Day: September 4, 2013

Caveat: Love Is a Bourgeois Construct

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Found Online

I believe the song is meant tongue-in-cheek. I especially love the opening verse, with the third line: “Speaking English as a foreign language.” Somehow, I can relate to that. That’s really the language that I speak, nowadays.

What I’m listening to right now.




picturePet Shop Boys, “Love Is a Bourgeois Contruct.”

Lyrics:

I’ve been taking my time for a long time
Putting my feet up a lot
Speaking English as a foreign language
Any words that I haven’t forgot

I’ve been thinking how I can’t be bothered
To wash the dishes or remake the bed
What’s the point when I could just doss instead?

I’ve been hanging with various riff-raff
Somewhere on the Goldhawk Road
I don’t think it’s gonna be much longer
Til I’m mugging up on the penal code

Love is a bourgeois construct
So I’ve given up the bourgeoisie
Like all their aspirations, it’s a fantasy

When you walked out you did me a favor
You made me see reality
That love is a bourgeois construct
It’s a blatant fallacy
You won’t see me with a bunch of roses
Promising fidelity
Love doesn’t mean a thing to me

Talking tough and feeling bitter
but better now, it’s clear to me
That love is a bourgeois construct
So I’ve given up the bourgeoisie

Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie

While the bankers get their bonuses
I’ll just get along with what I’ve got
Watching the weeds in the garden
Putting my feet up a lot
I’ll explore the outer limits of boredom
Moaning periodically
Just a full-time, lonely layabout
That’s me

When you walked out you did me a favor
It’s absolutely clear to me
That love is a bourgeois construct
Just like they said at university
I’ve been taking my time for a long time
With all the schaudenfreude it’s cost
Calculating what you’ve lost

Now I’m digging through my student paperbacks
Flicking through Karl Marx again
Searching for the soul of England
Drinking tea like Tony Benn
Love is just a bourgeois construct
So give it up, the bourgeoisie
Until you come back to me

Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie

Talking tough and feeling bitter
We’re better now, it’s clear to me
That love is a bourgeois construct
So I’ve given up the bourgeoisie

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

caveat: zap-o-matic number 18

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer

if i were to write a book about my cancer experience right now, i might as well subtitle it "the sputum chronicles." i realize its gross, but if you look through for a unifying leitmotif, that is what is there.

my congestion has been worsening, my phlegm and sinus drip is annoying as usual but exacerbated by my difficulty swallowing, etc. my dry mouth phenomenon is entirely perceptual and mostly has been from the start, as ive observed before. the fact is my mouth is full of yuck.

one of the most disgusting habits i have never gotten around to forgiving in my fellow humans is the habit of spitting on the ground in public. it is prevalent to the point of universality in korea, and is one of those small "things i hate" here. but now. . . im the one doing it, four or five times on my 20 minute walk. gwack.

the doctor said its "thick saliva" rather than sputum, to be precise. whatever. its just unpleasant.

Caveat: “호환”

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Andrew, Hollye and I met my friend Seungbae in Seoul for dinner. I ended up ordering 온면 [onmyeon = warm noodles], but I didn’t eat very much.

I enjoy Seungbae’s company, though – he’s amazingly smart in his autodidact way. He says “I’m just a farmer” but he knows 5 languages and can easily keep up with my discourses on history or culture.

I took a picture of them outside the restaurant.

picture

On the way back home in the subway, Andrew was looking at a box for a USB flash drive that Seungbae had given as a gift. It said, among many other things, “1.1호환” and I was trying to figure out what that meant. I put 호환 into the dictionary on my phone, and learned that 호환 [hohwan] means “disaster caused by tigers.” This is profoundly excellent information – but I suspect not really an accurate translation.

What, exactly, constitutes 1.1 disasters caused by tigers? How does one evaluate the concept of one tenth (.1) of a disaster?

This morning, I looked it up. The online dictionary at daum.net said the same thing: “호환 [虎患] a disaster caused by a tiger; the ravages of tigers.” What was funny, though, was that the automatically generated list of example usages following gave a hint of how the term is actually used: it’s used to mean “compatibility.” So why isn’t this meaning in the dictionary? Once again I raise that perennial question: why are Korean-English dictionaries so bad? Even my Korean-Spanish dictionary only has: “desastre causado por tigres”- clearly just a translation of the original Korean-English mistake (I suspect most dictionaries rely on some ur-dictionary created long, long ago, and just pirate and repackage the content from generation to generation, from book to translation to website to smartphone app).

This is one instance where the googletranslate gets it right, and says compatibility. It gets it right for the same reason the auto-generated list at daum is right – because it’s a statistical correlation of texts rather than a copy of some dictionary badly written (by humans).

Here’s another, tangential question, though: what does it say about Korean culture that they have a special word for a “disaster caused by tigers”? Or at least… that they used to?

Food for thought. And food for tigers…

Speaking of disasters…

What I’m listening to right now.

Someone on the internet decided to do Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” using some web-based emulator of Mario Paint. I guess this might be titled “Get Retro.” It takes existing at a certain strange confluence of cultural nostalgia and nerdiness to even “get” why this video is so entertaining, of course.

I took a picture of the moment before sunrise, this morning, out my window looking east.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Two Months Cancer-Free

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Food & Drink / My Photos

Two months ago on the 4th of July I had my tumor removed. Piece-of-cake.

This radiation thing, on the other hand… eheh.

But that’s the deal-with-devil I made, I think. 화이팅.

Last week I made a giant batch of pea soup – before what was left of my ability to taste food disappeared over the weekend. I finished off the leftover pea soup for lunch today with some cubes of ham cut into it, and imagined it was delicious.

picture

I just make myself eat, because I know there’s a lot of concern about patients losing weight during radiation, and especially because of the sores in my mouth potentially disrupting my ability to eat solids. So far, I just kind of buckle down and push the food in, chew, swallow. It’s doable.

Talking is just as difficult as eating, now – in that respect, this is quite different from my experience last month with recovering from the tongue-reconstruction surgery, where I recovered the ability to talk almost effortlessly and painlessly, but re-learning to eat and swallow were quite challenging. Now, it’s just that everything is so sore – tongue, inside of cheeks, gums, inside of lips, throat, etc. – that eating and talking are equally difficult and unpleasant. But, as I said, it’s doable.

I took a longish nap, after lunch. I guess I needed it. I always get hit really hard by tiredness around noon on my radiation days. The result was that I didn’t go to work. I guess I could go now, but I had a talk with Curt on Monday about my not going in so much due to how I’ve been feeling about the treatment, and he was OK about it.

I’m not really sure I have the right mental constitution to handle having an entirely “optional” job, though. It’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m just not up for it.”

But then… my friend Seungbae wants to meet this evening for dinner, because it would be his chance to say goodbye to Andrew before Andrew goes back to the US at the end of this week. So that’s another reason to skip work. But I have that same guilty feeling skipping work and going to see a friend in Seoul as I used to get being “sick” from school as kid when in fact I was taking a mental health day of some kind or another.

I’m not sure I’m really going anywhere with all of this. Just rambling on, letting everyone know where things are at.

Document everything! …My life of obfuscating, radical transparency!

Eheh. Whatever.

What I’m listening to right now.



Parov Stelar, “If I Had You.”

Here is a picture of magpie (까치) I tried to capture while walking back from the hospital this morning through the park, with only mediocre success.

picture

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Back to Top