Wednesday Afternoon

It's Wednesday, it's the midterm. Tomorrow morning is our big midterm exam. In the evening we will get on a bus that will take us to a train station, where we will all get on a sleeper train to Wenzhou. We'll spend Friday day at the beach on Nanji Island and then somehow preform our skits, which counts as our midterm oral exam.

If I haven't said so before, this program is 99% performance oriented, rather than competency oriented. Ask me later if you're dying to know the difference.

So the next night I think it's buses up to the mountains to go splash in a creek somewhere, and then a red-eye train back to Hangzhou early Sunday morning.

At first, it made a lot of sense for me to be in this program. I would earn academic credit, I'd be in a classroom setting.... Now, making sense? Not so much. Now that I got the new job, the credits I'm earning are worth nothing to me; all that matters is that I'm learning Chinese. Frankly, this program is a little too much for just learning Chinese. We just finished our textbook, normally a 10 week course, in 20 days. Now, I don't mind moving fast, but there is a lot of stress in this program. A lot of academic metaphor imposed on us.

As of now, I'm getting A's. But I did get that 75 on my first test, and when one teacher was concerned about it, I wanted to tell her very gently that I don't give a crap about my grades, that I'm not matriculated anywhere, that I'm not worried about transcripts or transfer credits or getting into some competitive program afterwards. But if I told them that, what would they do? They'd lose all hope. Their academic construct would fall around them like tears in a rainstorm.

So I'm keeping my mouth shut for now and playing along. But it does seem silly. And I guess if I have to crash through this grammar, I might as well do it now.

So tonight I will drill myself with electronic flashcards, and if I have time I will sew on a button.

One last thing: I think I'm losing diabetes. My fasting blood sugar in the morning has been right around 100 in the last couple weeks, and in the last three days, it's been in the 90s.

Meow meow meow, I'm sure I'll have a blood sugar impairment for the rest of my life, but right now, it looks and awful lot like I don't.