As of June, 2013, I have assumed a new identity: I am a cancer survivor. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."
"A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that." - Justin E. H. Smith
재미없으면 보상해드립니다!
"All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love." - Nietzsche (really!)
Leviticus 19:33-34
Donc, si Dieu existait, il n’y aurait pour lui qu’un seul moyen de servir la liberté humaine, ce serait de cesser d’exister. - Mikhail Bakunin
Solvitur ambulando.
"Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to soliloquize. Where was I?" - the villain Heinz Doofenshmirtz, in the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.
My name is Jared Way. I was born in California, and became an "adoptive" Minnesotan. Now I'm contentedly expatriated in South Korea.
For many years I was a database programmer, with a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature.
I quit my well-paying job and starting in September, 2007, I spent 2 years teaching EFL to elementary kids in Ilsan (suburban Seoul), South Korea. From April, 2010, until April, 2011, I worked a public school position in rural southwestern Korea (Yeonggwang County). I have since returned to Ilsan and continue to work there.
As of June, 2013, I remain in Ilsan in South Korea, but I was diagnosed with cancer, and have been undergoing treatment. As a consequence, the focus and tone of this blog has changed somewhat.
I started this blog before I even had the idea of coming to Korea (first entry: Caveat: And lo...). So this is not meant to be a blog about Korea, by any stretch of the imagination. But life in Korea, and Korean language and culture, inevitably play a central role in this blog's current incarnation. Let's just say... it's a blog about whatever I happen to be thinking, that currently takes place in Korea.
Basically, this blog is a newsletter for the voices in my head. It keeps everyone on the same page: it has become a sort of aide-mémoire.
For a more detailed reflection on why I'm blogging, you can look at this old post: What this blog is, and isn't.
If you're curious about me, there is a great deal of me here. I believe in what I call "opaque transparency" - you can learn almost everything about me if you want, but it's not immediately easy to find.
A distillation of my personal philosophy (at least on good days):
I have made the realization that happiness is not a mental state. It is not something that is given to you, or that you find, or that you can lose, or that can be taken from you. Happiness is something that you do. And like most things that you do, it is volitional. You can choose to do happiness, or not. You have complete freedom with respect to the matter.
"Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation." - Gilles Deleuze (writing about Spinoza).
Like most people, I spend a lot of time online, although I try to limit it somewhat. Here is a somewhat-annotated list of the "places" where I spend
time online.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Knowledge and News
I spend about half of all my time online reading Wikipedia. It's why I know stuff.
I get most of my world news from Minnesota Public Radio which includes NPR, BBC and CBC, depending on when I listen.
I don't really "do" social media. I have a membership at Facebookland but I never log in
there. I don't like it.
I have a membership at The Youtubes but I mostly use it for work. I also listen to music on youtube, frequently - I prefer it to typical streaming services, for example.
Humor and Cat Videos
Cat videos and other internet novelties: Laughing Squid.
Geofiction - this has evolved into a significant "hobby" for me. I like to draw imaginary maps, and there is a website that has enabled this vice.
I worked as a volunteer administrator for the site OpenGeofiction on and off for a few years. I created (but no longer maintain) the site's main wiki page: OGF Wiki. I am not currently working as administrator but I remain active on the site.
The above work has required my becoming an expert in the Openstreetmap system. Openstreetmap is an attempt do for online maps what wikipedia has done for encyclopedias. I have considered becoming an openstreetmap contributor, but I feel that my current location in Korea hinders that, since I don't have a good grasp Korean cartographic naming conventions.
TEFL - my "profession," such as it is.
Online English Grammar reference Grammarist. Useful for settling disputes over grammar.
I have a little holiday, today. It's the "end-of-semester government-mandated close-all-the-hagwons day."
As I often do when I get days off from work, I find myself being extremely lazy. I guess that's OK, but the consequence is that I don't even have anything interesting to post on this here blog thingy.
I keep posting just because some people use the blog to see if I'm doing OK. So here I am, doing OK.
I learned this aphorism from the Shamanism Museum on Friday.
가화만사성 (家和萬事成) ga.hwa.man.sa.seong home-harmonious-everything-achieve A happy home can achieve anything.
It was on a sign board on an outside wall (picture at right).
The most notable thing at the museum, to me, was the extreme similarity and parallelism between these shamanistic accouterments and images and those I normally associate with Korean Buddhism. I suppose 1500 years of coexistence has led to extensive syncretism on both sides.
So I took some other pictures at the Shamanism museum.
There were some exhibits.
There were various rooms.
There were token examples of Nepalese and Tibeten shaman costumes, perhaps to justify the name "Museum of Shamanism" as opposed to "Museum of Korean Shamanism."
There were stylistic pseudo-Chinese decorative objects.
There was a tranquil-looking back room.
The museum's location is in a newly developed neighborhood of typical Korean highrises, but the building itself is a historical site of some deified ancestor.
Some clouds disputed with the ground and trees. The earth kept forcing its branches skyward; the sky in turn was throwing down droplets. My friend and I were waiting; so we talked. I sat and pulled out from my pocket, then, my smartphone, checking something. Suddenly a splash of rain struck the screen. Like magic, the dictionary app was opened. "Look," my friend insisted, "there's your next poem."
I met my friend Peter this morning at Gupabal (구파발) to go to the shamanism museum (which we tried to visit a few weeks ago but it was closed). This time it was open and we went, though the founder/main proprietor wasn't there, which I think disappointed Peter a little bit, since he'd met him before and had been impressed by him.
I'll write more about the museum later, and maybe post some pictures or something, but for now, lacking time, I'll just comment that afterward, Peter and I decided to have a quick lunch. We went into a Subway sandwich chain shop. These shops are not just ubiquitous in the US, but are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in Korea as well - there's even one across the street from Karma.
Peter was very surprised when I announced that in fact this was the very first time I had visited a Subway restaurant in Korea. I don't visit American brand fast food very often in Korea - I've only visited McDonalds twice, that I can recall, in the 10 years I've been here. So not even before I got the mouth cancer. And now there is even less reason to visit those types of places. It was fine to eat there, though sandwiches are bit challenging to eat for me, being a bit too dry and requiring a lot of tongue-gymnastics to bite off and chew, if you think about it. Not my strong points, these days. But I managed fine - I can manage anything, these days, in fact.
So if visiting a Korean Subway sandwich shop was on my bucket list, it's taken care of now. After that, Peter went to his work and I went home. On the subway.
Andy is a fifth grader who is in an Honors cohort otherwise made up of sixth graders, because of his high ability. It was a bit problematic placing him there, because he ended up in the same class with his older sister, Julie. I suspect the direct competition isn't helping the younger boy.
Last night, we took a month-end speaking test. Julie scored 99%. Andy, on the other hand, only managed 71%. Their ability levels are similar and normally they score similarly. Andy moaned and made a sad expression. "It is my destiny!" he exclaimed.
"In Karma, it is your destiny," his older sister intoned, with mock seriousness. On the one hand, I think they were imitating the famous Darth Vader line, "It is your destiny." But I realized they both are also probably quite aware that one possible meaning of "Karma" is in fact "destiny" - certainly the fine semantic differences between them is lost, since both words are often translated 운명 [unmyeong] in Korean. I suspect they have a running joke between them.
Korea's been my home almost ten years and here I never drive a car. Yet still I dream the driving dreams: road trips of youth relived like films, a night or two each month.
The Mormon church that has been under construction in my neighborhood is nearing completion - I've commented on itbefore, partly because I'd developed a kind of special feeling or affinity for the vacant lot (so rare in Ilsan) that had previously occupied the space for most of the years I've been here.
I guess the architecture is solidly Mormonesque - whatever that is, although I do believe there is, at least, an identifiable (post hoc) Mormon architectural style. What was more depressing was that half of the lot is given over to an at-grade parking lot.
Believe it or not, I've contemplated the cultural semiotics of Mormon parking lots before. This may be partly due to having grown up across the street from the local Mormon church, and thus for me, as a child, the concepts of expansive parking lots and Mormonism became deeply intertwined. For me, as a child, the Mormon church's parking lot was simply the parking lot. It became the archetype of an American sort of over-engineered, low density, space-wasting, parking-in-front approach to parking.
I had imagined that local Korean building codes would preclude the construction of such a parking lot for this church. Apparently, I was naive.
It's not that Koreans don't build low density parking lots. It's that in my experience, if Koreans build an at-grade, open space parking lot (as opposed to a high density parking structure), these constructions seem to be, inevitably, fairly contingent, strictly temporary affairs. If they have a vacant lot, by all means, slap down some asphalt, paint some lines, put up an attendant's booth, and charge money to park there. These can be found all over Ilsan, in fact, as well as the rest of Seoul. Perhaps that was partly why I was so surprised that the vacant lot where this new church has been built remained simply vacant for so long.
As I said, however, these low-density parking lots are not, normally, viewed as particularly major undertakings, and they lack any feeling of permanence. There are several in Ilsan that are not even properly paved - they're just gravel. I kind of intuit that the expectation is that eventually the lot will get built with something, with the inevitable multi-level parking structure integrated into the new building.
But these Mormons - they've created a parking lot in the boldest of North American, low density, highly engineered traditions. There are little rows of trees, there are elaborate curbs and bays, there is even the modern "permeable parking lot" concept whereby grass can grow between the gaps and water can drain down - thus preventing the loss of so much rainfall for the groundwater. These are all things that seem so utterly American to me, and quite alien to the way Koreans approach parking in my experience.
Not only that, there's a giant fence completely enclosing it. Most Korean parking lots are quite pedestrian-friendly - I cut across or through both open low-density lots and parking ramps all the time, as I walk from one place to another.
What does it mean that Mormon churches always have such substantial and, more interestingly, prominently visible parking lots? Partly, it's about the fact of being a wealthy but most definitely minority religion. Their churches thus have to draw from a widely dispersed community, where most members might be coming from quite some distance away. Thus, they all have cars and they all need a place to park. But it's also a kind of declaration of suburban American values. I can't say I'm scandalized, but a part of me had expected something different of Mormons in the Korean context. I gather I was mistaken.
The storm's bland aftermath dissolved and stained the air so that it tasted like burnt wire or moistened stones. At last, a lingering tomato-tinted twilight grasped the streets.
Several times a week, it seems, the helpful Korean government authorities send little text message advisories to my phone. Most of these seem to have little relevance to my day-to-day existence: I get warnings about remote bird flu outbreaks or rural landslides or what have you. But I enjoy the opportunity to work out the meanings of these fragments of "found Korean."
This morning, I received this message:
[국민안전처] 오늘 08시20분 경기(고양,파주) 호우경보, 산사태ㆍ상습침수 등 위험지역 대피, 외출자제 등 안전에 주의바랍니다
Given the stunningly aggressive thunderstorm taking place outside my window, I had a suspicion as to its meaning already. The sky was dark like twilight, there was lightening and pouring rain. Not just more of the same old monsoon, this was hardcore weather.
Sure enough, the message says, roughly:
"[National Safety Service] Today 8:20 AM, Gyeonggi Province (Goyang, Paju) Storm Warning, please evacuate landslide or flood-prone areas and exercise caution when going out."
I felt pleased with the lack of difficulty I experienced in making sense of this message.
And that's your Korean for the day. Happy stormy Sunday.
Today in my "CC" listening class, we were listening to the American pop song "Blank Space," by Taylor Swift. The students' job is to listen to the song (line by line and over and over, if necessary), and fill in a cloze version of the lyrics (i.e. words missing). So we were filling in the blank spaces in the song "Blank Space.
One student, Kevin, when confronted with the line "I can read you like a magazine," decided, confidently, that it was "I can read you like a banana." For whatever reason, I started trying to explain how this might work. I held up an imaginary banana, and pretended to "read" it. I looked at Kevin, and tried to "read" him in the same way. The students understood the absurdity of the interpretation. Anyway, I found it entertaining, as often happens with absurdity.
What I'm listening to right now.
Taylor Swift, "Blank Space."
Lyrics.
Nice to meet you, where you been? I could show you incredible things Magic, madness, heaven, sin Saw you there and I thought Oh my God, look at that face You look like my next mistake Love's a game, wanna play?
New money, suit and tie I can read you like a magazine Ain't it funny, rumors fly And I know you heard about me So hey, let's be friends I'm dying to see how this one ends Grab your passport and my hand I can make the bad guys good for a weekend
So it's gonna be forever Or it's gonna go down in flames You can tell me when it's over If the high was worth the pain Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane 'Cause you know I love the players And you love the game
'Cause we're young and we're reckless We'll take this way too far It'll leave you breathless Or with a nasty scar Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane But I've got a blank space, baby And I'll write your name
Cherry lips, crystal skies I could show you incredible things Stolen kisses, pretty lies You're the King, baby, I'm your Queen Find out what you want Be that girl for a month Wait, the worst is yet to come, oh no
Screaming, crying, perfect storms I can make all the tables turn Rose garden filled with thorns Keep you second guessing like "Oh my God, who is she?" I get drunk on jealousy But you'll come back each time you leave 'Cause, darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream
So it's gonna be forever Or it's gonna go down in flames You can tell me when it's over If the high was worth the pain Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane 'Cause you know I love the players And you love the game
'Cause we're young and we're reckless We'll take this way too far It'll leave you breathless Or with a nasty scar Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane But I've got a blank space, baby And I'll write your name
Boys only want love if it's torture Don't say I didn't say, I didn't warn ya Boys only want love if it's torture Don't say I didn't say, I didn't warn ya
So it's gonna be forever Or it's gonna go down in flames You can tell me when it's over If the high was worth the pain Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane 'Cause you know I love the players And you love the game
'Cause we're young and we're reckless We'll take this way too far It'll leave you breathless Or with a nasty scar Got a long list of ex-lovers They'll tell you I'm insane But I've got a blank space, baby And I'll write your name
At work, I sometimes get so angry. This tends to arise out of doubts: the quality of my work. Am I making progress? Students fail to learn. Colleagues don't care. Kids complain. I can't help.
If I had said the rock was mystified what would have been my meaning? Would a rock have hoped to understand what I had said? Or would the rock just lie there, doing zen?
I've been facing some challenges with my current curriculum set-up with my middle-schoolers, because the newly re-arranged cohorts of middle school students have a wider diversity of ability levels. Thus, my traditional Speaking/Writing/Listening classes on the TOEFL-prep style don't entirely "work" - the lower ability levels in the classes are frankly not quite able to take on the productive tasks (Speaking and Writing) - at least not in the books I'm currently using. Also, the social feel of several of these classes is altered, with the higher level students resenting the lower level students, and the lower level students feeling intimidated.
I honestly don't know what to do, but I'm feeling pretty frustrated. I feel like I wasn't really consulted about how the students were re-arranged - if I had been, I would not have opposed the newly diverse groups, but I would have definitely insisted on a changed curriculum - a move away from TOEFL and toward something like my old debate curriculum, perhaps. I suppose I'm going to have to do that, anyway, but with the students having all been provided with the existing curriculum's TOEFL books, there will be parental resentment if those books don't get used. I'm going to have to get creative in how I use those books. I'm having trouble thinking of ideas, at the moment.
I learned this aphorism from my book of aphorisms.
나를 칭찬하는 자는 나의 원수 na.reul ching.chan.ha.neun ja.neun na.ui won.su I-OBJ praise-PRESPART person-TOPIC I-GEN enemy A person who praises me [is] my enemy.
Beware of those who offer praise. This is a fairly universal sentiment for aphorisms. I had some difficulty with the word 자(者) because several dictionaries I checked didn't make clear the meaning "person." This single polysemous syllable has half a dozen unrelated meanings (derived from different Chinese borrowings). Once I found a dictionary that included this meaning, I remembered running across it before - I guess it's kind of an archaic term, but pops up in aphorisms and fossilized phrases a lot.
"Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets." - Luke 6:26
My student who goes by Sandy, in 2nd grade elementary, dislikes speaking English. She's a pleasant and well-focused student, but she seems to suffer a kind of panic attack whenever I ask her to speak directly. Sometimes she cries, or hides under her desk. So I have taken to kind of asking her permission to ask her something. I don't want to stress her out - I want her to see learning English as a positive experience.
We are doing a roleplay based on the Jack and the Beanstalk story. We were playing a kind of game yesterday, and Sandy, between participating (sort of) in the game, used her "Hello Kitty" stationery to convey to me, without words, her own interpretation of substantial parts of the story. I thought it was quite interesting, as it gave me some insight into her intelligence despite her shyness about participating.
The animals were gathered to discuss a plan to make the monkey their new king. The simian was giving them a grin - in fact, he felt an utter disregard.
I ran across a very weird bit of avant-garde science fiction that has been created on a sports news website (SBNation), of all places. This seems unexpected. Anyway, it's a very strange thing - it's not a straightforward sci-fi story, but rather a kind of multimedia "text" in the postmodern sense. Nevertheless, it has a narrative, and the genre is definitely sci-fi.
If you don't like unexpected animations and fiddling with your mouse to make things happen, I don't recommend it, but if you don't mind those things, give it a try: link.
There's going down. There's going up. Which way you choose to go depends on your desire. Desire can lead, but those descents can stray: long corridors with many doors require decisions once again. It's better, then, to walk the upward path. The clouds can serve as steppingstones, and rainbows tell you when to turn, and when to jump, and even swerve. Well, all of this might seem fantastic news, but there's a problem still. You don't yet know where you might need to stop, and catch the views - that mountain for example, with glaring snow: it needs attention from the angels who you hope might tell you plainly what is true.
- structurally, it's a sonnet (of some kind - Elizabethan?), but I don't think it's very sonnet-like, thematically, and there's too much enjambment.
발이 넓다 bal.i neolp.da foot-SUBJ wide [Someone/he/she/you] has a wide foot.
The online daum dictionary pointed me to this page which said the meaning was "아는 사람이 많다" - "knows a lot of people." In my conversation with my coworker, the meaning was tied in with the idea of a broad social network. She was trying to explain that another coworker was good at networking - not in any modern high-tech sense but just that she had a really wide field of acquaintances.
I guess in many ways I'm the opposite. I'm really bad at maintaining my social network. The field ends up pretty narrow.
To eat is not now any luxury: a dull task that's devoid of pleasure which I do because I must despite my lack of any sense of taste and aimless tongue.