Where I'm going, every car should be bound by law to have one of these
A few days ago, Anna told me I should write down what I’m hoping to get done with these ten weeks, so that I can ostensibly have some goals to hold myself to. I realized that such a post would overlap a little bit with one I was going to write anyway about potential problems that I’m going to run into, and a lot with some advice that Connor gave me last week. So in classic, I’m-really-lazy-and-it’s-3-am-again style, I’ve opted to lump it all of it together into one. This almost necessarily means that structure is going to suffer a little, probably making it somewhat less enjoyable for you to to read. I’m too nice to my readers, yeah? Really do a good job of making sure they come back.
Anywho —
The concern that’s looming largest is that it’s going to be an incredibly lonely experience. The only American friend I was going to have in the city just figured out she couldn’t go. And so far as new friends are concerned, Connor pointed out that ten weeks isn’t really a whole lot of time, so most people aren’t going to find it worth it to invest in any sort of substantive friendship knowing that i won’t be sticking around long. So I guess two goals come out of this. The first is that fine, maybe I won’t be looking for my best friend this winter, but i’ll be damned if i’m going to go that long without even friendly acquaintances or something. And for that to happen, I’m going to need to be more aggressively social than i’m used to. The second goal is almost the opposite; I’m looking for meaningful introspection. I’ll concede that even if i succeed in getting to know some people, it’s going to be really unlikely that my social situation is going to be remotely comparable to what I’ve had for nearly as long as I can remember; i’ve been consistently blessed for years with various circles of close friends. In lieu of this i’d at least like to get to know myself a little better, and to see how i cope outside of the supportive mechanisms i’ve relied heavily on for so long.
Second goal is to glean something valuable from the internship itself. That is to say, beyond whatever technical database-crawling abilities or whathaveyou I might acquire on the day-to-day, I’d like to be able to end the summer and point to ‘this is what i did, here’s why it was a good idea for me to do.’ I want some identifiable benefits that can actually weigh against the sacrificed quarter of education. That’s not going to be “look at how fast i can use Excel, now” but might be “Hey, I enjoy/hate living/working alone in Beijing, and understanding how businesses work here / completing a project that matters / blah blah blah is cool because x,” and that’s knowledge i’m not going to be able to get otherwise.
Third is to get my Chinese level up as much as I possibly can. Sorta worried that i won’t be speaking as much day-to-day chinese as i want to because i won’t have people to speak it to outside of work, but that just gets back to the whole ‘so get out there and make some friends, dammit’ issue. I need to be talking to people as much as possible. Also, a related goal here is to keep up at least in vocab with the classwork my peers are doing back at home. should only be three or four chapters, certainly not unmanageable. In any event i at least want a language partner or something; with the number of people desperate to improve their english, this shouldn’t be too tough either.
That about covers the big ones. lotsa smaller goals like learning some basic meals i can cook for myself, not losing a lot of weight again, staying healthy, all that jazz.
Journey starts in about 26 hours. Catching a 6am plane, getting into Beijing at 4pm (bejing time) the next day. wish me luck!
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