The least athletic days of the year

All my life I grew up hating sports with the fixed determination of the overweight kid who could never make a free throw. Until China. Until sports day.

Sports day: Two to three days of collective lounging on the football field, complete with various events which the participating students never bothered to train for and usually with the limply thrown javelin for effect, the national anthem basically nonstop, Chinese teachers wearing goofy hats, and the consumption of your annual quota of sunflower seeds.

People, I love it. I love it almost as much as the staff cafeteria.

Cause when I walked out of my house Friday morning in time to watch all of the students I've ever taught wearing an array of at least mostly black colored clothing and marching around the track to easily the worst middle school marching band on earth complete with plastic drums, and I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of some of the hats my colleagues were wearing... I knew it was going to be a good couple of days.

Sports day is where things happen. Things like cheering like crazy for some students barely able to stand up after twelve laps around the track, like drinking the nastiest combination of butter tea, coke, and juice imaginable to engage the hospitality of students past and current, like joining teachers forced to spend the day holding stopwatches to their utter disbelief that anyone would want to, like taking pictures with the nice man who helped you in the cafeteria and always is so kind only to find out that he is the vice chairman of the school, like getting to see your boss wear a baseball cap and gleefully use a megaphone, like getting invited to eat noodles with some teachers by simply being at the right place at the right time, like taking nearly a thousand pictures, like accepting invitations to learn to cook dumplings from students who you only began to teach, like making announcements over the intercom for the whole school to hear, like seeing neighbors and students that you thought had transferred or just disappeared... things.

Sports day is a chance for me to pretend like I actually belong here, and get more excited about the opportunity than the people who actually belong here do.

And this year's closing ceremonies: dinner and tea with the boys from a class I taught last year. A chance I'd never had to be with them all together and hear about their dreams and their families and their past year's experiences. A chance I'd never had to figure out who they are and what is important to them. A chance to get a cramp in my stomach laughing because Yes Suoguo's bed is clean Ms. Kelly... but his socks...

I can't wait till next year. Shukeyup!