In My Mind I'm Gone to Southeast Asia (Sorry James Taylor for ripping your song)

I'm applying for jobs; not just any old jobs.  Jobs that are filled with noodles, nice people, and beautiful women.  Yep.  I'm going to Southeast Asia.  When?  Hopefully sometime in September.  I want to have a little bit of relaxing/cool down from a two year stint here, but after about a month I'm going to get wanderlust again.  I believe working in Asia will cool down the lust, for a while... 

Schoolwise it's like I've been a hotel.  I've checked out.  I still care about the kids, but I've definitely noticed that the amount of effort I'm willing to put into the school has decreased.  Maybe I'm just lazy.  Maybe I'm full of teaching kids again and again the difference between P and B.  Who knows...  

COS (Close of Service) conference is coming in one month.  It'll be good to see all the volunteers from all across Micronesia before we all go our separate ways.  

I recently (just today actually) started taking Chinese lessons from a friend I met on the island.  She's from the northern part of China, and she's willing to exchange Chinese lessons for English lessons.  So today I got schooled in the 4 tones of Chinese, and holy crap it's tough.  She wants her son to learn better English, so his lessons will be playing sessions with me and the two American kids from down the street.  Pretty sweet deal, right?

This post is pretty boring.  Shit.  How do I make it better?  

Photo bomb.

This is our new ping pong table.  It's pretty tight.

Dunkin Donuts coffee, donuts, and cake.  Healthy dohlul!

Teacher Joe working.

The horrible bluegrass vocalist Christian DVD that I've seen thousands of times here.

Kill me now...

Sweat. A Sting Ray. The Final Stretch.

Holy (insert your religious person's name here)!  It's hot.  I've come up with a new measuring system for hot it is.  I measure by the ounces of sweat I produce in a given time.  It's called the Nickiometer.  Let's say I sweat 2 ounces in 30 minutes.  2/30 = .067ounces/minute, or for the international people out there 1.98mL/minute.  The more sweat/minute, the hotter it is.  I've created this scale to emphasize how damn hot it is.  95 degrees Fahrenheit doesn't do it justice.  Sweat/minute does.

The latest news has been my changing host families in the past two weeks.  I changed host families due to some recent incidents at my house and because I believed it would be the best for me, and my old host family, to go our separate ways.  I love them, but the situation is better now that we've gone apart.  My new host family is amazing.  There's five of us (plus the extras who pop in all the time :)  ).  I play ping pong with my new thirteen year old host brother, and we're also planning to do a lot more fishing in the months to come; 5 months to be exact.  Last time we went on Sunday, a sting ray, yes, like the one that killed Steve Irwin, went right under our bamboo raft; mind you, we're directly in the water as in our raft barely separates our butts from the water.  Soo cool though to see a deadly animal just gracefully fly under your unprotected feet.  Subject change.  There's also two adorable half Pohnpeian half American kids who live next door who frequent our house.  At first they were very shy, but now they're asking me soooo many questions and wanting to play ping pong.  It's really cool how they're both fluent in English and Pohnpeian, so it's cool to be able to use both with them interchangeably and them not miss a beat.  My Nohno and Pahpa are really good people.  They love their movies, and we chit chat all the time.  Pahpa was a carpenter before he had a stroke, and Nohno has been the upkeeper of the apartment that they rent out, which by the way is my new home.

My new place is so cool.  It's out of this world.  I have an entire building to myself.  TO.  MY.  SELF.  Pants are entirely optional.  Singing embarrasing songs is required.  It's kind of amazing to have my own place but at the same time be right next door to my family.  It couldn't be a better set up.  BathroomS (yes, capital S for multiple bathrooms).  Kitchen.  Dining room.  Living room.  Balcony.  It's real life, and it's amazing.

This is the part where the song quiets down a bit after that pretty upbeat chorus right there.  We'll call this part the bridge of my blog post.  5 months.  I have 5 months until I leave Pohnpei.  August 19th is the day I hop on the plane.  I can't believe I've been here for only a year and seven months.  It sometimes feels like it's been longer, and very few times it feels too short.  I'm starting to look for jobs/experiences to do after Peace Corps, and my eyes are glued to Asian (mostly Thailand/China/Phillipines.  You know... Jobs.  Food.  Women.  They've got all my favorite types of each. (oh, long parenthesis exert you say?  How about I blow your mind (By really blowing your mind!) ) )  <-- I bet you've never been triple parenthesisied before, have you?

You're welcome.

In all, the next 5 months I hope will be nothing but amazing.  School is going great.  Secondary projects like coaching are hopping.  Job hunting is just about to commence.  Sweat to be sweated.

It's the Final Stretch.  Cue the Final Countdown Song.

Wo hai ni men.

- Nick

My private bathroom.

Living room.

Working those triceps.

Marbles has taken Pohnpei by storm.  Every boy plays it now.

My morning view does not suck.

Molly and the story she made for me personally.

Apparently I can't be Nick AND and an English teacher.  I don't mind.  I'll take either one.

She caught the men wai!  My host sister.

Apparently she doesn't like my bait.

Yes, I watched the Letter Factory video.  We made some pretty good "S"s.

Adorable.

Watch out!

Imagine a deadly sting ray flying underneath this.  Would you pee your pants?  Would you be greatful that your pants were already in the water so that you could pee in them?

2 Months Until COS Conference – Say What?!

I can remember back in December of 2012 arguing over what percentage of our service we had finished.  I was all about upping the numbers a bit.  Conservatively we had been here for four months of service out of a total of 24, making the percentage 16.67%; however, I like to cook the books.  I used to count the two months of training AND the month of December which hadn't finished yet: 7 months out of 24 to equal 29%.  That made it feel like we’d made it over the quarter hump.  It’s all about the milestones, and I needed one in December 2012.  However, there’s no need to be cooking the books right now.  Actually I’d say if there were a complete opposite of cooking the books, that’s what I should be doing now.

I’ve been here for 18 months of service out of 24 making it come exactly to 75% complete.  It’s scary.  I have two and a half months until we have out Cessation of Service Conference (the conference where we get to learn that readjusting back to America, in a word, sucks.).  I’ve been on this island for one year and seven months.  There’s no place to be cooking the clocks now.  As Muse would say, our time is running out.

Because of this internal countdown to leaving Peace Corps, I’ve been trying to leave my impact here with the time I’ve got.  I recently started coaching the Pohnpei middle to long distance Microgames track team which meets up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  They’re great runners.  I give them really hard workouts, but they are all no complaints.  They just put their shoulder to the grind and keep pushing.  I’m mostly teaching them about pacing, timing, and stretching.  Only one of the six I train have a digital watch to track their pace with, so I think the first step from here is to acquire some watches for the team.  It’s great to be coaching again, and yes, I do like the title “coach” quite a lot.

The internal clock is ticking.  I never got to have much impact on little kids here like under eight years old other than like making them laugh by showing them funny faces.  The amount of knowledge I’ve passed on is minimal which is okay because I’m really good at making little kids laugh at my ugly mug.  It’s fun.  Nonetheless, I wanted to leave something behind for young Pohnpeian kids before I leave.  A Department of Education worker and I have just finished writing a book to be used in 1^st grade Pohnpeian classrooms.  It’s mostly cute stories about puppies and animals doing things with one to two short sentences per page accompanied by a picture (we didn’t draw the pictures though.  Someone else will be hired to do that.).  We just sent the “complete” text and illustration ideas to our project coordinator at IREI (Island Research Education Initiative), and he said it’s good enough to start creating and pushing it though to publishing.  So yes.  It’s pretty cool, and it’s been one of the most interesting secondary projects I’ve done, not because of the work, but because of the environment.  My coworker and I usually planned to meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays for about an hour a day, but that was sometimes difficult because my coworker always had something coming up.  Funerals, meetings, and just wanting to go home early always killed our meetings.  I’d say we met up maybe 30% of the meetings that we had planned.  When we did meet up, our workplace was interesting.  The Department of Education has bathrooms, kind of.  There is no toilet paper.  The sinks are full of clogged dirty water.  There is no soap.  It’s disgusting.  So my only question is this: if there’s no toilet paper, and no soap, how do people use the bathroom sanitarily?  Answer: they don’t.  So ya.  That happened.  Lesson learned: bring toilet paper and hand sanitize.

My next project (I hope it works out) is to record stories to be read over the radio to kids after school.  I think another PCV and I are going to be working on this project because, well, we like the sounds of our own voices and, well, we like to think that our voice travelling the close to the speed of light over radios waves is pretty cool.

I’ve also been eating like a pig but mysteriously not gaining weight despite the fact I don’t run as often as I once did.  I eat at a buffet every day for lunch and grab at least two huge plates of food.  Where do the excess calories go?  No clue.  It’s a medical mystery.

The thriller novel has been in a standstill for a good amount of time.  I wouldn’t call it writer’s block.  I’d call it, dare I say it, lazy-ass-ness.  It takes effort to write, and frankly (yes Frank, I’m calling you out) I haven’t had it.  Surely I can’t be serious?  I am serious, and may Leslie Neilson rest in peace. 

Here’s some pictures to wrap this post up.  Happy late Valentines day to you all, and I’ll see you when the 24 clock burns down to 0.