Checking in – April 2024

I am late! But it's fine. There are some things I have to cover now.

Volunteering

This is the big thing, and it's been quite rotten, so let's break it down and see what happened.

As I have previously said, this whole volunteering thing is not really my idea; my dad very strongly suggested I do it and I went along with it for my own reasons – primarily, so that the gap on my CV would not be so big. So I went along with it, but not knowing what happens I just picked what looks convenient to me and went for it.

Now I've been tutored myself for Chinese which I'm really bad at, and my experience back then is that I hang back at school and wait for the tutor to come over. Since that's what I experienced, I would presume that I'll do the same.

Now as it turns out I wasn't to do that, but instead I would go to the student's flat. To me, it's not a massive problem, but this apparently /is/ to my parents and this event ultimately came to the point where I had to cancel all future appointments.

Back when they asked me when I would be tutoring, I did not know this, and I said everything I know to my parents. I forgot about it and then just went along with the going-to-the-flat thing as requested by the tutoring group. When I, in belief that nothing is untoward here, said this to my parents they had the above reaction, and in the end I felt like I screwed up somewhere.

Like, should I have seen the address and said, "nah mate"? Or maybe I should have realised that the tutoring group was shady to begin with and never applied in the first place. But in any case there's now I'm in a bad spot.

In the end, though, I made arrangements to fix things – I arranged two more tutoring sessions, both in public areas, so I have fulfilled my promise to not go to anyone's flats anymore /but/ also at least wrapped things up so I don't mysteriously disappear. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that this looks really bad from the outside – think about it: I've suddenly requested to perform tutoring in a public place, "for reasons of personal safety", and then later on flaked off on the rest of the service? I know if I were in their position I would think that I have some kind of unfortunate story behind myself.

It's not like my parents have the wrong idea either. It's genuinely a concern that I haven't thought about, and I agree with their risk assessment, which is why I went with what they said anyway.

And like, in a case of what I think is irony, that was pretty much exactly my parent's concern – that something untoward might happen while I'm in the student's flat and I would have little recourse to defend myself if it happened. No one will appreciate this irony except for me, the hapless agent that actually experienced everything.

Meanwhile...

I have been eating a lot, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, both in terms of new restaurants and in restaurants that I frequent already. It has had a minor impact in my body mass, but not a whole lot. I'm still sitting around the 72.0 kg mark without change. I think this is plenty steady though I do hope to change this in the future.

Falling behind

Despite not otherwise doing much through the month I always feel busy and out of time. And there are in fact quite a lot of things to do. First of course there is the PhD search that I have been putting off for years. Okay, there's that, but there's also things that I want to do in a much more shallow level that I didn't do. There is the lack of writing projects completed, and also I didn't really play as many video games as I would have hoped. Also I have had little time to do anything creative and I can't think of anything to make to that end in the last few weeks. Every day seems like I am being hounded by time limits and "oh where did the day go".

Perhaps I should try waking up a bit earlier to get more things done. But I tried that and the only extra thing done was that I had breakfast. I dunno.

This thing has been a bit late and I think I will end it here to try to attend to other things.