Wednesday, June 03, 2026
Day 3 of the literary sprint
Today is Day 3 of my literary sprint—the third of five short stories will be coming out on my free Substack today at 5 p.m., Seoul time. Future sprints will take place within the context of my paid Substack.
If you enjoyed Day 1's "When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived" (about the ultimate energy source), and if you enjoyed Day 2's "A Tale of Ass" (about a disaffected boy who meets a tiger) then I think you might enjoy Day 3's "Telekinetically Yours," a story about Marv, a frustrated man thwarted by life who thinks he's found the solution to all of his problems.
See you at my Substack!
sad news
As I make financial projections, I don't think I'm going to have the means to go to France, so I've canceled my ticket and written an "I'm sorry" to Dominique (he just replied). Maybe I'll make it over to France at the end of this year, when I'm once again flush with cash (assuming I get university work... there've been no further ads for days).
I also had my credit-card company cancel my over-$300 purchase of tee shirts from Spring (whose links I need to take down from my sidebar as the company seems to be on its way over a cliff)—a purchase made way back in March. So my credit card, at least, will feel some financial relief. I'm still hoping to get university work that'll start in the fall.
Otherwise, if worse comes to worst, my last desperation move—if no uni wants me—will be to go back to hagweon work as an old man. A shameful return to my roots, to how I started in Korea. There's one particular hagweon that I'm looking at right now: I'd be teaching adults one-to-one from the hagweon's own curriculum. If I worked at this business full time, it'd be a split shift with one or two Saturdays a month. Recipe for burnout at my age. If I do visit this place later in the summer, I'll see about working either a block shift or just part-time (i.e., only one of the two halves of the split shift). It'll be back to slacks and button-down shirts and neckties and ruthless clock culture for me. Yay. So much yay. But as I said—a place like this is a last resort. Fortunately, it's basically down the street, only a few subway stops away.
I'm spending the rest of today trying to figure out how to get tutoring ads onto Soomgo and used-item ads onto Carrot Market (단근마켓). Neither seems as straightforward as all that.
Pelley—finally out
For years, I've found Scott Pelley (CBS) to be an insufferable dick, right up there with the likes of The View, Keith Olbermann, Brian Stelter, Wolf Blitzer, Jim Acosta, Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the uncountable sea of leftists who dare to call themselves journalists and pundits and commentators. So it's with some satisfaction that I now see that Pelley, pencil-necked drama queen extraordinaire, has finally been fired. It's the least of the things I'd like to see happen to him (up to and including a very slow drawing and quartering), but it's a start. Alas, the corrupt "news" ecosystem will probably hire him to be on some talk show.
It’s probably what he wanted with that tantrum. https://t.co/tlxve2p3hG
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) June 3, 2026
Tuesday, June 02, 2026
I like "my" recipe better
At least "my" recipe for boeuf bourguignon (from my Simplissime cookbook) doesn't include onions or any kind of allium. I do add a wee amount of onion flakes and garlic powder, though. Just a subtle amount. This is French food, after all.
Trump pulls a Giuliani
There's the so-called Broken Window Fallacy, and then there's former mayor Rudy Giuliani's Broken Windows Policy, adapted from the broken-windows theory. Trump, a fellow New Yorker, seems to have taken his cue from Rudy.
Once Trump leaves office, though, we'll see whether DC citizens have enough inherent pride in their city to maintain whatever gets repaired. Or will it be back to the urban jungle?
ADDENDUM: I admit I felt a little homesick watching this, however much DC may have turned into a shithole in my absence. DC in the daytime, and seen through the lens of a focused historical tour (on a Segway?), still looks like a real city.
As someone from northern Virginia (often called "not real Virginia" by other Virginians for various reasons—transient military and political community), I've often fudged and told non-Americans that I'm "from DC." Washington sits no more than 15 or so miles north of where I used to live, in Alexandria, and I did both my undergrad and grad work in DC (Georgetown U., then Catholic U.), so in many ways, I may as well be "from DC." (My home was also about 1.5 miles away from Mount Vernon, George Washington's residence, which is now a cultural landmark and tourist site.)
did you enjoy story #1?
My five-day literary "sprint" began yesterday on Substack: Five Stories in Five Days. Yesterday was the first story, "When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived." Here's a snippet:
Fusion had been the sacred goal for so many years that, when it finally arrived, there was a global sigh of relief. No more worries about massive amounts of radioactive waste that could only be buried: Waste from fusion was called low-level waste, and it tended to decay quickly and harmlessly. And with so much energy now being released from the wholesale crushing and melding of atoms, people immediately thought of ways to attach monetary incentives to this new fuel source. Environmentalists were among the loudest voices, saying that people’s fuel dumps into these drives could be tracked and, depending on the amount contributed to the machine, given back to the contributor in the form of instantly usable credit. Dump in energy, get paid. Never mind that payments were in credit, and thus electronic, and thus easily trackable. Others argued the opposite, i.e., monetizing access to the drives. In different countries and cultures, people found different economic solutions to this new, reliable, and seemingly boundless source of energy. Some solutions worked better than others.
Entire mountains of trash from landfills began to be emptied. Every scrap of street litter got collected; there were sometimes friendly competitions and sometimes ugly fights, large and small, as different people set their sights on the same trash: Everyone wanted credit (both credit-as-fame and credit-as-money) for cleaning up dumps and litter. In under two years, wherever people were paid to find and dump their trash offerings into Mr. Fusion, the problem of plastic-clogged rivers disappeared. With pollution-catchers now in place on smokestacks, the pollution itself was collected and recycled, helping to clear the world’s air. Construction sites once filled with piles of scrap soon began to throw their scrap into the larger Mr. Fusions.
Today is Day 2. At 5 p.m. Seoul time, another story will appear, totally different in tone and content. I hope you enjoy it. If yes, leave a comment and/or subscribe to my Substack for free. Or become a paying subscriber and enjoy the benefits.
not much of a trip
KMA is still there in Yeouido, but it wasn't much of a trip. I'd forgotten that the closest subway exit to the building was Exit 4, not Exits 1 or 2 (good thing I looked at Naver Map). The neighborhood both had and hadn't changed.
The main building by Exit 4 looked exactly the same, but later, when I strolled over to look at the row of restaurants where I would normally eat on my KMA Saturdays back in the day, I saw that many of the old, familiar joints had been replaced. I don't remember an A Toi (French for "to you") flower shop, and there was now a Frank Burger, with a logo looking suspiciously like Shake Shack's. Another Korean knockoff. I wondered if it was any good. My old haunt, Shinuiju Soondae, was still there, clinging to life; I was tempted to sit down there for lunch, but I imagined that prices have gotten more expensive since a decade ago. Farther down, there was now a Salady, a chain I used to buy lunch at back when I worked at the Golden Goose. I was tempted to eat there, too.
Inside the building, aside from recognizing the familiar lobby, which looked about the same, I didn't recognize much of anything else. The general layout of KMA was about the same in terms of architecture, but the people were all different, and some of the in-room tech—from what I could see when peeking in—had changed slightly.
The purpose of the visit, which was essentially a cold call after having sent my paperwork over last night, was just to get my face out there... and that's about all I accomplished. I was told I'd have to wait to be contacted since I had already made my online submission. Always stick to the script, right? At a guess, KMA will likely phone me instead of emailing. That's if they even call. I first got introduced to KMA through a friend who already worked there, but I haven't spoken with that friend in over a year, and his Canadian contact inside KMA—the guy who sort-of supervised me while I'd been an employee there—was, last I'd heard, in the States, doing grad work. So: no one familiar. Life passes you by.
Still, it was a nice trip down memory lane.
starting to get a bad feeling
I'm leaving for Yeouido in an hour or so. In the meantime, I just got an email from Parchment, the service that's supposedly sending me sealed copies of my college transcripts. The email contained no delivery information, but the email's content implied that the transcripts had been delivered. I've seen nothing on my end. Not good. Many Korean universities ask for sealed copies of one's transcripts. One more thing to think about.
On my way out, I'll check with the lobby concierges to see whether they've been holding my mail all this time.
Monday, June 01, 2026
a spot of history
And what was Europe doing around 1200 AD? The AI god offers this:
Around the year 1200, Europe was a politically fragmented continent in the midst of the High Middle Ages. Characterized by the growing influence of the Roman Catholic Church and decentralized feudalism, this period featured the dawn of the first universities and a transition from heavy Romanesque art to elegant Gothic architecture.
When I think of the 1200s, I think of St. Thomas Aquinas and Scholasticism/Thomism.
803 years ago today, two Mongol scouts on a reconnaissance mission destroyed every army between the Caspian Sea and the borders of Poland.
— Ancient History Hub (@AncientHistorry) June 1, 2026
Subutai and Jebe were not supposed to conquer anything. Genghis Khan had sent them west with about 20,000 horsemen to chase down the… pic.twitter.com/ou05eeHIdI
things have changed
While I still plan on visiting KMA (Korea Management Association) in Yeouido tomorrow, I learned through AI (everything is through AI these days) that, to apply to be a KMA instructor, there's an online way to do so. I've spent the past two hours mucking my way through that process on the KMA website, and I have no idea whether, at the end of it all, KMA will bother to give me a call or email. Well, I'm not going to sit on my heels and wait, which is why I'll be visiting their head office—where I used to teach—tomorrow. I still have no clue whether KMA requires its lecturers to be employed elsewhere; based on what I've seen on the KMA website, a lot has changed, so maybe that rule has also changed. In my letter to the organization, I mentioned that I have an F-4 visa, which means I don't legally need a sponsorship to be employed anywhere (some work is still forbidden to F-4s, though, e.g., manual labor). I hope they take that into consideration. If not, I will have no choice but to get a full-time job first, then reapply to KMA. I'm definitely feeling my age.
well, God help me, I've applied
As I look at my dwindling cash, sifting away like sand in an hourglass, I've decided to bite the bullet and apply to Soonchunhyang University (abbreviated SCH). I suspect I might even make it to the final round of applicants since the uni's requirements don't seem that strict, but I sincerely hope that other universities, inside Seoul, will be putting out ads soon so that I can apply to those places as well. If my only choices are UNIST in Ulsan (which pays well for a university) and SCH in Asan, way at the ass-end of Line 1, I'm going to have to move either way, and that's going to suck. It'll also be awkward and complicated for my rental office, which prefers to have a three-month warning about moving. They're going to complain, and they're going to penalize me somehow for breaking my rental contract. But what else can I do? The timing sucks, but it is what it is.
If worse comes to worst, though, and my situation gets desperate, I can theoretically take the job at SCH (which I know is not a guaranteed thing) and commute there every day. That'll take almost six hours out of my day, though, and it'll be expensive to boot. I can do that for maybe a semester, then move to Asan during vacation. And I'll be pooped by the end. 2.5-hour commutes when I was younger were one thing; these days, I don't think I have the endurance.
However, SCH comes with a few advantages. For the next phase of the hiring process, it doesn't seem that they're requiring sealed copies of my college transcripts; I can therefore just send what I have. Also, for criminal background checks, they only want a Korean one, not FBI, which means I can go to my local police station and get that document printed out easily now that I have a better idea of what to do and how to do it (one background report per university, and specifically sent to that university). SCH is also known as a university that started out as a medical facility, and it's still got a nice teaching hospital, so should I conk out from another stroke or heart attack, I at least know I'll be in good hands as long as I get ferried to the hospital in time. And even if we don't consider the possibility of a health crash, I can transfer my records from Samsung Hospital to SCH Hospital and keep getting my meds and my checkups right there instead of shuttling back from Asan to my old neighborhood, which would be a royal pain in the ass.
Right. Well. The essential for today is: I've applied to SCH. If I make it to the second round of the process, I'll have to provide a criminal background check, passport photos, and my old transcripts. Assuming they don't want sealed transcripts, I'll just send them the electronic copies I already have. Keep your fingers crossed for better unis inside Seoul.
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