Buddha parade: fairy lights time!
May. 24th, 2013 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanThis has been an unfun week in some ways: either LJ was down or the internet was, plus a south-Vietnam-wide power cut that lasted for hoooours yesterday while I died from lack of air conditioning.
BUT. On the plus side, there have been cool celebrations and exhibitions and that to mark Buddha's birthday. I'm just sorry I missed the lighting up of five giant lotuses in front of a monastery last week. But today was a parade!
I didn't know about it, and I caught it on my way home from work on a motorbike so I couldn't take a picture even if my camera wasn't kaput :( Apologies. It was cool, though - floats with enormous lengths of plastic and real flowers with multicoloured fairy lights threaded through them, people sitting on them waving Buddhist flags, these big images of smiling Buddhists pasted on the sides of the floats. Lots of people were just on their motorbikes with big Buddhist flags, too, and people sticking out of cars to wave them, and light-up Buddhas beaming away everywhere.
It was a very Saigon sort of parade: God forbid the main roads, or any roads, be shut for it. So there were the floats, and people on motorbikes with flags around them, and also people just trying to get from A to B. I was going the other way up Cách Mạng Tháng 8 so I could get a pretty good look, but it was a near-traffic jam. Once I was at the junction I got to see floats going at their top speed, just part of the traffic, until they were out of the way and could slow down to an elegant 3 miles an hour :)
That was entertaining. Work was slightly more stressful; good lesson, got three more planned. But it's occurred to me that a kid who's had a lot of trouble concentrating, John, might be on the autism spectrum. I don't know, I generally feel super-uneasy about 'armchair diagnosing' or whatever, and being his ESL teacher means a lot of communication signs aren't going to be apparent either way. But I'd vaguely wondered before whether something was up with him (he doesn't like the games the others thrill to, he'll start reading the wrong bit of the textbook so I have to say his name repeatedly before he looks up, he often won't focus/do a task unless I stand over him but his English is okay) and then today I noticed he repeatedly flinches from eye contact. That strikes me as not a 'shy/anxious about his English' thing.
BUT idk, I haven't taught him all that long and I feel VERY AWKWARD about this. I am just going to keep an eye on it. Not least because he's only eight, he's repeated the course a couple of times, and I might be totally wrong or it might not have been picked up yet. Particularly since diagnosis and awareness of this stuff has gone up sharply in the last few years but from what Nga and Ngoc, my TA friends, tell me, a lot of doctors don't catch it until kids are pretty old.
ANYWAY.
Let's do my preferred variety of the Alphabet meme: I make a list of the letters of the alphabet, and you give me stuff you want me to talk about, beginning with any letter. I'll cross out each letter as I get a subject to discuss. It can be any topic: fannish or not, deep or not, WS or not. I'll make a post about those subjects in the next week or so. You can give me as many topics as you like!
A
B - bilingualism
C - Converse
D
E
F
G
H
I - Illyria
J - Jane Foster
K - kinks
L
M - moon
N
O
P - Pepper Potts
Q - queer/queering
R
S - sweets
T - transgenderism
U
V
W - woobiefication
X
Y
Z
BUT. On the plus side, there have been cool celebrations and exhibitions and that to mark Buddha's birthday. I'm just sorry I missed the lighting up of five giant lotuses in front of a monastery last week. But today was a parade!
I didn't know about it, and I caught it on my way home from work on a motorbike so I couldn't take a picture even if my camera wasn't kaput :( Apologies. It was cool, though - floats with enormous lengths of plastic and real flowers with multicoloured fairy lights threaded through them, people sitting on them waving Buddhist flags, these big images of smiling Buddhists pasted on the sides of the floats. Lots of people were just on their motorbikes with big Buddhist flags, too, and people sticking out of cars to wave them, and light-up Buddhas beaming away everywhere.
It was a very Saigon sort of parade: God forbid the main roads, or any roads, be shut for it. So there were the floats, and people on motorbikes with flags around them, and also people just trying to get from A to B. I was going the other way up Cách Mạng Tháng 8 so I could get a pretty good look, but it was a near-traffic jam. Once I was at the junction I got to see floats going at their top speed, just part of the traffic, until they were out of the way and could slow down to an elegant 3 miles an hour :)
That was entertaining. Work was slightly more stressful; good lesson, got three more planned. But it's occurred to me that a kid who's had a lot of trouble concentrating, John, might be on the autism spectrum. I don't know, I generally feel super-uneasy about 'armchair diagnosing' or whatever, and being his ESL teacher means a lot of communication signs aren't going to be apparent either way. But I'd vaguely wondered before whether something was up with him (he doesn't like the games the others thrill to, he'll start reading the wrong bit of the textbook so I have to say his name repeatedly before he looks up, he often won't focus/do a task unless I stand over him but his English is okay) and then today I noticed he repeatedly flinches from eye contact. That strikes me as not a 'shy/anxious about his English' thing.
BUT idk, I haven't taught him all that long and I feel VERY AWKWARD about this. I am just going to keep an eye on it. Not least because he's only eight, he's repeated the course a couple of times, and I might be totally wrong or it might not have been picked up yet. Particularly since diagnosis and awareness of this stuff has gone up sharply in the last few years but from what Nga and Ngoc, my TA friends, tell me, a lot of doctors don't catch it until kids are pretty old.
ANYWAY.
Let's do my preferred variety of the Alphabet meme: I make a list of the letters of the alphabet, and you give me stuff you want me to talk about, beginning with any letter. I'll cross out each letter as I get a subject to discuss. It can be any topic: fannish or not, deep or not, WS or not. I'll make a post about those subjects in the next week or so. You can give me as many topics as you like!
A
D
E
F
G
H
L
N
O
R
U
V
X
Y
Z
no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 09:04 pm (UTC)As for the alphabet thing. Hm… "Queer/queering"?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 12:34 am (UTC)Ooh, fun one!