Four month hiatus, ending now!
It's nearly six months until my service ends, holy poop! (But who's counting?) The amount of time I have left, from now until August (Peace Corps hasn't told me what day yet, but we know August), is like a candy cane. Every time I look at the calendar, it's like I'm sucking off a little bit of sugary, blueberry (I dislike peppermint) goodness, causing the cane to get just a bit shorter. I recently taught many of my students about similes in English. Theirs were much better than that candy cane simile. One of my favorites was "This exam is as difficult as having a baby!"
The future has, in increasing frequency, been unwittingly rolling around in my brain these past few months. As thinking about the future usually happens to feel, it is both exciting and nerve-wracking. Taking that next big step in my life will be a whole new, wonderful adventure that I can't wait to take. But, with six more months, I still need to focus on being a good volunteer, and learn to better avoid the temptation of dreams of the future. In order to balance the time in my head out, I made a video about the past. Hopefully the video of the past plus the anxieties of the future will equal me being in the present. That's totally how it works.
The video is called "This is How I", and it tells the story of our lives in Peace Corps Cambodia. It shows how we do our little daily routines, the contrasts and comparisons between how Americans do the same things. I also talk a bit about culture, what I've learned about culture from being thrown into a totally different culture, and the realization that I am like Jon Snow. (aka I know nothing. (Game of Thrones)). It was always important to me to be myself. I generally avoid conformity as it is, and I wanted my community to learn about American culture by showing them what Americans are like. But, after a year and a half, a lot of my American culture has blended along with some pinches of Cambodian culture, without me even realizing it. It's only when I look back at how much I've changed, that I do realize, and that causes me to think about which parts of which culture I like, and which parts I don't like. It's not cut and dry, of course, and these parts of me will continue to evolve over time. As I spend more of my time here, I will most likely pick up more Cambodian habits, but then when I return to America, how much of these habits will I lose all over again? How many will I keep? It's important for me to think about these questions, and to evaluate my values, because as I've learned here, not all of the values that I learned in America do I still consider to be good values. Sometimes I prefer the Cambodian values, sometimes I prefer American. Perhaps in the future I will have the opportunity to pick up even more values from different countries.
There I go thinking about the future again. I can't stop.
Schmanyway, here's the link to the video. It was made specifically for Meghan's birthday, which was on January 20th. Happy Birthday Meghan!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ulRxrtPKQ&feature=youtu.be
Another link I'd like to share is an article, written by one of my favorite people, Hank Green. He recently had the awesome opportunity to interview President Obama, along with two other YouTubers, about the State of the Union address. It was very neat of Google to do this, because after the last election, which had too few voters from my generation show up at the polling stations, it's clear that people my age are losing interest in politics. Hank talks about why that is, and I didn't completely realize it myself, but what he says is true. A lot of the disinterest stems from distrust with the news. Big news stations like MSNBC and Fox News have a too obvious bias towards their favorite political parties, and when biases like that creep their way into the news, it causes the viewers from my generation to form a distrust towards all news stations. Where do we look for our news next? The internet. However, the internet is also not entirely reliable. This causes an overall distrust towards news on our part, and ultimately frustration, which causes disinterest.
"The median-aged CNN viewer is 60. For Fox News, it's 68." That's crazy. And then there's the fact that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report get (got, for The Colbert Report) more young viewers than CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. Crazy.
I spent a lot more time summarizing that article than I had planned, but you should go over and read it anyway. It's much more well written than this is, and expands on a lot of other good points that I didn't cover. https://medium.com/@hankgreen/holy-shit-i-interviewed-the-president-fa3e8fb44d16
It's difficult for me to keep up with what's going on in America. I grab a newspaper whenever I'm in town, but those chances are few and far between. My only other source of news is this sloth-like internet, which as I already covered, I don't entirely trust all the time. But, there are few people that I trust, and Hank is one of them. This is because I have had the chance to watch his videos, and read his articles, and as he mentions in his article, he is honest, and thoughtful. He tries his best to be objective, and not to let his biases enter his videos, and I like that. I'm sick of the bias, and I'm sick of the constant political party struggle.
I apologize, as many of you didn't come here to read about politics, but it's important to me, and I like writing about and sharing things that are important to me. In other news, Shiri is coming to visit me in a little over a week, I'm incredibly excited, and I'll be sure to post a few pictures of our trip! In February, I'll be doing a Write On! competition with some of my students. It's a national competition, where the students have to write a creative story based on a prompt, and grammar and spelling don't count. I've been reviewing some of the basics on writing creatively in my private classes, and they are surprisingly enthusiastic about it. Especially the grammar and spelling not counting part. It's very cool to see the creative juices flowing in these kids.
To top it off, here's a picture of this one day Ninja decided to follow me to school, and refused to leave my side.
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