At lunch today I found metal shavings in my vegetables.  There can be only one explanation:  The lunch lady is trying to kill me.

***

I just had some good news.  The grade from my first assignment finally came back.  My mark was 22 out of 25, so in other words I have a B+ so far, which means maybe I won’t completely fuck up the course after all.  

Yesterday at about 4:00 I submitted my second assignment.  I don’t know.  It feels pretty weak.  I’m just afraid I might have missed the point of the whole task.  The paper was supposed to be about how language changes.  I wrote about language death and revitalization, which was fascinating, but I dealt only with sociological factors and didn’t really touch on linguistics.  I wrote about why languages die, but forgot to tell how. By the time I had that realization it was kind of too late to change without basically starting over from scratch, so I just kept writing.  Besides that the paper, like its author, is a disorganized mess.  Well, here’s hoping it won’t take so long to get my second assignment’s grade returned.  It will be nice to know how badly I suck as a linguist, instead of just guessing.

I have to spend a lot of time today working on the stupid paper I’m writing for the stupid class I was stupid enough to take.  Grr….

More will come once I’ve finished…promise.

I’m still doing the Dionne Warwick song with some classes this week.  Some classes like it, some don’t.  It was probably a bad idea, but not as bad as I feared it would be. I mean, Burt Bacharach? 1967? That weird muted trumpet thing? It reminds me of going shopping with my mother when I was a very young kid in the early 70s.

Yesterday I was introducing the song for about the ninth time.  What I do is I write the title of the song, “I say a little prayer” on the board, then ask the class to predict who and what she says a prayer for.  The usual responses are about what you’d expect; money, to pass a test, a boyfriend…but one student yesterday proposed, “her soccer team.” I can’t decide if she’s a true fan, or an ultra-nationalistic religious fanatic.  I’m going to refrain from making a judgement.  I’m just, ya know, putting that out there.  

What’s interesting about the song is I found a website that claims, “The lyrics resonated with wives and girlfriends whose men were fighting in Vietnam.” After we’ve listened to the song a couple of times and completed a small worksheet, I ask them again why Dionne says a little prayer, then tell explain this one possible interpretation.  I wasn’t planning to do that originally, but I did one time on a lark and the class (and especially my co-teacher) just ate it up.  I guess it’s that penchant for melodrama that made them connect with it.  So, after that I made the Vietnam interpretation a regular part of my presentation.  

***

Last night I ate too much Chinese food.  It started innocently enough.  My intentions were good.  I had a lot of work to do on my paper, so instead of cooking something, I was going to order a tangsuyouk (sweet and sour pork) and jajang myeon (noodles with black sauce) combo.  I had ordered this perviously, and it came in a split bowl with just enough for one person.  The place I had ordered from before didn’t answer when I called.  They may have gone out of business for all I know.  I called another place and tried in my extremely broken Korean to order the same thing.  What I ended up with was a jajang/tagsuyouk combo for two.  It was deliverd with four sets of chopsticks, just to give you an idea of how much food there was.  Well, I didn’t eat all of it, but came damn close.  I put the second bowl of jajang in the fridge, but ate just about all of the first, and most of the fried pork and mandu.  It all happened so fast.  Even now in fact, I’m feeling a little sick just thinking about it.  

Yesterday, because or some fluke or other, I only had one class.  It was a stroke of luck actually because of the mess I made of my schedule by being out for two days last week.  My Tuesday classes were ahead of everyone else, so it was just as well that almost all of them got the day off (from me that is, they had some workshop or something about their future job prospects and stuff).  

I worked hard on my assignment yesterday and feel like I’ve finally cracked the nut.  I began work on my second draft, and got over a thousand words written (out of 2000-2500 required).  Last night I wrote about Tok Pisin, a creole language in Papua New Guinea, which is kind of an interesting thing because it started as an English pidgin, got creolized and became a “real” language, and is now undergoing a decreolization process, so it is once again become more like standard English.  I know this is a nerdy little fact, and is probably far more interesting to me than to “normal” people, but I like knowing weird little things like that.  

Tonight I’m going to write about a Gaelic dialect spoken in a few fishing villages in Scotland, and may or may not touch on Irish.  On Thursday I’ll write the next major section, on language revitalization, then on Saturday and Sunday I’ll write my conclusions, then go back and make sure my citations are correct and all that technical bullshit.  

I’m still on the fence about whether to take a course next semester.  The course I would take next is Second Language Acquisition.  It’s the one I started this semester, then dropped because I figured out I was kidding myself about the taking two courses at a time thing.  You know what I need to do?  I need to figure out why I’m even doing this.  Right now I sort of have a vague dual-path idea, that I’ll either use my masters to teach in a University here, or I’ll use it to go home and teach in the states, either in a secondary school, or possibly in a junior college somewhere.  I guess I need to figure out more clearly what I want out of this.  Ya think?

Yesterday I had waaaay too much coffee in the morning, then had a large popular no-calorie cola beverage, with re-fill, at dinner, so by 6pm I was jumping out of my skin. Today I tried to have a caffeine free day, but it was a no-go. I got a major headache by about two o’clock. Since then I’ve had two little coffees (the half-cup instant kind you get from machines here) and a half-liter of the afore mentioned popular cola beverage. The headache still hasn’t gone however.

It’s midnight, and I DO NOT want to work tomorrow. Of course I will though. My schedule is a total mess. My Tuesday classes are ahead of everyone else, while my Thursday classes are two weeks behind. The upshot to this is I don’t have to plan any new lessons this week, just some games and stuff to kill time on Tuesday. Most of my classes will get one of two songs. The older kids will hear “I say a little prayer for you,” (I prefer the Aretha Franklin version, but the kids so far seem to like Dionne Warwick’s better. They got no soul.) The younger ones will hear a really old novelty song called, “I’m my own grandpa.” See, they just learned a bunch of names for family members so the song is kind of good for them because it repeats a lot of the vocabulary they learned.

I’m still unsatisfied with the way my lessons have been going. I just feel like I’m missing something, and there’s no one here to give me any guidance. You know what I wish? I wish we had an honest to god peer evaluation system. There are nine other teachers in my program in middle schools in this district. Many of them have education backgrounds and could probably give me some good advice. Even if they don’t know any more than I do, just having an outsider observe and give feedback would be immensely helpful. But instead we have the same kind of fucking dog and pony shows like Hogwans do for the parents. Everyone knows it’s fake, and everyone knows goes along with it anyway. Well, it ain’t gonna happen so I should quit my belly achin’. For the time being I’ll continue to blindly feel my way through the semester. Harrumph!

I called in sick to work today.  Well, I didn’t call in per se.  Yesterday I had all the classic symptoms of a head cold and decided then if I still felt bad this morning I would not go to work.  Truth be told, I was pretty much hoping I would still be sick. This morning I woke up at 6:00 and decided I was still sick, and promptly fell asleep again until my phone alarm started going off at 6:50.  My phone has this cool “morning call” feature where I can set it to “ring” several times at a selected interval.  I have mine set to ring every ten minutes from 6:50 until 7:20.  It plays a song I used to like, but which I now consider the most annoying song ever.  The only reason I don’t change it is I don’t want to ruin another song for me that way.  

When my phone woke me up for the final time at 7:20, I still felt sick, but not sick sick if you know what I mean.  Finally at 7:30 I had convinced myself of my impending death if I didn’t take the day off.  I tried to call the guy who gives me a ride to work every morning, but he didn’t answer his phone.  I tried again at 7:45. Still no answer.  Finally at 7:57 I decided to just get up and go to work like an adult.  Sloppily dressing in the one shirt I could find that didn’t need a thorough ironing and gathering my things together, I sickly, lazily, and not to mention resentfully, stumbled my way downstairs to meet my ride.  I suppose I may have played up the sick thing just a bit.  Mr. Lee suggested I should tell the vice-principal I was too sick to work and that I needed to go see a doctor.  This I did, and the VP very sympathetically said I should go home and rest, which I did/am doing.  

On the way home I picked up some cold medicine, and I actually feel a lot better now, but still achy and tired.  Maybe I am really sick after all.  Mr. Lee even suggested I should take tomorrow off as well. While I have not made a decision on that, I am totally thinking about it.  

Is that bad?  Well, for the record I have taken exactly one and one-half days of sick time in the past four years that I’ve been a teacher.  Even then, I made up the half day a couple of weeks later.  Not that I’m trying to rationalize or justify myself or anything.  I would never do that.  

And if you believe that……..

A couple things before we get into our main text for today:

• On Friday when Mr. Lee was picking me up for work he pointed out the sign on the kimbap shop on the ground floor of my building. To the left of the logo there is a green and white symbol of a church. Mr. Lee said it was a symbol of the Unification Church, or in other words, the religion founded by Sun-Myung Moon that is sometimes derisively called, “The Mooonies.” Turns out they own the whole chain of kimbap shops all over Korea. Whether this affects me in any way whatsoever is unclear. I feel a little funny buying cultish kimbap, but then I’m not so naïve as to think my money has never in the past gone to support things I didn’t agree with. After all, I’ve paid taxes haven’t I?

• The other night I noticed my local E-mart carries the same high-fiber cereal that I’ve been buying imported from the Netherlands at the international grocery in Itaewon. Now I feel like a schmuck because the cereal costs 4,500 won at E-mart, and the exact same product costs 16,000 won in Itaewon. Sixteen dollars for high fiber cereal. Pardon me for saying it, but that is some expensive shit!

Yesterday I went out to Incheon for no particular reason whatsoever. I was curious to see the old neighborhood where I lived and worked in 2003 and 2004, and I had nothing else going on that day, so why not? The subway ride from Chang-dong to Bup-yeong took almost exactly 90 minutes, which surprised me. I thought it would be more like two hours. Bup-yeong station is massive. It contains a Lotte Mart as part of the complex, and forms the terminus of a shopping mall that is a complex maze of underground tunnels. Nothing has really changed in the station, except they have an Outback next to Lotte Mart now. Leaving the station from the ground level (the tunnels are to be avoided at all costs), I walked around the plaza to the restaurant/night life district to try and get some lunch. I remembered a row of cheap eateries close together on one street. Apparently all of Incheon remembered them too, because there wasn’t a seat to be had in any of them. Finally I settled on a tall coffee and a muffin from Starbucks. While wandering around, it occurred to me that Bup-yeong is really just a poor man’s Myeong-dong. Sorry, I know these names mean nothing to my readers who haven’t been in Korea. It’s like saying (Lower Class Shopping Area) is a poor man’s (Higher Class Shopping Area). Make sense?

I had wanted to ride the Incheon subway for old times’ sake, but decided instead to walk to the area where I used to live. It’s about a 30 minute walk from the station. On the way however, I made a small detour to an actual big & tall shop, the only one I’ve seen in Korea outside of Itaewon. The owner was really friendly. Last time I went there I only saw a woman there who didn’t speak any English. He eye-balled me and guessed my correct sizes immediately. It embarrassed me, but there was obviously no point in trying to deny it. I ended up buying a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and a belt, which all told, cost 270,000. The whole thing took like all of ten minutes and I was out of there again.

My main curiosity about my old neighborhood was the school across the street from my apartment. See, there was this old abandoned school building there. It just sat empty for most of the year, but in the final weeks of my contract they began to dismantle it. By the time I left it had been reduced to a pile of debris. Now, nineteen months later, the site is the home of the brand new Sangok High School. It looks nice. There is also some kind of commercial complex going up behind the school, on land that used to belong to the US military. The building where I used to work is exactly the same. It looks like they gave the inside a coat of fresh paint, but that is all. No one was at the academy of course, it being a Saturday. For nostalgia’s sake I climbed up the back stairs and had a cigarette in the old smoking area. I was going to go out on the roof, but it sounded like someone was up there so I didn’t tempt it.

Next I walked around the block just to have a look. Again, it was all the same. On my little walking tour I thought about all the places in the neighborhood where I used to buy beer. I think I knew every outlet within about a five block radius. I used to have to keep track of them because I didn’t like to buy from the same shop on two consecutive days, or multiple times on the same day. Let me tell you, procuring and consuming alcohol, then getting rid of the evidence was a lot of work. If I went to 7-11 first, I had to go to Family Mart when I went back out for more. It sucked because Family mart was a longer walk. Eventually I started going to Family Mart first, because I knew later at night I’d be too drunk to walk all that way. I also knew every mom & pop grocery in the area and when their closing time was. That didn’t seem weird to me at the time. Even back then then I knew if I put half the effort into staying sober that I put into getting drunk, my life would be much, much better…and so it is. Thank God those days are over!

Anyway, as I came around the back side of my old apartment building I noticed the Ibadom Gamja-tang restaurant was closed, and all the fixtures were being torn out. It gave me no small pleasure to see that. I fucking hate Ibadom. Gamja-tang is a kind of stew made with potatoes and the spine of a pig. It was the closest restaurant to my academy, so every time we had a special event we went to Ibadom. That whole year, I rarely got to eat “real” Korean food, and every time I did, it was effing back meat stew. That I hold such a deep resentment toward a dish is, I’m sure, an indicator of the vast extent of my sickness, but I don’t care. So long fucking Ibadom!

Every large Korean city looks like every other large Korean city, and come to that, every neighborhood is more or less the same as every other neighborhood, so going to Incheon again was no great revelation. Still I’m glad I went. I got it out of my system at least.




An ariel shot of my old 'hood coutesy of Google Earth. My apartment was on the left side of that U-shaped complex. My academy is the small square building just to the north of it. Moving to the right, The old abandoned school is still visible in this image. The hated Ibadom restaurant is the long orange roof just east of the school.

Bub-yeong station as seen yesterday, May 13th, 2006.

Tuesday was unseasonably warm, but the students still were still dressed in their full uniforms.  The girls have to wear a vest over their blouses, and the boys have a sweater vest as part of their ensemble.  A couple of lawless renegades came to school in their summer uniforms, but most everyone kept to the standard apparel.  The boys did doff their jackets at least.  It dawned on me that there must be a regulation in place about when they can change to summer mode.  I asked a teacher, who confirmed my suspicions.  My first idea was that it must be regulated by the date, regardless of the weather, like maybe they can’t change until June first or something.  It isn’t quite that bad it turns out, but the teacher went on to say there is a person at the school is endowed with the authority to decide when it is warm enough to make the change.  Uniform Guy makes an official announcement and then the students can wear summer attire from that time until, I assume, the same person makes a converse announcement in the fall.  However, the person whose job it is to do that is out sick right now, so there is no one here to make a decision about uniforms.  So on Tuesday 700 students were suffering because one person wasn’t here to make it official.  One wonders why, in the absence of the Uniform Guy, they couldn’t delegate the authority to someone else, or just make a phone call even.  But, I guess it just isn’t done that way.  Anyway, I guess the point is moot, because the weather has turned cooler again, so the sweaters are tolerable for the time being.  One hopes Uniform Guy returns before July.

Here is an article from the BBC about school uniform regulations in various countries.

Note:  I wrote this a week ago, but decided just to post it as normal instead putting it into the right chronological order.  

This week I’m talking about daily routines (present simple tense) with my third year students.  I start each lesson with a discussion of what they do in the morning to get ready for school.  It got me thinking about how much I’m enjoying my mornings these days.  

To give some background:  I am decidedly NOT a morning person, at least I never have been until now.  Most of the jobs I’ve had involved working in the evening, so I usually stayed up late, sometimes until 2 or 3 am.  My habit during this time was to eat, watch TV, mess around on the computer, and—until last year—drink anywhere from 1-2 liters of beer.  Then I slept late, pulled myself together slowly, and repeated the process all over again the next night.  As an example, in Russia I had a 10am class two days a week, and I was really worried about having to wake up so early.  Most of the time I just barely made it.  Even after February 26th, 2005, things didn’t change all that dramatically.  Sure, I wasn’t drinking, but I was still working late, and was still in the habit of staying up late.  The only difference was I substituted soda for beer, so I’d be up half the night strung out on diet Coke and would still have to sleep it off in the morning.  

For most of the fall semester last year I would wake up at 7:30, or even 7:50, and scramble to get dressed and out the door to meet my ride at 8:05.  Breakfast was a quick gulp of caffeine and a cigarette or two before starting work.  

Last February, I began seeing a doctor about my “challenges” with regards to food. At the very first meeting the doctor said I had to eat according to a certain schedule which is roughly breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and dinner.  Full stop.  He said I had a classic case of binge eating disorder, which I knew, but he went on to say I was what he termed a night binger and morning anorexic.  That was news to me, but it certainly rang true.  Every morning I said I would “be good” today and skip breakfast to try and make up for the extra calories I had consumed the night before.  Sometimes I wouldn’t eat at all until 5pm or later.  But then the feed bag would come out and I’d be off and running.  Anyone reading this who is even slightly familiar with alcoholism will recognize a classis pattern at work here.  It has to be said my eating patterns mirrored my drinking behavior almost exactly.  

The first few mornings I really struggled to make myself eat something in the morning, and of course to do this I also had to get up earlier.  This was not easy, as I’m sure you can imagine.   I did ok for a while, then started to slip, and am now trying to get back in the swing of things.  

My typical morning routine is now as follows:  I usually wake up at about 6:30, but often don’t get out of bed until 6:50.  I have to stand up slowly because my feet are always sore in the morning (bone spurs in both heels).  If I’m doing really good, then I read the daily reflection for that day and meditate on it for a moment or two.  (I have to admit I forget to do this pretty often.) Then I do a few quick stretches and, if I remember, start the coffee maker before heading into the bathroom.  I do my bathroom stuff then come back out to the kitchen to make breakfast.  I’ve gotten in the habit of eating either bran cereal with milk, or a whole-wheat bagel with cream cheese, plus some kind of fruit and maybe a cup of yogurt.  Lately I’ve started trying to eat a little more in the morning in the hopes it will prevent me from getting too hungry later on, so for the past three days I’ve had one or two hard-boiled eggs with my breakfast.  

I like to eat my breakfast Korean style, sitting on the floor at a small table.  On most days I watch the Asia Business Report on BBC World.  I don’t particularly care about the KOSPI or the Heng Seng index or other stuff like that, but there are usually a couple of interesting stories. The report ends at 7:45, and then a strange phenomenon happens.  I don’t know if you know this, but everyday at 7:45 KST, time mysteriously jumps ahead by about ten minutes.  I’m sure of it.  So suddenly it’s like 5 mintues to 8 and I still end up scrambling around my apartment to get ready for the day.  Some things don’t change I guess.  

So that’s my routine.  It doesn’t happen everyday.  Today for example, I did read my daily reflection and did eat breakfast, but didn’t do my stretching and didn’t eat on the floor.  Instead I ate breakfast at my computer while reading a recap of a recent episode of Big Love, and didn’t get out of my apartment until 8:05.  
  

Back from the dead...sort of

Oh hi. Yeah, I’m back. Actually I got my computer back last Wednesday night. For the first few days I had to get caught up on all my TV shows and podcasts. I’m only human.

I’m having a bad day actually. Although I knew last night that I didn’t have any lesson plans for this week, still I couldn’t be bothered. Also, I was awake till past one am. Couldn’t sleep. Today I’m tired and lethargic. This morning I copied a couple of worksheets to use in my classes. Lowers are doing more with family and relationships, while uppers are practicing adverbs of frequency. It actually was ok today. Thank god for small favors.

While my computer was getting serviced I wrote up this whole big thing about how much I’m enjoying my mornings lately. I wrote it on the piece of junk pc at the desk next to me. Then the day ended before I finished, and I just never got back to it. Maybe tonight or tomorrow I’ll get it posted. Don’t hold your breath.

***

Just now I gave in a put my head down on my desk for a few minutes. Next thing I knew I was awakened by the ringing of my desk neighbor’s phone. I was out for about 20 minutes. For a moment I thought the ringing meant it was morning and I would have to get up and get ready for school. Talk about a nightmare!

On Thursday night I learned my computer has a bad chip in the chipset. They can't replace just the one chip however, so they have to give me a whole new main board. Well, they could replace the chip I suspect, if anyone did that sort of thing anymore, but in today's disposable world it simply isn't done. That is a rant for another time however. The repair will cost me around 400 US dollars by the time it's all done. One could fault Samsung (or Intel, or whoever) for the quality of their parts, but really I think I have to take at least partial reponsability for this one. See, I'm what you would call a Power User, which is a nice way of calling me a comptuer addict. It runs sometimes for two or three days without a rest. I'm always downloading something, or watching something, or doing actual work on rare occasions. The failure occured because it simply got too hot. A "normal" user probably would have got a year or more's use before having the same kind of problems.

What I am slapping my forehead about however, is the fact that I just bought an external sound card for 92 dollars because of a short in my audio-out port that I knew I couldn't repair without replacing the whole mother board. Well now, I will have a new board anyway, so I needn't have bothered. I wonder if it's too late to return.

Anyway, the forced abstention has been good for me. I've gotten a lot more studying done to say the least. Sigh! Stay tuned. There may be more later if I get bored this afternoon.