I don’t know the origin of this idea, but I find it singularly fascinating. A commenter at the LanguageLog blog by the handle of “Mark F.” writes (in a comment to a recent entry):
I have read that beavers can’t bear the sound of running water, so much so that they will cover speakers playing that sound with mud, sticks, and rocks until they can’t hear them any more; and that this is what induces them to build dams.
The implication is that what appears, objectively, to be evolved instinctive behavior is, in fact, subjectively experienced as a profound, even unbearable discomfort with some environmental condition – e.g. the sound of running water. Somehow this jibes quite well with my own subjective experiences with some aspects of my humanness – that things that are really evolved adaptive behaviors are only with immense difficulty perceived as such, because inside the own individual’s mind, they resonate more as various sorts of discomforts or dislikes.
Originally, because I had Saturday off from work, I had planned to travel to Gwangju and Yeonggwang this weekend. But I lost my momentum, as has often happened with me lately. So I didn't go.
Just not in the mood to travel, right? I haven't felt like traveling since I moved back up here to Ilsan in May, frankly. Even weekend trips seem like more than I'm wanting to do. I'm perfectly content to tool around Ilsan, such as it is, and be a sort of homebody.
I ended up going into work on Saturday, after all. I had been procrastinating on posting my monthly grades all week, and they're due start-of-work Monday. So I came home early on Friday night, and went in yesterday, instead.
I derive a lot of feeling of accomplishment from recognizing 100+ student names (in Korean), associating faces with the names, and writing personalized progress comments for each one.
To be truthful, lately my only sense of accomplishment has been coming from work – my other projects, as I've remarked elsewhere, are going badly, or not at all.
Last night, after work, it was cold, walking home in the dusk. Maybe 2 or 3 C (36-40 F). The rain was clearing, and you could feel the Siberian cold approaching. Last night, it got solidly below freezing, and I discovered an annoyance with my apartment – really, the first truly annoying thing I've found about it: the windows sweat, when it gets that cold. The condensation collects on the inside window-sills, and makes things sitting on them wet. Yeargh.
This morning, I woke up with a snap of insomnia, at 6 am sharp. Not able to go back to sleep, I made split pea soup and read random articles in the wikithing.
Life goes on. I'm watching things on my computer, and killing time reading a bad novel.
How strange is it, to be quizzed by a group of sixth graders about the idea of lucid dreaming? They didn’t remember the terminology, so the first several minutes of discussion required them explaining it to me, with their imperfect English. In and of itself, that was interesting, too – a lucid-dreaming-style sort of coming-to-awareness of the fact that the topic that we were attempting to discuss was, in fact, lucid dreaming. Hmm… I’m making it sound a little bit eerie, and it wasn’t.
It was just an interesting and engaging discussion such as rarely happens with my students, but that is deeply pleasing when it does.
And then I came home and I somewhat spontaneously (but perhaps prompted at some subconscious level?) decided to watch a movie I saw when it first came out, and that I’d recently re-downloaded: “Waking Life.” Which is all about lucid dreaming. Among other existential and vaguely gnostic themes. And don’t forget Pedro Páramo.
“We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up, sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Last night I had one of my increasingly infrequent "coding nightmares" – dreams that consist mostly of a sort of montage of SQL programming code, where I haven't got a clue what's going on. While I acknowledge that, if it became financially necessary for me to return to programming, I would, I find it less and less appealing the longer I spend away from it.
I had a really awesome debate class, today. The group of 7th and 8th graders debated Korean education, informally, as we sat in a circle. They actually opened their mouths and expressed intelligent opinions, in often comprehensible English.
The best was when a girl named Jiwon said, “Koreans are natural-born pretenders.” She elaborated (I will paraphrase): Korean schools and teachers pretend to teach, Korean students pretend to learn, Korean hagwon (after-school academies) pretend to help, Korean parents pretend to care. And the Korean government pretends everything is fine.”
Pretty dark and cynical, yet she is one of the brightest, most cheerful students I know, in a somewhat unmotivated way. I was, needless to say, impressed, both with the depth of her analysis and her evident interest in the topic.
“Today is Pepero Day Eve,” answered one of the students, creatively. We had recently discussed the fact that Halloween comes from Hallow’s Eve, meaning the day before All Saint’s Day (November 1).
Actually, today must be some kind of “Pepero Millenium” as one of my students put it. I would like to coin the term Peperocalypse: 11/11 in the year 2011. That’s 11/11/11, right?
Curt drew a Karma Org Chart on the blackboard of the staff room last night. He didn’t know to call it an “org chart” – I taught them that term, from my years of working in business. Here’s the picture.
The arrows represent not lines of authority but rather “lines of complaint.” It all seems more or less accurate. Some of the other teachers added some lines.
Yesterday was one of those days where I start out feeling truly horrible, but the kids are entertaining and lift my spirits so that by the end of the day I’m feeling OK about life. One of the reasons why being a teacher “works” for me, from a psychological standpoint.
I try not to complain, but I was complaining a little bit to my boss today about how this infection I have seems interminable and it’s making my life unenjoyable.
His answer: “But you’re not dead so everything’s fine, right?”
Depth of fall. But the weather was hot today. “Indian summer,” that used to be called, in USland. Still called that? I don’t know… I’m feeling out of touch with my own culture.
Easy day of teaching: two classes with the TP2 kids – easy group to get along with. Smart. Interested. Sometimes tired.
I’m just sleeping a lot. Sick. Fever.
What I’m listening to right now.
New track from Jane’s Addiction (recently re-formed), “Irresistible Force.”
I've been kind of sick, still. Ear infection. Because I was running a fever, I broke down and went to a doctor yesterday.
That was worthless – the doctor examined me in a rather perfunctory fashion, poked around down my throat and in my ear. He pontificated a while on that I was chewing too much on one side of my mouth. What's that supposed to mean? I don't do that, although I do suspect I grind my teeth some when I sleep. But my symptoms don't feel like that kind of problem – it's a burning thing in the back of my throat, and in the eustachian tube area (well, it feels like that). And fever. And then he proclaimed I had no infection
But then he wrote a prescription for antibiotics. What's with that?
I'm taking them. Hopefully they will make me better. I'm not enjoying this.
Here are a few more pictures from my camera from the two days of halloween celebration at Karma Academy.
Jinyong and Jaehyeon at the wall o’ pumpkins.
The three boys in EP3, who had the best understanding of the concept of halloween. We had a bag of costume pieces that they availed themselves of.
A picture of me taken Sunday, walking home from Kintex with my friend Peter. I liked the fall-colored trees.
Unrelatedly, yesterday in RN1 class (7th and 8th graders), I was having the kids read dialogues that they had written dictation from the listening textbook. There were two people talking in the this one dialogue, labelled only “Man” and “Woman.” I asked this one boy, Jemin, “So, are you the man or the woman?” – I was asking him to choose which he wanted to read. Instead, he decided to interpret this as a question about his gender. And his answer was good-humored: “Middle.” Eveyone laughed.
Yesterday was halloween. I was trying to teach the phrase “trick or treat” to my first graders. I gave them pumpkin cut-outs for them to draw faces on, then we would go out to the lobby from the classroom and say “trick or treat” to the front desk lady, and attach our pumpkins to a wall and hopefully get some candy.
As we marched out of the classroom to the lobby, the kids all in masks or witch hats, I would say “trick or treat,” and they would gamely (lamely?) try to imitate. But by the time we got to the lobby, they had given up on the difficult-to-pronounce “tr-” part of the phrase, and were simply saying “chaka chaka” when I said “trick or treat.”
It was like a dance line: “trick or treat!” I would say. “Chaka chaka!” they would answer. All in good fun.
Here’s Jeonghyeon, a third grader, wearing my hat and coat and wielding my devil’s pitchfork and mugging for the camera.
No he podido encontrar fácilmente la fecha de composición del poema, pero parece más bien temprano que tarde. Con su título, el poeta Huidobro hace referencia al famoso drama del mismo título de Calderón de la Barca.
La vida es sueño
Los ojos andan de día en día Las princesas posan de rama en rama Como la sangre de los enanos Que cae igual que todas sobre las hojas Cuando llega su hora de noche en noche.
Las hojas muertas quieren hablar Son gemelas de voz dolorida Son la sangre de las princesas Y los ojos de rama en rama Que caen igual que los astros viejos Con las alas rotas como corbatas
La sangre cae de rama en rama De ojo en ojo y de voz en voz La sangre cae como corbatas No puede huir saltando como los enanos Cuando las princesas pasan Hacia sus astros doloridos.
Como las alas de las hojas Como los ojos de las olas Como las hojas de los ojos Como las olas de las alas.
Las horas caen de minuto en minuto Como la sangre Que quiere hablar.
Vicente Huidobro es uno de mis poetas favoritos. Las hojas de otoño de estos días, rojas y marrones y doradas, me aparecen en el simbolismo aquí arriba, acompañadas por gotas de sangre y olas de las alas. Pero me pregunto, ¿quienes son las princesas?
La vida es sueño.
Entonces, anoche soñaba con una ciudad paradigmática, que parecía a una media docena de ciudades en que he vivido, que retrataba una media docena de metrópolis que he amado: Chicago, Los Ángeles, México, Filadelfia, París, Seul. Andaba de calles vacías de gente, decoradas por hojas muertas y mojadas al azar. Entre las hojas vi a una princesa, que lloraba la pérdida de un ratón mascota.
Así se puede notar los peligros inherentes de leer poesía surrealista antes de dormir. Hay que notar, también, que siempre sueño mejor cuando medio enfermo.
Debajo, una foto del otro día, mirando hacia el norte sobre el peatonal de Juyeop (주엽) en su cruce con la gran avenida de Ilsan, Jungangno (중앙로), a dos cuadras de mi departamento. Los árboles al fondo se han vestido de colores para los primeros días fríos de otoño.
So. I’ve been kind of sick, lately. This low grade infection feels like it’s floating around my head. Sometimes it’s a sore throat, sometimes it feels more like a tooth ache, then it’s an ear ache. It’s like some colony of something-or-other is migrating around my head. It makes me very sensitive to spicy food when it’s in its sore throat phase – like the capsaicin stings. So I made curried lentils and potatoes last night, but I went light on the red pepper flakes, and it was horribly bland. I suppose it was healthy, though.
I have a student Yun-jae who is in third grade, but she’s in my most elementary, lowest-level class, which is otherwise a bunch of first grade boys. I think she resents being there, but she’s actually kind of a co-teacher for me because she keeps the boys in line.
I do this thing sometimes where I tell a story, and tell them to draw a picture to accompany the story. This is fun for the lower grades and the lower ability levels. Yun-jae is an expressive artist. Here’s what she drew.
Don’t ask what the story was – I have no idea. Maybe you can figure it out. It’s got a kind of rebus feel to it, or like a free-form manga (Asian-style comic book). I was really impressed with it – if an old guy with an art degree drew this exact picture, he could sell it at a gallery.
I'm not necessarily deeply impressed by the social movements currently happening, that are going by monikers prefixed with the word "Occupy" – e.g. Occupy Wall Street. Rather than be critical of the lack of a clear program or set of demands, however, I'd rather be critical of the evident lack of clearheaded, genuine, scientific-spirited analysis. This is not just lacking on the left, though. It's just as lacking in anything on the right, of course. If not more so. Apparently no one has a monopoly on muddleheadedness.
Here is an interesting fact I found recently. I saw a pointer to a review of a recent book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I read the review and was impresed. At some point, I may work to acquire the book – perhaps I'll see it out on a table at Kyobo Mungo or another Korean bookstore with a good English book section. This happened with another book I recently started, called 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Cambridge University heterodox economist (and coincidental Korean) Ha-joon Chang.
The above mentioned review led me to a list on the wikithing about something called the Wealth Gini. Roughly speaking, the wealth Gini is a ranking of countries in the world by the "fairness" (equality) of their relative distribution of weatlh (not GDP or income, which I find less compelling). Saliently, South Korea is fourth from the top (Japan is the top), while the USA is fifth from the bottom (Namibia is the bottom).
What do these facts mean?
Eloquent blogic ranter "Who is IOZ" captures some of my feelings (eloquently, of course) with a recent post entitled Costaguana.
I am really enjoying the United States these days. It has come more and more to resemble the sort of tawdry, ramshackle, sweaty, tumbledown, corrupt Greeneland that it was always destined to be–or that it always was but managed to hide behind a mountain of dollar-menu burger patties and tip-hazard SUVs. Well, it sort of sucks to live in a decrepit police state, but at least it finally feels a little more like a real country: demonstrators, work stoppages, tent cities, felonious oligarchs helicoptering to-and-fro, private security firms, a hapless and yet still terrifying apparatus of state repression. A fat cop on the edge of cardiac arrest swinging a knightstick fruitlessly at a dirty kid. Forever.
I was so tired last night when I got home from work around 1045, but I went to bed at my more or less normal time, 1 am, and then woke up at 630, wide awake. I thought maybe I wouldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and had a cup of coffee and checked my email. I wanted to listen to the news on internet streaming radio, but Minnesota Public Radio is having one of its member drives, which is appropriately named because it drives me crazy, and being a member, I don’t even get the frisson of feeling guilty about it.
I started KCRW (Santa Monica), which is another radio station I listen to, but then suddenly, finishing my coffee, I was sleepy. I thought I should take advantage of that, and so I went back to bed, to try to add up to a more normal amount of sleep for the night. I’m not interested in replicating the Korean universality of sleep deprivation experiences.
It was only a one hour supplemental nap, but very strange-feeling, the way insomnia-induced “catch up” naps can be. All these disconnected, intense-seeming dreams. I sleep on the floor, Korean-style, with my head close to the windows in my little apartment, so I could feel the chill dawn air outside – maybe all the way down to freezing last night. I haven’t bothered to try to figure out how to turn on the heat in my apartment, yet. Sleeping when the air is cold is always a little bit like camping. Camping makes me think of northern Minnesota, which makes me think of Dylan. Or vice versa.
What I’m listening to right now.
I had Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” (with Johnny Cash), but I realized I’d blogged that song before, so I replaced it with “Hazel,” by Bob Dylan (embedded from some Portuguese site). [UPDATE: Link rotted, replaced with “official audio on youtube.]
One of my students cleverly updated the old “the dog ate my homework” meme, today.
When my advanced students write essays for me, they are required to email them to me before the class starts – that gives me an electronic copy and it makes it easy to negotiate corrections and due dates, etc.
Today, I was pointing out I hadn’t received an essay from her in my email inbox, and she said, in all seriousness, “my dog bit my internet cable, so I couldn’t send the email.”
Nice excuse. I asked if she printed it out, she said she didn’t have a printer at home. “Really?” I asked.
She handed me something scrawled on some scrap paper, probably in the ten minutes before class started. “I see,” I concluded.
I was laughing very hard, though. The students couldn’t understand why. I tried to explain, but it was lost on them.
I found, in my local supermarket, for the first time ever, grapefruit. From California. Labelled as 자몽 [ja-mong], which I think is a Korean neologism for grapefruit – the dictionary gives the Konglishy 그레이프프루트 [geureipeupeuruteu]. In the dictionary, 자몽 is given as meaning citron, which is a different kind of citrus altogether. But regardless, this is the first time I’ve ever seen grapefruit in the produce aisle anywhere in Korea. I bought some – because I love grapefruit. So much for living on local food, low carbon footprint, right? I made some pasta with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and garlic, and had dinner. And I cut sections of grapefruit and ate them as dessert. Kind of a boring life I have, I know.
I was watching this Korean drama, but the sites I habitually use to download English subtitled versions of the dramas are rapidly disappearing – the copyright police seem to be active. So I was left hanging, unable to watch the rest of the series. I’m annoyed by this – the pay site that had subtitles was so horrible (streaming at very low speeds and quality such that the shows were essentially impossible to watch) I quit my membership. If anyone reading this has advice on where to find subtitled Korean TV materials, please, please help me.
Saturday night my friend Basil was visiting up from Gwangju, where he now works, and we went to that Russian place he introduced me to. I had borsht and svekolny (beet/garlic salad). It was really good. I wonder where one can find beets in Korea? I want to make my own borsht, but borsht without beets is sacrilegious. I bought some brown rye bread from the Russian bakery in the same neighborhood there – the clerk speaking Russian and me speaking Korean, and sort of communicating – and I had some of that, toasted, as breakfast.
Walking from work yesterday, I had my camera. I took some pictures of fall-colored trees. The weather was humid and overcast but summer’s heat is gone. It drizzled a little bit.
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.” – Charles Baudelaire.
The picture below is a redwood tree growing in the Juyeop Park esplanade. It’s a Chinese-origin dawn redwood, that loses its leaves (needles) in the winter. A strange plant, but seeing them (they’re all over Ilsan) always make me think of my childhood in Humboldt.
I awoke from a dream in which I was "back in" the Army. These sorts of dreams are not that uncommon, really, for me – my own rather impactful military experience, combined with media images of military life (because of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), and combined with the fact that I live in the neighborhood where I was in active service (Northwest Gyeonggi), means these memories pop up pretty easily and frequently.
The dream was strange in that genre, however, because it was a dream in which I was "happily" in the Army – this is not common at all. I was some kind of officer, it seemed. And the soldiers under me were my middle school students. This makes sense. But this wasn't goofing around – this was serious Army stuff. We had to establish a camp amid bitter cold winter weather. But it was going well – unloading trucks, setting up these large tents, establishing a secure perimeter with guards.
There wasn't a lot of "plot" to the dream – it was mostly atmospherics. Dreams are sometimes like that. The feel of the "Team Spirit" joint US Army / ROK Army exercises that I remember from 1991, but populated with people from my current life.
Then my father showed up. He wasn't helpful. He got in the way, and he needed help. This is psychologically transparent – viz. Dream Interpretation 101. But I haven't had much interaction with my dad lately, so it's interesting that it dredged up from my subconscious just now. Is it the change in weather?
I awoke to an almost chilly fall rain, plonking outside my open window; rice and coffee for breakfast.
Work was long today. I had 8 classes, which is the maximum possible under the scheduling system used. There were good, bad, indifferent – as usual. It’s pretty tiring, though, but I felt positive at the end of the day. I took some pictures walking to work – not sure why, just a random impulse. Here’s a view of where I work. It’s the building with the bright yellow sign on the top floor (5th floor), across the street, a little bit left of the centerline of the photo. The sign says 카르마 [kareuma = karma]. Note that I’m standing in front of my previous Ilsan place-of-work.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to think positively in everything.”
This is #96 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-sixth affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray to think positively in everything.”
This affirmation is quite important. It is perhaps one of the affirmations that I have in fact been practicing, on and off, for a very long time. It brings to mind the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, writing on Spinoza: “ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” I’ve mentioned that quote before, on this blog – it’s one of my favorite and most meaningful, so I come back to it a lot. I found the silly image of Baruch de Spinoza in a random online search. Philosophical powers, indeed!
At hagwon, yesterday, we returned to the regular schedule (post-시험대비, so to speak), but many of the middle-schoolers didn’t bother to show up – out recovering from their mid-terms, I suspect. So we ended up showing them a movie: Green Lantern. One of the other teachers thought it could be justified “educationally” by having me ask some “comprehension” questions afterward, so I got to watch it too – during which I took notes and imagined I was going to have to write some kind of review. My semiotician’s trope-detector kicked into overdrive, entertainingly.
We didn’t finish the movie, but in the last few minutes of class, I asked the kids what they would do if the alien had chosen to give one of them the green lantern and magic green ring (with it’s seemingly infinite, vaguely Nietzschean powers).
One girl said, confidently, “I will sell it.” I laughed. Money is better than infinite powers of Will. Of course. So… Man. Superman. Billionaire.
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs
Once upon a time, I was a huge fanboy of Apple Corp in its first incarnation (see left) – my uncle’s Apple ][, which entered our household when I was still in junior high in the late 70’s, was my first and most excellent exposure to computers, both as tool for writing and for learning programming. Not to mention killing vast amounts of time with games like space invaders.
Frankly, I’ve always felt that Apple Corp in its second incarnation, post-Jobs-exile, was less thrilling or impressive. I found the latter-day, closed-garden design philosophy personally repugnant (I think this is the open-source programming geek, in me), and I felt the products were over-priced and excessively hyped. More marketing than engineering, basically. I have so far managed to get past 10% of the new century without owning or interacting with an Apple product.
Nevertheless, I believe that Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a Thomas Edison type figure for our age. His passing is premature.
Well… within 2 miles of it. And I was on a hill, so I could see North Korea easily.
Lots of people know that my Korean “hometown” of Ilsan is quite close to North Korea – the northwest suburbs of Seoul have burgeoned over the decades to the point that they basically touch the DMZ in some places. So the North Korean border is about 15 km from my apartment in a line pointing northwest, and it’s reachable on the local bus system.
My friend Peter came to visit because today is a holiday (more on that in a later post, maybe). We took the #200 bus that stops a few blocks from my apartment building toward Gyoha, and after about 40 minutes we got off at 통일공원 (Unification Park), a neighborhood on a point of land that is the spot where the Imjin River joins the Han River and the opposite bank is in North Korea.
There’s a museum and “observatory” there (통일전망대), where you can look through coin operated binoculars and watch the socialists going about their difficult lives in their cozy concrete burghs.
I find these “flexion points” of our global civilization fascinating. It’s an uncrossable border, demarcated by barbed wire fences and fox holes and guard towers and, probably, land mines and hidden weapons caches, too. This is not the sort of border one crosses for an afternoon. But it’s eerie how close it is – a local bus ride from my home is an utterly alien world, two miles distant across a river.
We walked around a lot, because finding the entrance to the observatory/museum area turned out to be a bit challenging. We walked on some trails in the woods, and there were foxholes and concrete and brick barricades snaking through the hillsides as if randomly. I speculated that, for all I knew, I’d dug one of those foxholes myself, 20 years ago, while on some field-exercise or another as part of my infantry support company of mechanics, as part of the US Army stationed in Paju County along the DMZ. I didn’t have a clear recollection of all the various places where we encamped and trained and made foxholes and pretended to battle insidious communists. I wasn’t marking them on a map – I suspected that would have made my commanding officer suspicious.
Here are some pictures.
Here’s the #200 bus, that was very crowded because of the holiday. A woman had vomited in the aisle behind us, and we missed our stop and got off at the next one and walked back, which is partly why we got turned around as far as finding the proper entrance to the place.
We saw golden fields of rice.
We walked down a country lane in search of the observatory.
We saw a wealthy-person’s brand new house constructed in a traditional style.
We saw a statue of a man pontificating.
We saw treeless hills of North Korea.
We looked down the Han River westward towards its mouth. Right bank (north) is North Korea, and the Left Bank (south) is South Korea. Because of how the river snakes, jogging north, then south, then north again, you are seeing layers of South and North. The most distant mountains are Ganghwa Island, which is South Korean, but the mid-ground jut of land from the right (the interestingly denuded hills) is North Korea.
We looked back down the Han River southeast, toward Seoul and Ilsan. I live within the scope of this picture, somewhere (Ilsan is the very urban skyline area to the right in the panorama, disappearing behind the little hill).
We posed with North Korea in the background.
We saw a mock-up of a North Korean class room in the museum (note pictures of Kim Il-seong and Kim Jong-il in upper right above blackboard).
We saw a man sleeping in the grass beside the road.
We received important advice from a trash receptacle.
I woke up this morning with a fragment of a dream stuck to the inside of my brain. Utterly realistic dream.
I was sitting at work, at my desk, overhearing my boss talking on the phone with one of a student’s parents. I was understanding it – not dream understanding, but actually capturing the words of the conversation. A first grade (elementary) student, Jaehyeon, was leaving the hagwon.
When Curt hung up the phone, with his dramatic sigh as he often does when he has failed to convince a parent who is set on leaving to stay, I said to him, “Jaehyeon is leaving.” Statement, not question.
“네” [ne], he agreed. In English, he added, “But she said he liked your class. So why is he leaving.”
In the dream, I felt very sad, that Jaehyeon was leaving. He’s by far my favorite first-grader, has a very active imagination and linguistic creativity. He makes random funny noises when he doesn’t understand something.
I woke up with this floating in my brain, thinking it was a memory of being at work. But no, I’d remember for sure if Jaehyeon were, in fact, leaving. But then I had another thought: I’d dreamed in Korean. Not completely, but somewhat. What’s distinctive is that it was understood dream Korean, that was real Korean. Not the dream-Korean I struggle with so often, where it’s gobbledygook that I can’t make any sense out of, and that I doubt is real Korean. And that is a milestone, maybe. Or a rarity, in any event, above and beyond the banality of the dream fragment.
Can any of my blog readers or facebook friends recommend a dentist? Preferably, someone in Ilsan (or northwest Seoul suburbs, or Jongno area) that I can get to in less than an hour. My last two dentists (one Korean, one in the US before that) were horrible – so I’ve procrastinated too long. Thanks.
I’m not that worried about how expensive – I’ll pay a premium for a competent dentist, and I’d really prefer someone who can make a recommendation based on personal experience.
I had some computer problems over the weekend. Or rather, on Friday… I experienced the notorious blue-screen-of-death on my little Asus EeePC netbook, which runs Windows 7. It’s the first time I had one on this machine – I had, in fact, come to believe that Microsoft had done away with the infamous crash-o-matic indicator with the new operating system, because I’d never seen it before. But lo, there it was.
This made me worried. I managed to recover the little netbook, but I felt a dilemma. I rely on having a computer a lot. More than just for going online – in fact, I spend a lot of time on my netbook off line, and I’m pretty OK with having to cope with lack of internet at home, as I learned the hard way during my struggles with internetlessness in Yeonggwang last year (although obviously I ranted about it quite a bit). I do writing on my computer. Not good writing. Not writing-to-be-happy about, but it’s a compulsive exercise.
Until last year, I’ve always had two computers. Well, not always, but at least in the most recent milennium. The idea being, that if I had a crash, I’d go to the backup. Well, last year, my “main” laptop, an old Sony Vaio that I bought the month before coming to Korea in 2007, suffered an ignoble retirement. It has 3 operating systems installed on it – Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003. I dropped it, and I guess I scrambled the Vista boot sector somehow. I can still boot it up, even now, but using Linux is virtually useless for surfing the Korean internet (although that’s changing rapidly, with the unexpected – to me – success of the iPhone and iPad and the various Android-running clones of those products, because Android is, after all, just Linux). The linux boot has got some other minor issues, too, involving the Korean-language input thingy, which I’ve been too lazy to resolve. The Server 2003 boot still works (and I use it when I’m searching for some old file I’ve misplaced, sometimes), but it never played well with the graphics card in the laptop, with the consequence being that it is only capable of presenting a bare-bones 800×600 half-size window on the already non-huge laptop screen. The upshot of all this, I consider the old “main” laptop to be dead.
So my backup computer, since my hiatus in the US in the fall of 2009, has been this $295 Asus netbook that I bought at Best Buy with a gift certificate. It became my new main computer. It’s very low-grade, but perfectly adequate for my writing and for doing things on the internet, if rather pokey running multiple applications, etc. I had to abandon my computer games habit, but that’s hardly been detrimental, in most respects.
Anyway, getting the blue screen of death, last Friday, set me to thinking… if this netbook fails, I’ll be in a world of hurt. I’ll be able to boot up “old main” if I’m desperate to write something, but it’s hardly convenient, and I can forget comfortably surfing the internet. And besides, I’ve been missing having a computer that can have more than 2 windows open at the same time without slowing to a crawl.
So Saturday morning, I tromped off to Costco and spent 800 bucks. I bought a desktop. Which seems ridiculous, but I’ve considered that one of the main things I do recreationally with my computer, these days, is watch movies or TV serious, and my netbooks 7 inch screen is pretty pathetic, that way. Those 24 inch flat screen monitors looked tempting. So basically I bought a fancy screen with a cheapo Jooyontech (a Korean discount brand) desktop PC attached to it.
I decided to make my life difficult for myself. Not on purpose, exactly: I somehow managed to click just the wrong set of initial choices on the “first boot up” of the Windows 7 Home Premium K (for Korea) operating system, such that the operating system knows I prefer English, but nevertheless refuses to use it with me about 80% of the time. As if that even makes sense. Haha. Let’s just say the remainder of the configuration process involved a lot of recourse to the dictionary. And I’m the proud owner of a semi-bilingual computer.
I decided that, well, wow, I had a desktop with an actual graphics chip set and a big screen, I should put a fun game on it. I have always had an inordinate and unhealthy love for the game called Civilization, in its various incarnations. I went to buy it and try to download it – only to be disallowed from buying by the download store thing (called Steam). I felt annoyed. I hate it when online vendors discriminate against me because of my IP address. They’re telling me they don’t want my money. Well, my reaction to being told by a product vendor that they don’t want my money is to not give them my money. It took me about 20 minutes to torrent and install Civilization 4 (not the latest version, but what do I care? I like the old version just fine) on the new machine. No money required. The internet’s like that, right? Probably, it’s a bit stupid of me to tell everyone this on a blog, but I feel pretty safe from the copyright police, because of the aforementioned discriminated-against IP address. Korean copyright police only care about Korean content.
Well, I played Civilization for part of Sunday, and then, in a long-unfelt rush of self-disgust at wasting such a vast amount of time on a virtual empire, I went on a walk. Such was my weekend. The picture below shows the new computer. It represents a certain degree of investment in my intention to stay in Korea, doesn’t it? I suppose if I end up leaving, I’ll sell it or give it away to a lucky friend.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Changes.”
The video someone made for it in the youtube, above, is clever, too. It’s an appropriate way to ring in the new computer, though Bowie always makes me think of freshman year at Macalaster College in St Paul. Life has changes.
A blogger named Christopher Carr (at a site called League of Ordinary Gentlemen – a blog name that I somewhat dislike, by the way, because citing it makes me feel like I’m on a street corner handing out ads for a strip club) is refuting some ideas he ran across on another blog by someone named Dr Helen. The level of writing and the way he manages the ideas is spectacular.
He uses the term “scrooge mcduckery” to describe the sort of wannabe-John-Galtism that seems to underlie some portion of the teapartiers. Here’s a great extended quote from the specific blog entry:
Going through the comments over there at Dr. Helen’s and measuring the levels of entitlement, uncompromising self-righteousness, baseless notions of victimhood, and B-team Scrooge McDuckery might be an appropriate exercise for Introduction to Physics students. As if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years, advocates of going Galt suggest the appropriate response to the democratic government not doing exactly what you-the-one-citizen-among-many like is to sit back and be pampered, as if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years.
Actually it’s all a sort of prologue to a paean to Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, and, having never been much of a fan of Hugo, myself, I stopped reading it. But the introductory part really captures quite well a lot of what’s caused me, in recent years, to turn rather leftward from my earlier infatuation with Ayn Randian ideations.
Even five years ago I still happily described myself as having strong libertarian tendencies, but I’ve become so uncomfortable with these tendencies in recent times that I cannot in good conscience use the word libertarian any more – at least about myself, anyway. Perhaps these years in communitarian Korea, where even the hard-right conservatives still believe in things like universal healthcare and massive government-funded infrastructure projects, has colored my worldview.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I so loved Carr’s use of the term “scrooge mcduckery” (and by the way, I loved Scrooge McDuck comics when I a kid – why?). So I had to post this comment.
I’ve been watching some episodes of the “crime-procedural” TV series Bones. Some of the episodes are pretty well written, atlhough it’s inconsistent. But there was a great line. The main eponymous character, nicknamed “Bones,” writes novels as a sideline to her work in forensic anthropology. In a season one episode, she gets caught working on a novel by a coworker, Hodgins. Dialogue:
Hodgins: “I recognize that look.” Bones: “What?” Hodgins: “You’re writing another book! When you write, you get this stunned look on your face, like you stuck a fork in a toaster. Am I in this one too?” Bones: “You weren’t in the last one.”
I had to pause the video and laugh at this. I love how this captures what happens to people who try to write. That it’s not, in fact, a particularly pleasant experience, but that, like sticking a fork in a toaster, it’s an unthought-out, impulsive exercise with unexpected consequences.
Yesterday was a long day at work. It’s the time of month when we have to post grades and comments about students into the giant, macro-infested spreadsheet that serves as the hagwon student database system. Actually, the spreadsheet’s not bad for an ad hoc job – I’ve sometimes admired its low-budget ingenuity. Anyway, at least I felt competent to do this job: it’s a good feeling of accomplishment when you can write personalized comments about 80 students and remember each of their faces and personalities.
Earlier in the day, I’d come in earlier than usual because I have my current “frontloaded” schedule that is all-elementary. I’m putting a lot of work on my “little ones” – mostly first-graders that have felt kind of challenging lately, walking the fine line between being entertaining for the students and parental expectations that they will come home acting as if they were learning something. Putting together a scheme for phonics flashcards (spelling simple words like cat and cake), I want to implement some kind of regular mini-quiz that’s not too painful for the students but that give me a sense of whether or not they’re making any progress.
I came home and faced the leftovers in my fridge. I like to cook, as I’ve said, but cooking alone always leads to leftovers, and having such a small fridge (it’s essentially what would be called a “dorm room” fridge in the US) means I have to get brutal and triage my leftovers pretty regularly – I end up throwing away things that don’t get eaten far too often, and that induces feelings of guilt, which leads to me cooking less, which leads to me feeling annoyed with my diet.
Um. What was I saying? I found some beans in my fridge and finished them off, after heating them up for an extra-extended period because I was worrying they might have something growing in them. They tasted good. And I woke up this morning.
Over the weekend I had made a tasty curry-coleslaw (see picture), using some end-of-its-natural-life cabbage and the infinite supply of gift-apples-in-a-box that I received as a Chuseok gift from my employer (see other picture – note standard-issue excessive packaging).
That coleslaw is keeping well, so far. But I had to throw out some rice and broccoli and mushrooms into the compost bin downstairs. Isn’t it cool, by the way, that big-city apartments in Ilsan give residents the opportunity to segregate their organic garbage? Not that I have huge amount of faith that anything useful is being done with it… it might be being mixed in with the regular garbage at the landfill, as happens so often in the US, for example. But one might be pleasantly surprised – Koreans seem predisposed, in some ways (e.g. by the density of their society, and its historically recent extreme poverty), to creating a more sustainable version of consumerism.
I like the word 흐림 [heurim], because of its sound. And the fact that it’s a kind of gerund, derived from the verb 흐리다 [heurida = “to be cloudy, to be overcast”]. So the word might literally translate as “clouding” or “overcasting,” although more natural English would be “cloudiness” maybe. I awoke kind of early, this morning. I haven’t been feeling well, lately, but the air outside my open windows was cool and truly fall-like, perhaps for the first time of the season. It was maybe 15 degrees (60 F), and the sky was grey. I felt really invigorated, to wake up and have it not feel warm and sticky humid. So I looked at the weather forcast, and it said 흐림. Clouding.
The implication is that what appears, objectively, to be evolved instinctive behavior is, in fact, subjectively experienced as a profound, even unbearable discomfort with some environmental condition – e.g. the sound of running water. Somehow this jibes quite well with my own subjective experiences with some aspects of my humanness – that things that are really evolved adaptive behaviors are only with immense difficulty perceived as such, because inside the own individual’s mind, they resonate more as various sorts of discomforts or dislikes.
