I have 20 minutes before my "bedtime", so I'll take the time to blog. Which is another way of procrastinating on the many other things I should be doing. This week is way to busy...and it's only Tuesday. It's 'PTA' week at Uncle Sam, and I use PTA loosely because it just means the parents come visit and tour the school and also sit in on one of your classes. The class they sit in on is over prepared and done up with more activities than you would normally do to make it look good for the school. Lucky me, I have to PTAs to do. One for my homeroom kids, my Gorillas, on Thursday, and one for the Pandas tomorrow. I'm doing the Pandas because quite a few of them used to be Gorillas so they're used to me, and since we're currently one foreign teacher short I didn't mind.
On top of PTA, this week is busy for my online class through WSC. I had a test to take Monday night...it was like 10 pages long! I think I actually did ok, but the weekend of studying stressed me out a bit. I have homework due on American Tuesday and Thursday (one of the main things I'm procrastinating, thanks to the 13 hour time difference!) and another test in two weeks.
Also in two weeks there's a birthday party that I'm in charge of, a trick or treat outing, and a haunted house that I'm also in charge of...slowly I am learning to say 'no' to extra things :)
It's safe to say I'm stressed and worn out. And for the past few weeks I've been having a pretty hard time, to the point where I've considered coming home quite permanently. I'm just at that point where I ask myself why I'm still here. It doesn't help that I have other people ask me the same question. The first year was an adventure, now that it's sort of the same thing, I think I'm bored. And yes, if I was in the states at a job, I could end up just as bored. But chances are, a job in America will be some sort of position or company that I would plan on staying with for many years and move up in the organization. It would be a job with a future, a career. Here in Taiwan, teaching is not a career, I can't move up in my position. It's a yearly contract to do the same thing over and over.
Feeling like I'm not going anywhere, when I've based my life on moving forward, making goals, and doing it as fast as I can, is really hard for me. As a freshman in high school I was researching colleges. College that I completed in 3 years instead of 4. Mom knew the day the next semester's class schedule came out to bring me home a copy, and that night I'd start listing the possible classes I could take. Planning and organizing, setting goals and schedules are habits that I can be quite obsessive about. Although most of the time I write out the schedule better than I actually follow them. I know I once blogged a whole 'life plan', and I'm not so obsessive that I freak out if things don't follow my plans, I know stuff can change, and I actually like change (explains moving to Taiwan!). So maybe I'm not getting enough change right now and I feel stuck. Who knows?
And I can't deny that some of this is probably homesickness. I miss my family and the few friends I'm close to. Although I do have friends here and people I hang out with, and people I will miss when I do decide to return to Nebraska, it's still hard because a lot of them I haven't known for that long, or if I have, they're Chinese so explaining emotions and feelings can get a bit tricky. I am lucky though because my two main supervisors I consider good friends, and when I first started questioning whether I should stay my full year I felt comfortable enough to talk to them and try to explain how I was feeling. Which helped me to decided that at least for now I plan to finish my contract, but will be taking a vacation for a full two weeks at Christmas, to go home and see if that helps. Xmas and New Years at home will do more help than hurt and I hope will give me the kick I need to finish what I started.
Maybe once October's over and all these extra things we have going on come to an end my feelings will change. We'll have to wait and see.
