My student, Dong-uk, drew this portrait of me last night, during class, and presented it to me proudly. The likeness is disturbing.
The text he wrote:
WANTED
Jared Way (AKA 왜저래 [wae-jeo-rae = “what the heck?” but very similar to my name in Korean order – a running gag])
A little bit alchol [hmm really? looks like it, but … not accurate, I swear]
Doesn’t smoke
K a r m a E n g l i s h A c a d e m y
1,000,000,000$
Each Thursday there is a little staff meeting at work. It’s generally in Korean, so I don’t worry too much about paying attention, as I know that if some point or aspect is important and relevant to me in particular, someone will make sure I’ve understood. Not to mention the fact that the meeting always starts at around 3:30, which is when I actually have a class to go teach.
On the little meeting agendas that the boss makes and hands out, he is fond of putting these little pep-talks or aphorisms or proverbs. For some reason, I more-or-less understood the one on yesterday’s. It said: “가르친다는 것은 오직 희망만을 얘기하는 것이다.” Roughly, it means: “Teaching is nothing more than talking about [or encouraging] hope.” I thought it was a nice thought.
Yesterday was one of those days when I’m reminded of why I have decided that teaching is the right sort of job for me. It was one of those days when I start grumpy and end happy. It’s the only job I’ve ever had where it often (though, obviously, not always) works that way.
I was feeling really frustrated and down after yesterday, and after sleeping badly, and feeling unhealthy and all that, besides. Not to mention the fact that some charmless woman on the street accidentally wacked me in the face with her umbrella on the way to work.
But then I had 6 hours of good classes. All strung along in a row. Each different, but each positive or successful in some small way. Connecting with kids, or having fun, or joking around, or making a point and being taken seriously.
So by the end of the day, I still felt tired, but I felt positive about my work, anyway. My boss asked me if I agreed with his little aphorism, mentioned above. “Well, not completely,” I extemporized.
“You always have to argue,” he joked, shaking his head in false exasperation. It’s a bit of a running gag, I suppose. It’s one way in which I am utterly, characteristically un-Korean, this business of declaring my differing opinion to my coworkers or boss. Korean culture is full of agreement and (verbal) harmony and lip service and (feigned) consensus. The proper Korean answer to his question would be, “Yes, boss.”
A couple of the highlights from the students.
A girl named Eun-sol (who I don’t actually have for a class right now) saw me in the hall between classes and when I said “How are you?” she said, triumphantly, “I’m not hungry.” Normally, this would be a non-sequitur, but with Eun-sol, it made perfect sense, and was funny. Eun-sol is always hungry. And I joke with her about it. So she was reporting a major accomplishment, or life-milestone, in not being hungry. It seems small, but these are the “real communicative moments” that make language-teaching seem interesting, to me.
Later, in another lowish-level class, a we had read a passage about history. Some European war that is utterly contextless and meaningless to these Korean kids, who aren’t even exposed to non-Asian history or social studies in the public school curriculum until sometime in high school. So after talking about it a little bit, I asked what seemed a not-too-difficult question: when was the war? The date was right in the passage, on the page in front of them – one of them was bound to figure it out. But the silence was epic. And it lasted a long time, against further hintings and promptings. Finally a boy named Hyeong-uk tentatively raised his hand. Excitedly, I called on him, and repeated the question, “when was the war?”
“Past,” he answered, deadpan.
I had to laugh, of course. This was brilliant, both in being indisputably correct and yet utterly devoid of useful information. I couldn’t stop chuckling about it, for the rest of the class, in fact. Sometimes when students say exceptionally clever, funny things, I will write them on the board, in a corner, so we can admire them. That’s what I did.
Working in an environment where everyone has a cellphone with a camera, it’s inevitable that students take pictures of you, I suppose. I got this picture (at right) attacthed to a text message the other day. It’s kind of small format – but it’s a montage of four candidish pictures of me taken with a cell phone, and the word “smile” in the middle.
What is this, an homage? Some kid killing time, I guess. I’m glad I make them think of smiling, right?
I was really exhausted after work yesterday. We’re getting a lot of new students, which is a typical part of the hagwon business cycle, since it’s summer vacation and parents are looking for ways to offload their kids – what better way than to enroll them in a hagwon or three? But anyway… I don’t have much to say. New students are a lot of work, mostly because of the shambolic curriculum, meaning that each new student requires a great deal of photocopying of materials and “catch-up” counselling. One thing I really appreciated at LBridge, in retrospect, was how smoothly incoming students were integrated into the tightly programmed curriculum. Because all the teachers followed the same texts, in the same pattern, on a published (via website) schedule, new students and the intake (front-desk) people could find out where the student should be and what materials they needed before they even came to class. Often, kids would show up for their first class already having done the homework, even.
OK – it’s easy to wax nostalgic for previous experiences – there were things that made LBridge a terrible place to work, too. So each place has its positives and negatives, right? I’m going through one of those inadequate-feeling phases with work, I suppose.
I was watching Colbert, thought this was very funny: he’s interviewing “Ham Rove” – a stand-in for Karl Rove. Note that’s a Sauron figurine behind Ham Rove to the far right. I think Sauron is Obama. Colbert definitely has his funny moments.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature is our teacher.”
This is #77 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
75. 자연에 순응하면 몸과 마음이 편안하다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tranquility of body and mind as they accommodate [the demands of] nature.”
76. 자연이 생명 순환의 법칙이라는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature follows the law of life cycles.”
77. 자연이 우리들의 스승이라는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-seventh affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature is our teacher.”
There are pigeons that keep crashing into my windows. What are they trying to teach me?
I was dreaming…
that I was trying to explain “the dialectic” to someone. I said that it’s like if you are showing how thinking about a story about a girl isn’t really about a girl. I pulled up an image of a girl, a kind of black-and-white, 1950’s photograph of a rather nondescript girl. “This girl looks like… just a girl. But the dialectic is realizing that something else is actually going on,” I explained.
I said to my invisible interlocutor, “It’s about that moment when you wake up.”
And then I woke up. It was perhaps 11 pm. I had fallen asleep with my face in the book – very much not my tendency or habit, these days. I had fallen asleep, while studying.
This was a former character trait of mine; I was reprising it from years ago: it’s from old, academic years. It developed due to the inevitable sleep deprivations of graduate school, perhaps.
The air around me was close and thick and hot – my window was open, but the earlier rain had stopped. The florescent light, on in the apartment directly across the alley from mine, seemed extraordinarily, unnaturally bright. It was shining rudely out and illuminating all the unmovingness outside with its overconfident yet highly limited repertoire of wavelengths. I listened to the sounds of the city, vague echoes of a woman singing, buses trundling past on the Jungang-no. I lay very still.
And I lay there, breathing a little bit fast, feeling like I was on the edge of understanding. I felt surprised at how I could have just woken myself up from a dream by suggesting, in the dream, that I could reach a moment of understanding at the moment of waking up. Really, it was nothing short of startling myself awake by confronting the concept of waking up.
The clear image of that story about the girl, from the dream, was falling apart very quickly, like a wet piece of tissue paper. I’m not sure it was important, though. It didn’t feel important, at all, to what had just happened. It was arbitrary, I felt myself thinking. I watched myself thinking….
I tried to visualize a slug walking along the edge of a very sharp knife: it just doesn’t work. Not funny. What if it was a fly, landing on that edge – would it… hurt itself? I was momentarily embedded in the digression of a Haruki Murakami novel. I’d been working on digressions earlier in the day – my own writing. Polishing a few novelistic digressions, like so much antique silverware – wishing they were whales.
I feel like this strange, crystaline moment hasn’t brought me one iota closer to understanding the dialectic; but it was nevertheless a very surprising, lucid dream. It was like an epiphany devoid of epiphanic content. Epiphany for epiphany’s sake.
One might ask, why was I dreaming definitions of the dialectic? The answer is not so obscure… I’d fallen asleep reading a recently purchased book: Valences of the Dialectic, by Fredric Jameson. I’m barely to page 15, in the first chapter, which bears the title, “Three names of the dialectic.” How about that Diego Rivera on the cover, by the way?
I’ll get back to you if I figure it out. I might not figure it out, though. I’ve not made much progress with feeling comfortable with this essential philosphical tool, over the years. Perhaps I’ve always invested too much in it. Perhaps, with Karl Popper, I am at core uncomfortable with the seeming solution-in-contradiction. But I’m particularly drawn to it as it is so ancient, so inherent – it’s one of the underlying intellectual tools that unifies Eastern and Western philosohpy. It is possibly something innate… even structural, a la Chomsky’s “language faculty.” A dialectical instinct? The insight presented by the dream, if any, is that there exists the possibility of a sort of recursive definition of dialectical practice.
Hmm… recursion as praxis? That’s a whole other post, maybe.
I needed to get out of the house yesterday. I took a long walk – along a route I took before… some years ago. I took the subway into the city and got off at Oksu, on the north bank of the rain-swollen Han River. I walked across the bridge into Apgujeong. From there I went to Gangnam, and after stopping at my favorite bookstore, I ended up at GyoDae (University of Education). I walked maybe 7 or 8 km. It was heavily overcast but it wasn’t raining. It was kind of steamy hot. I took a few pictures.
Looking back down the stairs up to the bridge. The subway runs in the median of the bridge, that’s Oksu station on the right.
I love the view along the river, here. For some reason it makes me think of Italy – maybe it’s the arches along the river bank and the way the buildings climb the hillside.
The bridge itself, with its embedded subway tracks and industrial feel, is New Yorkish.
Apgujeong (and all of Gangnam) is a very high-rent area. I would compare it to New York’s Upper East Side, LA’s Westwood/Brentwood.
But there is still the occasional cardboard-carting ajeossi, blocking the forward progress of honking Mercedeses.
The view at dusk looking east along Teheranno, one of Gangnam’s main drags, just west of its intersection with Gangnamdaero.
Here is a rather famous recently-constructed building that even had a write-up in the Economist, if I recall correctly. It’s your basic glass-and-steel box skyscraper, right? But it’s wavy. Wiggly. And there’s a giant sculpture of golden hands, holding up the sky, in front – you could stand under the outstretched hands to shelter from the rain, for example.
By the time I was headed home on the subway, it was starting to rain again. Just a sort of humid drizzle. I got home and made some tricolor rotini pasta with olives and pesto (I found jars of pre-made pesto at the Orange Mart across the street).
I did a lot of reading today.
Miscellany….
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” – Oscar Wilde
I took an online quiz that told me what kind of philosopher I am. It turns out I’m a stoic – I was linked to Zeno of Citium. The modern meaning of “stoic,” by the way, doesn’t really capture the original nature of the tradition. Here is Seneca, perhaps one of the best known exponents of stoicism in its classical incarnation: “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
Here’s an interesting thought: does my stoic orientation, combined with my sometime pursuit of mahayana meditation, make me a zen zenoist? Or maybe a follower of Zeno is a “zenist”?
Here is a vaguely arty photograph I took in 1983, of the mountains east of Eureka (near Kneeland, I think).
I’m a “faith-based atheist.”
What in the world is that?
It means that, unlike an agnostic, I’m certain about god: specifically, that there isn’t one. But such certainty isn’t something that submits to any kind of objective proof: just as the religious person must accept the existence of his or her god(s) as a matter of faith, so must the true atheist rely on belief over material evidence – after all, how do you prove god doesn’t exist? Anything short of this standard-of-proof makes one an agnostic, not an atheist.
What’s still more difficult, is to strive for an ethical existence when the most commonly invoked “cause” (or source) of human ethics (namely, the alleged “higher powers”) have been unequivocally rejected. It seems to me that the only ethical atheist is one who accepts that his or her belief is indeed just that – a belief, not a demonstrated “fact.”
Atheists who assert some kind of exceptionalism for their own beliefs vis-a-vis the beliefs of non-atheists strike me as hypocritical. I’m profoundly uncomfortable with many atheists – of the secular-humanist stripe – who attempt to position themselves as rationalists – I think it’s not only philosophically perilous but ultimately unethical due to this inherent hypocrisy.
Despite this, I’m also displeased with the tendency of humanists (again, i.e. “secular humanists”) to categorically place human beings in the center of things. Such pre- (or even anti-) Copernican posturing is just as irrational as the traditional, god-centered systems they presume to criticize – in my judgement, anyway.
With the categorical rejection of the transcendental and god-centric, I believe that there must come a similarly vehement rejection of the anthropocentric. So… but what’s left, then?
Let me get back to you on that one. Does this make me sound like a nihilist? This is a possibility. I’m most comfortable with a sort of aesthetic take on the whole matter, a la Robinson Jeffers Inhumanism. But that doesn’t really resolve the epistemological issues – which are what seem to most interest me.
Another issue is how I can reconcile my committed atheism with my frequent self-description as a “Buddhist.” However, one has to understand that Buddhism, in most conceptions, is doctrinally agnostic with respect to the theist question. To attempt to paraphrase Gautama Siddhartha, as I have understood it: when asked about the existence of deities or God, he reportedly answered that, like everything else, it was both true and not true. Thus there is room within Buddhism for both atheists and theists, as well as whatever falls in between.
[Last updated 2015-10-08]
Lately, because of facebook, I’ve been “reconnecting” with people I haven’t interacted with or known about for up to 25 years. People from high school! Jeannine, Kray, Richard…. People from elementary school! Tammy. People from the Mexico City time! Aura, Vlady.
Anyway, questions crop up: Didn’t you go to university in Missouri? (No, it was Minnesota). I heard you joined the Army? (Yes). Is it true you were married? (Yes). And then you got divorced? (Um, not exactly – separated-then-widowed).
Being a fundamentally lazy person, I have decided to answer a whole pile of these questions at once. I’ve created a year-by-year timeline of my life-since-high-school. Each year has 2 to 6 telegraphic sentences summarizing what I recall as the salient aspects of that year.
I can now point interested people to it – if they’re interested. More me out there, for all the world to see: I believe in transparency – it cleanses the soul.
[UPDATE 2021-05-20: While doing some link-rot maintenance, it came to my attention that I posted almost exactly this blog-post 2 years before, here. Anyway, the below timeline is out-of-date by about a decade, now, and it’s long been superceded by my Year-In-Six-Sentences category.]
Timeline
[Last updated 2011-07-31]
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature follows the law of life cycles.”
This is #76 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
74. 무지개의 황홀함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the ecstacy of rainbows.”
75. 자연에 순응하면 몸과 마음이 편안하다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tranquility of body and mind as they accommodate [the demands of] nature.”
76. 자연이 생명 순환의 법칙이라는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-sixth affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature follows the law of life cycles.”
Once again, I took some liberties in trying to translate this. There’s no word “follows” in the above – the phrase is, literally, roughly something like “…become aware of [the fact] that nature is a law of life cycle(s).” The nominalized copula suffix -이라는 것- fulfills the “[the fact] that… is” role, but I think “follows” captures the meaning better in English. I’m just pleased I was even able to recognize and more or less understand the convoluted use of the copula – this is so common in Korean but I’m still really bad at recognizing what’s going on.
I’ve decided to dedicate my little “holiday” to being eremetic and trying to “study”: study Korean, study my various literary pursuits, study the monkey mind (aka trying to meditate).
My friends and coworkers no doubt would find this a stunningly boring way to spend a holiday, but I am so often a rather unsocial person, and I’ve reached a sort of general acceptance and possibly even comfort level (meaning a most-of-the-time acceptance, and ambivalent comfort level, I suppose) with my mostly solitary nature.
I’m not sure if this “solitary nature” is part of the “nature” referred to above in the affirmation.
Working at my current hagwon is definitely “old school” Korea, in some ways. I suppose what I mean is that it’s a small business, where the human relationships are what dominate the employer-employee interactions, as opposed to the pseudo-professional character of the big chain hagwon (such as I experienced at LBridge) or the bureaucratic-but-hopefully-benign neglect that seems to reign in public schools (such as I experienced at Hongong Chodeung – minus the benignity).
This was underscored for me last night. Our hagwon is going to have a short little couple-of-days-vacation (not because it wants to – it’s a new provincial-level regulation that’s being forced on all the hagwon industry, apparently). Curt gave a little speech thanking all the hard work from the teachers and staff (July has been a tough month, the combination of increased class offerings and enrollment due to summer vacation, combined with Grace being on her long vacation meaning we’re short one teacher).
Then he handed out envelopes of cash.
I suppose there might be, um, er, “tax reasons” for handing out envelopes of cash, too – as opposed to simply paying higher salaries. But there’s nothing like two crisp gold-colored bills to make one feel appreciated, eh? The note reads “즐거운 휴가 되세요^^ 감사합니다.” [Have a pleasant holiday^^ Thank you.] Actually, I knew Curt did things like this – I’ve witnessed him doing it before, but had never been on the receiving end of it up until now.
Tangentially, below is a picture from the bathroom window at work. It was raining, and something in the view of all the apartment tower blocks seemed stark yet somehow iconic of life in high-density Ilsan. Remember, although this looks like something an American would call “housing projects,” in Korea this is upper-middle class. Everyone has a car in the underground parking garages. All the kids want to go to Harvard or Oxford or Yonsei or KAIST. One thing that is striking for me, about Ilsan, is that, because it’s one of the “oldest” of the 신도시 [sin-do-si = “New City”], it is lushly populated by large, healthy trees: apartment towers in a forest.
This is stunning information – but entirely in keeping with what's been going on: Apple Now Has More Cash Than the U.S. Government. As of July 28th.
This is so depressing.
Returning, once again, to the theme of densities and cities and sustainability, I saw the following TED video (if you’re not familiar with TED, it’s worth going and looking around). I’ll let the guy do the talking.
[UPDATE: the link to the TED talk rotted… and I don’t even know what the title was. It’s unrecoverable knowledge. Yay, internet!]
I am one of those people who’s a little bit distrustful of facebook. I worry about how it “owns” my social network. It’s partly why I mostly stick to posting and maintaining this blog, instead, where I more explicitly control the content and can curate its exposure to the world.
Having said that, facebook has proved an amazing experience from the standpoint of how it makes possible the renovation of old friendships, the rediscovery of long-lost friends and acquaintances. The other day I got a message and a “friend request” from someone I hadn’t heard from in 25 years – she’d been a good friend of mine when I lived in Mexico City. She’d invited me to meet her family and relatives in El Salvador, too, and I had gone in early September, 1986 – at the height of the civil war there. I remember going through army and guerrilla checkpoints, and the eerie normalcy of helicopter gunships flying overhead and truckloads of armed men racing down the highways.
She’d been a student of mine (although older than me) in my volunteer English class (that I gave at my workplace), but because of our friendship, she ultimately became one of my most important Spanish teachers. Even today, I would say some of the verbal “tics” of my colloquial Spanish have recognizable echoes of her use of the language.
I suppose I’m thinking of this in part because that summer and fall in Mexico City were the point in time when I feel I reached that “critical mass” of linguistic fluency. And it happened so quickly. And my current efforts to learn Korean are clearly hampered in part by the lack of any such parallel “teaching” friendship in my current life’s constellations.
Here is a picture, which I scanned some years ago, showing me and her and some of her relatives on the pier in La Libertad, El Salvador. I am standing a bit off to the side on the left, looking a little bit dazed (which was a frequent expression for me during that strange, immersive, whirlwind trip). I think it’s funny that my hairstyle looks like a Korean pop-star’s or something. Sorry that the picture is pretty poor resolution – it is ancient and scanned.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tranquility of body and mind as they accommodate [the demands of] nature.”
This is #75 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
73. 새싹들의 강인함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tenacity of a sprouting plant.”
74. 무지개의 황홀함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the ecstacy of rainbows.”
75. 자연에 순응하면 몸과 마음이 편안하다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-fifth affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tranquility of body and mind as they accommodate [the demands of] nature.”
Not feeling particular tranquility lately.
There were some nice thunderstorms yesterday and last night.
I've definitely returned to hagwon work – I put in 11 hours yesterday. It's going to be a long week.
But then, as people know, I have workaholic tendencies, given the right motivational structures. The public school job was structured in such a way that workaholism was essentially irrelevant if not downright impossible, and all those idle hours took a weird kind of toll on my psyche, maybe. I seem to seek out and/or prefer the psychic toll exacted by working too much over that correlated with working too little. Is this virtue? I actually don't think so. It's escapism and reality-avoidance, mostly. Just like those years in Burbank, the 80 hour weeks. The year in Long Beach / Newport Beach took it a step too far, and the 100 hour workweek was unsustainable.
OK, this is rambling and not going anywhere and vaguely self-hating. Whatever.
A few years back I discovered trolleyology.
Well, I already knew about trolleyology, but I didn’t know that was what it was called. Recently, I ran across it again. Trolleyology is the philosophical practice of setting up hypothetical ethical conundrums involving out-of-control trolleys racing down tracks about to kill oddly helpless innocent bystanders. Just as an example, from my recent re-encounter with them (linked above):
A runaway trolley is coming down the track. It is headed towards five people who cannot get out of its way. A passerby realizes that if he pushes a nearby fat man onto the tracks his bulk will stop the trolley before it hits the five, though the fat man himself will be killed.
The question being: is it right or wrong to sacrifice the fat man to save the five? There’s another conundrum here, far too complicated and full of philosophers’ inside jokes. The picture (above right) shows the Green Line trolley at 43rd Street along Baltimore Avenue, half a block from my apartment where I lived in West Philadelphia in 1995, when I was starting graduate school. Not shown in the picture: five helpless innocents just out view to the left, down the hill, tied to the tracks – just another day in West Philly, after all.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore–
And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
– by Langston Hughes
I don't know. My dreams are feeling deferred, today. So I wondered.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the ecstasy of rainbows.”
This is #74 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
72. 시냇물 소리의 시원함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the brightness of a running brook’s sound.”
73. 새싹들의 강인함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tenacity of a sprouting plant.”
74. 무지개의 황홀함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-fourth affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the ecstasy of rainbows.”
That sounds like it should be a poem.
I have been doing nothing but working. I didn’t see a rainbow.
What I'm listening to right now.
Depeche Mode – Waiting for the Night. You know how a particular piece of music gets associated with a place? This track is forever linked in my mind with the Golden State Freeway (I-5) between Burbank and Glendale – the start of my commute home from work for several years.
I’m struggling with the fact that I’m actually enjoying work more, now that I’m teaching 35 class-hours a week. It’s because I derive positive energy out of being in the classroom with the kids, whereas I generally find sitting in the staff room dinking around with prep work (or trying to write textbooks) depressing and dull. But there’s a burnout aspect out of pushing this hard, too – it’s fulfilling but not sustainable, maybe. I don’t know.
I’m doing OK – I’m doing almost nothing aside from working, lately. I’ve set aside my two main hobbies: fiction and/or poetry writing, and trying to study Korean. I haven’t been jogging every evening like I was before this hard push at work, too. Good habits die so easily, don’t they? I had barely got the thing off the ground, and all it took was a few nights of “oh-I’m-too-tired.” Well.
What I’m listening to right now.
The Fray – Cover of Kanye West’s “Heartless.” I like the video a lot too – talk about awesome animation capturing teen nerd-angst.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tenacity of a sprouting plant.”
This is #73 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
71. 바람 소리의 평화로움을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the peacefulness of the wind.”
72. 시냇물 소리의 시원함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the brightness of a running brook’s sound.”
73. 새싹들의 강인함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-third affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tenacity of a sprouting plant.”
I need more tenacity.
…only to find that Hongong Elementary had become surrounded by a primeval forest.
I wandered up and down somewhat familiar halls, but each time I looked outside there were only trees and ferns and streams and the peering eyes of barely-seen animals. There were very few students – it was summer vacation. I saw one girl, a 2nd-grader who I recognized, but she was too busy talking on her cellphone to even notice me.
I then saw the principal. I bowed to him appropriately, but he didn't recognize me. I went to the cafeteria, and only teachers were there. It was dark inside, because the windows were all covered by thick, lush, green vegetation. The vegetable garden on the west side of the cafeteria was shadowed by immense, ancient, gnarled trees, but the field to the north had been replaced by a face of rock, strewn with wet moss and miniature waterfalls and tiny purple flowers.
I saw fellow-foreign-teacher Moyer, and another group of foreigners who were ignoring him and who I didn't recognize. I went over to speak to them, and one woman said she thought she knew who I was. I said to her that she looked familiar, too. I sat down to eat the standard Hongnong cafeteria lunch – some kind of soup, rice, not-so-good kimchi, one or two other banchan. But there was canned iced coffee, too.
Suddenly I was uninterested in eating – I felt compelled to leave. I made my way to the main entrance of the school and walked outside. I had to walk across a log across a stream where the soccer field should be. At the log bridge, I ran into Mr Lee and Mr Choi, but I was in too much of a hurry to stop and speak to them. They called after me. I went up a steep mountain path, and suddenly I came to a parking lot paved in discarded plastic containers. And suddenly I was at Mad River beach, which is west of Arcata. It felt unnaturally warm, though, and there were still too many trees around. And then I was running, barefoot, alternating on redwood forest trails and the narrow one-lane, perfectly straight Arcata bottomland roads. The old asphalt of the road felt rough and real under my feet. It was raining. And there were Koreans looking at me curiously – why is that man running barefoot? I felt like a wild monkey in a wildlife park. I felt free and afraid.
I woke up and had rice and kimchi for breakfast – I stir it together with some seasoned salty seaweed and a dollop of bibimbap sauce and a bit of cooked egg that I'm trying to eat before it goes bad, as kind of poor-man's bibimbap. But I had canned iced coffee, too. The summer morning sun is glaring in my window.
I’m working hard, nowadays. I’m working one-and-a-half jobs – mine and half of Grace’s while she’s on vacation in Canada. I have 7 classes almost every day, so out of the 8 period day, I have one prep period. So. I’m staying very busy. I started coming to work one hour earlier, since I need more prep time.
And it stopped raining on Sunday. That’s the first time it stopped raining since sometime in June, maybe. So it got hot. Ah, the busy times of hagwon during school vacations.
What I’m listening to right now.
화요비, “반쪽” [Hwayobi – ban-jjok = “Half”].
Korean R&B, I somehow ended up with this song on my frequent play list. I like it.
Poesías.
TRÁNSITO DE LA ESPINA A LA ROSA
Labré el aire, y en cárcel de sonido
eché a volar el corazón sediento;
triste jilguero, al parecer contento,
que canta entre palabras oprimido.Tejí la estrofa cual si fuere un nido;
incubé mi dolor, le di alimento,
y al trocarse un alado pensamiento,
emprendió un largo vuelo hacia el olvido.Así libra el dolor quien lo embellece.
En la magia verbal de hechicería
la tristeza hecha verso no parece;siempre el vuelo semeja una alegría;
¡y es el rosal una ascensión de espina
en tránsito a la rosa en que termina!– Pedro Prado, en No más que una rosa, 1946.
Llevo cerca de mi corazón una ilusión de que sea un escritor, pero la verdad es que no escribo, sino sólo leo. Ayer, en frente de una clase, dije que escribo novelas y poesías – pero ¿cuando fue la última vez que esribía más que en este blog?
TRÁNSITO DE LA ESPINA A LA ROSA
Labré el aire, y en cárcel de sonido
eché a volar el corazón sediento;
triste jilguero, al parecer contento,
que canta entre palabras oprimido.
Tejí la estrofa cual si fuere un nido;
incubé mi dolor, le di alimento,
y al trocarse un alado pensamiento,
emprendió un largo vuelo hacia el olvido.
Así libra el dolor quien lo embellece.
En la magia verbal de hechicería
la tristeza hecha verso no parece;
siempre el vuelo semeja una alegría;
¡y es el rosal una ascensión de espina
en tránsito a la rosa en que termina!
No más que una rosa, 1946.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the brightness of a running brook’s sound.”
This is #72 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
70. 새 소리의 맑음을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the serenity of birdsong.”
71. 바람 소리의 평화로움을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the peacefulness of the wind.”
72. 시냇물 소리의 시원함을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-second affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the brightness of a running brook’s sound.”
시원함 should really be something like “refreshingness,” and the source verb is oftentimes translated as “to be cool,” but I didn’t like either of these. I chose “brightness.” “Cool” seems especially inapt – since hot soup can be 시원하다, too. It’s all in the effect it has on you. The word 시원하다 has a lot of meanings, and is very common, but translating it is difficult. It could also be “to be restful” or “to be relieved” or “to be unburdened.” It can apply to anything: a cool drink, hot soup, a breeze, a view, a forest path, a babbling brook, a loud political speech, a torturous confession.
Last Friday evening, in the “TP2” class. Everyone was in a joking mood.
Brandon said, “Did you know Cindy has a strange body.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, imagining something bad. But then the girl demonstrated strange, double-jointed limbs.
“She can put her arms behind her back strange too,” the girl next to her said. Cindy tried to demonstrate, but the constraints of her sitting position didn’t permit her a full range of motion. Still, I was impressed.
“Like an octopus,” somebody said.
“오징어 [ojingeo = squid],” I said. Somebody laughed. “She could be a new superhero,” I added. I’ve been thinking about superheroes, and this seemed clever. “Ojingeogirl,” I suggested. Dried squid are a universal snack food, with the same level of iconicity as hotdogs in American culture, maybe.
Cindy seemed impressed by this idea, and several other students began to riff on it. Then Luis said, “How about Gulbiboy, too? Who is Gulbiboy?”
I pointed to Brandon. I’d been telling the students short stories about my life in Yeonggwang, earlier, and they were charmed by my accounts of “Gulbi-land” – the preponderance of gulbi shops selling the (in)famous Yeonggwang gulbi (a sort of dried croaker fish).
I pretended to have a string of dried gulbi, which I lifted. All Koreans know what dried gulbi look like, because the strings of fish are given as gifts on holidays. I mimed extracting one of the 20 cm long fish from the string, and pretended to throw it like a shuriken (Japanese “ninja” throwing star) at Luis. “Thwack,” I emphasized. The students were all in convulsions of laughter at this point.
“Oh no, Gulbiboy!” complained Luis.
Later on, Brandon tapped me on the shoulder, in the lobby. “I am Gulbiboy!” he whispered, triumphantly. Brandon is very tall, but his face reminds me a great deal of my nephew’s, perhaps if it were aged a few years further into early adolescence. I feel a certain connection with him for that reason, maybe.
“Go rescue Ojingeogirl, then,” I suggested, pointing toward Cindy, standing out by the elevator. He made a pleased face, before he thought it through, and thought better of this.
What I’m listening to right now.
오승근, “떠나는 님아.”
I was listening to my mp3s on shuffle, and this song came around. I genuinely like it a lot. It’s 떠나는 님아 by 오승근 [Oh Seung Geun]. “떠나는 님아” [tteonaneun nima] means “O departing beloved…” – my intuition is that this is rather archaic Korean, which is of course quite appropriate for an old folksong. It took me a while to work out what seemed like an appropriate translation for the title. I won’t even attempt the lyrics, below.
This song wasn’t easy to find a video for – the only material available on youtube consists of noraebang (karaoke room) voice-overs. I was about to give up in despair (and/or make my own) when I found the above video on youku.com (a Chinese youtube-type site). [UPDATE: I found a Korean version, which is now what’s embedded.]
One shouldn’t be surprised to find Korean language material on Chinese websites – there are millions (maybe 5 million, conservatively) of Koreans living in China, including an autonomous region in the far Northeast, bordering North Korea and Russia’s Primorskiye, where Korean is the official language. I suspect the reason I had to go to China to find a video is due to copyright issues – the Koreans are pretty lax enforcing the copyrights of other countries, but work at it assiduously when it comes to their own cultural content.
Here are the lyrics.
오승근 – “떠나는 님아”
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
당신이 떠나고나면 미움이 그치겠지만
당신을 보내고나면 사랑도 끝이난다오
님아 못잊을 님아 님아 떠나는 님아
두눈에 가득 이슬이맺혀 떠나는 나의님아
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
님아 못잊을 님아 님아 떠나는 님아
두눈에 가득 이슬이맺혀 떠나는 나의님아
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
못잊어 못보내는님.
“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” – Pablo Picasso.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the peacefulness of the wind.”
This is #71 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
69. 생명들의 신비로움을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that life is magical.”70. 새 소리의 맑음을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the serenity of birdsong.”71. 바람 소리의 평화로움을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-first affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the peacefulness of the wind.”
I like these recent affirmations a lot more than the ones before. They’re zennier.
“What is the nature of Grape-Nuts? They are neither grapes nor nuts. And so, the sad farce continues.” – Hans Beinholt, German Ambassador to the United Nations.
Really, he said this. He was visiting the Colbert Report, on July 11th, and doing stand-up comedy. Apparently, he’s done this before. I thought he was very funny, in a kind of dark, nihilistic way.
Embedded below is the clip from the Colbert Report that includes his routine – it’s pretty short. It starts at around 3:15 in the clip. [UPDATE: The original link rotted, but I found the German’s part as a youtube post.]
I laughed at all his jokes.
What I’m listening to right now.
Les Mains Ensorcelées, “Sur le quai.”
The video animation is awesome. It’s a French group, also known by the English version of their name, The Bewitched Hands. I was unable to find the lyrics to this.
What I’m listening to right now.
The Sweet – Love Is Like Oxygen. 1978. I was… 13. I didn’t really buy into the “style” – I was too much of a nerd and a reject. But I listened to the music, and still do.
Time on my side
I got it all
I’ve heard that pride
Always comes before a fall
There’s a rumour goin’ round the town
That you don’t want me around
I can’t shake off my city blues
Everyway I turn I loseChorus
Love is like oxygen
You get too much you get too high
Not enough and you’re gonna die
Love gets you highTime is no healer
When you’re not there
Lonely fever
Sad words in the air
Some things are better left unsaid
I’m gonna spend my days in bed
I’ll walk the streets at night
To be hidden by the city lights city lights
