CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

Well.  That was a pretty crappy xmas.  I would have rather been made to work, honestly.

Walking to work today, I passed a spot where they've been doing some construction, a big hole in the sidewalk.  They were burning some scrap wood in a barrel, and the wind was bitingly cold.  The smell of the burning wood and the temperature evoked some late fall camping trips in northern Minnesota.  Fond memories.

I went into the Rotiboy (a Malaysian / Indonesian chain of coffee/"bun" vendors that seems to be doing well in Korea).  I got a caffe latte and a rotibun.  They were delicious.  I'm high on cold-medicine at the moment.

Xmas eve I spoke on the phone for a long time with Basil.  I like Basil well-enough, and I know he's a well-meaning and decent person.  But he seems to obsess on and dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of hagwons in general, the negatives of life in Korea in general, and on the admittedly numerous horriblenesses of LBridge (my current and his erstwhile employer) in particular.  I found myself feeling very depressed after talking to him.  I often find myself depressed after talking to him, so when he called me on xmas day, I ignored his call and turned off my phone.  That's rude, I know, but I just didn't want to cope with his obsessive negativity — I was feeling low enough as it was.  I stayed at home and watched some downloaded episodes of Hawaii Five-O (really?  why?). 

And I finished that novel, Native Speaker, by Chang-rae Lee.  A pretty good read, and an interesting take on the immigrant experience in the U.S., specific to the Korean experience but hardly unique to it, I'm guessing.  All cached in a spy/politics thriller type plot.  I wonder if sometimes one of the reasons I like living in exotic places (like Mexico or Korea) has to do with my desire to somehow understand better that "immigrant" and/or minority experience, which, as a native-born American of the majority, I never really can.

"Turns out this isn't one of these presidencies where you ride off into the sunset, you know, waving goodbye."– George W. Bush

Maybe in the end, he turns out to have at least some actual self-awareness, after all.  Better late than never?

I bought these little decorative paper clips today, they have messages in Korean in them.  Two of them I understood immediately:

안녕 = hi

사랑해 = love you

The other two I had to look in the dictionary:

두근두근 = beating (as in "my heart is beating fast…")

보고싶어 = miss you

Cute.  Maybe they'll make a nice gift or something.

It can be good to get out of the house. 

I went to work for a few hours.  That part… wasn't so great.  I was trying to prepare some lesson plans for next week, and doing a little bit of correcting.  But when I left work, I decided to stop by my friend Curt's hagwon, down the road a few blocks.  On the way, I ran into my former student Tom, who talked to me excitedly of his Ubuntu-Linux install.  In a country that's 99% Microsoft, Tom has the distinction of having successfully installed Linux on his home PC, partly at my suggesting.  He and another boy I had had while back had become very excited to learn that I knew a small amount about computers and especially Linux, and we had had some conversations about it before.

At the Karma Academy, Curt's new hagwon (that he's trying to start from scratch, basically), I chatted with him a bit, and with his daughter too, who's about 6 or 7, and is very shy about trying to speak English – so she gives me opportunities to practice Korean.  Then Curt's daughter went home with his wife and he and I had dinner together.  All kind of dull to recount, but I felt more content than I have in a while chatting with him about the hagwon biz and hanging out.

So anyway.  Good to get out of the house.

It snowed most of the afternoon today!  It's lovely, slushy, snowy, nice.  I went out and took a long walk among the fat, wet, tumbling snowflakes.

I bought some Spanish green olives stuffed with anchovies and some Edam cheese at the HomePlus mart.  And some instant hot chocolate.  I came home and ate some "3분 팔락파니르" (sam-bun pal-lak-pa-ni-reu = 3-minute palak paneer — i.e. instant Indian curry stuff) on rice, and some of my olives, and it was good.

I'm reading a pretty good novel, Native Speaker, by Chang-rae Lee (a Korean-American writer).   I might try to discuss it more in depth when I finish it. 

The weather has turned suddenly wintery.  The wind-blown sky is completely clear and crystaline blue, there is a strong breeze, and it's about -8 C at two in the afternoon (call it 18 F).  This is like Minnesota.  I find it refreshing and invigorating.  Of course, this being Korea, there is no snow on the ground… only patches of ice from the frozen puddles of the drizzle earlier this week.  It's almost always warm when precipitation comes (or, at least, above freezing). 

I've been noticing an odd little problem with my MP3 player… I like to keep it on 'shuffle,' but I've noticed sometimes it seems to 'forget' that it's on shuffle setting, and go back to a normal, serial mode of playing through the songs I've loaded into it.  I was wondering why this happened, and now I've developed a hypothesis.  It seems to happen every time it it hits a folder with unicode (i.e. non-Western) characters in its name.  In practical terms, on my MP3 player, that means anytime it hits one of the Korean pop songs I've been keeping in fairly heavy rotation, if only for the linguistic content.  But I find it ironic that this seems to 'break' the shuffle feature, given that the MP3 player is a Korean-designed, made and marketed product (Samsung, I think).  

It doesn't actually bother me that much, but it means that about once every hour or so of listening, I suddenly start hearing all of my Korean songs in a row, and the randomness of the 'shuffle' disappears' – this is because once the shuffle hits one of the Korean-labeled folders, it drops out of 'shuffle' mode and begins to play sequentially, and for alphebetization reasons, all the Korean stuff is grouped at one 'end' of the MP3 player's memory.  Now all that remains is to test my hypothesis.  But I wonder what causes it? 

I had worked out this really cool idea of something I wanted to write about in my blog. And then Basil stopped by, and wanted to talk for way too long about the depressing hellbridge experience, and by the time I finally shooed him out of my apartment, I'd managed to completely forget what I was going to write.  Not even the title.  That's really annoying.  What's wrong with my brain?

I spent part of the day trying to clean up and organize my computer, a bit.   Too much downloaded crap lying around, as well as the remains of several non-functioning OS installs – one of Windows Server, one of Linux.  I was starting to run out of space.

Of course, as soon as I had space, I downloaded some new stuff.  I started watching a new Korean tv series, after a long hiatus.   More of the standard romantic-comedy genre that I find so informative for trying to pick up bits and pieces of Korean linguistic pragmatics.   The hard-core dramas, especially the historical ones, aren't so useful for that, because nobody talks "normally" in those sorts of shows.

It didn't feel like a very productive day, however.