Tutoring

Tutoring is a quite common part-time job for college students. I have been tutoring since my second semester in freshman and I am getting more familiar with this kind of part-time job.
I start tutoring because of earning extra money and experiences. Many people think tutoring is always a well-paid job but actually it depends. As the recession goes on, many parents are not interested in finding a tutor for their children. Even some of them do want a tutor, they will lower the price of tutoring as possible as they can. In that case, they may hire someone who is able to handle their children's studies but not so professional.

I think teaching is hard. Sometimes the question is not about right or wrong; instead, it's about a common usage of a language ( English). There are little rules for language beginners to understand a language's common usage even if they do well on a language's grammar part. Learning a language is not only studying its grammar but its practical application in daily life. But sadly the top priority of students in Taiwan is doing well on exams rather than growing interests in languages and applying them to real usage. One of my students hate to read English magazines for there are too many words he cannot understand and he only wants to get high grades on tests. It really disappoints me to only teach him basic grammar in textbooks.

Good friend & good series

My good friend in elementary school, Ann came to Taichung to attend her cousin's wedding and visited me as well. She is kind of a friend that grows up with me though we did not go to the same junior high and senior high school; we kept in touch every little while. Since our long relationship, we share many things and chat about mutual memories, even the one we both used to have a crush on. It 's very nice to hang out with old friends especially eating delicious stand food and drinks with them. Somehow I never thought the food in 逢甲 night market was very tasty, but it turned out to be a quite good experience to eat stand food there with my old friend.

Upon talking about what I did when I had time to relax, I introduced Ann to watch the series: Desperate Housewives; she also insisted that Grey's Anatomy was a good series which might give me some inspirations. After watching several episodes of the series, I came up with some thoughts about "lines." It's all about lines in our daily lives. We draw a line to keep things clear and to feel security because of an organized situation. However, if there is anything we can't make sure how to handle it , we hardly draw a clear line. Even if we do draw a line, it's like a floating line, which we use to show how clinical we are and how well we deal with our own mess.

Lavender Cottage

One of my old friends came to visit me and my other friend, Momo last weekend. She wanted to see the famous lavender cottage in 新社, so as good friends I and Momo couldn't let her down though actually we didn't know how to get there. We did some route searching on yam map and made notes in order not to get lost. However, after one and half hour, we finally arrived at lavender cottage by asking people directions. It was a long and kind of tiring journey; especially the mountain route, there were many big turns and the roads were uneven.

Each of us spent 100NT on tickets and one ticket had two purposes: 60NT for eating or drinking and 40NT for souvenirs. The food there was unacceptably expensive and the only thing that really deserved a try was the ice cream. The ice cream had five flavors: lavender, lemon grass, rose, blueberry yogurt and mint chocolate. I chose lavender and lemon grass for others seemed not so special and they tasted so good that I even wanted to eat more, which I didn't for the price was not low and it might be too much ice cream for my stomach to digest.

There happened to be a small Florence market and we bought some milk peanuts candy with lavender and gui hua flavor and a tiny lucky container filled with lavender and perfumed beans
as souvenirs. The lavender garden there was not big but delicate and there were also many kinds of different flowers beside lavenders; the scene was quite good.

Housewives 2

After Mary Alice's mysterious committing suicide is resolved, her widowed husband, Paul, deals with the possibility that Zach (his son) was Mike's biological son. Meanwhile, Zach's grandfather knows the existence of Zach and decides to leave his entire empire to him. For Paul raising Zach like his own son, Mike doesn't kill Paul though he knows that Paul killed Deirdre.

Susan gets involved in rather complicated relationships with her ex-husband Karl, Mike, Dr.Ron and neighbor Edie. Edie burns down Susan's house after Karl rejected her for Susan. Susan ultimately rejects Karl in order to reconcile with Mike but unfortunately makes Mike the victim of a hit-and-run by a new friend of both Bree and Susan, a dentist named Orson.

Lynette is informed by her boss that her husband Tom, has been making regular trips to Atlantic City. Lynette thinks Tom is having an affair but it turns out to be he is visiting his other child, whom he gave birth to after a one-night stand before he married Lynette. The child's mother demands a large amount of money for the past eleven years support, which Lynette and Tom cannot afford. However, the single mom finally decides to move to Fairview to be close to Tom instead of taking the money.

Bree seeks to bridge the gap between she and her son Andrew with the help of her AA boyfriend, who is also a member of SA. On hearing that his mom's new boyfriend used to sleep with many people (not only with women), Andrew seduces him into having sex to spite his mother. Bree abandons Andrew outside of the town and tells him she can't give him unconditional love.

Housewives

I watched some TV series like desperate housewives, nip tuck and lost file. I never thought watching series could be so much fun. Housewives really intrigued me for the funny and cranky lives of the four women: Susan, Bree, Gabbe and Lynette. It starts with Mary Alice, one of their closest friends, mysteriously commits suicide in Fairview (the town housewives live in).

In the first season, a mysterious plumber named Mike Delfino moves to Fairview in order to find out the murderer who killed his former girlfriend, a drug addict Dierdre. The show reveals that the mystery of why Mary Alice took her own life is connected with Dierdre's death. By the end of the season, the show tells that 15 years ago, when Mary Alice's name was Angela, she bought Dierdre's only son and fled with her husband Paul to Fairview, keeping the child from being taken away. When Dierdre found them, Mary Alice refused to give up the child. Dierdre hit Paul and went upstair to get her son. Mary Alice was shocked and murdered her. Her horrified husband dismembered the body, put it in a toy-chest and buried it in their backyard.

to be continued