Thomas La Grua's Asia University Blog

Sunday yesterday felt like an elongated moment, wherein I (as time) seemed to take my time instead of finding more things to do and moving through them just to get them done. Perhaps this is because I have finally completed my preparations for the next couple of weeks of online classes. Here by myself in my apartment in the relatively small town of Wufeng, Taichung, Taiwan, I sometimes notice a space within myself that I might have once defined as loneliness. Nowadays, I simply breathe through it as part of my decision to untie myself from self-definitions, so as not to be defined, not even myself. A couple of very large birds just outside my main window have set up a nest, they and the geckos keep me company.   I used some class time the other day to teach students about sound symbolism and how to look and listen more closely to words. I said the word “pharmacy” very slowly to clearly enunciate its three syllables, pharm (farm) a (uh) cy (see), and I then asked them what sounds ...

Hi! My name is Thomas and I was born on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma during the  last years of what is called the Baby boomer generation. Although I love all of my brothers and sisters nowadays, back then it seems that we fought and argued a lot - at least until I was about 14 years old. That’s when my life changed in a big way for the better. As a child, my life was not so wonderful. My mother had 6 children and when I was 7, my dad decided that he didn’t want to be a dad any more. Yea, we were poor, so poor that I sometimes had to eat peanut butter for dinner and didn’t see my mom nearly as much as I would have liked to. She always seemed to be working or driving my other brothers and sisters to gymnastics practice. Nevertheless, she was an awesome mom. At the age of 14, I somehow got into a private high school and that’s when my life began to change for the better. With role models and a structured environment, I realized that I was not only very athletic, but also very int...