My intention had been to make a simple blog post of this bit of music I'm listening to, as I often do, these days. Nowadays, approaching 3000 posts, I do a quick search of my posting history before making a new post, because I have some rules: never post the same video or piece of music twice, and never post the same title, twice (though I may have broken that one a few times).
So the piece of music I wanted to post was by the band with the euphonious name of "the the." One of the absolute best band names of all time. So I searched my blog for "the the" – it seemed like a weird enough thing – I'd either posted something by them, or not.
Lo and behold, I never posted anything by that band. Unfortunately, my search for "the the" got 3 pages of google hits. Why? Because apparently in Jared-typo-ese, it's quite common: I like to type the the when I mean the. So then, being the slightly OCD person that I am, I decided I needed to fix all these typos. That took a long time. Fortunately, I had a "The The" soundtrack to accompany me. Heh. Heh.
I think winter has arrived. I checked my friendly local news website (naver.com) for the weather. Here’s the five-day forecast.
So. Winter.
Yesterday, walking around, I saw banners strung across Juyeop plaza, for the upcoming presidential election (December 19). The two main-party candidates are on the two banners: top is Park Geun-hye (conservative) and below is Moon Jae-in (liberal). The daughter of the dictator versus the former student activist (who was once jailed and barred from politics for his activism). I think either candidate would be a milestone for Korea, and both have their merits. But I predict Park will win.
상상과 실지와는 딴판이었다 imagine-AND reality-AND-TOPIC great-difference-is-PAST Imagined [thing] and reality were a great difference.
“Reality differs greatly from what’s imagined.” This proverb has a different provenance from those previous ones I’ve posted. I’m not sure it can even be properly called a proverb – it’s just a sentence I found in my dictionary on my new phone, as an example of usage for the word 실지 (reality, practicality). But I like a lot of the example sentences I’ve run across there, so when I run across one I’ll use it. My spreadsheet full of aphorisms and proverbs isn’t used up, by any means, but I’ll vary the source I guess. I’m sleepless at 430 am. Not sure what’s going on – I woke up wide awake in the middle of the night. Sometimes, that just happens. I can’t identify a pattern to it, really, but many years ago, I decided that the best strategy was to get up and do something rather than lie there and be insomniac. So I’m surfing the interwebs, listening to music, and contemplating the differences between reality and my imagination. The little illustration’s quote: “Everything you can imagine is real.”
You either get this or you don't. I'm not even going to begin to try to explain it, if you don't. It's a chipophone – for lovers of old-school 8-bit computer-generated music. As one commenter said, on the creator's website: "ubernice."
Recently there’s been some media hype about Peter Jackson’s upcoming first installment of his Hobbit movies, to follow up on the Lord of the Rings series. And it got me to thinking about the books. The Hobbit had a major influence on me as a preteen. I remember my dad reading it to me and and my sister, in chapters when we were only maybe 6 or 7 years old.
I attempted to read the Lord of the Rings series in junior high and it bored me – in the field of fantasy literature, I was much more interested in Herbert’s Dune, on the one hand, or LeGuin’s Earthsea books, on the other. But returning to it a few years later, I genuinely appreciated Tolkien, and moved on to consume the Silmarilion voraciously and repeatedly. That’s my favorite of them – I’m into mythopoeia, obviously.
But thinking about the Lord of the Rings, though, lead me to recall the work in the genre that is most impressive to me, despite it’s deeply flawed mythopoesis: E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. The text is available online. So I began reading it, again. There’s a strange tonal and linguistic authenticity – a lack of anachronism, perhaps, vis-a-vis the fantastic, high-medieval material – though in fact, the material is almost pre-medieval, but rather classical or Homeric. Regardless, it works. But it’s not an easy book – a novel written in the 1920’s that is in almost flawless 17th century English.
I’m feeling pretty frustrated and even angry, the last few days. I guess hoesik (business dinner) brings it out, slightly. But it’s not like you would think. What’s got me frustrated and angry? My inability to understand what the heck is going on around me. That’s the language issue.
It’s not even a cultural problem – less and less am I of the opinion that the alleged Korean “communication taboo” that I’ve ranted about before is a real thing – it really boils down to certain naive conceptions of how language works, especially in communities of mixed-ability adults with multiple native languages (by this I mean e.g. there are native Korean speakers with lousy English. native Korean speakers with good English, native English speakers with lousy Korean, and native English speakers with good Korean, in an ideal mixed-ability community). In a work environment, an immense amount of communication takes place that is not explicit: people know what’s going on not because they are directly told, but because they “overhear” what’s going on. It enters their background consciousness. But with my limited and lousy Korean, I miss out on that channel. And then it feels like I’m being singled out for “noncommunication” because I don’t know what’s going on. It’s an artefact of my situation.
The solution is to get better at Korean. Argh. No comment. I’m trying. Really. But obviously, not with a great deal of success. I think my coworkers are deceived that I am better than I am, because I sometimes pick up on things quite easily. But other times, I have literally zero idea. It’s a limitation of adequate vocabulary, more than anything else.
So there. I get frustrated in social situations, which make them stressful for me.
I get frustrated at work, because I have no idea what’s going on, and no one will tell me when I ask – they are too busy, or they don’t know themselves.
I’m frustrated when I try to study, because I feel stupid and inadequate. I guess on the bright side, I have a lot of sympathy for my most boneheaded students – I’m one of them.
But I’m so depressed with this whole situation, lately, that I’m on the verge of tears.
</rant>
OK.
I came home in the cold and made a big bowl of “Spanish rice” with my leftover rice. It’s not really Spanish. It’s just rice with a vaguely Italian-style vegetable and tomato-based sauce added to it.
Last night we had a sort of less-formal-than-usual 회식 (hoesik = work-related meal/meeting event).
I genuinely like my coworkers, but even when it’s clear they like and respect me, too, I never feel like I can settle into my “real self” at these kinds of things. It’s complicated – everything about me is so “constructed” – so “intentional.” Who am I, really? It’s hard even to decide what kind of person I’m trying to be, much less to be that person consistently while drinking alcohol. I feel like I stick with that “quiet observer of my fellow humanity” role, but it no doubt disconcerts people: my failure to speak too much, my failure to become raucous or candid. And inside, I’m just a little bit lonely, and a little bit confused, and frustrated with my many shortcomings, and second-guessing each utterance, as I always have. As I always have.
I got home late. Or early. 4 am. I tried to sleep. I woke up. I drew something, as if it had come to me in a dream, but without that actually having been the case. I slept some more.
I watched a remarkable movie entitled Travellers and Magicians. The movie is from Bhutan. For me, it had a large number of literary resonances, everything from the Welsh myths of the Mabinogion to Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (which itself is perhaps at least partly rooted in Aztec mythology). I guess this points up the universality of myth.
I spent a good portion of the day reading the middle part of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution. I like his conception of the living thing (including humans) as a thoroughfare for evolutionary forces. At the point I am now, he is saying that a living thing isn’t really a “thing” at all – it’s just an eddy in a flow, a locus of conservation and retrograde hesitation in a maelstrom of neverending change and growth. I like that.
The state of my birth. The governor of my childhood, and the once again governor: Jerry Brown.
The Dead Kennedys were the first band I ever saw live. I was 16, in Boston on my own. It was a transformative experience.
What I’m listening to right now.
Dead Kennedys, “California Uber Alles.”
Lyrics.
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president…
Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!
[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California
Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Close your eyes, can’t happen here
Big Bro’ on white horse is near
The hippies won’t come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!
[Chorus]
Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It’s the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Come quietly to the camp
You’d look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don’t you worry, it’s only a shower
For your clothes here’s a pretty flower.
DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent’s egg’s already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown
I have a student Mingyu who wrote this in his recent diary essay book.
I had a stomachache because I ate pizza, banana, lemon and bread. In fact I had a stomachache from yesterday when I went to math academy but I was very feel sick at the stomachache. So so I went to bathroom and I threw up all I had eaten. I went home I don't eat anything and I sleep.
I need to discuss the concepts of "over-sharing" and "TMI."
It’s Thanksgiving in America. So I have to listen to this song. It’s an important Thanksgiving tradition. Listen, too, and you will understand me better, knowing that I once had this song memorized.
I was driving in Minnesota snowstorm. Then the guy in the car in front of me, who I recognized as a coworker from Karma, was recruited by some construction workers to get out of his car and wave a green light up and down beside the highway, directing traffic.
This was weird – I was thinking that, even inside the dream. 'Is that safe or legal, recruiting random drivers to work at a construction site in a snowstorm?' I ponder, as my car devolves into a slow skid on the snowy, icy road, nearly knocking the man down. This emphasizes my point. But I roll down my window and wave to him, cheerily.
After driving some more, I show up at the meeting I'm going to. It's at work. That guy who got recruited to wave the green light shows up after me, covered in ice and snow, but he has a girlfriend who looks like a Korean pop star.
The meeting is in Korean. But my long-time-ago boss, Mary (I don't even remember her last name) from when I taught high school in New Jersey is conducting the meeting. And one of my coworkers, who was the head of the Spanish department at Moorestown, was looking around confused, because the meeting was being held in Korean. According to Mary (who has been speaking flawless Korean), the topic of the meeting was a debate contest we were supposed to participate in.
"Participate in?" I asked. "I thought we were the teachers."
One of the other teachers muttered something in Korean to the extent of, 'why does he speak English, it's annoying.'
We had a debate yesterday in my iBT class (mostly 6th graders with two 5th graders) about a topic that comes up now and then on this blog: is downloading music without permission wrong? That question was the basis of our proposition. Often, when I have an uneven number of students, I participate in the debate myself, on one side or the other. This provides modelling of debate language for the students and they seem to find it entertaining. I don't think my performance as the last CON team speaker in this debate was particularly good, though.
Here is the debate.
I have been sending debate speech recordings to the students' parents, lately, too. This is proving rather popular. I think the parents like seeing how their kids are doing.
So. After more than five years in Korea, I did something new today: I used an entirely Korean website to purchase something using my cellphone account. I suspect I’m a bit behind the curve on this. The reason I’m behind the curve has to do with my being one of those personalities that actually reads the fine print on online purchase agreements, combined infelicitously with the fact that there’s a hell of a lot of fine print associated with making purchases online in Korea – in Korean, of course, about which I have some degree of perfectionistic anxiety.
So to do this online commerce thing, I have to break through some barriers. First, I have to just relax and keep hitting the “확인” [hwagin = continue] and “동의” [dongui = agree] buttons obliviously. Second, I have to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Korean e-commerce is still hogtied by some very old regulations that keep it stuck in an unhappy marriage with ActiveX – 15 years ago they were very forward-looking and progressive and enabled Korea to bootstrap its current internet success story, but now they are quite annoying). Third, I have to have something I really want to buy.
This last barrier was surmounted because I’ve been listening to more and more Korean music and feeling less and less comforatble with my piratical ways. For my non-Korean music, I’ve been using Amazon’s mp3 store, which now works from Korea (it didn’t used to) – my account is tied to my US credit card. But for Korean music, Amazon is ill-stocked. And I’ve been put off by the lack of finding a comfortable English-option website whereat to download music legally, for pay. They simply don’t exist, in my experience. You’ve got to break down and pretend to be a Korean. Download it using IE, using “phone cash” from your cellphone account.
So that’s what I did. And now I’m the proud owner of an mp3 track that cost me… lemme see… about 138 won, including taxes. That’s 13 cents. 대박 [daebak ~= kewl].
The video, by the way, is… interesting. It all goes along swimmingly, entirely compliant to K-pop cultural norms, until the last moment, when… er… what’s going on there? Any thoughts, anyone? Is Korean pop taking a first step out of the closet? Or would that be an overdetermined reading for what is, essentially, intended to be a bromance?
기지도 못하면서 뛰려고한다 crawl-PRENEG-TOO cannot-do-IF run-TRY-PRES [Someone] tries to run if [he/she] cannot crawl first.
“Trying to run before you can walk.” Or, maybe, this is kind of like the proverbial “Putting the cart before the horse.” This seems to happen a lot in Korea. They need to remember this proverb when running a business. Just a thought. I slept badly last night. Good thing today is Sunday. I plan to be very lazy today – I have substantial skills in this area.
I sat and watched a 4 hour movie basically straight through, this evening. I’m a little bit hesitant to recommend this movie in this venue – it was most definitely NSFW, if you catch my drift.
But it was epic, and fascinating. It was half Cervantes, half William S. Burroughs, and executed like a live-action anime cartoon. If you can stomach strong sexual content (perversions!), vast amounts of blood and gore (homage to Kill Bill), insults to religion and capitalism galore, Lacanian psychosexual philosophizing and sadomasochistic parenting … well, then… if you can stomach those things, then I heartily recommend: Love Exposure (愛のむきだし [ai no mukidashi]).
It was really about 4 or 5 different movies. I would have been interested to watch any of them, though for different reasons. It’s not a a very optimistic view of human nature, frankly, despite the “love-triumphs” ending. The significant quote that runs thematically through movie is 1 Corinthians 13:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
But don’t misunderstand – it’s not at all clear that the message is “pro-Christian.” Or even pro-Love. I didn’t come away with that impression. And, as a product of 99% non-Christian Japan, that’s understandable. It’s messing with the symbolism, as a lot of Japanese pop culture does, but without any deference or loyalty or, for that matter, sincerity. But just because a movie is contrived and insincere doesn’t mean it can’t be a great work of art. It’s horribly contrived, and complicatedly switches between a kind of plausible emotional realism and a two-dimensional, adolescent, comic-book view of the world. Certainly, it is the case that Love Never Ends, if by love, you mean “lust” and by never ends you mean rape and bloody murder. For all that, the Corinthians quote is nevertheless perfect.
So much for trying to review it.
I liked the soundtrack, too.
What I’m listening to right now.
[UPDATE 2018-01-23: The old youtube video has disappeared from the internet. Probably gobbled up by the copyright police. But I like the song. So I found a “cover” of the song by another artist. That’s the current video embedded.]
ゆらゆら帝国 [Yurayurateikoku], “空洞です” [kūdōdesu = Hollow Me]. The lyrics:
ぼくの心をあなたは奪い去った Boku no kokoro o anata wa ubai satta 俺は空洞 でかい空洞 Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō 全て残らずあなたは奪い去った Subete nokorazu anata wa ubai satta 俺は空洞 面白い Ore wa kūdō omoshiroi バカな子どもが ふざけて駆け抜ける Bakana kodomo ga fuzakete kakenukeru は空洞 でかい空洞 Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō いいよ くぐりぬけてみな 穴の中 Ī yo kugurinukete mina ana no naka どうぞ 空洞 Dōzo kūdō
なぜか町には大事なものがない Naze ka machi ni wa daijina mono ga nai それはムード 甘いムード Sore wa mūdo amai mūdo 意味を求めて無意味なものがない Irikunda roji de anata ni deaitai それはムード とろけそうな Sore wa mūdo toroke-sō na 入り組んだ路地であなたに出会いたい Irikunda roji de anata ni deaitai それはムード 甘いムード Sore wa mūdo amai mūdo 誰か 味見をしてみな 踊りたい Dare ka ajimi o shite mina odoritai さあどうぞ ムード Sā dōzo mūdo
ぼくの心をあなたは奪い去った Boku no kokoro o anata wa ubai satta 俺は空洞 でかい空洞 Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō 全て残らずあなたは奪い去った Subete nokorazu anata wa ubai satta 俺は空洞 面白い Ore wa kūdō omoshiroi バカな子どもが ふざけて駆け抜ける Bakana kodomo ga fuzakete kakenukeru 俺は空洞 でかい空洞 Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō いいよ くぐりぬけてみな 穴の中 Ī yo kugurinukete mina ana no naka さあどうぞ 空洞 Sā dōzo kūdō 空洞 Kūdō 空洞 Kūdō 空洞 Kūdō 空洞 Kūdō
Last night, I gave a presentation to the parents of the kids who will be moving up from elementary (6th grade) to middle school (7th grade) at the new school year – which starts in March in Korea. The curriculum undergoes major changes, both in public school and in hagwon. So the hagwon does a lot of orientation for parents of kids that move up. This is part of that. Curt spoke for over 2 hours. My bit was about 15 minutes. I’m speaking in a style that hopefully is understandable to at least a plurality of parents – slow, clearly enunciated – but there are no doubt parents that aren’t understanding my English.
In the presentation, I’m talking about my debate program – I’m trying to sell it, essentially. There is so much focus on exam-prep at the middle-school level, that a lot of the parents don’t see the benefit of a debate program or even of building speaking skills in general – there’s no speaking component to the national English exam, after all.
The video of the 3 kids’ before-and-after debating skills that I’m presenting is here, if you’re interested to look at it.
A while back, a friend pointed me to a website called "Six Sentences," where people write six-sentence-long stories. This appeals to me. It appeals to me a lot, actually. I may even try writing an entry for the website, sometime. Certainly, brevity has more than once been not just an accidental but a genuinely intentional feature of This Here Blog Thingy™. So at some point, don't be shocked if all my entries turn into six-sentence-long essays – kind of like that mania I got for a while one time when I posted single-word facebook statuses every day for a few months.
I went into the classroom at nearly 10 pm, and Jeongjae and Donghun were still in there, studying for some vocabulary quiz, presumably. But Jeongjae was looking at his math book.
“You guys are still here?” I asked.
“Yeaaasss,” intoned Jeongjae in that laconic voice of his.
I pointed at his math book. “That doesn’t look like English,” I observed.
He glared down at the offending text as if it had suddenly appeared on his desk unexpectedly. He pondered his predicament for only a moment.
“Ohhh. but Teacher! There is x! X is English.”
“Yes, I think that’s English,” his friend agreed.
I couldn’t really argue. Though maybe “x” is more Latin, than English, in a math problem. But, well… who was I to argue? (Note that the image is not Jeongjae’s math problem – just a random image of a math problem in Korean with an ‘x’ in it that I grabbed out of the intertubes. I’m not sure Korean 7th graders are doing precalculus.)
I came back into the classroom on the 3rd floor, only to find Junbeom, a 6th grader, sitting alone, on the floor, under a desk. He had finished his homework – I didn’t feel upset. But I was curious.
“Why are you sitting there?” I asked.
“I’m eating,” he said.
“What are you eating?”
“오징어 땅콩,” he explained, sheepishly. He held up the package. Literally, this phrase, ojingeo ttangkong means, roughly, “squid nuts.” They are apparently squid-and-peanut-flavored rice-puffs.
My old town, where I worked for one year, 2010-11, was in the news on CNN. Really.
Why? Because the humongous nuclear power plant there has cracks in it. Which some inspectors found alarming.
Ah, Hongnong. I took the picture at right during a hike on the hill behind the town in May, 2010.
What I’m listening to right now.
G-DRAGON, 크레용 [crayon]. Korean rap/hiphop (kraphiphop?) at its best. 가사:
GET YOUR CRAYON
GET YOUR CRAYON
머리 어깨 무릎 발
swag check swag check
머리 어깨 무릎 발
swag check swag check
아직도 꿀리지 않아 yes I’m a pretty boy
난 날아다녀 so fly 날라리 boy
월화수목금토일 난 바빠
오빠 나빠 Baaaad boy
I’m a G to the D Gold N Diamonds boy
누가 아니래 U know I beez that
오늘의 DJ 나는 철이 너는 미애
아가씨 아가씨 난 순결한 지용씨
이리 와봐요 귀요미 네 남자친구는 지못미
넌 마치 닮았지 내 이상형 so give me some
김태희와 김희선 oh my god 전지현
Why so serious?
Get your crayon Get your crayon
Get your cray Get your crayon
Get your crayon Get your crayon
Get your cray Get your
Why so serious?
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on come on
Get your crayon crayon
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on come on
Get your crayon crayon
머리 어깨 무릎 발 swag
내 카드는 BLACK 무한대로 싹 긁어버려
이 노랜 CRACK 무한궤도 확 돌려버려
감 떨어진 분들께 난 한 그루 감나무
콧대 높은 분들께 기죽지 않는 깡다구
어중이건 떠중이건 편견 없이 CRAYON
잘 나가던 망나니건 차별 없이 CRAYON
하나 둘 three four 왔다 갔다 돌리고
차분하게 slow it down
심심하면 좀 더 빠르게 달려라
서울 대전 대구 부산 손뼉을 치면서
노래를 부르며 즐겁게 같이 춤을 춰
링가링가링 파트너 바꿔
머리 어깨 무릎 발
무릎 발 몸을 흔들어 ROCK
Why so serious?
Get your crayon Get your crayon
Get your cray Get your crayon
Get your crayon Get your crayon
Get your cray Get your
Why so serious?
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on come on
Get your crayon crayon
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on come on
Get your crayon crayon
Get your crayon crayon
Get your Get Get Get Get … crayon
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on Come on Come on Come on
Come on girls Come on boys
Come on Come on Come on Come on
머리 어깨 무릎 발 swag
According to an article in the Korean Herald, South Korea posted its first-ever "cultural trade surplus." This is a very interesting perspective. It's interesting to think about. It's interesting that Koreans are interested in it. They take the idea of being successful cultrual imperialists quite seriously, as a component of their "arrival" in the world as a "developed" country.
The idea, basically: Korea now exports more cultural stuff (books, movies, music, etc.) than it imports, on a dollar-value basis. There aren't many countries that do this – the US is the juggernaut, of course; there's probably some others: France, I suspect, and Japan, and Italy. I'd bet on maybe Egypt, actually, and maybe Brazil. But these are just guesses. Completely wild guesses. I'm too lazy to research it. But it's interesting, anyway.
I don’t remember the dream very clearly. It was one of my “university” dreams, with the added twist of my father showing up in the Model A – that is happening a lot in my dreams, because of my worry and preoccupation with my dad, lately. In my “university” dreams, I’m at the University (…of Minnesota, …of Pennsylvania, …of Mexico, …of Southern Chile – one of the various universities where I have spent far too much time in my life), and I’m trying to register for a class that either doesn’t exist or is for some bureaucratic reason is inaccessible – pretty common vaguely Kafkaian themes.
My dad showed up, and was giving me unsolicited (and frankly not very useful) advice. Then Michelle showed up, and she was telling me not to study so much. Then I was standing in line for some class registration, except all the other people standing in line were Korean farmers. So, I was beginning to suspect I was in the wrong line, when my father drove by in the Model A – with my aunt Freda and the Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee (assassinated 1979) riding with him – and that somehow confirmed I was in the wrong line.
So I walked off, looking for the right line. And suddenly I was in a lecture hall of the class I had so desperately been wanting to register for. I felt a warm, happy glow of bureaucratic conquest. Professor Lopez (University of Pennsylvania) was lecturing, but he was speaking English, not Spanish, and the topic was philosophy, not 19th century Spanish Literature (although you could see the connection, probably). And he looked around the lecture hall, and looked at me very directly and pointedly.
“Epistemic closure… what is this? What is epistemic closure?” he asked, rhetorically. And continued, “This dream you’re dreaming is an example of epistemic closure.“
And I woke up.
Here’s picture I took from inside the “closet” on the fourth floor at work, yesterday morning.
Is it sad that the best view at work is from inside the closet? Perhaps more importantly, what was I doing in the closet with a camera, anyway? These are deep mysteries of the human mind.
I watched a movie called 아저씨 [ajeossi = literally, “uncle” but used as “Hey, Mister” also meaning any Korean man of a certain age beyond youth, so, colloquially, “old dude” as a teenager or child would mean it] – the English title of the movie is “The Man From Nowhere.” In line with my typical practice, I won’t try to “review” it here – I will only say that I enjoyed it and recommend it. It’s a pretty standard, excessively violent action flick with a heart-string-tugging ending. Thematically, it’s similar to “Man On Fire” (which is one of my favorites of the genre).
My student who goes by John wrote this too-short essay in his essay book.
Jarad Way always say 왜저래? so his mother really upset. Jarad be punished. So he was really sad. So, He changed his name 왜저래?
I’ve written before that I sometimes jokingly tell my students that my Korean name is 왜저래 [wae-jeo-rae = way-juh-ray]. It has a similar sound to my name when pronounced casually in Korean order (i.e. last name first): way-ja-red. And the meaning is something akin to “what the heck?” – it’s not really bad cussing, but it’s not exactly polite – this explains why my mother punished me, in the essay. It’s a clever folk-etymology of my name (auto-onomastics?), from a 5th grader.
Here’s a bit of self-flattery to make up for the preceding – something encountered in 2nd-grader Lucy’s essay book earlier today. Notice how she started to write alligator but decided that that was too hard, and wrote “Steve” – which is the current alligator’s name.
곡식은 익을수록 머리를 숙인다 grain-TOPIC ripen-“increasingly-as” head-OBJ bow-PRES As grain grows more ripe the head bows more. “With age comes humility.” I guess that’s true. I’ve been feeling my age a lot, lately. It’s humbling when it’s not humiliating. Van Gogh, “Wheat Field With Crows.”
Obama has been re-elected. I think, despite my own failure to have voted for him, this was a foregone conclusion. I did a poll of my ISP7 class (formerly TP cohort) and they predicted that Obama would win without exception, regardless of whether they’d decided to support Obama or Romney in our recently-completed unit on the US election. So none of them were in that bubble who saw the race as close. It wasn’t, at the end – not because Romney and Obama weren’t neck-and-neck in the popular vote – they were – but because the Obama team had long-ago worked out the electoral math they needed (e.g. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio) and they’d worked their message in those states relentlessly.
So how do I feel about it?
I worry about the civil liberties issues – I think Obama’s essential continuation of the Buchcheneyian post-9-11 imperial paradigm is disturbing. I worry about the still-too-aggressive foreign policy – especially the drones and Obama’s alleged “kill list” and Guantanamo.
What I’m definitively not worried about is “creeping socialism” or “Obama-as-dictator” or whatever bogeyman the pseudo-Randian right has gotten so worked up about – despite my own mumblings to the contrary. Obama’s alleged socialism is essentially a straw-man that somehow took on a life of its own and has come back to terrify its creators. Obama is less socialist than your typical European right-winger, and less socialist than Nixon or Eisenhower. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who believe in this straw-man – but I feel they’re deluded at some level.
There were some interesting results in state-level elections. Most interesting to me was the reported fact that Puerto Rican voters approved statehood for PR. This doesn’t mean, of course, that PR becomes a state: Congress would have to approve, and that seems unlikely as long as Congress is divided (House Republican and Senate Democrat). I have long thought that PR should try to change its status, although I’ve felt neutral about whether that should be toward statehood or independence. But the fact that the vote on the island has swung toward statehood is striking. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
Of course, being a political junkie, I was looking at The Atlantic website’s liveblog of the election night, on this brisk Wednesday morning in Korea. There was this rather irrelevant picture of Dick Cheney watching the election returns, with the comment below the picture:
“It appears he has a lamp made of antlers.”
Why would this make me laugh hard for a few minutes?
