Letters from Vietnam 10

28th June 2006 – Home – 19:45

How long more will I continue writing this journal? Things already settled in a certain kind of routine and my life started to repeat itself again. I wake up at 07:15 every morning and leave home at 8:05. The average time for the bus to come is around 4 minutes (so far only for four days but I continue recording the time everyday) and average time to arrive to school is 3 minutes with an insignificant standard deviation. At the end, the whole journey takes around 15 minutes (including walking time from my apartment to bus stop). It is becoming monotone again, all the numbers approach to a mean value to kill the excitement. When the numbers approach to a mean value, there will be fewer things to write about, there will be fewer things to amaze me. The more monotone life I have, the more I will hate myself. Weekends are good opportunities to break this monotone style but if I spend five of weekdays in one way and the other two days in another way, then isn’t it called a harmonic monotone life. Exactly like the infinite series of ((-1)^n)*(1/n) with a larger period, smaller frequency. It is moving up and down but the whole process just repeats itself with a slight change in each step. If I consider writing and reading as a job, this can make difference. After coming to Vietnam, I read very few things. I don’t know why but it seems very hard to hold a book and read it for longer than 1 hour.

I told Ulas that I am writing these journal pages just because I want to keep on writing. Writing daily things in a foreign country is always better than writing nothing. It keeps my mind fresh. It also helps me find topics for future stories, but this is not a real purpose for keeping this journal. It can be considered as a result.

Today, another question came to my mind while I was going to school. Is it possible to write everything happened on one day? If it is not, then can we suspect the sincerity of the journal? Let me ask in another way: is it possible to call this writing ‘a journal’ if I hide things? I might hide things intentionally or I might hide things just because I find them worthless for writing. Then, how can a reader believe that I am not hiding things? As Tolstoy says, “if I write my journal, I can hide my personal life but if I write a story, it is almost impossible to hide”. Is it because stories are fed by unconscious more than they are fed by conscious? The intention of writer can vary from the intention of text in fiction writing more than it does in journal writing. If this is right, then we can say that a good fiction writer gets his/her material from his/her past experiences and put them together in a way even s/he could not understand. Therefore, writing fiction is not a result of hard work but a result of colorful childhood/youth.

Right now, we are watching Discovery Channel. It shows bird flu epidemic in Vietnam. There is a Vietnamese doctor whose family is Nguyen (what a surprise!). Before this program, we watched news in Spanish for 20 minutes without understanding a word. We will be paying around 15 USD for cable TV but more than half of it is useless. There are channels in English, Russian, Hindi, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Both of us can only watch channels in English. The others are totally unnecessary. I don’t really complain about this because I am not a real TV fan. The only reason we have cable TV is J. She is at home all day and she gets bored easily. There are no friends or she does not want to make friends.
In the morning, I discussed on a problem with A. Later on, our discussion extended to a more philosophical point: Is statistics part of Math? For me, it is a branch of mathematical thinking. For him, it is something different from Math because there are gray areas in Statistics. Don’t we use numbers to make decisions on things which are not black or white? Numbers help us to predict and decide. There can not be gray areas in Statistics or we do Statistics because there is no gray area in it. Managers use tools of Statistics because words are not enough to understand the motion in stock market or to forecast the future profit of a corporation. Probability as a theory makes decision making process easier because it consists of pure numbers. We all know that numbers don’t lie. The future may not be exactly what the numbers offer but on average, it cannot be so different neither.

Today, one of the administrators of the school told me that they got a letter from my old school in Bangkok. The letter complained about me as I resigned from my job after signing a contract for next year. I guess, F is still angry with me and somehow he wants revenge. It is like a dog that is chained to a tree. It barks and shows anger but never hurts. What does he want to do? Does he want my school administrators listen to him and fire me on the first week of the semester? Hopefully, I informed this school about all the incidents happened and they knew that they were going to get a letter from Bangkok. Therefore, whatever F writes, I have more credibility than he has. I already started to have good relationship with students and had my own way of teaching which is different for them.

I believe I did nothing wrong since I gave them a notice for at least 2 months before and it is what my contract says. I have right to break my contract as much as they have right to sack me if I do something wrong. The amazing thing is I knew that he would send a letter to my school but I still worked on schedule of the next year at the last weekend of the term. I spent two evenings on the schedule and a Monday morning to correct the conflicts, even though those days were part of my vacation. I may not have done all these things but I did because I have my own working principles and I do enjoy working. I prepared the schedule and gave it to the manager of the school before leaving. F knows that they will use the schedule I made –on my vacation days- for the whole year. He should thank me instead of complaining about me. However, human being is bound with certain things which are difficult to be overcome. Revenge is one of them and it brings nothing to the one who pursues it. I hope he will soon learn that I have gone and had a new life here. It is his job now to continue without me and forget what happened in the past.