Yaramaz Went Away

I’m thinking that this might help save my sanity during Nescafe-heavy weekends away doing Lucrative Testing come springtime.

Also, my current favorite background noise: a DJ I had always heard about in Istanbul, who was friends with my friends and who had a show on the only radio station I liked (Acik Radyo) and whose occasional in-club session posters were plastered over every wall in Taksim, who used to be bassist for a band I vaguely liked when I was living in London (Stereolab)– and yet I never actually heard a thing he did until I moved to China.  Here is a link to his show archives: Tighten Up With Simon Johns  I like the fact that he has no qualms about playing the Monkees, Frank Zappa, Gram Parsons, The Ramones and the Pogues without having to explain himself. 

Finally, ugh. Am staying in today. I feel like crap.

Dear Plumber,

When you come to fix a stopped up toilet, which is full to the brim with unspeakable unpleasantness, please don’t casually flush again to see what happens and flood the bathroom and make the whole toilet itself unspeakably unsanitary, inside and out (and for me to clean). Also, before you leave, please give the unspeakably unpleasant floor a bit more attention than just a quick once over with a soaking wet, unsoapy mop. It doesn’t help. Also, please don’t take our plunger when you go. We need it. Really. See Note to Repairman for further details as to why you shouldn’t steal our fucking plunger.

Dear Repairman,

When you come to re-bolt the shower stall back onto the wall, don’t drop all your bits of plaster, bolts, screws, etc down the shower drain. It is now clogged. We have no plunger. Also, please try to tidy up just a tiny bit before you leave so I don’t have to spend an hour trying to clean up the remnants of the clogged toilet mixed with plaster and mud and dirt and odd bits and pieces both in the shower stall and around the bathroom.  I resent having to stick my hand down the shower drain to extract your odds and ends. When I went to rinse out the incredibly grimy stall, it wouldn’t drain. We have no plunger. See Note to Plumber.

Dear Landlady,

Although I appreciate you taking time out of your day to supervise the repair of the shower stall, I would be a bit more grateful if, as you left, you didn’t turn to me and advise me sweetly to just be more careful next time.

Careful? The fucking screws came out of the wall, cracked, when D. slid the door open. It has been sticking for months. It’s rusting and cracking. Now, after the morning’s repairs, the left sliding door doesn’t even move or align properly so one must slide in to the shower sideways and hope the water doesn’t spray through the one-inch gap.

Sigh.

Remember a few weeks ago when the heater died and the sink faucet died and gas burners died and possibly a few other things also died, that I’ve simply repressed in my memory? Remember how I was taking bets on what would go next?

Did anyone place bets on bathroom?

You did? Fabulous! You won— and at double the odds! Wooot!

So, yeah, huh, dang, this morning the toilet kinda had severe plumbing issues AND the shower stall kinda came out of the wall when D. opened the sliding door. So, yeah, I’m spending my first real day off sitting on the couch, semi supervising the stream of repairmen passing through.  There is a lot of drilling going on now behind the closed bathroom door. I may be here all day. They haven’t even brought in a replacement stall yet. I hope we get a replacement one, as the old one was on its last rusting, peeling, jamming legs.

I’m sleeping badly now that classes are over, with my circadian rhythms readjusting themselves to their natural state wherein bedtime is sometime between midnight and 3am, oblivious to the fact that D. is up at 6:30am so I also wake then (I’m a very light sleeper and as soon as he opens the closet or bedroom door, I’m awake).  I have been having odd waking dreams sometime in the early hours- like waking at 3:30am quite certain that I’m in the middle of a speaking test but uncertain how to go about doing it in bed in the dark when I can’t see the candidate and am doubtful that they’d even be awake at this hour.  Even my unconscious mind overthinks things.

First of all, I’ll be home in just about 2 weeks, for the first time in a year. This gap is much better than my mid-Turkey gap, where I didn’t get home for nearly 4 years, partly due to a lack of time off, partly due to all sorts of things popping up and making life difficult. I will see Lola again.  I’m looking forward to having some good fur around. And my silent basement lair looking out onto a winter garden. And the sea close by. And family. And remaining friends. It has been a seriously difficult year for me and a bit of grounding will do me good.

Second of all, we’re halfway done the professional development workshop put on by the Australian uni. They flew up a phenomenally cool woman called Vesna to do the training and she’s one of those smoking and swearing and black-clad women with a dry, dry, dark  humour that I always want to follow around like a puppy dog. I’m a bit sad that way. But it’s been a good workshop and she axed about half of it when she realized pretty early on that we knew what we were doing. We all went out for noodles and talked about the meat hanging to dry up in the trees. Faaaaack, Oi’ve missed this facking place, she noted.

Third of all, my boss-boss Philip (as opposed to Kevin, who is just my boss) just came back from the end-of-semester meeting with my university and apparently everyone there, including the inscrutable Miss Wang the program director, likes me very very much and thinks I’m doing a smashing job at teaching the ruffians. Apparently Miss Wang is very hard to please. Many many many before me haven’t  gotten her vague twitch of approval and are now away doing other things, contracts not renewed. Kevin suggested that if a coordinator position comes up in Shanghai, he’d like me to do it.  *sigh*

Fourth of all, Shanghai is still stupidly, numbingly cold. Puddles are frozen over. Breath is visible. D. and I are pouring at least one bath each every night to thaw out extremities. Toes are tingling and skin is chilly to the touch. Sitting all morning and part of the afternoon in a theoretically heated classroom on those hard, flat rows of benches with the desk bolted to the back of the seat for the bench behind you  (like a 1930s high school) made my ass go numb and my toes go numb. I bought cans of hot fake coffee from the vending machine downstairs, all of which were pretty appalling but they kept my hands warm for a while. I wore coat, scarf, gloves and fuzzy hat all day, inside and out.

So, against all better judgment, we went to Hefei this weekend for our regular dose of Lucrative Testing. Hefei is an odd one for us– it’s 4 tedious hours away by train, quite grey and dismal at the best of times, with over heated, stifling rooms at the hotel and bad pillows for D’s cricky neck, and we don’t get back until nearly 11pm on Sunday night; however, it does attract a far less annoying batch of testers (because the usual snotty, whiny twits would never accept an invitation to test there), the hotel bath tub and bath goodies and coffee are top notch, the energy is really chilled out at the test venue, the sweet, perky monitors on each floor have their hot water thermoses ready to make you fresh leafy tea any time you pop your head out your door, and the test rooms are actually kind of cushy (mine had a big padded manager-chair, polished wooden desk, a brand new corner heater that warmed the room immediately and a wall-mounted flat screen tv).  It’s a tough call.

Today is my first day of unTeaching til March, so I’ve hauled out the espresso pot and made myself a double shot latte. I am insanely tired.

I’m going to run myself a stolen-bath-goody bubble bath soon, then catch up on some Lite Reading. My brain still can’t process the Margaret Atwood I’d optimistically packed for the train ride. I ended up playing the one  game installed on my phone that I don’t hate for about two hours (hitting borbs with orbs or something), then i started reprogramming my phone so that when D. calls me, there’s a blue-tinted light show on the clamshell cover and when I answer, his photo is on the screen. Same for Kevin, our head teacher who happened to be in Hefei testing with us. My screen pic of him is one I took around 10pm, leaning over the back of my seat and catching him bleary eyed with a stack of marking on his lap. His light show will be purple. Apparently I can assign different ring tones to different people so I may do that on our next 4 hour ride to Hefei– go through my phone book and give all bazillion people, including real estate agents and ex-colleagues, their own special ring tone. I have way too much time to kill.
Photo spam! Hefei! Fun fun fun!

 This one is really really dorky but I can’t stop laughing.  Lola used to proofread walls.

 I’ve downed about 5 strong mugs of black tea today and a Thermos full of lukewarm French press slightly milked coffee.  I have, so far, done 49 speaking tests, each about 5 minutes long. I have a pounding headache deep in my eye sockets (probably from all the tea).  The tests have run overtime into the after lunch session, so I have had to cancel the business classes to make way for the overflow. This is fine, really, because I just finished group 1′s tests and still have about a half hour left in what would have been their biz class. I’m going to put my head on my desk and rest my eyes. 

I can’t believe we agred to go to Hefei for testing this weekend. After these 55, I’ll have 30 more to look forward to. Huzzah! At least we have the Hilton to look forward to. They have the best bath goodies and a lovely deep bath tub. Must remember to bring my swimsuit for the pool.

Shanghai is still toe-numbingly brisk and the spicy, vinaigery broth from my noodles at lunch was notably hot going down as I sipped it. They put in extra baby bok choy, which made me happy. I had my monthly meeting out at the other university this morning and it was as unnecessary as usual- a formality to show the university that foreigners do all the right things I suppose– though I did finally get my time table for next term. Nothing has changed, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I tried out the new metro line to get to the other university and it took about 50 minutes, door to door, which is about 20 or so minutes less than it used to be.  It’s still an annoying journey, with an absurdly long and convoluted and poorly sign-posted transfer between line 9 and line 3. When I finally got to the line 3 platform after a ten minute walk and many flights of stairs and long draughty corridors, I could find no signs indicating whether I was on the northbound platform or southbound platform.  The two fellows at the metro map by the stairs somehow grasped my appalling attempt at asking directions and it turns out I had intuitively chosen the right platform. The trains are infrequent enough on that line as to make the crowds fierce and trains bursting.  I think I prefer my current 20 minute walk and twenty minute direct metro and five minute walk.

At home now with thawing toes, watching a YouTube documentary about North Korea, sipping some decent Argentinian red wine to celebrate my empty Wednesday and its continuation into the next semester, and nibbling on some of my left over Christmas gingerbread.

Things are okay.

The doc I’m watching (it’s good)