Last night, I
dreamed I was in Hades. Hades was a windowless library with infinite
stacks and poor lighting. There were dead people around, and one was
advised not to "listen" to them too much. But everyone eventually ends
up listening to the dead people, and their neverending litanies of
frustration, complaint, anger, despair.
One eventually realizes one is
dead, too, in the style of Pedro Páramo.
I dreamed I was staying at my uncle's house in Alaska. He wasn't there – which is quite common when I go to visit him. I go to visit him and he says, "oh, nice to see you, I've got to go work, so, enjoy the place." So I was there alone. Except then my mother showed up (my uncle's sister). She was complaining about the cold and rain. And then there was a storm and the sea began to dig away at the "lower shed" which is right at sea level on the Port Saint Nicholas Fiord, where my uncle has built a dock. We watched the waves begin to destroy the shed, and my mother and I got into a discussion about global warming, while several panicked-looking wallabies tried to flee the rising waters. There aren't normally wallabies in Alaska, but I suspect they'd followed my mother there into my dream. My uncle showed up in a helicopter (appropriate) and said "bah humbug" to global warming, even as his shed was being destroyed. This was all very realistic to their personalities. I just felt sad, and decided I needed to go back to Minnesota, but I couldn't find my bag. Perhaps it had been in the destroyed shed?
Here is a picture I took from the door of the "lower shed" at my uncle's in Alaska, taken in October of 2009.
Last night (or this morning) I had a strange dream.
It was a dream where I was drawing pictures – which makes some sense, as I've been doing a lot of drawing, lately. I so vividly remember this dream that I made an effort to reproduce, after waking up, one of the pictures I was drawing inside the dream. Of course, pictures and images that seem profound or amazing inside a dream rarely seem that way on the outside, and my artistic talent seemed higher inside the dream, too. But at right is a sketch of the image I was drawing – a sort of "world tree" where there were many things in a large, top-heavy tree, including houses and smaller trees growing out of the top of it.
The dream got weird (don't dreams always get weird?). A child came into the room. Well, maybe a young adolescent, about 12 years old. He wasn't Korean (that's odd, remember, because all my students are Koreans). I looked at him carefully, and my heart jumped – this child was me. Me, at age 12. Me said, "You're late for class." His tone was judgmental.
I rushed, following the me doppelganger down the halls of KarmaPlus to the appropriate class room. It was my beloved advanced debate students, mostly 13 or 14 or 15 (in Western counting). And the me doppelganger sat down among them, apparently a welcome member of the class. One of the Korean students said to me (the teacher, not the doppelganger), "Oh, we've missed you so much."
"Was I gone a long time?" I asked. There was an odd, long silence.
The me doppelganger nodded, sagely.
Ellen (who has graduated from middle school and is no longer, in fact, a student in the debate class) stood up and made a little speech, in a mix of Korean and German (huh, German? where'd that come from?), on behalf of the other students. I understood most of it, much to my own surprise – of course, it was dream-Korean and dream-German, so that really means nothing. Then she sat back down and held out a small, neatly wrapped present. The me doppelganger jumped up and grabbed the gift, and ran from the room, laughing.
I looked down at my notes for the class, feeling crestfallen… robbed. My notes were nothing but the world-tree picture I'd been drawing earlier.
That's the dream. I awoke to a square of very deeply blue morning sky outside my window, which was rimmed by hard rime on the inside.
I was dreaming that I was writing in my blog. That’s kind of a stupid dream, isn’t it?
But in this dream where I was writing in my blog, Michelle’s ghost was leaning over my left shoulder. I could feel her touching my neck. Her ghost never talks to me, much. Just that she’s hanging around, sometimes. I knew years ago that her ghost had followed me to Korea. Or maybe ghosts have a way of getting around.
When I woke up, it was snowing. I took this picture walking to work this morning.
Work is the building dead-center, across the street.
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 work up. I drew something, as if it had come to me in a dream, but without that actually being the case. I slept some more.
My dream this morning:
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.'
"Not anymore," Mary answered, now in English.
So we're not teachers anymore?
I wake up.
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 suppose some people may find it peculiar or self-indulgent or egotistical that I journal my dreams on my blog. I suppose it can be those things. But I will continue to do it. Last night's dream was quite odd but very vivid and memorable. You will be able to tell what issues are front-and-center in my subconscious.
I dreamed I went to visit my father, but my father lived in Ulleungdo (an island off Korea's east coast). It was a remote house on a dirt road – more similar to my uncle's house in Alaska than anything I saw on Ulleungdo. But when I saw my father, he said, "I have something to show you." We drove into town. The dream was an odd mash-up of my childhood in my dad's Model A and a Korean road-trip. None of the Koreans seemed affected by a pair of foreigners driving a 1928 Ford Model A through their towns. We arrived in the main town of Ulleungdo (called Dodong though the dream neglected to remind me of that – I only remembered as I was typing just now), and we got out near some construction.
My father and I walked over to this odd, square, unconstructed-upon lot on a steep hillside – the lot was "levelled" – it had been dug out so that it was flat at the lower street level, with an ugly, two-storey retaining wall of dark concrete block at the back of the lot, and boughs of pine overhanging that retaining wall. In the center of the lot was a strange "house" made of cloth and cardboard and sheets of metal – something a homeless man might construct – however, it was apparent my father had been spending time here. I surmised he had been "squatting" on the property during his visits to town. I went inside, and it was actually pretty comfortable inside. There was a small, old-fashioned stove you sometimes see ajeossis using in tent-like constructions in small towns in Korea in winter, and a platform made of pallets and plywood for sleeping. I came back outside.
In the dream, I was most struck by the fact there was a stunted palm tree in the lot beside the tent-thing, along with a pitiful-looking persimmon tree, shorn of leaves but with glowing golden fruit still hanging on the raggedy branches. Both trees seemed very lonely and unhappy. I laughed at the idea of a palm tree on Ulleungdo. It reminded me of the palmtrees in Yeonggwang, that I had seen covered with snow when I lived down there.
I commented on this, and smiled at dad. "I should buy this lot. I could build a nice house here." I began to describe the kind of house I would build on this odd vacant lot on Ulleungdo. It would have two or three levels, up against the retaining wall at the back, with a front enterance at the street and lots of stairs.
My father said, "I bought it." I was very surprised. My father owned not one, but two pieces of property on Ulleungdo!
Of course, it was all a dream.
To set the scene, here are some pictures from my 2009 visit to Ulleungdo.
This last is the picture of Dodong, seen from near the ferry terminal.
Most dreams seem like rehashes of old material, poorly or incompletely executed at best. But occassionally something really strange comes along. This morning I was dreaming something like a crime-procedural (a la CSI). But the specific situation involved investigating a dead person's past work history at a university library. This latter is the connection to my subconscious's accumulation of experience – I spent far too much time in university libraries, when younger. But I was the investigator, in this dream-story.
I had found a book that had been checked out by the deceased person in 1979, with those old-style check-out cards, and it had a date-stamp and their name written by hand on a list glued into the front cover of the book, in that old style libraries used to use to check out books, before computers and bar codes and all of that. So I wanted to take the book as evidence of something – I'm not sure what, but in the dream, it was important, as it showed something critical to the case I was building. But taking the book was a problem – I went to check it out, and the first thing that happened was some idiotic student worker at the library said, "…well, this book hasn't been checked out since 1979, so we need to put in a bar code and a new computer-printed information page."
He moved to remove the sticker in the front of the book with the deceased person's name on it. And I said, "Wait! That's the part that I need – that's why I want to check out the book."
This boggled the mind of the student worker, so I asked to see the supervisor. No one could even understand what I was talking about – even when I began referencing the fact that there had been a murder and that I was trying to get this book as evidence. I considered just taking the book as evidence through some kind of crime-scene confiscation scheme – but for some procedural reason I didn't have access to that pathway of action.
Finally, I was talking to some head librarian. "Why won't anyone help me solve this problem?" I asked. The woman was memorable – she resembled someone I actually knew in college. She didn't even look up from her work. She grimmaced, as if to say, 'how could this man be so ignorant?' And she said, simply, "You put a crook in their craw."
I woke up with a start. Why? The phrase was striking, and puzzling. Was it a real expression? It seemed familiar, to me, as I mulled it over in my waking-up brain. I couldn't shake the expression – it was sticking with me. Finally, I googled it. Nothing for "crook in their craw." A hits few for "crook in his craw" and "crook in my craw." There are enough hits – mostly in the comments parts of websites – to believe that it's a real expression, and not just a conjuration of my overactive imagination. But it's definitely not very common. It seems to be a southernism – perhaps it entered my mind while in the military, or via my mother, who occassionally lets her youth in Arkansas show through her layers of dialectical detritus. What is a crook in a craw? It's something that bends you out of shape. It's something that annoys you.
So in the dream, I was annoying those people. And I still don't know why, as I was distracted by the language used by the person who was trying to explain to me that I was annoying them. Is that annoying?
I awoke from a frustrating dream.
I had returned to college. I was at the University of Minnesota, but the campus was so radically changed I couldn't find my way around. The library was a stunning architectural marvel (which can't be said for any of the U of M libraries I actually spent so much time in). I had to go into a dormitory that resembled Holworthy Hall from my summer at Harvard (1982). I was on a campus tour with my coworkers from Karma. They were making snarky, insulting comments about the university, most of which I felt sympathetic with.
And then I was trying to do some homework for a computer class. I was trying to get linux command lines to work. I'm not sure I really did that while in university – if I did, it would have been VAX/VMS, not linux or unix. But these were definitely linux command lines, because I kept pulling up 'man' pages to try to get the flags right.
And that was the rest of the dream. I mean, a really long dream, that mostly consisted of me trying and re-trying variations on command lines to do some kind of compile on a LISP program I was trying to run (well, that part was like my time at the U of M, anyway).
Why am I being revisited by this depressing stuff?
Dang if I’m not utterly blown-over-infatuated with this track, at the moment.
I basically have been listening to it all day. More than that, I’ve been reading the lyrics, too – like I would study a new, compelling poem. This is rap/hip-hop at the level of lyric poetry – in my opinion, of course: musical tastes are entirely subjective. But even if you don’t like the track, read the poetry. It’s good. That good, in my opinion: half cinema-noir, half lucid gnostic fantasy, a kind of philosophical dreamscape littered with the detritus of too much living.
What I’m listening to right now.
Doomtree, “Beacon.”
Doomtree is from Minneapolis. There’s an official video that goes with the song, but I don’t actually like the video, so I found a non-official recording with just the album cover for the youtube, above. I would urge you NOT to watch the official video, until after you’ve listened a few times, and read the lyrics, and formed your own opinion about what the song is about – the video cheapens the narrative. It doesn’t fit. I’m very glad I didn’t watch the video the first time I heard the track.
Lyrics.
[Dessa]
I took it for a kiss, but it couldn’t have been, could it?
I see now what it is, we were just biting the same bullet
You called it in the air
it landed it on its edge
when the crowd gathers around
you turn tail
I turn heads
Shavin down the puzzle piece
tryna make a clean fit
Take what is lovely
leave before the rain hits
It’s a heartbreaker for starters, as you age not too much changes
practice doesn’t make perfect, just makes the game more dangerous[Stef]
Start repo
negative sleep nauseous
barf party for sure
intelligent creep stalking awkward
Flush flustered rush for doors
advance fire-plan
handy with the way out
routes explored
Cover catching up
careful with your care
We don’t go there, naw
We keep locks and keys steadily swallowed
never be followed, none of em dare
Channel up your anger leave it here
kindly disappear
Mind your mannerisms
I can’t be flattered back
The patterns the concern
lessons prolly turned to fact
By now you’d surely drown yourself
before you’d help me with this sail
I’m the wind
crossed fingers for the win
Up to ten til they hammer in the very last nail
Challenging like every last stalemate
Deal… with it
No mission ends
Precision lack of friends
Happily recommend nothing to no one, ever[Cecil]
I know, I know
I know, wake up, wake up
But I don’t go there, go there
She knows the way home
I know, I know
I know, wake up, wake up
But I don’t go there, go there
She knows the way home[Cecil]
You know your way home?
You gonna be all right?
Yeah, but I had faith that you’d see the light
and ride with me or kiss me goodbye
Now you got me feeding kites into the night sky
Covered them with nightlights – like, did you see the beacon?
I swear I let those kites fly around all weekend, no?
Well someone must have cut the lines or something, no?
Or maybe something, oh, you weren’t looking
…Ok Plan B just panic
run up the stairs and shut the door to the attic and don’t come up for air
until you’re torn from her fabric completely…
and just like magic, you’re all in one piece again
But, I’m nothing like I used to be…
elusive and reclusive
Now I’m just both times a hundred… exclusively
Truthfully, I was blind to the deep end
until that piece of us went and died that weekend[Cecil]
I know, I know
I know, wake up, wake up
But I don’t go there, go there
She knows the way home
I know, I know
I know, wake up, wake up
But I don’t go there, go there
She knows the way home[Sims]
Then it flashed forward, but I asked for it
Rip out the doubt, I’m way too south
I gulped it up, I laid back
peeling off the layers
the mantra saying “fear can’t stay here – self, see you later”
Fire chakra dissolve to ether
I have to meet her, I know she knows the way
I’ll have to die twice, no novocaine
See the Eye of Horace, I am Osiris
I meet the devil, it ain’t the first time
He kills me quick like I am nothing
Scream St. Peter, I need you now cousin
I see the owls coming, they float me safe
I learn their grace, they help me heal
under stars, peeling off my skin to rid my scars
it’s the first time I am reborn, but I am not me
No identity, and I am finally free< /span>
I am my brother, I am my father
I am the sun, I am the water
I am an ion, I am everything
I am the vapor, a cloud of smoke
I am a cheap laugh, but I get the joke
I am a brief flash, the abstract
I’ve been feeling more creative, lately.
Firstly, I made a rather creative dinner tonight, that came out quite deliciously: a tricolor rotini pasta alfredo with brocolli and cranberry and nutmeg. An unusual combination that I was quite pleased with.
Secondly, I’m trying to draw something every day. I’ve been messing with my pastels. Today, in about 10 minutes, I did the below self-portrait, while listening to this song. So now, every time I see this picture, I will think of this song.
I wandered through the space station for hours. Then for days. I was isolated, but hardly alone. I didn’t feel compelled to interact with the detritus of 10,000 species around me. I simply existed.
A small cranny beside a crowded corridor, with plants growing out of the wall in the dim simulated sunlight, was my sleeping place. There was a food dispenser nearby. A child not much younger than myself would sometimes stop by the food dispenser and stand and watch me sleeping. I would wake up feeling her eyes on me, and she would run off down a curved stairway, always pausing just as her head disappeared below the stairs’ horizon to look back at me, only to return another time. She had a mark on her forearm – it was a symbol of some kind.
I never spoke to anyone. It never occured to me that I could. Most people ignored me completely. Those who didn’t, I quickly learned to avoid or escape.
Assemblage 23, “Alone Again.”
The following essay by 4th grader Han-saem seemed exceptionally charming. I reproduce it with spelling and grammatical errors uncorrected.
today, I made book. because it's Homework over the vacation. I
have paper, glue, colored pencil, and scissors.
I'm cut into strips paper by scissor and painted with colored pencil on
the upside. Finally, I'm cheak but … oh my god!!! this is strange because it
is a dream ㅠㅠ
This is a child to whom I can most definitely relate – dreaming of making books.
I had a very strange dream in the pre-dawn, this morning. I haven't been having memorable dreams, much, lately, but this one lingered for a long time after I woke up, and so I jotted a few lines about it.
I was living, like a field-linguist or field-anthropologist, among some very low-tech people in some kind of alternate universe where Korea was an isolated and utterly undevoloped country. I was with two old women sitting on the stoop of a pre-Western-contact thatch-roofed hut, and they were "teaching" me to eat manioc – that's what it was specifically called in the dream (in my mind, in the dream, if that makes sense – the women were speaking a Korean that I couldn't actually understand, and manioc is not a part of the Korean traditional diet, being from South America). Manioc is also called cassava, and yuca, and I remember eating it quite a bit when traveling in Central America, where it most definitely is part of the traditional diet. The women on the stoop of the house resembled Central Americans in other ways, too, perhaps.
It was a very slow-moving dream-time. The women chewed bits of manioc, and then would insist that I eat the pre-chewed bits of it. Then they taught me to chew a bit and pass it to them. This had some ritualistic purpose, but I kept trying to figure out how such a ritual could have developed. I wasn't really repulsed by it, but I was thinking "now I'm really integrated to their community – sharing spit like this." Yes, that was my thought, in the dream.
And I had this notepad where I was trying to write down in hangeul the various vocabulary items they used that I could understand. That's maybe more verisimilitudinous. One of the old women was clearly irritated with my note-taking. She kept gentlly pushing the pad away, and insisting that I chew more manioc. I wasn't really enjoying the taste of it, though. And they had these pickled radishes. These are more typical Korean cuisine. They tasted better, too. I reached for one with some chopsticks and the other woman got angry. She spit out the manioc on the ground told me to eat it. Pointing at it.
I woke up.
Dreams are weird.
I had a rather strange flashback memory today.
Strange because of what triggered it. Strange because I don't think about it much, but when I do, the memories strike me has having been quite important.
The trigger was odd. I was walking to work, on a muggy, sunny afternoon. I saw a boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, walking the other way. He reached the corner where there was a traffic signal, and waited to cross the street. It was quite obvious the boy was having a problem – he needed to pee. He was hopping. He was pacing. He was clutching his pants. Everyone has had that feeling at some point or another. I hope he made it home.
But this business of walking home from school at such an age in the big city, alone, and desperately annoyed and embarrassed because of the need to go to the bathroom brought back a my own memories.
My fourth grade year was rather traumatic, for several reasons. First, my parents forgot (forgot!) my 9th birthday. We were traveling through Colorado, visiting relatives. We had a late birthday party at my Aunt Frances' house, but I remained convinced that the party occurred only because I wasn't sufficiently stoic to have resisted the urge to complain about it having been forgotten. And by the end of that month – September, 1974 – something very terrible had happened, the causes of which I don't even now really understand. Rather than returning home to the small town in California that had always been my home, my mother, sister and I ended up in Oklahoma City, at my grandparents' house, and I started 4th grade not at a typical low-slung, semi-rural California hippie school but instead at a big-city, multi-storey brick structure called Edgemere Elementary School. It was the most profound culture shock imaginable.
I remember standing on the asphalted school playground, behind the building, and being infatuated by some brash, loud, confident African-American girl with too-long legs, that held court by the basketball hoops there – we didn't really have African-Americans in Humboldt, and she seemed like a goddess descended from fiction. I remember walking across Edgemere Park from the school to my grandparents' house for lunch, because the school lunch was unacceptable somehow, or there was some problem – perhaps I'd simply complained, too socially traumatized to stand for the school cafeteria. And I remember one time on that walk across the park, in the cruel, unfamiliar sun of the great plains, when I was like that little boy I saw today – with an almost unbearable impending bathroom disaster, and returning home to my grandmother's incomprehension, in tears. Childhood is made up of so many small, sequential traumas.
By the end of that school year, we'd returned to California, and I'd finished my 4th grade year at familiar if rather unpleasant Sunnybrae, in Arcata. And my parents were getting divorced. So bigger traumas, too. But the name Edgemere is etched on my brain as a sort of symbol of the bigger world, my first immersion encounter with the wider world beyond the Redwood Curtain where my parents had kept me so safely sheltered. It was the first bursting of the bubble of childhood, maybe, and the creeping awareness that the world included strangers and dangers and exotica.
I can visualize the school vividly if I think about it. And lo and behold, I found the exact remembered view of the school, still there and materially unchanged, using Google street view. Here's a screenshot – Edgemere Elementary, Oklahoma City, OK.
Weird, indeed.
Work was horrible today – except for the students. I love my students. They put me in a better mood by the end of the day.
I haven't been doing the jogging thing – I hurt my foot somehow, 2 weeks ago, and haven't had the nerve to go jogging on it, as it seems to turn in a lame kind of limp after about 5 minutes. I'm trying to walk more to make up for it, but I'm not doing very well with that.
It's raining. I like that.
[Daily log: walking, 4 km]
I wish I could think something clever or pithy or bitingly sarcastic to write here, in response to this guy, Michael Chabon, who writes in the New York Review of Books that he hates dreams, and singles out fictional dreams for special hating.
But I can't think of anything clever to write. Just that he's kind of an asshole, as far as I can tell. I wanted to think there was something sarcastic or ironic or inverted in his little rant, but I can't find it.
Perhaps I should say, "This guy hates dreams; I hate him." But that's about as banal as what he wrote, isn't it? Oh… whatever. I'm stretching for a blog entry here, obviously. I wanted to document this obnoxious bit of internetalia.
I had a strange dream last night where I was walking around Ilsan and ended up in Minneapolis. But the signs were still in Korean. I felt lost.
What I’m listening to right now.
인피니트 (Infinite), “추격자” (The Chaser).
[UPDATE 2020-03-21: link rot repair]
가사.
★인피니트-추격자★
미안해 마 독하게 날 버리고 떠나도 돼
니가 원한다면 그래 good bye허나 내 맘까지 접은건 아냐
내 사랑이 이겨아이야 먼저 가 어기야 디여라차 어기야디야 되찾을꺼야
잠시야 앞서도 널 따라 잡으리 난~그녀를 지켜라 날 잊지 못하게
내 님이 계신 곳 끝까지 가련다rap)잊어버려 이별의 말 앞에 멈춰가는 가슴 치고 무릎 꿇어본 나
꺼져버려 썪은 장작 같은 슬픔에 타버린 날 끌어본다
식은 네 맘이 왜 아직 내 마음을 매일 설레이고 헤매게 하는지
걸어본다 사랑에 날 굳게 만들지 또아이야 먼저 가 어기야 디여라차 어기야디야 되찾을꺼야
잠시야 아파도 결국엔 웃으리 난~그녀를 지켜라 날 잊지 못하게
내 님이 계신 곳 끝까지 가련다
거리를 좁혀라 내 손에 잡히게
내 님을 찾아서 내 전불 걸련다rap)그래 나 독한 맘으로 널 버리려 했어 애써 본능을 짓밟아 버리며
흐려진 너에 대한 집착 또한 다~ 사랑이라~ 내뱉는 난~
또 도저히 널 놓지도 끊지도 못해 오늘도
뭔가에 홀린 듯 눈가에 맺힌 너를 쫓아미안해 girl 절대 너란 끈을 놓진 않을래
내가 니 맘 돌릴꺼니 괜찮아
가슴 쥐 뜯겨도 별거 아니야그녀를 지켜라 날 잊지 못하게
내 님이 계신 곳 끝까지 가련다내 맘이 그렇지 하나만 알아서
꺾기고 아파도 널 사랑 하련다미안해 마 독하게 날 버리고 떠나도 돼
니가 원한다면 그래 good bye
허나 내 맘까지 접은건 아냐
When I was in my early 20s, I smoked cigarettes. I was defnitely addicted, but I managed to kick the habit without that much difficulty. I started again when I was in the Army, but it was always a kind of boredom-while-working type thing, there, doing what everyone does during the breaks. It never really got to be a habit during that time.
Mostly I don't think about smoking, except that I'm glad that I stopped. But sometimes I get cravings. And this morning, when I woke up, I awoke from a dream about smoking cigarettes that was weirdly compelling. In the dream, I'd gotten really angry because I'd gone to buy cigarettes and I had been charged an outrageous amount of money – there was vivid moment of handing over one of those gold-colored Korean ₩50,000 (about 50 bucks) and getting small change back. So I was smoking my cigarettes, in the dream, one after the other, as if to say, "damn, I'd better enjoy these, they were so expensive."
I like when I have strange dreams – I've been having a lot of them lately. My sleep patterns are messed up, too. That part, I don't like so much.
I dreamed a Xanth novel last night. This might require some background in order to be understandable to most people, I suspect – probably more background than I'm really willing to give… so perhaps you could spend some time on the topic using the wikithing if you're really interested (and who, reading this blog, is really interested?). My feeling about Piers Anthony's Xanth novels is that they're not as good as they seemed to me at the time when I read most of them, but they're not bad, either. They are good, optimistic, teenage boy nerd-lit.
OK. The dream. There was this dwarf or hobbit-looking character, who wore blue pajamas, and his special magic power was that his presence intensified the feelings of community and togetherness and the social cohesion of the people around him. A lot. But it worked very subtly, and in a way that did not make it obvious at all that his presence was the cause. Somehow I was on a quest – possibly to figure out my own magic power. All very typically Xanthian. There were weird espionage things going on, and I was peripheral to the central plot, more of an observer than a participant.
We sailed off across some sea, Dawn Treader style (see CS Lewis's Narnia series – and by the way, that's the only Narnia book I genuinely liked – and no, I've never seen any of the Narnia movies). The details of the dream have faded quickly since waking up, and so … I don't know exactly what happened. We landed on some new continent. There was a distraught princess who felt threatened by the dwarf character – perhaps she was aware of his magic power and was threatened. There was a fractious community that resembled an English hagwon that slowly became more harmonious because of the dwarf's secret magic. But then the dwarf was assissinated by a mule that had George W's face, and while the princess held the dead dwarf's hands and cried, I woke up.
Setting aside the annoying, brutalist symbolism toward the end, I'm genuinely interested in the narrative potential of the aspect regarding a "magic power" that intesnsifies communitarianism. I've long been intrigued by – and drawn to – concepts of intentional communities. I was deeply influenced by my "borderline hippy commune" childhood, no doubt. I suspect if there is a character in my real life that resembles this peculiar blue-pajama-wearing dwarf, it might be my mother – someone who sometimes seems better at creating community around herself than being in that community. I was struck by the aspect in which my role in the dream was as a spectator of community being built by others, rather than as a participant, myself. I wish I wasn't like that, but I accept that it's my natural role, maybe.
Walking home, I heard Nik Kershaw's song "Don Quijote" come on my mp3 player's shuffle. This made me think of Rocinante. But not the Rocinante who was Don Quijote's horse, rather, the Rocinante that was the name of my giant M816 wrecker, US Army tow truck that I operated in Korea in 1991 as part of the 296th Support Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Division. In fact, I had nothing to do with why the truck was named Rocinante, although I approved of the name. It had simply come that way.
Nik Kershaw's album, The Riddle, which included that song, was one of only a half-dozen cassettes that I had for my Walkman, during my time stationed in Korea. As a consequence, the tape was on heavy rotation. When I was off duty, I would retreat from the barracks – where I despised some of my roommates, and most of all, where I genuinely feared my squad sergeant – and I would climb the hill on base to the helipad. I would sit down in a ditch and listen to my Walkman and read Dostoyevsky or Gogol. I consumed an immense ammount of Russian literature that year.
I don't have any pictures from that epoch in my life. But here's a "web pic" I found of an M816 tow truck. It's a very useful tool for flipping over Humvee's that have been stranded upside-down in rice fields by hotshot sergeants.
What I'm listening to right now.
Nik Kershaw, "Don Quijote." Lyrics:
your mind can play tricks
makes you what you want to be
just like superheroes
you saw them on tvcoast to coast, wall to wall
got to go, duty calls
here i am
superman, lois lane
saved the world, back again
here i amin my old, red saloon
i'm a knight in shining armour
if i were asleep, man
i couldn't be much calmerhit the road, on the run
faster than anyone
here i amone for all, all for one
shake the fist, shoot the gun
here i amdon quixote
what do you say?
are we proud? are we brave?
or just crazy?
don quixote
what do you say?
are we shooting at windmills like you?common sense, is as good
as a cafe' on the moon
when man and machinery come to their high noonbeat the clock, punch the wall
fix'd in no time at all
here i amradio on the blink
kick the cat, hit the drink
here i amdon quixote
what do you say?
are we proud, are be brave
or just crazy?
don quixote
what do you say?
are we shooting at windmills like you?here i am
don quixote
we're all men of la mancha
[Daily log: walking, 4 km; running, 4 km]
It was a kind of gloomy, rainy weekend, and for once, I didn't find the rain very comforting. The sky just felt heavy, without feeling dynamic as rain often does, at least for me.
I had fragmented dreams last night – I was trying to teach English to aliens. They kept having laser gun battles in the classrooms. Maybe I watched too much sci-fi crap over the weekend. Hm… maybe not so fantastical, though.
Utterly unrelatedly…
What I'm listening to right now.
효린 (씨스타) [Hyorin (Ssiseuta=Sister)], "널 사랑하겠어 [I Will Love You]." 가사:
내 뜨거운 입술이 너의
부드러운 입술에 닿길 원해
내 사랑이 너의 가슴에 전해지도록아직도 나의 마음을 모르고 있었다면은
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어널 사랑하겠어 언제까지나
널 사랑하겠어 지금 이 순간처럼
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어
효린 [씨스타] 널 사랑하겠어 Lyrics어려운 얘기로 너의
호기심을 자극할 수도 있어
그 흔한 유희로 이 밤을 보낼 수도 있어하지만 나의 마음을
이제는 알아줬으면 해
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어널 사랑하겠어 언제까지나
널 사랑하겠어 지금 이 순간처럼
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어널 사랑하겠어
널 사랑하겠어 언제까지나
널 사랑하겠어 지금 이 순간처럼
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어널 사랑하겠어 언제까지나
널 사랑하겠어 지금 이 순간처럼
이 세상 그 누구보다 널 사랑하겠어널 사랑하겠어 언제까지나
널 사랑하겠어 지금 이 순간처럼
이 세상 그 누구보다
널 사랑하겠어
— I awoke from a dream this morning muttering,
— "Well, I better to get to work
— on that data warehouse."
—
— The dream was one of those SQL coding dreams I used
— to have a lot, when I was working as an SQL coder.
— Screens filled with half-written SQL queries written
— against the infamous ARAMARK datawarehouse (or my
— surreptitious 2 terabyte copy of it that was running
— on the "National Accounts Stealth Server" that I'd
— constructed under my desk), in which I'd denormalized
— the database to speed up pivot table queries of
— various kinds. Dreams filled with feelings of anxiety
— and urgency and frustration. I almost never have
— those dreams, anymore – I haven't done a single
— line of programming in almost 5 years, now. I'm a
— happier and more balanced person, because of
— it (though not perfect, oh no, I know).
—
— But sometimes dreams do weird things, and this
— early dawn, as my cold medicine wore off (I'm combatting
— an unpleasant flu currently), I was plunged
— into a vivid relapse of my database-hacking days. And I
— awoke with a sense that I was behind on some ill-defined
— but very important project, some report due
— that day and the queries were running too slow, some
— effort to find some ineluctable fragment of
— information or some anomalous, dangerous data point
— that the sales people insisted shouldn't exist and
— would embarrass us in front of the customer, but
— lo and behold, there it was glaring up from the
— spreadsheet.
—
— I made some of my Brazilian instant coffee, and
— ate toast and an apple for breakfast.
—
— Below is a dummy query from a SQL educational
— website. Just to give a flavor or my dreaming.
DECLARE @PivotColumnHeaders VARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT @PivotColumnHeaders =
COALESCE(
@PivotColumnHeaders + ',[' + [MonthName] + ']',
'[' + [MonthName] + ']'
)
FROM dummy.dbo.ListMonthNames()
ORDER BY monthid
DECLARE @PivotTableSQL NVARCHAR(MAX)
SET @PivotTableSQL = N'
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT
YEAR(OrderDate) [Year],
DATENAME(MONTH, OrderDate) as [Month],
SubTotal
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
) TableDate
PIVOT (
SUM(SubTotal)
FOR [Month] IN (
' + @PivotColumnHeaders + '
)
) PivotTable
'
EXECUTE(@PivotTableSQL)
— What I'm listening to, right now.
— Kray Van Kirk, "You to me." There's no youtube or other
— online video for this song. So… find your own copy – his
— music is free from his website (I wonder… I should make my
— own youtube. I wonder if he would object?
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue… Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I'm listening to right now.
Humberto Pernett, "Cumbia galáctica."
I often tell slightly edited but mostly truthful stories from my life to my students, as a kind of reward at the end of a good class. I’ve had an interesting life, and so some of the stories are pretty remarkable, I suppose. One of the stories that the students seem to most enjoy is The Story About The Time I Got Shot At While I Was Riding A Horse.
I really did get shot at while riding on a horse – but the bullet missed. Here is a slightly less-edited version of this autobiographical cowboy story.
After I quit my job in Mexico City in January of 1987, I went to visit a friend of mine named Jon who was living at that time in Morelia, in Michoacan state, about 8 hours by bus west of Mexico City. Jon was actually quite a bit older than me, but he sort of treated me as a younger brother. So we hung out for a while in Morelia, and one day he made an outrageous proposal. Well, actually, he made many outrageous proposals, but this is one outrageous proposal that I actually assented to, and this was it: we should buy some horses and travel around the mountains of Michoacan by horseback for a few months.
We did that. We bought horses (quite inexpensive in rural Mexico in the 80’s) and some low-tech camping gear, and we played cowboys in the mountains. We met many Mexicans, and even Native Americans (in that part of Michoacan, they were P’urep’echa indians, known sometimes as Tarascos). We visited villages which were not connected to civilization by automobile. We found scorpions in our shoes and drank raw eggs mixed with coca-cola, which seemed to be a sort of local delicacy, offered by gap-toothed farmers by way of hospitality.
We met a tribe of American exiles (superannuated draft-dodgers) and Mexican hippies living on a farm in a town called Ihuatzio, and while my friend Jon flirted with resuming his previously defeated drug habit, I read back issues of Co-Evolution quarterly and Mexican comic books about Condorito and a battered copy of El Poema de Mio Cid, which conveniently had the 12th century Spanish and modern Spanish translations on facing pages.
After some time in Ihuatzio, we continued on around the Lago Patzcuaro to a town which was called, if I recall correctly, Santa Fulana de Tal, or something in that vein. Now, I should first explain, that my friend Jon had acquired a puppy. It was a husky, dirty white in coloration, which Jon, in his infinite naivite, dubbed “Negrita.” Negrita, unfortunately, although funny in a punny sort of way for a white dog, is a very bad idea for a name for your dog, becaues “negrita” is a way to call the attention of a woman of low-repute, in that part of Mexico: “Ey, negrita, negrita!” means something like “Hey, bitch,” or “Hey, baby.” That kind of thing. Or you could remark on the not-quite-accidental etymological relation it bears to a certain English-language slur, too.
So in this village named Santa Fulana de Tal, Negrita the dog ran off, and Jon, in his infinite naivite, began yelling at the top of his voice, “Negrita, negrita!”
Let’s just say, this was a bad idea.
Several of the women on the street appeared alarmed. It was a conservative village, where people came through on horseback frequently enough, but where gringos on horseback yelling “negrita” after their dogs where perhaps less well-known. One of the women who were inadvertently being offended by Jon’s yelling (and yes, I was yelling the name too, honestly, though I should have known better – my Spanish was better than Jon’s) had a husband or father who overheard this yelling, and this man decided to take offense.
Unfortunately, he was drunk.
Unfortunately, he had a gun, and so he decided to begin shooting at us.
Fortunately, he was drunk.
Fortunately, his aim was therefore really terrible. He hit my shoe. He hit Jon’s foot, with a graze. He was shooting low. For all I know, he hit a horse, though we found no wound on the horses later. Jon’s horse ditched him, leaving Jon sprawled on the cobblestone. My horse ran like the dickens, but I held on tightly. Several kilometers later, feeling more like Paul Revere than ever before or since, my horse stopped.
When Jon finally caught up to me, later, he blamed me for abandoning him. I said it was the horse’s fault, and I was just along for the ride. I blamed him for so stupidly naming the dog. Jon said I was saying the dog’s name too, and if I knew the dog’s name was offensive, why didn’t I say anything. I said that I had said something, but that Jon had been too drug-addled to pay attention at that time. And so we argued, for a while, there on the side of that hill among some scrub and cactus.
Our friendship effectively ended, that day. I ceded ownership of the horse to Jon, forfeiting my investment. I walked up the hill to a local road, and found a bus back to Mexico City.
My passport was stolen later that same week. It was a bad week. By the end of the month, I was back in Minneapolis. But it was a grand conclusion to my year-and-a-half in Mexico.
What I’m listening to right now.
Mexican Institute of Sound, “Mi negra a bailal.”
As is generally the case, I was letting my mp3 files cycle on shuffle on my computer, providing an utterly randomized soundtrack to my rather-dull-yet-lucid life.
Sometimes I hear things I don't even know I own. Often, actually – I'm a compulsive downloader and collector of music, and I will download things on impulse and drop them into the infinite music folder of my soul, and forget I've done it.
This morning, suddenly a version of Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down" came around. Sort of a metal/gothic remake. I used to live in a Depeche Mode-only mode, and I still get thrown into a very dark, nostalgic mood when I hear anything by them. But this remake, by a German group called Farmer Boys, was excellent, since it wasn't so nostalgia-inducing in that way, while still capturing the awesomeness of the original song. I listened to it about 5 times.
What I'm listening to right now.
Farmer Boys, "Never Let Me Down." The video is cheesy and dumb, though.
For reference, here's the DM original.
Depeche Mode, "Never Let Me Down." Perhaps it deserves mention that this song is very likely about heroin addiction – a topic that has a particular strong, strange, and deeply personal resonance for me, but not for precisely the obvious reason you would assume. Perhaps someday in the future (or past) I will explain. Here are the lyrics, which would make this observation more clear.
I'm taking a ride
With my best friend
I hope he never lets me down again
He knows where he's taking me
Taking me where I want to be
I'm taking a ride
With my best friendWe're flying high
We're watching the world pass us by
Never want to come down
Never want to put my feet back down
On the groundI'm taking a ride
With my best friend
I hope he never lets me down again
Promises me I'm as safe as houses
As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers
I hope he never lets me down againNever let me down
See the stars they're shining bright
Everything's alright tonight
[broken link! FIXME] I finally ran across some beets during my most recent visit to the Orangemart supermarket across the street. Grace had told me that they had them, but I had never managed to see them until this time. Maybe it's a kind of sometimes thing.
I love beets. And beets make me think of borshch (or borsht or borscht, Борщ). So I made borshch. I didn't follow a recipe. I'd been reading a while back about a way of making it where you oven-roast the beets and potatoes first, to carmelize them slightly and give them a stronger flavor. I don't have an oven – I don't even have a microwave – but I was trying to think of ways to achieve a similar carmelizing effect.
Here's the recipe I made up as I went, with occasional illustrations.
[broken link! FIXME] I peeled and cut up one large beet into thin bite-sized slices. I did the same to one carrot and two smallish potatoes. This seemed about right for one "batch" which I imagine will be three servings for me.
[broken link! FIXME] I sliced two small white onions and added a few cloves of crushed garlic to a pot and began to fry them in about a tablespoon of canola oil (I have a several-years' supply of canola oil, as several bottles came embedded in my Seollal gift-set from my boss this year). I added the chopped beets, carrots and potatoes, and some spices. I used ground bay leaf, thyme, oregano, dill seed, a dash of salt, black pepper, a squirt of lemon juice, a teaspoon of brown sugar (to bring out that carmelized beet and onion flavor, right?).
[broken link! FIXME] Then, I "stir fried" it all on a low flame. I didn't add any additional liquid. I figured when it started to burn, I would add the liquid, but I wanted to try to get the carmelizing effect. And much to my surprise, it didn't start to burn, for almost 30 minutes. The onions and beets and the lemon juice seemed to provide enough liquid to prevent the stuff from sticking to the pan. I stirred it a lot.
[broken link! FIXME] The stuff cooked down a lot. It bubbled and smelled delicious.
Finally there was some crusting on the bottom of the pot, so I added a half cup of red wine (which I keep for cooking and use when recipes call for vinegar). Then I added a cup of tomato juice – which is a great instant, convenient vegan substitute for any recipe that calls for broth or soup stock. This bubbled up and boiled I periodically added some additional water, for another 30 minutes.
The recipe is purely vegan up to this point.
[broken link! FIXME] I broke that rule because I put a pat of butter on it and sprinkled some dried thyme, for serving it. I didn't have any sour cream or yogurt on hand, which is what you're supposed to put on borshch.
Borshch always makes me think of Doukhobors. Doukhobors are like slavic Quakers (and there's an important link to Tolstoy). I like Doukhobors. If I had to be a Christian, I would have to be a Doukhobor, maybe. The name means "Spirit Wrestlers."
The personal connection, for me, was in the summer of 1989 when I made a road trip with my brother and father in the moonwagon (my dad's 1949 Chevy suburban) from Minnesota to the Kootenays region of British Columbia. My father spent some time during his childhood there, in a Quaker semi-utopianist community named Argenta, that was linked to the one his parents had founded in Southern California. There are a lot Doukhobors in that part of Canada, and we visited someone who served us home-made Doukhobor borshch, which is one the most delicious meals I have ever eaten in my life, perhaps in part the context, but truly good food, too. Ever since, I keep trying to reproduce that experience, which is why I so [broken link! FIXME] frequently obsess on borshch-making.
And as a stunning non-sequitur, I offer: what I'm listening to right now.
Mexican Institute of Sound, "Yo digo baila." Y además:
Mexican Institute of Sound, "El micrófono." Que chango tan chistoso, ´nel video.
Mejitecno. Jeje.
There is really nothing quite like sitting in a cozy apartment on a frigid February day, in Northwest South Korea, eating homemade borscht and listening to Mexican techno.
Spirit wrestling.
Today is 설날 (Lunar New Year, inappropriately called “Chinese New Year” in the West).
So… “may your lunar year be as wonderful and exciting and productive as the solar one you started a few weeks ago!” I guess it all depends on the moon, right?
I just can’t wait for the Mayan New Year. It’s supposed to be extra special, this year. Hehehe. Um. Just kidding.
I’m having a kind of boring day off. I’m so burned out on traveling places, lately. I’m just a dull homebody. It seems so cold and desolate outside, on the holiday. Like I woke up inside a dream, this morning.
I made some pasta and have been watching movies and listening to music.
What I’m listening to right now.
oOoOO, “Burnout Eyes.” What a great name for a band. What a great name for a band.
This is reminiscence (which is to say, I don’t mean a trip up to North Korea, a half-hour drive from here).
Lately, for some reason, I keep thinking of camping trips to northern Minnesota. It was an old, old tradition among my certain circle of friends, and camping trips to northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan were also a significant aspect of Michelle’s and my relationship.
In a related vein, I ran across a very old and somewhat embarrassing picture of me, possibly from the late 1980’s or early 90’s, standing in a campfire somewhere close to Hibbing, I would guess. It’s pretty funny – I reckon I was trying to stomp out the embers and was caught candidly. Dig the long hair.
Why do I post these things? Let’s just call it the spirit of full disclosure…
So, sometimes when we drove to Hibbing or Duluth or the UP, we’d stop and camp at Banning State Park, which is just off I-35, pert’ near Sandstone, along the kettle river.
What I’m listening to right now (nice segue, huh?).
Pert Near Sandstone, “Save Me.”
This might be called Minnesota bluegrass. An interesting genre.
I awoke from a dream in the middle of the night, last night. I was dreaming that I was… dead. Or nearly dead. I was like a skeleton. I was in house or mansion with other skeletons. They were complaining about the lack of healthcare, and the poor food, and their depressing “retirements.”
I kept wandering the halls aimlessly. It was like the mental hospital in the awesome Korean movie 싸이보그지만 괜찮아 (I’m a cyborg, but that’s ok). Some of people were speaking Korean, too.
There was a buddhist monk sitting very still in the middle of an empty room. I said to him, “why am I so old?” He said nothing.
I looked at a calendar on the wall – it was Korean. But the year said 2069. That would make me… 104 years old – in the dream. Really? Why am I thinking of this? Why do I feel like a skeleton? Why do I feel so sad? Am I feeling old?
I woke up. I had trouble sleeping again.
What I’m listening to, right now.
Wado featuring Curumin, “Esqueleto Samba 808.” I selected the song because of the dream, not the other way around. The lyrics (quite simple).
agradeci, agradeci o amor
e o esqueleto de uma folha seca
voa, voa, voa ao solagrade o amor
a folha seca
agrade o amor
a maravilha seca
I walked home in the rain. I feel tired, because of not sleeping well, last night. So good night.
I’ve never really had a long-distance, many-days-long hiking adventure. The closest I came were my two months living in the mountains of Michoacan, traveling by horseback (1987). When I traveled in Patagonia, too, although I traveled by bus (or boat, sometimes), I had a custom of walking for 5 or 6 hours each day that I could, exploring whatever town or lack-of-town I had arrived at, that day. I particularly remember walking from Rawson to Gaiman (Chubut Province, Argentina), about 35 km. It sticks with me as a vivid day-long hike, for some reason, in Argentina’s Welsh colony, stopping at Welsh tea houses and strange roadside attractions intended to be visited by car.
Well, anyway, I’m mentioning this because of this video I ran across.
Condor’s PCT Adventure in 3 Minutes from Kolby Kirk on Vimeo.
I very, very often think of just throwing aside everything and walking some really long journey, like this man above has done. Also, there’s Simon Winchester’s walk across South Korea, from his book A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. It’s one of my favorite books “by foreigners about Korea.” I think of doing something like that. Or walking to visit my uncle’s house in Alaska, from somewhere like Minnesota.
I like urban hiking more than rural hiking, too. Over several days, I once walked the length of Mexico City’s Avenida Insurgentes, one of the longest boulevards in the city (maybe 30 km? taking the subway or bus to a spot along the avenue one day, then going home and picking up at the spot farther along the next day), and I once had this strange fantasy of walking the entire Mexico City subway system – essentially, walking from station to station until I’d visited them all, collecting small bits of the system on weekends or when I was off from work. I more recently have thought I could do the same thing with Seoul’s subway system, too. I’ve done some major portions of the Orange Line (Line 3), along which I live, that way, including the long stretch from Yaksu to Gangnam.
It’s mostly fantasy. But fun to think about. And maybe someday I will do one of these things.
(Poem #5 on new numbering scheme)
the sound of the wind in winter in the frozen leaves of the frozen trees is perfect the buildings trace lavender-shaded straight lines against pales orange curls of sky near sunset nearby there are boys practicing soccer on the dirt on the playground of Munhwa Elementary School and their breath snakes up in visible lines of white in the January afternoon the setting sun reflects garishly off garish signs off a building across the street off in a separate place again the sound of the wind in winter in the frozen leaves of the frozen trees is perfect
Waking up from a dream fragment, this morning:
I was in the book bindery (University of Minnesota Press, where I worked 1987~1989), making a book. I was physically making the book. Stitching the spine, applying the glue and binding cloth, hammering out the curves of the hardcover “fit.” Then I gave the book to someone – a coworker. It wasn’t at the hagwon – it was some moribund office career.
I asked the guy later, “What do you think of my book?”
He stared at me with fish-eyes, saying: “Well, it seems basically like one of your basic 400 page fiction novel things.”
So I ask, “Did you read it?”
He shrugs and says, “No.”
Obviously, I’m struggling with anxieties with respect to my writing.
When I was a child, I had not one but several traumatic experiences around learning to swim. There was the rather unenlightened “throw them in the deep end and they’ll figure it out” approach that I got around age 7 or 8 at the Humboldt State University pool for some community-based children’s swimming class. And there was an event a few years later, I think, at the pool at College of the Redwoods, where some people in my extended family had taken me, where I ended up cracking my face open and filling the pool with blood and getting stitches later. Finally, feeling the deficit of my swimming ability, I enrolled, on my own initiative, in a private beginning swimming class one summer at the Arcata community pool. After 8 weeks of flailing around, my instructor pronounced me that most unusual of cases: I was, apparently, “unteachable.” Though this last was just a wounding of my ego, it was perhaps the most traumatic of all.
The consequences of these experiences were twofold. The first, obviously, is that I retain some anxiety around swimming, to this day. I did manage, in fact, to pass a “tread water” test while in the Army, and I feel confident that I could perhaps manage to get across a short stretch of water if I had to, in an emergency. But I’ve never enjoyed swimming recreationally, and I’m not a confident swimmer. The second is less obvious: whenever I feel anxiety, that smell of chlorinated pool water makes an appearance, like an olefactory memory but just as vivid as any visual or aural one, if not more so.
This is perhaps interesting – it’s like a sort of special-case synesthesia that comes to me in moments of despair and high anxiety, which, thankfully, don’t hit me that often these days. In high school during exams, I would smell chlorine. In university, while struggling to write papers during all-nighters, I would smell chlorine. Once, when I asked a certain someone on a date, I smelled chlorine.
Today, I had a weird experience. It was what you might call a case of empathetic anxiety-related synesthesia.
We are giving all the students at the hagwon special year-end “level tests,” which is because, effective with the new year, they technically move up a grade level. So the hagwon needs to re-place them in their appropriate ability level. This is especially important for the students moving up from the elementary curriculum to the middle-school curriculum.
The level test, being a level test, is astoundingly difficult. I’d say it’s almost SAT-ish. These are Korean kids who sometimes struggle to emit a coherent English sentence about how they feel, under relaxed conditions. For these… well, it’s basically just gobbledygook to some of them. Specifically, the PN반. PN is the lowest ability middle-school level at Karma. Don’t ask me what PN stands for – something involving “Pioneers,” I think.
When I went in to monitor their test-taking experience, already in progress, I swear several of them were in tears. Others had long given up and were sleeping, face-planted at their desks, with more than an hour still remaining of test time.
I tried to rouse their enthusiasm, and few of the more communicative ones just said, “oh. very, very hard.” Heavy sighs all around.
Several of the students were drawing pictures on the test paper. One was using his pencil as a random number generator (to give him the answers), by spinning it and seeing which point of the compass it indicated (this is a near-universal test-taking strategy in Korea, The Land of the Morning Multiple-Choice Test).
I had this moment of deep, deep empathy. I realized that if I were confronted with a test of the Korean Language at the same rough level as the test these kids were facing (and given that I long ago concluded that I was a PN반-type student of Korean, and not one of the more advanced ones), I would, even at 46 years of age, be in tears, too. And I don’t even have to worry about getting into a good high-school so I can get into a good university so I can get a good job so I can be successful so I can fulfill my obligations to my family and, most importantly, to my ancestors.
Watching my students tugging at their hair, playing with their pencils, making red sleep-marks on their cheeks by sleeping against the corner of the desk, I felt rising up in me the most profound empathy. It wasn’t fair!
And then I smelled that chlorinated water smell. Perhaps for one of the few times in my life, it came to me not because of my own anxiety and pain and despair but because of an awareness of those feelings in those around me.
Maybe… it’s like being the kind of person who cries at the movies. Maybe.
