Ave, Bill!

My good friend Bill Keezer writes an excellent, excellent post on American railways. His encyclopedic blog entry accomplishes something that few posts, these days, can do for me: it takes a subject to which I've paid little attention and makes it fascinating. Granted, I've lived in Europe and ridden its rail system, so I'm at least cursorily familiar with what Bill is talking about when he refers to Europe's trains. But I don't have the same deep feeling that Bill does when it comes to railways, and it's that feeling that shines through in his marvelous piece. A good teacher is one who can convince you that the subject he's teaching is imbued with urgency and importance. Bill's "American Passenger Rail: A Great Debacle" is a must-read because it manages to do exactly that.


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Happy Chuseok!

Today, Monday, September 8, is the official day of Chuseok in South Korea. Chuseok is often called a "Korean harvest festival" or even "Korean Thanksgiving." It's a time for families to gather together at the keun-jip—literally, the "big house," i.e., the house of the eldest sibling (usually the eldest brother). Lots of good food and familial conviviality, although I sense the tradition is dying away, bit by bit, as smartphones erode our sense of family, and other types of tech keep us from wanting to hang together for very long.

This Chuseok is supposed to be special, astronomically speaking, because there won't simply be a traditional harvest full moon: there's going to be a supermoon (September 9 for you readers in America: Korea is thirteen hours ahead of the US east coast). I'd like to find myself somewhere very dark and isolated to witness this amazing moon, but alas, I'm probably going to be hiking up the very light-polluted Namsan.

Today, my buddy Tom has invited me to go along with him and his wife and son to Weolmido, a humble little island on the west coast. I've been there once before, on a trip I took to the coast alone; the island is firmly attached to the mainland by bridges and a slew of other structures, to the point that it's hard to realize that you've left the mainland and are now on the island. There's a nice, windy boardwalk on Weolmido, as well as a long row of seafood restaurants, most of which specialize in hwae, or sashimi (raw fish). Tom is mainly interested in the nearby Chinatown, so we're likely to visit that area and chow down on some "real" Chinese food, since that's where so many ethnic Chinese folks live.

May your own Chuseok be a happy one, whether you find yourself with in-laws or relatives or friends, or even if you find yourself alone and quietly enjoying the scenery. Most of the country also has Tuesdays off, and some of us are lucky to have Wednesday off as well. Personally, I'll be busy on both of those days, but at least I'll enjoy a placid Monday among friends.

Happy Chuseok!


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15.3K

So—lessons learned! I faced my fear and did the double-summiting thing again tonight, braving the steep, steep bus route back up to the top of Namsan. It was about as bad as I thought it would be, but I must grudgingly admit that it was absolutely fantastic cardio. I walk the way I drive: competitively. (It's amazing I didn't get more speeding tickets than I did back when I lived in Front Royal and was tear-assing along Route 66.) This means that, when I see a person ascending the mountain ahead of me, I'm determined to pass him or her. Despite being tired, despite gasping as if I were having sex, I generally chug forward and pass the offending fellow hiker with a grim sense of triumph.

Another thing I learned was that the actual number of steps it takes to double-summit Namsan is only about 15.1K. The route from my neighborhood in Chungmuro 5-ga, through Dongguk campus, up to the summit of Namsan, then down the descending bus route to Namsan Library, then back up to the summit's bus parking lot, then back down through Dongguk to my Chungmuro neighborhood is only about 7.3 miles. I can get all this walking done between 9PM and midnight. It takes a little over two hours, given that I walk at a rate of about 3.2 miles per hour (approx 5.2 kph).

So how in the world did I manage nearly 26.1K steps the other day? Easy: it was a work day, so I had packed in several thousand steps just by going to and fro upon the campus, and up and down in it.* I normally get in nearly 7,000 to 8,000 steps on work days; this includes my tendency to prowl the classroom actively: I'm not a hide-behind-the-podium type of teacher, or a sit-on-my-ass type. My point is that I'm always racking up steps on the days that I work (although I think I slack off a bit on weekends). Sometimes, instead of hitting Namsan, I've taken to walking over to the Jongno district, which isn't far from where I live. It's not a bad way to pack in another 3,000 to 5,000 steps, and if I were to walk all the way to the Myeongdong Lotte Hotel, I'd probably rack up all 10,000 required daily steps.

Life has changed for me ever since I began to take my phone's pedometer seriously. Smartphones are extremely destructive when it comes to social relationships and basic human interaction, but on occasion they have their benefits, and I think my steadily improving physical condition is a direct result of my incorporation of the pedometer into my lifestyle.

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*Ten points to you if you know, with some precision, the literary reference. No Googling!


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mastering my fear

Tonight, I'm going to attempt the double-summiting of Namsan again, but this time, instead of taking the stairs (which offer a short-but-steep route to the top), I'm going to go back up the dreaded descending bus route—the one that terminates at Namsan Public library, on the Sookmyung University side of the mountain. Really not looking forward to this, but it's something I feel I have to try.


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sleep deficit

I've been waking up late—way late—these past couple of days. I think I'm laboring under a sleep deficit as I adjust to my new life at Dongguk University. Since the start of the semester, I've been averaging about 4.5 to 5 hours a night of sleep. Part of the reason for the deficit is not only that I'm learning the ropes at a new place of work: it's also that my Namsan hikes take over two hours to do. (The recent 26.096K-step walk took almost four hours, as I had hiked about twelve miles.) The hikes are draining, but because they're exercise, they also leave me unable to go to sleep right away. Exercise at night is often not recommended for this very reason: it can energize you before bedtime. But given the type of exercise I'm doing, I find it's much more pleasant to hike at night, without the summer heat and the annoying crowds, than during the day. Perhaps that'll change come winter, when the fair-weather pussies abandon the mountain paths and leave them to us chug-along introverts.

The problem with sleeping in is that you're left with fewer productive hours during the day. This is different from what I've written earlier about my sleep habits: as I've noted a few times before, my normal tendency, during vacation, is to go to sleep late and to wake up late, but to get about the same amount of sleep, per night, as a regular person—about 7 or 8 hours. Before the current Chuseok break, I was "undersleeping," and now that I've got a few days off, I'm radically oversleeping, which is not a good thing, given how much I have to accomplish before school starts back up this coming Thursday. It also doesn't help that I'll be gone all day tomorrow on a trip to the coast, and that I'll be working for large chunks of the day, at my other job, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

So today is it, as far as getting things done goes. And I've already woken up late. Most reliable prediction of what's going to happen, then: I'll get about 50% of my to-do list done today, and the remaining 50% will be done, in bits and pieces, over the next three days. Damn you to hell, sleep deficit!


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Ave, Elisson!

Elisson blogs and waxes poetic about his recent colonoscopy.

This calls for a poem of my own:

when science's shaft
is shoved deep in your aft
and the world is gloomy and dire
take heart, for you know
that no polyps will grow
in the tube where your ass-cannon fires

for isn't it rich
to be science's bitch
as the thing up your bum will attest
your doc sets a date
he says, "Let's irrigate!"
and your balls retreat into your chest

with your insides ballooned
and your brain all cocooned
and your colon quite prepped by the teams
'tis a matter of time
for that feeling sublime
to produce some magnificent screams

it takes balls made of brass
for a tube in your ass
to be given the freedom to roam
glad it's you and not me
on the table at three
as a snake makes your asshole its home


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new "frankly speaking" post

You now know where to look for my "frankly speaking" posts, so go to it! I just finished writing a post about the annoyances I experienced this past Friday.


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26.096K

You read that right: 26,096 steps tonight. A new record. That's a September average of 15,582 steps per day. I've crossed the asymptote. But will I stay in the over-15,000 range? At a guess, probably not. My daily average has been all over the place this month.

This was a very educational walk, I must say, and I'm happy to report that my hip bothered me not at all. Allow me to describe tonight's little adventure.

I started strong—stronger than I thought I would, given that I'd eaten a "linner," i.e., a late lunch or early dinner. Normally, when I hike a few hours after eating, I get the raging urge to poop. Tonight, that didn't happen, and I credit Tom's gift of Metamucil for keeping me regular. All hail psyllium fiber! In any event, I tromped with confidence onto Dongguk's campus, marched over to Trailhead 8, lumbered over to the ascending bus route, and walked faster than everyone except the hardcore bikers and runners, all the way to Namsan's summit.

Once at the summit, I drank from a water fountain to refuel, went back down to the bus parking lot that sits just below the summit (thereby forcing tourists to walk about a hundred meters up a very steep, asphalt-covered hill), and followed the descending bus route downhill.

I was very curious as to where this route led because, to be honest, I'd forgotten. I used to walk up Namsan fairly routinely from about 2006 to 2007 (I slacked off and re-fattened up during the 2007-08 academic year), and during that time I'd discovered plenty of routes to the top, but most of those paths had faded from memory during the intervening years.

One thing I immediately noticed was that the descending bus route was significantly steeper than the ascending route. I began to quail: I had planned to walk back up this same route, then down my regular route to go home, but the descending bus route was looking to be a bitch to walk back up. I no longer wanted to make the ascent, so I told myself that, if this route ended up anywhere close to the National Theater (which is where the ascending bus route begins), I would simply walk straight home. Then I hit the bottom of the route and realized where I was, which wasn't anywhere near the National Theater.

I found myself standing close to Namsan Public Library. In front of me was Soweollo, one of the streets that glides over the lower part of Namsan. Were I to cross Soweollo and go down a set of stairs, I'd be in Huam-dong, which is one district away from Cheongpa-dong—the district where my old university, Sookmyung Women's University, is located.

So I had a choice: I could go back up the steep bus route I had just descended, or I could take the stairs, which is what I used to do when I was teaching at Sookmyung. Quailing once again at the thought of hiking up that long, steep road, I decided that the stairs would be the lesser of two evils, and I resolved to go up them without stopping.

Somehow, I managed to do just that, which is a testament to how much my physical condition has improved since I began hiking up Namsan. Back in mid-August, when I had just come to Seoul and my brother Sean was here with his friend Jeff, I wasn't able to ascend the Namsan stairs without stopping. I probably had to stop six or seven times before we finally made the top. That was nearly a month ago. Over the past two or three weeks, I've been hitting Namsan almost religiously, and it's now obvious that the hiking has been good in terms of both strength and cardio. The sweat and effort are finally paying off, not just physiologically, but also in terms of belt notches. That is, in fact, one of my missions this weekend: to get more holes punched in my belts, and to buy new socks to replace my poor hole-y ones.

The route up the stairs was, I knew, much quicker than the bus route, but what I lost in distance I gained in steepness. I went very slowly up the stairs, but at no point did I actually stop, which is something I can be proud of. There was a huge line near the top of the stairs: people waiting to take the cable car back down the mountain. Wimps. Pussies. I arrived at Namsan's summit for the second time that night, went back down the hill to the bus parking lot, and bought myself some refreshment at the CU convenience store that has taken the place of the small row of souvenir stalls and restaurants that used to sit on that patch of real estate. I once ate a plate tangsuyuk there for W10,000. It wasn't bad. Man... that was years ago.

Properly refreshed, I walked the rest of the way down, stopping at a takoyaki stall to eat some octopus balls (bet you didn't know they had balls, eh? when you think about it, an octopus looks pretty much like a flying scrotum). By the time I reached my yeogwan and stripped off my sweat-soaked clothing, I saw on my pedometer that I had walked 26,096 steps, and had done it all before midnight (the pedometer resets to zero at midnight).

Again, I'm not sure how often I'll be repeating this double-summiting feat, but I have to say that it felt damn good. It was a great ending to a day that had had its annoyances (I'll be writing about those momentarily), and it proved that, even when I'm tired after summiting Namsan once, I can summit the mountain again by taking the stairs route without stopping.


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Namsanic ambitions

Tonight, which marks the first night of my five-day weekend,* I'll be attempting something a little bit different: I'm going to walk both bus routes that go up and down the flanks of Namsan. I'll start the way I normally do, walk until I reach the summit, then instead of walking back down the same bus route, I'll walk the other route down the mountain. Once I reach the bottom, I'll walk back up to the summit (well, almost to the summit), then I'll walk my normal route back down past the university and into my lovely little blue-collar neighborhood. It'll be like hiking up and down the mountain four times, and will probably take me until sometime past midnight to complete the entire périple.

My only worry is that my left hip joint might do more than twinge. Here's hoping that isn't the case, but it's a distinct possibility, given the long distance I'll be covering tonight. Those worries aside, here's a pic of a big hominid's face, in profile, etched into the pathway that I normally take up the mountain:

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*I'm actually going to be, uh, otherwise occupied on Tuesday and Wednesday, so this won't be much of a vacation.


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you learn when you teach

My buddy Charles sends me a link to an article with the grammatically dubious* title "Students Learn More If They'll Need to Teach Others" that supports my contention that more student-centeredness is better: get the students teaching to get them to master a subject. Charles's brief email says:

Of course, it will probably come as no surprise to you, but I thought of you and your pedagogical model when I read the article and thought I would send it along.

The article says, in part:

People learn better and recall more when they think they will soon need to teach the material to someone else.

“When compared to learners expecting a test, learners expecting to teach recalled more material correctly, they organized their recall more effectively, and they had better memory for especially important information,” says John Nestojko, a researcher in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.

[...]

“The immediate implication is that the mindset of the student before and during learning can have a significant impact on learning, and that positively altering a student’s mindset can be effectively achieved through rather simple instructions,” says Nestojko, who is lead author of the study.

Study participants who expected to teach produced more complete and better-organized free recall of the passage and, in general, correctly answered more questions about the passage than did participants expecting a test, particularly questions covering main points.

“When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure,” Nestojko says. “Our results suggest that students also turn to these types of effective learning strategies when they expect to teach.”

The study suggests that instilling an expectation to teach may be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom.

Abso-fucking-lutely. So, fellow instructors: quit lecturing, step back, and let the students have the floor. Don't make your class into "The Teacher Show." It's not all about you. In a place like Korea, where student passivity is part of a larger hierarchical culture that views students as empty receptacles waiting to receive wisdom and knowledge from their elders, this teaching paradigm is revolutionary, even though it's really no big shakes in American higher learning. This is especially true in a language class, as the onus is implicitly on the students to produce. How can they produce if they're always quietly goggling videos and goddamn PowerPoint slides? Some teachers can't let this teacher-centered paradigm go, however; they're too entrenched in a misguided way of thinking. Unfortunately, many students are this way, too: they resist being made responsible for their own learning, basically because they're lazy, and because the human mind follows Newton's laws of motion, especially the law about inertia. I'm not saying that videos and PowerPoint should be banned from the classroom, but their role should be, at best, minimal. Absolutely minimal.

Pace Charles's kind words, the student-centered approach isn't really my paradigm, per se, as I'm sure Charles himself would readily affirm (in fact, Charles has written, on Liminality, about his own experiences in student-centered teaching, so this is as much his paradigm as it is mine). It's just an approach that I hope more teachers will adopt.

You learn when you teach.

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*A quick review of "if"-conditional grammar can be found at my other blog. The title should ideally read, "Students Will Learn More If They Need to Teach Others."

OTHER LINKS: My round-robin method explained.


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confusion, fatigue, and excellence

Today moved a bit like a three-act play. It began with morning confusion, segued into afternoon fatigue, and concluded with early-evening excellence.

Yesterday, I had been sent a confusing pair of text messages, the first of which said that I had "English Clinic" (a one-on-one tutoring session) at 11AM the following day, despite the clinic's having been scheduled for 2PM on my printed time sheet. Knowing full well that this is Korea, where nothing moves in a linear manner and where snafus caused by lack of care and foresight are common, I simply rolled with it and texted back an "OK." A few minutes later, another text came saying I had no clinic the next day. I texted back a long-winded Korean-language version of "Huh?" and, after receiving no response, I decided to call the cell-phone number in question. I reached an apologetic girl who said that she was new to the department; I explained the two text messages that had come in, and she said I just needed to come in the following morning at 11. Turns out the second text had been sent in error (perhaps it had been meant for a different teacher). When I checked with our head office assistant about the English Clinic problem, the assistant said my English Zone* hour had been canceled, and I would be doing two hours of English Clinic instead.

So this morning, I went over to do my 11AM English Clinic session, and that's when I learned, upon talking with the guy running the clinic today, that I had no 2PM session scheduled. It's typical, in Korea, for parts of a bureaucracy not to be in sync with each other, and this snafu was obviously due to a lack of clear communication. I shrugged and, again, went with the flow. Okay, then: no 2PM session. Fine. For the session I did do, I sat down with a student who spoke excellent English. He went by the Western name Jack, and he had just returned from a year-long stay in Michigan. He said he was dying to go back, even though he felt he had experienced some racism from people who seemed to have trouble with his accent. Jack and I worked primarily on the nuances of American English pronunciation, and all too quickly, our session was over. I was left with several hours to kill.

I didn't have class until 3:30PM, so I grabbed lunch and loafed around. At 3:30, I found myself in a sweatbox of a classroom, teaching seventeen or eighteen intermediate-level students reading and writing. The kids were good, but the classroom was warm, humid, and cramped, and slogging through the textbook was a bit of a drag for everybody, myself included. I almost had the feeling that Unit 1 of our textbook might have been too easy for these kids; it's still too early to judge such a thing, but that was my impression today. I didn't have the heart to assign these tired souls homework over the Chuseok break, so I bid the class farewell by asking the stragglers to buy their textbooks and telling the rest of the class to go read the second half of Unit 1 in preparation for next week—nothing more.

The next class, an advanced-level listening/discussion session, came hard on the heels of the intermediate-level class. We got off to a late start because the prof who was in the room before us didn't watch her time very well, but let me tell you: these new students of mine were on point. I was thrilled to have them. Only seven out of sixteen students had shown up on Monday; today, I had ten, and I divided the kids into two teams of five each.

I kicked off the discussion by telling the story of how I had once helped an old, drunk halmeoni on a winter night some years back. This happened at a crowded bus stop, and no one else moved to help the woman. I asked my students to discuss the possible reasons why no one except yours truly bothered to help the old lady, who was in danger of freezing to death in the bitter cold and wind. Both teams did a great job of analyzing the situation and coming up with explanations; we spent about twenty minutes, as a class, kicking these ideas around. One student even used the English term diffusion of responsibility as part of his analysis of the situation, which pleased me to no end because that was precisely the concept I'd been hoping someone would bring up.

With that as a warmup, I then showed the students a YouTube video of a recent incident in a Shanghai subway car, in which people got up and ran away when a white man in the car fainted and collapsed to the floor (see video here).** As a class, we discussed the behavior of the Shanghainese who ran away from the fainting man. Was this symptomatic of a selfish society? Were the people afraid of the possible legal repercussions that come with helping someone who misunderstands the nature of that help? One student ventured an intelligent speculation: the first lady who got up and ran from the fainting man was a trigger, and the rest of the subway passengers were reacting to her and not to the man as he collapsed.

So I was extremely pleased with how perceptive these advanced students were, how logically they analyzed the situation, and how willingly they volunteered their opinions, with almost no prompting on my part. I'm planning to turn this class into something of an American-style seminar, now that I know what these students are capable of. I expect great things from them. (While I'm at it, I also plan to do something like the good old round-robin method with my reading/writing students because I want them participating actively in my class, not merely enduring it. As my motto goes: task-oriented, student-centered. The less the teacher is an active presence in the classroom, the better.***)

The one problem I had in that classroom was that I couldn't figure out how to get the audio going. Audio is crucial because the advanced class has a heavy listening component, and most of that component will come from the CD accompanying the textbook. So one of my several missions, after Chuseok break, is to work out all the technical kinks that come with using multimedia hardware and software in the classroom. For now, though, I'm basking in the knowledge that my classes are all generally quite good, but my advanced class is positively stellar. It's going to be very painful, at the end of the semester, to fit these kids into a curve. Right now—today, at least—I think they all deserve "A"s.

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*English Zone is a free-talk session that gives students the chance to flex their English-language muscles in a somewhat unstructured environment through directed conversation.

**The way the man's legs behave during his collapse leads me to believe he might have been faking. Was this performance art? A psych experiment? A prank?

***A corollary of my motto is Fuck Fucking PowerPoint. For PowerPoint to be effective, the students have to stop what they're doing and focus their attention upon a single screen. This is no different from making the students endure a lecture, and longtime readers already know my opinion of lecture as a teaching technique.


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Immigration aftermath

Bureaucracy ain't pretty. As Dr. McCoy said in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home":

The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.

I waited nearly four hours at Immigration before my number finally came up. A little girl ran around the crowded office, entertainingly cute and tiny. A French guy and girl, both in their twenties, came in and jabbered in French about their documents and the immigration regs. A group of Germans came in and spoke in Teutonic gibberish: I understand French but not German. A South Asian man and his wife waited with serene patience and the occasional wry smile. How else to deal with bureaucracy, and remain sane, except by finding the humor in it? We all sat around, a vast sea of humanity, just... waiting.

Finally: ticket number 109. Me. The staffer I met was friendly, at least at first. He riffled through my paperwork and found nothing missing, but then he asked me when I had moved back to Seoul. I confirmed that I'd moved back around mid-August, and he shook his head mournfully, sucking his breath in through clenched teeth in that classically Korean gesture that signifies an incipient problem. Some of his friendliness drained away, to be replaced by an annoying officiousness.

"You didn't report your move within the appropriate window," he said flatly. "So there's a fine." Now, I've lived in Korea for nearly ten years, and this is the first I've heard about the need for the South Korean government to track my movements that closely. And I sure as hell have never heard anything about being fined for not reporting a move. A fine. A fucking fine. Given how little money I had in the bank, I could feel my heart imploding like the planet Vulcan in JJ Abrams's "Star Trek."

"How much might this fine be?"

"I'd have to check," the staffer responded.

"At a guess—how much?"

"Maybe W100,000...?" he said.

"On top of the W60,000 I'm paying you?" I was incredulous.

"No—total," he said.

I had about W70,000 in my pocket, and pulling out another W30,000 would leave me with practically nothing until my university's payday on the 17th. I was going to have to call in an emergency loan.

"Do I have to pay the fine today?" I asked.

"No, but you need to take your paperwork and this form to the third floor and talk about the fine with those people," said my staffer. "We can't process the rest of your paperwork until you pay the fine. First, pay the W60,000 over at that desk to get the stamps. Come back here, then take all this paperwork upstairs." I went over to the counter where the voucher stamps were sold, paid my W60,000, lumbered back to my staffer, took my paperwork, and went upstairs to the third floor.

The third floor was much, much quieter, and there were no customers there when I went in. The uniformed gentleman behind the desk told me the fine was a full W100,000, and that I had to pay it by September 13 (or else, I suppose, there'd be another fine). I was glad to hear I had a little time to pay. The man took all my paperwork, to be held in trust until I paid the fine at a bank and brought back the bank receipt as proof of payment.

I left Immigration with just one document, having entrusted all of my paperwork to the third-floor office. I presented that lone document—a writ describing my fine—at a Shinhan Bank, grumbling to the nice, young bank teller about my having to pay a damn fine. She smiled, her mouth filled with braces, and expertly completed the transaction.

Oh—how did I pay the fine so quickly? you ask. While I was walking out of Immigration, I texted my buddy Tom and requested an emergency loan: W100,000 to pay the damn fine, plus another W100,000 so I could survive until the 17th. Tom sent the cash immediately, and that's how I was able to hop on a subway, travel sixteen stops, hop out at the Golden Goose, and pay my fine at the Shinhan Bank next to the Golden Goose's location. I got another impromptu loan of W100,000 cash from my supervisor there; he took pity on me and my impoverished state, and chided me for not having made a reservation so that I wouldn't have had to wait four hours to be served.*

Building oneself up from zero is hard work. For every step forward, it seems I take two steps back. Not working for nearly two years during and after Mom's cancer and passing was a big setback; needing to buy a car in order to work at the low-income YB in Centreville, Virginia was another setback, as was taking out a $7,000 loan when it came time to move to Korea (not to mention the steep monthly rent I had to pay for my apartment in Front Royal, Virginia). And now I work at a university that doesn't provide housing, so I have to pay for my little shack of a yeogwan while I try to save money to get into a decent apartment. The debt and the financial crises just never seem to end.

But I'm hoping that, once I start getting paid by my new jobs, things will begin to stabilize. The Golden Goose has said that, after I finish out my contract with Dongguk, it would hire me on full-time for W4 million a month (instead of the initially promised W5 million—long story). The thought is tempting, but I have to balance that temptation with the fact that, at a university, I get paid vacation four months out of the year. My current arrangement may actually prove to be better than going corporate and working 40 hours a week with only two weeks' vacation per year.

Won't be able to breathe until payday.

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*The Immigration website is a fucking mess. You apparently need to register before you can make a reservation, but I've been unable to do that: the site keeps running me around in circles every time I try to input my personal information. It could be that the site isn't designed to be viewed on a Mac; I've encountered that particular problem many times before. But I think the problem actually goes deeper, and is largely due to piss-poor Web design.


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the wait

Today, I'm off from Dongguk, as I have Wednesdays free. Normally, I'd be over in another part of Seoul, working for the Golden Goose, but today I'm at the Sejong-no branch of Immigration in Jongno. Once again, I was slow on the draw: I got ticket number 109, and by 9:45AM, we were only up to number 16. That doesn't bode well: that's 32 people in 90 minutes, 64 people in 180 minutes—then we skip an hour for lunch. I probably won't be out of here until 2PM or 3PM today, despite having arrived at 9 o'clock.

A side note: I never got the memo, but apparently, even though Immigration's services claim not to open until 9AM, people can arrive and take numbers even as early as 8:30AM. I'll have to remember that.

So for the moment, I'm sitting in a lobby coffee shop, banging out this entry. In a few minutes, I'll go up and check on the progress. My prediction: we'll be at about number 35. If we're further along than that, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

UPDATE: My boss from the Golden Goose just called me and said I could have reserved, online, a 15-minute block of time instead of taking a number. Duh. Lessons learned.


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120.1 or 120.5

My bathroom scale has never been trustworthy; tonight, when I weighed myself several times after a 21.5K-step day of walking, the scale told me I was either 120.1 kilograms or 120.5. Both numbers showed up three times. While I'm tempted to think the lower number is the truer one, the opposite is more likely the case. Either way, this is my lowest weight yet. Very soon, I'm going to have to pay that old belt seller near Gwangjang Market a visit and get some more holes punched in my belts.


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a most excellent morning

My morning intermediate reading/writing class was a great bunch today, although I felt a bit sorry for the lone girl in the class. Only eleven of the listed nineteen showed up; as with yesterday's advanced class, I imagine the rest will straggle in on the second class day. Those who did show up proved to be blessed with quite the sense of humor, and they were good sports as I led them through two activities before letting them go.

Tuesdays and Fridays are like split shifts for me: the morning class finishes just before noon and the next class doesn't begin until 3:30PM, which sucks balls. But the way I see it, that lengthy break between classes is a chance for me to settle in, settle down, and recharge a bit from an active morning. Introverts need long breathers.

I teach in two different buildings: there's the so-called "Building K," also known as the Munhwa-gwan, i.e., the Cultural Center. Then there's the main building for my department, the Hyehwa-gwan, also known as "Building G." Building G is a sweatbox; I can already tell that things are going to be miserable until late fall. Building K, meanwhile, is very well air-conditioned, which makes teaching there a pleasure. That's one thing that hasn't changed despite my change of workplace: I still sweat through my classes. Our office in the Hyehwa-gwan remains hot; once I get paid, I swear one of the first things I'm going to do is buy myself another damn electric fan. This shall not stand!

Class in a little over two hours. Advanced students again, so my hopes are high that the kids will come armed with brains.


_

August average

My walking average continues to improve. There's got to be an asymptote somewhere: a limit that I'll approach but never quite reach. I haven't found it yet, but I'm going to guess that it's something like 15,000 steps per day. I doubt I'll ever make that.

My progress over the recent months:

April: 5,940 steps/day
May: 6,049 steps/day
June: 6,197 steps/day
July: 10,692 steps/day

And now...

August: 11,458 steps/day

I'm going to see whether I can reach a 12,000-step average this month. It ought to be possible if I walk the mountain almost every single day, with only occasional breaks. A typical walk up Namsan generally takes about 13.5K to 14K steps.

One caution, though: last night, I felt a twinge in my left hip—a reminder of recent agony from just a few months ago. I don't want to push myself to the point of uselessness, so I might have to moderate my walking output. If things do start to get painful, I'll let up immediately, even at the cost of fattening up again. Perhaps my hip will define my asymptote.

Speaking of fattening up: when Sean and Jeff were here in mid-August (they're safely back in DC now), I bought a long leather belt from a street vendor in Jongno. I had challenged the old man by noting that almost no shops had belts in my size; he smiled a grim "Challenge accepted" smile and produced an enormous strap of leather that would have made any masochist melt with desire. I told him that I'd been losing weight from all the walking I've been doing lately, so he dug into his toolbox and took out a hole-puncher specially designed for holing leather belts. He punched several holes into the belt, and I'm now happy to say that I'm already on the final hole: I can't cinch the belt any tighter because there're no more holes left. It's hard to believe that I've gotten to this point so quickly; in the mirror, I really don't look any different: I'm my usual pudgy-looking self. But something must be happening if the belt holes are any indication. I'll just chalk this up as a good thing and keep soldiering on.


_

first day of school

My very first class on Mondays isn't until 3:30PM, so I can afford to take my time getting to school. Today, I got there early all the same, mainly because I needed to make photocopies of my in-class activities for the week. We've been given a photocopy budget of only W30,000 per teacher (at a rate of W40 per page, or roughly 4 cents per page), and after having made 160 copies today (80 double-sided sheets), I was out W6,400. This doesn't bode well for the semester; I'm a photocopying fool, so I imagine I'll be blowing through my meager budget within a month, after which I'll have to pay for copies myself.

I'd been told that we didn't need to teach more than 20-30 minutes today, but I ran my classes for nearly an hour each. My intermediates were shy but good, and my advanced students, while not truly advanced, per se, caught on quickly when I ran them through the two-headed monster exercise. Today's classes were Monday/Thursday; when I see these kids again, I'll be running them through the textbooks that I've asked them to buy. Tomorrow's classes are Tuesday/Friday; my first is a 10:30AM class, followed by another 3:30PM class. This is perilously close to teaching a split shift, but because the later class ends before 5PM, I don't think this will be much of a problem. Tuesdays will be a good time for me to explore our campus's many dining facilities; our faculty handbook contains a long list of such facilities, and I've decided to make it my mission to eat at every single one of them.

The one weird thing that happened today was that my second class, which was supposed to have fifteen people in it, had only seven. I checked with a colleague and with our office assistant about this; both said this was normal, given the confusing nature of the first day or two of class. I can probably expect the full complement of kids at the next session.

Speaking of colleagues: given our huge faculty of forty-eight people, I met quite a few office-mates today, only some of whose names I managed to retain. They all seemed friendly and helpful; a few of them went above and beyond in that latter respect, offering to email me any information I might have missed because I'm not quite in the bosses' email loop yet. Dongguk's community of expat faculty seems, all in all, quite tightly knit and very collegial, which is something you look for in a good faculty.

My office computer is smaller and slower than the one I had at my previous job, and my "cubicle" isn't so much a cubicle as a work station with very, very low walls and no real privacy. Not that that matters: the office was stifling hot today because the air conditioner wasn't working; I've vowed to buy yet another electric fan to bring in to the office during these remaining warm months. Once I get paid, of course: everything happens once I get paid.

Last night, I was pleasantly surprised to receive "Happy Birthday!" KakaoTalk messages from several of my former students from my previous job. That was touching, and not a bad prelude to the first day of classes. A couple of the male students told me they weren't looking forward to their obligatory military service, which interrupts the collegiate life of almost every young Korean male, ensuring that most men graduate behind the women. I felt bad for the guys, having never gone through such hellish training myself, but I trust they'll come out of the experience both tougher and more mature.

So all in all, today's experience was fairly pleasant. Since I'm a naturally organized person, I got all my prep done in a timely manner—no drama, no hassle, no confusion. I still felt exhausted by the end of the day; one of the byproducts of introversion is the feeling of being drained after interacting with a bunch of people that you don't know. I walked almost 7,000 steps on campus today, so I'm about to go out and pound out the final 3,000 before midnight. After that: a bit of hand-washed laundry, a shower, a shave, and I'm off to bed.

Up and at 'em again tomorrow.


_

farty-foyve

Today, I turn 45. I'm told, on occasion, that I look young for my age. You decide:

If I do look young, it's doubtless thanks to the fat that fills out any potential wrinkles.

To celebrate my birthday, I just ordered a pizza/fried chicken combo set from the local pizzeria/chickeria—a place called, humorously and nonsensically enough, Pizza Land, Chicken Princess. This sounds like a play on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to me, but really, I can't make heads or tails of what the name is supposed to mean, or how it's supposed to combine the ideas of pizza and chicken. The restaurateurs may as well have called the place Pizza and Chicken to convey the brute reality of what they do.

When I was first practicing ordering pizza on the phone and in Korean, years ago, I stumblingly requested a pepperoni pizza. Proud of myself, I waited for my prize to arrive, but when it did, I discovered to my horror and fury that the Korean notion of pepperoni pizza—at the time, anyway—meant that you got a pizza with pepperoni, ham, and onions. I fucking HATE onions on pizza (and on burgers, and pretty much everywhere else in Western food, with only a few exceptions). So today, after ordering the pizza/chicken set, I called the restaurant back and asked whether the pepperoni pizza would have onions in it. Thankfully, the dude said no. So I'm looking forward to chowing down on some bird and 'zza while I finalize my lesson plans for the coming week.

Forty-five doesn't feel any different from forty-four. Yet. It was in 2011, back when I was forty-two, that I began to notice the gray hairs arriving in earnest. I have no plans to color my hair, of course; coloring is for pussies with vanity issues.

Ah—my meal arrived while I was writing this, and I've delayed posting this entry so that I could chow down. Here are some pics of the food:




The chicken was surprisingly good. I loved the crusty, crunchy skin, which didn't look that impressive at first blush, but which proved to be quite addictive. The pizza was just OK, but it was still edible, especially after I'd spruced it up with a splash of hot sauce. The entire meal, drink and all, set me back W18,900, which isn't too horrible of a deal: a full load of chicken normally costs around W14,000, and so does a typical "large" (which is to say not so large) Korean pizza. So since the Pepsi cost me W1,000 (very cheap for 1.5 liters), each component of the meal—chicken and pizza—cost only W9,000. Truly not bad, if you'll pardon my modest litote. I'll very likely be ordering this unhealthy combo again, though not anytime soon, as I'm on a strict budget for the next few weeks.


_

how Korean chicks text

Here's a text-message exchange between me and a female friend of mine. My words are in yellow. I highlight this conversation because the friend in question has always been a bit daffy, and as is normal for us whenever we text, the conversation contains a hint of the strange. I also think this brief conversation provides a good example of feminine SMS discourse. I've "mosaicked" out my friend's name to protect the innocent.

My friend is in her thirties, so what you're seeing, above, is fairly restrained in the universe of estrogen-driven texting in Korea. Younger girls pile on even cutesier forms of Internet Korean, including a new and horrifying syllable I only recently learned: "Ggyang!!" ("꺙!!")—which, as near as I can figure it, is the Korean-cutesy equivalent of "Tee-hee," uttered in a shrill, girlish tone with one's shoulders in a high shrug, a single index fingertip placed very lightly on the lower lip, and a cocaine-powered smile upon one's face.

But note the elements of feminine discourse above. Double and triple (and quadruple) question marks and exclamation points are a sure sign of femininity, as is the classically East Asian ^^ emoticon, which represents the eyes, closed tight because one's smile is so intense. Note, too, the use of Kakao emoticons—the weeping dog, in this case. In the context of this conversation, the dog is weeping for joy because my friend hasn't yet missed my birthday.

Not able to follow the Korean? Here's a rough translation of our exchange.

FRIEND: Kevin!! Today's the end of August!! When was your birthday??

[NB: I had written a Kakao status update noting that my birthday was at the end of August. August has 31 days, so I assumed most normal people would take that to mean August 31st, as I intended.]

ME: But the end of August is tomorrow...

FRIEND: How is Dongguk University??^^ There's a famous pet shop in that neighborhood.^^

FRIEND: Oh!!!! Your birthday is tomorrow???

ME: The ambiance is good at Dongguk, but there's no instructional freedom. Still, I've heard tell that the students are really good. Yes, tomorrow I turn 45 in solar years.

FRIEND: I'm glad (weepicon). It [the date] hasn't passed yet.

FRIEND: I'll say congratulations to you tomorrow.^^ Hee hee hee~

ME: Thank you.

Weird enough for you? So my friend wanted to send birthday wishes on the wrong day, having perhaps forgotten that August has thirty-one days. (More charitably: she interpreted my Korean phrase, "end of August," to mean simply the last days of August instead of literally August 31st.) She tells me, apropos of nothing, about a famous pet store (famous pet store? really? they'd better have some pretty fucking awesome pets), then promises to contact me again with birthday wishes. Strange brew, indeed. But what's life without a little strangeness thrown into the mix, eh? Better to have daffy, loopy friends than to have no friends at all.


_

frank talk

Good gentles, I may need to be more cautious as to what I write on this
ol' blog regarding my new job, so for the most prudential of reasons,
blogging on that topic, especially if it involves frank talk, will now
always be found, uh, elsewhere on the blog. You might have to
check around a bit in order to find it, but it'll be there, and you'll
know when you stumble upon it. It's not that I have no desire to keep
farting my fetid prose in public; it's just that I don't want the wrong
individuals to be poking and prodding, mining evidence to get my ass
fired. Hence the removal of certain posts from their original spots on
the timeline (to borrow a Twitter term). My new place of work has an
exceedingly strange fixation on teacher performance evaluations, so that
even the appearance of disloyalty will result in the docking of much-
needed ratings points.

You may be wondering where I'll be posting my frankest thoughts, then;
even the least interested among you may be at least a little curious.
And I don't blame you. But as you must realize, I can't spell out the
real location of these posts—not without alerting the wrong parties.
So I'm relying on you, Dear Reader, to use your brains to figure this
itchy little puzzle out. It shouldn't be too hard; I trust that my
not-so-numerous readers are generally people of intelligence and wit;
muddling through this problem shouldn't be overly difficult.
Yet this makes me nervous because if the manner in which I've hidden
a hint as to where the "frank talk" posts are located is too obvious,
repercussions—sinister repercussions—will follow. So I hope the
caballeros who might be most interested in digging up dirt will
have too many other things to do to concentrate on snooping around
in places where they shouldn't be. Besides, what I say about this
very interesting new job is written in a spirit of compassionate critique—
even the truly harsh stuff. And I'll never target specific people
so much as I'll be critiquing systems. So there we are.