Clare Elsewhere

The best laid plans. How often have you heard that? Often followed by an ellipsis, or likely a verbal ellipsis... a thought left unsaid, because we all know what it means. That even the best laid plans oft go awry. So here we are. With a global pandemic. With soaring unemployment. With political unrest. With doubts that anyone, let alone anyone in power, has solid plans, let alone the "best laid plans". And if even the best laid plans go awry, how can we find confidence in the lack of a plan? I'll start by saying that I have faith in the Centers for Disease Control. They understand this disease, and its risks, better than anyone. It is exactly their purview to advise the general public how to control disease. We have a disease that needs control. The connection seems clear. When they advise social distancing, and masks, that's what we should do.  Where my faith falters is in the rest of our government, our economy, our society- and our ability to play within those lin

I've started and stopped this script far too many times- sometimes the cycles reaching a few paragraphs in my mind before they ever met the dreaded cursor on my keyboard, dancing forward a few strokes before an inevitable retreat. A retreat from the ramble that's been pent up for months, and now has too many thoughts to coherently structure into a single post. So, here we are. Staring at the computer's impatient heartbeat, the blinking text cursor that  at least has the decency to remain private between the two of us, rather than iMessage's betrayal of a thought still in process. We're here to capture the human side of things, the personal reflection of the current reality- that history is underway. It's an arrogant thought, and a daunting one, but I can't see it being anything but the truth. History is underway. We are living through a time that our children and grandchildren will one day read about. So how do we react? Do we chronicle it, documenting t

Hello, all! It's been a minute since I last dusted off these keys, but a fairly basic concept came to me recently, a baby step back into blogging: a brain dump. Yes, how eloquently this is all beginning. Well, let's start with the source. #RugbyWeekend2018 just came to town, and with it, my teammates. We were catching up, reminiscing, and then dipped our toes into one of my favorite pastimes: sharing our favorite apps/websites. I do not say that sarcastically. We all hold our own mosaics of knowledge, whether that's podcasts, books, articles, memories or wit. And when people start to exchange that knowledge base, their latest experiences, their favorite tools, the newest tricks- well, we all learn and hopefully end up the better for it. Now, this is not meant to be the most innovative technology, or the cutting edge, or even necessarily anything that new. It's just a few tools that we talked about, and agreed they make life easier. So, without further rambli

Some uncertain stairs We've all heard about the importance of failure. Heard that we must learn from our failures, heard that greatness comes from them. I even had an incredible professor who started off our lessons with "fail stories", helping us to celebrate failures, welcome them, and improve. But that's part of the problem- or at least for me, it has been. The implication that there's a need for improvement. Which is crazy, if you think of it- there's always room for improvement, we should always be striving for improvement. But when you fail, big, loud, and proud, it brings your vulnerability, your weakness, potentially your mistakes right out into the open, and welcomes criticism. And after growing up in a family where criticism comes even when it isn't welcome, I think I'd grown quite shy of that. I took a lot of safe paths, took a relatively safe school, major, career, and projects, areas where I was sure I was going to be challenged, y

of the essence money a flat circle free .... Time is... passing! It's something we spend so, so much time thinking about. What is the fastest way to get there? Will it be ready in time? Will we have to wait? Will we make the deadline? Whether it's planning our route home, thinking through our weekend, scheduling back to back to back to back meetings, or detailing out every moment of the next 365 days, we all function by measure of time, and we all fall victim to the constraints of it. More and more, we feel the pressures of efficiency, and the growing impatience with things that should take less time than they currently do. Long lines, traffic jams, waiting for coffee, or food delivery, or well, waiting at all seems to guarantee fits of madness.  Prime delivery is 2 days, 1 day, even offering 1-2 hours in some cities. Why? Because we've all decided that our time is too important. And it is. Time is really important. You cannot get any more- it is a finite res

As I finish my last day of classes and tutoring, it's hard not to see how things have changed over the course of the past few months. It's hard not to see how teaching has had an impact on my perspective, and hopefully a lasting one.  My office :) I started out coming to Thailand, teaching as a means to finance it. As the term comes to a close, the focus has shifted: I've been learning how to teach, with Thailand just as the setting. It certainly has influenced a lot in my classroom- the culture of the students, the structure of the education system, my status as a foreigner and the extreme language barrier between my co-teachers, my students, and myself. And over the weekends and holidays, I was able to enjoy uniquely Thai and exotic places and experiences.  But unlike my study abroad in Brazil (sorry CIEE), the most memorable times for me in Thailand, the lessons I will hold on to, occurred in the classroom or at least in the school yard.  There is an i