Category: My Photos

We went out to dinner, in Pasadena near my dad's house: my sister and her family, along with Andrew, Phil, Curt, Jin and me. There was too much food – more than we expected.

I feel extremely tired – more than it seems like I should, given what we did today. But I suppose it's more of a cumulative result of pushing so hard so far on this trip.

I had dinner at the airport with three korean ajeossis who went to high school together, two of whom are accompanying me on this trip back to the US. The third just happens to live very near the airport so he joined us.

As I was walking to work, just now, I looked up to see vast billowing clouds of black smoke over Gobong Hill. Sometimes I go walking over there. I wonder what is burning? It looked like a tire or petroleum fire. 

Right as I took this picture from a pedestrian bridge over Gobong-ro, a firetruck raced by , below. You can just barely make out its redness through yellow trees under the blue highway sign.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

I went into Seoul yesterday to bid farewell, once again, to my friend Peter.

Mostly it was just hanging out and watching him finish packing. A few of his other friends came by, too. I'm not sure my social skills are very good, anymore.

It was a cool, windy day, relative to the recent oppressive heat of August. A squall of rain crossed the city as we were leaving. The air was quite clear and the clouds were many stark shades of gray, like an abstract coloring book pattern in the sky.

Here is a picture of Peter, with a friend of his, and me, after going out in the street from his apartment (well, former apartment, now). In fact it is raining lightly in this picture, but it's hard to tell.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Like clockwork, the monsoon started yesterday, July 1st. It poured rain all day, nonstop. I got wet walking.

I  saw they were nevertheless using concrete pump cranes at the upcoming Mormon church: the Neojaredites trying to reach the sky. They have a ways to go.

This morning it was gray. I went to the store. 

[daily log: walking, 1km]

It's a tradition. Go to hospital. Snap a pic. Post to blog. Wait. Wait.
More later.

Update, a few hours later:

With respect to my diplostome, the doctor actually said, "very good." That is good news. It seems to finally be closing up as it is supposed to.

There was some less good news, too, though. After doing some x-rays to look around the rest of my jaw, the doctor identified another spot where there was likely some necrosis-exacerbated dental problems, around the root of an upper molar. The molar was a spot where I had a root canal long ago, and because of this, the doctor shook his head, depressingly. He explained there was little we could do. "Wait for it to start hurting, then take it out. Meanwhile, keep using it." It is another case where any effort to cure it would be worse than the problem, so the medical procedure boils down to "wait."

[daily log: walking, 11km]

I started writing about this several weeks ago, but dropped the ball.

30 years ago, in March, 1986, I started my job at the Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City. This was a transformative experience for me, in several ways.

The Casa de los Amigos is a kind of hybrid between a Quaker meetinghouse, a social services organization, and a hostel for travelers. It's all of those things. It has been all of those things for 70 or 80 years now – my uncle (my father's older brother) worked with projects affiliated with the Casa in the 1950s. I worked there in the 1980s. And the Casa still exists and is quite active. The "Amigos" of the name refers to the "Friends" i.e. Quakers AKA Society of Friends. The Mexico City meeting also maintains a tight connection with the Orange Grove Friends Meeeting of Pasadena, California, which was the community my grandparents were members of when my father was born, and of which, in a kind of biographical full circle, my father is now once again an active member, 76 years later.

That period was the time in my life when I came closest to adopting the Quakerism that was my "birthright." Ultimately, my year of working for the Quakers in Mexico City was a positive experience, but it also mostly convinced me that I could never be a "true" Quaker, because I was forced for the first time to face my fundamental atheism, and for me to have become a "social" Quaker (as is true of so many Quakers, who are active but who are not religious or spiritual) struck me as hypocritical. It would take more than a decade more before my reluctant acceptance of my own atheism gelled into a kind of "faith," but I suppose that year of attending Sunday meeting and interacting with Quakers was the beginning. My more recent flirtation with Buddhism is likely also ultimately enabled by that experience, too – it differs from my early attempt at Quakerism only in that Buddhism, unlike even the most unconventianal forms of Christianity such as Quakerism, neither presumes nor requires any doctrinal belief, and thus remains available to atheists such as myself.

Another seed that was planted in Mexico City was that that was my first experience as a teacher, and it was as an EFL teacher, at that. Which is my current career. 

That was also where I learned (truly learned) Spanish, which facilitated my later studies in linguistics and literature, and which enriched my "life of the mind" substantially. Even today, after 8 years resident in Korea, I still speak or read or write something in Spanish every day, if only a fragment here or there.

For all these reasons, my year at the Casa de los Amigos was formative, and transformative, and 30 years later, I remember my time there vividly and proudly. 

At right, above, is a picture I took of the front of the Casa when I visited there in 2007. Below is a view out the back window of the conference room, toward the hulking form of the Monumento de la Revolución a few blocks south, also taken in 2007.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

Thursdays are slipping into a kind of routine of going to the hospital in the morning. Today, I went to get my stitches out, from my procedure last week. It was fairly perfunctory, but I ended up waiting a long time. That happens sometimes.

Lately, I have been fascinated by the winter shapes of trees. I tried to capture them as I walked home over the hill. Limited success.

[daily log: walking, 11km]

…absque explicatione ulteriore

[daily log: walking, 6km]

Last week, I wrote an elegy to the vacant lot I walk past every day. Today, I found out that the vacant lot is going to be taken over by Mormons. Here is a picture of the construction site (a bit blurry). It says it will be a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – in English and Korean and something Chinese off to the right side, which I find quite puzzling.

I sometimes have expressed that I feel a certain fascination for Mormonism – a kind of fatal attraction. It may be because I grew up in a house across the street from a fairly large Mormon Church. It may be because in middle school and high school, I had several close friends who were Mormon. One friend, Wade, used to evangelize me on a fairly regular basis, though he was always quite respectful and polite. The consequence is that my own emerging atheist “faith” came to be defined, in part, as the outcome of a dialogue with Mormonism. Even at that age (or because of it?), I took that dialogue quite seriously. I suppose I was somewhat attracted to social aspects of the Church, even if I found the cosmology absurd.
And then there’s my name, which has meant that when Mormons meet me, they assume I’m an apostate – because Jared is a very common Mormon name, whereas it is not so common in the broader culture. One of the proto-Mormon groups in the Book of Mormon is even called the “Jaredites.” I had a teacher in high school who was Mormon (there were a lot of Mormons in my hometown, although not a majority), who even asked me once why my parents didn’t send me to the Mormon Church. He just jumped to the conclusion on the basis of my name that I must be Mormon in background.
So the fact that they’re building a church a few blocks from my home in Ilsan feels weird to me. Like they’re following me around.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

More falling – walking home from work today, in the drizzle. Not Babylon, just leaves.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

I was walking to work the other day and saw a sight common enough for Korea – even in such urbanized and upper-middle-class locations as Ilsan: hot red peppers drying in the sun. People grow them in balcony planters and in community gardens, and then set them out to cure in the sun in the fall.
This time, however, some pigeons had decided the peppers might be delicious. I didn’t know pigeons would find peppers edible, much less delicious, but they seemed to be enjoying their capsaicinated feast. They were flapping and dancing around, and fighting with each other over bits of red pepper.

I have to say that this makes me somewhat wary of the idea of consuming home-grown red peppers – no one seemed to notice or care that the pigeons were slobbering all over the peppers, and I can imagine an oblivious halmoni gathering up her peppers at dusk and chopping them into her kimchi or stew, clueless that they included pigeon detritus.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Recently, some civic-minded group of the sort which still abound in Korea decided to decorate the park benches along the pedestrian streets among the apartment blocks in Gangseon neighborhood, where I walk every day to go to work.
For example, someone placed a duck with ducklings on one bench.

Then I noticed there was an alligator – right in front of the church that annoys me so much because of the evangelists that stand on the steps handing out free packages of wet-wipes inscribed with biblical information (this is a thing in Korea).

I dubbed it the Ilsanigator.
[daily log: walking, 6 km right past the Ilsanigator]

Yesterday was a rainy Saturday. I went into Seoul and met my stepmother Wendy. We shopped a bit around Insadong, had lunch of jeon [전] and donkaseu [돈카스], and stopped off at the Jogye temple.

I came home and ended up going to bed early.
Today has been supremely lazy.
[daily log: walking, down the stairs and up again]

The neighborhood where I work is called Hugok [후곡]. In some ways, it feels more like “my neighborhood” than where I live (Janghangdong [장항동], oftimes referred coloquially as Ra-peh [라페] after the mall nearby, Ra-peh-seu-tah [라페스타 ] i.e. “La Festa”), which has a more big-city, downtown feel. Where I live is kind of like “downtown Ilsan,” while where I work is more like a real neighborhood, somewhere. In fact, from a development standpoint, Hugok is marginally older than Janghang, the former dating from the late 1980s while the latter was built with the subway line extension in 1993. Parts of Hugok along Ilsan Road were already built and inhabited when I was here in 1991.

I’m writing this because although there are 3 or 4 different Starbucks stores in Janghang, serving as an index of the area’s “downtowny” character and internationalist orientation, there has never been a Starbucks in Hugok.

That, apparently, is changing. I snapped this photo last Friday, looking across the street from my hagwon’s former location, a few blocks east of the new location.

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

I was walking around my neighborhood yesterday, running errands, and noticed a new “Caffe Fuckaccia” (light blue sign).

I wonder kind of café this is supposed to be – I didn’t look closely.
[daily log: walking, 7 km]