I’ve been fishing around for some new activity to replace my year-long effort to translate the 108 Buddhist aphorisms. [broken link! FIXME] The 108 were the right level of difficulty – they were quite hard in some ways, but because I was somewhat familiar with the subject matter (i.e. Buddhism) and they were predictable (they followed patterns) I could manage them.
I’ve been looking at various lists of Korean proverbs and aphorisms. Every time I try to understand one (without looking at the translation), I don’t do very well. But I’m still tempted to mess with it, because I like proverbs and aphorisms, and they give a lot of insight into culture.
Here’s a proverb from one of those lists.
맨끝에 정든다
only-end-AT attachment-begins
“Only at the end does one grow attached.”
I take the verb to based on the root 들다 which would mean it’s irregular in a way I didn’t realize (dropping -ㄹ)
I think the [broken link! FIXME] 정 [jeong] here is the same 정 (情) [sentiment, attachment, love] I’ve discussed previously.
I didn’t select this proverb because it seemed particularly relevant to any of my current life events – I only selected it because it popped out of the list as something I might be able to figure out in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe I’ll try to do a more-or-less randomly selected proverb a couple times a week. We’ll see how that develops.
Day: January 3, 2012
Caveat: The Hoping Machine
Walking home from work, the night air sparkled with a sprinkling of snow, the air cold and clean-tasting. Work is hard these days. I'm trying hard to improve my teaching, and there's a lot of pressure and discomfort at work because we've been losing students, too. This is partly just because hagwon business is cyclical, and parents always pull their kids out of hagwon in January, when public schools are in vacation and parents find other things to do with their kids. I can never understand how Korean managers – ever relatively good ones such as my current boss – seem to take these cycle-driven losses of enrollment so personally, and assume there's some mistake being made by teachers as opposed to just being the vagaries of the market.
Well, anyway. So work is hard, these days. I have a tight, dense schedule, too. But I felt OK about it, today, walking home in the dark in the cold in the snow in my dreams.
I found this really interesting image online at a site called love all this – it's supposedly Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions.
[broken link! FIXME]
I really, really like the resolution that goes: "19. Keep hoping machine running." It appears he doodled a picture of it, too. I like the idea of a "hoping machine." I'm doing some repairs on mine, currently.
What I'm listening to right now.
Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea."