Yup

November 18, 2006 – 9:50 AM – I don’t get to watch college football

The biggest college football game in a decade is on tomorrow and I don’t get to watch it. For the most part American sports are well represented on the Pacific Rim ESPN feed, but college football unfortunately is a significant casualty. The only games I get are the ones during the week (which happened to include the unlikely important Big East games this year). During the weekend I get to watch the exciting action of drag racing, fishing, and cricket.

I’ve been sitting around trying to identify what exciting happenings have occurred over the past month that I can write about, and the only thing I can think of is growing a few plants. I have two tomato plants and four eggplant plants sunning themselves. None of them are large enough to be transported out of their Styrofoam cups, but I did successfully transplant multiple seedlings in one cup to individual cups of their own. I attribute this success to my immense gardening skill. By the way, you can tell life in the Pacific is slow because the most exciting thing that happened to me in a month was plants growing.

I think I’m going to go diving next week, first time in half a year. It’s nice having some money this year. I can buy food that I want to eat and do things that I want to do. It dawned on me earlier this week that, despite having a worthless liberal arts major, I find myself having a “real life” earlier than most of my collegiate counterparts. I have a house. I have a yard. I weed my yard. I have a garden. I pay bills. I have to budget my necessities against my wants. I don’t borrow. I save. Who would have thought that this would describe me at age 23.

School is going very smoothly. I’ve established another internship, this time in conjunction with the national (read, only) newspaper. They’ve employed a senior and his responsibilities will be taking pictures, writing articles, and translating between English and Marshallese. He’s very excited, though I think the newspaper is even more excited to have cheap labor that’s fluent in both English and Marshallese. That’s difficult to come by around here.

My TOEFL kids are doing extremely well, even compared to the previous group last year. Their improvement at this point has outpaced the previous group’s improvement at the same juncture. At least three of them have a better than average shot of receiving the Taiwan Scholarship that Jane did last year. Speaking of Jane, I received an e-mail from her last weekend. She wrote it in Chinese.

PS: I might have told you that I plan on saving a lot of money and traveling around the world in about two years or so. I’m still very much serious. If anyone is even remotely interested in joining me, lemme know.