After six years with Hess I've finally jumped ship. I think it's been a long time coming and for the first time since university, I'm unemployed. Completely. After almost two weeks, adjusting to having so much free time continues to be a slow process. The first week was super, super weird because of the distinct and utter lack of any agenda. I found myself often feeling a bit anxious, on edge. Probably because I was without any classes to prepare for or teachers to observe, etc. Weird how I never noticed all that stuff hanging out in the back of my head all the time. But, you're probably wondering: "What have you been up to, you lucky bastard?"
Besides watching a lot of movies, coding, and eating, time has slipped past rather quickly. It's almost like I have so much time to do anything that a lot of the time I end up doing...nothing. Well, mostly nothing. It's been really nice to have the time to burn on reading and watching movies. Soon I also might: Drive around the island on my motorcycle, take a week to train Muay Thai in Thailand, or just soak up some rays down south.
I have been spending some time every day learning Python on my own as the Coursera class I was enrolled in has finished. Speaking of which, if you've never coded before, I seriously recommend that you give it a try. There are quite a few languages and learning any one of them could not only be useful to you but also looks great on a resume. And that's to not the mention the fact that it's fun. I personally love the problem solving aspect of it and the need for proper syntax appeals to my meticulous nature (warning: it can be frustrating). As a real life example, before I quit teaching I got tired of using a calculator to tally up my students' cards to figure out how many bonus points to give them on their next test. So, I wrote a program to do it for me.
Dance, robot monkey. Dance!
If you'd like to check out some coding stuff, my advice is that you go over to Code Academy, and make an account. Start with HTML/CSS and jQuery as they are the simplest, and if you get stuck there's loads of helpful folks in the forums.
Now, on a more serious note.
As things stand I should be out of Taiwan in two months or so.
For good.
I found out last week that my landlord is going to sell my apartment once my lease is up in October and that seems to jive with everything else lining up at the moment. My plan right now is to duck out of Taiwan and set up camp at Poppa Weiss' place until I find a job. For the last few months I've been hammering out my resume and cover letter(s) for employment in NYC to see what comes back. No hits so far, but I've seen a few things at non-profit companies that I think I would like and would probably be good at. Keep your fingers crossed for me; I might need it. If you know anyone in the city who's hiring, let me know!
I promise updates on that stuff as more things develop.
Anyway, in the last 10 days or so I've smashed through quite a few movies. Here's what I've been through so far, watch the crappier ones at your own peril (especially Need for Speed), and check out that nifty star rating I gave each one. Also, keep your eyes peeled for my next entry about my new hobby, Muay Thai, and how fun and often how painful it can be.
