I have always been more of a solitary figure. I no doubt would’ve been a total recluse if I didn’t have my sister and cousins for playmates growing up. Even still, the reclusive impulse is strong. My experience in the Army taught me how to be superficially social for survival purposes and I’ve become quite adept at appearing rather extroverted in public presentation while remaining at heart a committed introvert.

As such, when I play video games, my preferred experience is the single player one (unless we’re talking about Smash Brothers or Mario Kart; the more the merrier then). You can no doubt imagine that the MMO boom hasn’t really held much appeal to me. However, while my battle buddy was deployed to Iraq, I wound up picking up Guild Wars and later WoW to keep him company. (A small service to serve from the comfort of Fort Livingroom.)

Despite the massively multiplayer nature of either of these two games, my impulse (when said battle buddy wasn’t around) was to solo. This was less of a problem in Guild Wars (until my chara hit the level cap while the enemies continued to rise in level) than it was in WoW, because I was stuck on a PvP server. There are warmer climes each and every member of the Horde can be consigned to as far as I’m concerned. I am, of course, talking about the practice of ganking. (Random player-killing to the uninitiated.) Having some dillweed forty levels higher than you come by and kill you whilst questing in contested territory is about as fun as it sounds. It finally became too much for me and I quite the game. (Considering the conniptions my battle buddy would have years later despite being rather accomplished in the game shows that it didn’t just bother me.)

Now, of course the ganking was entirely mutual. Both factions were equally guilty of preying on the weak (though you are naturally going to see the enemy as the more evil). It’s classic predatory behavior, a lot of the crocodile brain at work, I’m sure.

The reason I’m bringing up this topic is because of a similar, albeit more benign variation I’m seeing in Fantasica, which has been occupying no small portion of my time lately. You are free to attack other players once an hour, five of your party and five of your allies versus your opponent’s monsters and vice versa should you find yourself the defender. The typical monsters get chewed up in short order even if you devote the time to maxing them out. Normally, the reward for victory is 10K Luna (the standard in-game currency). You can also target the artifacts an opponent carries to complete your set and get the monster card reward. Because the artifacts you win from the end chapter battles in the main questline are random, you pretty much have to resort to raids to reliably round out your collection. When attacked, though, there’s a report of it, which leaves the defender open to launch a revenge attack and reclaim the lost Luna. (Oh, yes, I failed to mention that the 10K Luna reward comes out of the defender’s coffers.) To prevent the cycle of revenge from going on forever, the game caps the number of attacks on a single player to three in a day.

When it comes to yours truly, I’ve found that I can be rather vindictive soul. If attacked, I will revenge myself three times over, even if the attack is itself revenge for one of my raids. I’ve already had two victims of my depredations plead with me to cease. The most recent even offered to pay me off to get me to stop, but it was never about the money. It was simple vendetta.

Those of you casting a dubious eye on my humanity may be mildly comforted to know that I’ve shown mercy to my supplicants and having reached the end of the current questline, I have no further need to go out a-viking. I’ll still wage a campaign of revenge on any who attack me, but online games have a way of bringing out your inner sociopath.

My father once said of farming, “It’s not a bad life, but it’s a sh***y living.” Of teaching, I might say the inverse. While no one’s going to become fabulously wealthy as a teacher. The roughly $3K a month you can make teaching full-time is a pretty decent living. Maybe less so as the sole provider for a family of four, but definitely more than enough for a confirmed bachelor like yours truly. The life of a teacher, however…

I was rounding out my elementary years when my mother got her degree and began teaching. In fact, when we moved to a new school, she got her first job as an English teacher. My English teacher, in fact. She later transitioned into reading (our school system kept English and reading separate at the lower levels, though I know some schools bundle them together–I happened to briefly work at one such school). I saw what it did to her. She didn’t make it to retirement. She finally had her fill after some 13 or 14 years and became a nurse. She warned me not to become a teacher and I honestly didn’t have any plans of doing so, but my first trip to Japan changed all that. While I can hardly claim the title of Great Teacher Carmack, I seemed to have a knack for it and teaching is stable work, just the sort of thing to prop me up while I work on my writing.

Being an ALT in Japan, you’re shielded from a lot of what being a real teacher means and once you get a taste of it, you can lose your appetite really quickly. After returning to the States, I took up a job as a 6th grade reading and language arts teacher. The problem was that I was in perhaps the worst middle school of a pretty bad town. It was an unmitigated nightmare. I quit after just one week. I knew my body would give out in a month’s time and it wasn’t worth it. Ever since my time in the Army, I vowed not to stick with a miserable situation so long as I had the means to escape it. I won’t go into the details, at least not at this time, but it was pretty terrible.

Things picked up for me after that. I landed a slot teaching ESL at a nearby university and did fairly well there until my position was eliminated. We had last year’s fiasco in Tokyo and then I was lucky enough to get on as adjunct faculty at two local community colleges. Though not unbearable, it highlighted what’s terrible about teaching, so I opted out of continuing into this semester. Instead I’m transitioning into private tutoring and yesterday’s lesson really highlighted what’s great about teaching. Let’s review the two sides of the fence.

Administrative bullcrap is probably the worst thing about teaching. The tangled web of politics, liability and busywork is positively soul-crushing and contributes next to nothing to the educational process. As an ALT, you’re completely shielded from the admin side of teaching and that can warp your perspective on the profession. It’s a lot of hassle and if the administrative personnel don’t have your back, it’s a straight-up nightmare.

The second part of what’s terrible about teaching (and this tends to have an unholy symbiotic relationship with the first part) is the unfortunate product of compulsory education (either by law or parental fiat): students who don’t want to learn. Yes, people will go on for days about the job of the teacher to motivate his kiddos, but if someone doesn’t want to learn, there’s not a whole lot a teacher can do to change that. Students who don’t want to learn are the ones you can expect to be disruptive, shoot your overall classroom averages straight to Hell, and have the shrillest and most unreasonable parents. Frankly, if a student doesn’t want to learn, he shouldn’t be in the classroom. Put him to work in the salt mines of Kessel for all I care. Teaching in college largely eliminates the issues of classroom disruption (because you can just kick the little miscreants out) and parental involvement (thanks to FERPA), but you still have to deal with failures bringing you down.

There are, of course, other factors that make teaching terrible, especially at the lower levels, such as overcrowded classrooms and the idiotic trend of teaching these rock-stupid standardized tests rather than actually educating students (a rant for another day), but the above two are what really make the job distasteful for me.

With all this talk about what makes teaching so terrible, why am I still at it? Well, let me tell ya, when you actually have a student who wants to learn, who’s putting out the effort to absorb what you have to impart, it’s like magic. There are few things as rewarding as watching a student progress. Maybe it’s because I’m an insufferable know-it-all, but I love sharing my knowledge and experience with others. This is what makes private tutoring so great, especially for adult learners. They’re there because they want it and they’re going to put out the necessary effort to get where they need to be. Are there going to be some bumps along the way? Sure, but there’s no administrative nonsense bogging you down and you don’t have the distraction of students who don’t want to learn. It’s good stuff.

I’ve recently begun teaching Japanese to a couple that’s wanting to spend a little time in sunny Nippon and even a single lesson has buoyed my spirits in a way that classroom instruction never could. Oh, I won’t deny that the repressed showman in me enjoys performing for a crowd, but as a teacher, I want my lessons to actually stick and this private tutoring thing seems to be the way to go. Now if I can just build my client list a little more lest I repeat last year’s experience in Tokyo. ^_^;

The past several nights, I’ve found myself dropping out rather abruptly, wrecking my plans to get some late-night writing done (hence the recent lack of WIP updates). I got an exercise bike not too long ago in a bid to strike back against my ever-expanding waistline. It would seem that ten or so simulated miles has a way of tuckering out a lazy, fat weakbody like myself. Whoda thunk it? ^_^;

I got up to 20 miles in a 90-minute go tonight. I’m sure that has to count for something somewhere. You know, my first time in Japan, I was doing over nine miles a day every day and that was just the day’s commute. If the spirit of adventure took hold, there was no telling how far I’d go. It wasn’t uncommon for me to half circumnavigate the city. This sort of feat proved none too easy to replicate after three years of being out of practice when I briefly returned in 2011. I’d rather not be that shot for stamina again. I’d also like to get back down into the 160s if I can manage it. I swear, just breathin’ the air in this country seems to make me gain ten pounds. It’s not for aesthetics or even so much for health I try to watch my weight, though. The less load on these busted ol’ joints, the better.

This sort of thing doesn’t move the writing along, I know, but my idea is to get to the point where I can be typing while I bike, so I can get the exercise and the writing in. (Now I just settle for overlapping my vid watching and stuff with the biking.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Chapter 14 of Tico3, so maybe I’ll get some of that done tomorrow. Until then.

During my last trip to the wilds, I saw a dog playing with a rabbit. If you’re unfamiliar with rabbits, you might think they don’t make any noise. I personally don’t have much experience with rabbits, but I do know that they squeak when they’re in distress. It’s unpleasant to hear.

I call off the dog, figuring I’ll give the rabbit a chance to get away. It was only a juvenile. Probably hadn’t been weaned that long. Well, when the dog came over to me, the rabbit just lied there. At first I thought it was just being too stupid to take the chance I’d given it, but I then learned that  it was already mortally wounded.

Because it was past saving, I let the dog have her prey. This is, after all, the law of the wild. There are predators and there is prey. Domestication distorts the system a little, but in the wilds you’re a little closer to the natural order and for my increasingly urbanized self, that order is an alien one.

My current trip into the wilds highlights an unpleasant truth I’m probably going to do nothing to fix: My daily routine isn’t very conducive to getting much done. On days that I’m not otherwise occupied, I go through my half-dozen high traffic e-mail accounts almost as soon as I wake up, I then spend an hour or two reading the news at getting all angry and depressed at our world gone mad (or our world been mad, as may be the more apt description), and then I spend hours numbing all that away watching let’s plays and similar vids. A little video gaming may also factor into the picture, though I don’t do much of it these days. Not much of any real merit gets done, if anything.

Contrast this with the times I’m deprived of my connection to the Internet. All I have is my writing to entertain myself. Yes, I may need to look some stuff up later, but I don’t get stuck in an hours-long wiki-walk, soaking up loads of data that may or may not be relevant. I don’t go looking for new distractions every two seconds. I just write or I work on the peripheral materials (which become a springboard for writing on the stories themselves). It’s really quite nice.

I’ve been trying to get myself to meet daily writing quotas, something in the vicinity of 500-1000 words, but I haven’t yet managed to commit myself to it. Perhaps I need to just disable my wifi and remove the temptation to indulge my taste for distraction. I don’t expect to actually do this, anymore than I expect to consistently meet the aforementioned wordcount quotas. Still, it’s something worth reflecting on. Then again, a little less time reflecting and a little more time actually remedying the situation is invariably the surer route to a solution.

Knowing you’re hopeless doesn’t make you any less hopeless, kids.