important hubristic announcement

I AM THE SHIT.

Look, most of the time I walk around this earth with a chip on my shoulder, a two-by-four in my eye, and a load in my pants. How I ever got this far from the Cherry Blossom Clinic is a mystery.

But today I have to crow. My morning class hit its last Friday of the term, which means students did presentations. And every time up till now that this has happened, it's been a quiet, shuffling, lawn-boning disaster. They get up one after another, do what they can (oh, the empathy), and it's all over in about an hour.

But today's students ran over time and for the most part they were amazing. I mean for upper beginners to make twenty-minute speeches is just nothing short of it. And they were funny as heck; they really killed it.

One student got nerves so bad he just ambled back to his seat and sat down before he'd said a word. He tried again after the break and it was the most hilarious thing. He's a Saudi student, and he's got fifteen bedrooms and twenty-one bathrooms in his villa back in the K.S.A. He borrowed another student's laptop, did some bullshit google image search, and there it was: a picture of his enormous fucking house. All the Saudis in class were laughing so hard I was scared someone was going to fall out the window, and the Asian students had this look on their faces like they'd just found out their parents are robots.

I really have no idea: I could be the archetypal male Westerner in the minds of the next generation of plutocrat overlords that run all our shit for us. I don't really know just how well off these students really are, and it's hard to imagine them in humongous ornate tents in the desert with camel milk and silver tea and coffee decanters and kaftans and a bearded, shoepolished Anthony Quinn. But that's what so many of my students come from. One day one of their fathers may have me destroyed.

A Taiwanese student gave a lovely presentation, unaided by notes of any kind yet grammatically precise, about Taiwanese food and customs. He showed a picture of pettitoes (pig's feet, used as food), explained what it was, and then I watched as it sank in with all the Saudi students that this gentle young man would wind up in hell for the things he ate.

All in good fun.

Afterwards was the graduation barbecue: for this one, I was the "games" guy. So I played volleyball with a group of soccer-loving multinationals who could probably tie someone else's shoes with their feet, but mostly couldn't coordinate their hands well enough to bump, set or spike in a way that didn't look absolutely foolish. My small-town high school V-ball skills took center stage. I was the hero.

And then I borrowed another teacher's guitar and futzed around a bit, and I was the hero again. I'M LIKE THAT. Today my students were awesome, and then I was even more awesome. Let tomorrow's pianos fall where they may.