"Glory glory glory" – Dylan Thomas.
I have returned to Glory Town. I'm very tired. I have tomorrow to rest. So, I will rest, and return to the contingent chaos that is work on Monday.
If I lived on Mars, the Earth would be a mere turquoise-tinted star.
I arrived at downtown Auckland around 10:30, finally. I drove around and explored a little, but I had to turn in my rental car by 1:30, and so I didn’t end up parking or walking around the downtown area as I had planned.
If Wellington is like San Francisco, then Auckland is like LA. All sprawling and patchworkily multicultural. I like the multicultural aspect, but the sprawl I can do without. The New Zealanders pronounce the name as Californians pronounce “Oakland,” and they also call it “the Big Smoke” – which is a great nickname for the metropolis of the South Pacific. But in my several days in New Zealand, when overhearing locals speaking of the city in conversation, it was always only referred to as Bloody Auckland.” I guess that’s how the rest of the country feels about it.
I’m at an airport hotel in Sydney tonight, because I have to check in really early for my flight back to Korea tomorrow morning. I’m freeloading some crappy free wifi – very slow. So no more pictures.
Maybe later. I’ll see you from Korea, probably.
I drove late last night, and slept at a rest area. What road trip is complete without a few nights like that? I surfed the late night radio as I drove across the North Island. Some items of interest.
1. Item. There are Maori radio stations. They speak in a mixture of Maori and English, and play a lot of reggae and R&B. What's with that? Relatedly, what's with all the LA-looking gang tags on rural bus shelters in this country? I should try to get a picture of one. Interesting.
2. Item. NZ is crazy for the NZI sevens tournament this weekend, in Wellington. Which is why the ferry across from Picton yesterday was so crowded that there were no seats. I sat on the deck. They love their rugby. A lot. And talk about it, too. At least I more or less understand when they talk about it, whereas when they talk about cricket, I can barely figure out that it's a sport, and not some kind of abstruse mathematical recreation.
3. Item. Racism and rants, part 1. There seem to be a lot of Limbaughesque clones ranting on the radio about entitlements and lazy, freeloading Maoris and the need to limit immigration and the like. It's depressing.
4. Item. Racism and rants, part 2. On the other hand, I heard a story about a Cambodian grocer / reataurant owner in New Plymouth who had another local businesswoman who owns a pizzeria handing out blatently racist literature in front of his establishment, urging the community to boycott his business. The hurt was compounded by the fact she is a member of the town council. But… the community rallied around the grocer, and he says business has improved a huge amount, because of the many people coming to his establishment to protest the councilwoman's protests. "I think everyone needs a racist. It's been so good for business," he comments, good-naturedly. It's uplifting.
What I'm listening to right now.
Kanye West – Runaway. This thing is getting almost constant airplay in NZ right now. So in this way, Kanye West becomes permanently associated in my memory and imagination with rural New Zealand. Is that wierd, or what? [I added this youtube link later (2011-07-21)]
My mother survived Cyclone Yasi’s attack on Queensland. I guess I just missed it, eh? I was very worried when I heard that the town of Tully was “utterly destroyed” on New Zealand Radio. You see, she lives just off of Tully Falls Road. I know the town of Tully is about 60 km away from her house outside of Ravenshoe as the raven flies, but that’s still pretty close.
On the Australian Courier-Mail (newspaper) website, I saw the following picture of Tully, for example. More on the article, here.
My mother’s email notifying family and friends of her survival is worth reproducing as a sort of first-hand account of the experience – so here it is:
But definitely don’t want to repeat the experience, EVER AGAIN. However, very lucky…house intact, simply have a completely new skyline to the north. Two huge trees down with parts of them about 2 meters from house. One is iron bark so will have plenty of firewood for foreseeable future.
Phone will probably go out sometime today, so want to send this to reassure all. Probably without power for a long time to come. Heard from Debbie (Gary’s wife). They survived in Charters Towers with category 3, and hope to be back tomorrow–something I doubt will occur if the Burdekin is up which the continuing rain will probably ensure.
I endured 5 hours of category 5 and likening it to a huge freight train barrelling through house is as close as I can get to a comparison. I was SCARED and huddled down in hallway–only narrow panels on back door to threaten with glass. Huge thumps in night…will have to check out roof once it dies down some more. “Torrential” rains is not an exaggeration for present condition of weather. Wallabies and butcher birds pretty pathetic at present. Will probably run out of power on computer and my iPod speakers, boo, hiss. But can run the earphones if so inclined/bored. Will be sleeping today!!! Not a wink before it quietened down around 4:45 AM, and only 7:45 at present.
Ben stopped by and helped me set up my old camp propane bottle/burner. It works–we extracted it from my little shed under house. He says there are heaps of trees down on their property–more on the old creek flat than on the hill. But it sure looks bright with all the tops off the trees. It’s going to be a long clean up, but he said he’d get around to getting the two-three trees down on drive off sometime in next couple of days. I’m cool for two days as long as I stay out of freezers and fridge. A lot of meat that needs to be cooked, but not sure when I’ll be able to get to it. May start giving it away.
Enough for now. I’ll see if I have an internet set up. It goes through Cairns and they didn’t suffer like Innisfal and Tully and Mission Beach. Feeling pretty lousy, nauseated from exhaustion. Could almost feel you all wishing me well. Much love, and, despite gloom of rearranged skyline (a lot of my natives gone–mostly lovely grey-green wattles), laughter and a feeling of being both lucky and blessed. Will be in touch when things get back to normal, or a semblance thereof.
Meanwhile, here in NZ (EnZed, pronounced locally as we yanks would pronounce “InZid”)… it was Southern California-like weather, as I re-crossed the Cook Strait back to Wellington, and began my drive back up to Auckland this afternoon. Here are some pictures from today.
The similarities between New Zealand’s South Island and Patagonia are so striking as to be almost disorienting. And the fact of the matter is that traveling around, here, is just reminding me of how much I yearn to someday return to Patagonia. The scenery and topography and weather are all amazingly similar, and I find Patagonia much more culturally interesting than New Zealand.
Although it’s easy to say that New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country, I hate to say that I find it rather boring. I like the people, to the extent that I’ve interacted with them, better than the Australians (who are brash and more “rednecky”) – perhaps it might be accurate to say that New Zealanders are like Canadians, contrasted with Australians’ more USA-style. But as much as I love my little hikes, my urban and rural random explorations, my real interest in travel is with culture. New Zealand offers the Maori angle, as Australia offers the aboriginal. There’s a great deal of interest there, but neither is particularly accessible to the casual traveler – you get something packaged and museum quality, and frankly you would learn more surfing wikipedia on the subject for a few hours. True cultural immersion in the damaged, ultra-colonialized native cultures of ANZ is basically impossible.
So what’s left? Just a bunch of Britishy pseudo-Americans. That sounds harsh.
I like the New Zealand accent – as a linguist, I like to try to work out what makes it different, and I think I’ve reached a point where I can tell it apart from Australian. They do weird things to the front vowels, in New Zealand.
There’s the other problem with traveling. I told myself while in Japan last year that I wasn’t going to travel, touristically, alone, any more. And yet here I am, less than a year later, traveling alone again. Why? It’s hard to resist. The opportunity arises, I have cash burning a hole in my bank account, and I go off on some adventure. But… though I enjoy aspects of it, I feel my aloneness, when traveling, that I never do when living day-to-day life.
The main purpose of this trip was to visit my mother. I don’t get down to see her very often – it seems to run once every two years. And the trip to NZ was spontaneous – I had some extra money (trust me, I needed it – NZ is easily the most expensive place I’ve ever traveled, more so than even Japan), and an extra 6 days to use up, and I don’t when I’ll get another chance. My original intent had been to go to Singapore and Malaysia after seeing my mom, but the Lunar New Year holiday created airline scheduling problems that I wasn’t able to resolve due to having procrastinated too long on planning.
I enjoy “road trips” which is the type of trip this has been. By the time I return my rental car to the Auckland Airport, I’ll have logged 3500 km trekking around NZ, easily. But the side effect of “road tripping” is that I have way too much time to think, as I drive. When traveling on public transit (airplanes, boats, trains, buses) I don’t think as much, because I can read, I can relax, I can nap, I can look out the window attentively. But driving requires more concentration, and all I can do, as I drive, is listen to music (which in New Zealand has proven difficult due to the sparsity of radio stations and a problem with my mp3 player) and think. Think. Think.
My thoughts are: I like Korea better than New Zealand or Australia; I miss Patagonia but like Korea better than Patagonia, too; I like Korea better than most places, so I guess I’m in the right place, for now, in my life. Just because I like Korea doesn’t mean I like some of the crap that gets pulled – I’ve been watching (via the weird, voyeuristic window that is facebookland) the misery of some of my fellow Jeollanam English teachers with dismay, and have essentially made up my mind to skip the renewal with the public schools and return to hagwon work. Most foreigners in Korea feel that hagwon work is much worse than public school work, and there are definitely ways in which public school teaching is a “cushy” job… but the utter disregard for competent administration seems pervasive and universal in the public schools, at least in Jeollanam, while with hagwon at least, it’s more hit-or-miss – so for every incompetent administrative experience you can also run across things done quite well. Whatever.
Here are some pictures (not in any particular order) showing the Patagonisity of the South Island.
This first is one of the long, one-lane bridges that seem extremely common here, even along fairly major highways. Just remember – trucks and RVs have right-of-way: might makes right.
The town of Kaikoura, where I am at the present moment:
Oops. Weather.
There was torrential rain after I left Greymouth – I was trying to get to Christchurch via the Arthur’s Pass highway (highway 73). The road was flooded and blocked by debris, and the rushing water was eroding the highway. I got there right as it happened.
There are only three highways connecting the South Island’s west coast and east coast. I had to backtrack more that 100 km to get to the next possible route over the mountains, and the consequence was that, because I have to meet my ferry back to Wellington tomorrow at a fixed time, I realized I would have to skip visiting Christchurch.
So I’m staying the night in Kaikoura, now – on the east coast but about 200 km north of Christchurch.
Here is the rain.
Here is the flood blocking the highway.
In other news, there’s a super giant humungous cyclone (aka hurricane) headed for my mom’s house. I just missed it. I hope she’s OK. Do you see her waving, up just west of the red spot in the satellite image?
This blog currently being brought to you by McDonalds of New Zealand – the only reliable free wifi I’ve been able to find, driving around.
I went to a place called Cape Foulwind this morning, on the northwest coast of the South Island. Ironically, it’s the only place in all of New Zealand that I’ve been to, so far, where the air was utterly calm and still. Mostly, it’s been extremely windy – perhaps the tailing effects of the giant cyclone storm that is currently planning to harass my mother up in northern Queensland. I just missed it.
Here are some pictures from yesterday and today.
New Zealand’s parliament building, in Wellington. Called the “Beehive.”
A view from the ferry.
Here is the Marlborough Wine Country of the northeasternmost part of the South Island.
Here is a very nice looking car parked next to my little Hyundai rental car, in front of the motel where I stayed at last night.
The avian du jour.
The view looking north at Cape Foulwind.
And looking west across the Tasman Sea. Maybe toward Tasmania – or am I too far south already?
A place I stopped called Punakaiki.
This blog is live, online, on a ferry boat, in the Cook Straight, New Zealand. And there's a cricket match on the television. I'm going from Wellington, at the bottom end of the North Island, to Picton, at the top of the South Island. I'd provide a picture, but bandwidth is limited.
I stayed in Palmerston North, last night. That's an oddly named town – I mean… where's Palmerston South? I can't find one. The town reminds me of Eureka, California. Or Temuco, Chile. A small town but too big to be a small town in its region, maybe. And the city geography is relatively flat and the streets are a dull, treeless grid. Wellington, on the other hand, is a beautiful city. It's one of those cities, like Duluth or Nagasaki, that I knew I would love before ever visiting there. Just that I have a sort of instinct for what places I will like, based on looking at things like maps and encyclopedias.
I drove to Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau-o-tamatea-turi-pukakapiki-maunga-horo-nuku-pokai-whenua-kitanatahu. It was very beautiful. Onomastics aside, New Zealand is a lot like California or western Oregon.
Here are some other pictures. I saw a chicken at dawn (at roadside rest area where I slept a few hours).
I saw some redwood trees (they’re not native to NZ, but they do quite well here – another reason why it reminds me of California).
I saw some lakes.
I saw the Hawkes Bay region, which reminds me of Monterey or San Luis Obisbo Counties, and the town of Hastings, which might as well be a funny-talking Salinas. The hills were golden.
I saw the beach, on the east coast. It was very, very, very, very, very, very windy. I waved across the vast Pacific to Validivia, Chile, where I lived in 1994 – same latitude. I watched the Antarctic clouds glowering.
I landed in Auckland at 12:20 AM. I went to get my rental car, but they didn't have my reservation. Fortunately, there was a guy there to rent me a car, who was very friendly and gave me the rate and car I would have had if my reservation hadn't failed to be entered into their system. Something about the fact that I tried to do it online from Australia. Oh well. It all worked out fine. And so then, with hardly a plan to my name, I began to drive south on the expressway out of Auckland.
Light drizzle, 2 AM. I stopped at a service plaza. There's a McDonalds, open 24 hours. Now… as some of you may know, I have a certain strange tradition. I'm very proud of having completely kicked my junk-food habits, years ago, but I still have this tradition of ordering a Big Mac each time I visit a new country. And although it's 2 AM, this McDonalds has free wifi, too. So… I ordered a Big Mac. That's country number… um, around 25, I think. There's a few countries where I never got a Big Mac: Cuba, Morocco and Belize spring to mind. But all the rest, yes. I'm loyal to that weird tradition.
And I logged onto the free wifi and here's my first blog post from New Zealand. I have no plan. This is Jared-style free-form road-tripping at it's absolute best. I guess I'll find a hotel or motel or pub somewhere to crash, or maybe just drive south - I don't feel that tired. It's only 7 hours to Wellington, if that's where I intend to go. Holy crap: we think of New Zealand as a small country, but the North Island is bigger than South Korea! So… more later.
First impressions: New Zealand at the international airport at 2 AM isn't that different from Long Beach, CA. That sounds funny – but I'm just going with what I know. The fact is, Long Beach has one of the highest concentrations of Pacific Islander people in the continental US – and obviously, being on a Pacific Island, Auckland is … similar. Ha. And the freeways and industrial architecture and the vegetation, too. But then, it's really dark outside. So hard to judge, really.
Highway service plazas are the same everywhere. More or less.
More later.
I fly back out of Cairns, this morning.
Because it's a fairly early flight, rather than leave my mom's at an ungodly early hour, we drove to her friend Pat's and stayed there last night, in Kuranda. Kuranda is maybe my personally favorite place in the broader Cairns/Tableland region of Far North Queensland – it's up on the mountainside, but definitely within the tropical rainforest – very green and beautiful. It reminds me of parts of Veracruz state, in Mexico, including my most favorite Mexican city, Xalapa.
I've been eating very well, these days. Too well. Several times, my mother served me "chile verde" and bean burritos. Her "chile verde" is quite famous – it is what is commonly called puerco pibil in Mexican restaurants in the states – it's a slow-cooked pork in spicy green chile sauce. Thursday night, she made chiles rellenos – traditionally these are chiles poblanos (but her recipe, which I love, uses pickled Anaheim chiles) stuffed with cheese and fried in egg batter, with a tomato/onion/garlic/chile sauce. Those are the most delicious things. Friday, I made my recently innovated curried dhal, with split lentils, curry spices, onion, carrots, etc., over rice, and with some yoghurt on the side with cucumber, mint and onion. Then last night, at Pat's, we had some fish in coconut broth with lemon grass (kind of a Thai type thing, it seemed), with roast chicken and stir-fried vegetables with rice, and an amazing baked peach custard for dessert. It's been like eating restaurant food each night, but all home made.
I guess the perennial diet will have to resume when I get back to Korea. I'm not sticking to it too well, during these travels.
Despite dial-up, I don’t have much to say, so I will try to post some pictures. Really, I probably have a lot to say, but I haven’t yet digested it into something sayable. So, later.
I accompanied my mom to an appointment yesterday morning, and then I took the car down the road a bit further as I waited for her, and took these pictures.
The view from a roadside view-point.
An abandoned motel in the desolate, depressing, yet charmingly-named town of Millaa Millaa.
Sunset as viewed from my mom’s house’s verandah.
This morning, I saw the crescent moon, before sunrise. Venus was right below it, but I don’t think it shows in the picture.
Here is a view of the tableland from the Tumoulin Road between Kennedy Highway and Ravenshoe (my mother’s closest town, still about 10 km from her house). I took it on the drive back from Atherton yesterday, after passing through Herberton.
I meant to post these videos several weeks ago. Having momentary access to broadband, in Atherton, Queensland, Australia, I decided to finish the post.
My students built "model classrooms" – 3 dimensional models of schools and other things – for my 3rd and 4th grade English "winter camps" during the first and second weeks of January. I made a pretty thorough video record of our work, and I think it's a good example of "what I try to do in the classroom" when I'm at my best. The full video is about 30 minutes. I didn't do much editing, but the camera was mostly in the hands of the students, and there were a lot of starts and stops and goofing around, some of which I tried to cut out. I divided it into 3 parts in order to post it to youtube. Here are the 3 parts.
I took my mother's Toyota and drove on my own into town today – this is the first time I've come to Australia where I haven't rented a car, but since my mom doesn't go places much, I have the freedom to use hers. I've probably logged well over 5000 miles in my various visits to Australia, with my worst incident having been a speeding ticket in Melbourne some years ago.
But driving on the "wrong side" is always a bit challenging. The hardest single thing is actually the turn signals – they're positioned on the right side of the steering column instead of on the left, and so every time I need to signal a turn, I turn on my windshield wipers. Turning right isn't hard – you pull into the right-turn lane and wait, as one would a left hand turn in the US or Korea. There are lines on the pavement that prevent one from making a mistake. I actually find left turns more difficult, especially where there are no lines or traffic in the street or road being turned in to – it's so easy to just allow oneself to drift over to the right as one completes the turn. The worst I did, with that, was a time in 2008 when I was here, when I was in Cairns and turned left and put myself on the right side of a median strip. I realized my mistake immediately (the truck coming head on at me was a good hint), and pulled into a parking lot and got myself turned around. All of which is to say, it really isn't that much of a problem, but it's mentally intense during the "adaptation" phase.
I drove into Atherton, which is about 50 km north of my mom's house. They have a "Woolies" in Atherton – a sort of full-scale grocery store rather than the small-town grocery or convenience store in Ravenshoe. I bought a guide book for New Zealand (since I'm going there next week for a few days and I have absolutely no plan as to what to do). And I got some high-speed internet (though I'm not going to upload any photos because I haven't been taking many – I'll try to take more).
Driving around the "tableland" – as this part of Far North Queensland is called – always reminds me, scenically, of the Tehuantepec area of southern Mexico – the point where Veracruz and Tabasco and northern Chiapas and Oaxaca all join together. It's highland, but verdant and green with rolling hills and intermittent rain-forest in the gullies on the windward side of mountains. There are cows standing around in fields, and palm trees in people's yards. Tropical savannah farmland, it might be termed. It's quite beautiful, I will concede, but I'm not sure I could ever live in place such as this – it's quite isolated, with Cairns, 2 hours away, being the only "big city" but still having well less than 100,000 residents. The closest metropolis, Brisbane, is nearly 1000 km away. And that's not much of a metropolis, to be frank.
I will maybe try to post one other thing, unrelated to my current traveling, while here at the high-speed internet spot – might as well get my money's worth, right?
Today is Australia Day, which celebrates the “founding of Australia” at Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1788. It’s not dissimilar to the Fourth of July in the US. I’m celebrating it with my mother, a naturalised Australian, by postponing our trip into Atherton, the nearest big town, until tomorrow – since everything would be closed today. Isn’t that a great way to celebrate?
The aboriginal people of Australia call it “Invasion Day,” according to the wikithing.
So my vacation, since arriving here at Ravenshoe, has consisted mostly of reading books and having long conversations with my mom. It’s pretty relaxing.
It’s very summery here, with temperatures over 30 C during the day, but the nights are quite cool, because her house here is up in the mountains. They were recovering from a lot of rain just as I arrived, but the days and nights have been stunningly clear since. Last night, looking up at the sky, the stars were so vivid I felt like I was in outer space.
There are many birds, wallabies and geckos about. My mother often yells at them. I think it’s a fairly good-natured coexistence, though.
My mother knows me very well, and one thing she does when I visit is that she finds and refers me to various random linguistics texts that she also sometimes pursues. She left a book on the floor of her guest room that was a big heavy text of Chinese historical linguistics, roughly.
Naturally, me being me, I picked it up and was reading it. I learned this morning that Chinese is full of substrata language traces, which is entirely plausible if one takes the time to think it through, but is not something I had ever thought about before. One very fascinating observation: the Cantonese "dialect" of Chinese shows strong lexical and even phonological traces of a non-sinitic, Thai-related substrata, which means that in some strange way, Cantonese is as closely related to Thai as it is to Mandarin (Beijing dialect). This makes perfect sense if you look at a map, but it's counterintuitive to the way that we normally like to think about Chinese linguistics. Not to imply that I know a lot about Chinese linguistics – I know next to zero, and what I do know is strictly theoretical, as in terms of actual speaking ability I'm lucky to be able to say "hello" – but it's quite interesting to me.
I got to my mother’s house last night, and woke up this morning to wallabies in the driveway. I won’t be posting a lot of content these days because she still has dial-up! Yes, it’s 1997 in Ravenshoe, Queensland. But here is a picture of what I saw, while having rye toast with homemade grapefruit marmalade.
Well, it’s a touristic obligation, right? Last (and first) time I was in Syd, I didn’t pay this icon a visit (it was a wintery June, I think, and pouring rain). So here, I did it, this time. I walked 2 km up George Street from the train station, took a photo, ten minutes ago, and put it here.
I’m sydneyed. Sitting downtown, being my typical, cafe-sitting self. I so much prefer just being places, to trying to be a tourist. Tourism, per se, is not actually something I enjoy. But I love sitting and existing in new or different places.
The bus from the airport was free of charge, because the authorities were feeling guilty the airport train was shut down for maintenance, I guess. A cheap Sunday morning holiday in Syd. 30 degrees C warmer than Seoul. Awkward climate transitions. Australians are so casual. They tell jokes and give sarcastic answers to strangers.
But the place I’m sitting, I’m overhearing two different conversations in Korean. And one in, maybe, Chinese. Sydney is global.
I had a weird insight, last night, sitting in the airport at Incheon. Korea fascinates me because although it is stunningly post-modern, it manages to be post-modern in a deeply earnest, largely unreflective, and completely unironic way. And that’s just plain weird, because for the Western sensibility, the post-modern position is definitionally ironic.
I think I'll go to Australia now. Sitting, waiting for the airplane.
I will have a 10 hour flight to Sydney – almost straight South! – where I have to wait 10 hours to connect to a 3 hour flight to Cairns, whence a 2 hour drive to my mother's house.
Maybe 10 hours is enough to do something vaguely touristic in Sydney – there's an airport train there that connects to downtown, but according to the website, it will be closed for "track maintenance" tomorrow. I guess there might be buses. I'll definitely have to try something – 10 hours is too long to spend in an airport.
Anyway, I'll update from Sydney, somewhere.
Here is a video I took last Thursday.
My student Seong-un seems to be an up-and-coming Korean comic genius. I really only understood about 10~15% of what he's saying here, but even his deadpan delivery and timing seemed incredibly funny, and he had his peers all crying with laughter with this little narrative. So, I post it here, unedited. Let me know (if you speak Korean) if this is really as funny as it seemed to me.
Yesterday we ended our “winter camps” (morning extracurricular English classes). Here are class portraits of the last two groups, taken yesterday morning.
The smart first and second graders (not all of them came on this last day, so the class isn’t full size, here – it was a large group of 24).
The calm and organized fifth graders (a few are missing, but it was a very comfortable class of about 8~10 – attendance varied).
Unrelatedly… here are some photos to remember my current “home” by, as I travel to Australia today.
Here is the view from the steps of my apartment building as I left for the bus terminal yesterday afternoon.
And here is the main drag in fabulous, cosmopolitan Yeonggwang, in front of the bus terminal.
“I bow in repentance of any sacrifice of the lives of others [in pursuit] of mere pasttime or pleasure.”
This is #32 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).
…
30. 거짓말과 갖가지 위선을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all kinds of hypocrisy and lies.”
31. 남의 것을 훔치는 생각과 행동을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of any thought or action of stealing another’s things.”
32. 한갓 취미나 즐거움으로 다른 생명을 희생시키는 일을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this thirty-second affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any sacrifice of the lives of others [in pursuit] of mere pasttime or pleasure.”
Yeah. Bad idea.
I was walking to work, and Beck's song "Loser" came around on my mp3 player. Where does a brilliant line like "'My time is a piece of wax falling on a termite that's choking on the splinters." It's Dylanesque, certainly. I always liked this song.
The song evokes strong mental associations of January, 1995, when the song was getting tons of radio time. I was working nights, at the UPS facility in Northeast Minneapolis. I would go and throw boxes onto and off of conveyor belts for several hours, each night. I was feeling very blue collar – I even had a teamster card, because you have to have one to work at UPS, even as a part-timer. I was also taking classes during the day, trying to fill in some course work for my ongoing graduate school applications. I was taking a fabulous graduate seminar on semiotics, I remember.
The most significant thing going on in my life was that that was the point in time when Michelle and I had made the commitment "for better or for worse" to each other. I had come back from Chile in November of 94, and Michelle and I had moved in together and decided we were most officially a couple. In a sense, it was a time of optimism and contentment, for me. I had "settled," perhaps, but it was that point in settling when settling was exactly what I wanted to be doing.
Every night, driving up the 35W from our duplex apartment off Franlin Avenue, I would hear Beck's song. "I'm a loser, baby. So why don't you kill me." I felt the song was deeply ironic. I could relate. Michelle, on the other hand, hated the song. More importantly, she hated the fact that I liked the song. It was indicative of low self-esteem, she would argue. She was right – but I didn't see the big deal. It was one of our few arguments from that period of our life, which was a sort of desperately poor married bliss, for the most part, at that stage.
I really like this super intelligent, well-argued rant about someone else's rant about the principle of double-space versus single-space between sentences in a single paragraph. I don't actually care, one way or the other, but I love that someone can argue the points so cogently, tearing apart another's poor arguments.
Fonts and typography fascinate my, but I'm unable, for the most part, of forming strong opinions on their aesthetics. I'm perhaps more strongly opinionated in the realms of usage or orthography – in a scathingly anti-prescriptivist direction.
Not sure what my point is, in this post, except to reveal that I think about these things way too much – aren't there better things to do with one's brain?
Sometimes I stumble on a pithy little phrase that I feel encapsulates some aspect of what life in Korea is like.
Korea, as a country and culture, is a bunch of layers. At the core, there is a group of mountain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, in a rugged, difficult climate. That was thousands of years ago. Add a layer of Confucian Chinese paternalism. Add a layer of Buddhist soul-saving. Add another layer of reactionary confucianism. Add a layer of Japanese fascism. And finally, a veneer of western modernity. But all the layers are from the "outside" – the core is still this rather disparate, hardscabble tribe of hunter-gatherers. This is evident any time you sit down to a Korean meal – everything and anything is edible, and, with some soy sauce and red pepper flakes, delicious.
So some time back, I had coined a phrase to describe Korea: "A medieval city state with an internet connection." But my current revision of this idea is to take it farther back – to the paleolithic. That's what I put in the title, above. I really feel this, at times. Korea is deeply primitive, yet in a weirdly post-modern way. I like that, about this country.
Oda al tomate La calle se llenó de tomates, mediodia, verano, la luz se parte en dos mitades de tomate, corre por las calles el jugo. En diciembre se desata el tomate, invade las cocinas, entra por los almuerzos, se sienta reposado en los aparadores, entre los vasos, las matequilleras, los saleros azules. Tiene luz propia, majestad benigna. Devemos, por desgracia, asesinarlo: se hunde el cuchillo en su pulpa viviente, es una roja viscera, un sol fresco, profundo, inagotable, llena las ensaladas de Chile, se casa alegremente con la clara cebolla, y para celebrarlo se deja caer aceite, hijo esencial del olivo, sobre sus hemisferios entreabiertos, agrega la pimienta su fragancia, la sal su magnetismo: son las bodas del día el perejil levanta banderines, las papas hierven vigorosamente, el asado golpea con su aroma en la puerta, es hora! vamos! y sobre la mesa, en la cintura del verano, el tomate, aastro de tierra, estrella repetida y fecunda, nos muestra sus circunvoluciones, sus canales, la insigne plenitud y la abundancia sin hueso, sin coraza, sin escamas ni espinas, nos entrega el regalo de su color fogoso y la totalidad de su frescura. - Pablo Neruda (Chilean poet, 1904-1973)
En México, su país de orígen, se lo dice jitomate, palabra azteca. Es la fruta perfecta, en mi opinión. En Corea, es fácil encontrar tomates locales de invernadero en cualquier mes del calendario, y aunque no son muy buenos, son mejores que los muy bien “viajados” (digamos californianos o mexicanos o chilenos) que suelen encontrar en gringolandia en época de invierno.
“I bow in repentance of any thought or action of stealing another’s things.”
This is #31 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).
…
29. 비겁한 생각과 말과 행동을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of cowardly thoughts, words and actions.”
30. 거짓말과 갖가지 위선을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all kinds of hypocrisy and lies.”
31. 남의 것을 훔치는 생각과 행동을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this thirty-first affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any thought or action of stealing another’s things.”
Stealing. I once stole a book. From a library. Should I confess this, online, in front of the world?
It wasn’t an act of avarice – I don’t have much problem with avarice. It was an act of pique – I was angry at the library because they had charged me a fine for stealing (or “losing”) a book that I had most definitely returned. It was an act of revenge, I suppose. So I’ll bow in repentance of thoughts and actions of vengeance and pique.
Beautiful! Good morning.
I've always had a strange, love-hate relationship with my first name. And now, a certain really annoying sociopath in Arizona has gone and disrupted that difficult balance. Being Jared will not be the same, for me… not for a while, anyway.
When I was small, my name was quite rare. It's popularity, as a boy's given name in the US, began to ascend in the generation following mine. The first Jared (non-self-Jared) that I met in person, face-to-face, was a little boy who used to be a customer that would come into the 7-Eleven that I worked at in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985.
Before that, in grade school and high school years, I never met a Jared. But it was a name many of my acquaintances nevertheless were deeply familiar with. That's because Arcata (my hometown), when I was young, had a substantial Mormon population, and until the early 1980's, the name Jared belonged to Mormons, kind of in the same the way that a name like Lakeesha could be said to belong to, say, African-Americans. The Book of Mormon has a two characters named Jared (not to mention a tribe of Jaredites, and a major character referred to, simply, as "Jared's brother," which always has struck me as very odd). The "main" Jared, of course, is the biblical patriarch, Enoch's father.
How my parents chose the name is mysterious to me. They were hardly religious. I have sometimes been of the impression that my mother, unable to think of a name, grabbed a bible (not out of devotion but only because it's a good source of names) and began scanning the begats and begots until she found a name she could live with. Possibly not true. But whatever.
Anyway, starting in the 90's, the name became much more common. I remember having a coworker with a son named Jared at the bookstore in Minneapolis. I've never met a Jared who wasn't at least 10 years younger than me. I guess you could say that my parents were "early adopters."
I remember how dismayed I felt when I saw that Jared had entered a top-50 given names list in the late 90's. I thought: there goes the neighborhood.
And now, the neighborhood, crowded as it's become, has been destroyed by a sociopath in Arizona. Thanks a whole lot, Loughner. Just. Freakin. Thanks.
Unrelatedly: the famous, ubiquitous Yeonggwang gulbi [굴비], drying hanging on a rack in frozen air. I had some really delicious roast dried gulbi yesterday, when I went out to lunch with some coworkers.
All languages have onomatopoeia: words like “woof woof” (a dog barking), or “whirr” (a spinning thing or a dragonfly), etc. But Korean (and apparently Japanese, too) possesses an abundant class of words known as phenomimes and psychomimes. These are words that use “sound symbolism” (q.v. in wikipedia) to represent concepts that aren’t, per se, auditory, but in a symbolic way. Most of the Korean ones include a great deal of reduplication and vowel harmony – in fact, it could be argued that these are actually some fossilized productive reduplicative semantic feature of proto-Korean, and not really “phenomimes” or “psychomimes” at all – it’s all in the definition of those concepts, I guess. Most of them are adverbial, in syntactic terms.
I love these things. They’re one of the reasons the Korean language is magical, for me.
Some examples, from my “bible” (Korean Grammar for International Learners, by Ihm Ho Bin et al.):
반짝반짝 [ban-jjak-ban-jjak] sparklingly
슬슬 [seul-seul] gently
주렁주렁 [ju-reong-ju-reong] richly, with fullness
흔들흔들 [heun-deul-heun-deul] shakily
옹기종기 [ong-gi-jong-gi] closely together
방긋방긋 [bang-geut-bang-geut] broadly [as in a smile]
드르르 [deu-reu-reu] excellently, smoothly
부둑부둑 [bu-dok-bu-dok] damp-dry, a bit damp mostly dry
[Update: I have blogged about this topic again with many more examples, 2012-06-04 and 2012-10-19. I have also modified this original post somewhat since it’s one of the number one draws of my blog from the broader internet, when people google “phenomimes” and “psychomimes” with “korean”, and I have been crosslinked, too.]
[Update 2 (2015-10-08): I decided to create a consolidated list of examples, which I can update periodically.]
