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.
We are doing last-minute prep for our talent show. Grace is doing some stage practicing with a group of her students, and she tells me, "I really need a fart sound for this play."
The play she's doing, the "Farting Lady," is a Korean classic tale adapted to grade-school EF, with songs, too. I may have mentioned it before on this blog - it's a perennial favorite of Korean students, because they know the story already, and because elementary children have fundamentally scatalogical senses of humor.
I can't use my laptop, because it's been repurposed as the main computer for all the projections, sound and powerpoint slides for the show.
The solution:
So I take my little USB memory stick and I go to one of the computers in the computer lab. I go to google, and I type in "free download fart sounds." I have a plethora of choices. First choice, try out some sounds, and download a half dozen.
I save them onto my USB, and return to the seminar room where Grace is practicing. I hand her the USB. "The internet is a great thing," I say.
"It is," she agrees, as she tries out the files, to the entertained giggles of 15 or so elementary kids.
Today is our big day, the annual Karma English Academy talent show. As is typical, I feel utterly unprepared. But thus it goes - that's life in the Karmic Korean Kingdom of Chaotic Quasi-Confucian Contingency.
Meanwhile, what I'm listening to right now.
Elton John, "Rocket Man." The video is brand new, but has been declared "official." I found the video, by Iranian refugee Majid Adin, quite stunningly beautiful and sad, and it manages to take a melancholic, classic song almost half a century old, now, like John's "Rocket Man," and imbue it with intense new meaning vis-a-vis the contemporary, never-ending global refugee crisis.
Lyrics.
She packed my bags last night pre-flight Zero hour nine AM And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then I miss the earth so much I miss my wife It's lonely out in space On such a timeless flight
And I think it's gonna be a long long time 'Till touch down brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time 'Till touch down brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it's cold as hell And there's no one there to raise them if you did And all this science I don't understand It's just my job five days a week A rocket man, a rocket man
And I think it's gonna be a long long time 'Till touch down brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time 'Till touch down brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time And I think it's gonna be a long long time
"Self-driving cars" are all the rage in certain Silicon Valley circles as an up-and-coming technology.
A conceptual artist explores the shortcomings of relying on not-so-smart robot-minds to try to drive a car. He has actually engineered his own self-driving car, using bits and pieces of existing technology. Then he proceeded to "trap" the car by exploiting its reliance on highway markings to decide where it is OK to drive.
Three simple songs were sung among the faces going by. I knew these songs in passing, then, though all the years did fly.
A song of patient worrying came first, a princess true. The second song had deep kindness, but understandings, few.
The third song had the boldest heart, but passions rather wild. These songs departed. But today, a song returned... and smiled.
- three quatrains in ballad meter. This poem is not just a hallucination or metaphor, unlike as is the normal case with most of my poetry. Rather, it has a fairly important and specific subtext, which will make the meaning quite clear.
"...there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss." - Kenneth Burke.
I had a class last night with my highest-level students, the TOEFL 8th graders, that was close to an ideal type of class, in my opinion.
Nominally, we were working on the TOEFL speaking questions. But before class, one of the students, Sumin, had asked me if I knew anything about the "Mpemba Effect" (see wikipedia - I'll not try to replicate the explanation found there). She had to make a speech about it, in Korean, for her Korean-language class. In researching it online, she'd found more materials in English than Korean, and, being an ambitious and motivated English student, she decided these were legitimate sources for putting together her speech. She was checking with me mostly to make sure she understood some of the technical aspects and the fairly specialized vocabulary of chemistry and physics involved.
So we carried on our conversation about it into the start of class. The other students overheard and were curious, and so I started explaining. And then I said, "Actually, this is exactly the kind of topic that they put into a Type 6 TOEFL speaking question." You listen to some complicated lecture on a difficult topic, and then you have to summarize.
Somewhat jokingly, I asked them if they wanted to do a speaking question practice on the Mpemba Effect. To my surprise, they were enthusiastic about this idea. So I pulled up the wikipedia article, scanned through it to make sure I understood it, and then proceeded to give a 10 minute lecture, more or less, on the Mpemba Effect. This included digressions to explain concepts such as convection, insulation, dissolved gases, crystallization and "seeding" crystals (i.e. catalysts), and several other things that occurred to me. Then their job was to give a one minute summary, in the TOEFL style, of my lecture.
In his summary, David even included the expression, "The Karma professor explains...," a joking reference to my sometimes being identified by both students and coworkers as a "professor." It's a moniker that seems to follow me regardless of career.
The class was ideal. We covered what we needed to cover - which is to say, we did TOEFL speaking practice on a particular instance of what are always essentially random topics. Yet the students themselves selected the topic, out of interest, and they more or less led the class in terms of what was expected of them. I was just a kind of resource, an on-call "professor" that they could hit "play" on for various aspects of the topic in question.
Sometimes I think about economics and philosophy, but I don't make much progress.
I have some thoughts about what you might term a "marxian analysis" of the modern post-manufacturing economy, and about what, exactly, the tech behemoths like google, facebook, etc., are doing, in the "modes of production" sense. These companies seem to traffic in the commodification not of products but rather the commodification of wants and needs for other commodities. This is a kind of "meta-commodification," where instead of exploiting consumer desires in order to generate surpluses, instead they operate entirely within the streams of surpluses, manufacturing consumer desires which they can sell to others to exploit. It's really a logical step in the succession of the economic modes of production, when viewed this way, just as credit is a logical extension of money, which is in turn a logical extension of exchange. But it seems to be something genuinely different from what came before, and certainly it is not classically marxian.
Having said all that, these thoughts seem to be merely a kind of epiphanic brainstorm, and thus I have nothing of substance to report.
So then I just have to post some song or something, instead, which likely is only related to the preceding if you're really good at apophenia.
What I'm listening to right now.
Cassadee Pope, "Wasting All These Tears."
Lyrics
I tried to find you at the bottom of a bottle Laying down on the bathroom floor My loneliness was a rattle in the windows You said you don't want me anymore
And you left me Standing on a corner crying, Feeling like a fool for trying I don't even remember Why I'm wasting all these tears on you I wish I could erase our memory Cause you didn't give a damn about me Oh, finally I'm through Wasting all these tears on you These tears on you
You ain't worth another sleepless night And I'll do everything I gotta do to get you off my mind Cause what you wanted I couldn't get What you did, boy I'll never forget
And you left me Standing on a corner crying Feeling like a fool for trying I don't even remember Why I'm wasting all these tears on you I wish I could erase our memory Cause you didn't give a damn about me Oh, finally I'm through Wasting all these tears on you These tears on you
And you left me Standing on a corner crying Feeling like a fool for trying I don't even remember Why I'm wasting all these tears on you I wish I could erase our memory Cause you didn't give a damn about me Oh finally I'm through Wasting all these tears on you Oh these tears on you
I tried to find you at the bottom of a bottle Laying down on the bathroom floor