Hanging in There

So started out early this morning just walking around trying to get my bearings, sorta have the cardinal directions embedded in my brain again. I can finally explore around and not feel completely lost. Thankfully the dorm is quite tall so it's easy to spot from a distance. Here are some shots from around campus, it's a super beautiful area. This is an insignificant fraction of the artwork around too, I'll have to snag some more shots later.

 

Rockin some Wolves in the Throne Room in Tainan. Learned how to say "black metal music" in Chinese and did a little presentation in class on bands to listen to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chinese chicken sandwich sold at the food truck by the dorm. I normally get either veggie or meat baozi but was wanting to try something new. The egg is a nice touch. They are labeled as "chicken hamburgers" so I had to explain to my one of my friends that there's no such thing. A hamburger is always beef. If it's not beef, it's a sandwich i.e. pulled-pork sandwich, chicken sandwich, tuna sandwich. I thought that little nuance was quite interesting.

Just another walking around picture. I ended up getting completely brutalized in class to the point of depression so I skipped lunch and instead nibbled on a little "feeling sorry for myself", which is unsurprisingly not very wholesome. I actually started missing home a little bit. The phrase "mute in a land of 23 million people" kept running though my head (yeah I can be pretty dramatic). I feel so helpless here at times. Without the help of the language partners I would truly be unable to accomplish anything. A lot of it is just my head though. Taiwanese people have been so incredibility nice and encouraging. Of course the ones helping out with the TUSA program are awesome, but I've also had the fortunate of "talking" to 4-5 random people in elevators or at restaurants. I say like "謝謝" and they comment on how good my Chinese is lol. My own fears of being ridiculed for trying to be a part of a culture 7000+ miles away from where I was born and raised and somehow "fit in" conglomerate into a cycle of doubt and seclusion forming a self-fulfilling prophesy that will inevitability be my downfall if I allow it.

Quite often I think "what am I even doing?" And I feel silly. Silly about my physical appearance, silly about my emotional state, silly about my past, and silly about my dreams and goals for the future. I can speak a little Chinese, but it's still going to take years to get anywhere to a fluent level, and I may never even be able to. I can express things like locations, what I like and don't like, school stuff, but I can't express emotions on any sort of complex level. I can more or less talk about what I think, but not what I feel about subject matter. Really at the moment I'm crying inside because I can't understand what people are saying. Even words I know, sentences I know how to form, fly over my head as quickly as they're spoken. My listening skills are total crap. In reality though it's going to take more and more practice. Going from listening to Chinese maybe three hours a week plus some music and a T.V. show every now and then, to this program where for 13 hours a week I'm in class being bombarded with the language and hearing and seeing everything in Chinese, has been a pretty rocky road. As much as I've complained about how difficult it is, I know as soon as I get back to Arkansas I'm going to miss Taiwan.

I'm continuously fighting myself between settling for a sedentary life or one of action. The only thing I do know is I'm going to die sooner or later, so what do I want out of life? I have such a finite amount of time to explore this planet, am I choosing the right thing? I've spent several years just sitting around thinking about what to do, and not actually really doing anything. I just kinda picked a major to study in school because I knew I had to choose something. Was it the right choice? I have no idea. Was it a wrong choice? I am also as unsure about. With so many options open I often find myself devolving into inaction and confusion. Somehow though I finally decided that learning Chinese and Environmental Science will allow me to do something magical somewhere, and as much as I love my job in the computer labs, after 7 years now I need to find something else.

So I continue on, even when my brain locks up and tells me I'm an idiot. Even when I just want to be drunk in bed playing video games all day. Even when I feel like my dreams of being a part of something bigger are a lie.

So I continue on...