Heart and Seoul

New Blog Address

2010-08-25T19:20:00.000-06:00

Tim's blog has moved!

www.tvny.blogspot.com

See you there!

Tim has moved!

2010-08-25T19:19:00.000-06:00

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I'm aware it's been about 4 months since I posted.

I haven't died.

I haven't been banned from the internet (not yet, anyway).

I've simply moved.

I'm not in Korea anymore, and a lot of exciting things have happened over the past 4 months. So I thought it fitting to move my blog to a more appropriate address and subject matter. This little blog was a welcome outlet while I studied in Seoul, and I hope someone besides myself and my mother got a kick out of it, but I'm moving on.

My new web-space is fancy but empty (not unlike my actual living space at the moment, but that's a matter for a future entry). Though it's empty for now, I promise it won't be for long.

The new site is www.TVNY.blogspot.com

I know, I know, it's blatant piracy. But it's slightly more clever than my original rip-off -- "Timpire State of Mind."

So if you find yourself interested, navigate your way over to the other site. I make no promises (implied or otherwise) that you'll enjoy it, but I certainly will. . . at least as much as a law student can.

Happy Black Day

2010-04-13T20:23:00.001-06:00

Korea has a thing for14th days.

February 14th is (of course) Valentine's Day, and according to Korean custom that's the day when girls give candy and gifts to their significant male other.

March 14th is White Day, a chance for men to take the reins and shower flowers and presents on their lady loves.

April 14th, though, is Black Day, and custom dictates that one this day those poor unfortunate souls who neither gave nor received anything on the previous two holidays collectively mourn their singleness over a bowl of black noodles.

The dish itself is delicious, but, well, it's a holiday called Black Day reminding single people that they went another spring without love.

"Happy Black Day!" probably isn't appropriate.

Instead, I'll take a cue from Dwight Schrute of the Office:

"It is Black Day."

It comes from a scene in which Dwight and Jim are trying to plan a birthday party for Kelly and Dwight is in charge of the decorations.

Here's the soundbite (since I couldn't find a video clip):

It is your birthday period sound bite The Office sound bites

Hwangsa: the yellow scourge

2010-03-23T22:14:00.000-06:00

It isn't terribly common to wake up in the morning, look out your window, and wonder in earnest (even if it's fleeting):

Is this the apocalypse?

But this past Saturday was one of those days. As I peered through the glass beside my bed and saw what may as well have been doomsday hovering low in the sky, I admit that my gut reaction was a quick personal inventory to make sure I had things in order if this happened to be the end of days.

The sky was a deep yellow-orange, visibility was low, and there was an eerie and unsettling calm. I quickly realized that it all added up not to Armageddon, but rather to Hwangsa, otherwise known as "the yellow dust," courtesy of China and its Gobi Desert.

What happens is that dust and sand in the Gobi gets stirred up by winds as they start to shift in the spring. The dust then combines with both ground and air pollution and is carried by the prevailing winds eastward, often through metropoles like Beijing and Seoul, and even to places like Seattle, L.A., and other U.S. cities.
These photos give you an idea (both from above and below)

Believe it or not, the first I ever heard of Hwangsa was actually as a high school student in Salt Lake City, 6,000 miles away on the other side of the world. The air was abnormally hazy, and the local weatherman reported that a large reason for the gritty air was "yellow dust" blowing across the ocean (plus several U.S. states) from Chinese deserts. If it's strong enough make it a significant phenomenon on the opposite end of the globe, you can imagine what it's like when you're just a (relative) stone's throw from the source.

Seoul typically endures Hwangsa 6-10 times per year through the early spring months, making the dust storms a regular, if not welcome, occurrence. This past Saturday's episode, however, was one of the worst on record. Chalk it up to a drought in the Gobi, but also to pretty extreme environmental damage and industrial pollution on the part of China that turns moderate storms into severe ones.

Thankfully, the Hwangsa season will pass quickly, and then the absolutely beautiful spring weather of April and early May will be here with its blossoming trees, refreshing breezes, warm temperatures, and clear skies. After what has been an abnormally long winter (it has snowed in Seoul at least once a week over the first three weeks of March), the spring will be especially welcome.

Negativity and a defense of Korea

2010-03-18T21:35:00.015-06:00

I feel compelled to wax a bit philosophical for this entry. The fun stories and interesting tidbits can wait their turn.

An acquaintance of mine left Korea today after a year of teaching English. While waiting at the airport, he decided to leave this epitaph on his time spent here (via his Facebook):

"This is just another situation on how rude and unkind Korean
people really are, they can not even give time to help out,
not one friend or coworker, just a rude throw it all away.
Good Riddance Korea, The way you treated me for a year,
and they way I left, why should I ever come back??"

I don't really take offense to things. I learned a long time ago that taking offense when it wasn't intended is stupid, and taking offense when it IS intended is usually stupid. But I'll be honest, this last bitter shot at Korea came pretty darn close.

But it also inspired me to tackle a topic I'm pretty passionate about, especially here in Seoul because I see so sharply the effect that it has on people's quality of life and their perception of the world and the people around them.

I'm talking about the miring power of Negativity and the potentially overwhelming drag it can be when indulged or entertained.

Life is made up of two things: people and choices. When it all boils down to it, life is simply ourselves and the people around us making our own decisions and dealing along the way with the decisions of others and the consequences of our own. Sometimes things happen that fall outside of the realm of individual cause/effect, and sometimes those things are inconvenient, tragic, or painful. But even in the face of those things that can't be controlled, all we can do is choose how to react and move forward.

Negativity is one of those choices. Negativity is generally born from small things. Something unfortunate happens, somebody disappoints us, our desires fail to materialize. . . It is natural to respond to these things negatively. We mourn the bad things in life. And this response is healthy.

But when Negativity begins to be destructive are the times when we fail to choose to get over it. We indulge those dark feelings of self-pity, judgment, malaise, indignance, and disdain. We allow them to tint our perspective on the people and the world around us. We begin to believe that the shades of Negativity we cultivate are an intrinsic part of our reality, failing to realize that we put those shades up in the first place. Worst of all, as we recede deeper into the darkness that Negativity provides, we lose touch with all the light and promise that life can offer and prevent ourselves from throwing open the shutters and taking in the vibrancy of the world around us.

Where my acquaintance went wrong was allowing himself, in the face of the occasional difficulty, to decide that his world was that difficulty, forgetting that in actuality the difficulty was merely a small part of a world that is literally teeming with goodness and warmth and wonder. As hard as that goodness can be to see sometimes, the important thing is to always remember that it's there and that if we can't see it then we have our own work to do to get to a positive vantage point.

My acquaintance claims that his negativity stems from problems he has had living and working here in Korea.

I don't buy it.

He may have had his challenges and difficulties, and his share of them may even have been greater than most, but his negativity stems entirely from himself and the way that he responds to and interprets the events of life, primarily in indulging the negative and ignoring (or even preventing) the positive.

That's the danger we face when we sink into a pit of unhappiness. All the good things around us melt away out of our sight because we're no longer capable of recognizing them for what they are. They no longer fit into the narrative of negativity that we have written for ourselves, and thus we summarily dismiss them or marginalize them as the exception rather than the rule.

My acquaintance's disdain of Korea breaks my heart. The image he built for himself of Korea and the people here will be shared with others, and their view will be clouded by the same negative fog that he has been receding into for so long here. He will never understand the warmth of Korean people, their willingness to help and to sacrifice, the depth and pain of their recent history, the cultural treasures of this peninsula, and the limitless opportunities here to learn, be inspired, and gain a deeper appreciation for life and all its facets.

To my acquaintance, I sympathize with his challenges here in Korea. But I emphatically disagree with his judgment and hope that he can gain some perspective by shedding the chains of negativity he has so willingly embraced, and by doing so recognize all of the positive things that he experienced (and could have experienced) during his time here.

My hope is simply that we can all of us choose to accept the bad and move past it when it stands in our way, not allowing ourselves to become judgmental, rash, short-sighted, self-centered, and bitter. If we can do that, then an entire world of possibility, hope, inspiration, and appreciation is opened to us. The power of positivity and an eye ever searching for good things is a transformative thing, and my wish is that we all can consciously cultivate that power more fully in our lives.

What a difference it will make.

The money bug

2010-03-14T10:10:00.010-06:00

As you've probably put together from the heading pic, this post has nothing to do with an itch for riches. Sadly, the topic is much more unsettling than that.

My hatred of creeping things is well-documented. From the menace of Methusalian mosquitoes to the pure, unfiltered evil of spiders of all types (recorded here and here), I've established pretty soundly that I don't like things that could potentially crawl into my brain while I sleep. That said, aside from spiders (which haunt my dreams and test my bladder control), creepy-crawlies don't really scare me, per se, I just hate the thought of them getting all up in my business.

Moving to new places is always a crap shoot on the bug front. I feel like I fared quite well at my last residence, disaster though it was in many respects. A handful of spiders and relatively few mosquitoes combined to register low on the Raid-ar (pun absolutely intended). But when I left the Single Mini-tel behind, I opened up the possibility of something less favorable.
My new apartment in south-central Seoul is palatial compared to my old room, complete with all the necessary furniture and appliances I need, and there is plenty of space for guests. Unfortunately, I am learning that there are more guests than I first realized when I moved in.

I am talking specifically about centipedes.

House centipedes.

Or, as Koreans call them, "Money Bugs."

Here's a picture that should give you an idea of what they're like:

The first encounter came as quite a shock, actually. I was composing an email one evening when I saw a darting shape out of the corner of my eye. I looked up on the wall behind my screen only to find a 3-inch centipede scrambling up towards the ceiling. I yelped in surprise and a battle ensued, which consisted of me stabbing with my umbrella, knocking off its legs, having it fall from the ceiling onto my body, flailing my arms madly, and finally succeeding in crushing the poor brute as he fled gamely for his dark corners.

Once the deed was done, I looked frantically around my room. Until that point, centipedes had never entered my consciousness, and so I had never bothered to keep an eye out for them. But as I started to look around with them in mind, I glanced up at my light fixture and realized there were three more camped out inside it. This worried me for a few reasons. For all I knew, those centipedes were still alive, and removing the cover on the light fixture would rain down multi-legged terror on my head. There was also the possibility that, if they WERE dead, the centipedes had been busy making babies before they expired and said-terror would be smaller but far more numerous, ready to emerge at any time. I still haven't mustered the courage to explore the light fixture, so in the meantime I hope I don't have little baby-pedes crawl out and take up residence. I might just lose it if they do.

It turns out that these types of centipedes are actually quite common here (though I confess in my almost 3 years of experience living in Korea, this is the first I've seen of them). I was also surprised to discover that they're quite common all over the world, including the United States. But common though they may be, that doesn't decrease the disgusting-ness factor.

I am nevertheless torn over their presence, and I'll tell you why.

Wikipedia tells me a lot of unnerving things about these little crawlies. They can live in your house for the entirety of their 7 year lives, they like closets, they're nocturnal, and they get it on like rabbits.

BUT, Wikipedia also tells me that they eat spiders.

Given my history, that's huge.

And thus I'm torn.

Because the fact of the matter is that I would prefer these 30-legged beasties to their vile 8-legged cousins. If they can munch the spideys (and do it while staying completely out of sight and out of my clothes/bed), then they're probably worth keeping around. But the centipedes also have to realize that if they show their disgusting little faces it's not going to end well for them.

(to transition completely suddenly)
You're probably wondering, "Why do Koreans call them 'Money Bugs'?"

Money Bugs are a relatively new inhabitant of Korea. They hail originally from the Mediterranean, but explorers and traders took them all over the world after the 16th century. In the spring and fall, the Money Bugs were lured by warmth, and most of the warmth they found came from the houses of well-off people. The poor generally couldn't afford to heat their homes much (if at all), particularly if it wasn't winter. Thus it was generally only the wealthy that had to deal with the bugs inside their homes. So having a Money Bug come strutting into your bed room meant that you were probably well-enough-to-do, and its presence became a good omen for wealth and success, particularly if you were a little down-trodden yourself.

What am I supposed to make of them, then? On the one hand, they eat spiders and portend financial comfort. But on the other, they are huge and gross and invasive and fast and I hate them. What do I do?

For now, I've decided to let them be (meaning I won't be fumigating any time soon). But it's a "don't be seen or heard" relationship. The second I spot one of these bugs, good omen or not, it's game time.

Watch out, Money Bugs.

But while you avoid certain death at my hands, make sure to take a few spiders out in the meantime.

iTim?

2010-03-11T23:47:00.005-07:00

.

I wore a black turtleneck on Wednesday with jeans and sneakers, which was odd because I never wear turtlenecks.

I got home from school and looked in the mirror, and realized what I had become for the day:

That's right. I was Steve Jobs.

That would explain why I felt like a cash-whore all day.

It would also explain my then-inexplicable urge to start wrapping things in aluminum only to sell them for double what they're worth and convince people that they were going to need a new one in 6 months when I release the same thing all over again (only slightly larger/smaller/more colorful).

I am joking of course.

But only kind of ;)

Back to school

2010-03-11T22:21:00.006-07:00

It's March, which means I finally started school again (yes, I did really have a 12-week winter vacation). Since I am back in a studious mode, it also means I can get off the proverbial keester and start writing again fairly regularly.

I'm excited to be back in school for a number of reasons, but I can sum up the best part of this semester in three glorious words:

Since I loaded up my schedule last semester (and paid dearly for it), I was left only needing three courses for the spring. Since all of the offerings at my grad school are three hours, once per week, I saw an opportunity. My hope of finding compatible classes that all fell on the same day was dashed when I saw the course listings, but I salvaged a pretty good deal when I saw a trio of classes that fell on consecutive days. They fulfilled all of my requirements, covered topics I love, and -perhaps most significantly- let me come to school just on Wednesdays and Thursdays, leaving me with five days off between school days.

Of course, this doesn't come without challenges. My courses are all extremely reading-intensive. I have my Modern History of Korea course from the same professor who taught Contemporary Korean Society last semester (see here, here, and here for a refresher). That means a new mountain of textbooks, though it comes as no surprise.

I was more hopeful for my other two courses, Korea-U.S. Relations and Comparative Foreign Policy. Both are taught by the same professor (who is highly regarded as one of the foremost experts in the field of Korean International Relations), and both syllabi listed only a single "course reader" as required material. I was optimistic.

Then I went to the bookstore to pick up my stuff. The lady working the store went back and pulled out four massive volumes, barely able to heave the stack up on to the counter. It turns out that the "course readers" are actually two-volume sets of selections, articles, analyses, case studies, and policy briefs totaling 1500 pages each.

All of a sudden, my decision to squash all three classes together into a 48-hour period seemed somewhat foolish, particularly given my propensity to. . . "delay" getting to work on my reading. Now that there's no turning back, I'm just going to have to buckle down, put my nose to the grindstone, grit it out, and learn a few more horrid cliches to inspire me to "just do it" (a ha! a fourth cliche already! I may just be able to do this).

In the meantime, I plan on taking full advantage of my copious free-days. With the weather trying to inch towards spring (despite last week's short-but-nasty mini march blizzard), and the days getting longer and longer, there shouldn't be any shortage of fantastic things to do and see.

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Year in Review: 2009 in Pictures

2010-01-16T10:58:00.007-07:00

2009 was a good year!

I graduated from the University of Utah, took a once-in-a-lifetime three week vacation with the entire family to the Norwegian motherland, and found myself moving to Korea for a year-long graduate school program prior to law school. Here are a few of the year's highlights in pictures.Enjoy!

Back at it: 2010

2010-01-15T13:44:00.005-07:00

Well after a month off from the blogosphere (due more to an utter lack of noteworthiness than anything else), it's finally time to ring in 2010.

First thing on the agenda: New Year's Goals.

Now, most people make resolutions at the new year. If experience has taught me anything, it's that "resolution" usually ends up meaning little more than nice thoughts and good intentions that are ultimately scrapped with a customary "I'll try again next year."

Resolutions typically aren't quantifiable, and they usually revolve around some kind of a sweeping lifestyle change ("I'm going to eat better," "I'm going to exercise more," "I'm going to be more nice," etc. etc. etc.). Now, as wonderful and laudable as these resolutions are, the objective soul will acknowledge that they lack the sort of concreteness or achievement-ness that facilitates tangible accomplishment.

That's why I make goals for the new year, because a goal is something you can actually reach; it's quantifiable to the point that reaching it isn't a matter of subjective evaluation, it's an absolute yes or no (you either reached it or you didn't).

I try to mix them up a little bit, combining serious with fun and ambitious with safe. Most importantly, I write them down and keep them in my mind, because otherwise my goals are little more than hopes and wishes.

But enough with my philosophizing -- let's get to them:

Goals for 2010:

1. Get into Columbia Law School
(and the others on my list)
2. Learn to juggle
3. Be on Korean television
4. Visit three new foreign countries
5. Get something published

A couple of them are already in the works, a couple will be a bit of a stretch/out of my control, and one has proven elusive to me for years (I swear, learning to juggle shouldn't be this hard), but I'm hopeful that I can hit them all.

We'll see how things turn out over the next little while. If anyone can help me hit any of these, please let me know (this means YOU Korean television stations).

If anyone has any fun goals of their own, I'd love it if you'd leave them in the comments. I'm always game for some new ideas.

And the award goes to. . .

2009-12-11T19:07:00.004-07:00

It turns out that I wasn't alone in my praise for the airport here in Korea.

At a ceremony in Los Angeles this week, the Incheon International Airport won the Best Airport Award from Business Traveler Magazine. This comes on the heels of winning "World's Best Airport for 2009" in Skytrax's World Airport Survey results. Global Traveler, the Airport Service Quality Awards, IATA, and AETRA Service Monitoring have all rated Incheon as the world's best, and Airports Council International (known in "the biz" as the UN of airports) has named the airport the best in world every year since 2005. Not a bad little resume.

Now, none of those names or acronyms really means anything to me, but I can certainly back up their awards through my own personal experience here.

The airport is simply fantastic.

If any of you ever have the option of stopping in Incheon, TAKE IT. You won't regret it.

But do give yourself a little more than seven minutes to do the airport thing. I don't think they make a habit of getting you through quite that quickly (though it's nice to know that they can).

Bloodsuckers

2009-12-07T00:56:00.007-07:00

Koreans are known throughout the world for their work ethic. Long, grueling hours and very few vacation days are just a few of the characteristics of the typical (or stereotypical) Korean work experience.

But who knew that work ethic extended to Korean insects, too.

I'm talking about mosquitoes, quite possibly the most baneful, irritating, invasive little creatures ever to curse mother earth and the people that populate it.
(notice I did NOT call them evil, creepy, or conniving. Spiders are still the winners in that sense)

It is the first week of December already (a fact that continues to blow me away as I wonder where in the world November went). Seeing as how Seoul has seen numerous nights dipping into the 20s and a couple of lengthy bouts with persistently frigid temps, one would think that the mosquitoes had packed it in for the winter or else frozen to death first.

Apparently, one would be sorely mistaken.

I make it a habit of keeping my trusty Home Mat -- a cartridge-loaded indoor mosquito repeller-- turned on at night because not doing so can sometimes have pretty severe consequences. When I lived near some sizable paddies in one of my former mission areas, a single lapse in keeping the Home Mat on at night meant literally 50-60 mosquito bites by morning. My face, arms, back, thighs, and neck were bitten mercilessly. Regardless of how many layers I wore or how many blankets I buried myself under, the biters would find their way through and have happy hour on me-- literally.

In this place I've been pretty skeeter-free. But that doesn't mean I haven't been keeping my Home Mat on religiously. At least, it didn't until this week. I decided that the prolonged cold weather coupled with the lateness of the season (honestly, DECEMBER?!) meant I was safe from the mosquitoes until the spring. I went to bed the other night confident that there was nothing to repel.

I woke up with seven bites on my left arm.

Not only that, but I found three bloated mosquitoes lying drunken (on my own personal brand of O-positive, I presume) on the bed frame near my head. My blood gleamed through their translucent little bodies. At least it did until I smashed them mercilessly with a box of Frosted Flakes. Needless to say, I wasn't happy.

How these little biters are still menacing society here in Seoul despite the icy temps and the increasingly angry wind is beyond me. Maybe they are influenced by the hard-working Koreans around them. Maybe the high Kimchi content in the blood they drink gives them a little extra go-get-em-ness. Or maybe they just stake out corners of the toasty Korean floors and wait for night to arrive so they can get their sucking done.

Whatever it is, I guess I'll be keeping my Home Mat on for the next two weeks as well. And those mosquitoes better watch out too -- I'm never too far from that Frosted Flakes box.

Mountain of learning

2009-12-03T04:59:00.005-07:00

What you're looking at is the stack of textbooks for my Contemporary Korean Society course and how it grew progressively over the course of the semester.

That's ONE course.

22 textbooks.

7,000 pages.

2 feet tall when stacked.

I don't even want to think about how much I had to spend (in terms of both time and money) on this little tower of wisdom. . .

I also don't want to think of how many of those 7,000 pages could be filled by combining all the usages of words like "hegemony," "praxis," "vis-a-vis," "concomitant," "teleological," "bifurcate," "obdurate," and "adroit" (along with all of the other overly-used academic jargon terms that these authors learned for their GREs and felt compelled to use at every opportunity).

But on the bright side, I can now answer any questions you may have regarding Korean white-collar labor solidarity in the 1980s, class consciousness among pre and post-IMF Seoul-ites, and a host of other Korean civil society-related topics.

And believe me, I'm taking that knowledge to the bank. :)

Out of sight

2009-12-01T08:38:00.003-07:00

Dryers and cluttered desks are traditionally the household experts at making things disappear. Granted, my desk is pretty messy, but there's not a dryer within a hundred miles (that's probably an exaggeration). One would think that this would naturally reduce the propensity of things to vanish. But apparently, one would be dead wrong. At least in this twilight-zone of a room I live in.

I was putting in my contacts this morning after my shower, and my left lens decided it was time for a jailbreak. It jumped from my finger in a desperate dash for freedom, only to flutter harmlessly to the floor. I watched it land on my bathmat not two inches from my foot. I repeat, I WATCHED IT LAND.

I bent down to pick it up, only there wasn't a lens there anymore. I was a bit taken aback. I was confused. I had just watched it land there. I carefully scanned the area around the landing site.

Nothing.

No tracks, no getaway car tire skids, and nowhere to run or hide, but the fact remained that the lens was gone.

I checked my body. It wasn't stuck to my feet or my legs or my hands or my face.

I checked my towel. It wasn't stuck anywhere there, either.

I got down on my hands and knees (carefully making sure that I wasn't going to kneel on the lens) and proceeded to search the entire floor area inch by inch.

Three hours (and my sanity) later and it was still fruitless. I had checked and rechecked every inch of my floor and everything close by that might be harboring the fugitive. I had even taken out my little hand broom to sweep the area -- to no avail.

The lens is gone. Somehow he made like a single sock in the dryer and found his way to that magic fairy land of lost things. And he left me lensless. And a little crazy.

How that lens disappeared and how I wasn't able to find it after three hours of thorough searching I will never know. But I DO know that it's going to eat at me for days.

And somewhere, a lone little lens will be laughing at me all the while.

* sigh *

Giving thanks

2009-11-23T01:22:00.007-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. While I didn't get my fill of football or my mom's delicious rolls this time around, I still have plenty to be thankful for. I don't want to put together a sappy list or anything, but there is one thing I wanted to share, something that pointedly reminded me about gratitude and how much we truly have to be thankful for that happened while riding the bus home from school this afternoon.

It was a small thing, really.

A few stops before my own, a 10-year old boy rushed to catch the bus while his friend kept hurrying down the sidewalk. As the boy got on and went to sit down, I overheard his friend calling through the window as he waved goodbye:

"Eat well and live well, ok?"

It's a common farewell in Korea and I've heard it a thousand times. I've come to accept it as just a cultural variant that expresses the same emotions we show in English with a simple "Take care" or "Have a good one."

But today it struck me like it never has before.

The phrase isn't just a combination of words arbitrarily put together. There is a reason that this customary goodbye in Korea deals with eating and living: not so long ago, neither food nor life was ever guaranteed.

A little more than 50 years ago, the average yearly income in Korea was $60 -- scarcely more than $1 per week. The Korean War had just ended and between 2 and 3 million people had died in the conflict (in a combined population of only 30 million). Farmlands were ruined or rebuilding and people lacked clothing and shelter. In a very real sense, eating and living well was just about the best that an average Korean at that time could hope for, and for many they were regularly, if not persistently, in doubt.

Thanks to favorable conditions, hard work, sacrifice, and a great deal of suffering and repression along the way, Korea has emerged today as a strong economy with a standard of living that people fifty years ago could scarcely have imagined.

But as was evident by the two boys I saw while riding the bus, the collective memory in Korea of their difficult past remains strong, and I'm convinced that such memory continues to give them strength and perspective. It's a perspective that we in the West lack a little too often, I think, and we would do well to remember just how much we have to be thankful for, even if it is as simple as food in our bellies and life at the end of the day.

It's wonderful that we have been blessed with such abundance in the States. I'm grateful for the privileges and opportunities that have come with living there. I'm grateful for the sacrifices and the hard work that have made it all possible.

But today especially, I'm grateful for the reminder from those two small boys that in the face of all else, there's always something to be thankful for.

("I will eat well")

To Autumn

2009-11-20T02:03:00.002-07:00

I studied English Literature as an undergrad, and sometimes find myself waxing poetic. My emphasis (if I had one) was in Victorian/Romantic literature, so I tend to gravitate towards the poetry of figures like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and others of the same period. The major contribution of these romantic poets was making the ordinary poetic, particularly the natural world around us. It was rare before this time to write literature about nature (which is hard to imagine since today we are flooded with it).

These poets tended to write in what's called blank verse -- un-rhymed iambic pentameter (which is the same style Shakespeare used). They did this because their emphasis was on the sounds of their poems, on the way that different words resonate with each other within lines and between lines throughout the poem. The sonic element complemented the poem's imagery, creating a deeper sensory experience.

It was in that same spirit that I wrote this one, inspired by the world around me as I walked one dusky autumn evening.

Sorry for its fuzziness.

Hosed (literally)

2009-11-18T00:37:00.004-07:00

I walked past the fire station yesterday right after finishing my term paper. I looked up and made eye contact with a crouching fireman who was talking to a chum. Time seemed to slow down a little bit, and I watched his expression change from a laughing smile to a look of worried panic. That's when I noticed a rapidly expanding froth of white start to fill my line of sight, and the next thing I knew I was being blasted in the face and torso by the jet from the fire hose he had been crouching over to turn on. For a moment, I felt like little Joel Miller after he found the marble in the oatmeal on Stanley Spadowski's Playhouse.

It didn't last more than a split second, so the damage wasn't too severe, but on a 30-degree afternoon, the last thing I needed was to be sopping wet from the waist up. The fireman apologized profusely, I told him not to worry about it, and I turned back around to quickly dry off at home before heading out again.

How he didn't see me and why he was shooting towards the street at neck-level are two things I will never know.

But I took it as a chiding smack upside the back of the head from the Universe for being so off the ball with my paper. Sometimes idiocy deserves a kick in the pants (or a firehose in the face).

It served me right.

Hopefully I'll learn my lesson at some point.

Hosed (figuratively)

2009-11-17T07:30:00.005-07:00

This week is a short week for me. Thanks to some timely college-entrance exams that happen to take place in my graduate school building later this week, my classes for Thursday and Friday are canceled. This is even better seeing as how the bulk of my classes, including all of the most demanding ones, fall on those two days. It's like my own special Thanksgiving weekend a couple of weeks early, and I couldn't be happier about it.

I greeted Monday with a warm smile, even though Monday greeted me with a morning low of 25 degrees and an utter lack of hot water. I probably should have taken it as an omen, but nothing could dampen my spirits at the prospect of such a short and pleasant week.

I went about my morning, did some homework, and headed eagerly off to class. Korean class went well (as it always does), and I even discovered a fantastic new restaurant at lunch with some classmates. With a hot meal in my tummy to warm my soul and help fend off the wintry weather outside, I returned to my school for my afternoon class all smiles.

In fact, I kind of felt like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this scene from "500 Days of Summer," though I didn't manage to get anyone on the streets around KU to start dancing with me.

I walked in to the classroom and cheerfully exchanged hi's and how-are-you's with some of my classmates as I made for my seat. I was just about to sit down when I noticed the first bundle of papers sitting in front of the student sitting next to me. A tingling sense crept up in the back of my brain, but I still didn't comprehend the significance of it. As I began taking my computer out of my bag, I looked over and noticed that other students likewise had small stacks of pages in front of them. My smile dropped slightly into a look of puzzlement. I asked the girl sitting next to me what she had in front of her, thinking perhaps there were handout materials that I needed to grab. She looked back at me quizzically.

"The final paper is due today."

I flushed, finally fearing that something bad was happening. I was CERTAIN that the paper was due next Monday, and I conveyed as much, trying hard to reassure myself. My heart began to pound as several other students corroborated her version rather than mine.

Snippets of their words like ". . . changed the date. . . posted online. . . announced in class. . ." swam through my suddenly muddled mind as a cloud of genuine dread descended to envelop me.

What had been such a wonderful Monday up to that point was now teetering on the brink of disaster. This paper is not only worth 40% of my grade, but the syllabus explicitly states, in bold-faced 16 pt. font, that there are "no late papers accepted for ANY reason short of emergency hospitalization."

The professor walked into the classroom at that point, and he did not look the least bit happy.

In fact, he was down right angry. And I hadn't even tried to plea my case yet. . .

He asked curtly for paper submissions, and students filed forward to turn them in. Then he looked over the class and asked who didn't have papers.

I raised my hand.

He simply said "I'm sorry. You're out of luck. It's very clear that no late papers are accepted. Do well on the final and you can still get a passing grade."

Now, though grades are important to me, the grade by itself wouldn't be the end of the world.But it would be a problem for one significant reason: money.

I wouldn't say that grades are inflated here, necessarily, but the average marks are significantly higher than I saw at the undergraduate level back in Utah (it may just be more qualified, capable students). That's important because the maintenance of scholarships here is dependent on relative ranking, not absolute GPA. And a single C- (which was the best I could hope for without this paper) was likely enough of a hit to drop me out of my scholarship bracket and cost me as much as $7,000 in tuition money for next semester.

Needless to say, I was downright panicking. I sat through the first 90 minutes of class in a bit of a daze, wondering how in the world I was going to get myself out of my predicament. When the break came, I asked my professor if we could talk outside for a bit. His mood had brightened just a little by this point, and he agreed.

It turns out that he had announced the date change in class the day that I missed while back in the States for Eric's wedding. He had posted the date change several times on the class website, but in a general section applicable to all of his courses, not specifically for ours. I had been in the habit of only checking announcements under our course heading, and thus missed it completely. So in all objectivity (much as I hate to admit it), I was completely responsible for my lack of awareness, and he had every right to enforce the "no late papers" rule.

However, I managed to cash in every bit of good will I had earned through the semester by being an active and engaged student and convince him to give me 24 hours to get my paper in when I explained the circumstances from my end and gave the reasons (though they weren't excuses) why I wasn't aware of the date change.

That meant 24 hours to research and write a 20 page paper on Korea's new policy of green growth as it compares to past development economic drives. I had planned on doing it more casually over the upcoming long weekend. Now I faced the prospect of doing it in a day. Not only that, but I still had a class to attend Tuesday morning for 4 hours that had been moved up from Friday because of the cancellations.

So from Monday at 5 until Tuesday at 5, I was in my own personal hell (completely self-induced, of course) trying to get it done. Food and sleep were luxuries I couldn't afford as I desperately churned out something coherent. I actually found myself somewhat grateful for my monster midterm and the practice that it gave me.

In the end, though I literally swatted myself in the face on more than one occasion through the wee hours of the morning in exasperation, I managed to get it done and send it off. I'm not happy with it, but it's the best I could considering the circumstances.

So for the time being, crisis is averted, and my heart can beat normally again. We'll see if that remains the case when we get our papers back.

On the bright side, this frees up my ENTIRE long weekend that I was going to spend doing my paper, so I guess a little bit of R and R is in order.

After the last two days, I think I deserve it.

Bring the (radiant) heat

2009-11-14T01:06:00.002-07:00

Well, it's happening. Seoul is finally giving way to the cold. Not winter cold, mind you. That shouldn't set in for another month or two. Just the brisk chill of late autumn.

I don't much mind it like this. The highs hover in the 40s (5-7 for my friends in the Commonwealth) and the lows are right around freezing. Temperature-wise it's nothing a good jacket and a pair of long pants can't handle.

But every time a strong bluster of November wind hits me in the face, I'm painfully reminded of the frigid Korean winter waiting patiently to envelop the peninsula come late December. And it makes me shudder just thinking about it.

It's a little known fact that Seoul is the coldest city on Earth among others at the same elevation and latitude. Consider this: Seoul is at the same latitude (about 37 deg. N) and elevation (effectively sea level) as San Francisco. However, their climates -- particularly in winter -- couldn't be more different.

In San Francisco, the average high temperature in winter is around 59 degrees F. The low only gets down to about 45. Winter is also when San Francisco gets most of its rainfall.

Seoul, on the other hand, has an average winter high of 35 and an average low of 20, with humidity in the 60% range all season, despite getting relatively very little snowfall.

But this isn't the worst part. Temperature-wise, Seoul isn't much different from my hometown of Salt Lake City. The difference -- and it's a major one -- is the wind. The cursed, howling, Siberian wind that never stops. Blowing a constant 20-25 mph and gusting to levels much stronger, it cuts through you no matter how many layers you wear. It sweeps through the streets and around corners, down into subway stations and through apartment hallways, blasting everyone within reach with all of Jack Frost's fury.

It's the Siberian aspect that accounts for Seoul's unusually cold winter climate (and its 25 degree temperature difference with San Fran). The seasonal winds in Asia shift in the wintertime from the Southwest (monsoonal winds that make Korean summers a wet, sticky affair) to the Northwest, meaning that the mass of arctic frigidness sitting over northern Russia blows straight down the peninsula, hitting Seoul unrelentingly until the always-slow coming of spring. It's like sitting in a freezing car only to have your friend blast the AC in your face. Not cool.

Dante's deepest circle of Hell in The Inferno wasn't the flaming pit that we popularly conceptualize today. Rather, it was a frozen void fanned by the endless winds of Satan's beating wings as he munched on Judas Iscariot. I can't help but think that Dante's view of Hell is right as I dread the upcoming winter and its fierce Siberian winds.

When I was here as a missionary, I spent many a winter day outside for three, four, sometimes six hours at a time. That didn't help improve my perception of the Korean winter. But hopefully this time around I can stay inside a little more often.

Especially because Korea specializes in radiant floor heating, meaning that you've always got a piping hot floor to walk, sit, or lie on even while the winter rages around you. There are few better feelings in life than fearing cold tiles in the bathroom first thing in a winter morning only to find the welcoming warmth of a heated floor. Bless the Koreans for using the lemons Mother Nature gave them to make such comforting lemonade.

Cab-atonic

2009-11-08T22:58:00.005-07:00

When I first came to Korea as a missionary, one of the things that struck me most (at least early on) about Korean people is their uncanny ability to sleep anywhere at anytime in any position.

It's amazing, really.

Subways are prime for observing this phenomenon. And every time I see it (which is pretty much every time I ride), I'm reminded of this classic Pepsi commercial from the Super Bowl a few years back:

You've got a few different categories of subway sleepers:

Droop-n-droppers: These are the people sitting straight in their chairs whose heads will slowly droop further and further down, until they hit the dropping point, at which they sink like rocks, only to be snapped back up and begin the process again. These types can also work in reverse, with their heads dropping backwards rather than forwards.

Metronomes: These sleepers also sit up straight but unlike the droop-n-droppers, they tilt slowly to one side or the other. When a metronome's head drops to one side, the snap-back recoil gives it a little too much momentum and it slowly starts drooping off to the other side, and so it continues.

Slippers: Slippers are usually found on trains with metal benches. They lean back to get comfortable, but while they doze their backsides slowly lose their grip on the slick metal and their bodies start to slowly slide out from under them, sometimes with hilarious consequences. . .

Slumpers: These are the ones that slowly droop their whole bodies rather than just their heads. They end up hunching over their own laps and, when drunk, can actually fall forward out of their seats. I've seen this on two occasions.

Side-slumpers: The most obnoxious of the bunch. Side-slumpers can't keep their bodies upright, so they start leaning sideways, usually falling onto whomever happens to be next to them. The slumps are met with shoulder pushes, irritated facial expressions, and general annoyance. Side slumpers wouldn't be quite so bad if they weren't invariably drunk, middle-aged men.

None of this really has anything to do with anything, aside from the falling asleep connection.

I bring all of this up because I was riding a cab to church yesterday and, as I always do, I was chatting with the driver. This time was a bit strange though. As we were talking, he would ask me a question, and as soon as I answered it he would ask the very same question again as if our conversation about it had never happened. He sounded odd, distant, and distracted. I thought he was just a little off.

We kept driving and I kept talking. The driver was in the middle of talking as we pulled up to a just-green light, but he went silent quite suddenly and the car started slowing down and drifting off to the side. I looked over at him to find him in full-out "side-slumper" position, almost falling into my passenger seat. The horns started blaring, angry words started flying from other cars, and it took me several good shakes and some loud "Mister! Wake Up!"s to get him to snap back to the land of the living.

He may have been drunk, he may have just been sleepy, he may have had a Dwight-style concussion (for those of you familiar with the episode of the Office when Michael Scott burns his foot on his George Foreman Grill). Who knows. I'm just glad I made it out of the cab alive.

Koreans may be able to sleep anywhere, but as I learned first-hand yesterday, there are some places where that power is best left unused.

North Korea

2009-11-05T05:25:00.015-07:00

Whenever I talk to people about my studying here in Seoul, the topic of North Korea inevitably comes up. They ask me if I'm afraid of the North and if I feel safe being so close to the border. They ask me if Kim Jong Il would ever attack the South and start another war. Almost invariably, the topic of conversation regrading the North focuses on its military and the threat of violence against South Korea, the United States, and their allies in the region.

People are often surprised when I tell them that nobody in this country (myself included) gives North Korea a second thought, and we certainly aren't losing sleep over any looming threat of a nuclear holocaust.

In the States, we are fed steady helpings of dire media alerts regarding missile launches and nuclear tests. The news in the U.S. would make it seem that North Korea is teetering on the brink of saying “to heck with it” and letting loose its entire arsenal in one last hurrah, engulfing South Korea and anyone else close enough to merit a missile.

The truth is, the North’s missiles and nukes are little more than a last-ditch effort at rattling sabers, the regime’s best attempt to garner some international attention, and hopefully secure much-needed concessions while also acquiring domestic propaganda fodder to try to keep its failing state alive. The North is barely able to maintain what military strength it has left,and any armed conflict would result in a quick and assured demise. However, sadly, the international community is eager to oblige the North’s need for attention and a semblance of power, and as a result the nuclear issue dominates any and all talk or news about North Korea in the rest of the world at large.

But the problem in North Korea is not a nuclear one – at least not entirely.

More important, and more deserving of international attention, is the problem of basic human rights and humanitarian need. In a very literal sense, North Korea is dying. And there is very little being done about it.

North Korea is an impoverished country with a destitute populace and a small, parasitic elite class. It doesn’t have enough energy to supply its needs or enough food to feed its people. What aid it does receive from the international community is siphoned off to the top ranks of society rather than distributed to the sick and the starving majority. Reports out of Wonsan, one of the biggest cities in North Korea, note that 70% of the residents are surviving on corn porridge mixed with grass. Most provinces are facing looming famines because the government’s recent “150-day battle”—little more than a national propaganda effort designed to boost the legitimacy of Kim Jong Il’s heir—forced farmers off their meager plots and into state industrial service instead, leaving fields poorly tended and yields unsustainably paltry.

The people in North and South Korea are genetically identical, and many families are still split between the two halves of the peninsula. Yet because of the humanitarian crises in North Korea and the harsh oppressive realities there, the people bear a physical burden that is slowly killing them. The average North Korean is 3-5 inches shorter than the average South Korean due to malnutrition. Infants lack basic care and are often left with developmental problems or susceptibility to disease and deformity. The future for an unaided North is even more grim than its sobering present.

Lack of access to basic food, shelter, and clothing is a common reality in the North, and firm state control prevents people from doing anything about it. As much as 2% of the population is being held in prison camps under the constant threat of abuse and execution. Entire extended families are sometimes imprisoned to serve as examples of what happens to dissenters and their loved ones. The few lucky enough to escape North Korea tell even grimmer stories that I don’t want to dwell on.

I literally ache for North Korea because I know that the people there are no different from those here that I know and love. The difference is that they are subject to an oppressive regime that puts political power and local authority over the lives and livelihoods of its populace. It’s abominable, and it breaks my heart.

One of my greatest goals in life (should circumstances allow it) is to be on the leading edge of rescuing and reviving North Korea. It’s a widely accepted reality that North and South Korea simply cannot reunite overnight, and the process will take decades of intense development before it even becomes a possibility. When the day comes that North Korea has a regime open to receiving aid and development from the outside world and willing to provide for the basic needs of its people, I hope I can be there directing humanitarian efforts, coordinating between governments and the North Korean state, and/or advising economic development organizations and investment-ready companies on how best to build up North Korea’s new, modern foundations.

There is hope for North Korea because there is hope in the Korean people living there. But it's going to take a lot of help from the rest of the world before those people can start fulfilling their potential. I hope that the humanitarian issues in the North will soon eclipse the manufactured crisis that is the nuclear issue and take their rightful place in the world's consciousness. The people need it.

Here is a link to a youtube video that does an excellent job of showing the difficulty faced by relief organizations due to the lack of international pressure being placed on the North Korean regime regarding humanitarian aid. It also shows us the heartbreaking realities of life outside the capital.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30-2sPGNGEw

Fall colors

2009-10-31T01:09:00.003-06:00

There's a mountain national park about 20 minutes from my apartment, and since it's leaf-changing season, I decided to make a visit. It was cloudy that day so the skies are washed out, but the colors on the trees were amazing. So vibrant and so varied. I wanted to emphasize the redness of the tree in that first shot so I made everything else black and white. The rest of them are true to life. Today it rained hard so these leaves are probably gone for good (or at least until next fall). Good thing I made it when I did.

Enjoy.

Man-opause

2009-10-27T18:34:00.006-06:00

What am I, menopausal?

I got a hot flash as we were landing in Seoul yesterday.

One minute I was feeling great, thankful that I wasn't going to be quarantined with a fever or anything when I disembarked. Within literally a matter of seconds I was flushed, light-headed, nauseous, green (I'm not kidding, my skin turns green when this happens), and I'd broken out in a hot sweat.

My first worry was whether or not my 14-year streak of not vomiting was going to end. I even grabbed the little paper baggie from the seat pocket just in case.

My second worry was whether or not the hot flash was going to register as a fever when the airport swine-flu police scanned me. The last thing I wanted to deal with was a week in quarantine, and I was determined not to give them cause.

I blasted myself with the overhead AC blowers, put my head down, and hoped for it to pass quickly. My seatmate probably thought I was panic stricken, afraid we were going to fall out of the sky and crash into the tarmac. I was too focused on breathing to explain myself.

The timing was going to be critical. If the pilot made quick work of taxiing to the gate, I was doomed. If there were delays, my hot flash would probably pass and I'd be back to normal.

Thankfully, the latter scenario played out and by the time we were disembarking the plane, I was back to 100%. Still, I was none too fond of getting railroaded by a hot flash, particularly as a 25 year old male. It's happened once or twice a year since I was 13 and it's miserable every time. One particularly memorable flash happened while I was teaching an LSAT class last spring. I had a student literally raise her hand and ask me "am I going crazy or did you just turn green?" I had us take our 10 minute break a little early that day.

I'm fairly certain I'm not going through menopause, but with the hot flashes on top of my already notorious birthing hips (guilty of knocking over clothing racks, banging into doors and corners, and almost flooring elderly women), who knows. . .

Not that there's anything wrong with that. . .

2009-10-25T16:13:00.003-06:00

My brother Eric's wedding went off without a hitch (well, THAT hitch went off just fine. . . ). The dinner, the ceremony, and the reception were all fabulous.

He and the new wife headed off to Mexico for their honeymoon this morning, which left my dad, my brother, and me responsible for picking up their car from the airport to take it and their gifts back to their apartment.

My dad dropped my brother Mikee and me off at the car to drive it back to Eric's place. We climbed in and started driving.

However, this car was the same car we had "decorated" the night before in traditional wedding fashion. It was decked out in bright red streamers, pink balloons, a feather boa flying from the antenna, and even had hot-pink caution tape down the center of the car warning "Caution: Wild Girls." The windows were painted with phrases like "Boom Goes the Dynamite," "All Night, Baby!" Gettin' Busy," "Shaggin' Wagon," and "Baby Maker." Across the back windshield, of course, was a large "Just Married!"

As Mikee and I drove through the airport parking lot, we realized how we must look to passers by and other drivers:

A car decked out with pink and feathers. . .
Two young, clean-cut-looking men in the front seats. . .
The pronouncement of "Just Married!" on the back windshield. . .

You get the picture.

The stares of other drivers as they passed us by were priceless. . .

Back to the future

2009-10-23T09:00:00.005-06:00

.

One of my favorite things about flying back home across the Pacific is crossing the dateline.

As I was flying home this week, I looked back towards the tail and waved a silent "Goodbye Wednesday" as the sun set behind us.

A few hours later, I smiled a silent "Hello Wednesday" as the sun rose before us. It was like Groundhog Day, but without the 6 a.m. wakeup call and the frigid Pennsylvania February.

I left Seoul at 4:45 p.m. Wednesday, local time.
I arrived back in SLC at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, local time.

Kind of trippy, but I liked pocketing that extra 30 minutes.

Of course, flying back will rob me of an entire Tuesday next week. And Tuesdays are my day off. . .

sigh. . .

Mad dash

2009-10-22T17:32:00.004-06:00

I am a very, very punctual person for the most part. When I need to be at a certain place at a certain time, I'm there right on time or a little early. I've never understood how some people can be so oblivious to where they need to be and when. Showing up late for classes or tests, coming in late for work, MISSING FLIGHTS. . . it boggles my mind.

Well, I almost joined the ranks of those unfortunate souls who somehow aren't able to get themselves on a plane when they are supposed to when I had to fly home for my brother's wedding. Allow me to explain.

My flight left at 4:45. Being a 45 minute cab ride from the airport (or two hours with heavy traffic), I figured I'd give myself a healthy three hours plus to get myself there via the airport bus that runs past my little place and have plenty of time to deal with unexpected delays.

Unfortunately, delays were the item of the day, and I ended up with a full, full plate of them. How did the whole process go down? Let me run down the timeline:

1:30 - I leave my room with my carry-on suitcase and a shoulder bag to walk down the street to the airport bus stop.

1:40 - no bus yet, but I'm entertained by the irate shuttle driver in front of the adjacent hotel as he screams incessantly at the bellhop. The problem? I have no idea. All he's yelling are profanities. Lots of 'em.

1:50 - still no bus. Two of them should have come by at this point. A shuttle-load of Chinese tourists has just left. Three of them snapped photos of me as they drove past. I guess there aren't that many tall, blond, blue-eyed white people in China, either. . .

2:15 - The bus arrives at long last. I climb on and expect a relatively quick drive since it's nowhere close to rush hour and lunch has ended. The clock at the front of the bus stares down at me ambivalently.

2:45 - we're still driving through the neighborhoods making pick-up stops. Surely we're almost done and will be heading for the airport soon. . .

3:00 - now we're in a marketplace. Why are we trying to drive through a marketplace? I don't know either. What I do know is that there isn't room enough for a bus. The bus driver has just discovered this as well, and we're in the process of backing up OUT of the marketplace. . .

3:15 - we just made the final pickup (FINALLY). I'm anxious to get going, only to watch the driver park it, stand up, and walk off the bus. I see the top of his black head of hair walk along below the windows of the bus, then stop, and a puff of smoke wafts up from beneath it. I guess mister bus driver needed himself a pick-me-up.

3:25 - the bus finally gets going again. I've been suppressing my rage as his cigarette became a 10 minute smoke, drink, and potty break. We're still at least half an hour (probably more) away from the airport. The clock still stares coolly as it flashes to 3:26.

3:50 - We made it to the airport -- the wrong airport. We're at the domestic one, still 20 minutes from Inchon where my plane awaits. The driver has again parked the bus. I assume it's to help the new riders load their luggage under the bus. That's when I see another puff of smoke rising from below the windows. My fury is rivaled only by my impending sense of panic as I run best-case timing scenarios through my mind. At this point I consider calling in a bomb threat. . .

4:00 - The driver's second smoke break is over and we're on the move at last. Unfortunately the speed limit is only 45 between here and the airport. I see many cars passing us at much higher speeds. I wonder if jumping out and hitch hiking the last stretch isn't a better idea.

4:17 - We're here! . . . driving to the terminal. . . driving past my terminal. . . I push my face up against the glass in anguish as we get further and further away. Are those tears welling up? Yes.

4:20 - I'm off the bus. I sprint, literally, through the airport trying desperately to get from entry 10 (where we were let off) to entry 2 (where I need to be). I'm hauling my two bags as I haul serious butt, wondering how in the world I'm going to get on my plane in time. . .

4:22 - I've made it to the help-desk and I gasp for air I ask desperately for a boarding pass printed ASAP. I can't bear to look at the faces of the dozens of people I'm cutting in front as the attendant leads me over to the counter.

4:24 - Boarding pass in hand, I rush over to the security check. I'm deflated to find another massive line. I gasp "4:45 flight, please help!" to the official. Surprisingly, he leads me again to the front of the line and I, again, can't look the hundred-plus people in the eye as I fly through the X-rays and the metal detectors to the other side. I finally believe I might make it as I start sprinting for my gate.

4:27 - I'm elated to find that my gate happens to be the closest one to the security check. I'm also elated to find that they're still boarding and there's no line left. I hand them my pass, walk on the plane, and proceed to find 43A. Somehow, in the last 7 minutes, I've gone from being on a bus to sitting on my plane ready to leave.

Bless you, Korea, for your fabulous airport (but curse you for your tobacco culture). Where else in the world could a grad student (or anyone not protected by the secret service for that matter) make it from a bus, through a crowded check-in, through more-crowded security, and onto an international flight in less than 10 minutes? Nothing's coming to mind.

So here's to you, Inchon airport. I'll see you again soon (and hopefully next time I won't running through you like a fugitive).

4

2009-10-18T07:57:00.003-06:00

Koreans don't much mind the number 13. Though their traditional history is pretty superstitious (a subject I could go on and on about if I wanted to), most of those superstitions are pretty different from what we have in Western culture. That includes unlucky numbers.

The worst number in Korean culture?

4.

This comes to westerners as a surprise. What did poor little number 4 ever do to anyone?

He's even, he's a perfect square, he's easily shared, he doesn't get up into anyone's business, and as far as I can remember he was responsible for bringing us some fantastic episodes of Sesame Street.

So what's the deal?

The deal is that one Chinese root for "death" sounds exactly the same as the number four (사, pronounced "saw"). Thus the number itself has become linked to the notion of the dead, and that would make anyone superstitious.

One particularly creepy example of this? The first death on Sesame Street (that of the lovable shopkeeper Mr. Hooper way back in 1983) was brought to us by, you guessed it, the number 4.

I guess not all of four's episodes were as chipper as I thought.

The unluckiness of the number 4 even extends to numbers that include it, especially 14, though that particular aspect is more prevalent in Chinese culture than in Korea. (In Hong Kong, for example, some buildings will skip every floor with a 4, including the entire set of 40s, making a "50 story" building only 36 in actuality.

I've never really cared about it all that much, as I've never given much weight to superstition in general. But the last several days have made me re-think my perspective on this seemingly benign little number.

Why?

Let me give you the rundown.

Over the past 4 days, I have:

*had to write a 4 page, single-spaced statistical report in Korean
(taking me, on average, 4 times longer than it takes to write in English)

*had to sift through 14 books totalling 4,000 pages to write my 24-hour midterm

*gotten to sleep at 4 a.m. virtually every night

*gotten only 4 real hours of sleep each night

*eaten a grand total of 4 meals

I'm starting to understand why the number 4 is such a bad omen in Korea.

Good thing I've got a birthday coming up to bring me some good wishes. . .

. . . on the 24th. . .

oh no. . .

Storm's a comin'

2009-10-16T05:34:00.004-06:00

I have a midterm on Saturday. It was originally scheduled as an 8-hour, single-prompt, handwritten, closed-book, 20 page essay from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The professor has since had a change of heart. . .

. . .for the worse.

The test is now a do-it-at-home, 24-hour, type-written, open-book, 30 page essay (still single prompt) starting when he emails the prompt at 11:00 p.m. tonight.

For the record, I have no intention of writing until 11:00 tomorrow night. 6:00 will still likely be the limit of what little cognitive function I have left at that point.

Of course, with the added time and the "luxury" of open-book (all 14 of them, filling over 4,000 pages, that we've read over the last 7 weeks), we are now required to use specific and relevant citations and produce, what he terms, "a product of significantly higher quality that will be graded accordingly with a much higher expectation."

There's thunder rumbling ominously in the distance, which is rare for Seoul.

Tonight, at least, it portends more than one storm on the horizon.

Wish me luck.

.

Marker murder

2009-10-15T05:10:00.008-06:00

As a general rule, I adore Korea and Korean society. Even the things that I don't understand as well as I should or disagree with on a personal basis usually don't bother me too much. I tend to find very few failings in Korean society worth ranting about.

But right now, rant I will.

Koreans are marker killers.

There, I said it.

You know what I'm talking about. We all grow up as children being told never to forget to cap our markers, because if we don't put the cap back on, we'll come back to our coloring books with nothing but anemic streaks of faded color coming from the marker tips. And dead markers were the bane of my coloring existence.

A dead red marker meant that Santa Claus flew around on Christmas Eve with bright orange threads. A dead blue one meant the sky was purple during the day. A dead green one usually resulted in a noble attempt at mixing the yellow and blue, but invariably in the end the tip of the yellow marker always got stained and the yellow was never the same again. Dead markers ruined my coloring books and the masterpieces that surely would have emerged had I been careful enough to always have free-flowing markers.

In my house growing up, we didn't get markers that often. If we were lucky, back to school shopping at Shopko would result in a new yellow box of 8. That put a lot of pressure on us to take care of them. If we killed a marker during the year, tough luck. We weren't getting any more til August, if at all. So naturally, I came to value the lids and made sure to keep my markers covered and alive throughout the year. I didn't always succeed, though, and my coloring books paid the price. My guilt and my shame knew no bounds.

When I was in middle and high school, white boards starting becoming all the rage in the classroom. Chalkboards disappeared as gleaming white sliding boards replaced the dusty old slates. One drawback to the transition was the shift from chalk (costing a pittance) to markers (costing a few dollars a piece). The need to preserve writing utensils become that much more significant. In light of this, especially in the cash-strapped nature of the Salt Lake City School District, we were reminded again and again to replace the caps on markers. Failure to do so was punished harshly (okay, only verbally), and the victims of student and teacher negligence piled up in sad masses in the bottom of trash bins. The sound of another dead marker hitting the bottom of the trash bin with a hollow "thung" made me think of the dead Crayolas I was responsible for, and I couldn't help but mourn.

Luckily, for the most part Americans seem to get the notion of replacing the caps on their markers. We respect the marker (and the pocketbook) enough to keep it safe from the ravages of the open air.

In Korea, that is anything but the case.

Koreans seem to have an inborn incapacity to replace the lids of markers. I cannot begin to describe the veritable casualty wards that are the marker trays hanging below Korean whiteboards. Sometimes dozens of red, blue, and black markers lay capless, almost wheezing as the last bits of vital moisture evaporate from their parched tips. The caps themselves are usually right next to them, lying in cruel irony. Korean professors will take up a marker, toss the cap casually, and emphatically begin scrawling on the board. These doodles will be interrupted occasionally by a declarative fist or knuckle rapping the board for emphasis. And once the climactic point has been made, the professor will discard the marker to the tray and never give it another thought.

I honestly struggle with this. I will usually linger in the classroom after the lecture is over just to walk over to the white board and replace the caps on those markers. The fact that they are inanimate isn't lost on me, but I feel compelled to preserve them. I can't imagine what the KU budget for markers is, but it must be immense given the sheer volume of dead and dying expos lying strewn throughout the various classrooms.

I realize that Koreans a generation ago didn't enjoy the luxury of markers to color with. They didn't receive the same schooling in proper marker care that I did as a young boy. But still, there's no excuse for the blatant disregard for the markers' integrity. The callous disregard for the markers' well being makes me cringe every time a professor picks up a marker, tries it out on the board, and tosses it dismissively to the tray when it can't perform in its dried-out state.

We've been studying labor and democratization movements in my classes. I wonder if a markers' rights movement isn't in order. . .

"Cap-e Diem!" "Put a lid on it!" "Live free or dry!"

Me, I'd settle simply for a little courtesy thrown the markers' way.

Squeezing the last bit of effort out of fast food

2009-10-14T06:13:00.009-06:00

It's Wednesday night, which of course means that I have a mountain of work due tomorrow. It also means that I haven't really started any of it. I find myself making this post in large part because I can't help but look for any and all legitimate distractions to keep me from reading through the heaps of social class analyses staring back at me from the side of my desk.

But I also make it because I experienced today the next step towards the end of society as we know it.

I'm talking, of course, about fast food delivery straight to the front door.

I was trying to read and realized that I was starving. Having gone a couple of weeks without American food, I thought a McDonald's run was justified. But I didn't much feel like making the 30 minute round trip on foot since I have so much work to do (yes, the irony of that statement does not escape me as I type out this post). So I thought I'd call them up and see if they truly did deliver, which would allow me to continue working and still enjoy a burger and fries. Much to my pleasure (and, in retrospect, much to my horror), they DO deliver, and within 10 minutes of placing my order, I was surprised by a text message telling me my food had arrived. I opened the door in perfect sync with the arriving delivery boy. He had my McMeal in hand, hot and delicious, with no tip necessary.

Now why, you might ask, would this give me cause for retrospective horror, especially given the fact that I absolutely love eating fast food, particularly french fries?

Allow me to explain.

Back in the States, otherwise known as the "land of the fry and the home of the crave," our ridiculous societal reliance on fast food is tempered (albeit slightly) only by the fact that you at least have to get off the couch and walk to and from a vehicle to obtain it. Those two or three burned calories represent the last tattered threads of a once-proud hunting/gathering legacy of "working hard for your food or you starve to death" that is oh-so-close to becoming nothing more than an intravenous ingestion of the "drip of the day."

But here in Seoul, the Korean drive to serve has resulted in a small army of yellow-clad delivery boys poised to rush your mega-mac straight to your waiting face. With the push of a button, you can have a 1,200 calorie McHeartAttack waiting on your front porch within a matter of minutes. Fortunately for Koreans, they still work hard, exercise daily, and keep fast food intake to a luxurious minimum, all the while eating mostly rice, vegetables, and small amounts of pork, chicken, or beef. They can indulge in the occasional McDonalds run (as I do). These McDelivery boys don't represent the same ominous specter in Korea that they would if they cropped up in the States.

But imagine the social implications of this system were it to exist in America! I can't help but visualize bloated masses in driving caps and floral mu-mus, finally enabled to permanently bond their backsides to their favorite Xbox seat or the well-formed butt grooves in their computer chairs. Recognition of sunlight would become a thing of the past. . . Personal human interaction would be seen as an antiquated form of social networking. . .

The caricature itself, though obviously extreme, has enough legitimate correlation to American reality that it makes me shudder.

I love fast food. I find myself too often craving a junior bacon cheeseburger or a cheesy gordita crunch. I will probably find myself utilizing McDelivery more often than I realize right now (and loving it, no doubt). But there will always be that little part of me that looks at the system itself and sees, in some small way, the end of modern society as we know it.

The [real] beautiful game

2009-10-09T05:31:00.005-06:00

I adore golf.

I bring it up because I discovered this week (after a month and a half of living here) that my apartment building has a mini driving range on the roof. That would have been good to know six weeks ago when I was busy de-contaminating my room and could have used a well-deserved break to hit a few balls and breathe some fresh air.

Golf has been called a lot of things over the years, and many of them aren't positive.

But here's why I love golf (and why I encourage everyone to take it up):

When I'm on the golf course, everything else is gone. Distractions, worries, to-do lists. . . they're all left outside the clubhouse. The golf course is my own space, free (temporarily) from all of my other cares and responsibilities. It allows me to clear my mind like few things can.

It's simply me, the grass, the trees, the wind, and the sky.

The game itself is a meditative exercise, really, and it allows me to keep everything else out of my mind and simply be. The only thing I have to worry about: picking the right club and swinging. If it turns out well, it's pure satisfaction. If it doesn't, then it's a chance to swing again and hope for a better result.

It hasn't always been like this for me. I used to get much more frustrated playing than I do these days (and I still do get a little uptight sometimes). Yes, I always want to hit good shots and I want to play well, but the more I play the game, the more I realize just how little that aspect of the golfing experience matters when I don't need it to.

More and more, I have come to value the source of release that golf can be, especially if it's a cool Salt Lake evening with the setting sun shining orange on the Wasatch mountains and a gentle breeze billowing up from across the valley. For a few hours, at least, it's just me and my surroundings, and none of the cumbersome inevitabilities of life weighing me down.

For those few hours, it's just me and some well deserved peace and clarity of mind.

If only golf didn't run $300 a round over here. . .

Somehow hitting into a green net five stories above the urban jungle just isn't quite the same.

Update: spiders read blogs (and they get steamed about it)

2009-10-03T07:54:00.003-06:00

Let this be a warning to all of you:

Spiders can read blogs.

And they go vengeance-style crazy over bad publicity.

I woke up this morning, ready for a relaxing and productive holiday, with sunshine smiling in through the window and the promise of beautiful weather throughout the day. I was well rested, refreshed, and my face was all smiles.

I sat down at my desk, flipped open my computer. . .

. . . and everything changed.

Before I knew what was happening, a beige mass of terror was flying through the air at me from my keyboard. I didn't realize what was happening at first, and then looked down at my shirt to find the culprit:

It was a spider. And it had JUMPED AT ME, screaming what I'm sure were silent spider swears.

As far as I can gather (noting of course that this relies on just a tinge of conjecture), the spider had been blogosurfing from his own little world-wide-web, and spewed his starbugs coffee all over his computer silkscreen when he came across my latest tell-all about spiders' evil. He was incredulous that someone had the cajones to call out his kind for their depravity, and I'm fairly certain that the momma spider from the video was a former lover who ran off with his best friend. Combined, this was too much for him to handle and, enraged, he crawled inside my computer and waited for his chance to pounce.

Well that chance came bright and early this morning, and I'm just lucky I'm as tall as I am because rather than hitting my jugular, which I'm sure was his intent, he landed on the left side of my chest.

Here's a good likeness that I found online (since I didn't have the wherewithal to stop, grab my camera, and have him smile):

My eyes met his glazed black orbs for a split second (i think), and as it hit me what had just happened. . .

. . . I freaked out.

No little girl screams this time, just a panic-stricken "oh no you did NOT!!" and a dart out of my chair as i brushed frantically to get him off. He jumped away, and started hopping around. It was terrifying! He was all over the place in an instant. I couldn't handle it!

Thankfully I have a nicely growing stack of hefty books for my Contemporary Korean Society class, and I grabbed the top volume and started smashing. The spider didn't last long.

Once he was dead, and I was breathing normally again, I turned to wikipedia to make sure I wasn't going crazy and that it truly was a jumping spider in Korea that had tried to do me in.
I discovered a few things that confirmed my most dire suspicions.

First of all, there are indeed jumping spiders in Korea (as well as almost everywhere else on earth). And what sort of creatures are they?

They "stalk their prey," which was evident from his diabolical way of lying in wait where he knew I would shortly come. He had probably been watching me for days through a pair of minuscule binoculars.

Once their prey is near, they "pounce, giving the victim little to no time to react before succumbing to the spider's venom." Sure enough, he pounced all right, meaning he was out for blood, and I had no time to react. If I had been a bit shorter, who knows how much I would have succumbed (alright, alright, I know. . . just indulge me in a little excessive drama).

Thankfully, it all worked out in my favor. I was alive, and the spider was dead. And his amigos (if he had any) had better watch out. I don't take kindly to being jumped at, especially by spiders. No mercy.

I'm beginning to realize that I may have to deal with spiders here more than I care to, and more than I had expected to as well. The battles may become more frequent, especially if there are other web-savvy spideys out for blood. But I'm up for the challenge. . . just as long as they aren't crawling on me or running/jumping towards my body. In that case, at least initially, I'm content to freak out and embrace my inner sissypants.

As a parting thought, I leave you with another video from youtube. My speculation about the spider's backstory reminded me of this clip produced by a Canadian church regarding various drugs and their effects on spiders' behavior. I'm fairly certain that this particular spider fell into the alcohol category. I hope you enjoy, but those of a younger generation will probably appreciate it more than others. . .

I'll do it now. . . maybe. . . in a bit. . .

2009-10-01T23:46:00.003-06:00

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I'm a procrastinator.

And I'm not just your garden variety put-it-off-er, either. This is serious.

I just can't seem to force myself to do anything productive towards anything that I have to do against my will if I know (or strongly suspect, at least) that I have enough time to do it later.

Now I realize that this is not unique to me. In fact, I would argue that procrastination is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous.

But I'm not doing myself any favors with my propensity to procrastinate, either.

One of my biggest problems is an uncanny innate ability to gauge how much I can do in a given period of time at an acceptable level of quality. Paired with this ability is a keen awareness of how much time I have between any moment and the deadline. Sprinkle in a sense of relative rigidity of said deadlines and I find myself quite automatically rationing out time and progress with the intent to put it off.

How is being able to gauge how much I can do in an amount of time a problem, you ask?

It's quite simple: The more sure I am of my requisite timetable, the less of a safety net I need. Knowing I can do it in exactly 75 minutes or less, rather than estimating 2 or 3 hours "to be safe" means that I don't start with 2 or 3 hours: I start with 80 or 85 minutes. Even when I decide to start earlier, "just in case," my self knows deep down that I can get away with putting it off further, and I invariably do. Which, of course, means that I waste all of the rest of the time that I would have given myself to work, doing instead whatever frivolous nonsense I have to in order to keep myself from doing something actually productive.

What's frustrating is that all the while, I'm well aware of what I am putting myself through by delaying my work. I quite willingly wave goodbye to much-needed hours of sleep; I apologize half-heartedly to brain muscles strained to lengths and used at hours that they never should be.

And it's getting worse all the time.

I had an English class in college on Critical Theory. It was the most demanding English course I ever took. My final paper in that course was worth 40% of my grade.

So, naturally, what was I doing the night before my final paper (again, worth 40% of my grade) was due?

Watching "24," of course, with my friend Doug (who, incidentally, was in the same course, but had a slightly less serious problem with procrastination).

**as a side note, TV shows on DVD are the crack cocaine of media. There's no need to deal with commercial breaks, and every cliff hanger can be instantly satisfied by popping in the next disc. "Watch 8 straight episodes of "Lost" on a Thursday night? Don't mind if I do. . . "**

We finished at 2:00 a.m. and I headed home to BEGIN reading and writing, having all of six hours to finish my final paper. It was agony. But fortunately it worked out for me. I wrote something comprehensible (I assume, since I remember nothing about those six hours beyond the heft of my five pound, four-inch-thick volume of Norton Critical Theory in my lap and the ambivalent white glow of my computer screen as the cursor blinked impatiently), and grades turned out fine.

This is unfortunate in one sense because it reinforced my subconscious allowance for putting things off til the last possible moment.

This past spring and summer, I had to write a 50 page thesis for my honors degree at the U. I was given 6 months to write it. That's 180 days.

Of course, that meant I didn't really start until about day 160. And that also meant that I didn't start to write in earnest until day 175. And that also meant that I didn't get more than 4 hours of sleep from that point on until I turned it in. But again, it worked out for me. Everything was done and the product was acceptable.

But again, all it did was reinforce my subconscious refusal to really get cracking until I have to. And that's sure to bite me in the behind at some point, probably very soon.

Indeed, I'm paying the price weekly here in grad school.

As I mentioned earlier, the workload in my program is not exactly light, particularly towards the end of my weeks. So what did I do with my relatively abundant free time on Monday and Tuesday? Not homework, of course, meaning my entire end-of-the-week stack of things to do was still untouched by Wednesday afternoon.

That left me with 600 pages of reading that needed to be done by Thursday morning, plus two papers to write. The topics this week? Intellectuals' roles in civil movements and their representation in folk art as a crisis of historical subjectivity, as well as a modern-day farmers' uprising as a case study of Korean civil/nationalistic protestation stemming from a failed 1894 rebellion.

600 pages.

So I started reading right off the bat, right?

Wrong.

I wanted to get it done early, but my brain's refusal to cooperate without the clock ticking kept impeding me. I'd read a few pages, then decide that my bathroom door needed a good windexing. . .

I'd read a bit more, then remember that I hadn't checked out the week's free downloads from iTunes. . .

I'd come back to the reading, realize an hour had passed since I first sat down, and decide that a walk around the neighborhood would help me focus. . .

Emails needed writing. . .
Laundry could use some doing. . .
My desk needed to get moved three inches to the left. . .
A Youtube dance-along instructional video needed my undivided attention. . .

etc, etc, etc.

4 a.m. couldn't come soon enough -- as in that's when I finally finished all of my work.

The sad thing is that this isn't an occasional occurrence. I'm pulling this nonsense every single week! But my brain is so conditioned to accept delay that I find that without the urgency that accompanies putting it off, my mind simply won't let me focus.

So I guess I'm stuck with it.

My goal is to get it all done by Tuesday one of these weeks, just to prove to myself that I am still capable of discipline. But I make no guarantees.

We'll see how next week goes.

Korea U. in Pictures

2009-10-01T09:38:00.017-06:00

Yes, I know. This post has nothing to do with procrastination.

I'll do that one later.

Instead, I wanted to give you a bit of a glimpse into my university. These are only a few images of the campus, but hopefully it gives you a bit of a feel of what the atmosphere at my school is like.

This is the main gate. It's now more symbolic than anything else, but impressive nonetheless.

This is the fountain on the main plaza after you enter campus.

This is the facade of one side of the Graduate School. Many of the buildings on campus are gothic style, which gives it an old, academic feel that I really enjoy.

Not all the buildings are gothic, though. This is the front entry to the International Studies Hall (my building). It's brand new.

This is part of the main library

This is the Inchon Memorial Hall, another example of KU's gothic stylings.

Another building on campus

This is the adminstration building at the head of the main entry commons. Yes, that is well-kept grass. And yes, that is a bright blue rope keeping any and all from enjoying it.

This is another face of the Graduate School

The Tiger Statue (KU's mascot, obviously)

A view through the main entryway to campus.

Procrastination -- I'll write this one tomorrow

2009-09-30T00:27:00.004-06:00

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No, seriously.

I'll post it tomorrow.

The "put it off" log is kinda full at the moment, and it may or may not include 600 pages of reading and two papers to write in the next 10 hours.

I'm just sayin'.

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Spiders. . . . (insert expletive of your choosing)

2009-09-26T08:43:00.008-06:00

Spiders are the spawn of satan.

I usually refer to tomatoes as the spawn of satan (as well as the fount of all that is vile and wicked), but tomatoes are at least passive about their utter Beelzebubbity.

Not so with spiders.

Spiders have a nasty (and, I'm convinced, intentional) habit of lurking in the dark places, waiting for unsuspecting shoes, legs, and shirt collars to infiltrate. They scurry at the edges of your vision, making you question whether or not they were there at all. They pass like ninjas in the night, leaving their vile trappings spread like gossamer noose-thread across doorways and under overhanging tree branches.

I'm moved to devote this post to spiders for two reasons:

I found the following video on youtube the other day and couldn't take my eyes off it:

There's something about watching disgusting, ridiculously evil-looking spiders that I just can't turn away from. It's like looking into the sun, or touching a hot plate as soon as the server tells you its hot. My mind couldn't help but wander towards horror stories and deeply kept fears, all related to spiders, of course.

But more importantly, I found two spiders in my bathroom this week. Where they came from and where they were hiding, I simply don't know. All I know is that they were there, and THAT made me extremely upset.

In a word, I DETEST spiders.

And, if I'm being completely honest, they scare the bejebus out of me.

A few cases in point:

Example #1: As a high school student, I was lying in bed reading when i noticed a tiny little spiderling crawling across the page. I then quickly noticed two or three others along the top of the book. I jerked instinctively and dropped the book in disgust, my fear being tempered by the diminutive nature of the threat. As I wondered to myself how three little spiderlings found their way onto my book, I looked towards the ceiling. . .

That's when the horror set in.

It was crawling with hundreds (nay, THOUSANDS. . . okay, it was probably only hundreds) of spiderlings. They were spreading out from the ceiling vent, meaning that some devil spider had made some devil egg sac and incubated its devil young in my air vent and I had been none the wiser. I jolted out of bed, convinced that the whole lot of them were poised to pounce on me in one well coordinated aerial assault. That's when i learned, to my utter terror, that dozens of the little spiders were in various stages of descent from the ceiling, dangling in mid air from their own vile webbings. I couldn't handle it anymore, and I bolted from the room, running through most of the danglers on my way out. They could have gotten into anything in my entire room (and probably did), including my sheets, my clothes, my shoes, etc. They could have been all over my frantic body. My sense of personal security was, for the time being at least, utterly compromised. It took weeks to feel at ease again in my own space. Yet another reason spiders are the devil.

Example #2: I was in college, driving through a residential neighborhood with one of my friends, and enjoying some tunes and nice conversation. I noticed something out of the corner of my eye, and turned quickly to my left, only to come face to face with an ugly beast of a spider dangling from the roof of the car. I did the only thing I could possibly do in a situation like that:

I screamed like a little girl.

Better than that: my little girl scream resulted in an equally frightened little girl scream from my friend, though he didn't know yet what the deal was. It goes to show that pure terror breeds pure terror, especially when eight-legged children of darkness are the instigators.

I quickly pulled over and, after realizing that the spider had drifted over to the window and not onto me, flew into a maniacal rage. I grabbed a stuffed Felix the Cat hanging from my rear-view and pummeled the stuffing out of both cat and hapless spider. It was one of my few victories over the beasts without the aid of a well-thrown issue of National Geographic.

Example #3: I was on my mission playing tennis with a good friend of mine. We noticed that in the upper corner of the fence a golf-ball-sized black spider was perched in a web, looming menacingly over the court. At the time, there was a colony of the same black spiders lurking in the doorway of my apartment building and I had yet to confront them. This had left me with a great deal of pent-up rage towards the spider and his sinister siblings that taunted me every morning and night. My friend had been throwing a tennis ball towards the spider in an effort to knock it down. He was missing terribly. My frustration at watching him miss combined with my anger towards spiders in general and in a huff I took the ball from him and hurled it towards the spider.

I missed. . .

. . . in the worst way possible.

I was dead-on-target, but my aim was a few inches too low. Low enough that I just missed the spider and its web, but high enough that the ball, on its return trajectory after bouncing off the fence corner, nailed the spider and the heart of its web as it sailed back towards me.

Time seemed to slow. . . I stood in utter terror, frozen with fright, as I watched the tennis ball fly through the air right back towards me, only accompanied by a large black wad of pure depravity flailing in the wind.

Again, I screamed like a little girl, and watched helplessly as my paralyzed figure stood by, awaiting the seemingly inevitable collision. I thought I could almost hear the spider laughing at me as it rode that cursed tennis ball.

The ball missed me by inches, and the spider was flung to the ground. That's when I noticed a large shovel resting against the fence. The spider didn't last long. . .

So yes, I have a history of fear and loathing of spiders. But where did it come from you ask?

I have two theories. One is that I was killed in a previous life by a horde of venomous spiders and my life essence is still wary of the beasts (which coincides with my other theory that another incarnation of my life essence choked to death on a tomato). The other, and much more plausible theory, has to do with one of my earliest (and most traumatic) memories: a nightmare at the tender age of 3.

To illustrate the nature of this particular nightmare, I've assembled (at great personal expense) some representations of what I still remember 21 years later as clearly as the night I dreamed them.

I began in a third-person perspective, watching myself alone in a dark room illuminated by a sole light source hanging above me. I was in bed, yet unable to move. The cause? millions and millions of spiders, of all sizes, weighing me down like a writhing blanket of venom and villainry. This was the minor trauma.

My perspective shifted to first-person, and I gazed down at my body covered with the hordes of spiders. That's when a single, large, hairy leg stretched itself over the footboard. . . and then another did the same. . . and my heart began to skip beats. . .

I shifted back to third person and the owner of those vile, hairy legs was revealed to be a hulking mammoth of a spider, red body glistening as it began to heave its mass up onto my bed. The spider itself is the only thing of color I remember, hence the simple ink of the rest of my dreams. I was paralyzed as it climbed onto me, crushing lesser spiders beneath its massive feet. This was the major trauma.

I once again moved to the first person and found myself staring the beast in its disgusting face. It was crawling slowly, inevitably, and precisely towards my face. Step after agonizing step, it came closer. . .

and closer. . .

That's when it reached its two front legs out before it, used them to pry open my paralyzed lips, stretched me to inhuman lengths, and began to crawl inside of me. . .

I awoke screaming and ran for the safety of my parents' room.

They weren't there.

I cried even more, convinced that the spider had gotten them too. . .

I ran to the basement fearing the worst, but found them, still alive thank goodness, watching television. They told me, as all parents do when soothing frightened children, that there was nothing to be afraid of.

Well, sadly, it has turned out that I had EVERYTHING to be afraid of; and now, 21 years later, I still find myself haunted at every turn by the possibility that an eight-legged foe might be anywhere near, and a girlish scream will come unbidden from my own frightened depths.

And you know what? I'm okay with that.

Just as long as they stay out of my business.

Which, thus far, has proven to be something they simply refuse to do.

Game on spiders.

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Kore-ads: Vol. I

2009-09-24T05:43:00.004-06:00

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It's time to kick off what is sure to be a regular fixture here, and one that is bound to be one of the most popular things I post.

I'm of course talking about funny Korean ads (including storefronts, packaging, etc.)

Now anyone who's been to Asia can attest to the fact that many times the real meaning that advertisers are shooting for gets lost in the translation. But there are also times when they just seem to miss the mark completely, and you find yourself thinking simply. . . "huh?"

These first three are some of the early entries into what is sure to be a lengthy volume when all is said and done. I hope you enjoy.

This is an ad that shows up in just about every subway station in Seoul. It's a makeup ad, but for the life of me I cannot understand why they decided to portray an infant holding a just-consumed bottle of lotion while laugh-it-up-daddy falls off the side of the shot. As far as I can tell there aren't any mentions of "non-toxic" or "doubles as baby formula" in the advertisement itself. But I've got to give the advertisers credit: this one's been up and running for a good 3 years at least. I guess there are a lot of lotion-loving lads and lasses out there.

Allow me to translate the headline:

"Men with large breasts are worse than men with large bellies!"

This one's a plastic surgery ad. Can't say that I've seen a lot of goatee'd beat-poets with massive chests and black unitards running around Seoul, but if there's a demographic out like that, I'm sure Fox Plastic Surgery can help them out. . .

I think this one's pretty self-explanatory. :)

The Clinic

2009-09-22T08:03:00.003-06:00

Seeing as how we're on a bit of a foot theme. . .

I woke up Monday morning with a problem.

My right foot still looked radiant from the pedi-party. All five little piggies were smiling and rested.

My left foot, on the other hand, looked like a puffy red latex glove that had been over-inflated. My middle piggie, the one who normally eats roast beef in the nursery rhyme, looked as if he'd eaten the whole cow and moved on to a dozen chocolate muffins, a crate of Ben & Jerry's, and a few pounds of peanut butter truffles.

Naturally, that meant a trip to the clinic to get it checked out and to get some antibiotics.

The clinic was the best part.

I walked into the waiting room, and in shining gold letters above the reception desk was the line:

"God Cures. We Care."

Now while I appreciate the sentiment, and fully understand that God has the ability to heal us when he wills, I couldn't help but think about the implications of the phrase.

If God's the one healing, what does that mean for Doctor Kwon sitting in the examination room? What's he going to do, give me a hug and tell me he's there if I need anything?
Will the nurses sit by me and listen to my problems while waiting for the Man Upstairs to make it happen?

It is sweet, yes, but doesn't exactly instill confidence in the clinic's sense of responsibility for my medical needs, even if it is just a red foot.

Of course, it may just be religious-style malpractice protection. If my foot falls off, it's the Big Guy's fault, because he's the one doing the curing. All the clinic did was care about me. Nobody did anybody else any wrong by caring about them, right?

All lightness aside (my apologies if it's too light), they seemed to do well enough. I got in to see the doc, he looked my foot over, prescribed some medicine and I was on my way.

The nurse was quite concerned when I told her I didn't have any domestic insurance. If I had to pay the whole thing it was going to be "MUCH more expensive," she said (complete with arms extended as an illustration of the scale of my expense)." I asked her what that meant in monetary terms.

She quietly replied, "twelve dollars."

I couldn't help but laugh. Since a copay in the states is double that WITH insurance, I was actually quite pleased. Tack on the prescription and I was set to go for only 25 bucks.

So I feel pretty good about the whole experience.

Just so long as the cure gets here (one way or another).

Pedi Party

2009-09-18T05:20:00.008-06:00

I got a pedicure.

There, I said it.

I made a commitment to myself that while I'm in Korea for the next year I will seize opportunities to do new things that I normally don't or won't do and experience things that I normally don't or won't experience. Test #1 of this commitment was, of course, the bidet incident. Since that one turned out surprisingly well, I have continued to stick with my carpe-diem mentality.

Well the opportunities have kept coming.

A few friends from the branch (all female) were chatting after FHE last week about getting pedicures that following Saturday. Not afraid to throw down some sass, I started giving one of them a hard time.

"Ange, I'm actually pretty hurt that you would just assume that a guy wouldn't be interested in proper podiatric hygiene. The fact that you would talk about pedicure plans right in front of me without so much as a courtesy invite kind of stings."

Naturally, this garnered a few laughs and some sarcastic "I'm soooo sorry"s. But that's when Ange fired back with an actual invite.

"Why don't you come, then? Come on, guys can get pedicures too. You said it yourself. What are you afraid of?"

This naturally sparked backup from the others in the pedi-planning committee, and before I knew it I was facing the very literal question of whether or not I was willing to go with three women to a nail salon to get my feet done.

It was a unique and rather unexpected position to be in.

Excuses started firing in the front of my mind. I was juggling all sorts of possible responses, from chores to study to made-up stories of previous plans or various fictitious foot ailments. But then I stopped to think about how many times I'd ever actually considered going to a nail salon on my own (zero) and how many invites I'd ever received to get my feet done (again, zero) and before I knew what I was doing I was committing to an 11:00 appointment Saturday morning at Pro Nail Salon with three other women and what was sure to be a very surprised salon staff.

The appointed day arrived, and true to my word I showed up at the subway station and awaited the other three. They showed, and together we made our way to the salon.

I wish I could articulate the looks of surprise on the faces of the pedicurists as into their shop walked a 6'2" white male with light curly hair and blue eyes intent on getting his feet done. It got even better when that same tall white blue-eyed male simply said, in Korean no less, "I'm here for a pedicure."

Like consummate professionals, they took it in stride after their initial reaction. They sat us down, made sure we were comfortable, and got ready to start.

That's when they started asking me how I wanted my feet done.

Since this was my first experience of ANY kind in a nail salon, I naturally had no clue. I simply told the pedicurist that I trusted her judgment and she should just go ahead and make me pretty. I realized how risky those instructions were when they started bringing over the selections of nail designs. . .

Bright yellow nails with lavender flowers or deep red, rhinestone encrusted foot-bling were not exactly on my wish list.

Of course, I did indulge my imagination with dozens of different "what if" scenarios as I looked through their various displays. I mean, it couldn't be ALL bad to have sage green or electric purple toenails with a couple of rhinestone studs, right?

I didn't have to worry about polish or anything like unto it until the end of the pedicure though, so the pedicurist went straight to work. I can only imagine what was going through her mind as she buffed and filed and did all the other things involved in pedicury. I think I'd probably not, actually.

It was a surprisingly relaxing event. From the massaging footbath to the exfoliating powders to the moisturizer, etc, everything was the sort of indulgence I'd never allowed myself.

I'll admit it, I was enjoying it.

But of course, it only lasted so long, and then it came time for the polish part. I had made up my mind to simply decline any polish and settle for the pedicure up to that point. I was especially nervous when she started using words meaning things like "glittery" and "sparkly." My 10 little piggies were NOT going to get glitzed out like 10 little Mr. Bo Jangles.

Luckily for me, the word that means "glittery" or "sparkly" also means simply "shiny." She showed me her own fingernails, which had the same clear gloss that she was asking me about. They were tame enough. I thought about it for a second, realized an opportunity to have shiny toenails for the first time, and thought "what the hey" and went for it.

As you can see from the lead photo, it worked.

So for the next two to three months, I'll be sporting a slightly new look when I go about in my flip flops.

And you know what, I just may do it again.

Maybe there is a rhinestone in my future yet. . .

:)

Rivalry Weekend

2009-09-14T22:40:00.009-06:00

This past weekend was the annual Ko-Yon Games, a two-day event pitting bitter rivals Korea University (my school) and Yonsei University against each other in a mini-olympiad of five athletic events (baseball, basketball, ice hockey, American football, and soccer). Imagine the BYU-Utah, Ohio State-Michigan, Auburn-Georgia, or any other intense rivalry and you'll get an idea of the atmosphere surrounding the Ko-Yon games.

One thing I learned: American college sports fans could learn a LOT from the Koreans. In fact, as much as I love the MUSS (the University of Utah's student section), we never held a candle to the student sections at these events.

It's not even close.

Let me detail the soccer match as an example, and maybe you'll see why I'm so willing to put the K.U. student section so many notches above my beloved MUSS.

The venue was the first thing worth mentioning. While both schools have their own soccer facilities, there is no home-and-home alternation between them like we have in the states. Instead, they go all out, playing at the site-neutral 1988 Olympic Main Stadium, with a capacity of up to 100,000. It's like Texas and Oklahoma playing every rivalry game in the Cowboys' stadium (though obviously the facilities are not quite comparable). The venue itself instantly added a feeling of heft and energy that both sides' fans were able to tap into.

The next thing that catches the eye is the cheerleading setup. In American sporting events, the cheerleaders line up on the sidelines and do their jumps and cheers, a few basket tosses, and the occasional human pyramid.

Not the case at Ko-Yon.

The first thing you notice in the stadium as you look down towards the field is the stages. Yes, the stages. Each school erects its own 10 foot-tall stage, complete with towers of speakers, pyrotechnic fire, smoke, and firework spewers, and 6-8 microphone-equipped crowd-leaders directing the action. Complementing the stage from the stands is a rock band piping their instruments to the massive banks of speakers flanking the stage. They mean business.

Well before kickoff, the event began. And I'm not talking about the soccer game. The crowd leaders from the stage and the band in the stands began what would ultimately be a 3 hour non-stop cycle of song and dance that seemingly every student knew by heart. Not only that, but the two competing sides were simultaneously trying to out-duel each others' student sections. Yonsei would be singing their fight song as raucously as possible, blaring music and singing from their own loudspeakers, while just a few sections over the Korea U. side would be doing their own song equally as loud. Songs blaring, fireworks erupting, and tens of thousands of students joining together in relatively well-choreographed dances in the stands gave the match an energy and exuberance in the student section that literally overshadowed the game.

In the opening minutes, new song after new song resulted in new dance after new dance by the crowd leaders AND by the crowd! Students sang and moved in unison, and with all that focus I couldn't help but wonder if they were even aware that a game was going on behind all the commotion.

Then Korea U. scored the first goal and what had already been an intensely loud and energetic body of students erupted even further. The floor shook, ears rang, and the K.U. side went straight into an even more empassioned rendition of the fight song even as Yonsei kept maintaining their own energy level. There was no silence or dejection from their end, despite having surrendered a goal. Flames shot out of both stages, speakers blared loud as ever, and students kept on singing and dancing through dozens and dozens of unique songs and cheers.

I have been in many intense football crowds in my day. I've been in stadiums that have felt like the walls were going to come tumbling down around me because of the noise. But those moments were simply brief outbursts surrounding the pinnacles of the match. Last second touchdowns and game-saving field-goal blocks. These Korean fans, on the other hand, were sustaining that same level of energy and more throughout the entire match. There were no quiet times, no rest breaks, no sitting at the half. They weren't joined together simply during a few timely cheers. They existed as one unit, one very loud and well organized unit, for the whole three hour spectacle.

It was awesome in a very literal sense. I had chills the entire time.

I couldn't help but think what the MUSS would be like if we had more than a few cheers here and there and general noisy-ness at varying volume levels. My perception of what it means to be a crowd of athletics fans has fundamentally changed.

Korea U. went on to win the soccer match 2-1 (scoring a major upset) and in the end the Ko-Yon games ended in a draw, with K.U. taking soccer and baseball, and Yonsei capturing basketball and ice-hockey. American football was a tie thanks to a last-second Yonsei touchdown.

Being a one-year student only, I won't get another chance to witness the Ko-Yon games, but I can't help but think I'll be comparing other crowds and other sporting events to it for quite some time.

Week 1 in the books (literally)

2009-09-11T06:32:00.010-06:00

Well I just finished my first week of actual academic course work here at Korea University. And I have just one thing to say about it:

They LIED to me!!

In this case, the "they" is every one of the hundreds of Koreans I've spoken to over the years about Korean higher education. The lie is the oft-told story of how easy Korean university education is because of the inherent mandatory rigor of high school here.

"Korean university students just drink their way through college and get good marks."

"You don't really do any work because you've already made it to the university."

"Korean students paid their academic dues when they passed their college entrance exams in high school. Universities just expect you to show up here and there and do some token work."

These and a dozen other versions are told day-in and day-out here. And they're true. . . usually.

Allow me to explain.

The Korean education system is somewhat a reversal of the one we have in the States. Grade school is, in a word, overwhelming, particularly for middle and high school students. School usually goes from 7 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, at which time the vast majority of students head from the public school to one kind of private institution or another for either additional coursework in math, english, science, etc. or else private instruction from a tutor. These "private academies" usually run every day and keep the students studying until 10 or 11 at night. The social pressure on parents to enroll their children in these academies is immense if for nothing else than the fear that by not enrolling their students, they will be devastatingly behind the rest of their classmates (i.e. their competition) when it comes time to take the all-important college entrance exams.

College acceptance in Korea is based almost exclusively on the results of these tests. A certain percentage are allowed entrance into one of the three most prestigious universities (of which Korea U. is one), while the scale slides down to various lower tiers as scores get lower and lower. Because so much is pre-determined by the results of the entrance exams, and because those results supposedly demonstrate so much pre-invested academic diligence, students are rewarded with a relatively easy university educational experience.

This whole system is, of course, quite the opposite of what we have in the States. In American public schools, kids can pretty much slide by for their entire grade-school lives and still graduate. Some of these skaters-by even make it into decent universities (the University of Utah isn't exactly the most selective institution, for example, despite the high-quality education they provide . .). However, once students get to the university level (in general), they find themselves having to work harder than they ever had to in high school to complete work, motivate themselves, and perform well on exams and with projects and papers. Those who worked hard in high school have an easier time of it in college, but the college level is in general significantly more demanding than that of high school.

Thanks to the repeated stories I had heard from Koreans themselves regarding higher education here, I naturally assumed that I would be able to do a lot of things beyond just schoolwork even if I was a full time grad student.

Now please don't misunderstand me. I by no means came to Seoul just so I could play around and show up on campus when it suited me. I came here to learn about Korea and its place in the world. I came to acquire knowledge and experience and to work hard doing it. But I expected to be able to do that pretty much on my own terms and without huge burdens of homework and imposed deadlines and due dates.

That expectation has since crumbled.

Much to my surprise, course after course that I have attended has laid out significant requirements in terms of work volume. Every class expects at least one sizeable research paper (25-40 pages), hefty chunks of reading, and regular presentations, projects, and exams. Now this would be fine and not much greater than I would expect from any respectable graduate institution were it not for the fifth (and only required) of my five courses: Contemporary Korean Society.

This happened to be the class I arrived at late last week after my adventures in the immigration office. I walked in (during the break, thank heaven) and talked a bit with the professor explaining my lateness. He handed me a syllabus and I took a seat, looking it over as I waited for class to resume. That's when I noticed the reading list -- both pages of it -- with "required" in large bold letters next to all 30+ titles on the syllabus.

Being an English major, I'm not unaccustomed to large lists of books, but in English classes the books are selections of poetry, or novels, and many aren't fully read. These books, on the other hand, are 300-400 page textbooks, written in strict, dense, academic style, on obscure subjects like "union-driven labor reform movements in the 1960s-era shipbuilding sector" and "gendered citizenship during a democratizing military regime."

Not exactly the most digestible works of literature.

I subsequently found out that our job was to read two of these textbooks for every class session (anywhere from 500-700 pages) and then articulate our synthesis of the readings in a 4-6 page critical response. On top of this, lump in regular hour-long presentations, essay exams, and assorted other assignments, and we're getting close to the volume of work expected for this single course on contemporary Korean society.

Optimistic estimate for weekly time spent doing these readings and assignments: 15 hours. Realistic estimate? 20. Then tack on the sum of the other four classes and their not-insignificant workloads and you start to realize that I won't be doing a whole lot beyond hitting the books.

So much for my thoughts of interning part time at the Seoul Foreign Commercial Services Office, I suppose.

I am honestly looking forward to everything that I'll be able to learn, but I do wish I had a little bit more time to literally experience contemporary Korean society rather than read about it in my new (and daunting) tower of textbooks.

I suppose I'll just have to soak up the little things in the meantime. And believe me, I'll be doing plenty of that over the next few days. More, of course, to come.

Becoming an alien (well, a registered alien anyway)

2009-09-03T04:12:00.006-06:00

When foreigners arrive in Korea, one of the things they have to deal with first is a rigid and highly bureaucratic system of foreign registration designed to keep close watch on the several million aliens in the country at any one time.

I compare it to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is America's stereotypical bureaucratic flag-bearer. Lots of meaningless and/or redundant forms, silly requirements, angry patrons, and, of course, lots of long lines.

Thanks to the swine flu scare (and Korea's peculiarly strong efforts to ward it off), I got an extra-early chance to be categorized and kept track of when I stepped off the airplane and in to a line for "scans and probes" intended to "determine the presence of infectious contaminates, particularly the H1N1 virus, more commonly known as swine flu." Before I had even cleared the passport check I had been scanned for a fever, been examined with a thermometer (in the ear, thank goodness) just to be sure, and been required to declare in writing that, to the best of my knowledge, I was not carrying an infectious virus with me into the country.

Thankfully, I wasn't infectious and didn't have to spend a week in quarantine like some other, unfortunate travelers have had to over the past months.

Today's continuance of the red-tape parade that is Korea's immigration policy meant a thirty minute trip to the northern branch of the Seoul Immigration Office to register as a foreign alien and apply for an identification card. Having a healthy three or four hours before I needed to be back for class, I headed to the office happy to have some non-scholastic objective on the agenda.

That was the last time "happy" crossed my mind for the day.

I arrived at the office without incident and actually had quite a pleasant conversation with my cab driver about Korean society and recent history. I went in to the office expecting a few dozen people and an hour wait, just like it had been in the past, especially since it was the middle of a Thursday.

I entered eager to avoid relying on English to go through the application process and anticipated passing the time conversing casually with other patrons in waiting. At this point, I see people as universally good, and the world as something headed in absolutely the right direction.

I walked into the alien registration wing, noticed that the waiting room was slightly fuller than I had expected, but took solace in the fact that there were 8 windows dedicated to foreign alien applications. I walked up to the "take a number" machine, saw the number 166 flashing in digital green on the front, and was mentally relieved that all day long there had only been 166 people coming in to apply. I took my number and quickly turned to find a seat.

That's when I looked at the number in my hand and read "1325."

Confused, I went back to the machine and compared it to my ticket. Now the machine was flashing 167. Then, suddenly, it went back down to 166 as a voice called "next guest please" from one of the windows.

That's when it dawned on me that I wasn't the 166th guest that day, I was the 166th guest in line at that moment.

Now I've dealt with long lines before. Airport security, midnight movies, Krispy Kreme openings, Christmas Eve shopping at Target, etc. But those are all lines that inherently move quickly. You scan your bag or file into the theater or make your particular purchase and you move on.

This line, on the other hand, consisted of 166 people who needed to sit down and work through application forms, identification checks, and payment options -- all of which are terribly time consuming.

Also, this line consisted of 166 foreigners, most of whom couldn't speak Korean or English, who had to be able to wrap their minds around the application instructions and the directions coming from the employees at the windows before they could complete their visit.

At this same moment, I realized that not all 8 windows were occupied by workers. In fact, to my utter dismay, there were only two employees working the alien registration side of things, leaving six useless windows staring back at me. . . taunting me.

In other words, I was in for a much longer wait than I had anticipated.

And so it began.

The psychology of a situation like this is fascinating, and to be honest I was surprised at my ability to step back and watch my own psyche as I gradually lost more and more patience, and became increasingly paranoid and angry towards my fellow waiters. My regression proceeded more or less as follows.

15 minutes: Hopes are high as a number of people don't show up for their appointed numbers. 5 or 6 flash by unclaimed. Mentally doing the math as I try to project an overall waiting time. I foolishly allow my optimistic projection to settle in as an expected wait as two Mongolians take their respective seats at the windows. I am sympathetic for the linguistic challenge ahead of them, as clearly neither of them can speak in Korean or in English. . .

30 minutes: Neither window has had a new applicant since I made my projection. Optimism slowly being crushed by the reality staring me down from the backs of these sweet but hapless Mongolians. Still capable of sympathy, but wishing that sweet people had come later in the day. . .

1 hour: Averaging less than one immigrant per minute including the no-shows. Hopes are kindled when another window opens up and a capable-looking employee sits down at the counter. . .

1 hour, 2 minutes: Newly-kindled hopes are dashed when said employee puts out a sign calling for "on-line reservations only." Silently cursing myself for not knowing that I could reserve a time earlier. . .

1 hour, 30 minutes: Slowly becoming more and more cynical. Sympathy more difficult to come by. I snicker to myself at the poor Chinese woman who has just come in the office and is now picking discarded numbers up off the floor rather than taking them from the machine. . .

1 hour, 45 minutes: Rendered speechless when said poor Chinese woman walks up to the window and sits down. Realize that earlier guest than me had discarded a number on the floor in disgust at the looming wait, giving poor (but resourceful) Chinese woman a free spot in line. Torn between feelings of anger towards wait-less Chinese woman and shame for not considering the same thing earlier. Struggling to resist the temptation to follow suit. . .

1 hour, 46 minutes: Fall quickly to temptation and rush to the floor under the take-a-number machine looking for a way to move up in the line. Heartbroken to find that there aren't any more numbers that will do me any good. . .

1 hour, 46 minutes, 30 seconds: steal a glance next to the machine at young male college student who came in 45 minutes after I did, sitting proudly with his number in his lap. Realize that his number is 85 spots higher than mine. Secretly wish death upon him. . .

1 hour, 47 minutes: Repent for wishing death upon another person. Revise secret wish to a midnight deportation or a bout of food poisoning. . .

2 hours: Paranoia sets in. Every approach to the counter is met with suspicion over whether the person has been waiting as long as I have or not. Begin characterizing sweet old ladies as self absorbed wenches and innocent teens as ambivalent vandals. Tempted to start demanding proof of wait. . .

2 hours, 30 minutes: Paranoia deepens. Mind starts creating backstories explaining how patrons became so obviously evil and dismissive of others so as to waltz into immigration offices and clearly cut in front of mild-mannered American students. One woman in sunglasses is imagined to wear puppy-fur underwear, while I conclude that a hapless Nepalese fellow must surely engage in human trafficking. Mind resolutely dismisses the stories' ridiculousness. . .

3 hours: Class is starting and I'm still waiting. 25 patrons still to go. Begin standing in line to buy six $10 stamps to affix to my application, having just learned that the windows themselves will accept payment only in stamps, not in currency, and that stamps need to be purchased at the adjacent window, where stamps and currency are both within easy reach of employees working with the applicants. Trying not to react to the sheer ridiculousness of it all, choosing instead to continue deducing backstories and condemning other visitors for their awfulness. . .

3 hours, 20 minutes: Purchase my stamps and affix them to my application after 20 minutes in line. Only 6 patrons to go. . .

3 hours, 30 minutes: Finally able to sit down and turn in my application. Informed that my visa already covers the fees I was using the stamps to pay for. Returned $50 worth of stamps and instructed to get back in line to get a refund. Desperate to point out that the worker could just as easily reach over and do the exchange for me without leaving her seat. . .

3 hours, 35 minutes: Application accepted. I get back in line to get my money back. Silently wish food poisoning on the entire immigration office. . .

3 hours, 50 minutes: Finally reimbursed and free to leave. Wonder how quickly I can make it back to campus now that I'm already an hour late for class. Wonder if professor will believe tales of puppy-killers and human traffickers.

Leave immigration office convinced that people in general are bad, and that the world is surely headed for impending doom. . .

Thankfully, getting back in the real Korean world quickly brought me back to my senses. Let's just hope I don't have to register myself as an alien again any time soon.

The Blog Begins

2009-08-29T03:48:00.002-06:00

Welcome! After a week in Seoul spent gearing up for a year-long study at Korea University, I've decided to chronicle my upcoming experiences in this blog as I go about the next 12 months. I imagine it'll be part travelogue, part angst-vent, part social commentary, and part placid musing, but I hope it helps give readers (what few there may be beyond my ever-loving mother) some insight into what real life is actually like here in Korea. Enjoy.