Caveat: Röyksopp – You Don’t Have a Clue (& other insomnias)

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Can't sleep.

Music track stuck in my head, by Norwegian techno group from the top of the world (Tromsø), Röyksopp.  The track, entitled "You Don't Have a Clue" (album "Junior"), I would describe the sound as: "ABBA goes to an all-nite rave, somewhere in a cave, tucks away a tab or two of x, and gets lost in itself.  Forever." 

I like being in Seoul, the city stimulates my creativity.  My mind feels far-ranging and vast.  But unfocused.  I bought books today.  I'm already restless to be back home in pitiful Glory County.   It's not that I like it better there than here, it's that I'm really becoming a homebody, these days.  Needing that feeling of stability or something, maybe. 

Caveat: OMG! Creepy… Palin said something I completely agree with.

Language & Linguistics / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Please forgive me.  Really, she did.  Here it is:

" 'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"
—Tweet, July 18, 2010

I found this Palinism just as I was feeling annoyed with snobby "English Nazis," too.  Ironic that the most popular voice of the most reactionary sector of American society should put such eloquent, less-than-140-character voice to my reaction to the grammar reactionaries.

Caveat: Wait-so-long

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

The morning dawned utterly cloudless, but definitely fall-like, cooler and with lower humidity.  

I decided to reprise my old commute from Suwon to Gangnam, and it was interesting.  The bus was only half-full – as empty as I've ever seen it on a morning hour.  It is, technically, a holiday.   I was listening to my MP3, on shuffle, and watching the familiar scenery go by.  I love giant cities, and that feeling of anticipation that one gets, coming into one through never-ending suburbs.  Coming into Seoul from the south feels just like approaching Philly from the west, or New York from the north – you pass through alternations of high-density suburbs and green, rural-looking hills covered with trees and striking rock formations.  

I especially like coming through the 우면산 [u-myeon-san] tunnel that the #3000 express bus from Suwon goes through.  You're in green countryside, with only the barest hint that you're on the outskirts of a vast metropolis.  The hills are steep and forested.  And then you go through a toll-gate, plunge into the 3 kilometer tunnel and pop out amid the high-rises of Seocho-gu.  

As the bus burrowed into the tunnel, my MP3 player began to play "Wait So Long" by Trampled by Turtles.  I'm not sure how I feel about this music, but it felt appropriate as I waited for the long tunnel to end.  Trampled by Turtles, by the way, is the most awesome band name, ever.  They're a vaguely "punk" bluegrass outfit from Duluth.  I think I listen to them partly just because of their being from Duluth – I have a ambivalent relationship with bluegrass music.  It's not really my favorite genre, nor even anywhere near the top.  But it was a part of my childhood, and my father is a passing-fair bluegrass and folk musician who plays in amateur gatherings frequently.  I think the Duluth angle, combined with their genre-busting punk leanings, is what makes Trampled by Turtles enjoyable for me.

Teheran-no (the main east-west drag in the high-rent Gangnam district of Seoul) was utterly devoid of traffic.  Seoul does, indeed, become a ghost town on the Chuseok holiday.  I got off at my accustomed stop at the Gangnam subway station, and promptly parked myself in the vast Starbucks half-a-block from the northeast station entrance.

I'm not one of those anti-Starbucks people.  I refuse to get defensive about it – except, by virtue of saying that, and writing in this way about it, I am, in fact, getting defensive about it.  Oh well.

The facts, such as they are:  a) Starbucks is a giant corporation, yes, but I think that, over all, it's more ethical in its policies and behavior than companies such as Google and Facebook, both of which are widely used by many of the same people who proclaim Starbucks to be evil;  b) I own stock in the company, and it's not done well (absolute worst overall performance in my portfolio for the last half-decade, but that's my own fault, for having bought near the peak) – so I feel this weird, irrational, emotional need to "support" them, although that's ridiculous from the standpoint that I'm sure I've spent more money at their stores than I've lost in capital losses on their stock.  To reiterate:  Oh well.  Just remember, each 4 dollar latte that you buy will contribute 1 bazillionth of a cent to my net-worth, so, over a lifetime of latte purchases, I'll have increased my net worth sufficiently to be able to add one more sip.

The vast Starbucks that used to be one of my study haunts when I was trying to be a full-time Korean Language student is utterly deserted.  It's as if there was a North Korean invasion, everyone ran away, and the staff wasn't told.  Hmm.  I'll get back to everyone, on that.

OK.  More later.

Caveat: Merry Chuseok

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Today was a day that restored my faith in the value of traveling with no plans whatsoever. In the importance of allowing serendipity to guide one’s footsteps, and just see where things lead.

I have come to Suwon – one of my Korean home towns, at this point. I feel very at ease in this city, although I only technically lived here for about two months, in February and March of this year.  I didn’t come on the bus – I got a ride with an acquaintance, a Korean man with excellent English who happens to be a doctor in Yeonggwang. We had a wide-ranging conversation about many topics, and he got me riffing on linguistics. He may have regretted this, as I can tend to get a little bit too enthusiastic on my favorite subject, and I maybe have overwhelmed him with my talk-talk-talk.

The day was grey and overcast, with low-lying clouds draping themselves over verdent green mountaintops like sleeping kittens. The damp, green fields of South Korea’s breadbasket alternately zoomed and crept past, depending on the flow of traffic – which was bad. Traffic in Korea, during the Chuseok holiday, is like traffic in the US during Thanksgiving. It’s as if God went up to a mountaintop and yelled: “OK, everybody… switch cities! Now!”

We finally got to Suwon’s old city walls’ south gate (Paldalmun) at around 130. I went to the guesthouse where I like to stay, and got my friend Mr Choi’s phone number from the manager there – I’d lost Mr Choi’s number because of my broken cellphone, last month.

Mr Choi said, basically, “Oh wow, Jared, hello. Go to the tea-seller’s shop and wait there!” He said it in Korean. I wasn’t even sure I’d understood. But I deposited my bag into a room at the guesthouse, and ran out and down to the tea-seller’s shop (see this old blog post if you’re wondering who the tea-seller is). There was the tea-seller man, and some friend of his with a very luxurious Samsung Renault car, still smelling of new-car-smell.

We drove to the tea-seller’s apartment, where Mr Choi was hanging out with a bunch of the tea-seller’s family, friends and relatives. They’d literally just cleared the table after their feast as I walked in. They insisted I eat something – so they set a single setting with a modest Chuseok mid-day feast and watched me eat as they drank tea and chatted about whether or not my Korean Language ability had improved. Well, they probably chatted about other things as well, including the weather.

After I finished eating, we drank tea alternating with shots of 12 year scotch whiskey that someone had presented as a gift to the tea-seller, out of the same diminutive cups (the tea and the whiskey had the same amber color, and at one point I became a bit confused about what had been poured in my cup, much to everyone’s amusement).

The tea-seller’s children put in a shy appearance (but it was pleasing that they seemed to remember me fondly – I’d provided them with “free” English tutoring back in March as a sort exchange for my crash course in Korean tea-culture and the tea-seller’s general kindness and friendship, among other things).

Actually, as I sat, gazing out the window at the overcast early afternoon, I reflected that these Koreans were possibly the kindest, most generous Koreans I have met in Korea, among many kind and generous people – I felt amazingly at ease and welcome and comfortable. I need to remember to get the tea-seller’s name and email address from Mr Choi … it’s so strange in Korea that it’s possible to become pretty close friends with someone and not know their name, but that’s the way it works, especially if they’re older than you.

We spent a few hours there, drinking a great deal of 보이차 [bo-i-cha = Chinese “puer” tea], and it was a pretty sympathetic Korean immersion environment.

After that, we drove in Mr Choi’s new car (he has gotten out of managing the guesthouse, and is working for a disabled-person’s advocacy organization – he seems to be doing much better than when I knew him last winter) to a movie theater and watched a movie, rather spontaneously. Chuseok is a big movie-going day (much like Christmas in the US), and we saw the opening day of a Korean movie called “퀴즈왕” [kwi-jeu-wang = quiz prince], about a bunch of inept people who enter a quiz show contest after meeting in a police station one night having all been involved in a giant and surreal traffic accident. I didn’t really follow the intricacies of the plot, although I gathered something about the quiz show’s supposedly “impossible” final question was revealed in some piece of evidence that everyone had had a chance to see while at the police station. About halfway through the movie, I thought, “this movie is a cross between ‘Crash’ and ‘Barney Miller’, seen through the filter of magic-realist Korean cinema.” That about sums it up. I think, despite not having understood it well, I liked it better than Mr Choi: “재미없었어!” was his melodramatic lament, as we made our way out of the theater.

Actually, that’s the first time I’ve been to a Korean movie, without subtitles, in a theater, and more-or-less at least had some idea what was going on. More confidence-building, on the language front.

After that, Mr Choi and I looked for an open restaurant. It was like looking for an open restaurant on Christmas day, in the US. We found a little joint a few blocks from the Paldalmun, and we ate 부대지개 [bu-dae-ji-gae = “Army Camp” stew]. I’ve had this many times, over the years, in Korea, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it before. It’s basically a bunch of things that might be found in a Korean army base, thrown together and cooked into a stew:  ramyeon (ramen), spam, hot dogs, kimchi, grass and weeds, tofu….  Delicious? It seems to be a popular thing to order after a hard night of drinking. All Mr Choi and I had had was way too much tea, and a few shots of whiskey, but it was a good meal. The restaurant lady was impressed by my ability to eat kimchi – some Koreans are, when they see a “foreigner” eating kimchi – and she kept bringing more.

Finally, the day was more-or-less ended at a reasonable hour, and I headed back to the guesthouse in the first chilly evening I’ve experienced in months, walking down the familiar alleyways of old Suwon. Is fall finally coming? How appropriate that there should be the barest hint of the Siberian months ahead, on Chuseok evening. The drizzle felt wonderful on the back of my neck. I shivered.

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Caveat: The place where no one wants to live but everyone comes back to

Banalities & Journaling

This is the Chuseok holiday – Korean Thanksgiving.  This is the holiday where everyone in Korea goes back to their hometowns and pays respects to their ancestors.  This is a holiday that celebrates traffic jams and excessive drinking.

I went down to the store yesterday, and the lines at the check outs were stretched back down the aisles of the store.  The massive gravel parking lot at the Hanaro Mart (the town Co-op grocery) was absolutely full – which I've never seen before.  The traffic circle was packed with cars in slow orbit, like a Paris intersection. 

This is a town where no one wants to live, but everyone comes back to.  The population must at least double during a "come back to your home town" type holiday.  I went back to hide in my little apartment.  The sky was blue but it was hot, yesterday.  Then last night, somewhat surprisingly, it rained.

I listened to LCD Soundsystem and Atmosphere.  I ate some yellow lentil dhal that I'd made on Sunday.  Today I'm going to attempt to go up to Seoul for a day or two.  I'm not sure how that's going to go.

Caveat: Three Minute Fiction

Less Banal Than Usual / My Poetry & Fiction

I overheard a fiction-writing contest on NPR, the other day, and something made me sit down and write a story in response to the contest.

The problem: I can’t enter the contest, because it’s only for residents of the US, which I’m not, currently. Whatever. It was just a moment of weird inspiration – I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts, lately.

The parameters: the story must be 600 words, and, “The Story must: (i)  Start with the first line: ‘Some people swore that the house was haunted.’ and (ii)  End with the last line: ‘Nothing was ever the same again after that.’” So here’s my three-minute ghost story.

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

The new house was probably haunted from the start.  From the day it was built, on the edge of the forest, there was a moodiness that would settle upon anyone who spent more than a few minutes near the modest, blue-tile-roofed farmhouse that squatted at the edge of the forest.

Perhaps it could be blamed on the man who built it.  Mr Choi was a taciturn man.  He would sit on the stoop in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and scratching himself.  People said one could overhear him talking, frequently.  But he lived alone.

He’d inherited the land from his parents, who had died in a bus accident on the new expressway, ten years ago.  He’d come back from the city, bitter and scandalously divorced at forty.  The storekeeper said that he thought that if he built a new house, he could attract a second wife.

Sturdily constructed, it was unxpectedly made to look traditional.  Mr Choi was the type of man one would expect to go for a fancy, Western-style house:  a flat roof, concrete walls, topiary bushes in a row in front and a satelite dish.  Perhaps it was an homage to his deceased father, who’d been a skilled craftsman and builder.  The house had a curving roof with rough-hewn eaves of raw wood, and sliding doors, almost like a temple building, but simpler.

People said the man had chosen the spot for his house badly.  There were some graves, in among the trees on the hillside.  There are graves everywhere, in Korea.  Ancestors are thick on the ground.

These graves were Mr Choi’s ancestors – including his parents. Perhaps he’d forgotten about his grandmother.  She had been a terrible, frightening woman.  Rumor said that during the war, decades ago, she’d collaborated, and had been responsible for the deaths of several dozen villagers. Because of her, no one completely trusted the Choi family, even now.  The Chois didn’t go to church, either.  They really weren’t good, modern Koreans.

It was the pastor’s wife, Ms Sung, who swore that the new house was haunted. She would point out that the Choi family had been shamans, generations ago, before the Japanese, and that Mr Choi probably still practiced secret, pagan rituals. He had placed some wooden jang-seung – the traditional, carved, protective totem poles – at the turning to the driveway to the house. Probably, his father had made them. “Superstitious,” the woman spat.

All anyone saw him doing, though, was working his fields.  And talking to himself, sometimes.  e made a peculiar farmer – some noted that he was supposedly well-educated, with a university degree. Supposedly, he had led a student strike, at the end of the dictatorship.

People dismissed the gossip, for the most part. They just left Mr Choi alone.

Then, one spring evening, several of the older women were walking along the road by the house. The sun was already behind the hills, making the sky orange and pink. The air was full of smoke from burning the stubble, after cutting the spring barley.  The earth was muddy and red-black, dotted with flecks of gold.

The women had paused their conversation.  Suddenly they heard shouting, very clearly. The women turned and stared at the house, across a field of freshly planted hot peppers.

Mr Choi came running out of his handsome house, his hair flying. He ran off among the trees, waving an axe. The women saw him strike at one of the burial mounds repeatly with the axe, weeping.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

Caveat: 이것은 흑마늘 매우 맛있구나

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea

I met with my friend Mr Kim, yesterday. We went hiking on Mudeungsan, which I’ve hiked parts of, twice before, but never to the top – it was over 6 hours, round trip, and we were basically jogging down, the last hour, trying to beat the setting sun, because we’d gotten a late start.

The late start was because we’d taken our time. He took me to his alma mater, Chosun University. It has a very attractive campus nestled on a southwest-facing hillside on the eastern edge of downtown Gwangju. It’s probably the most attractive university campus that I’ve seen in Korea, and it reminded me quite a bit of Humboldt State in its hillside layout.

The main building of the campus is against the hillside, quite a ways up, just like Humboldt’s Founder’s Hall is in Arcata. But the building is huge, and of a very distinctive architecture. Seeing it from a distance, looking up at it, I had always assumed it was one of those postmodern follies dating from a recent decade, but today I learned that the building in fact was made in 1946, making it that rarest of Korean architectural gems: a structure that is post-colonial but pre-Korean War – at the height of Americanizing influence in the peninsula, during the post-WWII occupation, but when things were much more idealistic than in the no-more-utopias phase that came after the 6/25/1950 war (as they call it, here).

After the campus tour, we parked at the very touristy base of the mountain, the west-facing, Gwangju entrance of Mudeungsan Park. We then went to one of the plethora of restaurants that cluster there, to serve the infinitude of day-hikers. The place that we went was absolutely the most delicious Korean restaurant I’ve eaten at in recent memory.

One highlight was the 도토리수재비 [do-to-ri-su-jae-bi], which is a kind of nuts and dumplings savory soup or stew. No meat or fish (which always strikes a chord with me), loaded with all sorts of different kinds of roots, veggies and nuts, a thick, umamiful (yes, I just made that word up, but look up umami in wikipedia sometime) broth, and these amazing acorn-flour dumplings (really, they were Korean acorny gnocchi).

The absolute culinary miracle, for me, however, was something I will never forget – my first taste of 흑마늘 [heuk-ma-neul], roasted, sweet, black garlic. Oh, this was a truly amazing treat – imagine whole cloves of garlic with a consistency and vague taste of chocolate, that you can eat like candy.

We finally started hiking at about 1220.

Here are some pictures of the campus and the lunch.  I will put pictures from the actual hike at a later post.

Looking down on the Gwangjuscape from the main building at Chosun University.

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The distinctive and ancient (by modern Korean standards – 1946!) and massive main building of the university.

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The stairs leading down from in front of the main hall to the rest of campus, including the dormitory building and the 16 floor engineering building where my friend Mr Kim studied nuclear engineering back in the 80s, in the distance.

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The spread, for lunch.  Look at all those amazing banchan (side dishes).

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And the really stunning, delicious, unique roasted black garlic.

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Caveat: The Venal Vice Principal Devours My Patience

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Life in Korea / Teaching & Methodology

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., in his book The Story of Buddhism, discusses the bodhisattva Shantideva's argument for patience.  Lopez writes,

When someone strikes us with a stick, do we become angry at the stick or the person wielding the stick?  Both are necessary for pain to be inflicted, but we feel anger only for the agent of our pain, not the instrument.  But the person who moves the stick is himself moved by anger;  he serves as its instrument.  If we are directing our anger against the root cause of the pain, we should therefore direct our anger against anger.

Today, my patience was tested.  I didn't fare so well – I felt a lot of anger.  Mostly, at my vice principal, who seems to be a petty bureaucrat, an unkind person, and, most disturbingly, a venal, xenophobic buffoon.  Yes, all of those things.

I didn't enjoy how his capricious commands ended up leading to my personal possessions and space (what little remains for me at my school – it has been reduced to a shelf in a cabinet, in essence, nothing more – no desk, no closet, no work area) being invaded, rearranged, and disregarded, while I was away teaching class.  I had to go dig my bag of stickers (prizes for students) out of a heap of seeming trash, and my toothbrush and toothpaste was in another pile.

The vice principal isn't so much a 'stick' being wielded by anger so much as a 'stick' being wielded by incompetence, I would say.  Combined with an utter disregard for human kindness.  That stick, in turn, wielded the stick of my coworkers' disregard for my personal space, which struck me and led to anger.  I felt anger.

The man is a caricature.  If I was watching a Korean drama, and there was to be an annoying, incompetent-to-the-point-of-dangerous, petty bureaucrat, he could fill the role, without having to take acting lessons of any kind.

I need to just get over it.  It's no big deal, right?  Where's my patience?  I really don't want to become one of those people who spend all his time in Korea complaining about Korea.  That's just… a waste of my time.  Right?  I meet people like that, all the time, and they drive me nuts.  But jeez…  I've felt so much frustration, lately.  With the language.  With the bureaucratic incomptence of my school's administrative staff.  With my commute.  With just this and that.

Caveat: Cute Monsters, Kimbap, Cake, etc.

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / Kids / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / Teaching & Methodology

Thank you, all, for the happy birthday wishes!

This blog post will be a disorganized miscellany.

1. We made “monsters” in my first-grade afterschool class on Monday.  This picture shows some of my favorites.

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2. On Tuesday, our “Yeonggwang Study Group” of foreign teachers, that’s been taking shape to try to study some Korean Language together, met at Anelle’s and learned how to make kimbap (a sort of Korean take on what Americans call “California Roll” and often incorrectly identify as sushi, which is something completely different).  Kimbap has things like radish, ham, crab, cucumber and carrot rolled together with rice in a sheet of seaweed.  Here is a picture of my first-ever kimbap that I made.

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3. I have so far received 16 happy-birthday wishes on facebook, as well as several non-facebook induced emails. Not only that, but several of my English-teaching colleagues at Hongnong Chodeung Hakgyo threw a sort of surprise party for me, with a little fruit-topped cake bought from the Yeonggwang Paris Baguette shop. I was deeply flattered and touched. Birthdays are hard for me – they always have been. I have a deeply disharmonious relationship with the passage of time, and birthdays are a notably overt marker of this. But it’s pleasing to be “appreciated” by a little party, especially since it was a genuine surprise – I really wasn’t expecting it.

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Caveat: Wednesday’s Child

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

My mother reports that I was born on a Wednesday.  I'm not sure about all the woe.  I suppose I've had my share, but can I say I've had exceptional amounts in comparison to my other-day-of-the-week peers, on average?  Not necessarily.  Or is that just revisionism?

    Monday's child is fair of face,
    Tuesday's child is full of grace,
    Wednesday's child is full of woe,
    Thursday's child has far to go,
    Friday's child is loving and giving,
    Saturday's child works hard for a living,
    But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
    Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

Caveat: 1) 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”

I’m definitely sick. I thought I was feeling better, yesterday morning, but I felt like I had a fever all day.  Often, when I know I have a fever, I deliberately don’t take medicine, because my understanding is that a low-grade fever can help the body fight whatever infection it’s fighting – the fever has the function of making the environment hostile to the infection.  I have no idea if this really good practice, but it’s always been my way of coping, though it’s uncomfortable. Partly it’s because I just don’t like taking medicine.  It always feels like an assault on my existential autonomy, although that’s philosophically inconsistent if not downright ridiculous.

Last night, when I got home, I felt really rotten. I began watching some shoot-em-up action flick on the TV, but it was really annoying. I have limited patience for Bruce Willis. I changed to the Buddhist channel. I sometimes will watch this as sort of background noise, because there’s lots of complex Korean to listen to, it’s culturally interesting, and the wacky-yet-banal informercials can be an entertaining contrast.

I’ve come to realize that every evening around 6 PM, the Buddhist channel runs a sort of day-end prayer, which are in the form of 108 affirmations. Lots of Buddhist ritual comes in sets of 108, which is an important number for Buddhists.

Anyway, the title to this blog entry is affirmation number one:

1. 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다.

Google translate, with typical guileless aplomb, asserts that this means “Buddha mind is extreme ear.”  Which might make a good title for a comedy involving a philosophical meditation on the daredevil the body parts of great thinkers.  But I think a good translation might be:  “I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”  The first word, “지극한” is an adjectivalized form of the descriptive verb “지극하다,” which literally means “extreme” but in this context, I think it can mean “the depths of,” i.e. “all,” modifying “마음” “heart.”

I am not becoming a Buddhist. Not in terms of commitment. I can’t – I’m a dialectical materialist, and deeply committed to an anti-spiritual, anti-transcendent worldview. But I have strong sympathies for Buddhist practices, and I have found a lot of pragmatic “peace of mind” in Buddhist-style meditative practice, specifically (such as Zen and Vipassana). And I have been encouraged by the fact that when I say things like “I’m an atheist” to Buddhists, I don’t get the shocked and alarmed reaction of Christians, who immediately begin to worry over the fate of my soul. Buddhists, on the other hand, generally say things like, “that’s OK,” or “It doesn’t really matter.” Because they express no hostility toward my worldview, I feel no hostility toward theirs. Peace begets peace.

The morning is foggy. One thing I like about the weather in Glory County, Korea, is the prevalence of fog. It takes me back to my childhood, and the Pacific fogs of the Northern California coast.

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Caveat: a-dreamin’ intertextualities

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

Sometimes I have such strange dreams.  I awoke from one, just now.

In the dream, I was reading a children's story.  I suppose, given what I've been doing for a living, that that's not so unexpected.  But in the dream, the children's story was in a weird mixture of Korean and English (real children's stories tend not to look like that), and had been written by my former LBridge colleague, Jinhee.   And it turned out that she'd incorporated me as a character into her story.  The story was about a group of Korean kids who go around solving little mysteries and problems in their community, which was a vast, densely populated suburb much like Ilsan.  It basically was Ilsan, but was never named as such.

One such mystery they solve is the "mystery of the missing soju" – yes, that's funny.  And not that unrealistic, maybe?  Hah.  They find out that at their school's hoesik (staff get-together dinner) the night before, a bunch of soju had disappeared, and they go about solving where it went.  It turned out the vice principal drank it.  All with very cute illustrations, and a nice moral at the ending, about maybe one shouldn't drink so much soju at hoesik events.

So strange, to be reading such a vivid and peculiar yet utterly apropos story, in a dream.  I've often had "textual" dreams of this sort, but few quite like this.

And the next part of the story has the kids running into their "crazy English teacher Jared" while riding a bus to the mall.  In the dream, I feel this mixed feeling of humility and pride at being included in the story by my friend Jinhee.  The kids convince the story character, Jared, that he needs to help them solve a mystery involving a missing puppy.   For some strange reason, to solve this mystery, the kids have to put together and then perform a drama production for a group of high-powered American business executives – hence the need for their crazy English teacher's help. 

So I help them write and perform the drama.  We put together a plot that involves a group of inept superheroes (a little bit a la The Incredibles?) who are being asked to work as office temps in a big company, and the superheroes end up saving the day by finding a missing puppy.

Seriously.  My dream was becoming an intertextual labyrinth of Cervantine proportions.   I'm having a dream in which I'm a character in a story in which that character (who is me) is writing a drama and helping some kids find a missing puppy, and in the drama-in-the-story-in-the-dream, there are some superheroes that are helping to find a missing puppy.  Got it?

The drama goes as planned, and induces the American business executive who apparently stole the puppy to come clean and return it to the crying little girl.  It's a scooby doo ending.  Added twist of irony:  the nefarious business executive in the story is a splitting image of my erstwhile nemesis from Aramark Corporation, CIO Bob McCormick.  I find myself wondering, in the dream:  "How did my friend Jinhee know that that's what evil American business executives looked like?"

But then I notice there's a typo in the story I'm reading:  the word "clearly" is written as "claxli" – this is an "impossible" typo… at the least, it's a highly improbable one.  What I mean by this, is that in the dream, I'm suddenly struck by the fact that "claxli" is not the sort of typo that happens in the "real world."  And somehow this jarring fact causes me to become aware that I'm dreaming.   And in the dream, now aware that I'm dreaming, I look up to see my friend Jinhee trying to present me with a copy of the story book she'd written, and I think to myself, I should tell her about the typo, but then I think, "oh, it's just a dream, so it doesn't really matter that much." 

So I just thank her for the story, and for including me in it, and then we walk into a hoesik where some kids are doing a performance of the drama from the story for their school administration and staff (including the vice principal of the missing soju).  And I think to myself, in the dream, "pues, de veras, la vida es sueño" (a reference to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous Spanish Golden Age drama, "Life Is a Dream"), and then I wake up.

It's six AM on the dot, although I'd turned off my alarm, and it hadn't gone off.  The window is open, the rain has stopped, and there's an almost-coolness in the air, that seems alien and unnatural after so many months of humid, sweltering heat.  It makes me think of Minnesota.

My stomach was feeling very upset yesterday (possibly, in part, stress-induced, from the difficult emotional week I'd endured last week), and it is still feeling unsettled.  I'm feeling a bit under the weather, definitely.  But what interesting dreams I sometimes have, when sick.

Caveat: Thunderstorms at Dawn

Banalities & Journaling

As was probably pretty obvious, I was feeling discouraged, last night.  I still am.  But I'll get over it.

This morning, it was thundering and pouring, rain, which de-motivated me in my plan to go into Gwangju this morning – I have some shopping I want to do, and I wanted to try to meet my friend Seungbae.  But anyway…

There is an immediacy to writing in a blog – you get my feelings of each particular moment.  I don't always try to tone down those feelings, or edit out the bad parts.  So it will swing back and forth, positive to negative to positive again.  Such is life.

I was watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert episodes this morning.  I particularly enjoyed Stewart's segment on the show dated Sept 9, by Wyatt Cenac, in which a Staten Island version of the SCOTUS struck down California's prop 8.  This gives hope for American values of tolerance, despite everything.

And this:  "…the greatest honor this nation can bestow:  free tee-shirts." – Stephen Colbert, in a show saluting war veterans.

Caveat: Zero of the most important things

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

Hard, hard week.  I'm pretty frustrated.

The two most important things in my life right now are:  1) improve my teaching;  2) improve my Korean language ability.

I made progress in exactly zero of these two important things, this past week.

With respect to teaching:  it was a challenging week, with chaotic, misbehaving children, messed-up lesson plans, a feeling of dullness and lack of dynamism in my interactions with kids.

With respect to trying to improve my Korean:  it seemed like every time I tried to say anything in Korean, I was hyper-corrected, laughed at, mocked, or ignored.  And the Koreans wonder why we Westerners so often give up on trying to learn the language.  When you're told "you're saying that wrong" ten times in one day, when you're laughed at for trying ,when you're stared at incomprehendingly after having spent over five minutes carefully trying to craft a meaningful sentence in your head before giving it utterance, you begin to lose hope.

Caveat: Growing Up as an Anchor Baby in Hibbing

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology

I found an interesting editorial in the LA Times about the concept of "anchor babies," with a Korean angle. I think it's worth reading. 

Starting last week, my new schedule included the sixth grade (in place of the fourth graders who I was with in the spring), for the "main curriculum" English classes. And then this week, all sixth grade English classes were cancelled, because the sixth graders got to take a class trip to Jeju.

So I'm finding myself with some time to kill, at work. This, combined with the fact that we have finally begun to settle into our newly remodeled English classroom (pictures coming soon, maybe), meaning that there's an actual computer with actual internet access that doesn't have a line of teachers waiting to use it like the ones in the staff room. Hence my websurfing activities.

Caveat: How Kindness Works

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

 

I found this while surfing online. It’s called “The Starfish Story.”

Once upon a time, there was a man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?" The young man paused, looked up, and replied "I’m throwing starfish into the ocean." "I must ask, then… why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled man. The young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die." Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and that there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!" At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."

I'm not so good at this, sometimes. But I believe in it.

Caveat: “Do you like dolphins?” – Castro Comes Clean

Language & Linguistics / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

There has been an interesting series of articles / interviews with Fidel Castro, by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.  Among other thoughts:  Ahmadinejad needs to mellow out, and Cuba's communist model has failed.

My favorite part of Goldberg's interview experience – a glimpse of banal humanity behind the old dictator: 

"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.

"I like dolphins a lot," I said. 

I've always had a deep fascination for the "repentant dictator."  Perhaps this grew out of my time in Chile, and the weirdly dysfunctional relationship that the people of that country had with their erstwhile savior and/or tormentor, Pinochet.  Yesterday, I blog-mentioned Chun Doo-hwan, who was dictator of South Korea in the 1980's.  What would it be like to talk to him, now, about what Korea is like, now?  I would be fascinated.

Caveat: About 23 Years

Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I have been reading (re-reading?) parts of Michael Breen's "The Koreans."  Living here, day-to-day, it's easy to forget that South Korean democracy (such as it is) is about 23 years old.  That 's not very old.  The dictator Chun Doo-hwan only allowed for direct presidential elections in 1987, and those elections were flawed because the state-run media (and the state pork machine) helped ensure that his hand-chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, would be elected (although the opposition didn't help itself by splitting the opposition vote). 

So in fact, although the constitutional changes 23 years ago could be said to represent the beginning of South Korean democracy, in fact, the first "normal" presidential elections weren't held until 1992.  South Korean democracy is still imperfect – but I view North American democracy as rather imperfect, too.  Still, those traditions, at least, have many generations of consistency and relatively smooth alternations of power.  South Korea is still quite fragile, I think.

It's interesting to realize that for anyone in South Korea who is approaching middle-age, these events were formative experiences of their youth and college years.  Most of us English-speaking foreigners who work and live in Korea these days are teachers.  Consider the fact that all of those cryptic, middle-aged teachers and administrators you work with have vivid memories of riots, police repression, surreptitious jailings and beatings, disappearances.  Your vice principal may have been throwing flaming molotov cocktails, while in university, at his principal, who was a youthful riot-police captain, ordering his men to shoot tear gas and beat the students with clubs.  Or vice-versa.  Perhaps some of the puzzling things we see Koreans doing could be better understood if we take these things into account.

Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: How to get out of South Korea

Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Actually, as is often the case, the caveat above is a bit misleading.  I've been thinking about Afghanistan, after reading some fragments of blog posts that included a discussion of the issues entitled:  "How to get out of Afghanistan."  And I immediately thought about South Korea. 

Now that our (by "our" I mean US) significant military presence in South Korea is in its 60th year, why does no one take seriously the idea that we need to "get out" of South Korea?  Because the mission is viewed as a "success" – we have a long-standing, almost unquestionable partnership with the South Koreans. 

So why is the only way to conceptualize "success" in Afghanistan couched in terms of "getting out"?  I think a real, genuine geopolitical success could just as easily be conceptualized as getting to the point where conditions "on the ground" for US troops in Afghanistan are just as boring and routine as the conditions for US troops in South Korea. 

I'm not saying that's the only option.  But I think people who insist that "leaving Afghanistan" is the only possible way to be successful are deeply misunderstanding what the role of "enlightened military superpower" is supposed to be.  Not that I agree with the idea that the US must necessarily be an enlightened military superpower – but you can't have it both ways:  choosing to operate on those terms in a place like South Korea, because it's convenient and relatively painless, and then failing to operate on those same terms in a place like Afghanistan, because it's painful and inconvenient.

It seems consistency is important not just in parenting and teaching children, but in geopolitics, too.

Caveat: Somewhere Else, It’s Fall

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Not here.  Hot and muggy, per usual, when it's not actually raining.  But on Minnesota Public Radio, I hear that it's 57 degrees F on the State Fairgrounds in Saint Paul, at 4 in the afternoon.   I love how fall comes so early in Minnesota.  It's possibly the single thing I miss most about "home."

Here in Korea… summer-like weather will persist well into October, although Koreans will obstinately call it fall.  Seasons are defined solely by the calendar, here, and not by actual experiential conditions.  And, in general, I would say weather in Korea is more predictable on a calendar basis than in the midwest of US.

Caveat: It’s really cute

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

What do you suppose that above quote is referring to?  A coworker said "it's really cute."  What was she talking about?  Lo and behold:  she was referring to the way that  I sound when I try to speak Korean.  This is so much more positive and pleasant than the occasional mockings and put-downs that I have to tolerate in my efforts to learn the language.

I won't go so far as to read anything into it except just that it probably does sound quite novel and entertaining to hear a foreigner trying to speak the language – it's something even more rare, in most Koreans' day-to-day experiences, than hearing English or seeing foreigners at all.   In any event, the semantic range of "cute" (귀엽다) is much wider in Korean, and generally speaking less ironic and/or flirtatious in the way it's deployed by adults.

Anyway, a little bit of positive (or at least non-negative) feedback can go a long way, in my soul (or whatever it is that I have that passes for a soul).  I'm feeling pretty happy about my language-learning efforts, for once.

We'll see how things go, over the weekend – I'm committed to spending the whole weekend with Mr Kim, in a little odyssey to Ulsan.  I may not be updating my blog until Monday morning.

Caveat: Phone Phun

Banalities & Journaling
OK, I got a new phone.  My colleague Haewon helped me with translating what the guy in the phone store needed to say to me.  I'm still trying to figure out how to use it.  If you have interacted with me on the phone in the past, please, please call or text me, because I've lost all my numbers from my old phone – it died a terrible and tragic death.  And next week was its 3rd birthday!  Happy birthday, old phone!  Sorry you've left us.

Caveat: Typhoon Kompasu

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

I get a lot of little notes and messages about the typhoon.  "Are you OK?"  I'm fine.  

Typhoon.  Sounds exotic and dangerous.  Really, just a hurricane, but rebranded for Asian audiences.  Both are names for a big, windy rain storms, which are primarily dangerous if you like hanging out or living near large bodies of water. 

Last night, I didn't sleep well, though.  The wind was causing the doors in my building to go "clank clank" as they fought against their latches in the rapidly shifting air pressure.  The building isn't tightly sealed enough to prevent this. 

Lots of wind and heavy rain.  It's annoying, if it happens to be when I need to walk between my apartment and the bus terminal – that's a 20 minute walk, and there really is no alternative – I suppose I could get a taxi, but getting a taxi when it's raining hard is not an effective use of time, since that's the idea many, many other people have too.

So, I get wet.  An umbrella is useless, when it's raining sideways and the water on the sidewalk is ankle-deep.  This happened yesterday, walking home from work.  During the rainy season, I carry plastic bags in my backpack, and use them to seal all the things I'm carrying inside the bag in rainproof containers.

But is the storm dangerous?  Do I feel at risk.  Not really.  It's got the same feel as an intense California winter storm.  Wind.  Rain.  But risk of life and limb?  No.  There may be flooding.  Korea has had bad floods, sometimes – the hazards of being a country made up entirely of mountains and river valleys between them.  But my apartment, and my place of work, are on high ground.

Caveat: 14..14…14…

Language & Linguistics

I was walking past the mental hospital the other day, and a group of patients were outside in an enclosed yard, shouting, '13….13….13'

The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and so I looked through, to see what was going on.. Some dude poked me in the eye with a stick.

Then they all started shouting '14….14….14'…

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