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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Online English Grammar reference Grammarist. Useful for settling disputes over grammar.
Having worked as a truck mechanic, and having grown up in the household I did, I have a strong interest in (and fascination for) engines, although I never developed the level of passion for vehicle mechanicking that seems to have been my birthright (by which I mean my father, grandfather and great-grandfather were/are all passionate mechanic hobbyists).
Some guy in Spain makes miniature engines that actually run. Here's a video of him putting together and testing a V12 engine. I think it's really interesting.
Slightly related to the above (in the aspect of "hand-made" industrial devices), I also ran across a story about a guy who tried to make a toaster "from scratch" - I mean really from scratch. I think it was meant as a sort of performance art. It's intriguing.
Yesterday I went to the foreign grocery store across the street, mostly to resupply myself with the Brazilian brand of instant coffee that I like ("Iguaçu"), and I saw a giant bottle of dill spice. It seemed too big, but it was the only size they had, and I've never seen dill spice before in Korea. I decided to buy it - it was only 8 bucks.
So I got home thinking, gee, I have a lifetime's supply of dill spice, what should I make? The main thing I have used dill spice for, in the past, is borsht - but I still haven't found any beets (admittedly I haven't looked that hard).
I had some nice tomatoes, and I had my pea soup. What could I make? I made fried tomatoes, with a breading that included corn flour, dill spice, nutmeg, black pepper. I literally invented the recipe from my crazy imagination - I had no plan or idea beforehand. Then I ate them with my pea soup and some toast. They were delicious.
What I'm listening to right now.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, "Buy for me the rain." The video is very interesting - it's a cheesy anti-war-themed music video from the 1960's! I didn't even know such a thing existed until I found it when finding a youtube of the song.
I grew up with some of this music - it's very nostalgic, for me. Here are the lyrics.
Buy for me the rain, my darling, buy for me the rain; Buy for me the crystal pools that fall upon the plain. And I’ll buy for you a rainbow and a million pots of gold. Buy it for me now, babe, before I am too old.
Buy for me the sun, my darling, buy for me the sun; Buy for me the light that falls when day has just begun. And I’ll buy for you a shadow to protect you from the day. Buy it for me now, babe, before I go away.
Buy for me the robin, darling, buy for me the wing; Buy for me a sparrow, almost any flying thing. And I’ll buy for you a tree, my love, where a robin’s nest may grow. Buy it for me now, babe, the years all hurry so.
I cannot buy you happiness, I cannot buy you years; I cannot buy you happiness, in place of all the tears. But I can buy for you a gravestone, to lay behind your head. Gravestones cheer the living, dear, they’re no use to the dead.
I'm finally getting around to posting a video of my last major debate test with the middle schoolers, which was at the end of October (no debate test for November because of the special test prep schedule, which doesn't have a debate class).
The video is kind of long - I strung together the Monday and Tuesday cohorts into one long video because the topic and proposition were exactly the same. One student's speech and part of another's were lost because of a camera problem, but other than that, it's all the students who participated.
As usual, I haven't put a lot of energy into the minutiae of editing - I cut out the various short exchanges between me and the students in which I provide quick feedback or directions - so it's only their voices.
Sometimes, they are very hard to hear - the sound pick-up on the camera didn't seem to work that well, and there's a lot of ambient noise (especially during the Monday group's debate) that makes hearing them harder, too.
Most of them are clearly not comfortable with public speaking yet, but a few show some progress if you compare them to earlier speeches. A few are more natural with public speaking - they will be the ones who are easier to understand, but keep in mind that they aren't, in fact, the ones with the highest competency in English, necessarily - they're just more at ease with the format.
The topic was challenging, and I think they did pretty well. I gave some guidance but I tried very hard not to let them merely bounce back ideas that I suggested (for both sides) but to forge their own.
The proposition was: "Immigration to South Korea should be encouraged." It's a topical, meaningful, "real" debate proposition, as it's something I bet has been debated in South Korea's legislature in recent years quite a bit. I've written and reflected on South Korea's relationship to the potential of redefining itself as an immigrant-welcoming society in other places on this blog - I won't go into it here, and I was careful not to be too transparent on my own biases and opinions with the kids.
Please don't judge the kids or their quality of presentation or English too harshly - remember they are 7th and 8th grade students who for the most part have never travelled to an English-speaking country. Nor have they had any experience with public speaking - even in their native Korean language. Considering that, they do pretty well..
Yesterday, in my youngest Phonics class, made up of mostly 1st graders, Yunho announced he had a booger.
He was speaking Korean ("코딱지!" [kottakji = booger]), and I had a weird moment when I reflected on my strange plateau of Korean language knowledge. It can't be normal for someone to understand a child's discourse on boogers but not be able to understand an adult's request for a suggestion (which also occured yesterday).
Yunho wasn't finished with his booger. He grabbed scotch tape out of my basket of classroom supplies and taped his booger to his finger. The other boys in the class thought this was the grandest achievement in recent human memory, and promptly set out to replicate it. I had to confiscate the tape and forcefully insist that everything end up in the trash.
The one girl in the class (who is also a year or two older) shook her head and clucked her tongue disapprovingly at the whole proceeding. Understandably.
Issitoq is an Inuit deity of surveillance and stern warnings. He is a giant eye that makes sure you don't break the rules, like some kind of proto-Foucauldianpanopticon-creature.
I was thinking about Issitoq as I drifted to sleep, night before last. And so I had a short but vivid dream about Issitoq. It wasn't really scary, but it was eerie. He was zooming down out of a stormy, sunsetty sky over a strangely colorful but desolate plain, like some kind of disneyfied Sauron.
I drew this picture yesterday, based on that dream.
I had homemade split pea soup (to which I added tons of carrots and some wasabi paste... very nice).
I've been reading Jameson on Marxism (in Valances of the Dialectic, previously mentioned). My question: so what's with China? The implicit answer is obvious... in the 70's, the central committee recognized that the revolution couldn't be a truly Marxist one, because they weren't an industrialized country. So... logically, they opted for capitalism. Not repudiating Marxism, but because they were true Marxists. Hmm. Just thinking. More on this later, probably.
What I'm listening to right now.
Marc Romboy & Gui Boratto, "Eurasia." What's with me and techno, anyway? Who'da thunk?
Alcoholism involves overconsuming alcohol, so workaholism obviously involves the excessive consumption of workahol, right?
Well, I'm not really working all that much - but given that we're supposedly in a test-prep period, when I should have a reduced schedule, I'm working more than expected. Curt's given me some extra jobs, and I'm sufficiently unhappy with the rest of my life, that I've taken them.
I've been working on making a "best of student work" bulletin board for our lobby. I've been doing "phone teaching" - which involves having students call me and try to have really basic conversations. The levels of success varies.
I've been working on prepping my next chapters in my self-made debate textbook. And I'm still doing the "CC" classes - basically, "noraebang 101." And because of this last...
What I'm listening to right now.
Blue, "All Rise." The kids seem to like this song, but it's hard to sing.
And also...
Bon Jovi, "It's My Life." I think mainly they like the video for this, but they do well with the chorus, too.
Rats can be made to laugh, apparently. They like to be tickled, according to this article.
I had a pet rat, once. I found a rat to be a surprisingly affectionate and comforting pet. I remember that he would "purr" when he was curled up and I was petting him. My rat was named "Fnugus" - which was some strange whim of my adolescent mind. I ran across a picture of my long-ago pet rat, recently, in my collection. It's not a great photo, but it made me nostalgic.
