Today is my 45^th day without a cigarette.

It looks like my iPod really is kaput. It’s ok though, because I have a plan. Let me break this down for you. The new 8gb Nanos retail for $275.00 in Korea (they’re slightly more expensive here than in the states.) The cigarettes I used to buy cost $2.50 a pack. Are you with me so far? When I’ve been smoke free for 110 days, I’ll have “saved” exactly $275.00 on packs of cigarettes that I haven’t bought. I think that’ll be about the right time to give myself a nice little reward.

You know, if I really wanted to I could go right down to the Apple store in Myeong-dong and get me a new Nano, lickity-split, but I hear this delayed gratification thing is pretty cool, so I guess I’ll give it a try for once in my life.

* * *

About a week ago, at the Gwanghwamun subway station, I stopped to look at a table of DVDs for sale outside the Kyobo bookstore. They were mostly older movies, documentaries, and music videos. All legal, but none of it A-list stuff. They did have a copy of David Lynch’s Eraserhead on the table however. I had never seen it (I’d never seen any David Lynch film in its entirety in fact), so I picked up a copy, along with Tirez sur le pianiste, and The King and I.

On Sunday night a friend came over for dinner and we watched it. Up to that point the most fucked-up movie I’d ever seen was Brazil. Brazil is Mary Friggin’ Poppins compared to this. It’s been three days and I’m still creeped out over it. Next time I think my life sucks I’m going to remind myself that at least I’m not the guy from Eraserhead.

Labels: iPod, movies, 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