I was reading the Economist, yesterday. Apparently, Tsutomu Yamaguchi died. He was one of the very few "double survivors" of the US's atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 — meaning, he survived Hiroshima, and then, 4 days later, survived Nagasaki. What I was struck by were some bits of his poetry, quoted in the magazine:
Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland
all the Buddhas died,
and never heard what killed them.
I formulated this last fall, and wrote in a paper notebook. I googled it, and it's unsaid, at least in this form. So I declare authorship of this aphorism at least for now.
"The reason we should not believe in god isn't because there is no god, but because believing in god distracts us from what's important in life."
Here is another quip written nearby in the same paper notebook, that appears original to my own formulation to the best of my ability to research it.
"It hardly matters at all where I end up. Just being there is what's interesting."
OK, I was in limbo for 4 days, and then, this: discouragement.
I always understood it wasn't a "done deal." So Curt broke the news to me last night… he can't hire me. I believe he's sincere when he says he wants to, but he just can't take on the financial burden of hiring a foreigner on an E2 visa — the financial burden in such cases isn't just the matter of my salary (which I was happily and willingly negotiating downward) but a matter of business licenses and legal compliances and such like. So, in the end, it's too much for his small, start-up hagwon to take on. Easier and cheaper to hire Korean nationals and/or F-series visa holders who are free to take whatever job they wish. Curt and I will remain friends, I hope… he has been very kind to me.
Meanwhile, I face one of those flexion points: what next? Plan B. I must plunge into the job market in earnest, because it is truly my intention to stay in Korea. It will take a lot of further disappointments before I give up and go with plan C.
I spent some time surveying the online classifieds this morning for the Korean ESL market. I don't think I need to be that worried… there seems to be an awful lot out there. Given I'm flexible on location and pay, I should find something. But of course, there's the gumption trap of getting started.
I've updated my resume, and I really should try to put together one of those "sample teaching videos" I'd been plotting last summer, but then kind of dropped. I could post it somewhere for potential employers to see.
I've rented a cellphone, finally… this business of trying to get a pre-paid phone (which is cheaper than a rental) on a lowly tourist visa is annoyingly impossible, as far as I've figured out. I'll put my phone number on resume and facebook if anyone wants to call.
Lastly, one more bit of… argh.
I was up at 5 am, this morning, which has been my wakeup time since settling down from the jet-lag. It's not going to be optimal, if I get an afternoon teaching job, but I'm very adjustable, that way — it just takes time. Anyway… this guesthouse I'm staying in is my favorite so far of the various I've sampled in Seoul. It's a bit of the atmosphere of the Casa, where I worked in Mexico City in the 80s (and have stayed there many times since). Of course, it doesn't have the same lefty-liberal bent, here, that prevails at the Casa. So you run into travelers, mostly Japanese and "westerners," and you have occasional conversations.
I had one at 5 am, with this scraggly but friendly fellow American. He was surprised to see someone else up and about. I mentioned my jetlag, briefly, and he was shocked I was "getting up" rather than ending my day. Of course, Koreans are night-owls, so anyone adapted to Korean lifestyle would find it odd, too. But as the conversation progressed, there was this weird, judgemental tone. Like somehow I was morally deficient because I was failing to stay up late and go out drinking each night. "Man, that's what everyone does, in Korea." Well, yes… and, no.
I felt annoyed. I began to feel that this guy, he's exactly the sort of ugly American that is partly why so many Koreans dislike or distrust "foreigners." And then, the icing on the cake:
The conversation had drifted to what I was doing. The job-hunt. I was mulling the fact that I wasn't being very productive. You know, voicing my guilt-feelings, I guess. And his response was quick and aggressive, locker-room toned: "Yeah, man. But that's not what we're here for, is it?" We're not here for being productive? And.. the alternatives?
No wonder so many Koreans see us Americans as lazy. Sigh.
So. 파이팅!
I visited my "friends-from-Korea" Joe and Christine this evening, in Bloomington, Indiana, after driving across from Philadelphia and staying in a motel last night south of Pittsburgh.
Joe said something funny: "I keep following your blog, waiting for you to stop moving, but you keep moving." I've been traveling a lot, definitely. North America seems like a pretty good continent.
More later.
When I was in fifth and sixth grades, I attended that alternative, art-oriented, “hippie” school called Centering School (see blog from 2009-02-02). It was a great place. There was a student named Tammy, who fascinated me from the first time I met her. She was two grades behind me, but that didn’t seem to matter much at such a small, non-hierarchical place. I could somehow sense that Tammy didn’t necessarily come from a perfect home-life (her mom, in her red Volkswagen Beetle always seems kind of “scary” to my young eyes, to be honest, and I knew her dad died in Vietnam). I think knowing about some of the difficult and complicated and fractured home-lives of some of my peers at Centering School was the first time I had the thought: my family may be weird and crazy, but it’s maybe not as messed-up as some others.
Anyway, despite her background… despite the occasional flashes of sadness… she was an amazing, intrinsically happy person. Infectiously cheerful. For no apparent reason. And so, because that was mysterious to me, and unfathomable, I decided that Tammy was magical. That was all I could figure out.
But when I graduated sixth grade, and plunged into the trauma of the public middle school in Arcata, I mostly lost touch with the former friends and playmates and denizens of Centering School. But I never forgot about Tammy. In fact, there were times, when I was struggling to make myself feel happier about life, when I was feeling down, or alone, or overwhelmed, sometimes her name and goofy smile would come to me, and I would think: well, SHE can be happy; why can’t I?
Still, I couldn’t ever really successfully articulate Tammy’s magic. It was just strange and impossible and yet something to aspire to. Until I was teaching at LBridge in Ilsan, Korea. I had a student named Jenny (see blog from 2009-02-12), who seemed like a reincarnation of Tammy. I even remember thinking that about her. And then one day, Jenny, who was fond of writing little “stationary aphorisms” in English on the corners of her assignment papers, wrote the following: “I am happy because that is the most important thing.”
It was like a weird epiphany, when I realized this wasn’t a syntactical mistake, it wasn’t a logic mistake, but rather, that it was simply true and obvious. And it was like, in that instant, that all those years of cognitive behavioral therapy, all those years of puzzling over Tammy’s magic or the mystery of human happiness, congealed into a moment of insight.
It was around the same time that I reconnected with Tammy, after over 30 years. Such is the magic of facebook and the internet. And last night, I stayed with Tammy and her husband and two daughters.
Life is never perfect. Happiness is sometimes elusive, even for Tammy, in her updated, adult form. She’s been through a lot, too. At least as complicated and traumatic as my own life, if not more so. I suspect she’s not always “simply happy.” But she still has that weird ability to look on the bright side of things. She jokingly said, “I can cut off my arm, and see all the blood and feel the pain, and think to myself, ‘well, but I’ve still got my other arm! things aren’t really all that bad.'” That’s Tammy’s magic. And Jenny’s wisdom, which finally allowed me to understand it.
Tammy in 1976, exactly as I remember her:
Jenny in 2009:
My friend Gerry (of Teulon, Manitoba), whom I visited today, is an astronomer and "space geek." The very moment I pulled into his driveway, he accosted me and pointed upward and said, "there goes the International Space Station, just in time to see it!"
Sure enough, the glowing object was passing directly overhead, zooming along. To my uninformed eyes, if I'd seen it without that introduction, I'd have thought it was just some airplane.
Anyway, a little bit later we were talking about the ISS because it showed up in the news on the television that we were sitting and watching, in his living room. And he was complaining about NASA's shortsightedness in wanting to end the program and shut it down. He was talking about the Russians having showed interest in taking it over and continuing to maintain it, if the US gave it up, and he explained the Russian perspective memorably, saying, "… but the ashtrays aren't even full, yet!" That sounded so stereotypically Russian, and it made me laugh very hard, conjuring up the image of a bunch of Russian cosmonauts sneaking cigaratte breaks on the space station when those uppity Americans finally weren't around.
Hmmm, aside from the fire and health hazard, are there other possible issues with smoking in space?
["back-post": posted 2009-11-20]
“A deep and sincere heart has no unreachable place.” I had bought a small textile wall hanging with the Korean phrase on it, at a “temple shop” near a Buddhist temple in Seoul. I had that one, and several others. I presented this one to my friends Peggy and Latif who live in my former home in Arcata. They are generous and kind, and the saying suits them very well.
Here is the “A Street House,” where I lived my first 18 years (with a few short periods away from it, in Eureka, Oklahoma City, summers in Washington or Idaho or Boston, etc.):
This is the same house, from a slightly different angle, in 1965 (with my dad’s Model A Ford parked in front):
Here is the back yard, looking from the Kitchen window. That’s the “pump house” that functions as a kind of detached, outdoor bedroom. It was my bedroom during my high school years:
This is the same old pumphouse, in 1967:
This is Peggy’s smiling buddha, under the cherry tree that was just a tiny sapling when I was a kid.
I spent some time today with my brother Andrew. We went on a hike in the canyon behind JPL in Pasadena, seeing a lot of fire damage on the hills from the apocalyptic fires earlier this fall.
We drove over to the west side, to get my stuff I'd been storing at Wendy's in Culver City. Driving around LA is so… unpleasant. And it was smoggy. But once on the west side, I took joy in seeing the cultural mix that the city represents: I could find bilingual signs for churches, dry cleaners, and auto dealers… Spanish and Korean. No English included.
I love the cultural mix of LA. But the city itself… just seems so stunningly badly laid out. So difficult to exist in on a day-to-day basis. I was talking with Andrew about it, as we sat parked in traffic on the 110 near downtown, and we decided it could be a new motto for the city:
Los Angeles — good idea, bad implementation.
"The revolution will not be televised, but you can damn well believe it will be Twittered, and then promptly forgotten as it scrolls off the screen." — Ted Dziuba (in his column "Fail and you" at theregister.co.uk)
House: As the philosopher Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want."
(. . . later . . . )
Cuddy: Oh, yeah, I looked up your philosopher, Jagger; you're right, you don't always get what you want, but I found that, if you try sometimes, you get what you need.
xkcd is so funny. That I think that, proves that I'm a nerd.
"The past is full of mistakes. That's why we left it there." – Stephen Colbert, on his show dated 2009-06-22.
And, according to wikipedia: "Electron degeneracy pressure is a consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time." Hmm… electron degeneracy? Is that something you do with an iPhone?
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." –H.L Mencken
For some reason, I regularly return to a gnomic little quote from Gilles Deleuze (his book, Spinoza) that somehow seems just perfect: "ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation."
I've been meditating on simplicity. On how deliberately putting boundaries around life's possibilities might, in fact, make life more livable. Then there's my conviction that aesthetics can drive ethics. This leads me to think about the relationship between constraints and aesthetics: consider that fine art is about creating (or finding) constraints and then creating within those constraints. Unconstrained creation is just chaos.
In this way, aesthetic creation is perhaps like other ludic activity — artistic praxis as game-playing. The playful artist. So, then, if you want an aesthetically grounded (ethically bounded?) life, you must accept arbitrary aesthetic constraints, just as in poetry or painting or whatever else.
Are the legalisms of Confucianism appealing to me in part because of the fact that they represent one such tried-and-tested set of "constraints on living"? Can deliberately setting out to live inside such constraints make one mentally healthier, or does it just lead to repression? Or is that dependent on other, unrelated factors.
I was correcting student workbooks earlier today. There’s an article in the most recent newspaper (an ESL “teaching” newspaper published in Korea) that features “Barak Obama” – our belovedly misspellable future Space Emperor.
I found this picture, above, in Julie’s workbook. It’s BHO’s best picture ever! And she wrote above his misspelled name her own personal misspelled transliteration: 벼락 오버머 (byeorak obeomeo, rather than the standard translilteration, 바락 오바마). Note the little lightning bolt above the “벼락” (byeorak means lightning bolt, I think).
Relatedly relevant:
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice." This is a corollary of Clarke's law, I guess. I think I stumbled across it while surfing tvtropes, as I seem to do rather regularly. It's a pop-culturally-inclined semiotician's goldmine.
I keep a collection of "blog ideas" that I go to when I can't think of something to write. But the list has been growing unmanageable, and most of these ideas seem destined to never go anywhere. So I'll throw a few of them out here. Random quotes and observations, I guess.
1. "Juche is the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism."– Bruce Cumings quoted by Philip Gourevitch in the Guardian, 2003-11-2. "National solipsism" has a nice ring, even as applied to the comparatively cosmopolitan south.
2. I wonder about this weird convergence of history, such that for the first time in 2 generations, the U.S. has a government farther to the left than either of its two main neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Currently the PANistas are running Mexico and appear to be closing in on a new party monopoly to replace the 70 year-long reign of the vaguely leftist PRI (at least, the PRI was rhetorically and theoretically leftist, if not always in practice), and the PAN is arguably farther right than even the US's Republicans, at least in traditional measures of conservatism. And the Conservatives are running Canada, under Harper. See also… Ignatieff v Grant (his uncle, the red tory)
3. "omgomg! my fans rock! the movie is doing great you guys! omg AND its all cause of you!!!! I LOVE U ALL! IF YOU HAVENT SEEN IT YET CHECK IT!," — Miley Cyrus, on the success of her new movie Hannah Montana (via Twitter). I'm glad I'm still not on the Twitter bandwagon. But, who knows…
4. "Crazy moms make crazy kids." — me, on the sometimes fraught interactions teachers must have with parents.
5. Mixotricha paradoxa… In addition it has spherical bacteria inside the cell; these endosymbionts function as mitochondria, which Mixotricha lacks. I knew that current theory says that mitochondria and chloroplasts arose as endosymbionts… but for some reason, I found this "halfway" adaptation that I discovered surfing wikipedia randomly one night rather fascinating.
6. Quotes from the TV series "Dead Like Me": "He's as dumb as a bag of hammers." — the character Dolores; and "Death is the one thing that always happens right on time." — the character George
7. Another reason why Rush Limbaugh lacks credibility: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society" — Rush Limbaugh, Aug 12, 2005.
8. El Kabong was just a persona of Quick Draw McGraw's. I didn't know that!
9. "There's a buzz to failing and not dying" — Stephen Colbert. True.
According to various news sources (e.g. The Korea Herald, The Australian), South Korea's response yesterday to the North Korean nuclear test has been to finally get around to joining the US's "Proliferation Security Initiative."
This was particularly interesting to me, because of an incident in one of my most advanced debate classes about a month ago. We have these "newspapers" (they have current events packaged for ESL learners, produced by a domestic Korean publishing house) that always have a current debate topic in their pages. I really like pulling our in-class debate topics from these newspapers, because they are always topics that are immediately relevant to South Koreans, being policy issues that are under discussion by the government. I can urge the kids to consider that they are learning not just English, but something along the lines of a South Korean civics class. This provides at least some of them with some additional motivation, and because the topics are prominent in the South Korean media, it also makes them easy to research, even if they are often conceptually quite difficult.
Last month, the newspaper had as its debate topic the question as to whether South Korea should fully join the US's Proliferation Security Initiative. I didn't know much about it, and I didn't put too much time into researching it, myself. I read the article, gave it some thought, and it seemed like a pretty uncontroversial thing, to me. I understood South Korea's ambivalence, about it, however, given the always fraught nature of its relationship with its northern neighbor — North Korea had basically said that it would view South Korea joining this treaty as a "declaration of war." Huh… right.
I tend to avoid stating my personal opinion on these debate topics until after the debate is finished, so as not to bias the students' take on them. But I'd formed in my mind that joining PSI would probably be OK. Until Sally's discussion of it.
Sally is a sharp sixth grader. A bit of a prodigy, in some ways, excellent with these civics and social studies type concepts. I have joked that she's going to be a lawyer, some day. Anyway, we were beginning our discussion of this Proliferation Security Initiative, and she begins, quite simply: "I read about it, and I think it's illegal." My jaw dropped open. "Uh… That's not what the newspaper said," I was thinking to myself.
But she went on to explain that it involved arbitrary search and seizure in international waters, and that it basically boiled down to a form of international racial profiling of ships-at-sea. Not using this kind of vocabulary — she's not THAT good — but she did a perfectly adequate job of making these ideas clear using simpler vocabulary. And I was just stunned, even recognizing that she was probably basing this on something she'd found on a Korean opinion website of some kind. Because here was a 6th grader, lecturing me on international law. She'd managed to internalize the arguments, and it was clearly not just parroting but that she understood the significance of them. I was so impressed.
Sure enough, when you look at Wikipedia on the topic of PSI, you find that it was another one of those dubious cowboy-internationalist undertakings of John Bolton, former UN Ambassador under President Bush. Given that pedigree, how could it NOT be illegal? I bonked my forehead and went "d'oh!" And, because of Sally, I changed my mind about South Korea joining the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Now, it becomes moot (note to self: now is the time to explain the meaning of the word "moot" to Sally's class — we can revisit PSI for 5 minutes in light of the news). South Korea has gone and jumped into it, anyway, in reaction to the North's intemperance. Ah, well…
“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” – Dr Geoffrey Miller, quoted in the New York Times May 18, 2009.
Notes for Korean
한국어를 잘 못 해서 죄송해요 = I'm sorry I can't speak Korean well
동경 = donggyeong, means Tokyo (literally, "eastern capital", thus it's a translation of the name, rather than a transliteration… interesting, I saw it in an advertisement)
바탕=background
"The piano is easy to play. Beat the keyboard." – Shaina, 5th grade. And here, all this time, I thought it was difficult. That it required some kind of finesse. Maybe I should give it a try.
I found a phrase that just drove me nuts:
우리학원을 오시려면 이렇게 오세요
The breakdown, as far as I can figure out:
우리학원을 =our school+[OBJ]
오시려면 = come+[HONORIFIC]+["INTENTIVE-SUPPOSITIONAL"(whatver that is)]+[CONDITIONAL-CLAUSE-SUBORDINATOR]
이렇게 = being thus+[-LY] ("thusly")
오세요 = come+[HONORIFIC CONJUGATED]+[POLITE/FINITE]
So, from all that:
if your honorable self might come to our school, come like this [i.e. here are some directions for getting here? or, i.e. come "as you are"?]
Meanwhile, babelfish alleged:
"Our school five cotton come coldly like this"
Hahaha. Never trust babelfish. That looks like it should be on a tshirt, though.
Other Korean Vocab:
회원 = member
금상=gold (first) prize
I have the flu. Bad. Fever and cough, yesterday. Argh.
On a news website, an ad for Bloomberg caught my attention. It’s a riff on the commonplace that things get lost in translation (a la the children’s game “telephone”). Still, the specific example was clever (if accurate, and… who knows?). I will reproduce it, thus giving them some free advertising. But, whatever.
[Start] English: Get your facts right at the source
[ –> ] Italian: Ricava le tue informazioni vere direttamente dalla fonte
[ –> ] Chinese: … .. ..
[ –> ] English: Make up a story and run to the motherland
I didn’t really make much effort to copy the Chinese. I had a hard time copying this. I don’t know Chinese, but I can read fragments, because of my efforts to study Korean hanja. Notes:
故 = 고 (chinese meaning is “therefore”)
故事[story? but korean is 고사 = historical folktale or tradition, fable?]
Quotes:
“Talent is not the same as intelligence.” – Me (and probably someone else, too).
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra
“Absentem qui rodit amicum, qui non defendit, alio culpante; hic niger est; hunc tu, Romane, caveto” – Horace
She walks in beauty—like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
— Lord Byron, 1814.
I can't sleep. I'm listening to "The Stone Dance of the Cameleon" by Celtic harpist Phamie Gow (whose wikipedia entry was deleted for being "insignificant").
I've been feeling down today. Not sure why. It could have to do with the spring equinox. I almost always seem to get down at the equinoxes, both fall and spring versions. I don't know why, but I've been noticing it long enough that I think it's a real pattern. Maybe it's a weird variant of that seasonal affective disorder some people struggle with.
So I don't have much to say.
Funny / Interesting quote:
"Technology has the shelf life of a banana." – Scott McNealy (founder of Sun Microsystems)
Relatedly, Sun may be swallowed up by IBM, soon. Apparently a deal is in the works, if it passes due diligence and the antitrust regulators.
As part of our curriculum, we have these newspapers (which are presumably level-appropriate current-events newspapers that the kids can read, and from which we get many of our debate topics). I actually rather like the newspapers, despite their many mistakes, as the kids seem to get into actually being able to talk about relevant current events in class. I had a funny experience, however, recently. And some of my students actually "got it" when I pointed it out to them.
You see, with the newspaper comes a workbook, which includes some pages of difficult vocabulary to review. At the top of the page, it says, "반복 학습을 통해 반드시 암기하고 Reading Comprehension과 Writing을 통해 그 쓰임새를 학인합시다." (rough translation: blah blah memorize these words blah blah")…. Then, farther down, in the list of vocabulary words to memorize, they give this word with its example sentence: "proficiency 숙달, 능숙 example: Pushing children to memorize vocabulary or grammar rules will not lead to a high level of language proficiency." This is subversively hilarious.
World's shortest astrophysics joke, heard on NPR:
"A photon walks into a black hole…"
Get it?
My student Gina was a veritable goldmine of one-liners today.
She said “아어에즈!” (which is apparently utter nonsense aeoejeu – kind of a howl of frustration – but they made sure I spelled it correctly, so I have my doubts, although Koreans take their vowels very seriously).
She said “Tiny green-skinned girl disappears!” somberly.
She observed that “A romance like wine is very expensive!” in response to a newspaper article we were reading.
And she announced, self-pityingly, “I memorized but I can’t remember” during the vocabulary quiz.
I decided to try some 잣죽 (rice and pine-nut porridge) for dinner (made from a little packet by adding water in a saucepan, boil, stir… just like any porridge I guess). It was pretty good.
More wacky quotes:
"You give a man a fish, that man knows where to go for fish. You teach a man to fish, and you've just destroyed your market base." – Jackie Kashian, attributed to her father, who falsely attributed it to Jesus.
"We are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday to die." – Ruby Vroom's song, "Screenwriter's Blues (5 AM Listening to Los Angeles)"
Another picture I took on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, from the Jichuk-yeok platform.
Wacky quote of the day: “vandalism is Australian for progress.” – Jon Stewart
I have a bathroom scale I bought for 12000 won at the Home Plus store. Apparently it was a leftover something originally intended for the U.K. market, as the weight is marked in stone and kilograms, but not pounds. According to that scale, I started the year 2008 with a weight of just a little over 13 stone, and I’m ending the year roughly the same.
That may seem inconsequential. And 13 stone and a fraction (it’s about 84 kg or 185 pounds, I think) is still more than my ideal weight, probably. But it’s really a major accomplishment for me to have kept my weight so stable this year, given it was only a few years ago (I think 2003 or 2004) when I peaked at around 245 pounds, and that my long-term year-from-year weight hasn’t shown a lot of stability, having mostly fluctuated between 200 and 250 over the last 15 years. So keeping it so stable, and at well under 200, feels like a major accomplishment to me. And basically, I have only one rule: “Eat less than you want. Always.”
Anyway, that’s my observation for this last day of the year. I have tomorrow off. No big plans, though. I ran across the following quote in an old file of snippets and notes of mine, but can’t figure out where I might have found it… I’m pretty sure it’s not mine. But I definitely think there’s something to it.
“Forget about all those years of therapy, just pretend you’re okay and you will be.” – unattributed.
The random picture below shows the changing of the guard (i.e. change of drivers) at the Jichuk station on the Orange Line of the subway, on a Daehwa-bound train – which is what I take from downtown Seoul to my home.
Last lines, at the end of the pilot episode of Hawaii Five-O:
Ms Quong: "To cops."
McGarrett: "To hippies."
Ms Quong: "Peace?"
McGarrett: "Peace."
Now there's some 1968 zeitgeist for ya.
"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." — Gandhi
"Long live freedom and damn the ideologies" — Robinson Jeffers
But meanwhile, the South Koreans show just how fun parliamentarianism can be. Makes me think my complaining about mismanagement at hellbridge is rather petty. The whole country clearly has a different approach to conflict (and resolution, or lack thereof) than anything I'm used to.
I found the above quote, written in my own incautious hand, on the endpaper of my Korean Grammar for International Learners reference book. It was accompanied by a date: August 26th of this year. That means I wrote it while I was at my mother's house. But there is no indication of where it came from.
Did it come from one of the books I was grazing upon while at my mother's? Did it come from my own brain? What does it mean? De-contextualized, it seems somehow both meaningless and sublime.
Ah well.
That's an obscure pop-culture reference from a 1960's movie. Can you say which one?
I have downloaded and watched a few movies, lately. Pretty much random stuff.
Today we started a new "term" at work. Not much change, except that I am now, allegedly, a "speaking" teacher instead of a "writing" teacher, primarily. We'll see how this impacts my overall workload.
"Contrary to the rumors that you've heard, I was not born in a manger," Obama said. "I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth."
As reported at Newsweek.
