Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

I have been floating in the same place for months now and my writing reflects it. Looking back at my past few blog posts, I can't help but cringe a bit. Some whiny meta-writing  and a cliche-ridden entry about snorkeling. Not my best work.        In some ways, I think I enjoyed blogging the most when I was at the height of confessional blogging towards the end of college. Reading through my old blog posts, the ones that stand out the most are the ones with some heart, the ones that took emotional risks. Sure, those risks were often cheesy and angsty, but my introspection frequently yielded decent writing and growth. Like I said, it wasn't always brilliant "writing" but there was an element of personal substance that has been missing of late. Perhaps I should simply embrace that cheesy, heart-on-sleeve personal writing that I started with. It is cathartic and easy, which would be good, since writing hasn't come easily of late. My will to blog has dried up ...

When you grow up overseas, your visions of American life are mostly formed by what you have seen on-screen. As a kid who had actually been to the US, I often found myself having to correct people's incorrect, Hollywood-created opinions. I would shake my head and smile at the Spaniards who thought that America was either some variant of Malibu opulence or a ghetto survivalism, that American cuisine was exclusively pizza and hamburgers, etc. These stereotypes were easy to make into movies and theme parks, but they were inaccurate. In many ways, Hollywood works almost exclusively with archetypes and stereotypes. I had spent so many years refuting these gross over-generalizations  that I was genuinely surprised when I arrived in the public school classroom that I will be teaching in this year. For someone who never went to school in America, it feels strange and surreal to enter a public school building here. It feels like you are on the set of a movie or television show, becaus...