My student Laura says the new Facebook looks like the old Twitter, which may indeed be the case.   I wouldn’t know a Tweet from a Squeak, but I’ll take her word for it.  She should know.  I, on the other hand, remain mostly bothered by Facebook’s forcing us to post “Status Updates” in the third person.  I had hoped the new version would eliminate that flaw, but no such luck.  If anything, it’s worse.  Yet this has not interrupted my addiction to the site.  I need a 12 step group.  I may require an intervention from friends and family who love me enough to pry my dying fingers from the mouse and bring me back to a world of face to real face communication–god, there we go with that image again.  The site is insidious.  It gets into your blood, and you’re  never the same. 

At any rate, while I was  instant messaging with my sister  last night (on Facebook, of course), I began to wonder why people don’t publish books of these abbreviated dialogues, like they assemble the correspondence of important people, so the rest of us can read what it’s like to be rich, or famous, or popular,  or behind bars.  Sometimes  Lynn is so damn funny, I imagine others might appreciate her humor and want to read her terse one-liners.  Our instant messaging works well  because  I provide the boring backdrop against which Lynn can pitch her comments.  The comic always needs a straight face at which to sling her zingers, unless of course she plays the more serious role herself and deflects amusing comments off her own shiny surfaces.

So much for my musings on the nature of comedy.  I know about as much about it, as I do about Twitter.

Good news from the blog gods–yesterday more than 100 people logged onto my site and read my  endless ramblings!  This is exciting and motivates me to write today–even though, for me, it’s late, I’m tired, and you may not care how many lost souls actually consume my  silly posts.

However, you may care to know that S. seems to be feeling better.  Please note that I use the word “seems” purposefully, as I am beginning to look less at her health as it varies from day to day and more at longer term trends.  Clearly one day of seeming improvement does not a trend make.  I should add that she at least looks better, though by “better” I  mean little more than  “less miserable.”  Interpret this as you will. 

S. has mentioned that so far Vietnam seems to lack the aesthetic of  Thailand and warned that Ho Chi Minh may not offer some of the creature comforts I had learned to associate with Bangkok.  Apparently the infrastructure of Vietnam has not kept pace with other places in Asia and what is there has not always been well maintained.  Is  this the impact of Communism on the country or the residual effect of war that seeps  into the very heart and soul and soil of a city and lingers even 30 years  after the fighting itself has stopped?

In addition to these aesthetic and infrastructure issues S. also describes what, even to her, seem to be strange traffic patterns.  For instance, several days ago a colleague from her Bangkok office warned that Vietnam had an over-abundance of motor bikes.  S. suspected this could not possibly be the case, as she had traveled extensively in places like India where the behaviour of motorcyclists was indeed bizarre and  frightened even her.  She has always told me that India was one country in which she would NEVER drive!  However, she mentioned this morning that she now knows what her friend meant.  Yesterday as she attempted to cross the street to her office, she was nearly  run off the sidewalk, when seeming armies of motorbikes merged onto and overtook every inch of the already crowded walkway, creating an extra lane of traffic to alleviate increased congestion on the street itself.  She said that as it is sidewalks nearly cease to exist, as shops overtake them, moving their goods out to the edges of on-coming traffic in an effort to accommodate a claustrophobic and suffocating lack of space.  On her Facebook page today, she even boasts having completed  her most recent crossing without having suffered bodily harm. 

Thank goodness  for even the smallest of successes, whether they relate to sidewalk survival or blessings from the blog gods.  We take what we can get!

Okay, S. is still quite sick, which upsets me considerably.  Actually, she had begun to feel better, or so it seemed, so I did not offer a health  update yesterday.  Now, however, her apparent relapse concerns me.  Plus, she  sounds  miserable–utterly so.  Perhaps, I’m over-reacting, but it’s difficult to be sick so far from home and almost as difficult to know someone you love is struggling in that way.

At any rate, S’s first 36 hours in Vietnam have proven fairly uneventful, outside of this health scare.  She visited her new office yesterday and met her staff of 40, a group that consists of Vietnamese and ex-pats alike.  Friday she will move to a hotel closer to the office, so she can begin an apartment search in that neighborhood over the weekend.  Gosh, it all seems to be happening so quickly!

In addition to worrying about S’s health, I remain busy on the home front, working this evening to assemble a panel of students whose work we will feature in the Undergraduate Writing Symposium.  I have approached a group of four.  Hopefully they will all be willing to participate.

I think I will hurry and post this with little attention to revision.  I want to relax with a book for a while before bed.  Recreational reading relaxes me like little else.  Thank God for good books and great adventure–if only now we can all stay strong and healthy or, at least, remain a little less sick.

Good News–S. has arrived safely in Ho Chi Minh City!  I always feel better knowing she’s settled comfortably in a new location.  So, now all of you can cheer along with me at this milestone, minor as it may seem.  Actually arrival on Vietnamese soil may prove more significant than I can accurately appreciate  at the moment, especially since this will be our home away from home for some months to come.  I’m especially curious to hear her impressions of the place once she’s seen it in day light.  She did mention, however, that she’s not terribly thrilled with her current accommodations, compared with the hotel she had just left in Bangkok which was twice as nice for less than half the price.  Though that may say more about the extreme affordability of Bangkok than any inherent flaw in her Ho Chi Minh hotel.

At any rate, I did manage to accomplish one significant task toward my own eventual departure for Asia–namely the purchase of a Blackberry 8830 World Phone.  This will allow me to stay in telephone contact with friends and family in the US.  Mostly we will communicate via Skype, which is free, but it’s important I have the Blackberry for emergencies.  It’ also fairly affordable for text messaging  internationally–not to mention being able to send and receive email from virtually anywhere.  All in all a good purchase and one with which I’m excited to experiment.

I might also mention in closing that S. is fighting a case of bronchitis that sent her to the hospital before leaving Bangkok.   The illness left her alone in her Thai hotel room for several days, alone and clearly feeling fairly miserable.  It continues to throw her into coughing spasms that are painful to watch and listen to.

Oh, well, this is clearly not one of my most exciting posts of the past month.  However, I guess it does manage to keep readers updated with recent developments.  Stay tuned for more about Vietnam as seen via daylight.  In the mean time, there’s much to be said for safe passage.

So my last post sounds pretentious!  No one has accused me of this, mind you.  I’m indicting myself.  Good God!  If I were smart I would probably delete the thing.  But in the spirit of honesty and transparency, I’ll let it be.  I thought it.  I wrote it.  I’m guilty as charged.  How do my friends even tolerate me, my family not disown me, my partner–well, what can I say–she puts up with a LOT!

Seriously now–these are the ways I know I can improve as a teacher!

First, I could organize my composition course around an arc that currently interests and challenges me–rather than sticking with the same old “space and place” theme because it’s easier.  Admittedly, I keep telling myself I’m tweaking and improving the thing–perfecting it even.  And, yes, I had late last semester developed an arc to test drive in the fall, but that was before this grand Asian experiment became a reality.  That progression began with an essay on happiness, continued with one on homelessness and then another on hunger, and ended with a paper on hope.  I was, for lack of a better name, calling it the ” Four H’s”–admittedly that needed a bit of work–okay, a lot.

Secondly, if I were sticking with the space/place theme, I could develop a reading packet that better suits that approach to looking at “issues of social relevance.”  The problem is–I like the Engaged Citizen–it may be slightly agenda-driven, but it’s an agenda I believe in!  So, I’m afraid my own ambivalence may prevent me from integrating readings as well as I might were I using a collection of essays I assembled myself.  And it may be that my personal life as a reader and my self as a writer are not as well integrated as they might be.  This particular form of schizophrenia may not appear in the DSM–but I may manifest a few symptoms of the disorder and inadvertently carry them with me into the classroom.   I’ll have to give this more thought.  It’s not that I mean to imply my approach to teaching composition is diseased in any way and certainly not pathological, for that matter.

Wow–I may have to stop here.  Identifying  these “weaknesses” is leaving me, well–weak.  My pedagogical top 10 may be little more than a top 2 at this point.  But what can I say?  I guess, I’m not a perfect teacher!  OMG!

Today I added photos  to my Facebook page and updated the format of this blog–all of that while I should have been summarizing student evaluations for my teaching portfolio.  Clearly I’m struggling with the latter task, putting it off day after day, dreading the need to sort and sift and distill so much information down into a few short paragraphs.  Many of my colleagues procrastinate because, according to them, the evaluations are painfully mean and negative.  This is not the cause of my delay.  In fact,  if anything my students’ comments seem surprisingly, almost unbelievably, affirming.  Evaluation after evaluation characterizes me as either the best English teacher students have ever had or the best professor they’ve encountered at UK.  Many indicate that mine was the only writing class they have ever enjoyed or the first one that lead them to believe they actually had something meaningful to say.

I suppose my greatest dilemma involves having to characterize my weaknesses as a teacher.  Perhaps, it’s arrogant to say so, but the negatives that students pointed out in evaluations a year ago seem to have evolved into positives in the last semester.  Clearly I’ve worked hard to improve peer work shopping, developing a strategy that involves meeting personally with each student group and coaching them through the process during the 1st several units of the semester.  In evaluations from the fall of 2007 students complained about the process and indicated that it did not benefit them.  More recently, however, students actually suggest that peer work shopping is one of the course components they  like best.  In evaluations from this past fall, students complain about very little and, in fact, come embarrassingly close to raving about the class.  It all seems too good to be true or at the very least too positive to be realistic.  I suspect they just really liked me and responded to my care and concern for each of them as both writers and individuals.  Clearly I connect well.  I establish good rapport.

I don’t know.  Maybe I should give quizes to assure students finish reading assignments.  Maybe I should not allow so much freedom in choosing writing topics.  Maybe I’m just not hard enough on these kids.  I don’t know.  I think the biggest complaint I noticed this past semester involved the lenghth of essays I required students to write.  However, that’s a requirement of the writing  program.  It has nothing to do with me.

This would not be an issue were I not required as part of this process to analyze my weaknesses as a teacher.  Everyone has room to improve.  I just don’t know EXACTLY what I need to change about the way I teach in general or how I can improve my approach to teaching compostion more specifically.

S. is sick.  She’s sick  in a hotel room in Bangkok, alone.  And she doesn’t manage illness  well.  When I spoke with her this morning  she coughed through much of the conversation.  Plus, she looked more than miserable.  Yes, I said “looked”–we do video calling  via Skype–for free.  At least the weekend has already arrived there, so she has 2 days to rest and re-cooperate before returning  to the office on Monday and leaving for Hanoi on Tuesday.  It saddens me to see her feeling so badly, knowing there’s no one there to care for her or comfort her or run downstairs to the lobby in search of  the Thai equivalent to chicken soup.

However, arrival in Vietnam may serve as “Chicken Soup for [S’s] Soul,” since she’ll visit our friend Robin and his wife Luyen who live in Hanoi.  Robin, a Brit, served as senior vice president for S’s NGO several years ago, while S. was creating the organization’s disaster response program.  While Robin was working in a Vietnamese refugee camp during the war,  he met Luyen who had fled the country with little more than her life.  They married and have one son.  Luyen, interestingly enough, works as a fashion designer and merchandiser in Hanoi.  I got to know Robin two years ago when S. and I were  attending an event  at the Bangkok Polo Club to honor the NGO’s then outgoing regional vice president for Asia Pacific.  Robin is a warm, C. S. Lewis like man (at least as I imagine Lewis to have been)–a person whose deep faith is rooted in a social gospel of giving.

At any rate, visiting with Robin, her mentor, will nourish S. in a way a bowl of chicken soup served up this afternoon never could.  Plus, I think Robin and Luyen will orient S. to life as an ex-pat in Vietnam.  We’re hoping Luyen  has connections in Ho Chi Minh/Saigon that can help us locate a suitable apartment in that city–a flat where the next time S. is sick I can cook up a pot of broth that will  feed more than body, more than soul–a soup we will share in a new city, on a new continent, in a hurting world.

Wow, my work week has ended, ended that is,  in terms of teaching and keeping office hours.  Plenty of class preparation still awaits me this weekend, as does the nightmare of summarizing student evaluations for my teaching portfolio.  However, the daily grind of getting up and facing roomfuls of freshmen is over till Monday.  And, frankly, I love the kids I teach, but periodically I want to crawl into bed with laptop and books and escape all forms of responsibility, instructional and otherwise.  Boredom is under-rated.

Gosh, it’s pretty sad when your idea of a good time involves little more than “laptop and books.”  Clearly I need a life!  But then again I never have been hip or even remotely more than nerdy.  Hell,  I’m the one who’ll go to bed before the sun sets and read and blog and Facebook myself to sleep before the evening’s prime time television lineup even begins.  Be afraid of old age.  Be very afraid!   This is what it means to be a member of the “Dancing with the Stars” generation.

S. has arrived safely at her hotel in Bangkok.   She called a few minutes after 2 pm here–2 am Tuesday there–indicating that the trip had been long but uneventful and that it felt good to be back in a city she knew so well, doing work she believes in again.  Needless to say, the  news of her arrival thrilled me.  It’s always been difficult for me to relax knowing that she is in transit to the other side of the globe.  But now that she’s arrived, I feel a bit better, less anxious, less preoccupied with fears of plane crashes and other man made disasters.  My baby is safe and I am satisfied accordingly.

However, I’m now worrying about Ralph, the older and larger of our two dogs, who injured his leg this afternoon while running in the yard.  He circled the fence line at high speed and on the curve closest to the gate he yelped and came limping to me on three legs.  He still, several hours later, refuses to put weight on the injured limb and is unable to jump up onto the bed.  I’m having to lift him.

This concerns me especially, since, as a puppy, he was hit by a car and had to have both hips fused back together.    This makes me think he is both more vulnerable to injury and less likely to heal easily.  If he has not improved by morning, I will have to take him to the vet for examination and x-ray.

Now, however, I’m sleepy and ready for bed–ridiculously early, I know.  Hopefully, I’ll awaken refreshed, and unlike Ralph, will not limp through peer review sessions with students tomorrow.

Our Asian adventure is officially launched with S’s departure this morning for Bangkok.  Right now she is in the Detroit to Tokyo leg of the trip–an excruciatingly long flight of more than 13 hours.  Almost two years ago when I flew that route, I remember landing in Tokyo (Narita) with unusually swollen feet from so many hours in the air–feet down, unable to move comfortably around the cabin.  However, all told, the trip to Bangkok takes around 27 hours, from wheels up in Lexington to wheels down in Thailand.  S. will arrive there early Tuesday morning–just after midnight–and will spend 2 days in Bangkok at her NGO’s Asia/Pacific headquarters, before leaving Thursday for Vietnam–a couple of days in Hanoi and then down to Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon).  She will remain in Vietnam until late in the month, when she goes to Jordan for a UN leadership conference on disaster response.

It all sounds exciting, but frankly at the moment I feel miserable and lost, knowing that this chapter in our lives is ending.  However, I’m trying to focus on the positive–the fact that another is beginning–trying to be optimistic.  At the moment though, I feel like I’m in limbo–lost between two worlds–living out this semester until I can join S. is Asia around the first of May.  But basically I’m experiencing an overwhelming sense of dread–two months is a long time apart.  We did six weeks during the tsunami–that’s been our longest separation.

However, I have a wonderful family and friends and students who will occupy me.  My mother returns to the US from Brussels at the end of this month.  I look forward to that.  I only wish she were going to be back in time for my birthday.  Gosh, that sounds childish, but frankly I’m feeling fairly toddler-ish at the moment, trying to get my feet under me and regain my balance.  This whole learning to walk on two legs thing is not all it’s cracked up to be.  I’m like my nephew Reeves, who we feared for a while might crawl down the aisle to his own wedding.  But he has recently learned to get around all too well on two legs–toddling toward two–vertical all the way.