Broken Promises - Mr. โดน

Well, I have some good news and some confusing not-so-good news. First the good news: I got the confirmation call from a lady in HR at the hotel about my latest millionbahtaire job on Tuesday evening. I agreed to a slightly lower wage than I had hoped for, but its still plenty of money for the time I'll actually be working. They want me to start either on the 1st or the 6th of August, the date has yet to be confirmed. Yaay.

Next, the other news. I got a call yesterday from a different person in the HR department. He told me he had yet to confirm anything with the GM. He also mentioned that they were now considering having just 2 classes instead of 4 and would I still be interested in the job at the same rate. I said probably not. I'd need all the details first and then I would consider. Gnilb!

So I have no clue if I have this job or not. As usual, I find myself almost believing what people say only to be let down 100% of the time. Not sure why I can't seem to learn from this particular type of mistake. I never trust anybody, but I guess when I want to believe something I lie to myself or something. Oh well.

I met with a Korean couple who were referred to me by a friend of mine. I'll be teaching them privately twice a week so that will alleviate 10% of my briefly expected fortune in the event I don't get it.

I'm still going strong on my language studies of late. My browsers are either in Chinese or Japanese now and microsoft office software is all in Thai. I'm in the process of making the switch to monolingual dictionaries in all the languages that I study. I've been doing it with Thai for a while, but I just ordered a student j-j dictionary from Japan and my friend is going back to Korea tomorrow and I told her not to come back without a Korean-Korean dictionary mean for young students. Not sure where the hell I am going to find a Chinese-Chinsese one. When I asked my Chinese school about it, they said they'd never seen one nor could they comprehend what I would want with it.

Um, in other news, I bought a new badminton racked as the head of my last one broke off as it collided with the face of my partner. Black eye for him and a shiny new racket for me. Not everything bad that happens needs to be bad for me.

Winning Freedom

I got the call yesterday. They want me to start August 1st. They are trying to cut about 40B/hour off of what I asked for. I told them I needed the weekend to think about it. At their offered rate, I would still be making much more than I need, but frankly, I'm worth more. They don't need to provide a visa for me as I have one already. I'm fluent in Thai - there are very few people in this city that can explain grammatical nonsense and most importantly, I know how to learn a language. I don't just teach English. I teach people ways to learn. These methods can be applied in any field.

Now my dilemma. This job is too good for me to turn down, but I am extremely tempted to turn down their offer as I feel its not enough. I'm worth more and they realize that.

I need to go teach my kids class in a minute. Mousetrap and twister today. Its too early for twister.

Almost There

As to where I'm referring, I'm not yet certain. I'm still on my language kick. I'm making use of a few different programs at once now rather than before where I put all my languages into one program. This worked fine for a long time until my hard drive died some time ago. I've since rebuilt my Vtrain cards and twice the program crashed and I lost thousands of flashcards and countless hours of work. So while I am by no means splitting up languages, I am taking it easy not to overload any particular program. I am also using a few web-based flashcard programs. I probably spend in total 20-30 minutes doing flashcards in an average day. This is by no means in one sitting. Depending on how busy/patient I am during a day this could be anywhere from 3 to 30. Seems to be working, but it takes months to know for sure.

In other news, I had a meeting with the director of human resources at the hotel I had the 1-month teaching gig at and although I am restraining myself from getting excited...(actually I never get excited..I just get my hopes up and then dashed on a fairly regular basis) as it will be a week before I have any sort of confirmation in writing. Before the meeting I had already calculated every possible outcome about how much I wanted vs how much money I was willing to accept and I was quite pleased to come out of the meeting feeling like I can get exactly what I asked for.

The salary/schedule I designed was meant to be beneficial to all parties - The hotel would pay me 90% of what they were paying the school who is employing me temporarily at the moment and would therefore save money. I required that I be in charge of setting up the entire program within reason. Everybody studies 3 times/week for 1.5 hrs/session.

I would get nearly twice what the school was paying me. But, I'm more than worth it.

The staff would get to study with things that I chose/modified to be most efficient. The schools tend to give you a book the first day so you have little time to familiarize yourself with something new and the situation is worse if you don't like the style of a particular book as the school has already charged the students/clients for copying the books.

I have a million ideas of how I want to run things and I think this could be really good for me. Obviously, this would set me up perfectly financially. I would make much more than I currently spend while working just 18 hrs/week. The hours would be such that I would still have plenty of time to pursue most of the other things I do - Uni classes, piano lessons/practice, daily exercise, Korean lessons, badminton in the evenings and a bit of extra p/t work if felt like it. I'd have to give up my night Chinese class for good (I have kind of done this already as I have come to the conclusion that classes that I don't teach tend to be useless - and some of the ones that I 'teach' are also). Showing up for a class for a year or 2 doesn't mean shit if the teacher/book/your own effort and/or etc sucks.

I want to go more into this right now, but I gotta shove some knowledge in my brain so it will have to wait a while. I finish my work slav-a-thon on Tuesday. Then back to the gym to attempt to coax my muskles back from their month-long holiday.

***I'm going to stop there...but it just occurred to me that this could very well be just an 'up' phase in my life. I have been off of Zoloft for nearly a month with no adverse effects. I do feel like I'm dying because I can no longer breath properly and I have coughing fits frighteningly similar to when I quit smoking, but I feel mentally/psychologically fit. I'm still drinking every day, but its more of a habit than anything else. Its extremely rare that I get drunk. There has to be some situation that brings it about. Just coming down from a long day is not a good enough reason for that. I'll try to write again soon, but who knows. Certainly not me.

Possible Promotion in the Slave Pits - 10,000 Maniacs (Or just 1?)

I have 5 more 8 hour days at the Holiday Inn. I'm teaching 2 different groups now, 4 hrs/day each. One of the managers came and talked to me a bit about how he wants to have an ongoing class for the 4 groups that I've taught/am teaching. He asked how he should go about that...whether through the teacher or the school. I liked how he referred to me as well as the school in the 3rd person. I told him he was welcome to go through me as this would cost them a bit less money and I wouldn't have to fill out stupid evaluation forms with the dumbest questions, make tests for 10-day classes where I don't even have a set book in some of them and of course, I would be able to get paid quite a bit more. I pointed out that 4 hr classes are silly both for the hotel, the staff and me. Most people just can't retain much in a 'learning marathon' of that calibur. As far as classes go I think a minimum of 3 times/wk (though more is better) at no longer than 1.5 hrs is ideal. In this situation both the student(s) and the teacher can hopefully focus for a full hour and possibly a few extra minutes. The extra 30 min covers bathroom trips, loss of concentration, explanations, etc.

So if I get this job, it would be 6 evenings week for 3-4 hrs ( I think this is entirely up to me). Assuming I am satisfied with the pay, this would allow me to continue my other pursuits (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, piano and exercise) while also having time to finish my degree albeit part-time and be able to buy stuff. As I usually get overexcited at such things I am containing myself quite well. Of course, this could just be because I'm too tired to get excited about anything. We shall see.

I've kicked my Japanese program back into shape. Using a 'new' method. Ok so its not new, in fact, I've done it before for fun without considering using it as a backbone to my other styles of learning. I'm going to learn 10,000 sentences in Japanese while I continue to use Heisigs Remembering the Kanji system to learn a respectable amount of Japanese characters. I have a good grasp of a bit over a 1000 at the moment and I've decided to review those thousand over the next couple of weeks to make sure I know them before I move on to the next 1000. Depending on the success of this mission, I will of course attempt something similar in the other languages.

We shall see I suppose.