I hope my writing doesn't turn out like my game of ping-pong with Onion today. I was on fire when we were just messing around, then when we started a real game I was hitting it off the table, into the net, whiffing it... I hate how something as universal and essential as thinking can completely ruin your game. It's so easy to find that crucial balance between trying and not trying when you're not thinking about it, but then it shatters when you become too conscious of what you're doing (W, remember our drunken conversation about this in Vienna before the Shakira concert?). I think that's exactly what happened with the piece I tried to write for that women's travel website about my hike in Spain. I watched myself write the whole thing, and as a result it spun into a boring and turgid disaster. But I'm choosing to believe that was an exception.



Anyway, Onion. I can never tell what layer I'm on, even though he's got a really distinct internal hierarchy. His shy, awkward, honest moments must be coming from the center, and when he's going on about how LAST night he had this crazy dream that he was a baNAna and he came to WORK and he was STILL a banana and nobody noticed, that must be completely surficial, but what about the rest? I have no idea, for example, if he really converted to Russian Orthodox (although Artichoke buys it), if he's really 27 (he seems much older), if he's really going home to Canada for good in a couple weeks (he finally divulged a date, at least), if he's letting me win at ping-pong... I can't shake the mental association of him with Kaiser Soce from The Usual Suspects. He's that intelligent and impossible to pin down.



He's been here for 6 years. Never plans a lesson, just goes in there and wings it and is successful through sheer force of charisma. He has a perfect knack for entertaining people, which he says, cynically, is what English teaching is all about. You create an engaging, fun atmosphere, tell some stories, jump around, and the students don't notice that they haven't actually learned anything. It sounds like his cynicism built up over the years (today he was telling me how he used to give so much of himself to his students, a phase I'm still in), and it has a lot to do with his decision to go home. His teaching personality is creeping into how he relates to everyone else and he's starting to be sickened by it.



If I were a student I think I'd hate his classes (which would put me in the tiniest of minorities). I don't respond well when people try to put on a show...I keep trying to peek behind the curtain and figure out what they're really about, and figure out what exactly is so important about what they're saying that they get the right to monopolize everyone's head-space. I think Onion picks up on this (like I said, he's smart), and is at a bit of a loss for how to relate to me. It's completely my fault as well, for not being able to meet him halfway...recently things have gotten easier between us (which wasn't really helped by the fact that he's my boss). I think we both find some sort of humor in how we're different. He's leaving too soon for that to bear anything interesting though.