He aquí los pensamientos aleatorios de un epistemólogo andante.

I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

피할수 없는 고통이라면 차라리 즐겨라

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.

Is seer periculeus voor de onbekende, om aan te doen. - Hendrick Hamel

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." - Linus Pauling

Blogging online since 1965

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Who Is Jared?

  • My name is Jared Way. I was born in rural Far Northern California, and became an "adoptive" Minnesotan. I have lived in many other places: Mexico City, Philadelphia, Valdivia (Chile), Los Angeles. And for 11 years, I was an expatriate living in South Korea. In the summer of 2018, I made another huge change, and relocated to Southeast Alaska, which is my uncle's home.
  • For many years I was a database programmer, with a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature. In Korea, worked as an EFL teacher.
  • In June, 2013, while I was in Ilsan in South Korea, I was diagnosed with cancer, and underwent successful treatment. That changed my life pretty radically.
  • Currently, you could say I'm "between jobs," somewhat caretaking my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that) and getting adapted to life in rural Alaska after so many years as an urban dweller.
  • These bloggings, then, have been my random jottings on the subject of my mostly pleasant life among the Quasi-Confucian Cyber-Industrial Paleolithic Peninsulites of Lower Far Siberia.
  • I started this blog before I even had the idea of going 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 have come to play a central role in this blog's current incarnation.
  • 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).

Categories

My Life Online

  • 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
  • "Social Media"
    • 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
  • A Diversity of Blogs - I read these a lot.
  • Blogs of people I actually know
  • 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.
    • Starting in April, 2018, I decided somewhat capriciously to build my own "OGF stack" on my own server. This was not because I intended to abandon the OGF site, but rather because I wanted to better understand the whole architecture and all its parts. I built a wiki on the Mediawiki platform (the same as wikipedia). This wiki has no content. I built a map tileserver and geospatial database, which contains a very low resolution upload of an imaginary planet called Rahet. And I built a wordpress blog, which is a separate, low-frequency blog intended to focus on my geofictional pursuits rather than this more personalized, general purpose blog. All of these things can be found integrated together on my rent-a-server, here: geofictician.net
  • TEFL - my "profession," such as it is.

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« Caveat: What am I? A Freakin' Cleaning Service? | Main | Caveat: Kindergarteners »

2010.05.18

Caveat: Worse than a hagwon job?

I was lying awake last night, overwhelmed and frustrated. Why am I taking this so hard?

I think I always tend to view my "home" (wherever it is and such as it is) as a refuge from whatever frustrations I'm dealing with in life.  So having the "home" situation BE the frustrating situation that I have to cope with leaves me feeling exceptionally naked and vulnerable.

When they gave me my first apartment, and there were issues, I was angry for a little bit, but I told myself: "it looks like they had some BAD foreign teachers before me [meaning dirty, unreliable, etc.] and I can prove myself different, and earn their respect." But when, one month on, they pull that out from under me, shuffle me around like a dog to a kennel, and they put me into a temporary apartment that would make a Guatemalan Discount Hotel look hospitable, well... to put it mildly, I feel underappreciated. 

And never is there clear communication. That's the Korean Communication Taboo ... I've written about that before. But when applied to my living situation, it's extra frustrating.  And it strikes me as deeply UNPROFESSIONAL. I'll rant more about professionalism later, in a separate post - Koreans have no monopoly on lack of professionalism in the world. 

I lay awake and found myself thinking: "Can it be that working in hagwon is actually better? Have I DOWNGRADED my career? Have I moved to a third-world country?" Hmmm.... that last point is relevant. I already knew this intellectually, and now I'm coming to grips with the "facts on the ground": Korea IS a third-world country, but Seoul is a first-world city, and so it appears that I'm going to have to reduce and alter expectations in a BIG WAY, to adapt to life in the provinces away from the capital.

But honestly... I have to ask, where's the "pride of place"? Or is this particular school just exceptionally messed up, in that respect?  Is it better at other schools?

Posted at 15:41 in Banalities & Journaling, The Wonders of Work |

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Comments

My friend Chris Marsh was given a pad that was horrible with no sink and threatened to leave if the situation wasn´t rectified in two weeks. His boss was even clueless that it had no sink, but she was at least forthright to fix the problem ASAP, and she was his former boss and knew he was a good employee and wasn´t about to lose her prized goose. She is a forward thinking hagwon boss. I don´t really think there being bad foreigners before is a good excuse for a place to be filthy. An employer should have a place ready for the cash cow, the EFL instructor. Hey, I can understand why you´re pissed. Yes, it´s better at other schools. There may be a pattern of what you have dealt with, based on my experiences, but it´s not the rule, as you and I know. It´s just a high chance to get either the good or the shit, so to speak. It seems like 50-50. Whereas it´s more anomalous over here.

Posted by: A former hagwon LBridge slave | 2010.05.18 at 19:54

You are my friend, and I want you to sleep and get your rest. I don´t want you sleepless. I want you restful. I am going to send good vibes your way and hope you will have good news for us soon. Keep me posted. Think of the good times at that great cafe we used to go to. I know you are a tenacious guy. Give it a few days for things to go your way. If not, come up with plan B whatever that is in terms of getting some kind of result.

Posted by: A former hagwon LBridge slave | 2010.05.18 at 19:56

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