Caveat: Countdown

Dateline: Ilsan


In about 30 hours I’m leaving Korea to return to the US for the first time since 2009 (although I took a trip to Japan in 2010 and to Australia and New Zealand in 2011).I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family, but overall I’m still feeling much less interested in “travel,” conceptually, than I used to feel – I seem to have become a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.

I’m also feeling really stressed right now with the remaining work items – grades to be determined and posted in an as yet incomprehensible computer system, and some kind of outline of the classes that my substitute teachers will have to teach. Etcetera.

I woke up scrunched into the corner – a sign of restless sleep with preoccupations.

A random picture – because otherwise when my blog cross-posts to facebook some default picture shows up the selection of which I have no control over.

picture

Mad River Beach, Arcata, 2007. Caveat: this is not to imply that my upcoming travel will include Humboldt.

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Caveat: Invective!

My TP2 class was in high spirits. Two of them were arguing. They slipped between Korean and English.

One student said of another, "He said invective to me!"

"Invective!" the other said.

"See? Abuse. Abuse. Oh, he is not kind."

What was funny was that what he was saying was literally just "invective" (and I think words in the vein of "욕설" [yokseol] which mean "abuse, invective"). This is "meta" language – he wasn't actually uttering abusive language, he was just uttering pointers to abusive language. This was weirdly clever and strange to see played out.

[Daily log: walking, 3 km]

 

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