My students are taking exams today, so I don't teach any classes, so I have time to write a little more than usual.

As reported previously, today begins a new phase in this strange new life of tobaccolessness; that of the 7mg nicotine patch. You know, I just want to pause here to make an observation. At the stores where I got my supply of patches, they had a lot less shelf space devoted to stage 3 products than they did for stage 1 and 2 products. Why do you think that is Beavis? Because not that many people make it to stage 3, that’s why Butthead.

Ok. I apologize for my cockiness. It’s just that today is a big deal is all. On with our story…

This morning I opened my patch packet and was happy to find it was half the size of the 14mg version, which makes sense I guess. Trying to find a hairless bit of skin that I hadn’t patched in the past few days was getting more and more difficult. I was starting to feel like a junkie in search of a fresh vein.

About an hour ago I got the jitters and an attack of dizziness. Right now I feel a little odd, but no odder than usual. It’s still early though. It doesn’t make me crave a cigarette however. If I didn’t know what was going on, I would just think I felt a little weird. I hope this will pass in a day or two and I’ll start feeling more normal again, normal for me anyway. I’m not going to be a hero though, I have some nicotine gum. Even though they recommend against it, if I get truly desperate I will supplement the patch with one or two pieces, but still make sure my total intake is less than 14mg.

* * *

To prepare for this day, I knew it would be necessary to finally do something about the nineteen packs of cigarettes still in my apartment. At this point, giving them to another smoker, supporting someone else’s habit, just seemed wrong. The smokes cost about thirty dollars, but I couldn’t think of it that way. If you found thirty dollars worth of spoiled meat in your fridge you wouldn’t keep it around and think about possibly eating it because you hated to waste the money, would you? You’d throw it out, because the wasted money is not as important as the risk to your health if you ate the poisoned meat. So it had to be with the nineteen packs of cigarettes.

Merely chucking them into the trash wouldn’t do. The packs needed to be spoiled in some way; I guess as a symbolic gesture to show that I was really and truly done with them. An act of violence was called for. Tobaccocide. I grabbed a pair of scissors and the cigarette cartons and dumped the packs out onto my bed, then with a waste basket at my feet commenced to cutting the packs in half. It proved more difficult than I had imagined, and my hand quickly became tired. Laying the scissors aside, I went to the kitchen to get a cutting board and a serrated knife. Perfect. I knelt down on the floor and carved the rest of the cigarette packs as if I were preparing tabac rôti for dinner. Soon I had just one pack left. Here I stopped. Instead of sawing it in half, I felt for the cellophane tab and pulled open the wrapper. I listened to it crinkle in my hand. I flipped open the box and gave the foil a tug. With my thumb and forefinger I pinched out a cigarette like I’ve done thousands and thousands of times before. I brought it close to my nose. It smelled sweet. Without giving myself too much of a chance to think about having “just one more,” I broke it in half and dumped it into the trash, along with the rest of that last pack. As a final act of desecration, I dumped a full glass of water over them.

No murder is complete until after the body has been gotten rid of. I tied up the trash bag, gathered up the carton boxes along with the rest of the recycling, and went out to the elevator. Once in the basement, I gave the trash bag a final fling onto the heap of other trash bags, and thus ended the story of the nineteen packs of cigarettes.

Labels: Nicotine patches, quitting smoking

There’s just really nothing exciting going on that I feel the need to say anything about. Here’s a collection of minor updates instead.


My new vertical blinds will be installed this Saturday. The guy came the other day to measure and show me some samples. If you’re really into beige, then Korea is your kind of country.

I’m using a Mr. Bean video in my lessons this week. The kids love it. I’m doing a couple of different activities with it and most of them are good, but I made a short worksheet to use for the second viewing (CELTA veterans will know this as the Minimal Response Task or MRT). My MRT is way too hard.

My usual lesson planning pattern seems to be plan the lesson I want to do, then make it easier, then make it easier again. Debut the lesson on Monday, decide it’s still too hard, then modify it yet again. That’s not an exaggeration.


It’s now 39 days since my last cigarette. Today I used the last of my “step 2” 14mg nicotine patches so that means tomorrow I start using the “step 3” 7mg ones. I’m a little worried about that. At least I don’t have any classes tomorrow, so my students won’t have to feel the wrath of my disease. On the other hand, I’ll be sitting around in the teachers’ room all day, and that might not be the best thing. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.


Because of my foot thing I skipped going to the gym on Monday, but I’ll hit it tonight. I’ll spend a few minutes on the cross-trainer, and maybe [grumble, grumble] walk on the treadmill for a while.

There’s more to my disastrous workout last Saturday that I haven’t even mentioned. Besides rendering myself incapable of walking for a day, it looks like I may have toasted my iPod. Maybe “drowned” is a better word. See, I have this headphone-lanyard thing that holds the iPod around my neck, and it’s the neatest thing ever, except on Saturday it was kind of hot in the gym and of course I was exercising, so I worked up quite a sweat. This next part is kind of gross, but what happened I guess is the sweat ran from my neck down the lanyard and directly into the ipod. Oops. About 15 minutes into my workout the sound started cutting out. I looked down at the iPod and saw the battery indicator flashing back and forth between fully charged and nearly empty.

Of course I immediately removed the soaking wet iPod and tried to shut it down. As soon as I let go of the button it sprang back to life and resumed its manic rapid cycling. Crap! Over the next few days I let it dry out completely and did all four R’s of trouble shooting. Even a complete restoration didn’t fix the problem. It operates perfectly now, except that it won’t turn off, so the battery runs down. Now it constantly shows that little plug symbol whether it’s on the charger or not. This does not please me, as you might imagine. This gym thing is turning into a costly venture.

Labels: EFL teaching, iPod, life in Korea, quitting smoking

While I was browsing around on my lunch break today, I ran across a neat little piece of code that lets me embed a Flickr slide show right here on the blog page. So to experiment I've made a slide show of all my photos tagged "Korea." Ain't that something?

Labels: flickr, Photos, slide show

My foot is better today. Taking it easy yesterday was the right move. Now though I have to think about how soon I should go back to the gym and what things I should do so I don’t re-injure it. Like I said yesterday, this taking care of yourself thing is exactly the area where I come up short.

Just because I spent the day with my feet up doesn’t mean the time was wasted however. I did hammer out a basic synopsis for this year’s Nano novel. Sorry, but I’m not willing to share it with the world at large just yet. A really cool thing happened over the weekend though. The seed of an idea for my story first came to me more than a month ago, and I kind of kicked it around in my head for a while but parts of it were problematic to me. Then on Saturday evening the thought came to me that one detail of the story should really be different, and the whole idea suddenly made a lot more sense. I know that’s kind of cryptic, and again, I’m sorry I can’t say more right now. Ok, I know how I can explain this better: You know those Sudoku puzzles that are all the rage right now? Right, well you know how you’ll be going along, filling in numbers where you can and it’s a slow a tedious process at times, but eventually you get to a point where once you fill in a certain square, you suddenly can see where the next one goes, and the next, and the next, and they all seem to cascade into place in rapid succession until the puzzle is complete? It’s kind of like that. Those moments are really cool. Electric.

For the next month I will be getting my story ideas worked out, figuring out the names of my characters and locations and such; almost like pre-production work for a film. Then at midnight on November 1st the insanity begins. I will be blogging about the experience during the month of November, but I will be writing much shorter entries during that time. After all, every word that goes here is a word that won't be going into the story.

The other thing I did yesterday, whether it was a waste of time, well that’s a matter of opinion. A number of my friends are doing the MySpace thing. Yesterday I finally broke down and got a MySpace profile, and ended up messing around with it for quite a while. I don’t take it too seriously I guess. It’s just for fun. Have a look if you want, post a comment, and I’ll do the same on your space.

Labels: heel pain, myspace, Nanowrimo, writing

I’ve really done a number on myself this time. I’m at home in bed today because I can just barely walk. The damage is totally self-inflicted too. Just because I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life doesn’t mean I’m necessarily any better at taking care of myself.

For about two years now I’ve had a bone spur in my right heel. It’s sort of like having a pebble inside your shoe, except instead of in your shoe, the pebble is inside your foot, and you can’t get it out. For a long time I felt pain with every step I took, but it had been better for the past several months, especially since I started losing a significant amount of weight. Around last July though, the pain became worse. I figured it was just because I was becoming more active and hoped the pain would eventually subside. Not so.

Last Monday I took a major step, as it were, and joined a gym here in my neighborhood. I meant to write more about that whole experience, but I’ll have to skip it. I’ve gone three times so far, and it’s been going ok. Yesterday though, I guess I pushed it too far. I ran kind of hard on the treadmill and must have just shredded the tissue in my foot. The whole time I was doing it, I knew it was going to cost me, but I did it anyway. Sound like a familiar pattern?

It’s a real problem because the most important long-term solution to this problem is exercising and losing weight, but the repetitive stress of walking or running puts me in a lot of pain, but to lose weight I have to exercise, but exercising is painful, and so on. It’s a perfect little catch 22. Of course, there are exercises one can do that don’t put as much stress on the feet. I don’t like doing any of those exercises, but I’m just going to have to put my best foot forward and give them a shot.

Seriously, I’m in a lot of pain today, so I’m hanging out at home, staying off my feet and taking it easy. I think I’m going to go back through some old entries and add some tags since that feature has now become available. If I get very bored, which at this point I’d say is highly likely, I may post again on some additional stuff I’ve been thinking about, including some thoughts about my possible 2006 Nanowrimo project.

Labels: bone spur, heel pain, injury, plantar fasciitis

More thoughts about quitting smoking today. It’s on my mind rather a lot these days as I’m sure you can imagine. (34 days now). Sorry, I didn’t intend for the Blog of Brian to be completely hijacked by the smoking issue. It’s like having my own personal General Sonthi.

*

I never thought I’d be able to stop smoking in Korea. Well, I guess it’s technically true that I didn’t stop smoking in Korea. I officially stopped smoking in the United States, but what I mean is I stopped during the Korea phase of my life, which seemed rather unlikely until…well, until it happened.

See, during most of my career as a huffer and puffer, my main thoughts about quitting came from economic worries instead of concern for my health. (We could go deeper into that, but we’ll save it for another session, okay doc?) When I got to Korea, and saw how cheap cigarettes were I said to myself, “I guess I won’t be quitting smoking for the next couple of years.” In case you’re wondering, which I doubt, but in case you are, it’s even worse in Russia. There, the “expensive” imported smokes are about 65 cents a pack, and the domestic brands are something like 30 cents.

The thing is, price doesn’t actually matter. I didn’t smoke more in places where they were cheaper, and I didn’t smoke less in places where they were expensive. I smoked how much I smoked because that was what I needed to service my addiction. After I’d been here a while, it didn’t matter anymore what the cost was. They just cost what they cost.

So anyway now that I’ve stopped, at current Korean pricing I figure I’ve already saved about 85 dollars. Amazing how quickly it adds up. I should reward myself. I deserve it, don’t you think? Maybe when I’ve “saved” a hundred dollars I’ll get myself a bauble.

I also have to come clean about another thing I haven’t told anyone yet: I still have 19 packs of cigarettes in my apartment. See, before I left on my vacation I bought two cartons at the duty-free shop in the airport. That just goes to show I had no intention of quitting before I actually did. For the first week I was at home I worked on the first pack out of the two cartons, but then I quit before it was even finished. Even then, I continued to carry that unfinished pack around with me until just before I left to return to Korea. It was like a security blanket you know, in case I really, really needed it. The same could be said I suppose–if you wanted to get deeply Freudian–about the 19 packs still in my apartment. As long as they are just sitting there on the shelf, still in the plastic duty-free shopping bag, they don’t bother me, but if they were gone I think I would freak out a little.

So just get rid of them you might say. If you haven’t been a smoker or an addict of some kind I can see how it must seem that simple, but it isn’t. Let me illustrate with a joke on a slightly different topic:

Q: What do you call it when someone drinks half a glass of wine, then walks away and leaves the rest on the table?

A: Alcohol abuse.

At first my plan was to take the cartons to my school and leave them in the maintenance shed where the (male) teachers go to smoke between classes. It seemed like that would be kind of smug though, like “I guess I don’t need these anymore, but I thought you poor bastards might like them. Enjoy.” Anyway, I kept forgetting to bring them in (more Freudian stuff there), so now it would just be weird.

Well, regardless of what I do, I guess it’s time to get rid of them one way or another. Anyway except smoking them, right?

Labels: cigarettes, quitting smoking

Today is Wednesday, September 20^th. It’s now been more than a full month since my last cigarette. The cravings are fewer, but when they do happen they come on strong. When I’m leaving a restaurant after dinner for example, I’ll get the urge to light up. It's not that I’m consciously thinking about it, rather it just feels like the most natural thing to do. I remember I don’t do that anymore, then I kind of panic for a second because I feel a need and I know it’s not going to be satisfied, and this primal, childish part of me wants to freak out about it. Thankfully, the rational, adult part (at least so far) wins out and employs some alternative method to meet the need, or at least keep myself occupied until it passes. Gum helps.

In about 10 days I’m supposed to switch to the “step 3” patches, with a lower dose of nicotine, so I’m already gearing up mentally for that.

A friend of mine who quit like four years ago told me he still gets cravings from time to time….so I guess good times are ahead. No really, I know it’s far better than if I just kept smoking, but seriously? I get to jones for the rest of my life? Oh well. It’s a small price to pay compared to dragging an oxygen tank around with me, or getting giant tumors on my lungs.

So, there’s my pep talk for today.

Labels: quitting smoking

Back when I gave a little photo tour of my apartment, I mentioned there was a giant, red 안마 "Ahn-ma" sign visible from my window. It means "massage," and the sign flashes on and off all night long. Here's some pictures to give you an idea.



If you really want to have some fun, download both of these pictures, open them up in a photo slideshow viewer, then flip back and forth between them at two second intervals. Now do it non-stop for eight hours.

The other day I finally broke down and asked a teacher in my school to help me buy darker curtains for my window. I have no idea how much curtains cost in Korea, or in any country for that matter, but if it keeps out the red menace it will be money well spent.

Last night I was invited to an impromptu dinner at the apartment of a young teacher who just moved into the building where I live. Of the six of us, I was the oldest and had also been in Korea the longest. Two of the young newbies started talking about their plans for the upcoming Chuseok holiday. They mentioned trying to travel in Korea, or maybe even going to Japan, more or less on a whim.

“Forget about it,” I warned them. I mean, everyone who knows anything about living in Korea knows you do not try to travel on Chuseok or during Lunar New Year, but they remained undaunted. All it required was some flexibility, they smugged. If they couldn’t get a seat on a train they would stand, all the way to Busan if necessary. If they couldn’t get a motel, they would sleep in the station, or on the street. If they couldn’t get a flight or a ferry, they would just hang around until something opened up. It adds to the adventure, they said. “It adds to the pain in your ass,” I thought.

There was as time when I thought as they do, and it wasn't all that long ago. All the things they described are things I've done at some point in my life. I’ve spent whole nights wandering the streets of a new city because I didn’t have enough money for accommodations. I’ve languished for hours in airports and train stations, and slept in dodgy quarters more times than I care to remember, and loved the adventure of it all. Nowadays though I want wheeled luggage, an aisle seat, a reserved room. In brief, comfort matters. When did that happen?

The guys I hung out with last night are obviously still in the young adventurer phase of their lives, and I couldn’t be happier for them. They will probably return from their holiday with tales of standing toe-to-toe with other travelers in a train car packed to the gills with Kimchi and roasted squid. They’ll talk of missed connections, chance meetings, wild mishaps, foul weather, dangerous reprobates and good Samaritans. It will sound to me like a perfect description of Hell, and yet they will have had the time of their lives. It’s the natural order of things I guess.

Labels: aging, chuseok, Korea, travel

For my first week back at school, I thought I would keep it simple. It’s part of my new teaching strategy of taking a step back and trying to make my lessons more easy and fun for the kids and less stressful and aggravating for me.

I devised a moronically simple task where I posted signs saying “yes” and “no” on opposite sides of the classroom. I then asked the class some questions about what they did during their summer vacation, and they had to go to one side of the room or the other, depending on their answer. The idea was that I would next ask some follow-up questions to get them talking. What I failed to consider was that if they stay on the “no” side, then they don’t have to talk. Some students figured this out and began gaming the system. By mid-week I had abandoned this task with the upper grades, but it works slightly better with the younger students.

For the second half of the lesson, I’m teaching them the “She sells seashells” tongue-twister. Did you know there’s a lot more to it than just the first line? I swear for all my life I thought it was just the first bit. The whole thing goes:

She sells seashells by the seashore

The shells she sells are surely seashells

So if she sells shells on the seashore

I’m sure she sells seashore shells

That part is going much better. As part of my introduction I ask the class if they can tell me any Korean tongue twisters they know. That is a lot of fun. I even told my students I would learn a Korean tongue twister since I am teaching them an English one. I’ll probably try the following…

Sorry, I was going to provide a Romanized version, but I decided I can’t be bothered. I’d probably get it wrong anyway. It translates roughly as, “I draw a giraffe picture, a pretty giraffe picture. You draw a giraffe picture, an ugly giraffe picture.”

It’s now been more than three weeks since I’ve had a cigarette. Yesterday was a challenge though. The next hardest one before that was the day I first came back to Korea. The next one before that was the day I first stopped smoking. Does it get easier? Most of the time, yes, with occasional periods of sheer torture. They don’t last long, thankfully, and I’m still fighting the good fight.

When a strong craving hits I try to take a few deep breaths and appreciate being able to do so. I smell the air and think about the smells I used to miss. (That wasn’t always a bad thing, but still…) Drinking water and chewing gum also help. It’s the classic oral stimulation thing. Mostly though, the real trick is not sitting around and stewing about wanting a cigarette. It’s important to stay occupied, better still to be occupied and with other people, preferably other non-smokers.

Come to think of it, I haven’t really talked about why I suddenly decided to quit. I’m sort of violating the stuff I just said, since I am alone right now and explicitly focusing on smoking, but maybe telling my story will be worth it.

My first cigarette was a Gauloises blonde, at the highly unusual age of 25. Like, who starts smoking at 25? How and why I started smoking is part of a much larger story. Suffice it to say it was one of the dumber, if not the single dumbest decision I’ve made in life, worse still because I can’t blame it on peer pressure or Joe Camel. I chose it.

During my last semester of college I smoked maybe one or two cigarettes a day. I smoked so few I got a buzz every single time. Somehow two became three, then three became six, then before long I was up to half a pack. Still, it wasn’t until I moved to Portland in 1997 that I became a truly dedicated smoker. There, I quickly ramped up to about a pack-a-day, and stayed there for the next eight years.

The problem was whenever I would visit my strict Mormon parents it would cause me much anxiety. They never “officially” knew I was a smoker, but they aren’t stupid of course. I’m sure they knew, and I knew that they knew, but it became one of the many things we didn’t talk about. (Uncomfortable silence is really the foundation of a healthy family, don’t you think?) Nevertheless, it’s not like I could say, “Excuse me Mom and Dad, while I step out for a smoke break.” So during my visits home I would be reduced to the level of a fifteen year-old, sneaking out to get my fix, and then scrubbing my hands and popping breath mints to try and cover the smell.

On this most recent trip home, I decided to use nicotine patches and do my best to live like a human and not simply be ruled by my addiction. The patches helped a lot, but I still found myself sneaking two or three cigarettes each day I was home.

When I left Phoenix this time and got down to Tucson, my first thought was “Thank God! Now I can smoke again,” and lit up immediately. Fortunately, my next thought was how stupid that was. I had had such a great head start over the past few days. Instead of going back to the insanity, why not just keep going forward? “No pressure,” I told myself, “and maybe I can’t do it, but let’s just try it for a while.”

That was Thursday, August 17^th. The next day, I didn’t smoke any cigarettes at all. On Saturday the 19^th I had a slight relapse and smoked two. From Sunday the 20^th until today I’ve had none.

While there is never really a best time to quit smoking, I think the odds were pretty well stacked in my favor. Besides using the nicotine patches (which I can definitely recommend for anyone else thinking about quitting) and getting the little head start at my parents’ place, I had the advantage of being out of my normal routine, being away from all my usual triggers, and being with supportive friends almost constantly during my first two weeks on the wagon.

I hope I’ve had my last cigarette ever, but who can tell?. In my world it’s best to avoid sweeping proclamations. I know I’m not going to smoke today, and then we’ll see how tomorrow goes.

Labels: Nicoderm, quitting smoking

Vacation is officially over. I’m back in Korea, back in school, back at my desk. Back. What a ride. Mostly I’m happy to be back, and I feel recharged and determined to go into this semester with a good attitude. Of course, I have yet to teach any classes, so for all I know it could come crashing down within the first few minutes.

My school has given me today and tomorrow as prep days, which was pretty smart of them I have to say. Mid-terms start on the 29^th, so this way it will give me exactly three weeks of instruction before then. The schedule will stay all nice and neat without any loose threads hanging around.

I arrived on campus this morning to find the fence around the school yard had been torn out. A teacher informed me it is to be replaced with shrubbery and things as part of a beautification project. Kudos to them for that.

Also, the same teacher told me the school festival has been cancelled this year and they will use the money instead to buy new equipment for the school, especially new computers for the classroom that had the fire last June. Again, that’s really great to hear.

I don’t quite know what to think about all this. It’s like the principal got a hold of some really good weed. Like, next week maybe he’ll renounce school uniforms in favor of tie-dye t-shirts. Or maybe not.

Labels: Korean middle school.

So that’s it. Well, nearly anyway. Right now I’m back more or less where I started, at a wi-fi coffee shop near my parents’ trailer park in Tempe, Arizona. In just about 24 hours from now I begin the long, long journey back to Seoul. This vacation has been just what I needed; a break.

After Baltimore, I spent two more days in Philly with my friend. We walked around, looked at some stuff, ate some stuff, and saw two more movies. I did not eat a Philly cheese steak sandwich, but I have no regrets about that because I did have something that might be even better. My only regret in fact, is that I never got to see the oldest continuously inhabited street in America. Pity.

The two movies we saw were Little Miss Sunshine, and Factotum. Both were great, but for very different reasons. While Sunshine examined family dynamics and what drives us to be successful, Factotum looked at, scrutinized really, the life of a guy with few connections, barely any family at al, and a seemingly limitless capacity for making bad decisions. The best thing he has going for him in life is Lili Taylor cooking breakfast in a bra and panties, and he even manages to screw that up. Not the feel good movie of the summer.

Many of the things I’ve seen and done in the past few days seemed to carry the general theme of “Nothing comes easy in life. Sometimes your personal choices make life harder than it needs to be. But sometimes too, you can make all the right choices, and life will still suck, because sometimes it just does." I wasn’t looking for a theme, or a moral-of-the-story, really. It just became so glaringly, in-your-face obvious that I couldn’t help but say, “Alright, I get it already!” You kind of had to be there, which, some of you were. :)

To which, now is as good a time as any to run some numbers by you: Since last February I have lost about 13 kilograms and finally…[drum roll please] today is my 14th day without a cigarette. But of course, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. They can’t show what a truly, truly sick fuck I still am.

To everyone reading this who I got to see in the past three weeks: Thank you. I love you all, and I’m glad you’re part of my life. I hope we’ll get to see each other again before too much time goes by.

If I wasn't able to see you on this trip, it doesn't mean you are any less important to me. One of the great things about my life is that I have friends all over the world. The problem with that is...my friends are all over the world.


My next update will originate from my apartment in Seoul. Until then, follow the advice of this very wise Baltimore trash and recycling bin...

Labels: life lessons, movies, Vacation