I am your garden-variety nerd. I spend a lot of time playing video games, board games, and building Lego models. I also find crochet very relaxing, and make a lot of blankets, sweaters, and hats to give away to friends and family. Teaching consumes a lot of my time at the moment, but when I can I like to play badminton on the weekends or go out for a leisurely hike with friends.
I travel a lot. I have been to just about every country in East Asia. I’ve had a lot of great adventures doing that, but appreciate a relaxing vacation every now and then. We got a good deal on an all-inclusive resort in the Maldives one year. It was so bougie. I had never had a vacation like that in my life, and probably never will again. So I would say that was my favourite place I travelled to.
I also went to Guam and Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands a couple of years ago. It is an interesting place to visit because Guam is a U.S. military base. Seeing how westernized the region was and the juxtaposition with how commercialized the visible parts of indigenous culture were made me think about what neo-colonialism looks like. From Guam, we travelled to another island called Saipan which is very close to where the Enola Gay took off carrying the atomic bomb in WWII. A major hurricane had just hit the island and was rebuilding while trying to restart its tourism industry. There was this whole line of hotels along the coast that were just abandoned, fully destroyed that will probably never be rebuilt.
I love teaching, but my younger seventh-grade self’s initial reasoning for entering this profession is kind of silly. I always enjoyed history related to ancient civilizations like Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Medieval Ages and one day we had an open-book test in class. It was super easy. But I was the only kid in the class who got a perfect grade. At the time, the teacher made an example of me and was like, “Hey, this human got a perfect score, because it's a textbook test. Like, why didn’t everyone?”
And I was like, “Oh, this is a thing I'm good at it, and I like it. Wow.” Could that be a job? I considered a couple of other jobs. I thought about being a masseuse, going into construction to do a carpentry apprenticeship, or studying museum studies and becoming a curator. But I didn't think I had the social skills for that at the time (weird because I picked teaching instead?). I was like, “Well, I guess I'll try being a teacher and then we'll see how that goes. If I don’t like it, I’ll just try something else.” Teaching is different every day, I get to be creative and try new things out every year. Plus I get to spend time with really great people in this community. I love it. No regrets.
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