스님 (seunim) means Buddhist monk. It’s an honorific form of address used in talking to monks, too.
Over the weekend, I cut my hair. When I cut my hair, I tend to get it very short, because I’m lazy and by cutting it super short that makes it possible to avoid a haircut for a long time, afterward. So my hair has become very short – military “basic training” style.
Most of my students noticed the haircut. They would say, “Teacher! Hair?” or the less linguistically confident would just point at their heads and say “머리?” (meori = head or hairstyle).
One student, who goes by the English name of Angelina, came up to me very gravely as my afterschool class was starting. The tiny 3rd grader put her palms together and bowed. “스님,” she said. It was a very clever joke, and funny. Even though my hair really wasn’t short enough to be a monk.
Month: July 2010
Caveat: forgot-the-world
I went on a long walk on Saturday. It was a spontaneous, random thing, but I forgot my camera and my phone. I was just out wandering. I really like Korea. And this rural part that I'm in, nowadays, is stunningly verdant.
But I've been pretty down, lately, for more personal reasons. And yesterday (Sunday) I felt kind of sick. Maybe inhaling too many allergens on Saturday, or not eating very healthily, lately, or just summer blues overtaken by too many kid-germs. I don't know.
I played a game on my computer – something I generally avoid falling into, because I know I have some addictive tendencies in that direction. And suddenly the day was past – I forgot to go shopping, forgot to do any writing, forgot the world.
I'm having plain rice and coffee for breakfast. Weird hybrid breakfast.
Caveat: This Is Happening
Yes.
I recently downloaded the latest album by dance-punk outfit LCD Soundsystem. It’s really good. I’ve collected a few of their tracks prior to this, and thought they were snappy and clever, but not like “great art” in the field of contemporary pop music.
But this album crosses over to that status, for me. There are snippets and tastes of some of my favorite groups’ styles: Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Magnetic Fields, even weird old progressive rock stuff like King Crimson. Not just one or two good tracks – I think I could move 5 or 6 of them over to my “top rated” list for heavy rotation on the mp3 gadgets.
Caveat: Bernie-the-cat was a good cat
I learned, in an email from my father, that my cat (well, ex-cat? ex mine, anyway) was put down. She was 15 years old, and had been sick for a long time.
Bernie was a good cat. We got her as a tiny kitten in February, 1995, in St Paul, Minnesota. Here is a picture of her, from 1997, in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where Michelle and I lived at that time. She was a well-traveled cat, having lived in 5 states and driven across parts of the country at least twice.
I get to harbor guilt feelings about this death, too. People and animals, whom I leave behind, and then they die. Michelle and Bernie had a link – I would call it a “dysfunctional relationship with Jared” link. So it’s a fitting time for Bernie to go, I suppose – today is very close to the exact 10-year anniversary of Michelle’s suicide.
Another awesome pic, from a drive across Texas/New Mexico in 2007. Note that she was a very good “car cat” – she would just sit and look out the windows for hours on end.
Caveat: Korea… contingent chaos, constant quasi catastrophe
Today was one of those chaotic days. Yet I feel OK about it. It's weird how some things affect me, and other things, that seem to so profoundly affect others around me, slide over me with barely an impact. Some types of chaos I can handle, others I can't.
Today they decided to announce that they were going to start remodeling the language classrooms – immediately. That meant we had to move to a different place, a kind of supplementary staff room, and teach our after-school classes in a who-knows-where location.
I wish I had taken pictures of the parade of children helping move all the stuff from the language classrooms. It all seemed very communitarian.
Well anyway. Such is Korea. Sometimes, given how institutions and groups make and execute decisions, it's puzzling to me how they've been so successful
Caveat: Iranians speaking Korean
I'm fascinated by the weird connections, cultural and economic, that seem to exist between Korea and Central Asia. These are largely Stalin's legacy: in the 1930's, millions of ethnic Koreans were relocated from the area around Primorsky in the Russian Far East (and neighboring the Korean Peninsula) into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Russia. Even today, Koreans are one of the larger ethnic minorities in Uzbekistan, and South Korea has cleverly leveraged these ethnic connections into economic ones, in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Back in Soviet times, however, many Korean-Central Asians had fled the region, and, in the years when Iran was reliably in the Western camp (i.e. before 1979), some Koreans had settled in Iran. The consequence of this is that there were Koreans in Iran, too.
I was reminded of this because I was watching a documentary on Korean television this evening, about the strong economic ties that currently exist between Iran and South Korea (which of course underscores the fact that Korea, for one, has no interest in sanctions and blockades). But what really struck was that the documentary film crew were strolling around Tehran, and randomly ran into a group of Iranians who spoke excellent Korean. These were ethnic Iranians – not Korean-Iranians. But they explained to the film crew that they'd lived and worked in Korea for a number of years, which of course jives with my observations regarding the way certain parts of the Itaewon area, in Seoul, seem to resemble a "little Middle-East," these days.
Anyway, I don't really have a major point, here, except that it was very cool to see a group of Iranians talking to Korean reporters using the Korean language, in Tehran, with bustling crowds of women with head-coverings and big signs in Farsi in the background.