take your headphones off little girl

"Freedom" - xkcd.com

This week's theme is: freedom. Partially because I think this is outrageous: Flag sparks controversy at Taoyuan basketball match. Now Taiwanese students can't display the ROC flag in their own country? There's nothing more unsympathetic than a whiny, authoritarian government and its citizens being "offended". Banning Miley Cyrus from all of China was one thing, at least that had entertainment value. Anyway, go Taiwan for winning the basketball tournament anyway. (And for having an awesome 10-10 day, which I'll post about in the near future).

I'd like to discuss briefly what it is I'm even doing in Taiwan, since I should have done that a long time ago. This is supposed to be my senior year at Yale, instead I'm exactly on the other side of the world doing...what?

When I first found out I had an opportunity to come here this year, I honestly was too scared to even consider it. It took awhile to realize that I actually had a choice to make. It's easy to forget about all the choices you have and to fall back instead on habit, prejudice, pure mental laziness - and this is what I tend to do when I am really busy or under pressure. That is, unfortunately it's something I tend to do at school.

Last year, despite having a number of bright spots (especially my wonderful friends - hi guys!), actually really sucked in a big way, from being sick pretty much all of fall semester to really just wanting to be anywhere else from March until finals. Before junior year, I was looking forward to the Best Year Ever: I had really great (and also not difficult) classes and teachers, a light extracurricular load, a great living situation, the best friends and teammates. That instead I had to drag myself to the finish line makes it pretty clear that, though some things totally out of my control also caused unforeseen problems, I still didn't make the choices I needed to make to have a good year, let alone the best one ever.

So this year is going to be about making choices, something I think defines us as human beings and deserves being worked at all the time. Mainly, living a balanced life style (healthy food, daily gym trip, time with friends, other fun/positive things like hikes, cooking, reading, attending performances, sleeping, maybe even TV). These are things I struggle to do once midterms roll around (weeks 3 through 11 of the semester) and I start getting closer and closer to living a life more suited to a robot than a person, where even fun is something that has to be squashed into my schedule and stressed about. I want to be busy and constructive here, but as a person not a machine.

Secondly, learning outside of a test tube and with a different attitude. Somewhere I remember Light encouraged fellows to aim for an A-, I think this will be a really good skill to cultivate. Not the grade or underachieving so much as aiming to learn 90% of what the class thinks you should know, instead of the 110% I automatically aim for. That way you have an extra 10% left over (yeah ok, math is not my strength, clearly) to learn things that the class doesn't think is important. And let's face it, classes are never completely correct about these things. I need to remind myself that although the teacher sets the goals, I get to choose to what degree I want to adopt them as my own.

I've heard some students here, especially those that attended Harvard in Beijing and memorized 150 bazillion characters daily with tests and threats of beatings or whatever, complain about not having enough work at ICLP. To me, that's just silly. Not only is there plenty of work, if you really learn the material and how to use it (not just how to reproduce it on a test), there is also so much to do in Taiwan! Language study is less about hours locked in a study cubicle than about applying what you study, and I'm really happy that this is how I get to learn for the next nine months. If I feel like I don't have enough classwork, I'll learn something I want to learn, like how to order the most delicious dishes in Chinese, what is going on in the news, what kind of television programs Taiwanese people like to watch and where they hang out - these things will all improve my language, and none of them involve becoming a pale, atrophied book worm.

Lastly, I hope to really feel at home somewhere besides home. There are many ways in which I really feel at home at Yale (in particular at Yorkside, obvi), but sometimes it's hard for me to know how much this is me feeling at home or Yale-me feeling at home, if that makes any sense. I'd like to really get to know Taipei, the people, the places, the culture (AND THE FOOD)! And, figure out if I could really live in a big city for any length of time, if I could really live in a Chinese-speaking country for any length of time, and for that matter, what I can do with the rest of my life that incorporates all the new things I'll learn about myself this year. Freedom is about adjusting yourself to your environment, making Yale-you or Taipei-you a real part of your identity, but it's also about choosing the environment that best suits you, how to view it, and how to influence it as much as it influences you. Got to start doing a little more of that.

I've had similar goals for every year at college so far, but always at crucial points in the semester failed to see that there were still choices, even concerning things that felt as though Yale pre-determined them. I do not have to live like an over-committed robot person at Yale - all of the opportunities there made me feel pressure to do so, my life got more and more robot like, but giving in to the pressure/robotizing was my (dumb) choice. I think this year, with a new environment and entirely different kind of pressure, I will really be able to work on balancing my life and not feeling boxed in, all of this just by remaining aware that everything I do involves a choice. And I'm really excited to get back to Yale next year to see how I will pass my last year there and how much I've really changed.

So far things are going really, really well. I'm already a lot more comfortable in Taipei than I expected I'd be. Thanks to the gym, you can no longer tell I spent the summer in blubbery carby gym-culture-less England. Every time I've gone out has been a success, or a failure that taught me something. Classes have largely been really great: newspaper class is sooo useful and surprisingly interesting, radio plays is really fun, even when I have to write my own script, and my core class, Talks on Chinese Culture, is kind of really boring but completely necessary for activating all my forgotten vocab and sentence structures. I think I was placed perfectly, despite taking the written test 8 hours after I got here. I'm actually pretty sure the teachers had already decided what level I was without even looking at my test results, since they knew me from the summer before (it's also been so nice to see them again!). Half of the "oral exam" was actually the head teachers just asking me about Cameron. It was really sad but nice that they were direct enough to bring it up and were thinking about him. We still miss you, Cam

I guess this turned out to be more of an adverb-heavy diary entry than an entertaining blog post, so if you've made it this far, here are a couple of interesting and purely entertaining things I've seen:

Since Chinese chengyu are so important to sounding intellectual, Chinese people try to learn English by learning (often way weird or obsolete) idioms and quotes from dead people. This book is actually better than most I've seen - Pony Up and Party On!



Chinese version of an ice-cream truck:



The huge ice-cream cone I got from it (ok, lying, it was from Danshui) that was SO BIG I couldn't even get a picture of the whole thing and looked like a weirdo trying to take it (cf. face of guy in background):



I am SO eating here ASAP:



Since I take this Irish proverb very seriously:



One huge ice-cream and a ton of potatoes later, I realized the gym was a little quiet - no grunting or loud noises allowed. In fact, try to avoid exerting yourself at all:


Adventure updates coming soon, promise.

Katie