ghost stories

today in m5 conversation class, a handful of us were sitting on the floor.

"nicki, have you ever met a ghost?"
"have i ever seen a ghost? ohhhhh...well..."

you know me. i friggin LOVE ghost stuff. anytime there's a ghost-related show on tv, i watch. i've spent many a night seeking out haunted places around the bay area. the ghost of niles canyon story is one of my favorites. gravity hills are my thing. there's an especially creepy one off 580 as you're going toward stockton, off vasco road. you have to drive pretty far along this country road in the complete darkness before you get to this bend in the road. if you put your car in neutral at the beginning of the turn, it goes around the turn completely by itself.

rumor has it that a school bus full of children crashed off the side of the road at that exact turn many years ago. the accident killed all the school kids and the driver. ever since then, the kids have stayed around as ghosts, helping cars around the bend. they say if you put flour on the back bumper of your car, you can see little hand prints left behind.

i told the kids this story, which inspired their own. our school is supposedly haunted. someone died on the second floor of building 11 (the foreign language building, aka ours). there's also one over by building three, next to the basketball court. the boy in the group told us how one time, he was playing basketball and the ball rolled away. he went to get it and when he looked up, he saw a woman in white standing there...headless. he looked away for a second and when he looked back, she wasn't there anymore.

when maddy and i (oh, yeah, maddy was there, too...combined convo class today) suggested hey, maybe we should all go ghost hunting at night, the kids sort of freaked out and told us helllllllll no (in so many words).

the students went on to tell us about thai folklore that says no building is truly complete until someone dies during construction.

"wait...you mean that every time they make a building, someone dies?"
"yep."

DO YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW RIGHT NOW?

the adults always ruin everything

back in the day, i was an umpire. i loved it. i got to hang out in the sunshine (sometimes the pouring rain, sometimes the terrible wind, sometimes the bitter cold, but in my brain i like to think it was always pleasantly sunny), watch some kids play one of my favorite sports, and i got paid $20 an hour, which is a better wage than i ever expect to be paid in the future. i was understanding of the girls and they were understanding of me. i wasn't too hard on them, so they weren't too hard on me.

the worst thing, though--easily the most terrible part of the job, hands down--was the parents. "OH UMP HOW CAN YOU CALL THAT A STRIKE!" "WHAT?! FAIR?!" "THAT'S AN INFIELD FLY IF I'VE EVER SEEN ONE, UMP!"

i was 16-18 years old. these were grown adults. oddly, although they had the years and the potential for wisdom with them, they lost perspective on the game way more often than the girls. the parents got so invested and acted like everything was so serious. yeah, i had some overly invested girls, but for the most part, they knew what they were in for, they knew when they messed up, they knew when i messed up, and we never got in huge fights. a lot of the umpires for that league--me included--will say they did it entirely because the girls were great and entirely in spite of the sometimes horrid parents.


my students here in thailand are phenomenal. some of them have way more potential and drive than i ever have, and some of them are way smarter than me, a lot of them far more charismatic, and about three quarters of them are genuinely good people. (you can't win'em all and i think 75 percent is a pretty good chunk.) they are the reason i absolutely love teaching here.

let's see if you can connect the dots and see where i'm going right now.