This is an old post that I found in my “drafts” folder. It dates from way back in 2009, when I first joined Facebook. I wrote it in India, but never posted it. It is cute and still timely, and I figured that it deserves to see the light of day! So here goes:

My students are all into Facebook, and so they convinced me to sign up for it. While I don’t really spend all that much time exploring it (there are plenty of other time-wasters on the internet, thank you very much), it has been kind of fun to run into old acquaintances in the virtual world.

One of the other things a person can do on Facebook is join any number of different groups, and one of the first that I saw was called “You know you went to an international school when…” There follows a list of more than 80 ‘indicators’ of someone with an international school background – some of which I agreed with, and some of which I didn’t.

In any case, here is my personal list of those criteria that best fit my experiences:

You know you went to an international school when:

• It is hard to answer the question “Where are you from?”
• Your life story uses the phrase “Then we went to…” five (or six, or seven) times…
• Your school memories include those days that classes were canceled due to tear gas, riots, demonstrations, or bomb threats.
• Police guarded your school…carrying machine guns
• School trips meant going to a different country
• You could walk into a bar and order a drink without being questioned
• You got excited when someone sent a video tape of regular TV with commercials.. in ENGLISH!
• You never had a job until you reached college
• Class reunions are not at your school – not even on the same continent!
• You run into someone you know at every airport
• You don’t think its strange that you haven’t talked to a friend in a couple years, but you know you will always have a unique bond
• You have a time zone map next to your telephone
• You know the geography of the rest of the world better than that of your own country
• You speak in many broken languages when you are drunk
• You go home for vacation.

Waking up is tough, especially when the day starts as follows:

Me: “Why is my coffee cup in the bathroom?”

Susan: “I was using it to brush my teeth.”

I don’t even know where to go from there (and it is only Tuesday).

My homeroom class was so excited about today’s date that they requested to stay an extra minute after class ended to watch the clock count down to the time noted. We all started cheering and applauding when the time hit 11:11, and eleven seconds later the crowd really went wild. I guess you could say we turned it up to 11, right?

High fives all around, and lots of big smiles on the way out.

I love teaching middle school!

Grocery shopping today, I passed the meat counter, and there was fried chicken for sale. I felt like a snack, and took the smallest packet available. When I opened it up, though, I was in for a surprise:

It was a packaged portion of fried skin! I always get mocked at the in-laws’ Thanksgiving dinners, when my brother-in-law and I fight over the turkey skin. Well, apparently we would not be laughed at in Jakarta, where it is available in the local supermarket.

Eat your heart out, Uncle Kevin!

Remember that old knock knock joke about apples? While that one ends with “Orange” as the punchline fruit, I mention “Lemon” since I am making reference to the computer rather than the fruit. And really, the only reason I do is because I am on a steep learning curve.

See, we are just coming into a brand new one-to-one computing environment, but this time the computers are Apples (at least at the upper school). I haven’t used Macintosh machines since I was an undergraduate at Northwestern (this was back when you carried around all your info and documents on floppy disks – no external media or cloud computing for us, thank you very much), so I am feeling a bit behind the times on this campus.

Folder management, look, and organization is really funky on these machines, as is this whole “Finder” thing. And there is no way to automatically “full size” an application window – using those little red, yellow, and green dots don’t really do that – and even when you close an application by clicking on the red button, it is still open until you actually go up to the file menu and shut it down. And all my cool applications that I knew how to work on the PC – they’re not even made for the Mac. But the second-most annoying thing is the lack of a delete key. Oh sure, there is a button that says “delete,” but that button lies. It is really just a plain old “backspace” key.

And the number one frustrating thing? No right click. As any long-time PC user can attest, the lack of a right click function is a killer (and yes, I know you can push down with two fingers, spin around three times, spit on the shadow of a barn owl on the first full moon of any given month and achieve the same result on a Mac, but I choose not to start down that path to the dark side).

So it is a darn good thing that I like to hit the bars. See, the best thing about going out to happy hour with teachers is that you often pick up hugely important bytes (ha ha) of information. Out at a bar called “Satu Lagi” (literally “One More” in Bahasa Indonesian), one of my new colleagues showed me how to set my mouse pad to register a right click. Now I can open links in new tabs, save pictures, and do all (most) of the things that I could on the PC.

And I do have to admit – the battery life is pretty darn good on this thing. It makes it easy to rock out while typing on the side of the pool. With a beer in hand. Sorta like I’m doing now. Ahhh, maybe these Macs aren’t so bad after all…