One of my students cleverly updated the old “the dog ate my homework” meme, today.
When my advanced students write essays for me, they are required to email them to me before the class starts – that gives me an electronic copy and it makes it easy to negotiate corrections and due dates, etc.
Today, I was pointing out I hadn’t received an essay from her in my email inbox, and she said, in all seriousness, “my dog bit my internet cable, so I couldn’t send the email.”
Nice excuse. I asked if she printed it out, she said she didn’t have a printer at home. “Really?” I asked.
She handed me something scrawled on some scrap paper, probably in the ten minutes before class started. “I see,” I concluded.
I was laughing very hard, though. The students couldn’t understand why. I tried to explain, but it was lost on them.
I found, in my local supermarket, for the first time ever, grapefruit. From California. Labelled as 자몽 [ja-mong], which I think is a Korean neologism for grapefruit – the dictionary gives the Konglishy 그레이프프루트 [geureipeupeuruteu]. In the dictionary, 자몽 is given as meaning citron, which is a different kind of citrus altogether. But regardless, this is the first time I’ve ever seen grapefruit in the produce aisle anywhere in Korea. I bought some – because I love grapefruit. So much for living on local food, low carbon footprint, right? I made some pasta with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and garlic, and had dinner. And I cut sections of grapefruit and ate them as dessert. Kind of a boring life I have, I know.
I was watching this Korean drama, but the sites I habitually use to download English subtitled versions of the dramas are rapidly disappearing – the copyright police seem to be active. So I was left hanging, unable to watch the rest of the series. I’m annoyed by this – the pay site that had subtitles was so horrible (streaming at very low speeds and quality such that the shows were essentially impossible to watch) I quit my membership. If anyone reading this has advice on where to find subtitled Korean TV materials, please, please help me.
Saturday night my friend Basil was visiting up from Gwangju, where he now works, and we went to that Russian place he introduced me to. I had borsht and svekolny (beet/garlic salad). It was really good. I wonder where one can find beets in Korea? I want to make my own borsht, but borsht without beets is sacrilegious. I bought some brown rye bread from the Russian bakery in the same neighborhood there – the clerk speaking Russian and me speaking Korean, and sort of communicating – and I had some of that, toasted, as breakfast.
Walking from work yesterday, I had my camera. I took some pictures of fall-colored trees. The weather was humid and overcast but summer’s heat is gone. It drizzled a little bit.
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.” – Charles Baudelaire.
The picture below is a redwood tree growing in the Juyeop Park esplanade. It’s a Chinese-origin dawn redwood, that loses its leaves (needles) in the winter. A strange plant, but seeing them (they’re all over Ilsan) always make me think of my childhood in Humboldt.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to bear a clear and bright heart.”
This is #98 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I awoke from a dream in which I was "back in" the Army. These sorts of dreams are not that uncommon, really, for me – my own rather impactful military experience, combined with media images of military life (because of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), and combined with the fact that I live in the neighborhood where I was in active service (Northwest Gyeonggi), means these memories pop up pretty easily and frequently.
The dream was strange in that genre, however, because it was a dream in which I was "happily" in the Army – this is not common at all. I was some kind of officer, it seemed. And the soldiers under me were my middle school students. This makes sense. But this wasn't goofing around – this was serious Army stuff. We had to establish a camp amid bitter cold winter weather. But it was going well – unloading trucks, setting up these large tents, establishing a secure perimeter with guards.
There wasn't a lot of "plot" to the dream – it was mostly atmospherics. Dreams are sometimes like that. The feel of the "Team Spirit" joint US Army / ROK Army exercises that I remember from 1991, but populated with people from my current life.
Then my father showed up. He wasn't helpful. He got in the way, and he needed help. This is psychologically transparent – viz. Dream Interpretation 101. But I haven't had much interaction with my dad lately, so it's interesting that it dredged up from my subconscious just now. Is it the change in weather?
I awoke to an almost chilly fall rain, plonking outside my open window; rice and coffee for breakfast.
Yesterday we had our “Simpsons” Debate Test in my Mon/Weds/Fri cohort middle-school debate class. Today we will have the same debate in the Tues/Thurs/Sat cohort.
I created a unit for my debate class that focuses on learning about the types of mistakes one can make in a debate – meaning reasoning errors and logical fallacies. To make it more interesting, I decided to go with a tongue-in-cheek, humorous theme, and so the debate topic is the “Simpsons” (all the kids love the Simpsons, of course). The other quirk of this unit is that I tell the kids I want them to deliberately make mistakes in their debate speeches. They really get into this – they’ve come up with some pretty humorous and silly reasons to support or oppose the proposition that “Bart is smarter than Lisa.”
One of my favorites, which I paraphrase: “Socrates once said a wise man is a man who says he’s not wise. Bart says he’s dumb, so he must be smart.” Yes, they’re really quoting Socrates (of course, they find the quote in Korean, and so it’s Socrates via translation through Korean, but I do remember a sentiment of this sort from him). Isn’t the internet wonderful?
I took some video and might post some of that later, if I get around to it. Meanwhile, here are some drawings by two of the talented students in that class. It’s a very small class – only 6 students. Claire drew a cartoon of the day’s theme.
Then she drew a class portrait. I’m not sure why she made the two boys in the class so small – Alex is taller than I am. And note that she gave me only 4 hairs on the top of my head. In the picture, my name in Korean is “왜저래” [wae-jeo-rae] which is a sort of joking “Korean name” for me, because of how it sounds similar to my name. If you type it into google translate, it says it means “What the hell?” – I don’t think it’s that strong, but the pragmatics are similar.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to live with a compassionate heart.”
This is #97 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-seventh affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray to live with a compassionate heart.”
What I’m listening to right now.
[UPDATE 2024-04-20: in the fullness of time, all internet links will rot. The linked video on this page has done so. Let us show compassion toward those rotted links, and toward the incompetent internet giants that make them happen.]
Antonio Carlos Jobim’s instrumental from his album Stone Flower, “Tereza My Love.” As one critic put it: “Brazilian music made for Americans.” But that doesn’t really detract from it, that much.
Work was long today. I had 8 classes, which is the maximum possible under the scheduling system used. There were good, bad, indifferent – as usual. It’s pretty tiring, though, but I felt positive at the end of the day. I took some pictures walking to work – not sure why, just a random impulse. Here’s a view of where I work. It’s the building with the bright yellow sign on the top floor (5th floor), across the street, a little bit left of the centerline of the photo. The sign says 카르마 [kareuma = karma]. Note that I’m standing in front of my previous Ilsan place-of-work.
If you like maps and killing time online, I highly recommend a site I’ve found called Radical Cartography. I spent way too much time yesterday killing time surfing the various maps and graphs on the site. It’s like when I used to “read” atlases as a kid. Here’s one of Chicago’s ethnic geography that was very interesting.
The website also presents some more abstract, or experimental “maps” or even things that might fit better into the category of experimental “art.” Below:
Terry Atkinson & Michael Baldwin, 1967
"Map of a thirty-six square mile surface
area of the Pacific Ocean west of Oahu"
"Scale 3 Inches : 1 mile"
“Buddha. I bow and pray to think positively in everything.”
This is #96 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-sixth affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray to think positively in everything.”
This affirmation is quite important. It is perhaps one of the affirmations that I have in fact been practicing, on and off, for a very long time. It brings to mind the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, writing on Spinoza: “ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” I’ve mentioned that quote before, on this blog – it’s one of my favorite and most meaningful, so I come back to it a lot. I found the silly image of Baruch de Spinoza in a random online search. Philosophical powers, indeed!
At hagwon, yesterday, we returned to the regular schedule (post-시험대비, so to speak), but many of the middle-schoolers didn’t bother to show up – out recovering from their mid-terms, I suspect. So we ended up showing them a movie: Green Lantern. One of the other teachers thought it could be justified “educationally” by having me ask some “comprehension” questions afterward, so I got to watch it too – during which I took notes and imagined I was going to have to write some kind of review. My semiotician’s trope-detector kicked into overdrive, entertainingly.
We didn’t finish the movie, but in the last few minutes of class, I asked the kids what they would do if the alien had chosen to give one of them the green lantern and magic green ring (with it’s seemingly infinite, vaguely Nietzschean powers).
One girl said, confidently, “I will sell it.” I laughed. Money is better than infinite powers of Will. Of course. So… Man. Superman. Billionaire.
I recently ran across a Time magazine article about South Korea’s hagwon industry (“Kids, stop studying so hard!”). It even mentions my city of Ilsan by name.
In some ways, it’s a pretty good introduction to the hagwon industry. It makes several points and observations that have been echoing around my skull in other contexts – most notably, it points out that other countries near the top of the achievement list in education, such as Finland, manage to do so without testing their children into submission.
But that connects to another point the article makes – that the hagwon system is, in fact, much older than Korea’s modernization – there were private “cram schools” in a Confucian mold even in medieval Korea, to help the kids of low- and mid-level aristocrats enter the civil service.
But that connects to a point I’ve been thinking about that the article doesn’t mention: in a Foucauldian sense, the hagwon system might be viewed as a sophisticated and highly successful means of social control (this blog post’s title references the philospher’s work that I obliquely have in mind). Perhaps forcing high proportions of the country’s youth into perpetual states of anxiety and sleep deprivation not only achieves those remarkable and famous South Korean suicide rates, but also guarantees a sort of social quietude that is the envy of many other countries. I’m speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek, of course.
The world isn’t really that bad. Steven Pinker made some observations recently in the Wall Street Journal that I found confirmed some intuitions I’ve had about historical trends, especially with respect to violence. The fact is that in terms of overall trend, violence is steadily decreasing in the world, despite increasing population. This graph, in particular, shows his point very clearly.
If someone would like to try to refute the point being made by the article and emphasized by the graph above, I’m open to argument – but I really think that all the doom-and-gloom people have got it so very wrong about the world, about history, about where we’re at and where our world is going.
The title of this post comes from Abraham Lincoln, whom Pinker quotes in his article.
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs
Once upon a time, I was a huge fanboy of Apple Corp in its first incarnation (see left) – my uncle’s Apple ][, which entered our household when I was still in junior high in the late 70’s, was my first and most excellent exposure to computers, both as tool for writing and for learning programming. Not to mention killing vast amounts of time with games like space invaders.
Frankly, I’ve always felt that Apple Corp in its second incarnation, post-Jobs-exile, was less thrilling or impressive. I found the latter-day, closed-garden design philosophy personally repugnant (I think this is the open-source programming geek, in me), and I felt the products were over-priced and excessively hyped. More marketing than engineering, basically. I have so far managed to get past 10% of the new century without owning or interacting with an Apple product.
Nevertheless, I believe that Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a Thomas Edison type figure for our age. His passing is premature.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to be honest in everything.”
This is #95 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).
Four thousand, three hundred and forty-five years ago, in early October, the gates of Heaven opened over the White-Headed Mountain.
A Heavenly Regent (Hwanung) had asked that his father, the Lord of Heaven (Hwanin), grant him a beautiful peninsula to rule over, because he had seen that the people in that land had become badly behaved and he felt sorry for the place. At the holy White-Headed Mountain (Baekdusan) in the north of the peninsula, near a holy sandalwood tree, the Heavenly Regent established a heavenly city with his three chancellors, named Wind, Rain and Cloud, and 3000 followers.
There were a tiger and a bear living together in a cave on the mountain, and they saw the Heavenly Regent’s city and were desiring to become human, and so they would pray each day at the sandalwood tree. Finally, the Heavenly Regent called the bear and tiger into audience with him, and told them that if they would do as he said, they could become human.
He gave them garlic and weeds (like daisies and mugwort) to eat, and told them to take only these items deep into their cave and wait 100 days, and they could become human. The tiger and bear went into the cave, but the tiger quickly grew tired of only eating garlic and weeds, and gave up his hope to be human and fled the cave. The bear persevered, however, and after 101 days, she awoke to discover she’d become a beautiful woman. She emerged from the cave and returned to the sandalwood tree.
Now that she’d become human, she wished to have a child, but her husband the tiger had abandoned her due to his lack of patience. So, again she would pray at the sandalwood tree, and after a time, the Heavenly Regent took her as a wife and she became pregnant and bore a child, who was named Sandalwood (Dangun), which also means Altar Prince.
The Prince Sandalwood moved to the Flat Land (Pyeongyang) and founded a city he named Morning City (Asadal). The kingdom was named the Morning Calm (Choseon).
More than four thousand years later, on October 3rd each year, the people of Morning Calm, who are the descendants of Prince Sandalwood, and who also call themselves the Great Nation (Han or Khan), memorialize the opening of Heaven by taking a day off from work.
I arrived just this instant today at work to find the following anonymous note posted on the little bulletin board beside my desk, attached with a thumtack:
Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin -Kevin-
For those who don’t get the joke, “Kevin” is the name of my large green plastic alligator (below).
Well… within 2 miles of it. And I was on a hill, so I could see North Korea easily.
Lots of people know that my Korean “hometown” of Ilsan is quite close to North Korea – the northwest suburbs of Seoul have burgeoned over the decades to the point that they basically touch the DMZ in some places. So the North Korean border is about 15 km from my apartment in a line pointing northwest, and it’s reachable on the local bus system.
My friend Peter came to visit because today is a holiday (more on that in a later post, maybe). We took the #200 bus that stops a few blocks from my apartment building toward Gyoha, and after about 40 minutes we got off at 통일공원 (Unification Park), a neighborhood on a point of land that is the spot where the Imjin River joins the Han River and the opposite bank is in North Korea.
There’s a museum and “observatory” there (통일전망대), where you can look through coin operated binoculars and watch the socialists going about their difficult lives in their cozy concrete burghs.
I find these “flexion points” of our global civilization fascinating. It’s an uncrossable border, demarcated by barbed wire fences and fox holes and guard towers and, probably, land mines and hidden weapons caches, too. This is not the sort of border one crosses for an afternoon. But it’s eerie how close it is – a local bus ride from my home is an utterly alien world, two miles distant across a river.
We walked around a lot, because finding the entrance to the observatory/museum area turned out to be a bit challenging. We walked on some trails in the woods, and there were foxholes and concrete and brick barricades snaking through the hillsides as if randomly. I speculated that, for all I knew, I’d dug one of those foxholes myself, 20 years ago, while on some field-exercise or another as part of my infantry support company of mechanics, as part of the US Army stationed in Paju County along the DMZ. I didn’t have a clear recollection of all the various places where we encamped and trained and made foxholes and pretended to battle insidious communists. I wasn’t marking them on a map – I suspected that would have made my commanding officer suspicious.
Here are some pictures.
Here’s the #200 bus, that was very crowded because of the holiday. A woman had vomited in the aisle behind us, and we missed our stop and got off at the next one and walked back, which is partly why we got turned around as far as finding the proper entrance to the place.
We saw golden fields of rice.
We walked down a country lane in search of the observatory.
We saw a wealthy-person’s brand new house constructed in a traditional style.
We saw a statue of a man pontificating.
We saw treeless hills of North Korea.
We looked down the Han River westward towards its mouth. Right bank (north) is North Korea, and the Left Bank (south) is South Korea. Because of how the river snakes, jogging north, then south, then north again, you are seeing layers of South and North. The most distant mountains are Ganghwa Island, which is South Korean, but the mid-ground jut of land from the right (the interestingly denuded hills) is North Korea.
We looked back down the Han River southeast, toward Seoul and Ilsan. I live within the scope of this picture, somewhere (Ilsan is the very urban skyline area to the right in the panorama, disappearing behind the little hill).
We posed with North Korea in the background.
We saw a mock-up of a North Korean class room in the museum (note pictures of Kim Il-seong and Kim Jong-il in upper right above blackboard).
We saw a man sleeping in the grass beside the road.
We received important advice from a trash receptacle.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to do the best in everything.”
This is #94 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-fourth affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray to do the best in everything.”
And hence, to Nirvana. Not the end state of Buddhist practice, but the rock band.
On the radio there is a lot of retrospective about the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. Everyone is saying it’s a group and album that changed everything.
So, speaking of doing one’s best, actually, I am inclined to agree. I remember hearing the boys from Aberdeen, Washington, in 91 or 92 when I was in the Army, or shortly after getting out, and thinking, this is a band that is really representing something new, something different, something capturing the alienation of the post-disco, post-Reagan generation. And I have a very, very distinct and clear memory of when I was studying in Valdivia, Chile, in 1994, and going to some bar or nightclub with some Chilean friends I’d made, and “Smells like teen spirit” was playing, and one of them (who happened to be an activist in the post-Pinochet truth and reconciliation movement) turning to me and saying “Este grupo Nirvana es el más importante de nuestra generación – verás” [this group Nirvana is the most important of our generation – you’ll see].
I listened to the sound carefully, because of that, and felt inclined to agree in that moment, having drunk 1 or 2 Pisco Sours (Chile’s national cocktail).
What I’m listening to right now.
Nirvana, “Come as you are.” My personal favorite from that album, maybe. Perhaps one strength of Nirvana was that they managed to be huge and famous and yet in some weird way remained raw and utterly unpretentious. Not that that lack of pretention rescued Mr Cobain from his untimely suicide, right? That means something, too.
Here’s a screencap from the video – note the lyric, “no I don’t have a gun.”
Yesterday I wrote about my dream that included (untrue) news about a student, Jaehyeon. Here is a picture drawn by Jaehyeon, a very creative first-grader.
Note the figure in the lower left (directly above).
When I asked him who this figure was, he said, rapidly, “gorillaboymonsterteacher!” And he pointed at me. I’m always pleased when my students represent me in their artwork.
I woke up this morning with a fragment of a dream stuck to the inside of my brain. Utterly realistic dream.
I was sitting at work, at my desk, overhearing my boss talking on the phone with one of a student’s parents. I was understanding it – not dream understanding, but actually capturing the words of the conversation. A first grade (elementary) student, Jaehyeon, was leaving the hagwon.
When Curt hung up the phone, with his dramatic sigh as he often does when he has failed to convince a parent who is set on leaving to stay, I said to him, “Jaehyeon is leaving.” Statement, not question.
“네” [ne], he agreed. In English, he added, “But she said he liked your class. So why is he leaving.”
In the dream, I felt very sad, that Jaehyeon was leaving. He’s by far my favorite first-grader, has a very active imagination and linguistic creativity. He makes random funny noises when he doesn’t understand something.
I woke up with this floating in my brain, thinking it was a memory of being at work. But no, I’d remember for sure if Jaehyeon were, in fact, leaving. But then I had another thought: I’d dreamed in Korean. Not completely, but somewhat. What’s distinctive is that it was understood dream Korean, that was real Korean. Not the dream-Korean I struggle with so often, where it’s gobbledygook that I can’t make any sense out of, and that I doubt is real Korean. And that is a milestone, maybe. Or a rarity, in any event, above and beyond the banality of the dream fragment.
“Buddha. I bow and pray to be humble in everything.”
This is #93 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).
Can any of my blog readers or facebook friends recommend a dentist? Preferably, someone in Ilsan (or northwest Seoul suburbs, or Jongno area) that I can get to in less than an hour. My last two dentists (one Korean, one in the US before that) were horrible – so I’ve procrastinated too long. Thanks.
I’m not that worried about how expensive – I’ll pay a premium for a competent dentist, and I’d really prefer someone who can make a recommendation based on personal experience.
I had some computer problems over the weekend. Or rather, on Friday… I experienced the notorious blue-screen-of-death on my little Asus EeePC netbook, which runs Windows 7. It’s the first time I had one on this machine – I had, in fact, come to believe that Microsoft had done away with the infamous crash-o-matic indicator with the new operating system, because I’d never seen it before. But lo, there it was.
This made me worried. I managed to recover the little netbook, but I felt a dilemma. I rely on having a computer a lot. More than just for going online – in fact, I spend a lot of time on my netbook off line, and I’m pretty OK with having to cope with lack of internet at home, as I learned the hard way during my struggles with internetlessness in Yeonggwang last year (although obviously I ranted about it quite a bit). I do writing on my computer. Not good writing. Not writing-to-be-happy about, but it’s a compulsive exercise.
Until last year, I’ve always had two computers. Well, not always, but at least in the most recent milennium. The idea being, that if I had a crash, I’d go to the backup. Well, last year, my “main” laptop, an old Sony Vaio that I bought the month before coming to Korea in 2007, suffered an ignoble retirement. It has 3 operating systems installed on it – Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003. I dropped it, and I guess I scrambled the Vista boot sector somehow. I can still boot it up, even now, but using Linux is virtually useless for surfing the Korean internet (although that’s changing rapidly, with the unexpected – to me – success of the iPhone and iPad and the various Android-running clones of those products, because Android is, after all, just Linux). The linux boot has got some other minor issues, too, involving the Korean-language input thingy, which I’ve been too lazy to resolve. The Server 2003 boot still works (and I use it when I’m searching for some old file I’ve misplaced, sometimes), but it never played well with the graphics card in the laptop, with the consequence being that it is only capable of presenting a bare-bones 800×600 half-size window on the already non-huge laptop screen. The upshot of all this, I consider the old “main” laptop to be dead.
So my backup computer, since my hiatus in the US in the fall of 2009, has been this $295 Asus netbook that I bought at Best Buy with a gift certificate. It became my new main computer. It’s very low-grade, but perfectly adequate for my writing and for doing things on the internet, if rather pokey running multiple applications, etc. I had to abandon my computer games habit, but that’s hardly been detrimental, in most respects.
Anyway, getting the blue screen of death, last Friday, set me to thinking… if this netbook fails, I’ll be in a world of hurt. I’ll be able to boot up “old main” if I’m desperate to write something, but it’s hardly convenient, and I can forget comfortably surfing the internet. And besides, I’ve been missing having a computer that can have more than 2 windows open at the same time without slowing to a crawl.
So Saturday morning, I tromped off to Costco and spent 800 bucks. I bought a desktop. Which seems ridiculous, but I’ve considered that one of the main things I do recreationally with my computer, these days, is watch movies or TV serious, and my netbooks 7 inch screen is pretty pathetic, that way. Those 24 inch flat screen monitors looked tempting. So basically I bought a fancy screen with a cheapo Jooyontech (a Korean discount brand) desktop PC attached to it.
I decided to make my life difficult for myself. Not on purpose, exactly: I somehow managed to click just the wrong set of initial choices on the “first boot up” of the Windows 7 Home Premium K (for Korea) operating system, such that the operating system knows I prefer English, but nevertheless refuses to use it with me about 80% of the time. As if that even makes sense. Haha. Let’s just say the remainder of the configuration process involved a lot of recourse to the dictionary. And I’m the proud owner of a semi-bilingual computer.
I decided that, well, wow, I had a desktop with an actual graphics chip set and a big screen, I should put a fun game on it. I have always had an inordinate and unhealthy love for the game called Civilization, in its various incarnations. I went to buy it and try to download it – only to be disallowed from buying by the download store thing (called Steam). I felt annoyed. I hate it when online vendors discriminate against me because of my IP address. They’re telling me they don’t want my money. Well, my reaction to being told by a product vendor that they don’t want my money is to not give them my money. It took me about 20 minutes to torrent and install Civilization 4 (not the latest version, but what do I care? I like the old version just fine) on the new machine. No money required. The internet’s like that, right? Probably, it’s a bit stupid of me to tell everyone this on a blog, but I feel pretty safe from the copyright police, because of the aforementioned discriminated-against IP address. Korean copyright police only care about Korean content.
Well, I played Civilization for part of Sunday, and then, in a long-unfelt rush of self-disgust at wasting such a vast amount of time on a virtual empire, I went on a walk. Such was my weekend. The picture below shows the new computer. It represents a certain degree of investment in my intention to stay in Korea, doesn’t it? I suppose if I end up leaving, I’ll sell it or give it away to a lucky friend.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Changes.”
The video someone made for it in the youtube, above, is clever, too. It’s an appropriate way to ring in the new computer, though Bowie always makes me think of freshman year at Macalaster College in St Paul. Life has changes.
A blogger named Christopher Carr (at a site called League of Ordinary Gentlemen – a blog name that I somewhat dislike, by the way, because citing it makes me feel like I’m on a street corner handing out ads for a strip club) is refuting some ideas he ran across on another blog by someone named Dr Helen. The level of writing and the way he manages the ideas is spectacular.
He uses the term “scrooge mcduckery” to describe the sort of wannabe-John-Galtism that seems to underlie some portion of the teapartiers. Here’s a great extended quote from the specific blog entry:
Going through the comments over there at Dr. Helen’s and measuring the levels of entitlement, uncompromising self-righteousness, baseless notions of victimhood, and B-team Scrooge McDuckery might be an appropriate exercise for Introduction to Physics students. As if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years, advocates of going Galt suggest the appropriate response to the democratic government not doing exactly what you-the-one-citizen-among-many like is to sit back and be pampered, as if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years.
Actually it’s all a sort of prologue to a paean to Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, and, having never been much of a fan of Hugo, myself, I stopped reading it. But the introductory part really captures quite well a lot of what’s caused me, in recent years, to turn rather leftward from my earlier infatuation with Ayn Randian ideations.
Even five years ago I still happily described myself as having strong libertarian tendencies, but I’ve become so uncomfortable with these tendencies in recent times that I cannot in good conscience use the word libertarian any more – at least about myself, anyway. Perhaps these years in communitarian Korea, where even the hard-right conservatives still believe in things like universal healthcare and massive government-funded infrastructure projects, has colored my worldview.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I so loved Carr’s use of the term “scrooge mcduckery” (and by the way, I loved Scrooge McDuck comics when I a kid – why?). So I had to post this comment.
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
This is #92 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-second affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
Resent. Is this like jealousy? The dictionary also offers the word “blame” as a translation of 원망하다. It also lists “hold a grudge” and “feel bitter toward.” I see resentment and blame as being very different things. But I can see how they’re linked. I would say resentment and blame, together, are the number one “sins” of the expat community in Korea – foreigners like to sit in Korea and resent how things are different, or blame strange Korean culture for all the various misunderstandings and frustrations they have. It’s so very easy to slip into that mode. It’s why I stay away from online groupings of foreigners at all costs, generally.
Actually, I don’t feel like this is one of my bugaboos. Maybe my big problem isn’t with resentment but rather with metaresentment. By which I mean the fact of resenting others’ resentments. Haha.
I took the picture (above left) two years ago during my visit to Ulleungdo (an isolated island off Korea’s east coast by a few hours by ferry). Ulleungdo is by far my favorite rural place in Korea that I’ve visited. I’m mostly a city person, but I seem to like my rural places “extreme” or remote, in some sense: Patagonia, Southeast Alaska, Upper Michigan, Ulleungdo.
reams are so strange. They can be so vivid and memorable and yet make no sense, or seem utterly insignificant, devoid of deeper meaning.
I awoke from a dream in which I went back to Paradise Corp (an anonymization) to plead for my old job back. The building was still in Burbank, but when I got to the IT department, it was a transformed space. It resembled the trendy, loft-like interiors of some of those web 2.0 tech firms that make their work areas vaguly resemble a Starbucks or a Chuck E Cheese. I once interviewed at a place like that in Santa Monica (and now, years later, I can’t for the life of me remember if I was offered the job or not – but I remember the interview pretty vividly, because they asked me to solve a weird, complex, recursive SQL programming problem on the fly, and I felt kind of stumped by it, but showed them how I would find the answer; and the man leading the interview looked exactly like Mark Zuckerberg). There had been sofas and bean-bag chairs and long tables with giant flat screen monitors and little meeting tables like in a kindergarten.
The other thing about the IT department in this dream was that it had shrunk. It essentially only occupied the one large, well-decorated room. I asked the rather generic man showing me around what had happened: “Where did everyone go?”
“Oh, it’s all outsourced, now,” he responded in a singsongy voice. “Mostly to Bangalore and Hyderabad.”
This made some weird sense, and reflected trends that had been developing when I was still at the company, but I was undiplomatic: I responded, “Are you sure it isn’t just that the company has shrunk?”
This earned me a very realistic glare from my former boss, Tom, who was there but refusing to interact with me. He stalked off in search of an elevator.
All the remembered denizens of the IT department were sitting at these long tables, working. Some didn’t even have computers, though – they had paper notebooks open and pencils. Looking more closely, a lot of them were studying phonics flashcards with words like “cat” and “cake” on them (symbolically in line with my current job, teaching elementary students English). Some of them had cups of chicken nuggets with hotsauce, from the Aroha cup-chicken fast-food place downstairs (here in Ilsan, I mean).
One of my former coworkers wanted to make small talk, but I was trying to get at what they wanted me to do now that I’d returned. “What kind of database are you trying to design, now?” I asked.
There was nothing to do – it’d all been outsourced. I asked the man with the singsongy voice what this “rump” of an IT department was actually doing. “We’re mostly keeping them because we feel sorry for them,” he explained. He made an expansive gesture around at the tables. Several of the erstwhile programmers were squabbling and skuffling over a comic book (again, I now teach elementary students, right?).
I looked around at my former coworkers, and saw the signs – the lack of computers, the fact they were doing crossword puzzles or sudoku or studying phonics flashcards. This was no IT department – it was a sort of retirement facility. And I had asked for this “job” back?
I said, “Maybe I should just go back to Korea.” My former coworkers looked sad, but they all seemed to understand. Karen nodded, sagely.
I walked back out of the old building in Burbank to find myself in a Seoul subway station. I was confused, though, and couldn’t figure out how to get to the orange #3 line, that I could use to get home. I studied a map on a wall for what seemed a very long time. Maybe an entire day. After that, I wandered through the subway until I found a bowl of samgyetang (a sort of whole-chicken stew) sitting on a ledge in one of the tunnels. My backpack sat beside it, which seemed unremarkable, but which I suddenly realized I’d been missing. I looked at the samgyetang, but found it unappetizing.
In general, I’m contentedly expatriated. But in some moments, I’m proud that my residual US address is the city of Minneapolis. e.g. My congressman from Minneapolis, Keith Ellison, on the issue of Palestinian statehood, quoted Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The time is always right to do what is right.” He wrote an editorial in the New York Times.
I know there are serious issues between the Palestinians and Israel, and that the problems cut deeply both ways. But denying a people a sovereign state (or, alternately, denying them full rights as citizens) can never be the “right thing to do.”
Personally, I find the so called “one state solution” (latterly espoused by Qaddafi, of all disrepeutable people) to be the most ethically appealing, but I recognize that this is the least likely from the facts on the ground. Then again, who would have predicted in the 1980s that apartheid would have been utterly abrogated less than a decade later, in South Africa? Things change fast once change takes root.
I’ve been watching some episodes of the “crime-procedural” TV series Bones. Some of the episodes are pretty well written, atlhough it’s inconsistent. But there was a great line. The main eponymous character, nicknamed “Bones,” writes novels as a sideline to her work in forensic anthropology. In a season one episode, she gets caught working on a novel by a coworker, Hodgins. Dialogue:
Hodgins: “I recognize that look.” Bones: “What?” Hodgins: “You’re writing another book! When you write, you get this stunned look on your face, like you stuck a fork in a toaster. Am I in this one too?” Bones: “You weren’t in the last one.”
I had to pause the video and laugh at this. I love how this captures what happens to people who try to write. That it’s not, in fact, a particularly pleasant experience, but that, like sticking a fork in a toaster, it’s an unthought-out, impulsive exercise with unexpected consequences.
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to disdain other people.”
This is #91 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this ninety-first affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray not to disdain other people.”
The one-word substitutions from one affirmation to the next are the easiest to translate. Even if I don’t know the word, with the syntactical matrix being exactly the same all it takes is a simple dictionary look-up. 무시하다 can also mean “ignore,” and I nearly preferred that word over disdain. Mostly because it would make it a very “relatable” affirmation – I am, in fact, sometimes quite guilty of ignoring other people. I have such strong anti-social tendencies, maybe… or else, in a more positive way, it could be said that I value and need my solitude, daily. It’s so difficult when people “reach out” to me and I’m just not “in the mood” to be social. It seems more polite to ignore them than to respond with a “leave me alone” (clearly), but I nevertheless feel guilty about it.
I wonder how this could connect to those Buddhist monks who go off and live solitary, isolated lives. Are they still called upon to not ignore others? I suppose they’re making it difficult for others to reach out to them … isn’t that a kind of ignoring?
Yesterday was a long day at work. It’s the time of month when we have to post grades and comments about students into the giant, macro-infested spreadsheet that serves as the hagwon student database system. Actually, the spreadsheet’s not bad for an ad hoc job – I’ve sometimes admired its low-budget ingenuity. Anyway, at least I felt competent to do this job: it’s a good feeling of accomplishment when you can write personalized comments about 80 students and remember each of their faces and personalities.
Earlier in the day, I’d come in earlier than usual because I have my current “frontloaded” schedule that is all-elementary. I’m putting a lot of work on my “little ones” – mostly first-graders that have felt kind of challenging lately, walking the fine line between being entertaining for the students and parental expectations that they will come home acting as if they were learning something. Putting together a scheme for phonics flashcards (spelling simple words like cat and cake), I want to implement some kind of regular mini-quiz that’s not too painful for the students but that give me a sense of whether or not they’re making any progress.
I came home and faced the leftovers in my fridge. I like to cook, as I’ve said, but cooking alone always leads to leftovers, and having such a small fridge (it’s essentially what would be called a “dorm room” fridge in the US) means I have to get brutal and triage my leftovers pretty regularly – I end up throwing away things that don’t get eaten far too often, and that induces feelings of guilt, which leads to me cooking less, which leads to me feeling annoyed with my diet.
Um. What was I saying? I found some beans in my fridge and finished them off, after heating them up for an extra-extended period because I was worrying they might have something growing in them. They tasted good. And I woke up this morning.
Over the weekend I had made a tasty curry-coleslaw (see picture), using some end-of-its-natural-life cabbage and the infinite supply of gift-apples-in-a-box that I received as a Chuseok gift from my employer (see other picture – note standard-issue excessive packaging).
That coleslaw is keeping well, so far. But I had to throw out some rice and broccoli and mushrooms into the compost bin downstairs. Isn’t it cool, by the way, that big-city apartments in Ilsan give residents the opportunity to segregate their organic garbage? Not that I have huge amount of faith that anything useful is being done with it… it might be being mixed in with the regular garbage at the landfill, as happens so often in the US, for example. But one might be pleasantly surprised – Koreans seem predisposed, in some ways (e.g. by the density of their society, and its historically recent extreme poverty), to creating a more sustainable version of consumerism.
Today, I was pointing out I hadn’t received an essay from her in my email inbox, and she said, in all seriousness, “my dog bit my internet cable, so I couldn’t send the email.”
