to her, and this makes living together feel even stranger. But I often feel like she is just using me. For the past three years she has been living with my boss, where she had a 10 p.m. curfew and never got to hang out with her friends at night. Now she gets to come home whenever she wants, bring home whomever she wants, and she’ll put up with me lording over the apartment, because the fact is I’m doing her a huge favor. However, I should have told the truth from the start—that I prefer to live on my own, or with someone I know I get along with, like Julia O., who’ll be coming to Mexico in January for a few months, and who might end up staying with me sometimes.
At the suggestion of friends from my school who know this girl from her time as a helper in the kindergarten class there, I have now told on my roommate. I told my boss Monday while we were driving back from the book fair in Guadalajara, that my roommate receives gentlemen visitors, who sometimes stay very late. Only one of these guys is suspect, of course, but the news did not go over well with my boss, who feels responsible for her, especially because—news to me—my roommate’s father doesn’t even know that she is living with me instead of my boss (presumably because he’d never allow it, for obvious reasons). My boss was shocked. This is a very, very conservative town. Young people live with their families till they marry, much as they do in Taiwan. My roommate is supposed by all her family to be a chaste and well-behaved young woman. I am not saying that she is not, but right now I do not want to be responsible for her. Now that I know my boss feels she would be blamed should anything socially unacceptable happen to my roommate (unplanned pregnancy, for instance), I feel less inclined to take any responsibility for her (and I never planned on taking any responsibility for her whatsoever anyway). Being extremely conspicuous as the only Chinese-American English teacher in town—and as Julia O. pointed out, the representative of three foreign nations (the U.S., China, and Japan—because everyone here thinks I’m Japanese)—I don’t want to develop a bad reputation in town or in my building, disturbing my neighbors with noise and various late-night gentlemen callers. My boss said she would recommend to her associate that my roommate move back in with my boss.
Now I am waiting for the fallout. The only signs so far that anyone in my roommate’s family knows the shocking news are that my roommate and I have been avoiding each other, and that she sends me text messages to let me know whether she’ll be home late, which is always. I am, of course, prepared to receive dirty looks and cold shoulders from her and her friends. I feel pretty bad because I allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted granted it didn’t disturb my sleep, even assured her at the beginning, when she asked me, that I wouldn’t tell my boss anything that would get her in trouble, and now I’ve gone and told on her. But I’m not going to lie to my boss or the person who pays me (my roommate’s aunt) if they ask me if my roommate is “behaving,” and I already hid a lot from them already. My boss is even upset with me a little that I didn’t tell her about this earlier and allowed it to go on for a while. My excuse is that I didn’t realize how serious it was, how implicated both my roommate and I would be if we often had male visitors, how culpable I would be if anything happened to my roommate. I said that it’s none of my business what she does, that she’s the only one responsible for what she does.
Now I feel annoyed that in fact, yes, it’s my business, and yes, I’m responsible. Actually, I rather resent having had this person foisted upon me and finding out that I am something of a chaperone or babysitter. How was I supposed to know that I should report any untoward behavior to my boss? I’m not used to living in such a small, conservative society.
But yeah, it was my fault for saying yes to something I didn’t even want in the first place.
I did a tarot card reading on this a while ago, and it was pretty accurate. (I know some of you groan to hear this.) It said I would face an ethical dilemma. I had no idea how difficult a problem it would become, and just how much ethics would be involved. There’s the loyalty issue—to whom am I loyal, my boss or my roommate? I have betrayed both of them in some way, because they both trusted me to act in a particular way. And there’s the issue of being true to myself, as well. Shouldn’t I have listened to my misgivings and taken a stand for myself from the beginning? Then none of this extremely messy stuff would have happened; I wouldn’t have upset both my roommate and my boss. That’s the lesson I learned the hard way.
Maybe it’s better in the future if I just live on my own….
