… but the song said he would. I’m referring to the Johnny Cash song based on the Book of Revelation (St John’s Apocalypsis). It’s rather dylanesque. Kind of intense in a not-sure-that’s-relevant way.
What I’m listening to right now.
Johnny Cash, “The Man Comes Around.”
Lyrics.
And I heard as it were the noise of thunder One of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw And behold a white horse
There’s a man going around taking names And he decides who to free and who to blame Everybody won’t be treated all the same There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down When the Man comes around
The hairs on your arm will stand up At the terror in each sip and in each sup Will you partake of that last offered cup? Or disappear into the potter’s ground When the Man comes around
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers One hundred million angels singing Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum Voices calling, voices crying Some are born and some are dying It’s Alpha and Omega’s kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree The virgins are all trimming their wicks The whirlwind is in the thorn tree It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks
Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom Then the father hen will call his chickens home The wise man will bow down before the throne And at His feet they’ll cast their golden crowns When the Man comes around
Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still Listen to the words long written down When the Man comes around
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers One hundred million angels singing Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum Voices calling and voices crying Some are born and some are dying It’s Alpha and Omega’s kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree The virgins are all trimming their wicks The whirlwind is in the thorn tree It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks
In measured hundred weight and penney pound When the Man comes around.
Close (Spoken part) And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts And I looked and behold, a pale horse And his name that sat on him was Death And Hell followed with him.
I heard this as I was walking around Ilsan earlier today – I went to the HomePlus store over by Kintex – it’s actually closer than the other one that’s near my old apartment. (HomePlus is a kind Korean Target store, roughly – it’s a step up from E-Mart which is Korean Wal-Mart, and, much as I prefer Target to Wal-Mart, so I also prefer HomePlus to E-Mart.)
I walked by the Juyeop Children’s Library, which is rather cool, architecturally.
I walked by some springing flowers in front of Hansu Elementary School.
It felt like early Summer. Wait – it’s early Summer. That must be why.
We were talking in one of my classes about their mid-term test scores at the public school, in their various subjects – not just English. Then later, I was asking them about their “dreams” – as in their lifetime ambitions. The following conversation took place (with some minor omissions for coherence).
I asked one student, “What is your dream?”
“I need money. A lot of money,” he answered. This is typical for 8th graders. And Koreans. And Korean 8th graders.
“That’s not so easy,” I reflected. “How will you get a lot of money?”
He shrugged.
“That’s difficult,” a second student offered.
The first student said, brightly, “I got very lowest score in 도덕.” [도덕 (do-deok) is mandatory ethics class, in Korean public schools.] This seemed rather cynical, or else it was a clever joke.
He thought for a minute, and the discussion moved to other students’ dreams. But then the first student interruped. “My dream. I want to be a father.”
The room was quiet for a moment. The second student said, “Oh! That’s not so difficult.”
The girls in the back of the room giggled. I decided to change the subject.
…
I went jogging in the park by the lake tonight, after work, under a rising bloody orange gibbous moon. I love to be in the park at exactly 11 pm, when they shut off the outdoor lights. It’s still plenty light enough to see – the city is all around. And they don’t close the park – people are still around. But it’s suddenly much, much darker. It’s like a sudden chord change in some dramatic music. The feel of it changes.
What I’m listening to right now.
Gus Gus, “Starlovers.” Very weird, kind of groovy song. Creepy video. [UPDATE: the creepy video linkrotted into nothingness, but the audio track is restored via a replaced youtube link.]
An utterly unrelated, random picture from my archive, just for whatever. Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, 2007.
Yesterday during Children’s Day, I went ice skating. Really. Among other things.
I met some friends who have a child – which seemed appropriate. We hung out at this street-fair style gathering at a place called 고양어울림누리 (roughly, you might call this Goyang Harmony World – Goyang is the name of my city, and Harmony World is a sort of multi-use municipal cultural center, with theaters, museums, sports centers, etc.).
First we went ice skating – I last went ice skating in the late 1980’s. I didn’t do very well. Neither did many other people. I never fell down, though. Above, here is a picture of me taken by one of my friends from outside the skating rink with a cellphone. Not very good resolution, but I offer this as proof that I actually did this thing, for those who know me well will be skeptical.
After that, we had a kind picnic sitting in some shade among many other families and social groups gathered in open plaza areas. There were many fountains and many children playing in fountains, and except for the wind, it would have been a hot, summery day. The wind kept it pleasant.
We walked around the booths set up for the fair. There were lots of activities for kids.
The son of my friends wanted to make an airplane. We stopped at that booth.
I walked around while the boy was making his airplane. I saw many booths full of crowds making various crafts. And I saw one booth that was almost completely empty – it was a traditional book-making activity. This made me sad. Making books is my number one favorite craft type activity.
We walked to where a minor-league soccer game was going on. There were only a few people in the stands, but players were taking it very seriously. They argued with the refs.
It was definitely springtime.
The airplane was a good investment. The boy played with it for several hours, continuously. Despite the wind, which caused it to follow quite unexpected routes. I like this picture – the plane spun off around behind him, and he’s spinning to try to watch it. The shadow of the plane on the ground looks a little bit like a dragonfly.
Thus I spent my Cinco de Mayo, 2012 – better known locally as Children’s Day.
What happened to spring? It was hot today. Summer. What’s with that? Wasn’t it just winter?
OK. Whatever.
My Korean friend Mr Kim of Gwangju called me out the blue today. Why am I so bad at staying in touch with people I genuinely like and am pleased to interact with? Well, I’m glad he called. He was wondering why I never came to visit him in Gwangju. I gave some excuse about being busy… the fact is, I’m lazy and simply haven’t taken the time to travel down there. Maybe this summer, right? I have other people to visit in Gwangju too. Picture, at right: a photo of a painted outside wall panel of a temple I visited at Mudeung mountain, Gwangju.
What I’m listening to right now.
한동준, “너를사랑해.” 가사:
아침이 오는 소리에
문득 잠에서 깨어
내 품안에 잠든 너에게
워우우워 우워워
너를 사랑해
내가 힘겨울때마다
너는 항상 내 곁에
따스하게 어깨 감싸며
워우우워 우워워
너를 사랑해
영원히 우리에겐
서글픈 이별은 없어
때로는 슬픔에
눈물도 흘리지만
언제나 너와 함께
새하얀 꿈을 꾸면서
하늘이 우리를
갈라놓을 때까지
워우우워 우워워
너를 사랑해
내가 힘겨울때마다
너는 항상 내 곁에
따스하게 어깨 감싸며
워우우워 우워워
너를 사랑해
영원히 우리에겐
서글픈 이별은 없어
때로는 슬픔에
눈물도 흘리지만
언제나 너와 함께
새하얀 꿈을 꾸면서
하늘이 우리를
갈라놓을 때까지
워우우워 우워워
너를 사랑해
너를 사랑해
I’m having my debate class students write speeches “for the UN” – i.e. what would you say if you could address the United Nations?
One of my students offers some harsh, harsh words. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty intense from a seventh-grader. I’m not entirely comfortable with his implicit embrace of authoritarian solutions, but in other ways he’s very perceptive. As usual, I reproduce without corrections – I’ve changed his name, however (“Hong Gil Dong” is Korean for “John Doe”).
Good evening! All members of United Nation. I am Hong Gil Dong. I am from Republic of Korea. Just call me John. Today, I am going to show some opinions what all members have to listen and practice. I`m going to tell the problems of ethics, environment, and economy.
First, don`t think democracy is always ideal and make fair democracy. I think members of UN are slaves of democracy. Do you know why? Because if there is a good policy but it damages your country, you always say sophistry. Then, you don`t choose any policies. So is the democracy ideal? In addition, if there is a good policy which was made from weak country, you just ignore the policy. And it`s not fair.
Second, it`s both economy and environment problems. I think Un makes people, the slaves of money. Why? Because, your policies are good for economy but these are just protection for big companies, and big countries which like to destroy environment and take lots of money. Such as Republic of Korea, Japan, China, some countries of Europe, and USA. These countries are rich countries, and the top of mammonism. So if you keep making these policies, these countries will kill environment continuously, and make innocent people to slave of money.
Last, this is most environment problem. You say human must develop with good environment but you force to join all environment treaties what countries don`t kill environment. But you don`t force to join these treaties what countries kill environment. So I think you stop talking symbiosis development.
I said some criticism to you. I wanted to criticize more but other people, Earth, and me will give you some chances. So please, practice good policies and carve my criticism in your heart. Thank you.
I will conclude with a random picture, which I took in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico in 2007.
Then I asked, “so what’s the term for a baby dog?”
All Koreans know the word “puppy,” but they don’t necessarily use it, semantically, as in English – it seems to just mean a cute dog (admittedly English can do the same thing, too). I assumed someone could think of this word, though.
Without even a pause, however, a bold seventh-grader raised his hand.
“Yes?” I said.
“Son of a bitch.”
Brilliant. I laughed for a few minutes.
Unrelatedly, a picture of the Ilsan power generation plant, on the east end of town, taken from standing across the street from the Costco. I was struck by the stark tree and the grey scudding clouds. The picture isn’t that good, though. Just random.
Yesterday I went with Curt to go on a small hike up a mountain (well, really just a hill). His daughter came along, who’s just entering 4th grade. The mountain we chose is called 심학산 [simhaksan]. It has a view of North Korea, like many mountains around here – it was hazy and not very distinct but I’m always very aware of it – I guess it’s just my geographical interest kicking in.
After the mountain we went to a brand new giant mall and had dinner and bought his little one-year-old a Pororo-branded toy. It was fun. Here are some pictures. I didn’t get a picture of the boy with the toy. I should have.
This is near the top of the mountain.
Curt and I.
A view southeast, toward Ilsan. Somewhere near the center of that vast cluster of buildings is my apartment and workplace.
Here I am looking dazed with the community known as Geumchon hidden directly behind me. Geumchon is important because it’s where I lived in 1991 when I was in Korea, as a soldier in the US Army.
And here’s the striking view looking North – I’ve added some useful labels to this picture – you can click the picture to enlarge it.
Anywhere in Northern Gyeonggi Province, if you go hiking on the hills and mountains, you will run across military structures – fox-holes, fortified hill-tops, bunkers and concrete tank traps and hidden installations. Here’s a covered “tank-parking-space” amid the trees on the side of the mountain.
Curt’s daughter (and my sometime student at Karma, too), looking focused and tired on her way down the mountain. She was angry because Curt had promised a snack at the top of the mountain and he’d forgotten, and she failed to complain about it. We had a snack when we got back down to the bottom.
Here’s a turtle-based monument seen along the trail.
At the mall.
Lurking in the dusky haze beyond the freeway interchange, there lies the Han River Estuary and the point of North Korea. I wonder what the Northerners think, watching this massive monument to blatant brand-name consumerism through their high-powered binoculars.
Yesterday after work I took the subway in to Itaewon to meet my friend Basil, who’d recently returned from a holiday in Turkey. We went to a Middle Eastern restaurant there, of course. I like hearing Basil speaking Arabic with people in Seoul. It feels very international.
We stopped at the food store there that sells things like coriander powder and split peas and lentils, and I stocked up. We wandered around the neighborhood because Basil was looking for the hotel where he wanted to stay – I guess he’d been there before but forgot where it was. There are a lot of interesting halal grocers and restaurants and things on the side streets to the south east of Itaewon station. I said… “it’s like visiting New York.” Then, as an afterthought, looking at the uninspiring architecture, I said, “Or maybe Newark, New Jersey.”
I came home last night and made some soup and have had a very lazy Sunday today.
Here’s a picture of dusk from the hill in Itaewon, looking toward Yongsan.
What I’m listening to right now.
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, “Down From Dover,” 1972.
Originally written and performed by Dolly Parton. And riddle me this – why does Lee Hazlewood have the same singing voice as Mr Snuffleupagus?
Perhaps I spoke too soon in stating, last week, that my job is relatively unstressful.
And now, I’ve been having a really horrible week. It’s enough to feed into that superstition that speaking positively about something will jinx it, making it worse.
Rhetorically: why do my coworkers ask my opinion if they choose to so consistently ignore it? Several times in the last two days I’ve been asked what I think of the placement (or re-placement – movement from one class or cohort to another) of students. I’ve given my opinions, which have been consistently disregarded. I think I need to just quit stating my opinion – it’s a little bit humiliating to not be taken seriously as a teacher after all this time.
Although… I must acknowledge that simply stating my feelings here constitutes a kind of passive-aggressive “push-back” vis-a-vis work, given that this blog is an essentially public forum, right? Hah. We’ll see if anyone’s reading this.
I saw the graffito below in a classroom. Does it really require comment?
Translation: “This hagwon is really boring.” Below that, in different handwriting, “dude” (not literally “dude,” but in the usage / pragmatics in teen slang, “헐” works the same way).
The below is apparently a very famous poem in Korea. I find it notable that the author was imprisoned and tortured by the dictatorship in the 1960’s.
귀천 / 천상병 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 새벽빛 와 닿으면 스러지는 이슬 더불어 손에 손을 잡고, 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 노을빛 함께 단 둘이서 기슭에서 놀다가 구름 손짓하면은, 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 아름다운 이 세상 소풍 끝내는 날, 가서, 아름다웠더라고 말하리라…..
Back to Heaven by Cheon Sang-Byeong I’ll go back to heaven again. Hand in hand with the dew that melts at a touch of the dawning day, I’ll go back to heaven again. With the dusk, together, just we two, at a sign from a cloud after playing on the slopes I’ll go back to heaven again. At the end of my outing to this beautiful world I’ll go back and say: It was beautiful. . . . (translation by someone who goes by “Brother Anthony“)
I took the picture below in April, 2010. Somewhere near Gwangju.
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.
This is comedy. Or maybe not. Painful, if it’s comedy.
I think I should have less stuff. I’ve given up owning a car. I live in a 200 sq ft apartment, fairly contentedly. But I still have a storage unit in Minnesota with 5000 books and assorted furniture. I still have more clothes than I wear. I still have 2 (and a half) computers.
Simplify. Keep simplifying.
Here’s something from TED, on a similar theme. I’m not entirely impressed with it – its default starting point is a level of consumption I never actually reached in my life. But the same point can be recursively applied, and should be recursively applied, relentlessly.
Below is a picture I took in June 2010. Just because I want to put a picture.
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
No recuerdo… (Ya no viene el cavador que cavaba en el venero)
No recuerdo… (Sobre la mina han caído mil siglos de suelos nuevos)
No recuerdo… (El mundo se acabará. No volverá mi secreto)
– Juan Ramón Jiménez
Yo recuerdo demasiado…. Pero al final – de repente – no se recordará.
Lo que escucho en este momento.
UNKLE, “In a State.”
Which state?
I took the photo, at top, in 1983: Kneeland, California. I scanned it in 2007. It’s not edited in any way, except the vast sky has ended up slightly cropped.
I live about 10 miles from the North Korean border. Mostly, I can totally ignore this fact. Today, while I was walking to work, I was reminded, as I saw not one but two Korean military helicopters passing overhead, in the cold blue sky. Understandably, the Korean military is probably doing things.
The Onion conveyed the hereditary Stalinist, Kim Jeong-eun’s insecurities.
Meanwhile, yesterday I had fun with first-graders. Three of my phonics kids drew self-portraits on the blackboard, during the break. I thought it was cute. They also drew Christmas trees for me, later.
What I’m listening to right now.
The Youngsters, “Smile (Sasha Remix from Involver).” Euroelectronica, I guess.
Walking home in the dark, it was snowing. First real snow, I would say – the other was a false alarm. This is the real stuff.
Side observation (or trivial pondering of the day): why do Koreans with foreign cars (like BMW’s and Chevys) drive worse than Koreans with local marques?
I awoke this morning and looked out my window, speculatively… facing the day, as it were. There was snow. “엄ㅁㅁㅁㅁㅁ… 첫눈” So I leaned out my window and took a picture of the buses in the middle bus-lanes of 중앙로 (Central Avenue, the street I used to call Broadway because I couldn’t figure out its name, before they put up helpful western-style signs). “First snow.”
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.”
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.
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.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to bear a clear and bright heart.”
This is #98 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).
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.
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 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.
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
This is #92 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-second affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
Resent. Is this like jealousy? The dictionary also offers the word “blame” as a translation of 원망하다. It also lists “hold a grudge” and “feel bitter toward.” I see resentment and blame as being very different things. But I can see how they’re linked. I would say resentment and blame, together, are the number one “sins” of the expat community in Korea – foreigners like to sit in Korea and resent how things are different, or blame strange Korean culture for all the various misunderstandings and frustrations they have. It’s so very easy to slip into that mode. It’s why I stay away from online groupings of foreigners at all costs, generally.
Actually, I don’t feel like this is one of my bugaboos. Maybe my big problem isn’t with resentment but rather with metaresentment. By which I mean the fact of resenting others’ resentments. Haha.
I took the picture (above left) two years ago during my visit to Ulleungdo (an isolated island off Korea’s east coast by a few hours by ferry). Ulleungdo is by far my favorite rural place in Korea that I’ve visited. I’m mostly a city person, but I seem to like my rural places “extreme” or remote, in some sense: Patagonia, Southeast Alaska, Upper Michigan, Ulleungdo.
Theory of Truth
(Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
the road. I remember
This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
proposed three questions to himself:
First, is there a God and of what nature? Second, whether there's
anything after we die but worm's meat?
Third, how should men live? Large time-worn questions no
doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.
How
many minds have worn these questions; old coins
Rubbed faceless, dateless. The most have despaired and accepted
doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
With aching strands of insanity in them.
I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
mind the delusions and miseries of human life.
Why does insanity always twist the great answers?
Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and
women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private
agony that made the search
Muddles the finding.
Here was a man who envied the chiefs of
the provinces of China their power and pride,
And envied Confucius his fame for wisdom. Tortured by hardly
conscious envy he hunted the truth of things,
Caught it, and stained it through with his private impurity. He
praised inaction, silence, vacancy: why?
Because the princes and officers were full of business, and wise
Confucius of words.
Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people
That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the
prophetic splendors of the race of David.
Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived. Too loving to curse his
mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted,
The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also
Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his
father? Because God was his father,
Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God.
His personal anguish and insane solution
Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem
drunk with the wine of his blood.
And here was another Saviour, a prince in India,
A man who loved and pitied with such intense comprehension of
pain that he was willing to annihilate
Nature and the earth and stars, life and mankind, to annul the
suffering. He also sought and found truth,
And mixed it with his private impurity, the pity, the denials.
Then
search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate?
Only stained fragments?
Until the mind has turned its love from
itself and man, from parts to the whole.
- Robinson Jeffers, 1937.
The greatest American poet, IMHO.
I took the picture above in November, 2009, not far from Point Sur, California.
It being Saturday, I got home from work relatively early. I had been feeling motivated to go do some shopping, but when I stopped by the bank to get cash, I discovered that my ATM card had expired. I guess that’s one of those signs that I’ve been in Korea a long time. I need to go by the bank and get a new card.
So, being low on cash, I did a minor grocery run in the GS Mart instead, and came home.
I had this big pile of apples that have been getting older. As in, beginning to get soft and brown-spotted. Obviously, I’m not eating them fast enough. Feeling some minor inspiration, I decided to make some curried apple-onion chutney. It turned out to be one of those random, no-recipe-in-sight culinary experiments that was utterly successful. I try to keep wine around for cooking even though I don’t drink much alcohol, and I had this intriguing bottle of Korean chardonnay (Korean!), called Mujuang (see picture). I heated the chutney in that, with some lemon juice and lots of spices (tumeric, cumin, clove, cinnamon, red pepper flakes, etc. – a homemade curry powder), just long enough to make the apples and onions tender and to blend in the spices, and then I let it cool.
Then I took some of my already-cooked dark red beans that I keep in fridge (I have no idea what variety they are, in western parlance – they’re just a kind of generic Korean dark red beans, which I cook in a large batch in my rice cooker and keep in a tupperware in the fridge) and I heated them up with a dash of sesame oil, with rosemary and garlic. I scooped some rice out of my cooker into a little pilaf-thingy. I always cook my rice with some 혼합곡 [honhapgok = “medley” (a fifteen-grain medley)] mixed in, about 2 parts rice to 1 part grain medley, to give it more texture and flavor, and that lends it a purplish color.
Here is a picture of my dinner.
It was a creative and tasty meal – its flavors and textures reminded me a lot of the vegan, Indian-cuisine themed restaurant I used to frequent when I lived in Mexico City in the 1980’s, which is still one of my favorite restaurants of all time.
At the risk of boring everyone with a third blog post in less than 24 hours, I feel compelled to observe that today is the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Korea. On September 1st, 2007, I landed at Incheon and made my way to Ilsan, where I was met by my new employer, Danny, of the eventually-defunct Tomorrow School, to begin my new teaching career.
I have spent all of the last four years in Korea, with the exception of a three-month, unemployed hiatus back in the US in the fall of 2009, and several shorter vacation trips – two to Australia to visit my mother (with side-junkets to Hong Kong and New Zealand), and one to Japan to resolve a visa issue.
I like Korea, But I’m not really a Koreanophile. Although my linguistico-aesthetic infatuation with the Korean language refuses to go away, I’m actually only lukewarm when it comes to Korean culture in more general terms. It has a lot of shortcomings, and I’m not always happy with it. But… I will attach two caveats to that statement: 1) I think the Korean polity is less dysfunctional that the US polity, and that’s a notable achievement (the current state of the US polity is so depressing as to leave me feeling embarrassed to claim US citizenship); 2) I reached a level of alienated “comfort” with life in Korea that is at least equal to the perpetual alienation I have always felt within my own country and culture.
The consequence of these preceding observations is that, as things stand, I have no interest in (and no current plans for) returning to the US – except perhaps for brief visits. For better or for worse, for now, Korea is my home. If, for whatever reason in the future, my life in Korea has to end, I will seek to continue my expat life elsewhere.
I have changed a great deal in the last four years. I have acquired some confidence as a teacher; I have built some good habits; most notably, I have embraced a sort of meditative buddhist zen (선) atheism that works well for me. Although I’m hardly content – often lonely, often aimless in a philosophical or “spiritual” sense (as much as I dislike the concept of spirituality) – in fact I have found a kind of inner peace that my life prior to this most recent phase utterly lacked.
So, there you have it. And so begins a fifth year…
I took the picture below on a long hike in October 2007. It shows some scarecrows in a field of cut rice, across the highway from the former Camp Edwards, in Geumchon, Paju-si (about 7 km northwest of where I live), which incidentally is where I was stationed in 1991, during my time in the US Army as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Thus, you see, my “roots” in Northwest Gyeonggi Province go “way back.”
Today is Liberation Day in South Korea. It’s the day that Japan surrendered to the Allies, and 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism were brought to a close. What followed was the division of the peninsula by the victorious powers, and a bifurcated, two-sided neocolonial regime (Soviet and American) that, arguably, persists even today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
The North is the world’s only surviving even vaguely Stalinist regime, and the South, despite having shifted to a sort of neolibral democracy (such as it is, and, erm, perhaps not coincidental to the moment in history when the Soviet Union fell), remains the largest “peacetime” host of American troops on foreign soil (i.e. discounting the active war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq).
Despite my cynicism, I continue to believe that South Korea may be the sole genuine success story in America’s highly questionable exercises in “nation building.” I think that this is true, in part, because of the unique geopolitical moment that followed World War II and that the Korean War consolidated – a moment when “democracy” was happily represented around the world by repressive neo-fascist regimes (such as Syngman Rhee and subsequently Park Chung-Hee) – true – but where the lip-service concepts such as freedom were paid would eventually result in an evolution toward more inclusive (if never perfect) political systems.
I think that one reason why the current neoconservative efforts at nation-building (in e.g. Iraq) have been such utter failures is because of the historical myopia that is unable to recognize that “nation building” is, in fact, almost never a democratic enterprise. Democracy can take root in nations, undeniably, but nations are rarely constructed as a result of truly democratic impulses – because true democracies are full of people who are not, in fact, interested in being part of this or that nation.
And don’t try to sell me on some kind of American exceptionalism in this matter – the “American” nation was built by a very narrow demographic of middle-aged and elderly white, male landowners, over and against the objections of all kinds of embedded subjugated peoples (Native Americans, women, Catholic immigrant-laborers, Jewish small-scale merchants, etc.), who were only subsequently, through several centuries of struggle and brutal war (e.g. the Civil War), ideologically homogenized into some degree of inclusion. Never forget: even now, Obama talks white – and that’s how he got elected.
Nationalism is – as movements such as Nazism (not to mention Teapartism) should make obvious – all about the imposition of some totalizing ideological regime across an inevitably heterogeneous population. It’s only as a retroactive construct that such homogeneous nation-peoples (such as Koreans or Mexicans or even Americans) choose to perceive themselves as such.
All of which is my way of saying that I have, in fact, come to believe in a certain strain of South Korean exceptionalism, if only in that its relationship to the United States is utterly unique in the history of neocolonialism. There are lots of caveats attached to that, too.
There’s a perhaps-relevant quote, frequently misattributed to Sinclair Lewis (similar to something said by Halford E. Luccock, but probably invented in its misattributed form by journalist Harrison Salisbury). The recent proto-primarial antics of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry set me to thinking about it: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
To which I will add: Yay, nationalism! Oh, and maybe, as a dash of seasoning, the old Samuel Johnson line: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Speaking of freedom… What I’m listening to right now.
Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kris Kristofferson wrote the song, and this is an early demo version that is currently one of my favorite renditions. There’s a Willie Nelson cover I like, too. I never actually cared for the famous Janis Joplin version that topped the charts in the early 70’s, for example, and I suspect the version that I grew up on was probably one of the Greatful Dead’s covers of it – I couldn’t find anything that sounded exactly right in surfing around youtube, though.
Here is a view of Ilsan’s Jungang-no [Central Avenue], a block from my apartment at the Juyeop subway entrance. I took the photo earlier, shrouded in drizzle – there are a few limp South Korean flags hanging from light poles. I took a long walk today, but didn’t really do a lot. Trying to find inner peace.
[Daily log: walking, 6 km]
