I'm feeling kind of depressed right now.
First, there's the movie-review book problem. I thought making one or two corrections to a nearly error-free manuscript would be enough, but now, Amazon KDP is being a bitch and complaining about how my text doesn't have a sufficient gutter for the 6 × 9 format, how my cover image isn't bleed-to-the-edge, etc., etc. It didn't give me any grief during my first upload of the manuscript, so what happened? I spent all of yesterday trying to get everything perfect, and when I reuploaded my manuscript... more of the same complaints from the Amazon system. So late last night (this morning, technically), I gave up. It was all just too much.
Second, I haven't heard from UNIST, SCH, or Hanyang about EFL-prof work. KNU, for its part, says it won't start replying to potential hires until Monday the 22nd.* My ex-boss, with whom I occasionally commiserate, is in a somewhat similar situation. He's been working various part-time jobs but can no longer seem to secure the kind of high-paying work he'd had in the past. With his fluent Korean, he used to work for local government officials and hosted radio and TV shows. His last job, in which he was my boss, was netting him over six figures (that's US dollars). He's got nothing like that now, and he thinks part of the problem is his age (mid-60s). I haven't had the heart to ask the ex-boss how sustainable he thinks his current situation is. He's got a wife and two sons, which means he already has to spend plenty of money every month. He lives in the rich part of town, in a very nice apartment, which costs him God-knows-how-much. How much longer can he go this way? If he's saved up a massive amount of money from his previous jobs, then he could theoretically go on for a few more years. But any well that's lost its source of water cannot last forever.
My impression is that the Korean job market is looking for young, fresh, energetic meat, not old fogies like us, to attract students. If you've stayed in one place and made a name for yourself instead of hopping around nomadically, you've managed to put down roots and become a known, respected commodity. If, on the other hand, you've zigzagged around trying anything and everything for years, you've got no roots anywhere.
That reminds me of something. The words of the old CEO of the SsangYong Paper company, where I'd worked for a few months in 1996, come back to me. The CEO's name was Park; he was a temperamental asshole, an old man with dyed-black hair, who started every morning with a long, ranty shouting session in which he would gather his managers and directors in a conference room and harangue them for their perceived failures. My classroom—his employees were required to attend my 7:00 a.m. class for an hour a day—was right next door, and I could hear the shouting through the thin door that separated us. Every day, I would teach for an hour, then spend the rest of the day as an office prole, proofreading English-language correspondence to be faxed overseas (this was right on the cusp of the email era). Despite being an asshole, the CEO gave me some parting advice during my exit interview in the fall of 1996: "Dig a deep well," he said in English. "There are people who dig shallow holes all over the place. They never find water. Stay in one place and dig a deep well." (He was probably referring to my leaving his company only a few months after joining.)
To my shame now, I recall leaving CEO Park's office while sneering at his advice, which reeked of the blind company loyalty that my father—a pre-Boomer born in 1942 like Joe Biden—had shown his whole working life to Northwest Airlines, a company that routinely shafted and reamed its employees despite my father's being in a union (joining a union was an implicit or explicit requirement, at least in the 70s and 80s). Aren't unions supposed to protect worker's rights? Well, as I discovered when Mom started working—and her job required joining a union, too—that's not true at all. Whatever the unions' noble intentions were at their start, they quickly morphed into predatory entities that protected incompetence and indolence while failing to promote merit.
As I look back now at my own sneering attitude, though, I see clearly how Gen X I was being. My age cohort isn't known for decades-long loyalty to any company; we listened to the Boomer generation's Follow Your Bliss advice and took it seriously. And I also see now that CEO Park, while being an asshole, had the right idea: Dig a deep well. Anyone who succeeds will tell you that the formula is to pick a thing, then plug away at it relentlessly. This means effort, focus, discipline, and dedication—not flightiness and zigzagginess.
So because I'm feeling a bit depressed this weekend for the above reasons, I'm going to drown my sorrows in hot dogs. Last night, it occurred to me that I could go downstairs and buy meat to grind for chili dogs, so I'm about to go shop for some meat. I'll grind the meat today, chop my dill pickles into relish, eat regular hot dogs with carnivore buns, then make chili and have chili dogs with the rest of my dogs tomorrow. It won't solve my unemployment situation, but it'll temporarily alleviate the depression. Then starting Monday, back to the damn grind.
The grind. See, that's the funny thing: All of this time, since the beginning of 2025, I've remained extremely busy. I started off by learning some new video/photography skills through Skillshare. Then I got onto Substack, where I had vainly hoped to "break out" as a writer. On Substack up to now, I've produced massive amounts of (utterly unappreciated) material, and I've been diving deep into writing projects that I had put off for years, one of which is my series of movie-review books. I haven't moved the needle at all on Substack; I did, however, get an initial and fairly committed group of free subscribers (some of whom may be bots), plus a very small handful of paying subscribers. And I haven't broken out beyond that. But I'm trying. And trying. Maybe something will come of all this.
And maybe that's the "deep well" that I've been at pains to dig all of these years. I've always been a writer, and I've long been an educator. While I'd like to think I've improved over the years, I am, unfortunately, still too mediocre to break free of the Don't quit your day job! cohort, but I'm going to keep plugging away at my projects until I finally keel over, shit myself, and get found only when the neighbors complain about my smell. In the meantime, I have a parachute in the form of hagweon work. If I hear nothing from any university by mid-July, I'll look up local hagweons (of which there are plenty in my area) and get a part-time job at one, thus following my boss's template, but without having a family to feed and a hellaciously expensive apartment to pay for. And I'll play things by ear from there.
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*Your quick glossary:
UNIST = Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, known for tech
SCH = Soonchunhyang University, known for medicine, in Asan, about 90 km south of Seoul
Hanyang = Hanyang YK Intercollege, known for interdisciplinary work, in Seoul
KNU = Kyungpook National University, known for agricultural science, in Sangju
