What
we did on the weekend Dalian integrating technology blog at DAIS
integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Next
video at:
http://youtu.be/8Osc_Ckmz3E (Phuket)
http://youtu.be/8YGAf2A7NtM (Ao Nang)
(Railay) http://youtu.be/0O4WK_fCm2A
(Krabi) http://youtu.be/08hPnWF7PWw
(Koh Klang Island, Krabi) http://youtu.be/92Vx8hSsXzs
What Narda saw from her hammock http://youtu.be/l02Wi9lYdbc
2013 http://neuage.us/2013/ I could do over. Perhaps in a parallel universe or at least in a better written narrative I would have changed a few things. But what I would have changed could have been simple infractions such as not getting as many haircuts; I think there were four maybe five even six that happened, none by my suggestion, all by Narda’s perceptions of what a dude at my age should look like or what her dude should look like at any age. But to change anything else… nah. I spent a lot less time on Facebook than in the previous years; finding it a bit too much time-consuming. How many baby pictures can one see in a week – do they change that much? How many meals people post about, photos of last night’s pizza??? or comments about what I have no idea what they are talking about. So I check once a month or so and it is great seeing what folks are doing and having a peep into others lives; like everyone else my Facebook friends span a lifetime which in my case is lots of decades and lots of interactions and I am grateful for the people in and out of my life the past years and I will always be interested in what they are doing so I suppose at the end of the day Facebook is really great and as long as it exists or perhaps as long as I do; whichever comes/goes first…
2013 was a good year. They all are; with their different presentations/illusions/fulfillment/obstacles, choices to make or crafted by others and we are swept up in those choices leaving us to make our choices within the realm of someone else choices who no doubt is making choices within someone else parameters or perhaps if there are other life times we are reacting to how we acted before or setting the stage for the next life or the return to the One or we are preparing to be dinner for a great white shark or the revenge for someone’s belief system or simply the end of the localized life system we call our life.
Simply put, as everything in my life, it was good. Four years ago after my school in New York City ‘dismissed’ everyone over 55 – there were about eight of us. I signed up for employment assistance in NYC and signed up with the New Jersey unemployment bureau as we own property in Jersey City and I was getting unemployment from that great state. I have worked the past three years at Dalian American International School and I have been happy with that but I forget to stop my New Jersey employment alerts. This is all they had to offer me this week….
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Your job matches from Jobs4Jersey Job Alert |
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Your resume generated the following matches |
Not sure how my resume gives me this
sort of job ability. Perhaps this is all one will be offered after getting a
PhD in Communication and New Media at the University of South Australia. Gosh
Darn! Spent seven years on the bloody
thing with a 575 page book at the end of it and the whole thing online at http://neuage.org/ODAM (Online Discourse Analysis Method) which I had once dreamt of
becoming ODAT (Online Discourse Analysis
Theory) but of course to be a theory takes a long time and a lot of folks
onboard and perhaps a Nobel Prize; nothing of which my way ventured.
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ADVENTURE EDUCATOR |
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UNKNOWN, NEW YORK, NY |
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Match level: |
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Adventure Educator NEW YORK NY |
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SUMMER CAMP COUNSELOR |
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The Educational Alliance, NEW YORK, NY |
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Match level: |
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Summer Camp Counselor DESIRE TO SPEND THE SUMMER OUTDOORS |
I could have stayed in the States and had jobs like this to prospect for. Wow what a mistake. That is all they have to offer me for this week and I think for the month. Unemployment was/is brutal but I did get another degree to amend my PhD; one in teaching, which got me lined up for life in China. It was a good year in China. Not that I am keen on China and being now in Thailand I could easily turn my nose up to it. Of course I would do that in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Guatemala, India and a number of other countries that we have loved. China has done us well but it is a difficult environment.
The people in Thailand, India, Viet Nam and Cambodia to name a few places, are much gentler and dare I say cleaner and well-mannered? For example we have had motor scooters in India (watching out for cows everywhere of course), Viet Nam and here in Thailand and I would not be so sure of doing the same in China. They all move so aggressively and without indication of what comes next, like for example, a vehicle next to them.
But China has done us well. The people are warm and friendly it is just when they group together in the millions such as on the trains and buses and sidewalks and shopping centres and food places that they get pushy and did I mention spit a lot? We started 2013 – January 1 and of course ended 2012 – in Hanoi. This has been pretty much an all Asia year with our usual visit to Australia (just once this year), the States; saw my sister and her family in upstate New York. I have only seen her like four times in my life as I was adopted and she wasn’t – my adopted father said it was because I talk all the time but I never really believed that. I first found her in the 1980s and saw her with my two sons first in 1991, again in 2003 or so and a couple of times since. My blood-brother who lives in Hawaii I have only seen once.
We checked our beautiful Victorians in Round Lake New York http://neuage.org/house I caught up with friends, a first girl-from 1963 - Kathleen, my adopted http://neuage.indiko.com/robert_adsit.htm brother’s friend, Marta Waterman http://martawaterman.com/ who is writing a book about him and we spent a week in Atlanta with Narda’s son and daughter-in-law. Actually we went to Australia twice; once in February and the other time in July for a couple of weeks. We shifted our belongings in our storage area. This is our life; stored past, boxed memories, what-the-hell-will-we-do-with-this-crap futures. The idea was to spend two maybe three days going through our belongings and tossing crap. We talked about this on endless occasions; well Narda talked and I agreed that we would be ruthless. Our happy result (Narda’s happy result) would be a couple of boxes (she would probably have put smiley faces on them) and everything else would morph into rubbish to be landfill for some future resort in a South Australian vineyard or wherever trash ends up in South Australia.
Meaning that one of my cherished memories protected in a box for a decade or even decades if it had been a box stored from before we met, or even before I had children or even before I left Clifton Park in the mid 1960s; OK so I hoard a bit, and now in landfill to rot away and become a nutrient mixed with a manure composition of too many wayward thoughts upon which a seed would be planted and a grapevine would grow and from that a bottle of fine wine would be produced and I would re-incarnate in 2047 a hundred years after the life I had lived had begun and my need to hoard, no doubt coming from being adopted and having Venus conjunct a Saturn & Pluto exact conjunction 10 degrees 40 minutes of Leo in the 10th house square my Jupiter in Scorpio (it is those fixed signs that have been the bane of my existence) in the first house near my ascendant and I would, to make a long thought short, drink the wine a couple of decades later, 2067, and become intoxicated by memories, that being unidentifiable (after all this is a reincarnation of myself and I may not even believe in reincarnation at that time just as I am not sure whether I believe it this time though there have been times in this life when I did believe in it but not now I think) would just be some flashing images of something stored in my ROM (read-only-memory) because by then with our cyber-enhanced brain we would have embedded search engines and what is real and what is someone else animational thoughts would mesh together much like my thoughts do now. So really thinking about this as we of course all do; in the future we will re-incarnate sort of because our consciousness will be uploaded and we will download the consciousness or plural that if which to have multiple personalities or simply be a Gemini and we will be who we downloaded.
So here I am at
the end of 2013 mid-day in a beautiful location in Thailand. Today we have done
little or we have done much. Life is so interpretable. This morning I was up at
6.30 AM, crawling out of bed with a mosquito-net covering the bed though I did
not fare too well with many bites on both knees. And that is with sleeping
under a net as well as using bug spray. And that is one night’s worth of din din for a family of backpacking hungry mosquitos.
I worked on a video of yesterday’s travel around here, Ao Nang, and when Narda got up an
hour later we walked to the nearby shop half an hour down the road and dropped
off our laundry. We bought a liter water each found a great stationary shop
with all kinds of strange stationary stuff and we bought a bag of stuff. I got
some signs in Thai such as one with a 
line through a
handgun. I assume it says ‘do not bring your handgun into the kitchen at tea
time’ though not being able to read Thai I do not know. I will put it on the
door of our flat at Campus Village when we get back to work. Another one had a
picture of a water tap and a light bulb and I assume it says ‘turn off’. It
could have said something rude – I will put it on my office door at school. I
got a notebook that had some strange translation of English sentences which I find
funny and read aloud with Narda hitting me in the
side saying I was being rude. This happens so often I will probably start
wearing padding under my clothes as apparently I often say inappropriate stuff
in public though to me it is funny. We even have a code word that Narda says if she thinks I should shut up – I can’t put it
here because then it would no longer be our secret code word for my saying
stuff I should not be saying. I hear it at school from her a lot so apparently
my humour and her sense of normal decent social
verbalization are at times not synchronized. I
took a few photos of ants on flowers and have been sitting writing this and now
it is one pm and maybe I will take a nap so we can stay up and watch fireworks
tonight. Such is the end of another great year. In our almost all Asia year we went to Shenzhen for an iPad
workshop and to Shanghai for a
technology conference. We spent a week in Xi’an for Chinese New Year’s
hanging out in the Muslim Quarters, seeing the Terracotta Warriors and spending actual Chinese New Year’s at the Giant Wild Goose
Pagoda. We spent a
week in Dandong on the North Korea border and did a few other sides.
In early 1981 I started a tofu
factory living in and raising my children, babies at the time, selling tofu and
tofu products at the same time as dreaming of success in one of many businesses.
I had a children’s furniture idea with rocket beds being my first piece I
built. Actually it was the last. We dragged that thing around from home to
home; I lived in ten houses in ten years, a difficult parenting period. In this
photo with my one and only rocket bed; inside was a playhouse and the bed was
on top with a bookshelf in the back; my children: Leigh is standing in the
front and Sacha is sitting on the bookshelf in the
back are all happy campers. The other children were often parked at my house in
Mt. Compass for me to look after; I forgot where there hippie parents were off
to but this was my lot in life then. I wrote children stories http://neuage.org/stories/ I had a few
novels underway; these were handwritten as I did not have a typewriter and
computers for the likes of me was yet to be available. There was my tofu
business http://neuage.us/tofu/ my picture
poem business http://picture-poems.net/
and I had about 15 other ideas none of which I can remember at the moment. I
was probably doing some astrological readings as I actually believed in it then
and I did start a daycare centre in Mt. Compass which
was taken over by some females after I had it up and running – one of the
themes of my life; move over let women take over.
The big business was the tofu business. The big turning point in my
life that never turned was Jurlique. http://www.jurlique.com.au/ I had a bean
grinder loaned to me from Jurgen Klein who used our okara (the soy fibre left after
making tofu) and some tofu for body creams he was just beginning to make. Years
later he would become one of the top cosmic companies and Jurlique
would have stores from Australia throughout Europe and Asia to New York City.
For a while it looked as if I would be having production in the same factory as
Jurlique but as dreams and circumstances changes
those dreams never happened and Jurgen has moved onto
great success and me, I am writing this.
It is these paths we embark on
and some continue and some do not. Now when I see a Jurlique
store I take a deep breath and wonder how I got so far from my dream and how
other people’s dreams are so wonderfully real. Are we assigned paths or do we
create them and fall off of them and continue lost for a while or for a long
time? If I had been able to put together a successful tofu business would I now
have products worldwide or would I at least have been able to have a good stay
in Australia? I was building a large tofu factory on Tooperang
Road Mount Compass in the old Mount Compass Piggery.
My children and I lived at
bottom of the hill in a two story chalet like house. To make a really long
story short I had borrowed money from a person who was going to help me sell my
products to Sanitarium run by the Seventh Day Adventist. My neighbor who had
gotten me the bank loan was some high-to-do person in the organization but
things went sour and the factory never got built and Jurgen
Klein set up his factory in the old cheese factory in Mt. Barker and he grew
his herbs for his product at his home there. I was involved for a little while
before my business went bankrupt then I never was in touch again.
Just a side note as most of life
is compared to the greater whole or lesser hole or
larger community or sometimes even to ourselves I have a link to the
Seventh-day Adventist mob that I have not consciously created and I have been a
vegetarian for about four decades.
1.
It started out with being born in Battle Creek Michigan in a
military hospital;
This from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium) The Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle
Creek, Michigan, United States, was a health resort based on the health
principles advocated by the Seventh-day
Adventist Church, most notably associated with John Harvey Kellogg. The
complex was purchased by the U.S. Army during World War II and converted into
the Percy Jones Army Hospital.(a
funny side note to my larger side note is that I was born in this hospital
delivered by an Army Dude:
The
Physical Me
I was born 10th August 1947
Battle Creek Michigan in a military hospital and delivered
by Hugh Robins,
M.D. and left with the name Terry Miller which was changed upon
adoption to Terrell Adsit which was changed when I joined a cult order to
Arthur Adsit
and upon marriage
to Terrell Neuage (first marriage 1980). From Leaving Australia)
Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism and is best known for the
invention of the corn flakes
breakfast cereal (which incidentally is the
only cereal I eat if I buy commercial cereal other than granola due to its low
sugar content)
2.
My tofu business was going to make great strides forward
with the assistance of some leader in the SDAs in Mt. Compass as I rambled on
above about
3.
I am sure there are other connections but the most recent
synchronous event was ending up at the Seventh-day
Adventist
Hospital in Honk Kong to have four stents put in because I was a step from a
heart attack according to others. This was a totally random choice and not my
choice for a place to do it. We were originally going to go to Beijing but that
is China and some things are not best done there, then we were going to go to
Seoul but were counseled against it and the suggestion was the SDAs’ digs in
HK. And of course it is a vegetarian hospital.
There has been a lot of studies on random events in life and
that we just put meaning to randomness to make it sound kool
and as if our sorry-ass-lives really do have meaning and purpose and there is a
map or destiny we are fulfilling as the progressions to our astrological chart
and transits; especially the slower moving outer planets, and of course our
relationship to the galactic centre evolves over
thousands of years as our soul tries to find a better way to get us laid or
whatever it is we consider the ultimate zenith of our lives…. And I am so happy
I do not believe any of this anymore but just worry about local concerns like
this morning we did not have any water. It seems we used up the water in the
water tank which was our two-week allotment in our first week. But in my
defense I was watering the garden here in paradise which our neighbor said when
he filled our tank this morning that we did not need to do every day. And to me
this is really the whole thing. Stuff the metaphysics and what random events
seemingly coincide just let’s get on our motor scooters and spend another day
exploring the beauty of An Nang Thailand.
Last night
we were going to stay on the beach until mid-night and watch fireworks but hey
when one lives in China and there are fireworks almost every day they do not
become such a highlight that staying up until midnight is fun. We did make a
picnic and sit on the beach and look out at the boats and islands and folks
setting lanterns into the sky and all that until 9.30 and I am sure we were
asleep by 11. Our neighbours are Muslims and I do not
think they make a lot of noise or carry on. We get such a fright about Muslims
living as Westerns but Christian and Buddhist and any extremists are all just
as dangerous. Right-to-life clinics get blown-up and doctors killed by people
saying they want to save lives. Belief systems are so weird and dangerous.
Anyway back to the Muslims here. We went to a travel agent chick last week in Krabi and she was veiled and all but she was quite the
character. We had planned to take a train up to KL but what we found on the
Internet was that the trains in Malaysia are very cold with air-conditioning on
full force the whole time and that part of the trip would be 20 hours plus and
the trains through Southern Thailand are coming under attack by some group that
is pissed off with something or the other – probably people like Narda and I though we do not know how anyone could be upset
with us. Apparently they are targeting Western teachers; but as I am a student
of life I should be good. Nevertheless it all was becoming difficult too as the
train is several hours by mini-bus away and mini-buses are uncomfortable. We
just did one last week for almost three hours to go see the stupid James Bond
Island and Monkey Cave and that was not only uncomfortable but the driver took
too many chances in trying to scare the poop out of us. Narda
was OK talking to others – the other eight passengers were from India which
seems to be the primary foreigners this time of year in Phuket.
So our
Muslim chick, Narda’s age (quite young – see I do say
nice things about her – in geological time scales…) got us on an eight hour
ferry to Langkawi Island, Malaysia where we will stay
for two days then a flight from there to Kuala Lumpur which leaves at 1.30 in
the morning for Shanghai and gets us home in time to get back to work where I
will go back to making videos and writing storylines and working on our
school’s broadcast show; not really a big change from what I am doing now; though
with faster Internet I will be able to work more online.
So our
Muslim chick turns out to be quite an OK person who laughs, I think she saw Narda as more interesting than me and she did not laugh at
my jokes but she seemed to think Narda was a bit
funny and of course I never get pangs of jealousy when she gets more attention
than me; I am used to it because everyone loves her and in the States and in
China everyone thinks she is so kool and she has such
a great accent – hey I am Australian too; sort of, I am a duel citizen and at
least I got there by plane and Narda is just a boat
person arriving on a boat from The Netherlands when she was young…. But being
overlooked when in her presence never bothers me; well sometimes, a bit. But
all I really wanted to say was that for some stupid I am such a
Western-programed human – I thought the Muslim chick was just a normal person.
And now with our little interactions with our neighbours
I am not sure of what my fears of them were. They don’t drink alcohol, I
haven’t for seven years, they don’t do drugs, they wear colourful
clothes, and they don’t eat pork – now if they would stop eating meat all together
we would be on the same page. What I do find different the most about locals
and we saw this in Phuket too, is that they do not seem to have furniture.
Everyone sits on the floor on rugs. We looked in windows of new houses and they would have their
mammoth television and everyone would be sitting on the floor watching. They
eat meals on the floor too. Otherwise we are all the same except they do not
speak the same language as me they look different and they sit on the floor and
take their shoes off when going inside whether it is home or a business. That
is a good idea though. Oh and the Muslims overdress themselves – even at the
beach. Our local beach, this time of year is flooded with Europeans, Russians,
Swedes, Germans and the like and they have no problem with showing their bodies
and some of them should be covered but I suppose when they only get a few hours
a day sun they want the sun to see as much of them as possible which explains
why the sun quickly goes behind a cloud when a big fat Russian disrobes on the
beach. I mean have you ever seen a big fat hairy Russian in underwear on a
beach? Not a pretty site.
I have made a deal with Narda that if I spend a block of time writing in the morning we will get to a real-estate office this afternoon to look at buying or renting long-term. Of course this is part of the ever continuing saga of conversation about retirement which seems to be just around some mysterious; to me, corner. At the end of this contract I will be 67 and just starting my career; Narda who is much younger than me by 8 years or so wants to retire. Not sure what that means. The plan I think is that we arrive in Australia this coming July and then maybe do some part time work maybe I will apply to adjunct at university. Actually we have a business idea involving film making and Chroma-screen and storytelling and all my slowing acquired knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud products but we will see though I really hope we can do something and that it turns out better than my tofu business I had in Adelaide for eight years. And mingled/mangled in with this is some retirement concept with us traveling heaps and spending time in third world countries like the United States of America and progressive countries like Cambodia, Viet Nam and places like that.
I grew up with stories of Cambodia and Viet Nam from my relatives who were missionaries back in the 1950s and 1960s. It was because of them sort of that I left home when I was about 16. I got so sick of their stories and hearing about the good missionaries in these heathen locations that I had to get out of Clifton Park, New York.
I was living
in Hawaii in 1970 being a brother in a New Age cult order going through cosmic
initiations such as Illumination and Self-Realization and feeling full of light
and quite the 
chosen cosmic incarnate as most
people in their early 20s feel when Mr. Doty, our missionary pain-in-the-ass of
my youth stopped in Hawaii on his way home following one of his five-year save
the Asians tours. For some stupid reason, probably because my father asked me
to, I went to see him at his upscale Waikiki hotel which no doubt was financed
by my parents and their fund-raising exercises with their church and money that
went to the Doty’s instead of my brother and me so that those poor people bound
by the evil thoughts of the Buddha could be saved. So there is Mr. Doty sitting
in the lobby with his bible in his hand speaking loudly at me that the first
thing he saw when he got to Honolulu Airport was the same Buddhist dressed
people, only in this case they were Westerners, at the airport chanting and
asking for money and that was proof that America had gone to Satan. Here we
have poor Mr. Doty who had spent his life in Viet Nam and Cambodia ‘saving’
people and getting them to turn from Buddhism to the Christian’s religion only
to find that this evil scourge had spread worldwide. I had a hard time to
control myself from laughing as what he saw at the airport were the Hara
Krishna groups that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s and were populated with
the youth looking for something different than what their parents had fed them.
We all did this and it is happening still. People in their 20s and 30s get into
a whoop whoop religious thingy whether it is Krishna,
New Age, Christianity, Muslim and all the others then when they get older and
wiser they have a bit of a laugh of what they use to believe in and go on with
their life.
What is
next? 2014 here we come with really a different year in front of us because we
are officially quitting work. I have to deal with some heart surgery and other
stuff and who knows? Maybe I will join or start a new spiritual movement or
start a new business or write some more crap or take some photos but whatever I
do I will do one thing that I have always done. Live in the moment.
2014 looks
great – how could it look any different? We are into day 2 of 2014. 2013 was
good. A little consciousness bump a couple of days ago
when we were in Krabi. We were wandering around this
small wonderful Southern Thailand city when Narda
said ‘don’t look to the left’. OK so I look to the left. Jurlique. Those bloody shops are everywhere we
go. And my whole could have been different life momentarily passed by then I looked
at Narda and my life and went down the street headed
into 2014/
chart for starting my book 'Leaving Australia' for
when I started it in Hamburg - if you look at it in relationship to my chart it
is obvious I would never make more than two copies and seven years after
finishing it Narda still says she will read it making
perhaps my second reader of it if in fact my son, Sacha,
has read it. He says it is in his loo and he reads parts at a time. Great!
.