Caveat: E a luxúria única de não ter já esperanças?

Not My Poetry

Estou cansado, é claro,
Porque, a certa altura, a gente tem que estar cansado.
De que estou cansado, não sei:
De nada me serviria sabê-lo,
Pois o cansaço fica na mesma.
A ferida dói como dói
E não em função da causa que a produziu.
Sim, estou cansado,
E um pouco sorridente
De o cansaço ser só isto —
Uma vontade de sono no corpo,
Um desejo de não pensar na alma,
E por cima de tudo uma transparência lúcida
Do entendimento retrospectivo…
E a luxúria única de não ter já esperanças?
Sou inteligente; eis tudo.
Tenho visto muito e entendido muito o que tenho visto,
E há um certo prazer até no cansaço que isto nos dá,
Que afinal a cabeça sempre serve para qualquer coisa.

– Álvaro de Campos (heterónimo de Fernando Pessoa, poeta portugues, 1888-1935)

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: The Social Construction of Discomfort

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Pain is real, and exists at a fundamental level.

However, I think the principle of "discomfort" is quite different. I have come to believe that most of what we think of as discomfort is socially constructed – even what we think of as physical discomfort. It's important to understand that I'm not speaking of pain, here, not even mild pain, but rather that sense of being uncomfortable in some way. Certainly it is true that some types of physical discomfort can shade into real pain in inperceptibly small steps, but when we cringe at someone's awkward behavior, or complain that a room is too warm, or insist that our chairs are uncomfortable, mostly we are dealing with psychological constructs, which in turn are often the result of social (cultural) interactions and conditioning that we received as children.

What I'm thinking of is my recent observation that Koreans seem to find the idea of wearing a long-sleeve shirt in summer unbearable. They visibly stare and wince when they see me wearing my now habitual long-sleeved shirts. I don't really care, one way or another, as far as my own personal comfort is concerned – I don't think it really impacts my experience of feelings of relative "heat" or "cool," since frankly, in the summer I'm always just plain hot, and there aren't many shades of difference in my experience of feeling that it's too hot.

Korean-uv-sunlight-protective-elastic-arm-sleevesKoreans however – and at a very young age, apparently – are taught that wearing a short-sleeved shirt offers immense – even indispensible – relief from the discomfort of summer heat. Koreans do odd things, because of this belief that they must wear short-sleeved shirts – many older people wear short-sleeved shirts, and then they wear these weird-looking "arm socks" (see advertising picture at right) because they don't trust the sunlight's effect on their skin, either. My feeling is that this looks much less comfortable than simply wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

My students and coworkers regularly ask me, while wincing in sympathy and gesturing at my arms, if I'm too hot. I shrug but it's starting to feel awkward. I admit that there's a certain vanity involved, on my part – I have a really scary, icky looking scar on my right wrist, now, from the cancer surgery, and my arms are skeletally skinny. I'd just prefer not to have it out there. When my scar shows, people stare at that instead, so I can't win either way.

This social construction of discomfort goes both ways. We in the West are taught almost universally to "chew with a closed mouth" and not to slurp food. Koreans don't care at all, and to a person they will slurp noodles and cram vast quantities of food into their mouths and share with all their progress in masticating it. I still cringe when I am around Koreans eating because it's quite hard to ignore my own early social conditioning in the matter.

 [daily log: walking: 5 km]

 

 

Caveat: On Feeling Trapped – “For Better or For Worse”

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

My friend Bob wrote me a long email recently in which he discussed feeling trapped in his job. I, too, have struggled with that feeling, although perhaps in different ways or for different reasons.

I certainly have days of deep, deep dissatisfaction with my "life as it is" these days. The last few days have been in that category – I feel like a failure at work and that permeates all the other aspects of my life, since I have let work become so central to my current sense of self and identity. This is, of course, a dubious move from a mental health standpoint, but it seems almost unavoidable, for when I dwell on other aspects of my life, I find myself even more disappointed.

I won't say that I feel that I am a bad teacher. I don't actually think that. What I will say, however, is that I may be a bad teacher for this environment – what Koreans need and want, in a teacher, isn't necessarily where my strengths lie. Nevertheless, I remain, and keep trying.

Recently, our middle-school TOEFL-based program has been dying. Students have been dropping out of it in a steady attrition, either migrating to the so-called "TEPS" cohort or leaving KarmaPlus altogether. The reasons are obvious: being in the supposedly "premium" TOEFL cohort isn't getting them the high scores they want and need on their school tests. 

The reason for this, in turn, is because TOEFL and a Korean middle school English test are quite different animals. TOEFL is a fairly well-designed test, intended for university level, that seeks to determine a student's communicative competence in English. TEPS (Korea's special home-grown English test) and the middle school tests that seem to follow the TEPS lead are not tests of English communicative competence. Instead, what they most resemble is perhaps the types of tests in Greek and Latin that high-schoolers did around a century ago. With frozen idioms and artificial texts, they quiz you on minutiae of grammar and vocabulary and are brutally unforgiving of small mistakes that the TOEFL, by design, essentially ignores. 

If a student forgets to write -s on the word "drive" because it happens to be in the third person singular, the TOEFL scorer may take note, but the impact on the final score is minimal as long as the writer's ideas are clear. In the tests my students take, however, a missed -s can mean a hit to the final score that fails to get one into one of the elite high schools.

I have students who have gotten 80 or 90 points on practice TOEFL tests (a level that could get them into an American University, provided they meet other admission criteria of course), but who blow the naesin (school test). These are the students who are dropping out.

OK… this is a digression. My TOEFL2 cohort has died – there weren't enough students left to keep it running. We only have one TOEFL cohort left in middle school, and it's a mediocre collection of students at best – the English stars are all gone. 

As their teacher, I feel like a failure. I can't help them prepare for naesin by teaching TOEFL, it seems – knowing English isn't enough. What they need is meticulous attention to grammatical detail and the capacity to memorize obscure English vocabulary. I guess I'm willing to try to teach this, but I need to "train myself." Additionally, ironic though it is, I will have to further master Korean to be able to teach anything for naesin at all: the test is in Korean, after all (not the texts or words, which are English, but the questions – i.e. the parts that say e.g. "Underline the noun phrases in the below sentences" or "Which sentence below contains no grammatical error?").

I started out intending to write about feeling trapped. I guess my answer is… sometimes I feel trapped, but I'm kind of just accepting that I feel that way sometimes, and not fighiting it. I'm here for the long haul, it seems – both because I'm tired of quitting things (my life has been that of a "serial quitter," as my former coworker and friend Tyler once said with huge impact on my psyche), but also because I'm now a cancer patient who can't easily get insurance and inexpensive healthcare in my own country (I don't trust that obamacare actually solves the preexisting condition catch-22 – it doesn't appear to have done so).

I do not use the metaphor "I'm married to Korea, now" lightly – I mean to capture exactly that level of meaning: "for better or for worse…"

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: 無呌響山谷

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

I made a surprising and interesting discovery today. I was browsing through my bilingual Korean-English Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, as I sometimes do to kill time and try to learn something (I have always been fond of consuming reference texts qua reference texts, which is why I like to surf wikipedia randomly, too).
I ran across a term I wanted to try to figure out better, and so I typed the phrase into google to do a search, with some accompanying English to rule out the Korean-only sites. Lo and behold, the first site to come up was an online version of my Korean-English Buddhist dictionary. That’s pretty cool: that they’ve decided to make it accessible online like that.
The phrase I was looking for was: 

무규향산곡
(無呌響山谷)
mu·gyu·hyang·san·gok
not-echo(?)-valley

The explanation given in the dictionary is “no echo valley” and the meaning, I think, is that you should stop listening so much to your mind. Turn off the echo-chamber of your brain, or something like that. Stop over-thinking things.
I don’t really know if 규향 means “echo” or not – I’m just guessing. I can’t figure out the hanja – it’s classical Chinese as opposed to something natively Korean, as is true for many Buddhist terms.
picture[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Well That Was A Busy Day

Banalities & Journaling

Sometimes when I have a busy day I have some pre-prepared blog post waiting that I can just clean up a little bit and post, which takes very little time. I have a "queue" of them, generally, sitting as "drafts" in my blog manager. Some of my aphorisms are done ahead of time, and some of my "found online" fragments of interesting news or humor are in that category as well. 

Today, my queue is empty, it's late, and I'm exhausted. I have nothing to post. So this is what you get. Sorry. 

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Nick the 6th Grade Graffiti Artist

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

I have student nick-named Nick (appropriately?). He is a very shy, quiet, unbecoming boy who doesn't always work very dilligently but he's quite smart and well-behaved. 

After writing yesterday about some of my students' writing okie-dokie graffiti, last night I had a dream that Nick, specifically, was going around writing strange things on the walls and desks and books of KarmaPlus hagwon. He was also suddenly dressing like a 1980's fan of Depeche Mode or something – vaguely "goth" with piercings and tattoos, too. It was quite strange. 

"What's happened to you, Nick?" I asked. He was just as shy as always, to talk about it. Yet every time I turned around, he was scribbling his name or some diagram on a piece of furniture.

Strange dream: not much plot to it except that. 

[daily log: walking, 1.5 km]

Caveat: 옼돜

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Some of my students have taken to wrting 옼돜 on things – the whiteboards in class, their notebooks, their pencil cases, their desks (ahem).
This is not Korean. I asked them what it is. They said it means “Okie Dokie” : the hangeul, sounded out, is in fact something like ok-dok. I tried to figure out if they had adopted this phrase from me alone, or if it has some wider cultural diffusion recently in Korea. I know that I say it quite a bit – it’s one of those verbal mannerisms or tics that I use with kids, and I see it as having come to me from my father and to him from my grandfather John, who I remember saying it.
What’s interesting to me is how it it’s not quite phonetic, in the way that they’re writing it, and hence it’s an innovative use of hangeul. To represent okie dokie phonetically would require 4 syllables, not 2: something like 오키도키 [o-ki-do-ki]. Further, they’re deploying it visually, not in spoken form – more like a graffiti tag than a catch-phrase, e.g.:
    옼돜!☺
picture[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: One Year Cancer Free

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Less Banal Than Usual

Well, it hasn’t gone perfectly. Being alive, however, means I am lucky.

I grossly underestimated my ability to meet the challenges of the long-term, despite having coped pretty remarkably well on the short term. The great challenge, frankly, has been that the centrality of eating to daily life, not just for sustenance but for socializing, has collided with the fact that eating has been rendered permanently unpleasant. Eating is a chore, now – on par with cleaning the toilet or jogging, with genuine unpleasantness being inevitable during the task, and only a residual and mostly hollow sense of accomplishment afterward.

Last night, we went to a work dinner (회식) for a coworker’s birthday, and Curt said to me – incidental to something else we were discussing – “Life is nothing.” I reminded him that exactly one year ago, on 2013-07-03, he’d said the same aphorism to me, on the eve of my surgery (and reprising previous uses of the same, vaguely Buddhist expression, such as on the date of my biopsy). It’s meant to be reassuring, and sometimes, it is.

I will summarize here the past year, just for completeness sake (and then I can point people to this blog entry for the “short version” of my cancer story).

I was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue on 2013-06-25 and things moved very fast. By the following week I was checking into Korea’s National Cancer Center (국립암센터) – possibly one of the best cancer hospitals in the world but which happens to be in my neighborhood – and I underwent a 9 hour surgery to remove the tumor from the root of my tongue on 2013-07-04. I spent three nightmarish, hallucinatory days in the ICU before finally being released out into the general ward.

My hospital stay was 23 days. I had a pretty good recovery although I had an infection that necessitated an additional “emergency” surgery to remove some badly behaved parts in my neck and tongue again.

My friends Peter and Grace and my coworkers Helen and Curt all provided immense amounts of emotional support and material support. I haven’t in any way adequately repaid any of them their kindness during this time.

My brother arrived a week or so into my hospital stay, and his help was quite useful, too – Korean hospitals expect family members to do a lot of the work done by nurse-assistant types in western hospitals.

By the time I was discharged, I was feeling quite elated, and that lasted until a week or two into my radiation treatment phase, which began in September. As the radiation treatments progressed, my brother left but stepmother visited. I was on a very limited schedule for work, and so I did a lot of daytripping around with them during that long, complicated summer. In early October, I had finished the 30 days of radiation by the time my mother came to visit, but I was also feeling much less elated and much grumpier about my health. Ultimately, it seems that the post-radiation discomforts were mostly permanent – or at the least very long-term.

I have lost a great deal of my sense of taste: especially sweetness – sweet things are kind of just bland. I have a saliva shortage in my mouth, which is the main cause of my difficulty eating – when I chew foods they turn in to dry, unswollowable blobs that my handicapped tongue is unable to push to the appropriate place in my mouth. Sometimes, I will have to shove a finger into my mouth and manually push the bolus of food to the right spot for swallowing. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t really feel comfortable eating in public, anymore. I have to be very careful or can end up with a choking fit. This problem, however, is in ironic conjunction with a horrible phlegm problem in my sinuses and throat such as I never suffered from before the surgery. I am constantly hacking up gobs of nasty gunk, despite having a dry mouth. I experience “ghost” pain sometimes in my my missing nerves in my tongue, neck, and wrist, all places where nerves were severed for the surgery. My tongue gets “sore” after talking a lot, which despite everything, is still a tendency of mine (not to mention my profession, as a language teacher).

I think I have a pretty high tolerance for pain – I almost never take pain medication but suspect that I would be a candidate based on a best guess at comparing my symptoms to those of others. It’s possible that this chronic low-grade, permanent pain (in mouth, tongue, neck, throat) has to do with my affective struggles of, especially, the last few months.

My eating difficulty has had a side effect of being a very effective diet plan. If you want to lose a lot of weight, tongue cancer is a great way to do it! It seems like I have managed to stabilize at about 70 kg.  We’ll see if I can stick with that.

I have been going in on a three-monthly basis to the hospital for CT scans to make sure I’m still cancer-free. In two weeks, I’m due for my first annual scan, which will be more thorough and include a PET scan.

There are times when I feel I made a deal with the devil. I worry that my post-cancer quality-of-life wasn’t “worth it.” Mostly, however, I remain grateful to be alive, knowing that it might not have worked out that way under different circumstances.

I’m going to discontinue these “X months cancer free” blog posts and perhaps even try to avoid discussing the post-cancer aspect of my existence much, as I feel it leads me to dwell more on the negative than I should. This entry is meant to be a kind of closing entry, then. Obviously, if something “new” comes along, I’ll share it.

picture[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: la nuestra es una civilización muy avanzada… Como dice la gente

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Not My Poetry / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

This song came around on my mp3 player and I could not remember the last time I heard it, but I used to like it a lot. I swear I blogged about it before, but I was unable to find any entry about it, so I will blog about it now. 

It has an ecological message – a bit naive, in my opinion. But the entire Re album by Café Tacuba is one of my favorite albums – a masterpiece – and the lyrics are always deep, symbolic, and layered in meanings. Note, for example that the rebellious engineer in this song is named Salvador (AKA Christ). Because this is a Café Tacuba song, that is not an idle reference. 

Anyway, it is a great song from a great album.

What I am listening to right now.

Café Tacuba, "Trópico de Cáncer."

Letra.

Cómo es que te vas Salvador
de la compañía si todavía hay mucho verdor?

Si el progreso es nuestro oficio
y aun queda por ahí mucho indio
que no sabe lo que es vivir en una ciudad…
como la gente.

Que no ves que eres un puente
entre el salvajismo y el modernismo.
Salvador el ingeniero,
Salvador de la humanidad.

Está muy bien lo que tu piensas
pero por qué no,
tú te acuerdas
que la nuestra es una civilización muy avanzada…
Como dice la gente.

Que no ves que nuestra mente
no debe tomar en cuenta:
ecologistas, indigenistas,
retrogradistas, y humanistas.

Ay, mis ingenieros
civiles y asociados,
no crean que no me duele
irme de su lado,
pero es que yo pienso
que ha llegado el tiempo
de darle lugar
a los espacios sin cemento.

Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver
con esa fea relación de acción,
Construcción,
Destrucción,
Ahha.

Cómo es que te vas Salvador
de la compañía si todavía hay mucho verdor?

Ay, mis compañeros petroleros mexicanos,
no crean que no extraño el olor a óleo puro.
Pero es que yo pienso que nosotros los humanos,
no necesitamos
más hidrocarburos.

Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver
Con esa fea relación de acción,
Construcción,
Destrucción,
Ahha.

Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver…

Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver…

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: 서당개 삼 년에 풍월 읊는다

한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

This is an aphorism I ran across online.

서당개 삼 년에 풍월 읊는다
school-dog three year-AT poetry-compose-PRES
After three years a school dog composes poetry.

“Practice makes perfect.” But… if I am the dog in question, having been in Korea for 7 years, I still cannot recite a poem. Err… obviously, I haven’t been studying enough. Do dogs study diligently?
picture[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky

Not My Poetry

An Allegory

I.

A portal as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
Around it rages on unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

II.

And many pass it by with careless tread,
Not knowing that a shadowy …
Tracks every traveller even to where the dead
Wait peacefully for their companion new;
But others, by more curious humour led,
Pause to examine; — these are very few,
And they learn little there, except to know
That shadows follow them where'er they go.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (English poet, 1792-1822)

I'm going to confess I don't quite know what this Allegory is an allegory of. Death?

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: More Korean War Reading

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Having finished that Halberstam book I was working on, last week I started yet another Korean War book, which is also from the collection of books I acquired from my friend Peter when he was leaving the country "forever" last summer (I saw him on Saturday, so his "forever" hasn't worked out). 

FrompusantopanmujomIt's a book by a Korean War general named Paik Sun Yup (백선엽). After Halberstam book, it provides a very interesting and distinct perspective on the War, and I'm enjoying it more than the other book although I find myself speculating too much between the lines about his possible roles in the subsequent dictatorships in South Korea, given General Paik's noted anti-communism. Regardless, I read almost half of it on my low-tech Sunday, and I can recommend it.

According to the wikithing, the General is still alive – see picture below. It's hard to imagine how he must perceive the South Korea of today vis-a-vis his experiences.

225px-ROKA_GEN_PAIK

 [daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: Even hermits need good social skills

Banalities & Journaling

This article (linked) is about the “job” of hermit. Apparently, it requires good social skills.

Interesting.

Meanwhile, my own off-work hermitage was pleasantly interrupted by my friend Peter and my long ago friend Basil (a friendship I have neglected the last few years) who came out to Ilsan to visit me. We had a sort of reunion. . . I met Peter originally through Basil, whom I had gotten to know when he and I were coworkers at LBridge Academy in 2008.

Here is a picture of our reunion at a Starbucks at Madu.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: 복잡한 시간표

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

One Korean word that I use quite frequently is 시간표. It means “schedule” – I use it because it comes up so much at work, and there are so many issues involving the scheduling of classes, etc.
Today we had a sort of “schedule crisis” – that’s how I would describe it. I am of the opinion that KarmaPlus has made its own schedule unnecessarily complicated, but it’s more a consequence of lack-of-planning and the “evolved” nature of it than because of any specific incompetence. In any event, anytime some policy change (e.g. in this case, the new policy “Jared should teach all the advanced level speaking classes for the elementary students”) is decided, there arise numerous scheduling conflicts and problems – in fact, we have 11 cohorts in parallel and only 10 teachers – so you can see where the problems can arise as resources get spread quite thin. Thus, the new schedule (intended for July 1st) failed to represent the intended policy. My reaction was to just shrug and take it in stride, but Ken felt upset because it was something we had fought hard for. Now we are madly struggling to solve the problem, well past the deadline. This is typical in Korea, I guess – at least in hagwonland.
I’m writing about this because in the event of discussing this, I got a bit defensive and got angry. “I didn’t make the f__ing schedule,” I said to Ken and Razel. This was bad behavior, on my part. I agree. Now I feel badly about it. That kind of reaction poisons coworker relationships.
Partly, this event occurred after I had just gotten out of three not-so-well-done classes. I had attempted to “have a fun class” with the elementary kids, since it’s the last day of the old schedule before cohorts get rearranged and new books and levels are started. The kids weren’t getting it, though. After having computer problems during my first class (I was trying to do one of the karaoke-style “CC” classes with them), the second and third classes failed to play by the rules of the game we were trying to play. So I was annoyed with them; we stopped the game and went back to textbook, which was a bummer for everyone. I didn’t lose my temper in class, but I was on a short fuse by the time I got back upstairs to the staff room, and when I got confronted with “why is the schedule like this? This isn’t what we agreed on,” immediately, I blew it.
Thus I’ve spent the last 2 hours feeling repentant and trying to solve the schedule problem, but I can’t. It’s just too complicated. There are universities with less complex schedules than this small 10 teacher hagwon, I swear. A person would need a degree in mathematics with a specialization in graph theory and combinatorics to solve it.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Three Stars of Complexity

Life in Korea / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

“Samsung” means “three stars” in Korean. It is, I reckon, now the most widely known Korean word in the world – although few realize the word means anything more than fancy electronics, and a lot of Americans, for example, have the parochially mistaken belief that the name is Japanese.

I ran across an interesting diagram the other day, that has been circulating online. It shows the complex cross-ownership patterns of the many different “Samsung” companies.

picture

In fact, this wacky diagram (you can click to embiggen) doesn’t even show them all, since there are some Samsung companies that are no longer “related” to the vast Samsung empire held by the Lee family (e.g. Samsung Motors, and automotive company, Korea’s third-largest, that is an owned subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan Group, but which retains the Samsung name for historical and brand-loyalty reasons). Not including these unrelated Samsungs, the Samsung Group allegedly comprises about 20% of the South Korean economy – a fact I first remarked on this here blog 4 years ago.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Looking for matches in a Mexican snowstorm

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Life is a Dream

Mexico City appears much more often in my dreams than seems merited, given I only lived there less than 2 years, and that was almost 30 years ago, now. I suppose it was such an important, formative period for me, though.

I was walking around the neighborhood around the Monumento de la Revolución (which was called “Colonia Revolución” when I lived there but had been renamed “Colonia Tabacaleros” in 2007, the last time I was there – I believe the “renaming” was a reversion to an older name, however). When I lived there in 1986, the Monumento was surrounded by rubble from the 1985 earthquake, though the monument itself had survived just fine. I was out at dawn, looking for matches. Why was I looking for matches? Something about building a campfire – I was cold. I went into several small stores but I was in a linguistic crisis – I could not remember the Spanish word for matches. People would not help me.

This was more like Korea. Or perhaps… it was a flashback to that time when I was freshly arrived in Mexico City and my Spanish was still quite weak. I stepped out of a small store and the rising sun was a vivid, bloody orange just above the peak of Popocatepetl to the east, with the Torre Latinoamericana standing in stark silhouette. But it was cold, and when I turned around, I realized it was starting to snow. I ran down the street taking pictures of the snow on the Mexican streets with my phone. I really did see a fall of snow once, in Mexico City – it is not unheard of, though it is quite rare. But this was a lot of snow, falling now.

I still wanted to buy matches. I stepped into a shop that was called, oddly, “El Museo.” It sold a random collection of things. I succeeded in explaining to the clerk, through mime, that I wanted matches, but she said she did not have any. She was being fatalistic about these things, in the Mexican way: es que no hay. She shrugged, and suddenly decided that she needed, desperately, to sell me some comic books. These were those bound collections of humorous or dramatic stories and vignettes in cartoon form that were so ubiquitous when I lived there – strangely, I have a collection of “Condorito” humor cartoons on my shelf here in Korea, which I have no idea how or why it followed me here. It may have been accidentally included in some box I mailed to myself.

Anyway, she succeeded in selling me a collection of humor vignettes wrapped in plastic. I stepped out in the snowy Mexican morning, still without matches. I unwrapped the book and opened it to find that the cartoons included were my characters – my alligators and aliens, etc. I was only fascinated, and puzzled, as to how they had gotten there. The Spanish dialogue was interspersed with Korean, and the jokes made no sense.

I went into the VIPS restaurant (a kind of Dennys clone, with a Mexican twist, and unrelated to the Korean chain also called VIPS) that is a few blocks south of the Monumento, to get out of the snow. I met my father (this makes sense, since I remember he and I went there once to eat when I took my father to visit my old haunts there in 2007 – though it was summer then). With my father was my hyperactive 4th grade student Hyeongyu, whom my father was dealing with quite well. They had ordered a plate of chilaquiles. The waitress seemed relieved to find someone who would speak Spanish at the table when I arrived, and she started complaining about Hyeongyu, who had been under the table playing.

I was showing my father the pictures I had taken on my phone of the snow on the Monumento. Then I woke up. The sun was just rising – it was before 6 am and at the summer solstice the sun rises quite early in Korea, given we are on the eastern edge of our meridional time zone.

I was unable to go back to sleep.

Unrelatedly, I found a strange video about escaping from a prison area called Writer’s Block (if the embed fails to work properly, which seems possible given how it seems non-standard in some way, here is a link). [UPDATE 2023-05-13: depressingly, the video has apparently irreplaceably disappeared – depressing internet linkrot at its best… ]

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 3.5km]

Caveat: God’s Alive! Run, Bob Dylan

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Not My Poetry

One of the worst cases of mis-heard lyrics I've ever experienced was with this song by Korn called "Got the Life." I love the song, though it's a bit dark and depressing, I suppose. The song's main chorus and title are the words "Got the life." I always heard this as "God's Alive," which – given the atmospherics of the song, as well as rest of the oeuvre of the boys from Bakersfield – I assumed was meant ironically in some way. Further, there's a line which is just nonsense: "Dance with me / Rumbiddieboo." I always heard it as "Dance with me / Run, Bob Dylan." 

Personally, I prefer the way I heard the song to the way it actually goes, so even after learning the correct lyrics, I still imagine my own personal version when I hear the song:

"God's Alive! Run, Bob Dylan." 

What I'm listening to right now.

Korn, "Got The Life."

Lyrics.

Hate, something, sometime, someway,
something kick on the front floor.
Mine? Something, inside.
I'll never ever follow.
So give.. me.. some.. thing.. that.. is.. for.. real.
I'll never ever follow.
Get your boogie on…
Hate, something, someway, each day, feeling ripped off again.
Why? This shit inside.
Now everyone will follow.
So give.. me.. noth.. ing.. just.. feel.
And now this shit will follow.
God thinks we will never see the light, who wants to see?
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I see…
God thinks we will never see the light, who wants to see?
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I say…
Oh, I see
Each day I can feel it swallow, inside something they took from me.
I don't feel your deathly ways.
Each day i feel so hollow, inside I was beating me,
You will never see, so come dance with me.
Dance with me
Rumbiddieboo
Rum bum dee dum dee bum diddie doo
ME!
God thinks we will never see the light, who wants to see?
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I see…
God thinks we will never see the light, who wants to see?
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I say…
Got the life.
Got… the… life.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Trip of a Lifetime

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

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]

Caveat: Hell for Leather

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

I ran across the expression "hell for leather" in the Halberstam book I've been reading, and had to admit I'd never seen it before – I had to look it up.

It apparently means to do something doggedly or recklessly – the latter meaning seems to be under the influence of a different, unrelated expression, "hell bent." The most plausible etymology was that it refers to the effects that an arduous journey had, in the 19th century, on shoes (i.e. "leather"). To take a long, dogged, difficult trip was "hell for leather." Hence the primary meaning of doing something arduous in a dogged fashion. The phrase "hell bent," however, had influenced the meaning of the expression by the beginning of the 20th century, and I think the soldier Halberstam is citing as using the phrase means it more as "to do something recklessly and at great speed."

Having finished the book yesterday, I will say I'm not as disappointed in it as my friend Peter (who gave me the book, I believe, if not quite intentionally). I think ultimately with a modified title it would have been much less disappointing. Halberstam's title is "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War".  I would only change the subtitle: "The Coldest Winter: How Douglas MacArthur's Mistakes in Korea Led to America's Disaster in Vietnam." That about sums up the book, and with that narrower title, one could be more comfortable with the book's many omissions.

[daily log: walking, km]

Caveat: Monthly Monkeywash

Banalities & Journaling

pictureI brought home my minneapolitan rainbow monkeys (bought at the Minneapolis-St Paul Airport in 2012) because they needed to be washed. So they took a spin in my washing machine with a load of laundry.

The children, especially my Copernicus반, are quite fond of these monkeys with their magnets (which stick to the whiteboards) and stupid smiles and the stories I tell of how their job is to be eaten by the alligator-du-jour (currently named David). The monkeys’ names are therefore Breakfast and Dinner. There is also a small, white, stuffed mouse named Lunch. I think the two monkeys are enjoying their vacation away from the alligator, however, and like hanging out on my laundry-drying rack.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Soñé vagar por bosques de palmeras

Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Not My Poetry

Las Hadas

140px-JorgeisaacsSoñé vagar por bosques de palmeras
cuyos blondos plumajes, al hundir
su disco el Sol en las lejanas sierras,
cruzaban resplandores de rubí.

Del terso lago se tiñó de rosa
la superficie límpida y azul,
y a sus orillas garzas y palomas
posábanse en los sauces y bambús.

Muda la tarde ante la noche muda
las gasas de su manto recogió;
del indo mar dormido en las espumas
la luna hallóla y a sus pies el sol.

Ven conmigo a vagar bajo las selvas
donde las Hadas templan mi laúd;
ellas me han dicho que conmigo sueñas,
que me harán inmortal si me amas tú.

– Jorge Isaacs (poeta colombiano, 1837-1895)

 [daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Autoarcheological Activities

Banalities & Journaling

I am sometimes reluctant to expose too much of myself in this blog. Then, other times I lapse into an ardent, navel-gazing confessionalism. This morning, while looking for some writeable DVDs in my closet (which I never found, though I distinctly remember purchasing them), I happened across one of my old paper journals which had gotten separated from the main collection. This collection I carry around with me, and on rare occasions I will dig into it, fish something out, and use it in some way: for my current efforts at novel-writing or to “retroblog” it here in bloggolandia. I suppose it’s a bit autobiographical, but because of the need to sometimes guess at the date or context of a given bit of writing or drawing, it’s really more like “autoarcheology.”

The journal I found was from 1983~1984 (my first year of college), with some loose pages inserted, oddly, from 1998. Actually, finding loose pages from 1998 happens all the time to me – that year was quite prolific in journal-writing terms (perhaps my most prolific, at least until blogification) but the year was also intensely disorganized, hence the loose-leaf pages have ended up in all kinds of strange or unexpected places.

How everything – this whole collection – has managed to follow me to Korea might seem a bit mysterious. In fact, I was more organized at some point in the early 2000’s, and I had consolidated all my paper writing in a clearly marked box, which, when I realized my stay in Korea was evolving towards permanency in 2009, I mailed to myself. Once the box arrived here, however, it exploded in several bouts of nostalgia and its contents has since been fairly evenly distributed among my boxes and closets and folders here in Korea.

After a mostly unproductive, cancerous year, my retroblog has seemed nigh moribund. I decided to post two things I ran across this morning. One is a rather-compelling (to me, anyway – YMMV) bit of poemy prose from winter, 1984, and the other is a drawing with accompanying enigmatic inscription from the previous summer.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Children Climbing the Walls and Learning Racism…

Banalities & Journaling

… not at the same time, though.

Well, there are good days and bad days. Lately, I think my affect has been improving, despite the recent bout of stomach problems and other annoying but minor health issues. Earlier today, I was feeling pretty positive.

Then I had a bad day. I felt unable to my control my elementary classes, and I sat, exhausted after only three classes, wondering what I was doing wrong. Today I feel like kids were quite literally climbing the walls: there were three boys who somehow managed to start a competition at the back of the classroom to see who could jump highest against the wall, trying to touch a part of the door frame, all while I was going desk-to-desk checking homework. It looked like they were, indeed, climbing the walls. 

Then to cap things off I had one of those "only in Korea" experiences that many people would dismiss out of hand but that left a very bitter taste in my mouth. Sometimes when we have new potential students come to the hagwon, I'm asked to do a "native-speaker" interview to find out the potential student's ability level in English. I went in to interview a young student and she immediately freaked out and started to cry – she was in first or second grade, and sometimes kids react strangely. I wasn't bothered – I ran out and went to get one of my puppets to maybe try to play with the her and calm her down. When I got back to the interview room, though, buwonjangnim told me to skip the interview, as the girl was "afraid of foreigners" – according to the mom.

I have a problem with this way of conceptualizing the problem: this is, in my opinion, the exact way that racism is created and perpetuated. The child's reaction was innocent, I prefer to assume. Something in my manner, or appearance – or even just the stress of being "interviewed" for enrollment at hagwon – startled her and she reacted, but I sincerely believe that children that age are not yet set in their attitudes about "foreigners" as a separate class of humans. The mother, by using the language that she did, and characterizing her daughter's reaction in that way so matter-of-factly, is teaching the child about racial difference and legitimizing her reaction. Everyone, including my coworkers at the hagwon, shrugged it off as "normal" and no big deal. I, however, quickly dropped into a doomy, gloomy feeling full of thoughts such as, "Well I should perhaps just get out of here, then."

[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]

Caveat: I’m dead and I’m perfectly content

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Not My Poetry

The last few days, I have been suffering from some kind of minor but unpleasant stomach flu, I think – or some kind of minor problem from something I ate. I had bought some vegetables from the Lotte Supermarket which in retrospect may have been a bit questionable. I'd used them on Saturday to make a mild curry sauce which wasn't particularly delicious or easy to eat in any event, and then this consequence followed. 

Oh well.

Work is easier at the moment, with a somewhat reduced teaching schedule since the middle-schoolers are now in exam-prep classes for their Spring exams. I slept 10 hours last night – some kind of recent record.

What I'm listening to right now.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, "The Songs That We Sing."

Lyrics

I saw somebody who
Reminded me of you
Before you got afraid
I wish that you could've stayed that way

I saw a little girl
I stopped and smiled at her
She screamed and ran away
It happens to me more and more these days

And these songs that you sing
Do they mean anything
To the people you're singing them to
People like you

I saw a photograph
A woman in a bath of hundred dollar bills
If the cold doesn't kill her, money will

I read a magazine
That said by seventeen
Your life was at an end
I'm dead and I'm perfectly content

And these songs that I sing
Do they mean anything
To the people I'm singing them to
People like you

And these songs that we sing
Do they mean anything
To the people we're singing them to
Tonight they do

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: On prospects dreaer

Not My Poetry

To A Mouse

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

pictureI’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell –
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

pictureBut Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me;
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects dreaer!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

– Robert Burns (Scottish poet, 1759-1796)

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: 호랑이 더러 고기를 달란다

한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

This is an aphorism from my aphorism book.

호랑이 더러 고기를 달란다

ho.rang.i deo.reo go.gi.reul dal.lan.da

tiger some meat-OBJ ask-for-PRES

[He] asks a tiger for some meat.

Which is to say, the asking of the impossible. I was puzzled by the word 더러, here. I surfed the dictionary for a while and decided it must mean something like “some” or “a bit of.”  I’m not very confident of that, however.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 1 m]

Caveat: 왜저래❤ AKA Mr What-the-Heck

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“왜저래” [weh-jeo-rae] is my “korean name” though it very much a joke, since its meaning is something like “what the heck?” When students call me “Weh-jeo-rae-saem” it’s like they’re saying “Mr What-the-Heck.”

pictureThe other day in class I found this (at right) written on the board at the end of class – I’d already left the room and come back to get some stuff I’d left in the room, so the author of the note was annonymous. It’s nice to know that I’m appreciated.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking km]

Caveat: Reality

Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

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]

Caveat: Mouse Torture

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / My Photos / The Wonders of Work

I have a stuffed toy mouse whose name is “Lunch” – because his job is to be eaten by the Alligator (who in his current incarnation is named “David”).

Lunch sometimes comes to my elementary classes because the kids like to play with him. Yesterday, my Betelgeuse반 kids (first and second graders) started torturing Lunch. The placed him on the floor under the end of a chair-leg. I caught them and took a picture with my phone. They were proud of their mistreatment of the mouse – as kids can be cruel.

Mousetorture_520

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: 흙

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I added a new word to my Korean active vocabulary today: 흙 [heuk = dirt].

Why am I now able to talk about dirt in Korean?

I had a plant – a flowering houseplant whose identity I don’t know well, but it was given to me while I was in the hospital last summer by my friend Seungbae (who is now a proud resident of Mexico City, believe it or not). My brother Andrew attached the flowerpot to the top of my IV cart, decoratively – here is a picture.

Flowerpot_580

In fact, the flower is the longest-lived houseplant I’ve had since my time with Michelle in the 1990’s. I’ve made several attempts to keep houseplants but I seem to have a singular talent for neglecting them, and they die.

So this plant has lived nearly a year, and I feel some small attachment to it. The thing was looking droopy and forlorn lately, and I decided it needed an infusion of new, higher-quality dirt. So I got linguistically brave and ventured into the neighborhood plant shop and with my dictionary I figured out how to ask for 화분용 흙 [hwabunyong heuk = flowerpot-use dirt], and bought a bag of dirt.

I did a transplant of my little flower to some new dirt. Now I have all this left over dirt, and I’m thinking of buying another plant. Let’s all pray for their survival at my unproficient ministrations.

Dirt_520

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 7 km]

Caveat: expediency determines the form

Not My Poetry / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism 
The Past Is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.
- Marianne Moore (American poet, 1887-1972)

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: … and War Dreaming

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

I suppose having read detailed war history all day yesterday, it was to be expected: I dreamed war dreams. They were quite odd, however. The war was being conducted mostly at KarmaPlus hagwon, where I work, and the soldiers were the elementary students. Their weapons consisted mostly of small index cards of different colors, such as I give the students for writing their speeches and notes for debate classes. They would draw various weapons on the cards then put them down in places in the hallway and other students would move theirs around. It was more like chess than war, in some ways – but a kind of free-form chess played on a very large and variegated board.

I think the dream had its origins in the detailed battle-maps of Halberstam's book, with their conventialized, rectangular representations of various units – companies, batallions, regiments, etc. – just like index cards.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

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