Super amazing and enthusiastic blog post

January 17, 2016 (Sunday)

Still very, very little happening around here. I've been re-upping on my Korean lessons, which is good, but starting at the end of next week, there will be no classes (for me to teach at the college) for threeeeeeeee weeks. This is because there is a national holiday in February called Sagaan Saar, the celebration of the lunar new year. The actual holiday takes place over about three days, but my school operates under the department of labor in Mongolia (not the dept of education). That's how they do, you know?

I have no idea what I'm going to do. Work on clubs and lesson plans, I guess, and get really good at Spades again. If I could find some wood to carve, I'd start making a mah jong set, but I don't even know where to look. Ah well.

It's finally dipped into the -35 to -40 degree range, which is somewhat exciting in its own way. I will say, though, that there are still kids outside (when it's sunny) playing soccer. I can remember times as a kid when people wanted to cancel classes because it hit 0 outside. One of the many consequences of an overly litigious society, I suppose.

A funny observation: up until the past few days, I've been warm enough in my apartment that I've been able to wear shorts (albeit with long socks and slippers) and not get cold. The diving temperatures outside have made that impossible lately. Just think about that: the construction and insulation is good enough here that, until it hit -35 degrees, I was able to wear shorts inside without getting cold.

In Mongolia, they measure the winter by a series of nine nine-day periods (i.e., 81 days), in which things get progressively colder until about the 4^th period (which I believe we're in right now). I've made up my own system: comfortable without slippers and in a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with slippers and a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with slippers and socks and a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with thick socks, slippers, light shirt; comfortable with thick socks, slippers, thick shirt; and the current temperature, comfortable with thick socks, slippers, pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. It's a major consolation that February is generally warmer and sunnier than January (still in the -20 to -35 range, though).

Um... let's see. This past Saturday, Emily and I taught together for the first time (outside of Monglish night); a seminar on creative writing. We taught one class of younger students and one class of 11^th grade and up students, each two hours long. In the younger class, we got through far less of our material, but in the older class we finished almost all of it. We focused a lot on writing a good introduction. It went well, we think, even if we did step on each others' toes once or twice during the first lesson. A little of that is to be expected. We'll do it again next Saturday, then the following Saturday we'll have a creative writing competition (under the auspices of the WriteOn International competition, a Peace Corps project started in, I think, Georgia).

Our weekly Monglish night meeting was BIG this week, with probably 15 people. That might not seem like a lot, but in the past, it was five or six people sitting around on the couch in our apartment. Monglish night has fast become one of my favorite things to do, because it's specifically not a class. We're just practicing English with a bunch of people who want to improve, playing games and not taking it too seriously. It is incredibly refreshing. I am wondering, though, if maybe breaking it up into two groups might help things flow, if it keeps getting bigger.

UhhhhhhhhhhHHHhHhHhhhHhh otherwise I've been keeping an eye on the markets' continual dive, and reading doom-and-gloom reports about 2016 and the end of society as we know it. One way or another, 2016 is probably going to be a bad year economically: the first few weeks of the year serve as predictors for how the rest of the year will go almost 75% of the time. I also read a report from Lloyd's of London, among the most respected insurance companies in the world, predicting... well, predicting bad things. Food supply shocks and resulting food riots, water shortages and an increase in instances of disease, and in general failure of governments and societies to adapt quickly enough to any number of climate-change driven catastrophes. Lloyd's thinks that, if we continue with business as usual, human society by 2025 won't be recognizable as such.

Okay, I'll back off of that. It's occupied a lot of my time and thinking lately, though, so I couldn't resist a little bit of morbid speculation. I am getting well off the tracks here, though, so maybe this is a good stopping point. yeah? Yeah.