Caveat: Growing Up as an Anchor Baby in Hibbing

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology

I found an interesting editorial in the LA Times about the concept of "anchor babies," with a Korean angle. I think it's worth reading. 

Starting last week, my new schedule included the sixth grade (in place of the fourth graders who I was with in the spring), for the "main curriculum" English classes. And then this week, all sixth grade English classes were cancelled, because the sixth graders got to take a class trip to Jeju.

So I'm finding myself with some time to kill, at work. This, combined with the fact that we have finally begun to settle into our newly remodeled English classroom (pictures coming soon, maybe), meaning that there's an actual computer with actual internet access that doesn't have a line of teachers waiting to use it like the ones in the staff room. Hence my websurfing activities.

Caveat: How Kindness Works

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

 

I found this while surfing online. It’s called “The Starfish Story.”

Once upon a time, there was a man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?" The young man paused, looked up, and replied "I’m throwing starfish into the ocean." "I must ask, then… why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled man. The young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die." Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and that there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!" At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."

I'm not so good at this, sometimes. But I believe in it.

Caveat: “Do you like dolphins?” – Castro Comes Clean

Language & Linguistics / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

There has been an interesting series of articles / interviews with Fidel Castro, by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.  Among other thoughts:  Ahmadinejad needs to mellow out, and Cuba's communist model has failed.

My favorite part of Goldberg's interview experience – a glimpse of banal humanity behind the old dictator: 

"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.

"I like dolphins a lot," I said. 

I've always had a deep fascination for the "repentant dictator."  Perhaps this grew out of my time in Chile, and the weirdly dysfunctional relationship that the people of that country had with their erstwhile savior and/or tormentor, Pinochet.  Yesterday, I blog-mentioned Chun Doo-hwan, who was dictator of South Korea in the 1980's.  What would it be like to talk to him, now, about what Korea is like, now?  I would be fascinated.

Caveat: About 23 Years

Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I have been reading (re-reading?) parts of Michael Breen's "The Koreans."  Living here, day-to-day, it's easy to forget that South Korean democracy (such as it is) is about 23 years old.  That 's not very old.  The dictator Chun Doo-hwan only allowed for direct presidential elections in 1987, and those elections were flawed because the state-run media (and the state pork machine) helped ensure that his hand-chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, would be elected (although the opposition didn't help itself by splitting the opposition vote). 

So in fact, although the constitutional changes 23 years ago could be said to represent the beginning of South Korean democracy, in fact, the first "normal" presidential elections weren't held until 1992.  South Korean democracy is still imperfect – but I view North American democracy as rather imperfect, too.  Still, those traditions, at least, have many generations of consistency and relatively smooth alternations of power.  South Korea is still quite fragile, I think.

It's interesting to realize that for anyone in South Korea who is approaching middle-age, these events were formative experiences of their youth and college years.  Most of us English-speaking foreigners who work and live in Korea these days are teachers.  Consider the fact that all of those cryptic, middle-aged teachers and administrators you work with have vivid memories of riots, police repression, surreptitious jailings and beatings, disappearances.  Your vice principal may have been throwing flaming molotov cocktails, while in university, at his principal, who was a youthful riot-police captain, ordering his men to shoot tear gas and beat the students with clubs.  Or vice-versa.  Perhaps some of the puzzling things we see Koreans doing could be better understood if we take these things into account.

Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: How to get out of South Korea

Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Actually, as is often the case, the caveat above is a bit misleading.  I've been thinking about Afghanistan, after reading some fragments of blog posts that included a discussion of the issues entitled:  "How to get out of Afghanistan."  And I immediately thought about South Korea. 

Now that our (by "our" I mean US) significant military presence in South Korea is in its 60th year, why does no one take seriously the idea that we need to "get out" of South Korea?  Because the mission is viewed as a "success" – we have a long-standing, almost unquestionable partnership with the South Koreans. 

So why is the only way to conceptualize "success" in Afghanistan couched in terms of "getting out"?  I think a real, genuine geopolitical success could just as easily be conceptualized as getting to the point where conditions "on the ground" for US troops in Afghanistan are just as boring and routine as the conditions for US troops in South Korea. 

I'm not saying that's the only option.  But I think people who insist that "leaving Afghanistan" is the only possible way to be successful are deeply misunderstanding what the role of "enlightened military superpower" is supposed to be.  Not that I agree with the idea that the US must necessarily be an enlightened military superpower – but you can't have it both ways:  choosing to operate on those terms in a place like South Korea, because it's convenient and relatively painless, and then failing to operate on those same terms in a place like Afghanistan, because it's painful and inconvenient.

It seems consistency is important not just in parenting and teaching children, but in geopolitics, too.

Caveat: Somewhere Else, It’s Fall

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Not here.  Hot and muggy, per usual, when it's not actually raining.  But on Minnesota Public Radio, I hear that it's 57 degrees F on the State Fairgrounds in Saint Paul, at 4 in the afternoon.   I love how fall comes so early in Minnesota.  It's possibly the single thing I miss most about "home."

Here in Korea… summer-like weather will persist well into October, although Koreans will obstinately call it fall.  Seasons are defined solely by the calendar, here, and not by actual experiential conditions.  And, in general, I would say weather in Korea is more predictable on a calendar basis than in the midwest of US.

Caveat: It’s really cute

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

What do you suppose that above quote is referring to?  A coworker said "it's really cute."  What was she talking about?  Lo and behold:  she was referring to the way that  I sound when I try to speak Korean.  This is so much more positive and pleasant than the occasional mockings and put-downs that I have to tolerate in my efforts to learn the language.

I won't go so far as to read anything into it except just that it probably does sound quite novel and entertaining to hear a foreigner trying to speak the language – it's something even more rare, in most Koreans' day-to-day experiences, than hearing English or seeing foreigners at all.   In any event, the semantic range of "cute" (귀엽다) is much wider in Korean, and generally speaking less ironic and/or flirtatious in the way it's deployed by adults.

Anyway, a little bit of positive (or at least non-negative) feedback can go a long way, in my soul (or whatever it is that I have that passes for a soul).  I'm feeling pretty happy about my language-learning efforts, for once.

We'll see how things go, over the weekend – I'm committed to spending the whole weekend with Mr Kim, in a little odyssey to Ulsan.  I may not be updating my blog until Monday morning.

Caveat: Phone Phun

Banalities & Journaling
OK, I got a new phone.  My colleague Haewon helped me with translating what the guy in the phone store needed to say to me.  I'm still trying to figure out how to use it.  If you have interacted with me on the phone in the past, please, please call or text me, because I've lost all my numbers from my old phone – it died a terrible and tragic death.  And next week was its 3rd birthday!  Happy birthday, old phone!  Sorry you've left us.

Caveat: Typhoon Kompasu

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

I get a lot of little notes and messages about the typhoon.  "Are you OK?"  I'm fine.  

Typhoon.  Sounds exotic and dangerous.  Really, just a hurricane, but rebranded for Asian audiences.  Both are names for a big, windy rain storms, which are primarily dangerous if you like hanging out or living near large bodies of water. 

Last night, I didn't sleep well, though.  The wind was causing the doors in my building to go "clank clank" as they fought against their latches in the rapidly shifting air pressure.  The building isn't tightly sealed enough to prevent this. 

Lots of wind and heavy rain.  It's annoying, if it happens to be when I need to walk between my apartment and the bus terminal – that's a 20 minute walk, and there really is no alternative – I suppose I could get a taxi, but getting a taxi when it's raining hard is not an effective use of time, since that's the idea many, many other people have too.

So, I get wet.  An umbrella is useless, when it's raining sideways and the water on the sidewalk is ankle-deep.  This happened yesterday, walking home from work.  During the rainy season, I carry plastic bags in my backpack, and use them to seal all the things I'm carrying inside the bag in rainproof containers.

But is the storm dangerous?  Do I feel at risk.  Not really.  It's got the same feel as an intense California winter storm.  Wind.  Rain.  But risk of life and limb?  No.  There may be flooding.  Korea has had bad floods, sometimes – the hazards of being a country made up entirely of mountains and river valleys between them.  But my apartment, and my place of work, are on high ground.

Caveat: 14..14…14…

Language & Linguistics

I was walking past the mental hospital the other day, and a group of patients were outside in an enclosed yard, shouting, '13….13….13'

The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and so I looked through, to see what was going on.. Some dude poked me in the eye with a stick.

Then they all started shouting '14….14….14'…

Caveat: The English Teacher K

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Less Banal Than Usual / Life in Korea / Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Yes, another Kafka reference.

I go to work yesterday, only to find out I don’t need to be there. The groundskeeper asks me “오늘 수업 있어요?” (“have class today?”) and I say I don’t – I knew that. But I thought I still had to be there. I’m not quite sure how to phrase that, in Korean. Then he asks me why I’m there. No one else is around. I go to the classroom I’d been using for my summer classes, just as a place to hang out and a computer to sit down at. I text some coworkers, and await their response.

Finally, they text back that, indeed, I didn’t need to be there. I contemplate feeling angry, but decide that “showing up for work when you don’t need to be there is better than NOT showing up for work when you DO need to be there.” Hmm, what to do?

I walk back down through the courtyard. There are some children, hanging out. “Hi kids,” I say. “Why are you here?”

Big googly eyes, showing utter non-English. Yeah… how would you feel, if some guy spoke English to you, after a wonderful, month-long summer vacation? I recognize the little girl from a fourth grade class, from the end of July. So I ask, “학교에 왜 왔어요?” (“to school why came?”)

“그냥,” (“just whatever”) she answers. Big, pleased-looking smile. Kids do this, in Korea. They come to school when it’s not in session, just to hang out. That’s especially interesting, when the school’s been transformed into a giant construction zone – two workmen carrying bags of cement trundle past us.

I poke my head in the teacher’s workroom, one last time. My colleague Mr Lee is there.  Look of utter surprise. In Korean, he begins something to the effect of “why are you here?”

“오늘 일하야 하지 않아요… 잘 몰랐어요.” I know this is bad, awkward Korean, but he tilts his head and grins in understanding – its message makes it across the barrier. (“today work not have to… didn’t know”)

I leave the school. I have a free day. Completely unexpected. Well, not completely. I remember thinking on Friday… I’d thought, what are the chances I show up on Monday, and it turns out I don’t have to be there? But when I’d asked a coworker on Friday, they’d said, “no kids Monday, but yes we have to work.”

I decide to take the bus to Gwangju. Maybe hang out in a Starbucks or something. I do that sometimes. Got to support that Starbucks stock in my 401K, right?

I study Korean for a few hours – mostly vocabulary – something I haven’t done in such a focused manner in quite a while. Then I think, really, I should go find the immigration office. I have this pending bit of bureaucracy that needs finishing: I need to get a “multiple re-entry” stamp to go with my visa, for the event that I decide to travel outside of Korea – so far, I haven’t felt like traveling outside of Korea, and the soonest plan to do so would be next February, but having a free day during the work-week, in Gwangju, is pretty rare, so I might as well try to take care of it, right?

I log onto the internet using free wi-fi, and go to maps on naver.com, to find the immigration office. It’s not where I thought it was – good thing I looked. I walk around downtown Gwangju, then take the single-line subway out to Hwajeong station, and walk through this very much under construction neighborhood to the immigration office. As I arrive, it begins to rain. Why is it that every time I arrive at an immigration office in Korea, it begins to rain? I’m serious, I’ve been here 3 years, and this always seems to happen.

When I get into the immigration office, the place is more internationally chaotic than a Los Angeles branch of the California DMV. There are at least 50 dispirited-looking people in queue (taking little numbers) ahead of me, playing with ballpoint pens and forms. Sitting in chairs and standing around, enjoying the airconditioned office, away from the stunning humidity outside.

I hear vietnamese, tagolog, russian, english, chinese, some-other-language. Ah… nevermind. Maybe I’ll try to figure out how to do this online? Or come back some other day, when half the foreign population of Jeollanamdo hasn’t got business at the immigration office.

I go to E-mart (Wal-mart, since Wal-mart abandoned the Korean market some years back, the local partners re-branded as E-mart, but it’s still basically Korean Wal-mart). The sky is beautiful, as I walk. Clouds scudding.

I find some good Australian cheddar cheese for sale, there, unexpectedly. I buy a new shirt. I go to the bus terminal, nearby, and have a “toseuteu” (“toast,” which really means a grilled egg sandwich). I go back home.

Strange, directionless day, yesterday.

Oh… I just had a strange, strange thought. What if you sat down to read Kafka’s The Castle, but you were given one bit of information before you started: “The Land Surveyor K is a bodhisattva.” Wouldn’t that utterly change the meaning of the book?

Caveat: Let People Live In Your Heart

Teaching & Methodology

I want to be a better teacher.  Often, I feel like I drop the ball on this immense project.  Sometimes, I lose sight of the objective, or else, I get frustrated, and stand still, for a long time.

Sometimes, one finds unexpected inspiration.   Many of my fellow foreign teachers are my “friends” in facebook, and I occasionally take the time to survey the messy world of facebook postings, to see what’s going on.  This morning I found some unexpected inspiration, in something someone posted a link to.  So I’ll add it here. 

I don’t know if this is possible in American public schools.  It should be.  Certainly, although not common, it’s at least not inconceivable in a Korean classroom, at least in my limited experience.   It’s an example of what I’ve seen translated as “moral education,” which is an integrated part of the Korean classroom curriculum, as in Japan.  My feeling is that although the teacher in the video is still an outlier (on the “good” end of the scale), he’s less of one in the Asian spectrum than in the Western one.

I haven’t finished watching all five parts on youtube.  Much of it isn’t per se relevant to working as a foreign language teacher (as opposed to, say, a local-native-language homeroom teacher) – empathy can be hard to convey when the kids only understand a small percentage of what one is saying to them.

But I’ve never found the concept of “moral education” offensive, the way that many Westerners react to this Asian classroom universality, and which this teacher in this video has integrated so deeply into his classroom.  Certainly, done badly, it can be full of nonsense and propaganda.  But done well, it’s the absolute main purpose of putting children into collective groups and “educating” them – much more important than math, reading, writing, etc. 

I often end up on the losing side of arguments with Westerners (and even with Koreans) over whether the Korean education system is “broken” – I believe it is much less “broken” than our American system, at least at the elementary level.  And in part, it’s because I think that the sort of “moral education” being exemplified in the video is at least not impossible here, if nevertheless rare.  Whereas it’s become my impression that such a classroom experience would simply be out of the question in the US.  Maybe it is, and I’m just out of touch with how education works in my home country.  But that’s my impression.  And the fact is, if I had kids right now, I’d rather them going to school in Korea or Japan than in the US or Canada. 

Caveat: Arcoiris en Bulgapsan

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Life in Korea

Mi amigo Seungbae recien ha conseguido nuevo empleo en Gwangju.  En consecuencia, voy a poder verle más frecuentemente que cuando estaba en Suwon.  Ayer me llamó, y vino a visitarme en Yeonggwang por unas horas.  Como tiene vehículo, fácilmente fuimos a Bulgapsan, la montaña al sur del pueblo donde se ubica un templo algo famoso, y que no he podido visitar hasta el momento:  hay autobuses locales que corren regularmente, solo he faltado de motivación para poder hacerlo.

Llovía bastante fuerte a ratos, en el parque alrededor del templo, pero fuimos caminando y hablando.  Debía haber traído mi cámera, porque el templo fue muy bello e interesante, incluso un puerto en forma circular, construcción tradicional, muchas figuras  pintadas con los colores tradicionales de Corea.  Debo regresar con mi cámera.

Caminando de regreso al estacionamiento, vimos un gran arcoiris sobre el valle. 

Caveat: The View From Your Window

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / My Photos

Andrew Sullivan has a feature on his blog (at The Atlantic magazine’s website) called “The View From Your Window,” where he invites people to send unstaged photos of views from their windows, and he publishes them in his blog. He’s even compiled these photos and put them into a book.

A few months back, I emailed a photo I had taken from the window in my classroom at Hongnong. I had posted the photo on my blog, on June 17. I didn’t really expect the photo to be published in Sullivan’s blog. But he did. Now I can say that my photography has been published on The Atlantic‘s website.

[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Of course, in the fullness of time, The Atlantic’s link rotted. Mine did too, actually, but I was able to fix mine. Anyway, you can’t see that view from my window on Sullyblog, anymore. Sully long moved on and became right-wingier and irrelevant.]

Caveat: Goodbye, Town

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Teaching & Methodology

Today was the last day of my “summer camp” classes.  I was so pleased with how much my sixth-grade class (which actually included not just sixth graders but at least one fifth grader, one fourth grader, and a third grader, too) seemed to like the project.  We made a town, on the bulletin board, using construction paper, with scissors and crayons and pens.  And using dice, we played a game, running businesses, having disasters, earning money, buying and selling land.  We even had a stock market.
It was a small class.  All the regulars showed up for the last day.  We liquified assets, and I sold them “real world” stickers and candy.  $200 bought a miniature chocolate bar, and $300 got a small sheet of smileyface stickers.  We disassembled the town.
Here is a video I made, this morning, before that end.  The girls’ ability-levels are highly varied, but they all understood the main ideas, and got into the project.

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Caveat: Not A Single Charming Feature

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / Teaching & Methodology

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I realized that since the whole apartment fiasco that my school put me through during my first two months, I never took the time to post any pictures of my new apartment. On the inside, it’s quite similar to my apartment in Ilsan, although it’s a bit smaller. At least it’s fairly new and in good condition, and the existence of a working airconditioner is definitely a redeeming feature. But it’s not charming, per se.

On the outside, it looks like a low-end Korean love motel, with the added bonus of being situated in the back parking lot of a gas station, and a 20 minute walk down a vaguely rural highway from the bus station. Here’s an outside view. My apartment is on the sixth floor (actually fifth, since “fourth” is skipped due to bad luck – much the way 13th floors are skipped in American buildings, sometimes), behind the false gable, second window from the left end.

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Caveat: I want money ~ please

Kids / Teaching & Methodology

I found this on my bulletin-board town (which the students named “Washington, SK”) today.
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Actually, the student who wrote this is the richest in the town.  So I guess that’s the power of affirmational thinking.
Some other close-ups.
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Caveat: “Seu-naeng-naep” Part I – Konglish Challenge Quiz

Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

When the Korean Language borrows words from English, those words undergo very regular and scientifically predictable sound changes (by the "science" of linguistics, specifically the sub-field of phonology).   It is inappropriate (and intellectually lazy) when foreigners (i.e. foreigners in Korea, meaning non-native-Korean speakers) refuse to understand this and make fun of it, or attribute "konglish" pronunciation to laziness or ineptitude on the part of Koreans attempting to use English vocabulary.

But it nevertheless can be challenging to figure out what is meant, or even to realize that one is hearing an English word at all.  I like the example above, "seu-naeng-naep."  I won't write it in Hangeul, because that might give it away to the more savvy and/or to the vaguely bilingual among my readers.  I was only able to figure it out because of the context in which I heard it, combined with above-referenced access to Korean phonological rules.

The Konglish Challenge Quiz question is:  what English word for a product advertised on TV, is being named by the term "seu-naeng-naep" (revised romanization; IPA [sɯnɛŋnɛp])? 

In "Part II" I'll give the answer.

Caveat: Are We On Zanzibar?

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Science & SciFi

John Brunner's novel Stand On Zanzibar is a new wave science fiction novel written in the 60's and meant to be taking place in 2010.   The novel made a very profound impression on me, when I read it while still in high school – in fact, all of my college entrance essays referenced the book, if I recall.

Since it was set in 2010, it might be interesting to re-read it now.  I think it had a darker vision of the future than what has actually come about – I recall a sort of constant-state-of-war, a la Orwell's 1984, but with a McLuhanesque flavor.  

I wonder if I could get a copy here in Korea.

Caveat: 제목: 공룡액자

Kids / Language & Linguistics / My Photos / Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I don’t know why exactly, but I love this picture that my first-grade student Eun-ji made for me.  She wrote 제목: 공룡액자 in upper left and bottom center.  It means “Title:  Dinosaur Picture,” roughly.  She wrote my name, 왜제렏 (my own prefered transliteration), but then appeared to have second thoughts and crossed it out (or else maybe she experienced the vandalism of one of her peers?), and wrote 선생님께 (to teacher) instead.

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And here is a picture of the sixth grade town-building class.  These are five girls who refuse to leave – the picture was taken 20 minutes after the end of class, and they’re still messing around with arranging things in the town, discussing things they want to do, decorating their houses and businesses, etc.

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Caveat: If it weren’t for that ad…

Found Online / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

I had an American friend, Peter, who worked in Ilsan.  He's back in the US, now, but one time when I was hanging out with him and the TV was on, and this commercial came on.  One of those ubiquitous, twitchy, obnoxious TV commercials.  Peter and I had been talking, rather seriously, about the positives and negatives of "life in Korea," and when that ad came on, Peter said, in a wry tone, "If it weren't for that ad, I would love this country."

That ad still comes on the TV all the time, half a year later.  And it came on, and I remembered Peter's joke, and laughed.  And just to give everyone a taste of something small and irrelevant but absolutely, undeniably a part of "life in Korea," here is that ad.  Enjoy!  Or throw things at me!  Whichever.

I think 원캐싱 (won-kae-sing i.e. "won cashing") is a check-cashing or salary-advance type service.  As if you could tell from the ad – although note the exhorbitant interest rate that flashes up in the fine print at one point.

Caveat: Becoming the Ghosts of Our Ancestors

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / Science & SciFi

I was really sore yesterday, from the hike on Saturday.   So I didn't do much.  I watched some television; I started to try to write a story that was so terrible I immediately wanted to delete it. 

Then last night I had some very strange dreams.  The dream I was having when I woke up this morning was like some strange science-fiction movie, with many details and complex plot-twists.  It was one of those "remote colony on another planet gradually goes insane" plots, but there were features to the plot that made it uniquely mine.

The colony was a Korean colony:  yes, there were Koreans making space colonies.  And I was there, as some kind of token non-Korean.  I often didn't know what was going on.   So far, so much exactly like real life.

But… there were invisible monsters stalking the colony – a la "Forbidden Planet."  Members of the colony kept disappearing.   Soon many of the buildings and areas were dilapidated and vacant.

Then there was some weird time-travel experience.  The few remaining survivors of the invisible monsters, including myself, locked ourselves into an underground room and decided to go into some kind of cold-sleep for 100 years, to await a rescue team.

After 100 years, when we came back out, much to our surprise, there were people living in the colony, including families with children.   The people were living the lives of traditional, pre-modern Koreans, although they still had some technology.  They thought we were the ghosts of ancestors.  They had set up Jang-seung (traditional Korean wooden totem poles, carved with the faces of spirits) around the encampment.

And then the awaited rescue team arrived, finally.  The rescue team included my sister.  She was very unimpressed by the state of things.   "Why have you been wasting time building farms and having children?" she demanded, pointing at all the mysterious people who had taken over the colony.  I didn't know.  I was as puzzled as she was.  I was worried about the invisible monsters, still.

There was one strange building, that had been built, while we were in cold-sleep:  it looked a little bit like a church, but was full of machinery.  I went to look at it, on a hill, with my sister and some Korean soldiers from the rescue team, who were chain-smoking cigarettes.   The building was surrounded by carefully planted redwood trees.  When we got to the building at the top of the hill and looked back down at the colony, all of the people had disappeared.  The colony was deserted.  I wondered if we ALL were ghosts.

That's about when I woke up.  Pretty complicated dream.  A little bit like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Paramo," in space.

Caveat: Somebody loves Morgan Freeman a lot more than I do

Background Noise / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

That somebody is Yellow Ostrich.  Plus, I like his music marketing strategy:  pay what you think it’s worth.  Embedded, a video of one of the tracks of his Morgan Freeman EP (“Inspired by Morgan Freeman’s wikipedia page.”).  Brilliant.  And here’s a review. A commenter muses, “this is post-irony, I thnk.” Uh-huh-yeh. Thanks to Chris Bodenner, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, for pointing to this.

Yellow Ostrich – Morgan Freeman’s Early Life from Panaframe on Vimeo.

Caveat: 음주산행 절대금지

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I hiked up to the top of 월출산 (wol-chul-san = Moon Rise Mountain) with my friend Mr Kim. It took 7 hours – about 3 hours longer than we had anticipated – we went very slowly, like ants (우리는 개미처럼 천천히 가고 있었습니다) . We spent a lot of time pausing and trying to communicate with one another, me teaching English, him teaching Korean.

I became frustrated with “faucalized consonants” (or sometimes called “tense” consonants, and mistakenly understood by many as geminates because they are written as “doubles” of the regular series:  ㅅ[s] / ㅆ [s͈]… ㄱ[k] / ㄲ[k͈] … ㅂ[p] / ㅃ[p͈] … ㅈ[t͡ɕ] /ㅉ[t͡ɕ͈] … ㄷ[t] /ㄸ[t͈]). Not even the linguists seem really to understand these sounds. To my English-trained ear, I am simply incapable of hearing how they’re different, but there are many minimal pairs where understanding the distinction is important. I can’t produce the sound consistently either, although I can sometimes make myself understood by pronouncing a geminate or by using the “ejective” series that I worked so hard to master during my phonology classes as a linguistics major: p’, t’, k’, q’, s’ (these ejectives are common in many African Bantu-family languages, like Xhosa, I think).

Memorably, I was trying to say the word “dream”: 꿈 [k͈um] (standard romanization <kkum>), but Mr Kim was simply incapable of figuring out what I was talking about, because he was only hearing me say 굼[kum], which, standing alone, is a nonsense syllable. I was almost in tears when I realized I simply couldn’t express the sound correctly. Will I ever be able to do it? I wish I could meet a Korean-speaker who was also a trained linguist (or, a trained linguist who was also a Korean-speaker would do, too), who could teach me what to do with my vocal tract to make these sounds reliably. Most Koreans, when faced with the idea that the difference is hard to hear for non-native-speakers, will simply pronounce the faucalized versions louder, because that is part of how they’re perceived psychologically, I think.

Anyway… here are some pictures.

Approaching the mountain in the car from Yeongam Town.

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A small temple under construction.  I like the detailed woodwork on the eaves.

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A small purple flower.

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I’m not sure what “shemanism” is (sounds vaguely West Hollywood), but it’s definitely not allowed.

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The Cloud Bridge (구름다리)

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A dragonfly.

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“Hiking while drunk prohibitted.”

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Looking east.

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At the summit.

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A man surfing the internet on his cellphone at the summit (because we’re in South Korea, of course).

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On the way back down:  Six Brothers Rocks.

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Me, trying to look very tired (because I was very tired).

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A waterfall.

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Caveat: The commute to work, part III: “High Street” [Zeromancer – Fractured]

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Videos

I don't really know the name of the street.  It's one of basically two streets that make up Hongnong town.  There's a "High Street" and a "Low Street" – I mean these literally, because one street is farther up the hill than the other, and they run parallel to each other, with little alleyways between, for about 10 blocks in length.  The bus terminal is on the southwest end of "High Street" and the elementary school where I work is on about two-thirds along the same street, toward the northeast end.  Beyond the elementary school is the middle school and the fire station.

Here's the little video I made – all shakey and walky but whatever… it sorta captures the town.  Although that morning I didn't run into any of my students, like I normally do.  The music is "Fractured" by Zeromancer.  Awesome track.

(Sorry the resolution is so poor – I've been having nightmares with uploading large files from home, so I cut the video output filesize way back, to make it tolerable on upload – it still took 25 minutes to put it on youtube.)

Caveat: Where is your house?

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Mr Kim, from last weekend, invited me to go hiking today.   I was thrilled to hear myself attempting to give him directions to my apartment in Korean, yesterday evening, on the phone.   Well, not thrilled.  But it gives me some optimism, when I use the language at all in a successful way, that I may someday "get there" – wherever "there" is: some kind of communicative efficacy, anyway.

"Where is your house?" he asked.  I answered in English, and realized he wasn't understanding.  I tried to explain in Korean, then.  I wasn't even using full sentences.  But he said he understood.  Now, we have a real-life test of that understanding, as I wait for him to show up to pick me up.

Caveat: Optional School

Kids / Teaching & Methodology

I've always wondered what it would be like to to run a school that was genuinely, completely optional for children.  Partly, it's a sort of what-if, child-empowerment question that has lingered with me since my own hippyish origins.   Partly, it's some curiosity as to what might be the challenges of such an operation, from the standpoint of things like curriculum.

The Hongnong summer school seems to be my chance to see how such a thing might work.  Any given kid shows up one day, and not the next.  A colleague teacher comes by my classroom at 10 AM, and deposits a pair of visiting nieces with me, because the teacher's got something "important" to do.  "This is my nephew [sic].  Can she stay here for a while?"  "Sure," I grin, and a preschooler in a soaking wet purple shirt charges happily in amongst my third graders and begins headbutting her older peers, like an ecstatic goat.  I give her a paper cut-out alligator and some crayons.

The consequence is that there's very little chance to build up any kind of class-to-class "progress" – each class session becomes a stand-alone daycare operation, where even the nominal breakdown by age or ability no longer holds.

Not even the physical environment holds steady.  The school is under constant, heavy construction.  Yesterday morning, I entered my classroom to find two workmen hanging out the window, doing something arcane with a power drill.  And then during the JET test prep class, the power went out.  Whoops… I guess we need a new lesson plan that doesn't require the computer (which I was using to play the CD with listening sections on it).

And you know what?  I don't mind.  I'm not bad at rigidity and structure, tempermentally.  But I've always harbored philosphical reservations about it.  So here we are.  What shall we do today?

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