develop character

The world is a myth. We live in a fable.

I used to be someone else but I traded him in.

Vientiane, Laos.

Helping grades 6-7 how to be more human. Develop character - strength, optimism, persistence, social intelligence, gratitude, with curiosity and humor.

Practice good manners. Treat everyone with respect. Be aware of other people's feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt. Help others.

Moral character: fairness, generosity, integrity.

Trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, caring, citizenship.

Performance character: effort, diligence, perseverance.

Are you fair?

Are you honest in dealings with other people?

Are you a cheater?

Are you a good person?

Behavior and values.

Kids needs challenges - hardships and deprivation. Trial and error. Taking risks.

How do you build grit and self-control? Through failure.

Think for Yourself Academy exam questions.

Why do we exist?

Why are we here?

What's it all about?

When your legs get tired walk with your heart.

If its not in the heart it's not in the head.

Focus and simplicity.

Have the courage to follow your heart & intuition.

Real eyes realize real lies.

Plot is a character - TLC 34

 “I will tell you the secret,” said a silver shop owner in Istanbul. “Be honest. If you rip someone off, if you cheat them in the slightest, you will lose them and then you will lose others.”

“Thanks,” said Lucky, “it’s a karmic lesson. I will share life’s secret with you. Laughter.” Wind-spirits howled.

“I am a gelotologist,” said Bamboo conducting a careful study of laughter. Ha, ha.

He wandered with Leica and Nikon tools. Visual experiments. Shoot through things. Breathe and squeeze. Smile and sit still. Patience. Dance around your subject. Focus on spectators at an event. Move like a ninja. Geometry. Spontaneity. Hunt and trap. Embrace extreme situations. Be an invisible non-shadow.

The Museum of Archeology in Istanbul offered historical perspectives of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian sagas singing civilizations.

Cuneiform writing symbols told Sumerian stories. Scribes etched symbols in wet clay with narrow sharp reeds.

Greek and Roman statues surveyed visitors.

Greeks idealized the human form.

Romans focused on realism.

Bust heads.

Apollo, Aphrodite, Pan, Marcus Aurelius, Sappho the poet.

* 

Human-propelled factory buses roared around Bursa collecting worker aunts and uncles intent on daily toil and simple job satisfaction inside production and consumption machines. Rusty neighborhood loudspeakers imported from Hanoi exhorted:

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Turkish/French car companies and textile factories proliferated with a bumper crop of shirts and pants.

Asian babies had babies.

Fat happy housewives dusted, mopped, moped, morphed and scrubbed lives. Simmer tomatoes. Women rolling grape leaves filled with their husband’s crushed nuts gossiped in alleys near crumbling stone and thatch homes below the Ulus Roman citadel overlooking the Plain of Jars laid waste by relentless U.S. bombing in a nine-year covert war.

They destroyed lives to save them from future suffering.

TLC in Bursa made arrangements for a new teacher. TLC went through teachers like a hot knife through butter or a serrated scalpel through cancerous tissue.

“To cut or not to cut,” is the literary polishing process, said Omar.

“Caress one line of sharp description,” said Zeynep. “I love divine details the reader can visualize or imagine. My job is to give you the situation. Your job is to experience it. Recreate the human experience as truthfully as possible.”

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals,” said Bamboo. “Plot is not something that happens to a character. Plot is a character dragging others around.”

“Save the strong, lose the weak,” whispered a word surgeon walking their rounds from Tibet to Sichuan to Fujian to Ankara before Bursa along The Silk Road with Doner and Pide, surviving on handfuls of Lao sticky rice, iced java, dreams and sliced diced tomatoes while transporting Bamboo baggage filled with laughter’s fugue as Amnesia, smashing chopsticks wrung out wash and wear drip dry holidays near flashing factories before zooming along Metro subway tracks where world weary pedestrians completed a simple sentence with a full plate of shopping nouns dancing inside fire breathing verbal ovens stoking blind love’s fire feeling fear and inevitable death closing in for the kill before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother, and grandparents decked out in traditional morals, values and ethics strangling medicated ma-scared necks before handing someone life’s spare change by showing a gentle reader’s fragile receipt after paying at the Cosmic Bowling Alley for strikes and spares dude, and were you aware Ataturk the great father liberator of Turkey in 1923 has a green train carriage car parked at the main Ankara station?

It was a gift from Adolph The Further, everything surreal and imaginary in Turkey where idle men stood around bored, unemployed and uneducated drinking brown tea massaging a microscopic silver spoon around a rim swirling deep into a universal void of sugar stars clanging scrap metal against fractured glasses destroying perfect mathematical cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so a female inspection engineer with a Masters in Food Quality Control and a TLC student whispered, “don’t use the sugar” to Lucky in strict confidence across a plate of Alfredo pasta one winter night a traveler before they attended a wedding in an underground Ulus cavern filled with Roma Gypsy musicians playing illegal anvil hammer and dulcimer music as wild free dancers and families celebrated an arranged marriage near testosterone driven shy lovers grasping hands below tables craving privacy as their short flaming life illuminated fatal attraction desire passion lust suffering loss courage joy gratitude and grand illusions.

Two elderly women in silk floral headscarves smoked exploding droplets plummeting from icicles on tiled roofs above the cafe where Omar released indigo ink flowing from his 149 fountain pen magnifying shadows seeing with a blind why eye.

L(if)e. No why.

Falling water molecules was music to his ears. If only it were true, he sighed.

The Language Company

Return to Mandalay

Hi. My name is Timothy Mouse. I am a wanderer. I wander and wonder. 

I was in Mandalay three years ago at a private school playing in the Montessori program.

The kids taught me to say I am a miracle.

The management wasn't very professional so I left after ten weeks. Probation is a two-way street. You can read a story about my experience in STORIES on the sidebar. 

It's called Dr. Scary and Mrs. Marbles. They were a strange dysfuntional couple. I really enjoyed Myanmar. The people are gentle, kind and smiling. 

Anyway, last year I had the chance to return with a language company in Yangon. It was a fantastic combination of helping others develop their vocabulary, criticial thinking skills and laughter while doing my street photography experiments. Everything I do is an experiment.

The CEO was mean and selfish. He lost the lease on one building where we had classrooms so I was downsized with three other teachers after five months. I was grateful for the opportunity.

I returned to Seems Ripe, Cambodia and did a volunteer English project in a rural reality for two months with low income families. I polished a new book of black and white images called Street 21, about Yangon. O joy.

I accepted an offer to return to Mandalay and here I is. I have classes with 9th graders, college prep seniors in a fancy air-con room and primary grades 1 & 2 at a rural private school. It's the first time any of them have had a native speaker.

Young learners teach me songs. We dance, sing and play games using the alphabet and colors.

It's the same old story - young ones have no fear and the older ones have been tyranized into passivity. Big ears no mouth authoritorial conditioning. As Einstein said, "Learning is an experience. Everything else is just information."

They are emerging from imaginary shells with a new sense of love, responsibility, leadership ability, polite manners, teamwork and courage. They experiment in creative notebooks. It's a joy to be a small part of their process. 

ugly chinese trash nepal and elsewhere

In a Bhaktapur, Nepal guesthouse it’s dinner time. Five Chinese aliens appear. Two males and three women. They are in their 20’s. They are armed with laptops, cell phones, and loud discursive language. This is normal.

Noise and confusion and interruptions and arrogant attitudes fit their life style. One girl is dressed like a flapper dancer from the roaring 20’s. Daisy Bell talks with her mouth full of rice. Her red diamond tiara squeezes her frontal lobe into a shucked pea. 

They are lucky to have a passport. Their parents are important Red Party Officials. It’s all about connections. They whined their way out of manners and intelligence in public places. They are the new breed of The Ugly Chinese, the lost, terribly frustrated never satisfied in their exported coddled spoiled youth.

They are the new emperors and empresses of a prosperous, for a minority, rising dynasty. They act like they own the restaurant. They complain about the price of a meal. One girl said in a shrill voice, “Oh, it’s too expensive. I am a poor student.” She is majoring in Stupidity and Callousness at Beijing Normal University. She failed Basic Courtesy 101.

A brat boy chastises the Nepalese waiter about his pronunciation of Menu. The crew cut Mandarin idiot commands the boy to say it again, Menu.

They are living, breathing examples of the spoiled one child political and cultural genocide legacy. It will come back to haunt China. They have the emotional maturity of a 15-year old. They are so busy stuffing their faces and talking over each other all the European guests stare at them.

They don’t care. They act and talk like this at home. A new strain of vociferous Chinese virus has been unleashed on Earth. Hong Kong residents call them locusts. 

Suddenly Flapper Dolly jumped up on the table yelling, Kill the Running Capitalist Dogs! Making Money in China is Glorious!

Everyone threw their steel toed reinforced Everest hiking boots at her. She died of Shame. Her friends dragged her body out, selling the boots to pay for her cremation.

Brick boys in Kathmandu valley.

Twins work in Bhaktapur. 

Lao kid

I’m a big seven as in 7, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator.

Your life is not a test or a dress rehearsal. If it is an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear.

My dad's not very smart. It's probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Laos. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

It's pouring like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

Grandmother sits on the faded 1924 white austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

Grandfather stares at rain on flower petals collecting in pools.

Father's very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

My mom's also really smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever? After the rain, when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Yeah, yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character saying, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kinda like that smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she's not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She's a baby machine. What's another mouth? She manages the home, kids and cash. In China I’m worth $3,500 on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

Mom ignores me mostly. She's very busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

People here like parents and teachers and lazy passive humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera in a strong wind. The trick is to tolerate, with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zig-zag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians listen to it grow.

Ain’t nature a great teacher?

For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

It needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around. It kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease.

Milling Around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to clean it up. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

Their existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it. Breed and work. That’s what I say.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you build self-control and grit?

Through failure, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity. Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance. Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

Thanks for the life lesson. You are the future of Laos.