The End of an Era

It is my last night in Korea. Well, it is my last night in Korea relative to the experience of living here, which leads me to think about the definition of home; first, though, let's talk about the day.
I spent the first part of it with my friend/violin teacher socializing and identifying key flaws in my self-perception, which I freely acknowledge but may fail to deal with. Then I went to work to see people and, having nothing better to do, settled in to make some vocabulary lists and advance my intensive course proposal from the winter. Dork-tastic. Voluntary labor on my last free day in Korea. I stuck around so I could see my students and forbade the one heading towards an eating disorder from getting skinny; I even forced her to acknowledge and consume a miniature peanut butter cup. After work we all went out drinking. It was pretty entertaining. The most reserved of the staff pulled up his shirt to reveal a mighty tattoo of a dragonfly on his torso, I was egged into directly challenging my replacement, and I harangued one of the more adorable members of the Korean staff (who, incidentally, said I sound really educated).
The replacement apparently indicated that he was considering, with his English literature degree, among other things, getting a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Granted, this can't be serious because he is, beyond a doubt, too stupid to achieve any greatness in any field (unless Jackassery is a discipline that has developed since I left college). I was more than pleased to start throwing out words and phrases because I spent my vacation with a philosopher and am confident I could crush said replacement with my mind even without the added help of being able to abuse philosophy jargon to highlight his ignorance. The opportunity never arose. The coworkers began inviting me to speak, prodding me to start fucking with my replacement, and I explained that "the flower must bloom; I cannot force the bud to open," and raised a toast of soju, infamy of liquid infamies, to "horticulture". I hope that my ability to bring laughter made up for my failure to crush my coworker with my mind in an overt and public way.
It's late. I will pursue the idea of 'home' another time.
Dear America,
I'm coming home. Or returning to some close approximation.
Love,
me

In the Tank in Singapore

I'm wearing blue today and tracking the elections from my friend's office in Singapore.

Singapore feels much more multicultural and integrated than anywhere else I've been.

In quieter moments I find myself staring down a path of worries about my future -a job, a place to live, what to do with the cat, reconnecting with people.

Things to look forward to: Thanksgiving, baking, vegetating with friends and loved ones, being near my books, sweaters, cooking, fighting zombies, & snow.

If you have a final request for items from Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea or the Narita Airport in Japan please send me a note so I can acquire them. There are 5 airports and 1.5 weeks between me and home.

I Got Skillz

As long as we're on the Wonder Girls I'd like to recommend this one as well because it's another example of how whoever is managing their image has recognized the value of weaving humor into the more traditional selling of sex that comes with girl groups. Tell Me is the group's first hit single and I heard it near constantly soon after arriving in Korea (in cabs, in the grocery store &c.).

Nerd Status Confirmed

So I just watched the following video:


After a few minutes of pondering the more expected topics of Korean pop, the attractiveness of the artist, and the hittability thereof I started wondering: Why don't they ever interrupt Ph.D. defenses? Seriously? I know this just makes me an even larger dork but why is it that when the hip, pseudo-iconoclastic pop star interrupts/disrupts something it's always goddamned ballet or other classical style? Can't just one artist challenge the dominant paradigm of academic success with sexy wordplay, a Greek chorus and a flaming chandelier?

I blame Flashdance and everything after...



Save the Last Dance



Take the Lead



Stick It (if you didn't know, this is the gymnastics version of Bring It On)



Now, turn it around:



I think what truly confirms my nerd status is the fact that I've blogged it. I should add that this is all rather meaningless now as Outkast's "Big Boi" Patton is teaming up with the Atlanta Ballet. It's time to shatter some different preconceived notions.

Stupid Won

The exchange rate is so bad that I cried at the bank yesterday. I'm hemorrhaging hundreds of dollars because the Won is so worthless.

Thanks, McCain!

Also, for the record, I'm incapable of working up any sympathy for someone making $250,000 a year. I tried. I even tried imagining really absurd tax rates and still just couldn't squeeze out a single tear. I guess I'm just heartless.

New Look

Today I was "pretty". Any student under the age of 10 who noticed my new look today said I looked pretty. Interestingly, some of my older students made the observation that I looked older because of the contrast between my actual age and the age associated with one who wears pink bows. The most mortifying part of this was that we got a new part-timer and his first introduction to me was me in a color antithetical to my being. It reminds me of the time I rented a car and the rental agency picked out a bright yellow Ford Mustang.

K-Pop, Part Hana

My expectation is that this will be the first of at least two posts about K-pop (Korean pop music). The video linked below is one that I watched numerous times last winter at the gym. The song was hugely popular although Jewelry has not been as successful as the Wonder Girls (you'll learn about them soon enough). Note the hand motion of moving the two index fingers towards each other in the synchronized dance. A few months ago I witnessed a child mocking one of my former students by dancing around him in a circle, using his middle finger in the same fashion and yelling "I do fuck you."

I have lived a life largely removed from all but the most prevalent of popular songs here but, recently, I am drawn in. My favorite quote about age is an entire paragraph in Snow Crash wherein Stephens discusses the fact that until the age of 25 a man still thinks he can be truly badass. Something about pop music reminds me that I am no longer young. As much as I enjoy the empty but entertaining lyrics I can't help but watch these videos and think, "Ah, yes, here comes the urban one. Oh, and there's the innocent one and the girl with 'spunk' and the classy one." You can play along at home!

Every Day In Every Way...

I have only a few addictions. One of them is acquiring books. I have a terrible habit of buying three books for every one book that I read. Knowing that I could not afford to build up a library here I have generally resisted the temptation to buy books and instead opted to expand my awareness of "classics". Our library at school hosts a large collection of Penguin Classics. Unlike other books at the library these ones are not for use by the students. We only have a few students capable of fully digesting Jane Austen and the only reason the copy of War and Peace is tattered is because the kids pull it off the shelf and marvel that something so big might actually be read by someone or brandish it as a weapon.
The last two novels I've read are by Henry James (The American and The Portrait of a Lady). I don't think I'll read any more James because the pattern thus far is that an American goes to Europe and gets screwed over by love. One has to wonder about his personal experience given that he was an American who moved to England and became a citizen. The editors of Penguin Classics like to point out that James met Flaubert and Eliot, as though this lends value. At any rate, James' character descriptions and so forth are good but reading The Portrait of a Lady, or at least finishing it, was only mildly rewarding.

Too Much Stuff

I've been posting boxes of stuff back to the states. I don't want to drag around multiple suitcases and bags in Singapore so I'm attempting to send all but what I'll need in my last few weeks back. Somehow, I've doubled the amount of stuff (crap) I possess. Now, when I walk into the post office one of the women slides an overseas package form across the counter before I even reach her.

The Star of the Show

Yours truly, giver of Study Hall, alien hell-beast, stuff of nightmares, has been featured in homework again:

Your Skill in Tae Kwan Do has Increased by Yellow

There are those who believe I am incapable of being diplomatic. It is not that I am incapable of it, but rather that each of us is supplied with finite amounts of diplomacy and by the time I got to Tae Kwan Do I had already used up all my Diplomacy Points not tearing a new orifice in a coworker. So, when I was under the impression that I had failed the test because our club leader left it a mystery, as though it was an episode of American Idol, I may have indicated that the person giving the test was perhaps a "fat bastard". Threats to call said test-giver and report my opinion of his weight relative to cultural expectations were made. Quite possibly, I even pantomimed phoning up the evaluator and shouting while alternately demanding his phone number. These things might have happened but what matters is that I have a yellow TKD belt with my name on it in Korean and something small, yet tangible, has been achieved.

Observation

Dealing with government job applications is like playing MYST. MYST without a reasonable underlying assumption of logic.

Palin Debate Flowchart

I love flow charts!


Thanks to Sunkist for the flowchart.

Hammer Fist

One Step Closer to Being a Superhero

I took my belt test. I will not find out if I passed until next week. The guy who did the judging was a bit pudgy and I vowed to call him fat if he failed me. Once the test was over he gave us the grandmother lecture about piercings and an absence of politeness during the test (insufficient ceremony, really). The important thing:

I broke a board in half with my "hammer fist". *flex*

Children are Vectors of Disease

I had a moment of clarity this week. It was during class. A student sneezed directly in my face as I was leaning down to check his work and I knew instantly that I was going to catch that little bastard's cold and so it has become. On the bright side, the cold will pass but the emotional scars I'm inflicting on him could last a lifetime.

Liancourt? Takeshima? No, Bitch, I Love Dokdo.

Just as I was departing for Hawaii there was an outbreak of panic as the most serious foreign policy problem facing the Korean peninsula came to a head: the perceived status of the Liancourt Islands to the United States of America was changed to "contested". Oh the drama! I'm always tempted to mock countries when they fight about useless rocks but now that I have a fairly firm grounding in international law I understand why it matters. On the other hand, I don't think that those are the reasons that any generic citizen from any country gets worked up about such issues[1]. Actually, it's fairly instructive that Wikipedia refers to them as Liancourt Rocks.

A coworker informed us that he recently saw a (facetious) list of ways to make friends in Korea and among the suggestions was to call the Dokdo Islands "Takeshima" and to call kimchi "kimuchi". Both are references to the long-standing bitterness that Korea holds for Japan because of that whole colonization thing[2]. Takeshima is the name for the islands given by Japan and "kimuchi" is the Japanese pronunciation because all but a single consonant sound is followed by a vowel sound in Japanese, in contrast to Korean.

Another coworker, who I appreciate more every week, found these socks referencing the recent flurry of patriotism and got me a pair. The are my very first foreign policy socks.



[1]And when such things come up I always hear Eddie Izzard in Dressed to Kill doing an impression of Britain insisting it needs to keep the Falkland Islands.
It doesn't come up til the last 30 seconds but it's worth the wait:

[2]I'm the first to admit that many of Japan's actions in Korea as an occupying nation were horrendous. I still have not brought myself to read The Rape of Nanjing, even though I purchased it, because I know it will give me nightmares. On the other hand, we occasionally see our first graders, formless, innocent humans, writing about destroying Japan. It has to stop somewhere and raising children to despise a country, wherein virtually no one capable of being involved in Japan's occupation of the mainland of Asia is still alive, seems absurd.

Midnight Madness

Why is it that I don't consider pursuing my desire to learn to juggle until the third glass of wine?

Also: Might I suggest you try putting peanut butter directly on top of vanilla ice cream? Do it.

Strange Mood

Garfield Minus Garfield