I was having some issues with my camera yesterday, so I was messing with it on the bus this morning. I started taking pictures out the window, during the ride to work. The sky was full of clouds, the air was cold. Some of the pictures came out really nicely.
Last week, Won-seok captured a fly, and glued it to a triangular piece of scrap paper. It was still alive. “It’s hang-gliding,” he explained.
Today, it was incredibly cold. I was waiting for my first-grade afterschool class to start, and hanging out with some of them in the area behind the English classroom. The pathway is the one that leads between the gym and the library to the cafeteria. Min-sol was cavorting around in the very, very cold wind and sprinkling of raindrops. There was a rainbow, but my camera failed to capture that. I think it wants to snow.
It reveals the language geek in me, that I think the Catalan language is cool. Just because it is – it’s like Spanish or French (really, a sort of linguistic average between them, in some ways) – but with less of the historic imperial guilt that comes with loving those languages.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure the world reallly needs more nationalism, regardless of which formerly-oppressed ethnic group it’s elevating. Nationalism can be endearing in a hopeless-case, long-struggle variety, and end up losing a great deal of its charm once instituted as a long-term, triumphalist government (case-in-point: 1920’s Korea contrasted with nowadays, anyone?). Even Catalan nationalism is a bit unusual, though – consider it’s one of those rare nationalist movements that seems to be predominantly on the left, ideologically. Perhaps that’s an inverted legacy of the Falangist Franco dictatorship, which suppressed all things Catalan for so long.
Still, the below is a catchy little song, all things considered. And it’s in Catalan! How cool is that?
A rant.
I have a facebook account. Which I use, more and more. Living out there in front of the world, in a glass brain.
And I have several other facebook accounts – set up, somehow, in ways I can't quite recall – linked to other email accounts. Because I have so many email accounts (jaredway@basicallywhateveryoucanthinkof). And facebook doesn't make it easy to de-link and/or kill those other accounts. I mean really kill them, as opposed to just "deactivate" them, which seems to mean basically nothing at all, except that you stop receiving email notifications.
It would be nice if facebook set things up so it would be easier to just link everything together. I mean… they do have some options in this domain, but only if you haven't already set things up in some other, unlinked, way. There's no "unsetup this clusterf엌" option. So… there are those other facebook identities out there, that I do nothing with, and try to pretend don't exist. But they murmur, cloyingly, in the back of my head sometimes.
And now, I've been doing some recreational adminning on my blog, and suddenly my blog has its own, separate facebook identity, too – as of today. Hmm. How is this going to work. How do I tell facebook that this CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK identity is really just another version of me? Where's the "yo – Zuckerberg, you freakin asshat – this is me" button?
At this rate, I could become a whole social network on my own, without ever interacting with another person. Hmm… I wonder how often this occurs, out there in the interwebs world? I'm going to "like" myself, sixteen ways to Sunday!
“I stepped out from a supernova. And so did you.”
[UPDATE: The link rotted, and is unrecoverable – I simply can’t even find what it used to point to, anywhere. Very sad.]
The farmers have been burning the rice stubble in their fields, these days. The air is often smoky. Combine this with the fact that Glory County has a propensity for coastal fog-type weather, and you get these days when the lowering sun is just a red-orange disk pasted to a hazy, smooth sky that's the same color as end-of-the-week school-cafeteria spicy fish soup.
This morning, it's so foggy out I can't even make out the shiny blue roof of the Hyundai Oilbank gas station 30 meters in front of my apartment building, much less the highway beyond that.
I was so exhausted last night. A week that started in the hospital with food poisoning, and ended with the third graders finally performing their little musical, combined with a right-at-the-same-time visit to our newly remodeled language classroom by the county education superintendent – Ms Ryu was frazzled and panicked as we all scrambled to make it "inspection ready" to meet our vice principal's peculiar, vaguely military notion of orderliness and presentability. The bigwigs came and admired the technology and Ms Ryu talked a mile-a-minute.
It seems I availed myself, more or less – the hotshots were a little bit impressed with the pet foreigner teacher who could actually say a few coherent sentences in Korean. The defining moment was as they were leaving, and the superintendent shook my hand, and I said, gesturing at Ms Ryu, "이선생님이 열심히 하세요" [this teacher works hard]. I think that set the right tone of humility and respect, and at the same time, gave her some often unreceived positive light from her higher-ups. I hope it wasn't too forward of me to offer praise of a coworker in this way – I know Korean office politics work in weird and mysterious ways, as compared to in Western culture.
And then, like that, it was all over. There were parents and proud, happy children all over the school. Some kids stopped by, wondering about the afterschool classes, but they had been cancelled. I had expected to have to stay late, but instead, sitting a little bit bored in front of the computer at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, winding down from so much intensity and stress, I read on the screen a little pop-up message from the administrative office that the vice principal was pleased with how hard everyone had worked for the arts fair, and that therefore we were free to leave at 4 pm instead of 5.
I read the message, in my wackily-pronounced Korean, out loud to my co-teacher, Ms Lee.
"What, really?" she exclaimed in English. She ran over to where I was sitting (she had been sitting at the desk with the fancy new computer that, coincidentally, is too fancy to run the antiquated messaging software the school uses, so she hadn't seen the message, and I knew that).
"Do you know what that means?" she asked.
"Yes. We can leave early."
"Wow, your Korean is getting really good."
It felt very good, at that.
Still, I got home not much earlier than I normally do, though – I only managed a slightly earlier bus back from Hongnong, and I stopped in the 축협 하나로 grocery on the way back from the bus terminal. I bought lots of juice, some tomatoes, and one of my decadences: plasticky Korean processed cheese. I felt really OK, but exhausted.
And, I was terrified of going out to the regular Friday night's pizza and beer gathering of foreigner teachers – because that pizza and beer is now mentally linked with my food poisoning experience. That was what I'd eaten right before getting so horribly sick, a week ago. I'm not sure I'll be able to eat pizza or drink beer for a long, long time, given how… erm, vividly… it all came back up. Even if that wasn't the actual source of the infection – since no one else got it, that I know of, I have my doubts. But what in the world was it, then? Who knows.
I stayed home, watching some Korean drama that I can't understand, and was fast asleep with the TV still on at 7:30 pm. And then I had a restless night. Ever since I stopped the morning coffee (which I did after getting sick because of the nausea and meds), my sleep has been weird and uneven. I woke up 5 or 6 times in the night, even surfing the web for about 20 minutes at 1 or 2 am. I know that the lack of caffeine does this to me.
And so I dreamed cloudy, murky dreams filled with singing children and burning rice fields and political pundits. A sort of postmodern Mordor of the mind.
Good morning. I'm not going to do much this weekend. That's the plan. I just need to take it easy, I think.
We've been working on it for a long time: my 3rd graders and a little 7-minute musical I put together, using some songs from a curriculum book and my own amended script for the talking parts.
We tried during summer session, but the motivation at that time was low. Then we started again last month, and this time the motivation was high, because we were slated to perform in the school arts festival (학예회). That was today, and we did it. Not perfect, due to poor sound system, among other things. But it was successful as far as the audience (parents and kids, mostly) was concerned. And they were very cute doing it. Here's a video – poor quality, I admit. I didn't take it – I had to hand it off to one of the staffroom ladies, because I had to supervise the sound guy to make sure he started the songs at the right time based on the kids' dialogue.
I'm very proud of them. I'll make another video sometime soon with some other random footage from festival and from our practice times leading up to it.
재 방과후수업에서 이름이 유빈이라는 일학년 학생 있어요. 그녀는 아주 똑똑하지만 영어를 잘 못해요. 계단에서 저번에 그녀를 봤어요. 그녀는 뛰 놀고 있는 때 저는 조금 놀라게 생각해요. 그래서 떨어졌어요. 그녀는 울고되지 않았어요. “티처 때문에 엉덩이 아퍼”라고 했어요.
Jim Oberstar has represented Minnesota’s 8th district longer than Jerry Brown hasn’t been Governor of California. He was already a fixture in state politics when I moved from California to Minnesota the first time in 1983. I think I heard him speak, several times, during my “politics summer” in 1984, during the Mondale campaign. I’m not sure I ever liked him – he seemed like Minnesota’s answer to the sort of “congressman-for-life” concept that one mentally associates with Appalachia. Then again, the 8th district is “da Range” – Minnesota’s answer to Appalachia.
But he often took political stands that I understood and respected, despite his propensity for pork. I think he was right to feel that infrastructure issues were (and continue to be) crucial to revitalizing regional and national economies. On the other hand, he was positioned as pro-life (inevitable given the demographics of his district, I suppose), and I really disliked his opposition to free trade agreements. Still, those are positions that have little to do with one’s credentials as a lefty. And… I learned just now, from the wikithing, that he was a linguist. No kidding. And he has a Master’s degree in “European Studies.” Really? How gauche. No wonder, in this contemporary politcal climate…
As of last night, Oberstar has fallen to a political newcomer with the typically unusual name of Cravaack (“typically unusual” meaning that I think that Minnesota’s 8th district seems to have more than its share of unusual last names).
The 8th district is Dylan’s home, the “north country.” It’s greater Duluth. It’s the Boundary Waters – which Oberstar made into a National Park, I believe. It’s Lake Superior, and the Iron Range, and rough, left-leaning Finns on snowmobiles. It’s some of what I most love about Minnesota. And now it’s gone and tea-bagged itself, for all the world to see. Lovely. What’s become of what was once the nearly socialist character of rural Minnesota? It’s been Bachmannated and now Cravaacked beyond recognition.
Feeling pretty pleased about being an expat.
Below: a picture I took in Duluth, last year, during my back-in-the-USA-but-only-temporarily tour; looking northwest toward downtown, from “the Point.”
The citizens of the state of Oklahoma have approved a measure (State Question 755) that prohibits the state courts from considering Sharia (islamic) law. I was sooo worried.
I continue to feel relief that I'm an expat.
Unlike 2008, I felt very little optimism about this election. I don't see myself as a typical disillusioned obamite, but I suppose the end result is the same – I failed to motivate myself to get my absentee ballot and vote in this election. The Minnesota governor's race is the only I found even vaguely compelling, but divided three ways, it seemed to me unclear what to opt for – the two options I would consider, the Independent and the Democrat, both seemed stunningly uninspiring when I heard them speaking. I like my congressman, Keith Ellison, well as could be expected, and he seemed in no danger of losing. Anyway… so I didn't vote. The whole tone of the election, nationwide, seemed just disturbing, on all sides.
I'm grateful to be an expat.
I took a "sick day," today. I'm not even really used to the idea that I actually have "sick days" – in hagwon land, there's no such thing. This is my first sick day I've taken since I started working in Korea, 3 years ago. Not the first time I've been sick, although the worst I've been sick, too, by far.
My bout with food poisoning has left me feeling pretty glum with the aftereffects on my health. I'll muddle through, but I'm not feeling my shiny, vibrant self.
Today was my first experience with urgent health care in the context of Korean universal health care. Or in the context of any kind of universal health care, for that matter – I have only ever gotten sick before in countries and places where universal health care was only a fantasy. I can only say: the $10 I paid probably didn't cover much more than the cost of charging me with their fancy computer system. My national health card has my name as 우이제레드 [u-i-je-re-deu], but the quality of the transliteration didn't seem severelyto affect the quality of my care.
In my three years living here, I've never been to a doctor or hospital, except for a mandatory health check-up / drug test. I probably should have gone in sooner. Like on Saturday. But my distrust of doctors and medical care is well documented, so, as is my wont, I procrastinated, hoping it would "get better on its own." It did, but only… sorta.
I spent the afternoon in the county hospital, after my department head, the competent and kindly Ms Ryu, took one look at me and said, "why are you at work?" At the hospital, the good doctor Ryu (no relation to the department head), with his excellent English, put me at ease. I am eternally indebted to him for rendering what might have been a stressful experience a rather less stressful one.
So, anyway. Yes, I was diagnosed with climbing down off of a nasty case of severe food poisoning. Probably. It sounds about right, although it's hard to figure out what I ate that brought it on. I'd already realized by Sunday that it wasn't just a bad case of stomach flu – I've had those, and it's not nearly the same level of fun, fun, fun. The food poisoning, in and of itself, is probably mostly already past.
The explosive, high-pressure vomiting I got to experience over the weekend (and apologies for the no-doubt unwanted detail), however, had some additional unfortunate and undesirable side effects. Possible "superficial" internal bleeding – hmm… sounds about right. Ick. Conjunctival hemorrhage – which is a fancy name for the fact that I vomited so hard, I caused a blood vessel in my eye to burst, giving me a rather vampiric look. Yuck. An inguinal hernia – which is to say, I somehow managed literally to heave an intestine right through my abdominal wall. Squorlk. Ouch.
I was dehydrated (which I sort of knew) from my weekend with the porcelain goddess, so he put me on a 1 liter IV. I sat and listened to the elderly people around me in the emergency room confront their various ailments, while their adult children carried on around them. I watched the drip-drip-drip. I read the pharmacy prescription he'd given me, which was in Korean, so I didn't really understand much.
After a while, Dr Ryu brought me a cup of instant pumpkin soup from a machine, after he thought the medicine he'd given me had had a chance to quell some of the nausea. That's one of those smells/moments that will probably be indelibly engraved on my memory now: instant pumpkin soup = Yeonggwang General Hospital, an IV in my arm. But not unbearable, for all that.
I'm home now. My stomach is a little shaky, still. But I'm going to try to eat something. Sorry for the disgusting details – such is life, a-blogged-right-here.
