I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.
김서방네 지붕위에 콩깍지가 깐콩깍지냐 안깐콩깍지이냐 ?
김서방네 지붕위에 콩깍지가
kim·seo·bang·ne ji·bung·wi·e kong·kkak·ji·ga
kim-mister-“chez” roof-ontop-LOC bean-pod-SUBJ
깐콩깍지냐 안깐콩깍지이냐
kkan·kong·kkak·ji·nya an·kkan·kong·kkak·ji·i·nya
husk-PASTPART-bean-pod-OR not-husk-PASTPART-bean-pod-OR
Is the bean pod on Mr Kim’s roof a husked bean pod or an unhusked bean pod?
There some things we must ask, in life. This may not be one of them.
Day: June 25, 2013
Caveat: Please comebake healthy teacher
I have about 20 students and former students who are friends on facebook. I knew that posting my health status there means that that information will become available to those students. Fortunately, I don’t think Curt is specifically uncomfortable with students knowing my status, but we both agreed it wouldn’t be something generally announced, either.
It didn’t take long, though, for my students to find out, since they are always checking their smartphones for any signs of novelty in their worlds.
Last night I got a kakao message from a student who had apparently seen my facebook posting. I’m actually impressed she took the time to figure out what my post was about, as she’s only an intermediate-level student. She deserves bonus credit just for that!
She made promises to always do her homework if I get healthy. Which is cute and charming and amazingly beautiful in its kidlike naivety. She concluded “Please comebake [come back] healthy teacher.” My heart is rended as I feel so happy from this sincere message.
How I’m perceived is so much different than how I perceive myself. Not just by students.
Last Sunday, my friend Peter told me that I was “one of the most consistently positive foreigners” he’d met in Korea. Really? He said my blog made me seem gloomier than my actual persona. Yet from the inside, if anything, it’s the opposite: my blog is more positive than my actual self. But I’ve remarked on that before – I guess I’m pretty good at keeping positive in social settings.
I awoke with incredible nausea this morning. I know it’s not anything directly related to my illness – I haven’t even started any treatment or serious medicine. It is, without a doubt, essentially a “gut level” emotional response to my emergent reality.
Caveat: Tragedy Magnet
In maudlin moments, I find myself speculating that I have been some kind of “tragedy magnet” in this life.
This is ridiculous, of course. My life is perhaps more tragic than the lives of some others, if one wants to inspect it on those terms. But it is still so much less tragic than many, many lives. It’s just a life.
Humans, collectively, are perhaps better conceptualized as tragedy magnets than any individual. We perceive tragedy, and that allows us to draw tragedy around us like a proudly worn, tattered cloak.
13 years ago this week, my wife Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but talk of divorce wasn’t at that moment on the table. It was a complicated time, and painful.
In my more self-punishing moments, I could imagine that I brought her suicide on, myself. Or that she and I, together, brought that tragedy on ourselves. After all, she and I chose the lives we were making… or failing to make.
But then life went on, after that.
In that same kind of self-punishing moment, I wonder how much of my current cancer (now that the doctors are calling it that without circumspection) is the result of “incorrect thinking.” I don’t mean that I’m conceptualizing this newly discovered illness as a kind of punishment for sins, because I don’t believe in sins – but rather, I’m talking about psychosomatic processes: a somatic expression of my broken psyche.
Of course there are senses in which this is true. There are senses, though, in which it is not true.
Scientifically – medically – psyche plays a role (via the way that stress impacts the body, if nothing more), but there are many other factors: genetics, pollution in the environment, bad habits of diet or tobacco (when I was much younger, if referring to me specifically) or lack of exercise, or even random stray cosmic rays zapping just the wrong molecules of DNA at just the wrong moment.
But cumulatively, my psyche has a job to do, too, and so I sometimes imagine I’ve brought this onto myself.
Should I just let it run its course? Is this creature meant to be fought?
Such a futile thing: to purchase a few more years, of uncertain quality, in exchange for a price of a vast amount of treasure and energy and willpower and yes, pain. I really don’t like pain.
Below, an utterly random and definitely unseasonal picture from my archive: the frozen Lake in Ilsan in January, 2009.
Those footprints in the snow on the frozen ice… There I go.