forces at bay; forces at work

Recently I feel that I’ve been walking in place while the scenery is a blur around me. It’s unclear if the scenery is moving quickly or slowly, but it’s definitely unclear. Sometimes I stop and the scenery continues to whirl around in different directions, occasionally buffeting me off balance, fine grains of sediment etching my face. I lose direction of the scene but it doesn’t really matter; all I need to do is continue walking and the blur will take care of itself, quite well I might add, and without any interference on my part.

My Mandarin program ended last Friday. It was a group class that was largely enjoyable but occasionally marred by frictional personalities, but in the end it was worn smooth. I performed quite well during the lessons and was one of the top students, I think, but during the second half of the course, as is custom with yours truly, my academic fidelity wore thin and my rapid progress slowed (but didn’t diminish entirely). I was also distracted by personal events. Now that the course has ended, and my funds remaining precarious, and my enthusiasm for finding new work clearly not the bottomless wellspring I once believed it to be, I’m in need of a vacation.

Which is a well-timed sentiment. I’ll be returning home to the USA on December 16th for a three week break. I’ll be able to see people (and dogs) for the first time in two years or more. It’s an exciting time for me and an important milestone in my stay in Taiwan. Reflecting on the person I was when I came here, and the person I’ve become until now, and all the different stages of development along the way, I think I’ve accomplished a nice amount. When I came to Taiwan I was a college graduate from a middle-class family with a pretty but insubstantial degree, an inflated sense of self-worth, a resentment toward people who couldn’t care less about me, a distorted view of personal hardship, and an even more distorted view of the opposite sex. I was easily sidetracked with petty grievances, immediate gratification, an indulgent brand of nihilism that came from a three-year cushion of like-minded people and friendly chemicals and which would continue long into my stay in Taiwan. During these past two years, I’ve been introduced to a world of mixed colors I initially embraced, but came to disown as fully as I’ve done with most trends in my life, but never one in which I was so immersed. I’m referring, of course, to the apartment in which I lived for about fifteen months, which was home to almost all the entertainment one can buy with a well-placed phone call.

That same apartment was also home to people whose acquaintanceships I valued and which had a very formative impact on my late-blooming sense of individuality. In time I would react strongly against the lifestyles that apartment catered to and sour many of those acquaintanceships, but not the ones that had any meaning to begin with. As I’d come to be defined by the limitations of my tolerance, and I’d been becoming a caricature to myself, I finally moved into a new apartment quite close to the Chinese school where I hoped to turn over a new leaf and end my second year in Taiwan on a positive and productive note.

I suppose I have succeeded. While my finances were in serious disarray after I’d finished paying the tuition for my school, and I was running a deficit for a few weeks until I found more private students, I had completed my course on a positive note with a vastly improved understanding of Mandarin and a stabilized income that allowed for a bit of weekend indulgence, and I could begin to save money again. At the rate I’m going at the time of this post, I can pay my rent, utilities, weekly expenses, monthly tuition repayments, and still be able to put a paltry sum into the bank account (which is about an eighth the size it was one year ago). And though there’s been little literal change in my outward appearance since my undergraduate days, save for the touch of time, I still get glances from women on the street. Overall, I don’t think I have much to be ashamed of.

But I wouldn’t say I have much to be proud of. I’ve successfully fallen out of contact with a good number of friends who longer seem interested in renewing our former friendships. I’ve managed to bring an official end to an unofficial-yet-mutually-interested relationship with a beautiful girl, which was intense on my part and I think, for a time, on her part as well. I’ve managed to drain my finances to the brink of bankruptcy. I’ve lost or quit more jobs in Taiwan than I’d ever had back home (I’m on job number seven. To be fair, the jobs here were all in the same field. There’s no escape!).

I’m not sure what to think. I’ve been walking around with an impending sense of doom. This may be partially due to my recent discovery of a sharply receding hairline. My cells are degenerating, and fast. Old age looms ever closer and the sprightliness of youth is becoming a distant memory.

On the other hand, the mother of one of my private students, a woman with whom I chat a lot about personal and professional issues, yesterday told me in pretty good English that she thought I was a good person, and that she and her husband hope their son Ethan grows up to be like me. She said that many people are content to live with their parents after school, and she likes that I look for more work and more independence. She told me that even though I’m still bothered by the girl situation, I’m handling it well, and presumably seeing through the haze that possessed me following our split. She called me today about another parent who might be looking for a tutor, and while we discussed it she said she wanted to help me since I was a good friend. It meant a lot to me. In many ways, it validated the personal changes I’ve experienced in the past few months.

I think I’ve experimented enough with things I don’t like. I’m tired of melodrama and inflated egos and cults of personality and talking heads. I have to find meaning in what I do, or do meaningful things. Painting by numbers sure makes things easy but it doesn’t make a picture worth a damn.