I'm stressed because August grades are due today at work, and I procrastinated more than usual because last week was kind of a burnout week, with too much going on.
So I'll leave it at that. More later.
"If you don't know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself." – Ian Smith
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
"In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth … and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit … are the highest form of consciousness." – Vladimir Nabokov.
This Nabokov quote serves, probably unintentionally, as a summary of the plot of the poem Altazor, by Vicente Huidobro, which is probably my favorite "long" poem, at least in Spanish.
[daily log: walking, 6 km straight down]
I was led to this "document 9" (formally "Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere") of China's party leadership by a comment thread on an entry at Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog.
A commenter basically said, "Why do we spend so much time trying to figure out the China Leadership's intentions? Why not take what they say at face value?" with a link to this document. Frankly, this is a very good point. I don't think that anyone with even a limited background in the history of Marxism, Maoism and China could fail to see that the Party leadership isn't really hiding anything here.
Whether one agrees with it or not, an exposure to Marxist thought on questions of ideology, dialectics and theories of history seems like the sine qua non as regards commenting intelligently on the China question. I think the Chinese leadership take a very long view of history, from a still unrepentantly marxian position, and their embrace of "capitalism" is merely a means to an end. The preamble to the last section of the document reads:
Historical experience has proven that failures in the economic sphere can result in major disorder, and failure in the ideological sphere can result in major disorders as well. Confronting the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out Westernization, splitting, and “Color Revolutions,” and facing the severe challenge of today’s ideological sphere, all levels of Party and Government, especially key leaders, must pay close attention to their work in the ideological sphere and firmly seize their leadership authority and dominance.
They intend to dance with the devil and step on his toes and force him out of the dance competition.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
People think I'm weird because I don't seem to suffer from loneliness. Sometimes I feel gloomy or restless or bored, but I almost never experience loneliness.
I guess that's weird.
I make sure I get a good dose of sociality through my choice of career. And kids make better company than adults, in my opinion. They are "high intensity" social experiences, so you get lots of sociality in a short time. Then I can go home and be alone-but-not-lonely.
"If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company." – Jean-Paul Sartre.
[daily log: walking, 7 km]
"The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities."-Sophocles
Maybe.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to." – Dorothy Parker.
Last night there was a kind of freezing-rain/snow/ice storm, and there was a thin coating of ice on all the sidewalks. It made my normally routine walk to and from work a bit hazardous, but I managed it without falling down.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km on thin ice]
A minimalist Sunday. I had a relapse of my flu.
"Success is a lousy teacher," Bill Gates once said. "It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
[daily log: walking, 1 km]
This is a complex sentence because it has a subordinate clause.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
I was almost feeling healthier, yesterday (recovering from that never-ending flu that nailed me a few weeks ago), but today I felt lousy. I have been sleeping very badly, lately. I will sleep a few hours but then wake up wide awake and unable to go back to sleep. So for today I just tried to relax.
I have been reading history. I may even finish a book this weekend.
What I'm listening to right now.
King Tuff, "Black Moon Spell."
Shakespearean insult du jour:
Were I like thee, I would throw away myself. —from “Timon of Athens”
[daily log: walking, 2 km]
Still being sick, I had an exhausting day. I failed to post this in a timely fashion (meaning I failed to stick to my one-post-a-day schedule for the first time in a very long time), so I'm putting it up late, and back-dating it.
Chris, a sixth-grader, was doing a writing test. He was doing something weird with his fingers on his skull. It looked like a cross between a secret handshake and a massage.
"What are you doing, Chris?" I asked, gesturing at his hands.
"I'm thinking with my fingers," he explained.
Unrelatedly, a quote:
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." – Gertrude Stein.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
If you wish your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, you are foolish, for you wish things to be in your power which are not so, and what belongs to others to be your own. So likewise, if you wish your servant to be without fault, you are foolish, for you wish vice not to be vice but something else. But if you wish not to be disappointed in your desires, that is in your own power. Exercise, therefore, what is in your power. A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave. – Arrian of Nicomedia, ENCHIRIDION of Epictetus, XIV (2nd century)
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This seems like a kind of extreme case of a sort of confirmation bias:
"If no one comes from the future to stop you from doing it then how bad of a decision can it really be?" - This was circulating online, and as far as I can figure out it originated from Will Farrell (comedian).
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
"Fun is an artificial construct," according to Steven Patrick Morrissey, former front-man for The Smiths. Apparently he has recently been struggling with cancer, which is something I can relate to, and this perhaps indirectly lead him to the above conclusion, which he stated to a Spanish journalist will on tour in Spain. This seems perfectly suited to the morose persona Morrissey has long cultivated, but I'm willing to concede the premise.
What I'm listening to right now.
The Smiths, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now."
[daily log: walking, km]
Lately several of my coworkers have been militating for and setting up some vacation time. Everyone, even Curt, has asked me "don't you want some vacation?"
Certain friends and relatives also have brought it up. They ask, When am I planning to take a vacation and travel and see people?
When I think of taking a vacation, it leaves me utterly cold. On the one hand, it's true that I have been working hard – but I'm not working to exhaustion. I get enough sleep and rest and I don't push myself except for work – even to the extent that a trip to the store seems excessive and gets put off sometimes, and the idea of even a day trip into the city on a weekend requires a lot of lead time and mental preparation. On the other hand, when I imagine a vacation, I imagine two possible things. First, I could travel somewhere (e.g. the US) and make a whirlwind visit to people who are important to me. That sounds exhausting and stressful, and although I would love to see certain people, I can't imagine trying it on the sort of week-and-a-half-long race across America such as I did in 2012. The second possibility is that I could sit in my apartment and "relax" for some period of time. Frankly, that sounds boring and depressing. My 4-day weekend a while back for Buddha's birthday was already pushing the limit of my mental hunger for solitude.
As a consequence of the above thought processes, in fact the idea of a vacation doesn't really inspire me much. I'm having about the kind of vacation I "need" right now, anyway: because of the exam-prep period of the middle-schoolers, my teaching schedule has been halved for a few weeks. So I have enough work to get me out of bed each day, to keep me active and interested in things, but not so much work that I feel overwhelmed by it. Next month, I'll get a chance to feel overwhelmed again, but for now I'm taking a sort of "working vacation," basically.
So I'm not really planning anything. The whole idea of travel hasn't been particularly compelling for me the last few years – even before the cancer diagnosis, I was evolving into more of a homebody. Although I still sometimes fantasize about traveling, the reality of it is that I tend to get depressed and lonely during extensive trips (such as my trip to Japan in 2010, or to Australia and NZ in 2011), or else I feel stressed – overwhelmed and exausted (such as my trip back to the US in 2012).
When people came to visit me, we did some trips – day trips and a few overnight tours to various parts (Andrew and Hollye to Yeonggwang; Ann and Jacob to Sokcho; etc.). Although I enjoyed those trips, I did them as a means to "share" Korea with them, more than out of an interest in traveling myself. For me, a half-day adventure into Seoul to meet my friend Peter and hike a stretch of city wall is about the most extensive sort of trip for which I can work up any interest at all.
I write all this to say: sorry, if you're hoping I'm going to take a vacation. It doesn't seem to be in the cards, right now.
Here is another thought about "vacation," vis-a-vis my cancer experience of the past year:
In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. – Flannery O'Connor (written to friend about her lupus disease that eventually killed her)
What do I mean by quoting this? I only mean that perhaps I've had the trip of my lifetime, over the past year, at the National Cancer Center Resort.
What I'm listening to right now.
Aztec Camera, "Pillar to Post." In my college years, I really liked the group Aztec Camera, but it is no longer very interesting to me. Nevertheless, occasionally it comes around on my mp3 shuffle, and I get nostalgic for those times in the mid-80's when I listened to it a lot.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I felt a little bit under-the-weather today. I slept in much later than my normal time, ate an omelet, worked, and felt tired.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." – Philip K. Dick
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
"It hurts. That's how you know it's worth it." – a throwaway line in Birds of Prey (a cheesy and quickly cancelled superheros-genre TV series from 2003), episode 13.
Sometimes you find deep wisdom in unexpected places.
At work, at closing time (10 pm):
Ken: "I wonder if this is the real path to success…"
Jared: "What?"
Ken: "…this working everyday."
I didn't have an answer to that. I suspect maybe not.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with work, lately. I'm trying to be more organized, but such organization doesn't always come naturally to me. We have grading and student evaluation comments to finish, and since I didn't touch any of that stuff during the 4 day holiday, I had a huge pile on my desk Monday, that I'm still wading through.
Anyway. I'm also sleeping a lot, lately – another sure sign that my cold relapsed, or I got a new one, or something.
I like this quote.
"We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue." – Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian poet, 1875-1926)
My question: which questions?
Indeed.
[daily log (11 pm): walking, 5 km]
I had all these fragmented dreams, because I kept waking up. Discontinuities.
First, Burnamore Lambert. I was looking for someone named Burnamore Lambert. I was in a nameless town, that resembled a cross between Wisconsin Dells and Hornopiren, Chile – I should note that I don't have particularly positive impressions of either of these places, the former being a crass, comercial "tourist trap" and the latter being the singularly most depressed town I have ever visited on 5 continents. I was in some hotel, which had weird Daliesque statuary in the hallways and rooms. The hotel went on and on, and I would go outside and wander around the town then back into the hotel to find new rooms and galleries. I never found Burnamore Lambert.
Second, I was in Folwell Hall (at the University of Minnesota). The whole hagwon was there – we were using the classrooms for our classes, but college students and professors kept interrupting us. It was inconvenient. At one point, the vice principal from Hongnong Elementary walked in, and caused me to feel chills down my spine.
Third, Curt called me into his office and wanted to talk about his new brilliant strategy: he wanted to have a Shakespeare-themed hagwon. Ken also thought it was a great idea. I told them it might be good marketing but the kids wouldn't like it. Curt said everyone likes Shakespeare. I asked him if he'd read any Shakespeare, and sheepishly he admitted it was too difficult for him to understand. "That's where you come in," he said.
I woke up. It's raining.
Unrelatedly, I ran across this the other day. Stick towers!
[daily log (10 pm): walking, 2.5 km]
There is a fun website where you can make your robot dance.
"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture." – Thomas Merton
My mother recently asked me how I feel about the NSA, the prospect of Big Brother via technology, the much-announced end-of-privacy and all that. She also mentioned the preponderance of "conspiracy theories" in the media universe that arise in relation to these issues.
I started to write a long, involved answer in email form, but decided to just give her a short answer and save the long answer for some kind of blog post. Here is that blog post.
One can't think about the state except in relation to what lies beyond it, the single world market, and in relation to what lies this side of it, the levels of minorities, becomings, and the "people." Beyond the state it's money that rules, money that communicates, and what we need these days isn't a critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx's that goes on from where he left off. – Gilles Deleuze
I don't buy much into conspiracy theories, but concede the "scariness" of bigbrotherism via emerging technologies. My own marxian counterpoint is to observe that capital and the state are not natural allies. As antagonists, they tend to damper each others' totalizing tendencies. When google or facebook get out of hand with their accumulation of user data, the governments tend to step in. When the governments get out of hand with their spying on citizens, the corporations and the technoanarchists step in. This is a broad tendency, and of course there will be many exceptions and counterexamples in both directions, such as the apparent cooperation of US phone companies with the NSA or the recent failure of the government to back net neutrality.
As a reflection of this principle, I will note that a new internet browser was created recently by everyone's favorite Swedish anarchists at Pirate Bay, that "bypasses" the government sponsored DNS system through use of the same technology as the file torrenting systems, and therefore makes possible a sort of "stealth" internet that regulating governments can't "see."
The state-capital conflict is a long-standing interest of mine, and perhaps it is a source of my continued optimism for the lot of the little guy vis-a-vis big brother, even now. I think that Marx over-estimated the role of the "worker" (collectively) but that he also in some ways under-estimated the role of the state – hence his hoping that it would whither away under communism, for example. But this miscalculation in his theoretical work does not invalidate the perception that there is a sort of conflict at work, and my own tendency is to apply the more recent insights of cybernetics and ecological system to realize that it leads to a kind of "balance" that is, over the longest run, a steady state (different meaning for state, here).
The South Koreans know everything I do online. I have a very strong faith in their collective incompetence, and thus worry very little about it. My take on ALL conspiracy theories returns to the theorem: "Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by stupidity."
"Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
– Samuel Beckett, concluding his 1954 novel The Unnamable.
[daily log: no]
"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."
– Stanley Kubrick
What I'm listening to right now.
Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Blinded By The Light."
Lyrics.
Madman drummer bummers
Indians in the summer
With a teenage diplomat
In the dumps with the mumps
As the adolescent pumps
His way into his hat
With a boulder on my shoulder
Feeling kinda older
I tripped a merry-go-round
With the very unpleasing
Sneezing and wheezing
The calliope crashed to the ground
Blinded by the light
Revved up like a deuce
Another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
She got down but she never got tight
She's gonna make it through the night
Some silicone sister
With her manager mister
Told me I've got what it takes
She said, I'll turn you on sonny to something strong
Play the song with the funky break
And go-kart Mozart
Was checking out the weather chart
To see if it was safe outside
And little Early Pearly
Came by in her curly-wurly
And asked me if I needed a ride
Blinded by the light
Revved up like a deuce
Another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun
'Cause mama, that's where the fun is
Some brimstone baritone
Anticyclone rolling stone
Preacher from the east
Says dethrone the dictaphone
Hit it in the funnybone
That's where they expect it least
And some new mown chaperone
Was standing in the corner
Watching the young girls dance
And some fresh-sown moonstone
Was playing with his frozen zone
Reminding him of romance
The calliope crashed to the ground
Blinded by the light
Revved up like a deuce
Another runner in the night
Blinded by the light
What's funny is that when this song (originally written by Bruce Springsteen) was young (and I was young, too), I was convinced that the line "Another runner in the night" was "The rohner in the night." Now, you might wonder: what is a rohner?
Well, near my hometown in Humboldt County, California, there is a town called Rohnerville. We used to go there a lot when I was small, because my best friends lived there. There was a small airport near the town – not a commercial airport, just a landing strip, really – and in my mind, due some ambiguous highway signage at the turnoff to Rohnerville, the concept of the town and the airport merged. "Rohnerville" merged semantically into "Airportville" in my mind. Then, the existence the alternating green/white/red runway beacon was always very salient, as it was quite eerie to drive past on the highway on foggy nights (which are the most common type of night in Humboldt). Because of that, I developed one of those misbegotten ideas that the airport's runway beacon was called a "rohner." I never bothered to find out if this was true or not from any adults. A couple years later, as I neared adolescence, I heard this song on the radio and I simply imagined a "rohner in the night" as being your typical airport runway beacon, and I thought that was a major theme of this song. Furthermore, due to that misunderstanding, the song became wrapped up in my mind with memories of fun times playing with my sister and our friends Steven and Jeannine at their house in Rohnerville – thus it became one of those nostalgia-anthems many of us have, but in this case a sort of ex-post-facto one.
[daily log (10 pm): walking, 1 km]
This video is creepy and strange and charming all at once.
Die Eierbrecher from Emanuel Strixner on Vimeo.
"What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."
— Sylvia Plath.
What she said.
[daily log (1130 pm): walking, 3 km]
Normally I’ve been unimpressed with the proliferation of gifs – those little mini-animations – on websites, but I’ll make an exception to this one, where the gif strikes me as a perfect medium for what is a very simple story: sometimes a mud puddle needs an extra trip. And the dog is very patient.
A religious belief… is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating — these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.
– Anthony de Mello
[daily log (10 pm): walking, 1 km]
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can stop your country from doing." – Jon Stewart, paraphrasing (updating) Kennedy to match the current approach to lawmaking in Congress.
If Kennedy's original is a kind of soundbitized (soundbitten?) touchstone of progressive (liberal) sentiment, then Stewart's parody seems to represent the apotheosis of the contemporary Randian anti-liberal tendency.
[daily log (1100 pm): walking, 5 km]
It's a little-known fact that I once took a graduate course in the Ancient Sumerian language. It was all part of my general interest in obscure and difficult languages, which continues unabated to this day.
I had to memorize archaic hieroglyphs, cuneiform logographs and vocabulary meanings, not to mention the bizarre Sumerian grammar (the agglutinative nature of which I am sometimes reminded of when I look at Korean).
I don't remember much of it – Sumerian is just not something one has much occasion to use.
Somehow I ran across a proverb that was allegedly Sumerian, the other day, and I wanted to find out if it was just an empty attribution or if it was really from Ancient Sumer. So I researched it a little bit. Apparently it's the real deal. I really wanted to find an image of the cuneiform inscription, but my googling skills have proven inadequate to that task. So here is the proverb and the transcription I found (at this website):
A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred.
Segment A: 1.105
71. šag4-ge šag4 ḫul gig nu-ub-tu-ud
72. dug4-ge šag4 ḫul gig ib2-tu-ud
Above right is an image of the archaic style (c. 3000 BC) I mostly focused on in my class but it's utterly unrelated to the quoted proverb. Below, likewise unrelated, is an image of the later, more refined style of the civilization at its height (c. 2000 BC – and note that the refined style below is just as likely to be Akkadian as Sumerian – the civilization was bilingual and used the same writing system for both languages, which were linguistically unrelated – actually, that's similar to the situation between Korean and Chinese in the pre-modern era).
It's a few days late, but I just now ran across it.
Warning: if you are unfamiliar with Burroughs, be forewarned – you might want to reconsider listening to his "prayer" (which is not a musical track, either, by the way – this is poetry being read by the author).
Burroughs was a great American writer in my humble opinion – one of the greatest – but he was undeniably deeply profane and gallingly liberal (or perhaps more correctly he was a type of libertarian – he was pro-drug but also radically pro-gun, for example, and though he despised "lawmen" he didn't seem to have much of a problem with big government in principle).
His iconoclasm comes across plenty clearly in this short bit.
William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer."
Text:
For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day, November 28th, 1986.
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories – all right let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Burroughs, as a writer, was perhaps one of the single most influential in my life, though you wouldn't know that by looking at my lifestyle or my other tastes and interests. I am the junkie-that-never-was.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Here is an interesting quote on the process of revision.
Over and over again, we are told about the importance of polishing, of revising, of tearing up, and rewriting. I got the bewildered notion that, far from being expected to type it right the first time, as Heinlein had advised me, I was expected to type it all wrong and get it right only by the thirty-second time, if at all.
I went home immersed in gloom and the very next time I wrote a story, I tried to tear it up. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I went over to see all the terrible things I had done, in order to revise them. To my chagrin, everything sounded great to me. (My own writing always sounds great to me.) Eventually, after wasting hours and hours–to say nothing of suffering spiritual agony—I gave it up. My stories would have to be written the way they always were—and still are.
What is it I am saying, then? That it is wrong to revise? No, of course not—anymore than it is wrong not to revise.
– Isaac Asimov
I was forced to revise my Sunday walk, as once I was outside I came to the stark realization that it had become cold. It was 1°C. I guess it's time to break out the winter clothes.
What I'm listening to right now.
John Newman, "Love Me Again." The video is rather depressing (spoiler), if you watch all the way through.
[daily log: walking, 4 km]
Being But Men
Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.
If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.
Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.
That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.
– Dylan Thomas
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Mar sesgo, viento largo, estrella clara,
camino, aunque no usado, alegre y cierto,
al hermoso, al seguro, al capaz puerto
llevan la nave vuestra, única y rara.
En Scilas ni en Caribdis no repara,
ni en peligro que el mar tenga encubierto,
siguiendo su derrota al descubierto,
que limpia honestidad su curso para.
Con todo, si os faltare la esperanza
de llegar a este puerto, no por eso
gireis las velas, que será simpleza.
Que es enemigo amor de la mudanza,
y nunca tuvo próspero suceso
el que no se quilata en la firmeza.
– Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616).
El soneto aparece en su novela Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, en el cap. 9 de la primera parte, atribuido al personaje de Manuel de Sosa Coitiño, el llamado "enamorado portugués." Es fácil olvidar que el novelista Cervantes también escribió mucha poesía de calidad notable – porque siempre aparece en sus novelas y cuentos atribuida a sus personajes fictícios.
Last night, I had a pretty long conversation with Curt. He was distraught over difficult business decisions: complaints from parents about teachers (fortunately not about me, at least none reported)… therefore more changes in the employee rolls forthcoming… lost students….
"I don't want to be 원장 [wonjang = hagwon boss] anymore!" he sighed.
He paid me an unexpected complement, then, as I complained, in turn, about my current struggle with reconciling my slow and still painful post-cancer recovery with my ambition, such as it is.
"In the time if have known you, you have shown a strong ability to be reborn," he said. He stood up and demonstratively tapped the [broken link! FIXME] Nietzsche quote that is still taped up beside the staffroom door. I'm often surprised and pleased by the philosophical turns our conversations take.
"I reinvent myself," I clarified, perhaps wanting to move away from the religious connotations of being "reborn" that he no doubt wasn't really familiar with in English.
"Yes. You were very different when I first met you." That was in late, 2007, and I worked for him the first time in the spring of 2008.
I didn't feel different…. I don't feel different.
But yes… I reinvent myself, it's true. Constantly.
"So now, I have to reinvent myself again," I finally said, with my own sigh.
"Yes. You can do it."
I will strive to become a better teacher, in my new post-cancer version of the jared.
Here are some ideas from my sixth-grade student Andrea in her recent month-end speech, on how to be a better teacher.
She's the kind of student that I am teaching for – I prefer students like her who have such high standards and expectations. I have titled her speech, "Teach Children with Love and Wisdom" – because that's what she says.
This phrase, "cancer-free," as discussed [broken link! FIXME] last month, is just code for "no major tumors currently identified." We all have cancer, all the time.
I guess my health is much improved.
But now that the elation of living through the summer has passed, I'm more and more suffering from a kind of mild depression: life must go on, and at times it's just as frustrating and tedious and unfulfilling as before.
I had hoped I'd be eating normally by now. I'm not. When do I get to eat Indian food again? Kimchi? Cake? Burritos? Crackers?
I had hoped I'd be gung ho about work and taking on the challenges it presents, by now. I'm not. When do the major problems plaguing my workplace finally reach some kind resolution?
I had hoped I'd be plunging into some life-affirming project (i.e. my writing), to make better use of my remaining time on earth. I'm not. When will I finally have a reliable every-day writing habit?
This is the hard slog.
One. Step. At a time.
Kurt Vonnegut, in 2006, wrote back to a group of high school students. In part, he said:
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting,
sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or
badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
What I'm listening to right now.
M83, "Wait."
