lost data

I need to confirm this when I get back to my place, but I do believe I've lost a thumb drive—one that had been with me for years. It was an 8-gig drive, and while it didn't have a ton of data on it, some of that data could be called valuable. I had left it hanging off the side of a campus computer's CPU after having taught a Korean class. Now, a week later, I checked the computer and saw that the drive was gone. Either I myself pulled the drive out and took it home (forgetting that I had done so), or I did indeed leave it in the school's computer, and some punk has since come along and taken it for himself.

There's no sense of tragedy here. First, I'm not sure I can recall everything that was on that drive, which means the information couldn't have been that earth-shatteringly important. Second, most of what's on that drive is simply replicated from what's on my desktop Mac, so it's not as though I've lost all that information. Still, despite the lack of tragedy, there's a definite sense of frustration and self-chastisement as I ponder my idiocy in leaving the drive in a strange computer in the first place.

A man should never leave his junk pushed into strange places. Someone might come along, yank it off, and claim it for himself.


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back to bidness

The five-day weekend is now over, and we're back to business at the uni. Alas, over break, our department head kept me busy with a proofreading assignment and some very minor translation work, plus I sat myself down at the office and graded a pile of midterms. Sad, really: the weather's been gorgeous these past few days, post-rain, and I spent the time mostly indoors. I'll have my day, though. Not sure when, but I'll have it.


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the weaning

I've been free of meds for almost 24 hours, now. No aspirin, no prescription meds (I ran out of those sometime last week). Over the weekend, as I mentioned earlier today, my pain levels mysteriously dropped and I've been able to walk around much more freely and fluidly than I had been for the past six or seven weeks. I'm not at 100% yet; my left hip joint is still very stiff, and I suspect that it would be easy for me to re-injure myself, but if I were to graph out my medical situation, I'd say I was on a steady upward curve. As before, I don't want to jinx this by speaking too soon, but things really do seem to be improving, and I have no clue as to why.

My buddy Tom is insisting I get an MRI when I'm next up in Seoul; he's offering to pay all expenses to make sure I get the treatment I need. While I frown and grumble at his pushy mothering, I understand his concern and agree that a deep, detailed scan would be nice so that we at least know what's going on inside my body.

For now, though, I'm just thankful that I can function without meds. That in itself is real progress. And may it continue: I'd like for this condition to be a fading memory by June.


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Ave, Charles!

My friend Charles writes about the recent untimely passing of a young monk who made an impression. A somber and touching read, and very apropos on the Buddha's birthday.


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why we hyphenate phrasal adjectives

On a blog I shall not name, I saw the following post title:

China's Rare Earth Advantage

The phrase "rare earth" should have been hyphenated. Why? Because we normally hyphenate phrasal adjectives that precede the nouns they modify. But why? Because the hyphen often helps clear up potential ambiguities. Compare:

"China's rare earth advantage": what is an "earth advantage," and why is it rare?

"China's rare-earth advantage": ah—I get it. China's got an advantage when it comes to rare-earth metals.

See the difference?

Another conundrum, though, is how to capitalize such a title once you introduce the hyphen. The proper way would be thus:

China's Rare-earth Advantage

Why not capitalize "earth"? you ask. Because "earth" is now part of a compound, which removes the justification for capitalization. You can capitalize the second element of the compound only if it's already a proper noun: African-American history.

There are exceptions to the phrasal-adjective rule of hyphenation. The basic rule of thumb is: you can get away with not using a hyphen if there's absolutely no chance of any ambiguity.

Next, I really need to write a post on how to use semicolons. So many lost souls.


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found online

You're welcome.





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is there an improvement happening?

I don't want to jinx things, but the past few days have come close to a Buddhist miracle: my left hip has suffered very little pain—so little, in fact, that I've actually forgotten to take aspirin after long stretches of time. I'm wary, of course: the onset of this pain was rather sudden; if its disappearance (if disappearance is indeed the word) is equally sudden, that still leaves me with much unexplained. But wariness notwithstanding, I'm grateful for any reprieve from my regularly scheduled agony.

Today is Seokga-tanshin-il, the Buddha's Birthday, lunar April 8, known as Vesak in the old Indian tongue (and Buddhist Vesak comes soon after Jewish Pesach). I just got out of bed and stood up with absolutely no pain. I shook my left leg around: a twinge, but nothing horrible. I have to go to the office today to keep working on grading midterms; I'm thinking about doing the 15-minute walk to campus without taking any meds. We'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful that we're in for another Buddha's Birthday miracle.

NB: if my body is spontaneously healing itself, this rules out osteonecrosis. Then again, it could mean that some of the meaningless "therapy" I'd been receiving from the local clinic (which I haven't visited in nearly a week) has actually been working: it's my understanding that one way of dealing with osteonecrosis is electrical stimulation, which I had been receiving. If the electro-therapy has been working on previously necrotic bone, then that means we can still rule out osteonecrosis as a present condition. Either way, it's looking as if I'm not necrotic. So don't count me out quite yet.


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the Sewol disaster versus 9/11: a question of passivity

Something to consider when pondering the inaction of the kids aboard the Sewol: on the morning of September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked in the United States. Three of the four ended up hitting their targets; the fourth plane went down in Pennsylvania, apparently because the passengers on that plane decided to resist and go down fighting. It seems incredible that a group of men carrying only box cutters could have cowed three planes' worth of people. "I'd have acted differently in that situation," many of us tell ourselves firmly. But, really: would you have? Sheep-like behavior in crowd situations is neither uncommon nor incomprehensible. In such situations, most of us are inclined to disavow responsibility, simply doing what we think the situation demands.

In our search for possible "cultural" explanations for the Korean students' passive behavior while the massive ferry was sinking on April 16, we might do well to ponder the psychology of crowds. I'm in no way saying that the Sewol disaster and 9/11 are perfectly analogous events, but they do have this bizarre, almost sacrificial passivity in common.

The psychology I'm referring to may work on even larger scales: people abandon responsibility in a variety of major crises. Why, for example, didn't the Jews rise up en masse and throw off the Nazi yoke in those camps? This is a painful question that historians return to again and again. Why don't the North Korean people rise up and take back their country? Semi-plausible explanations are offered, but none seems to hold water. Why didn't the African slaves collectively rise up in the United States and give their masters a royal beat-down? It happened more or less successfully in Haiti, after all. Why didn't the French resist the Nazi incursion more vigorously? This remains a touchy issue for many older French people. The same goes for Koreans under the Japanese yoke for thirty-six years: how did they let that happen to themselves? In all of the above cases, there were isolated pockets of resistance, to be sure, but there was no system-wide attempt at a massive overthrow. From a God's-eye view, the landscape was, generally, one of passivity and resignation.

So it could be that, in our search for "cultural" explanations of the Sewol disaster, we might want to consider pancultural explanations as well. Resigning oneself to one's fate, while in a crowd or other mass situation, is more common, and more human, than we care to admit. Does this make such passivity noble? Not at all: in almost every case, the cause of the oppressed or the threatened would have been better served by proactive resistance. I'm not arguing that passivity in a crisis is morally justifiable, but I am suggesting that it's not as incredible as some observers of the Sewol disaster are making it out to be.

Nitpickers will say that I'm conflating different phenomena: an airplane-hijack situation is nothing like having Nazis stationed in your French village. Let me preempt that accusation by strongly disagreeing. True: a sudden disaster is not the same as systemic oppression (in the form of wartime occupation or slavery). But I've zoomed my perspective back to speak more abstractly about crises and masses, and the psychology that binds these disparate scenarios together. I think that's a perfectly legitimate analytical move to make.

Like a lot of expats and Koreans, I'm weary of the explanations of the Sewol disaster that try to reduce the horror of the event to the effects of cultural dynamics like Confucianism. I don't believe that culture is irrelevant to the picture, but I also don't think it's the most fundamental explanation for three hundred deaths.


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she would have been 71

Today is Mom's birthday. She was born on May 4, 1943, and would have been 71 today. She died on January 6, 2010, in an ICU berth at Walter Reed Medical Center, a little after eight in the morning. It's been more than four years, and there are still moments when it feels as if her death happened yesterday.

At her tallest, Mom stood a puny 5'3"—barely 160 centimeters for you metric types. For a tiny woman, she contained a tremendous amount of will, much of which I inherited. She and I fought a lot; I think it's fair to say we had unresolved issues, even up to the very end, when brain cancer stepped in, like a grim referee, and stopped the quarrel. Life with Mom wasn't just conflict, though; I don't want to leave you with that impression. In her later years, Mom and I began to see more eye-to-eye, and in part I have my experience in Korea to thank for that. Understanding Mom's people was a big help in understanding Mom. There's still much about Korean culture that I disagree with, or even outright reject, but I understand more. And that's important. Such knowledge has even been therapeutic, you might say.

There are times, even now, when I imagine taking Mom to places I'd visited—especially places in Europe, like Nice or Interlaken. I imagine her delight as she whooshes along inside a TGV, awash in the French language that she wouldn't understand, captivated by the gorgeous rural scenery. I imagine her barking at me to Wait up! while she catches up with me on a Swiss mountain-hiking trail, or I imagine her sitting on a flat rock, as I did in Nice, enjoying the caressing breeze of an evening on a pebbly Mediterranean beach, staring out at the waves. I imagine Mom's happiness as she takes one more trip to Korea, freshly astonished at how much the country keeps changing, and changing, shedding its old skin every year.

What would you give for one more day with your mom, for one more opportunity to take a trip somewhere with her? I can say without hesitation that I'd give my life. My whole life. Sometimes, the silence is deafening; it's still hard to believe I live in a world without Mom. The planet, like clockwork, hits that moment in its orbit, the one that marks when Suk Ja Kim was born in 1943, just seven orbits before the Korean War. Now, the Earth simply passes that birth-moment by; there's nothing—no one—left to herald, and all that remains to mark Mom's coming-into-existence is memory, and the three sons who do their best to keep memory alive.

Happy Birthday, Mom.


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Ave, Korean!

Love him or hate him, The Korean, of Ask a Korean! fame, has been offering analysis of the Sewol disaster. Thanks to a post at ROK Drop, I clicked over to the original "Part II" article, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. TK breaks the tragedy down into four chronological phases and zeroes in on three principal actors, then does an overview of how these actors behaved during those time frames, noting the sad counterfactuals—the would-haves, could-haves, should-haves, and might-haves—along the way.

TK's body count assumes that the missing are already dead, which I agree is a pretty safe assumption at this point. There's simply no getting around the hypothermia/anoxia issue. As of this writing, the actual body count stands at 228 with 74 missing, assuming a total of 476 passengers and crew (which may not actually be the case, given the existence of at least two unverified passengers, now known to be dead).

If you're so inclined, start with The Korean's "Part I" article here.


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not needing pills

I find myself in a strange, possibly interstitial state today: from this morning to now, I've had no need of pills, aspirin or otherwise, to get around. There's pain, but it's not as debilitating as it is on most days. After I cook up some lunch, I'm going to take a bunch of aspirin before I head off to the office, mainly as a precaution before I do my several thousand steps: we don't want to tempt fate, after all.

But for the moment, I simply need no pills, and it's weirding me out.


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the big NO

Friday evening, I emailed my editing test back to Metatron. I think I did a fine job with the editing I did do, but I failed miserably at meeting Metatron's deadline and working at the expected production volume. Metatron sent me almost thirty single-spaced pages of work, you see, and the prose was so shot full of errors that it took me more than an hour per page. Factor in a lunch break (my stomach lining needs protection from all the aspirin I've been taking), and I managed to edit only five... measly... pages.

So even before I get a reply back from Metatron's Powers That Be (assuming they bother to reply at all), I already know I'm no longer a candidate for that job. I take comfort in the notion that I'm a thorough editor, but thirty pages in six hours? You've got to be kidding.

And that's that. Now I get to have a long weekend, except for an hour of tutoring on Sunday evening. Monday is Children's Day, so no school; Tuesday is the Buddha's Birthday, so again, no school for the Catholics. Perhaps I'll go see a movie in Gyeongsan. "Spider-Man 2"?


UPDATE: Le grand NON may have become le grand PEUT-ETRE. One of the Metatron bigwigs wrote back to say that he didn't seriously expect me to do thirty pages in six hours, and that he hoped I'd consider continuing with my candidacy. He promised to send me another document to work on next week.


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out of the starting gate

Metatron has just emailed me a pile of manuscripts to edit. This is part of a multi-step job-application process: Part One was the interview I attended last week; Part Two is a review of my writing sample (sent last week) and my editing skills; Part Three will likely be a second interview in Seoul—but only if I do acceptable editing work today. So a lot depends on today.

All for now.


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"Western medicine"

Yesterday, because I've been planning to hit an herbal clinic, I put the question to my pronunciation students: "Which is better—Western medicine or Chinese-style medicine?" The response was nearly unanimous, and somewhat surprising, as my kids said:

"Western medicine."
"Western medicine."
"...Western medicine..."
"Western medicine."
"Western medicine..."
"...Western medicine."
"Western medicine."

I was so surprised that I failed to ask the logical follow-up question: "Why do you think this?"

Are the results of this impromptu survey a reflection of the attitudes of most modern youths these days? Me, I would have thought that Korean pride, or some other nationalistic or culture-centric motivator, would have impelled my students to vote strongly in favor of Eastern medicine (known as hanyak, 한약, here on the peninsula). How wrong I was.

Are modern Korean college kids more practical than their elders? Chinese-style medicine used to be very popular; sometime between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the Korean government stopped pharmacies from selling traditional herbal remedies, forcing the drugstores to carry only Western-style, or mostly Western-style, medicine. Perhaps trust in Chinese medicine is, thanks to the government's move, more of an older-generation sentiment these days. I'd like to think the decrease in trust has something to do with the rise in Western-style scientific/empirical pragmatism (the existence of ki meridians isn't scientifically verifiable, after all), but these same kids believe all that nonsense about how blood type influences personality, which doesn't instill confidence in their overall rationality.*

Could it also be that the kids didn't want to offend their Western teacher by waving the sheer awesomeness of Eastern medicine in his face? At this point, I have no idea since, like an idiot, I failed to ask the Why question. However, I suspect this hypothesis is wrong: Koreans, especially in groups, can be fairly opinionated. With proper prompting, one can discover their convictions with ease; if they feel it's the right moment to give an opinion, Korean folks very often don't hold back. This is especially true if they feel comfortable with their interlocutor, as my pronunciation students generally feel with me.

Perhaps I'll ask Why next week.

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*To be fair, the American public is prone to its own irrationalities. Note, for example, the oat-bran fad: on some days, oat bran is good for your heart; on others, there's no scientific evidence that it benefits you. Note, too, that an embarrassingly high percentage of Americans believe the Earth is no more than 6,000 years old, that aliens routinely visit our planet and anally probe us, that crystals can somehow focus magical healing energies, and that John Edward can actually speak with the dead in front of a live audience. The American love of lottery tickets is also evidence of my culture's irrationality.


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challenging my skepticism

My supervisor has suggested I try a local Chinese-style herbal clinic that's in town (probably a haneui-weon/한의원). He went there to get a problem resolved and came out of the experience a believer. From what I gather, there's some acupuncture involved, plus some palpations and medications to aid ki flow. I've been skeptical of this sort of medicine for years, but a clinic visit doesn't sound expensive, so I may as well give it a shot.

I had initially wanted to go to the Chinese clinic this morning, but (1) when I initially got out of bed at 8AM, I was in too much pain; and (2) after taking my meds and going back to bed, I woke up around 11:30AM, which made me too late to visit either my own clinic or this new place. So perhaps this afternoon, or sometime tomorrow, I'll give the new place a shot. Maybe the witch-doctor will just unblock a jammed ki-meridian and poof—the pain will miraculously disappear. As I wrote before, I'm not afraid to use myself as a lab rat, and I'm curious to see how my experience will (or won't) dovetail with my supervisor's.


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193

As of this writing, 193 bodies have been retrieved from the Sewol ferry disaster. At this point, I'm pretty sure that all the rest of the missing are dead. It's simply a matter of how much time has passed, combined with the mortal limits of human endurance. Any "air pockets" would have lost their ability to sustain life by now, if living people had been using them. Hypothermia probably claimed the lives of most of the trapped students and adults early on, and random corpses continue to float out of the ship and into the open sea. Rescuers have strung nets, kilometers long, far from the site of the sinking in order to catch the bodies that might have drifted from the downed vessel; one can only hope that the nets are both wide and deep enough to intercept the lost.

I couldn't help noticing that the rate at which the body count has been ticking upward has slowed. I don't know, exactly, what this might imply. At worst, it means the rest of the bodies have already been carried away from the Sewol by random currents and are eddying into the dark distance. If that's the case, and if bodies slip past the nets, a full accounting may never be possible, and some families will be unable to experience the necessary closure that comes with knowing, definitively, that a loved one has perished.

At this point, all that I can do is what I've already been doing: just wait and see. The rescue—more like a salvage or a simple recovery, at this point—will proceed at its ordained pace, and Korea will continue to mourn.

On Twitter, I saw the following poignant image, which symbolizes the sadness of the parents who have lost their children:

I'm sure that many of those grieving parents wish they had the miraculous power to raise the ship and extract their children, alive or dead. I wish they had that power, too, but that's not the reality. Right now, the reality is a number: 193.

UPDATE: In the hours since the above post was written, the death toll has hopped up to 205. Twelve more bodies have been found.


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salt

Lookit my big sack:

The above 5-kilogram bag of sea salt comes courtesy of the local bargain grocery, the one that has the surprisingly cheap deals. It cost me a little over W5,000, or about 90 cents per kilogram. This is a Costco-scale purchase, of course: I can't see myself using up this much salt anytime soon, so I expect this bag will be following me around for years.

SALT!


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tarred

I'm tired. Walked 8,500 steps today, and I never made it to the clinic. In fact, it's almost impossible for me to make it to the clinic on Mondays and Wednesdays, mainly because I teach both early and later in the day (English + Korean classes). Walking to the clinic from campus is just too much. Tuesdays are all right for clinic visits because I have only one morning class, then a slew of hours to kill from 11AM to 5:30PM. Same goes for Thursdays.

I'm also tired because my second class, today, was wearisome. I don't know what got into some of the kids, but a few were harder to manage than usual—very talky, like American secondary-school students. I may have to separate some of them from their buddies next time around. It sucks to have to manage my students at all, but as I've noted before, Korean college kids are at about the same level of social and sexual maturity as American high schoolers.*

I had thought about doing some test grading tonight, since I didn't get any of that done over the weekend while I was in Seoul. I've already apologized to my Monday kids about not having their midterm grades ready. The same apology is going to go out to my Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday kids as well. Yes, I'm lame.

Meanwhile, Metatron has asked me to do an editing test this coming Friday (and possibly Saturday and Sunday as well). The test will determine whether I'm a competent editor (I may well prove myself not to be), and whether I can perform under Metatron's strict deadline pressure. This means that, as regards whatever lesson-planning and test-grading I have to do, all that work needs to be done by Thursday night. This is a "crunch" week for me.

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*Think about it: Korean kids spend their entire childhood focusing on college entrance exams, the sine qua non of their existence. This focus is so intense that kids will actually commit suicide if their exam results prove unsatisfactory. There's no time, then, for young people to have real social lives or otherwise to explore their budding pubertal urges. Pretty much all of that has to wait until college: the four bright years during which Koreans have the latitude to take time to smell the roses. Korean college kids, unlike their American counterparts, don't seem to take college all that seriously. Much of college is playtime for Korean students, despite the looming prospect of getting jobs and plunging back into the hectic, high-pressure realities of the corporate world. Sure: Korean college kids complain about their workload, but the truth of the matter is that they spend an inordinate amount of time coloring their hair bizarrely, experimenting with miniskirts and other budding-adult fashions, and getting drunk. (Come to think of it, that's really not so different from what American college kids do.) I saw this at Sookmyung and I see it at my current job: kids aren't serious about taking responsibility, and it won't be until after they're in their new jobs that they'll be exposed to the harsh reality that adults have repeatedly warned them about.

To paraphrase Nabokov: college is, for Koreans, the one brief spark of freedom between two eternities of oppressive, daily-grind darkness. After graduation, it's back to conformity.


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John McCrarey, beef belches, and Herbert Hoover

The first thing you need to know about John McCrarey is that he has the most impressive radio voice in the world, easily rivaling that of James Earl Jones. John's voice doesn't have the same sinister, subterranean quality that Jones's voice has, but as I told John today when we met at Tabom Brazil in Itaewon, he should try working for KBS Broadcasting if he ever gets bored of life as a retiree. Thanks to his rich, sonorous vocal cords, he's got a lucrative career as a radio personality and/or voice actor ahead of him. "A face for radio," he joked.

John is a jovial presence. He noted that our meeting was nine years in the making, since we'd been following each other's writing for a long time. (John blogs at Long Time Gone, and will doubtless soon be publishing his own version of our encounter.) He also seems much more interested in talking about his interlocutor than in talking about himself. His relaxed, easygoing style kept things comfortable.

John's lovely wife Jee Yeun (지연) graced us with her luminous presence as well, and we three talked in a mixture of English and Korean the entire time. Jee Yeun is happy to be back in Korea; life in the States was boring to her Seoulite sensibilities. She and John go back to America every six months, however, so I hope that, on her next trip to the States, she takes along whatever she needs to keep from being bored.

Tabom Brazil proved to be a larger, calmer version of Copacabana, the other Brazilian rodizio in Itaewon. Tabom's setup for the food is roughly the same as Copa's: there's a salad bar, of sorts, along with a "hot" station that features carby entrées like feijoada (meat & beans), rice, and even French fries. The meat-on-a-sword guy floats over to your table and offers you a cut of sirloin or garlic beef or pork or chicken or whatever. I tried to impress our server, who was Brazilian, by thanking him in Portuguese: obrigado, but I don't think he was impressed that I knew only one word. The server, meanwhile, knew the Korean equivalent of "Bon appétit."

Conversation ranged all over, but generally focused on immediate family, friends, and relatives. John had many questions for me, and he tackled the task of unpeeling the mysterious layers of the Big Hominid with the élan of a professional interviewer. Later on, when we left Tabom and went to Coffeesmith, a local café just up the street (where the above photo was taken), conversation turned a bit more political. Jee Yeun knew a barista at Coffeesmith (his name escapes me, but he's also in the picture above); this gentleman hooked us up with free mugs of whatever we wanted. Since I don't drink coffee, I got my usual hot chocolate, which turned out to be quite good.

All too soon, it was time for me to get to my train. We said our goodbyes on the street; I caught a taxi to Seoul Station and talked with the taxi driver on the way—mainly about the state of traffic. The driver was afraid there might be traffic jams on the way I had chosen to take, but there were no jams, as it turned out, and we got to Seoul Station with plenty of time to spare.

In fact, I had an hour. I spent several minutes on the second floor of the station just people-watching, noting that women with kids—just like in America—tend to dress way more casually than women with no kids. I reflected again on the previous day: I had spent the evening at dinner with my buddy Tom, and we were both surprised to discover that the Buddha's Birthday parade was happening that very evening and not ten or so days later, when the actual national holiday, Seokga-tanshin-il, is celebrated.

I should note that Tom and I didn't eat the galmaegi-sal that I'd been expecting. Tom took me to a different favorite restaurant of his, and we enjoyed grilled galbi instead. So it was beef yesterday and beef today—a veritable beefucopia. When I found out that my KTX train was already parked and ready for boarding almost forty minutes before departure, I climbed aboard, found my seat, and began experiencing beef belches—noisome, not-too-pleasant echoes of the meat I'd eaten earlier. Luckily, I had the train all to myself for about twenty minutes, which gave my belch clouds time to dissipate before the passengers came in and we got rolling.

The trip home was uneventful until I was within 80 meters of my building. I got off the local train at Hayang Station, walked through the light rain to my neighborhood, and went over to the neighborhood garbage pile to pick up my food-waste bucket.* The way it works, in this area, is that you separate out your trash into various categories, and food waste must be dumped into a special black-and-orange bucket (black sides and handle, orange snap-top). Normally, what then happens is that you leave the bucket at the local garbage pile with all the other trash, and the collectors come and dump your food waste into their trucks. My bucket had been set out almost a week previous, and the goddamn garbage men (true men of garbage, in my opinion) had refused to empty it out. So I left the bucket where it was when I went to Seoul, and now that I was back, I wanted to see whether anything had been done about my food trash. I noticed that the bucket no longer had my plastic bag in it (I normally line the bucket with a plastic shopping bag to make food-waste removal easier for the trash dude), but I also saw, with horror and fury, that were was still food in my bucket. I did a double-take: the food waste in my bucket wasn't mine!

What fucking cocksucker did THAT? I wondered. I'd like to snap his fucking neck. So basically, at some point, my bucket did get emptied out, but some enterprising asshole then dumped his food waste into my bucket. I stomped home with the bucket, emptied the stinking contents—foul chicken chunks and ramyeon noodles—into a Ziploc bag, stuffed that bag into a regular garbage bag, and prepped it for a return to the garbage pile. A chicken in every pot, indeed. I knew I couldn't get revenge on the chicken-dumper, but I was determined to make the garbage men pick up my garbage this time around.

It was a weird, ugly ending to an otherwise fine (albeit rainy) day.

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*I have no idea how else to describe how our neighborhood handles garbage than to style it a "garbage pile." It's literally a pile of garbage—a mess of pre-labeled, standardized garbage bags filled with (presumably) non-recyclable trash and regular plastic shopping bags stuffed with sorted recycling. The food-waste buckets are usually grouped together off to one side, each bucket marked with the owner's building name and apartment number. In principle, anyone can come along and steal your bucket, so there's something of an honor system at work with these receptacles.

UPDATE: John's fine take on our meet-up can be found here.


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back among the pubes

Yes, ladies, I'm back in my favorite pube motel. And I'm delighted!

The dour old ajumma's greeting was hilarious. "Wow... ajeossi's back," she droned. Her bored, weary, cynical tone completely undermined her words. For her, my appearance was the most unsurprising, unexciting thing in the universe.

I'm here tonight (Saturday night) as well, then it's back to Hayang on Sunday after a session of face-stuffing at Tabom in Itaewon with the evil and crafty John McCrarey.


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