I haven't been mentally present in my classes for about a week. I feel like I'm watching my students through a TV screen, and grammar explanations and vocabulary words are coming out of my mouth without passing through the conscious part of my brain. If I were better at teaching that might be a fine way to operate, but as it is I think I'm coming off as detatched and a little spacey. I lose my sense of when to put off questions, and end up letting a student drag me off into a hazy beside-the-point grammar woods (It can take up to two hours to climb the mountain? It could take up to two hours to climb the mountain? When can nouns split the particles of phrasal verbs? What?)

It's getting harder and harder to perform and to pour so much into teaching. It's like Onion (who has gone back to Canada) said--when he started teaching, he was practically ripping off pieces of himself and giving them to his students, but eventually he wanted to save something for himself. By the time he felt that way, he had been teaching long enough that he could just let his technical proficiency carry him. I'm not there yet, but I'm still starting to withdraw. I hope I snap out of this, at least somewhat.

A lot of it's because I've started to wonder what I'm doing teaching. It's as if a one-year-since-graduation timer went off in my head and now I'm antsy about what I'm doing next. I'm still waiting to hear from the Magazine, and soon I'm going to get stuff together to send to the expat newspapers here.

I went to the American diner by Mayakovskaya with Strawberry after class, and unloaded to her over burgers and milkshakes. By the time we were halfway through, I had stopped seeing the world on television. She said she's hit a groove in teaching and is kind of sad to be leaving. Hopefully she'll come back in September.

T minus 9 days until new computer. Yesterday the lightbulb in my monitor-illuminating desklamp exploded. As in exploded.