Kids, hookers and rain

One of the funnest things about being an ESL teacher are the cute, wacky and sometimes unintentionally dirty things that kids write. I had three worth sharing today:

1. The test word was "squeeze." One particular girl clearly had not studied, but she did her best to guess at the spelling. She managed to write "skeezy." As tempted as I am, I'll refrain from explaining to her what that one means.

2. The word was "servant," defined as, "a person who works for someone else in a home." I guess I should have clarified a bit more, because one girl's sentence was, "The best servant I know is my mom." Although these kids are spoiled as hell, so maybe it's not all that far off...

3. The word was "sober," defined as "not drunk."(Why this is on a vocab list for 3rd graders, I don't know.) But I got this sentence: "My mom is never sober, but my dad always is." Hmmmmmm......

No dirty ones today, sorry. But when I get some I'll be sure to share them.

But I do have this - Matt found bought this shirt for $3.00 in a subway station tonight:

I've already claimed it!

Ah, I love shirts with bad English. They are everywhere here, and they never fail to make me giggle. Someday I'll do a post exclusively on them.

And one final note before I head to bed, totally unrelated to dirty shirts and bad English. Virtually every single person from the Bay Area that has emailed me recently has told me about how much rain ya'll have been having. So I know about the rain, no one else needs to tell me:-P Its raining here too, but not as much. My whole life, I have kind of disliked rain because it made driving more dangerous and made me feel depressed. Since I have been living in Seoul though, I noticed that I love the rain. I mean, I really love it. When I see dark clouds, I'm like, YES, its going to rain!!" I am not entirely sure why me feelings have changed.

So when I went to my Tai Chi class this morning, my teacher asked me how I was, and I replied, "Good, good, good!" (or perhaps I said good 4 times) Everyone in the room was surprised, because they were all depressed by the rain, and I said that I loved it. Then it came time to do our "chi readings." (Did you know they can measure your chi with a machine and graph it on a computer? They can, and my Western mind absolutely fails to comprehend how it works, but they do it.) Anyway, my graph is usually waaaay out of whack, indicating various problems that my teacher explains to me -- my liver is off balance, I'm having digestive trouble, my heart and spleen meridian are not in harmony, etc, etc. But today, my graph was nearly perfect. So perfect that my teacher was actually mildly surprised. And the reason she suspected for this drastic improvment over my usual state of inner disharmony? The rain. Apparently it agrees with me. Maybe I should be in California right now.....