S. is finally feeling semi-human again and successfully navigating the chaos that is motorbike traffic in Ho Chi Minh City.  On Sunday she walked without incident from her hotel near Le Van Tam Park all the way east to the Saigon River–a distance of, perhaps, 30 blocks.  That she felt well enough to embark on such a hike indicates to me just how much better she’s feeling.  I’m relieved–especially since I haven’t heard her cough since Saturday.  I think we’re well on our way to healthier days.

Tomorrow S. leaves for a three day trip to the far south of Vietnam, where refugees from the Khmer Rouge regimie in Cambodia eek out a bleak existence, living off of garbage dumps in the Mekong delta.  Her NGO is undertaking a building project in the region that will help house these people.  If you recall, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in the 70’s, exterminating more than a million ethnic Muslim minorities and intellectual elite–many of whom fled into Thailand and Vietnam.  It is the current generation of this displaced group that needs housing now in the south of Vietnam.

S. will return to Saigon on Saturday, before leaving for Hanoi in the middle of the following week–a three or four day trip to visit with members of her staff who office there and with our friends Robin and Luyen.  I believe I may have mentioned before that Robin works for another international NGO and Luyen is a Vietnamese fashion designer.  They met and married while Robin was working in a Vietnamese refuge camp to which  Luyen had fled during the war.

Back in Lexington I am enjoying Spring Break, not so much for its freedom from work, but more for the freedom it allows me to do the work I need to–a rare luxury, actually.  So far I’ve done little more than grade student essays and run errands.  However, the weather today has been lovely–warm sunshine.  I sat outside  in it  this afternoon while grading.  The  dogs enjoyed their opportunity to lounge in the sun and sniff the yard.  Inch by inch and foot by foot, they circled the fence line looking for God knows what, navigating,  noses to  earth,  with seeming disregard for the eventual success or failure of their search. 

If only I could experience such satisfaction in the process, in the mere doing of anything, less concerned about the outcome and more engaged in the nose-to-earth navigation itself–there’s surely something about the smell of soil  that keeps us grounded, mindful of the place we’ve all been planted.

 S.’s most recent observation about  Vietnamese culture went something like this:  “They have no respect for the sidewalk here!”  Yes, that’s it folks–the well-traveled woman we all know and love has  declared  that  “the sidewalk,”  those elongated paths of concrete and cement that border our streets and roads, merit  our “respect.”  She has established “the sidewalk”  as a social  institution of sorts–one that deserves not only care and maintenance, but also a degree of honor,  a place of prominence. a certain status, if you will.

Clearly, I make much more of this comment than it merits, but I do so to make a point–namely that I think I’m in trouble, that I think I am soon to experience a culture shock like none I ever imagined.  If you know S., you’re aware that it takes a lot to ruffle her cultural feathers.  She’ll eat any animal organ, consume the testicles or brain of any creature a culture requires of her.  She tends to embrace  the social norms of any nation or tribe she encounters,  no matter how seemingly unfamiliar they may be to her.  Given this fact about her, and given her sidewalk comment, fleeting as it may have been,  I suspect I’m about to receive a cultural kick in the ass of sorts.

You see, I’m a cultural wimp compared to S.–a light weight in terms of travel and ability to adapt to the extreme of anything, whether it be  diet, or temperature, or what-have-you.  I need order and routine, my cup of Lipton tea and can of  Pepsi Max, preferably both at one time, if you will, in double-fisted fashion, if at all possible.

So, you see, if S. experiences a cultural phenomenon as “pedestrian” to us as sidewalks to be strange in a place  or outside her comfort zone, this tells me more about the place than it does anything about the woman I love–namely that I had better prepare myself, that I had better duck and cover or run and hide, because much of what I associate with comfort and normalcy, what I consider to be as ordinary and pedestrian as sidewalks, may be hard to come by once  I step  foot  in this  place that could become  Oz to me, that may make  me  say, “I don’t  think we’re in Kansas anymore.”   Oh, I have no ruby slippers.  I may have to go shoe shopping.

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.