Johnny rain-cloud

Hi, y'all. It is Thursday night. I just ate a yummy dinner of tortillas and chicken--all of which I made from scratch! You should be impressed. I know I am. I'm actually starting to like cooking! Teaching doesn't seem very challenging most days, but cooking sure is!

Today it was raining again, but it was a pretty blessed day. I had office hours and taught one class and had lunch and had more office hours and helped conduct English corner. Today I had my favorite class. These students all speak in English, and they usually think at least a smidgen outside the box. I just want to hug them all. They are so talkative and interested during the whole class, which just warms my heart. My other classes are so shy, and much less talkative.

Then one of the boys with gigantic hair, who always wears cool pleather jackets asked me to go to lunch with him and his friend, another one of my cool-dressed male students. I said okay, but he had to bring a girl student too. Four other female students came as well. It was such an awesome lunch, especially because they were students who have lower English levels, but are more down to earth than a lot of other students.

I headed to lunch with six of my bubbly, and extremely eager students. On the fifteen-minute walk, they all jostled for position next to me, each of them asking me about three questions all at the same time. I tried my best to pay attention to all of them equally, while hurtling over the gigantic mud puddles.

We invaded the second-floor student cafeteria, which is always mildly controlled chaos whenever I go. It's so fun. I ended up getting tomato fried-rice which wasn't too bad, and we chatted the whole time. They invited themselves to be my best friends and invited themselves to my apartment on old campus. They have also planned my social calendar. We are to go skating, play ping-pong, play tennis, play badminton, and take trains to all of their hometowns to meet their families. Most of it is not likely to happen, of course, but it was still cute. We are going to go skating next week, though. They just made me extremely happy, because they are so enthusiastic and energetic and innocent. I want to adopt all of them. And tomorrow I get to eat with some more of my favorite students!

So for a lot of the day, I was pretty joyful and excited about life, even during English corner. If I could just hang out and talk with my students all day long, I would be totally content. I just love them all so much. But then I get all depressed when I think about teaching, or learning Chinese, or living in general. Yes, isn't that really strange? I'm just being honest, but I have never struggled so much in my life to keep thinking positively. It is difficult for me not to focus on what I do wrong, how I should be a better teacher, how people are poor, how I can never blend in here no matter how hard I try, etc.

In other news, we have started discussing culture in class. Today we talked about stereotypes people have of Americans. Here are some good ones: (And they think most of these are true!)

-All Americans are tall.
-All American women are charming.
-All Americans are very rich.
-All Americans have yellow hair and blue eyes.
-All Americans like war.
-All Americans are open-minded.
-All Americans carry guns.

In class we concluded that all of these perceptions come from American movies, because that is the only time when they are exposed to American culture. So I cheerfully dispelled most, if not all, of those stereotypes.

Well, thanks as always for your thoughts. The struggle for my mind is probably the biggest battle in my life right now.