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2011-02-08T14:18:00.000-08:00

Everyone complains these days about their content online. We hate the commercials on youtube and everywhere else, the popups, the subscriptions to spam, and so on. We also even complain that our downloading sites are being compromised and shut down by movie and record corporations.

I think this sense of entitlement arose because of the length of time the internet was underutilized by corporations as a medium for advertising. But now, since so many people are cancelling their cable TV altogether, and refusing to buy/rent dvd's, and no longer buying cd's, companies are forced to move their advertising to match where the consumers are.

There's no reason to expect companies to produce content for you, for free. Let's say Wal-Mart, over the years, had turned a relatively blind eye to petty theft, but recently has cracked down. There will be a certain number of regular thieves who think that this new situation is unfair to them. The same logic, I believe, is in the minds of consumers who have been conditioned over a number of years to think that accessing free media from companies who are not voluntarily giving it away is OK. It's really not.

I read a study that part of the reason people don't see why it's wrong to steal media is that we have trouble understanding the concept that non-material things can and do have real value. For the same reason people who use credit tend to spend more than people who use cash, we think that a piece of digital information suddently doesn't belong to its creator, just because it's copyable. but think of an analogous case: it's intuitively obvious that a person shouldn't be allowed to photograph/photocopy a painting and then sell or give away the copies without the consent of the artist. And we see it as obvious in that case because suddenly it's a 'real thing,' being copied, and each copy has intuitive value. This psychological quirk is also why investors sell stocks and flock to gold when there's a recession, and why we all enjoy counting (or are even willing to count) that pile of change we've collected over the months or years. Of course, the value of gold and cash and artwork are no less artificial than that of a digital movie file, but for us there's a difference.

To me, watching a commercial on YouTube before seeing a music video is a bigger compromise for the record company than it is for me. They're only taking that step because of how unwilling people are to purchase CD's or even Itunes files, and want to find a middle-ground between people buying stuff, and theft. It's be like if Wal-Mart's anti-theft strategy was to simply let people steal, but force them to steal only items that have sponsor flyers super-glued onto them. Who's getting the better deal?

We expect things for free, then threaten to boycott companies who do not spend money producing free things for us, and then complain when these companies generate their revenue by giving us free things with advertising attached!

2010-06-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs presented the new IPhone today, and while comparing the thing to it's predecessor, neither of the two phones could catch a Wifi network. Oops.

Anyway, he went into their respective photo albums in an effort to stall the audience, showing off the difference in picture quality between the two phones, which was actually noticeable, albeit only hardly. At that moment, he spoke out of script:

"It really comes down to... what do you want to be looking at all day?"

Yes Steve, yes it does.

2010-06-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

I had two obvious chances today to do something socially conscious, but failed at both of them. The first occurred as I was sitting on the beach studying, at clover point. A couple of girls who were near me packed up and left, walking by me and leaving several beer cans on the ground. I almost stopped them to mention the garbage they were leaving behind, but didn't.

The second, a more odd situation, happened at the grocery store. In front of me were a few young high school boys, maybe 15 years old... not the 'cool kids', you might say by their appearance. In front of them was a guy and a girl together; the guy had one of those macho t-shirts, a few tattoos, and looked like a through-and-though prick even before he opened his mouth to talk. And he was a prick, as it happened, because for no reason he confronted the three boys, asking something like "I hope you're not trying to fuck with me, because if you do, I'll fuck with you..." It didn't even make sense, and there was zero provocation. The poor boys didn't know what to do, and I know exactly what they felt in that moment, because I've felt it many times. At that age, boys are so self-conscious, so inwardly focused, so worried about how they look and what others think, that they have trouble realizing that there are other people in the world who are just plain wrong, or worse, just plain assholes. In reality, quite a large number of people are, and this guy was.

I should have calmly stood up for the boys, perhaps telling the macho guy to relax and keep the language to himself, but I didn't.

2010-06-01T23:05:00.001-07:00

Well, I bought an eggplant today for the first time ever. It was just sitting there in the vegetable section, staring at me. It was so... so purple, I just had to buy it. But now that it's in my fridge, I don't know what to do. What the hell does one do with an eggplant?

2010-06-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

It's been about two full years since I've actually watched a tv show on cable here in Victoria, commercials included. I did today, and what do you know, that god-forsaken Money Tree caterpillar is still pumping out new ads. I just about threw my remote at the screen.

Why does anybody have cable anymore? Everything is free online (albeit not legally), without commercials, in high quality. The internet is everything that cable and satellite want to be, but aren't. I got cable just this week because Shaw, the drug-pushers that they are, actually finagled with my bills so as to save me money for getting cable. What they do, in addition to the 6-month promotional offer, is extend my existing 6-month internet promotional ($10 per month) to a full year. After the math is done, I'll have saved 30 bucks a month for six months, so long as at the end of November, I cancel the cable and keep the internet. Or to put it another way, refusing the cable promotion would actually cost me 180 bucks.

The logic, I assume, is that enough people just end up keeping the cable TV to justify the loss leader of extending the promotions, thanks to the fact that television is addictive. So now it's in my house, and this time, I'm not watching it. As long as that money tree caterpillar keeps showing his face, this addiction should be easy to fend off.

In other news, school starts on Thursday.

Oh and one other thing. Any readers out there who also have blogs with blogger.com? Notice how, when you press the publish button, it says "Your blog post published successfully!"? As though the website has something to brag about... Imagine if your car displayed that message on the dash, "Your engine has started successfuly!" every time you turned the key... in a very real way, wouldn't that give you less faith in the machine?

2010-05-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

BBC reported yesterday that condoms in India are often too large for men, particularly the men living in rural areas. It makes sense; in less developed parts of the world, the people are simply shorter and smaller all over, thanks to a lack of protein and other nutrients during childhood and adolescence. Conversely, the nations with the highest standards of living are the tallest.

That must be a blow to one's sense of nationalism, that one's country needs smaller condoms manufactured than those of international standards.

Anyway, I'm not tooting my own horn here, or implying anything, but the condoms in Korea really are smaller than the ones sold here. At first I thought I was mistakin', but after a few, er, tests, it became really obvious. See the thing is, Seinfeld was right: when it comes time to wrap up, you've got about a 30-second window to complete the task before all is lost. There's just something about refocusing one's mind away from the sexual and on to this tricky task, combined with the realization that a very tenous layer of latex is protecting one from all kinds of things that may or may not otherwise be results of the intimate moment. It is a little bit of a taunt to millions of years of evolution.

Back to my point: condom sizes really do vary by country. I wonder, then, if the data exists out there on the average 'size' of men all over the world. Could countries be ranked? Who would be on top? Imagine the bragging rights we'd have if our country was #1. Imagine the taunting there'd be by tourists from one country to the next. Imagine the consequence at international sporting events, if all the fans knew who was where on the rankings. It's no wonder such a list has never been published.

2010-05-28T01:54:00.000-07:00

I've always been skeptical of ratemyprofessors... Many of the reviews say more about the quality of the student than they do about the quality of the professor. And just the other day, I looked up one of my old favorite profs, who's teaching one of my upcoming summer classes, and she's got terible reviews! "Worst professor I've ever had" and "Avoid this professor at all costs" were common phrases on her page. I was shocked.

Sure, she's less than friendly, her lectures are never particularly well-organized. Hell, she even answers "I don't know" to questions every so often. But I don't care, the classes are interesting and the tests are fairly made and marked. What more could a student ask for?

2010-05-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

You know how, every time you need cash and you go to some ATM that's not your bank's, they charge you $1.50? And then your bank, to rub it in, charges an additional $1.50 as a processing fee (at least my bank does)!

The U.S. congress wants to cap ATM fees, interestingly, at 50 cents per transaction. The logic is populist; only really low-and-middle-income people use ATM's that much, so they end up with the shitty end of the stick once again.

But I thought about this for a minute, and came up with the following question: Why don't we just eliminate cash altogether? I'm trying to think of all the reasons we use cash these days, and there aren't that many. Petty purchases (snacks, bar drinks, etc) - and all other small purchases - could be done with a swipe debit card... the technology exists already and it would only require /everyone/ to have a bank account of some kind. The only other things people use or have cash for are things that are illegal, annd things that they don't want to pay taxes on. I"m talking about drugs, tips, under-the-table business fees, and all that sort of thing.

So let's replace our slow debits with fast swipe cards for small (i.e.under 50 dollar) purchases, and use our regular cards for everything else. It would only be a small leap in technology to create cards that could transfer money to each other, thus eliminating the problem of paying people back for things in person!

Forget the penny, folks. Let's get rid of all cash. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that before I'm dead - presuming I live up to average mortality rates - cash will be a thing of the past. And luckily, if you chart the trends, people in my sort of shoes (Canadian, healthy, non-smoker/drinker born in the mid-80's) should live well into their 90's, if not beyond.

2010-05-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

Now, I may already have mentioned this, but in Korea, you can have just about everything a human needs to have in life with rice. In the food department, they serve it up strait, puffed, mashed, shaped, coloured, sweetened, levened, or gelatinized. You can also find it in milk, wine, and beer form. It's a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, and a dessert... hell, even a midnight snack.

But the good folks over in Japan, long-standing rivals of the Koreans, have truly outdone themselves. They've clothed a woman with a miniature rice farm. Well, sort of... I'm not sure "clothed" is quite the right word.

On a related note, I'm pretty sure that all it takes to be a news producer is to be able to work a ridiculous pun into every possible story title. I bet I could do that job... let's have a look at some of CNN's real headlines, May 13th, 2010, and give them a pun-upgrade:

6-month sentence sought for U.S. Missionary in Haiti

Upgraded: Missionary position not so good for one U.S. aid worker

Mr. Obama: Buffalo needs 'freakin' jobs

Upgraded: Obama is 'freakin' out over Buffalo's job losses.

Lettuce E. Coli oubreak spreads

Upgraded: Eat your vegetables... except for lettuce

Some quitting Facebook as privacy concerns escalate

Upgraded: Some facebook users feel their private parts are being violated

BP hopes pipe insertion will capture spewing crude...

Upgraded: That one's just too easy, it's not even fair...

Fries with that?

2010-05-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've been trying so hard, so very hard, to get into the habit of selling customers things that I would never buy myself. When it comes to menu items that I believe are good value, or tasty, or otherwise worth the money, I'm an excellent salesman. But other things, not so much.

For example: when people ask for water, I'm required by the restaurant I work for to ask "Would you like sparking, mineral, or tap water?" It annoys the bejesus out of me for two reasons. The first is that people who order "just water" are almost always ordering it because they're on a bit of a budget and don't want to drop extra money on a drink, or like me, think that restaurant drinks of all kinds are a huge rip-off. Second, who on God's name orders a bottle of water at a restaurant? Who buys a bottle of water anywhere?

So I say "Sparkling, mineral, or tap water?" and most people just look at me like I'm a sales guy on a used car lot who just doesn't get how to pick his battles.

But then, every so often, somebody decides they want a bottle of San Pellagrino all the way from Italy. Water. From Italy. It's all I can do to stop myself from saying "seriously?" when someone agrees to my imported water pitch.

10K

2010-04-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it was actually a 2009 resolution, so technically this one was nearly 5 months late in completion. Nonetheless, it's done! I ran the Times Colonist 10k, in a pretty darn reasonable time of 52 minutes 47 seconds. That was well under my goal of 60 minutes, and approximately 10 minutes short of my real goal, which is ultimately to beat Jordan. You heard me, old buddy. Next year, it's on.

2010-04-25T17:30:00.001-07:00

If I owned one of those live-in rehab places, I'd name it "The Last Resort"

2010-04-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

I was out for a walk last night at around 10, and came across -out of pure coincidence - a big apartment fire on Oak Bay Avenue! The top floor of a building, right across from Garden Works, was up in smoke; fire trucks lined the street and residents from the building and elsewhere were gathered around to watch the show... and what a show!

I like a good fire. It's primal. I listened to all the people around, as they seemed to be 'giving reasons' to themselves and others for why they were standing there watching... analyzing the job of the fire fighters, talking about how the fire spreads, making phone calls and relating themselves to the one or two people they know who live in the building, and so forth. But they're all really there to watch a little bit of destruction. Our society is so well-built, so carefully shaped right from the buildings to the services to the educations and right up to our minds, that it's pleasing - at least occasionally - to see a little bit of it crumble. A little bit of the mind burns with the rooftop. It reminds me, anyway, of our species' spear-flinging, meat-eating, battle-crying, cave-and-forest-dwelling origin... distant ancestors staring at rising flames, flames that meant light, warmth, safety, and power!

Back in business

2010-04-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it's high time to write a thing or two. Honestly, if you're reading this, it's a little depressing that you've kept checking all this time to see if I've posted anything. But, still, I am truly grateful! Your diligence will, hopefully, be worth it.

So, I ran ten kilometers without stopping the other day (see: new years resolutions 2009!). Took me 59 minutes, which puts my goal of running the TC10k (coming up in 12 days) in under an hour within reach. It's no guarantee though, because that 59-minute run very nearly killed me. I'm changing my goal to 'under 55 minutes', just to keep things interesting.

You know, it's good to spend as much time combating your natural weaknesses as you do enhancing your natural strengths. My natural weakness (among many), as far as it seems, is endurance. Every time I practice and work on endurance, it is grueling, painful, difficult, and never does it come easy. So here we are; after months, and I mean months, of consistent running, biking, hiking, and even rowing, I can slog out 10 kilometers at what most runners would consider to be a slow-to-moderate jogging pace. To me though, it's a real accomplishment.

All this running has made me think about the concept of 'wanting it'. You know, how the olympic announcers always attribute a neck-and-neck marathon or cross-country skiing or triathlon win to one guy "wanting it just a litle bit more"? It's a bit insulting, don't you think? Maybe the guy in second place wanted it way more, and the winner just didn't have to try as hard. In fact, for all we know, the guy who came in dead last might have wanted it the most, and might have tried harder than anybody else in the field. Sometimes you'll see Michael Phelps cruising his way to victory in qualification matches, "saving his energy", against guys who look like they're being tailed by great white sharks they're swimming so hard. In the end, physical competitions are only really as fair as our bodies are similarly endowed.

Anyway, the boost of confidence I've received thanks to this little feat, and the general shape I've gotten into for it, also may have contributed to the job I just landed, serving at a classy patio restaurant right down in Victoria's Inner Harbour, over the summer. This job was sought after, and I finally got the offer after two interviews, and a cruel selection process that seems to have distilled 4 or 5 servers from a pool of at least 25. The first interview was group-style. I was the lone male among nine female candidates and two female managers. Not one was less than a 7.5, if we're to be frank about it. I was given a minute to "sell myself," and my experience as a debater, trying to keep cool back in the old days while being watched by hot girls in private school skirts, came in handy. The second "short list" interview was detailed and thorough, lasting 45 minutes and peppered with serious personality and experience questions. It was like trying to land a job as a fricking supreme court justice. All this, I thought, so I can hand out salads and run credit cards. All this, I thought, so I can get in once again on the pointless racket that is our cultural custom of tipping servers 15 cents on the dollar when the check comes.

The nice thing about Korea was, there was no sales tax and no tipping, anywhere. The price you see is the price you get, end of story. And they didn't fart around adding .49 or .99 to everything either. I really hate when stores do that, adjusting the price or offering little buy-two-get-one-free deals, or screwing around with payments or cash back or interest rates or limited-time sales. It's cold manipulation, masqued as a favour to the customer, and I don't appreciate it. Stop taking advantage of our innate weaknesses with logic and payoff structures. It hurts society, it really does.

So, at Wal Mart the other week, the girl at the till asked me for my postal code as she was ringing my stuff through. "Why?" I asked. "Well, we ask everybody... Wal Mart just wants to know for some reason." I thought about it for a moment, since she clearly had no idea what it was for, and told her my guess. I said they collect postal codes and match them to the purchasing habits. What people, in what neighbourhoods, by any given kind of product? How many people from any given neighbourhood go to Wal Mart, and how often? Can you see the postal code map that wal-mart could populate with detailed consumer data, not unlike a population/demographic map? They could map out entire countries, target underutilized communities, learn exactly where to place new stores, market certain products to certain areas, and even predict household income and debt levels using a statistical combination of real estate prices and purchasing habits. I bet if you had the postal code of a regular wal mart shopper, and all their recipts, you could approximate their age, marital and parental status, even mortgage payments and debt. Just think how deep that rabbit hole could really go...

I was holding up the line by this point. The cashier had this dull, useless stare, indicating vague interest, even attraction, but also passivity and boredom. She looked like the chick in Twilight always does, whatever her name is.

It's a scary world this way. Most people just give their postal code without even thinking, because we're geared (especially in Canada) to answer positively and politely to questions that are asked positively and politely.

Oh, and one other thing. You all know how Thrifty's stopped doing plastic bags, right? It's such a good thing they did for the environment, and pretty forward-thinking that they took the step when none of their competitors are doing it. So, credit to Thriftys for their environmental consciousness!........

But, wait, hold on just a second. Don't we all have to buy kitchen catchers now? I know I do, because I used to use grocery bags for the kitchen garbage can. And we also have to buy cloth reusable bags to go shopping now, right? So let me get this straight, Thrifty's stopped giving away bags for free, in exchange for making people buy two new kinds of bags they never had to buy before, from its stores? And in the name of environmentalism? That's some bold shit right there.

It feels good to write again. Thanks for the read.

Well, it finally happened.

2010-03-24T21:04:00.000-07:00

I bought a cell today. It's to the point now where a cell is cheaper than a land line for people who don't talk on the phone much. My goal of dying of old age cell-phone-less has itself died, and so be it. I made it until the good year of 2010 (and Korea doesn't count, because land lines don't even appear to exist there anymore).

Speaking of South Korea, it's quite something to see how far behind Canada lags in terms of its mobile technology and reception. My phone doesn't even have a touchscreen! Pfft. By Korean 2010 standards, I might as well be chiseling my texts onto stone tablets and strapping them to the back of a dinosaur.

2010-02-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

My Grandmother, and current host, is an absolute hoot to talk to sometimes, amid the lengthy discussions about life, love, work, and philosophy that we have regularly.

"I don't know much about rappers. Their pants always seem to be falling off."

From Victoria

2010-02-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

I've been terribly behind on this site... there are many pictures to post but the fact is that, unlike facebook, blogger.com requires much more time and effort on the part of the user to resize, upload, and format them. All in good time.

I am once again destroyed by jetlag. I've flown on no less than 12 different planes since I left for Korea 17 months ago, and that has been more than plenty. I even know which of my belt buckles set off airport metal detectors and which don't. I learned quickly that, at Seoul's airport, one can get a rather thorough frisking from one of the their unusually attractive security ladies (who you'd think were flight attendants by dress and smile) if one chooses to wear the right belt buckle through the metal detector. Hypothetically, that is.

Back in Vancouver, I found that I could take a new skytrain line part-way to the ferry terminal. A security fellow, in response to a question about the new line, mentioned offhand that it had been completed under budget and three months early. I stood aghast, for a moment wondering if I had landed in the wrong province. "This is Vancouver, BC, right?"

Fears of mislocation were alleviated not 10 minutes later, as on the skytrain a friendly fellow sat down next to me and proceeded to eat a maple glaze doughnut in a total of three bites, before sipping his red-mugged Tim Horton's coffee. "How about this weather, eh?" he scoffed friendily. Little did he know, but this stranger pulled my mind out of travel mode and planted it firmly in the notion that I was, in fact, back in my home country after nearly a year and a half abroad. The fact that it was raining, but that it is always raining in Vancouver in January, made his question all that much more Canadian.

It feels incredibly nice to be back in Victoria. The air is fresh and dewey, birds wake me up in the morning instead of alarms and traffic, and there is just so much more space to move one's body and mind around within. The feeling is also, as other returning teachers already have warned me, strange. You see things with foreigner's eyes, and you're left picking up and putting together the surviving remnants of your social life before you left. Additionally, I feel awkward and slightly hindered in my ability to communicate... formalities seem to have to be re-learned a little bit. Also, I have lost all respect for the knife/fork combination as a means of food-mouth conveyance. I feel like I'm hacking and stabbing at my food like some sort of caveman, instead of eating it elegantly, delicately, and purposefully with chopsticks that, as scientific studies have shown extensively, improve and sustain mental dexterity simply just by being used regularly at the dinner table.

I also feel more confident to speak to strangers, particularly the attractive and well-put-together ones. Perhaps this is merely the result of having aged, or a result of having a no-nonsense committed relationship for the first time in my life (and the nourishment it provides daily), but I believe also that having spent so much time in such a different culture has allowed me to be able to see just what is and isn't 'cultural' about human behaviour, in a much deeper way than before I had left. The "lenses" I was taught about endlessly from a feminism professor a few years back are very much over our eyes, in at least certain ways. But they also are, contrary to this professor's insistence, largely removable by way of diversifying one's experiences and living with critical thought as a guiding principle.

It is a relief to be able to speak to strangers comfortably. I can walk down the street here and not be noticed; I can say hi or strike up a conversation with the next person in the store line without any issue. I can smile at a female without her giggling and whispering to a large cluster of friends ala middle school; this is the way of it in Korea even for women my age, and I do not miss it.

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There's only one thing about women that I can honestly say that I know, mainly through trial and error. I believe many other things that may or may not be true about any number of women, but this one certain thing I am sure of as sure as I am of the typing hands in front of me. It's what my dad told me as a child, a piece of advice to follow religiously if a man wants to be any kind of romantic success in the long run. "Son, the secret to making a woman happy is to make her feel good about herself." The older I get, every day this becomes more true in my eyes. And there are, if we're to be journalists and not scientists for a moment, essentially two kinds of men in relationships: there are men who control the dynamic based on a slight sense of worry and insecurity, that a better man will show up and make a fool of him. This kind of man will bring his woman down to ensure that she feels she can't do better; "I am the best you can do, even if you're not that happy." I tell you, this slight insecurity, if allowed, will grow and infest every aspect of the relationship, eventually bringing it down. The second kind of man governs his behaviour with confidence and compliment, assuring his woman that she could have any man in the world, and he simply happens to be the best one for her. The corollary to this, which if spoken aloud comes off as arrogant but if simply left unsaid and known is very uplifting for a woman, is the man's confidence that he chose her when he could have chosen any number of other women, and that he is happy with this choice. This is the man I am trying my absolute damnedest to be. Maintaining a fit and healthy self, both body and mind, is a pre-requisite.

There you have it, folks. That's nearly all the relationship insight I've accumulated since the age of 13 when my first girlfriend Amanda kissed me on a dare from her snickering friends. Those same friends, as I recall, convinced her to break up with me after a month or so because I wasn't particularly popular. From this experience, I learned the beginnings of a second truth that I believe about most, but certainly not all, women. The second truth is this: women, especially those near my own age, tell each other everything. I mean everything; all the things they promise not to tell, and all the things you just assume on common sense they won't tell... they tell. In detail. This, I have also learned by way of trial and error. Mostly error. It's been a harder lesson than the first, and my unflinching belief that personal privacy is something to be cherished and guarded rather than exchanged for very cheap returns from gosspiers and fellow status-updaters, seems to be a belief that will all-but-disappear as previous generations to my own pass the reigns of society on to us. Living in the most connected country in the world, with the highest percentage of cell phone ownership (South Korea, that is), has only convinced me of this even more.

I swear to you, the easier that communication gets, the more tempted you will be to ignore the need for meaning in communication, and the more you may become convinced that things about your life which are in truth mundane and unworthy of informing people about, are worth saying. Exhibit A: Twitter. My Grandmother, who I have the pleasure of living with for the next couple of months, believes that this trend is (at least in part) a result of parenting practices through the 80's to today that involve telling children that absolutely everything they do is wonderful and excellent; this constant and undeserved praise has the twofold effect of hampering a child's ability to differentiate between good and bad work/behaviour, and also convincing them that all of their life's little outputs will be found wonderful and excellent by others as they become teenagers and even grown adults. In other words, we've pumped kids so full of emotional sugar that they've fermented into self-absorbed young adults drunk on paper-thin validations for nauseatingly superficial insecurities. I'm inclined to agree with this stance, but only intuitively so as I've not got the kind of perspective and experience required to grasp the contents of these beliefs fully. Also, as a .com opinion pusher myself, I can't exactly take the high road.

On that note, a conclusion is in order. It's good to be home, and among the many gifts that time Korea has given me, the one most transferrable to the medium you are currently using is the gift of content for thought. I have now this extra batch of information in mind that could not have been acquired in any other way or from any other place, that will forever inform my ideas and perspectives on a wide range of topics and decisions-to-be-made.

2010-01-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

On the Trip

I might as well publish the story here. Apologies in advance for the lack of photos; they will have to wait until I can access a computer which allows me to use USB, because hostel computers don´t.

The trip has been, basically, cancelled. After a week in Madrid and a few days in Barcelona, I´ve realized that this isn´t the time for such a vacation... I´ve been feeling terribly homesick, partly because it´s been over 16 months since I´ve been home, and also because I just left my second and more recent home, Korea. I thought, while leaving, that I´d feel more ¨at home¨ going to western Europe, but it had the opposite effect... I´ve felt disconnected fully on both fronts, and sad for not having either of the homes or sets of routines that I´ve become accustomed to over the years. I had these intrepid ideas in my mind, of traveling to remote places, spending each night with new faces, and generally going rogue through Europe... but now that I´m here I just miss the people I love, because this is where none of them are. The long and short of it: I´m a god-damned softie. So, after visiting some family in England, then taking a plane back to Korea for a week or two, I will fly home to little old Victoria.

My travel partner and friend, Emily, has decided, albeit reluctantly and cautiously, to salvage much of our planned itinerary on her own, relying on the exceptionally friendly world of hosteling and couchsurfing (.org) for company and fun times. Her decision came as a great relief, as at least a small portion of my guilt from ruining everything was alleviated.

For the money I´ve spent, it´s been an unspeakably bad deal, these 8 days in Spain. It has erased easily several months of wise day-to-day spending decisions and careful budgeting in Korea. But it hasn´t been a total waste.

On Spain, Korea, and Travelling

It has been a new and interesting experience to walk through an array of architecture spanning hundreds, even thousands of years in age. One can see history passing by more vividly, and I imagine, if not sense, a certain solidarity among the nationals derived from this long common history. We in Canada don´t have much of that... Living in Korea and taking this short trip in Spain has clarified just how young Canada is as a nation, and how young and dependant the culture is on foreign influence. You can find traditions elsewhere that are cherished by nearly everyone in a nation, whose details and movements are guarded by an invisible wall against influence and change. It is lovely, and I wish more of these traditions existed back home; they assist in giving strangers a sense of brotherhood and solidarity with each other.

Food in Spain kind of sucks. Well, budget food anyway. You order what appears to be a ham sandwich at one of the millions of deli/bar joints, and what you get (for 4 euros!) is a slice of ham between bread. You want some salt and pepper? Too bad. How about a little mustard and mayo? Hell no. For a couple of euros more, you can get a ¨combinatio¨, which (now for the same price as a full sit-down BBQ dinner with fixings in Korea) buys you a small unseasoned pork chop, some limp fries, and a wad of iceberg lettuce that looks like a handful of used kleenex.

The beer, however, is excellent here, and priced reasonably. Also, great tapas. I only wanted to afford the expensive stuff in small portions, you see, just to get a taste.

On the topic of alcohol, I should mention just how conservative Canada is on the substance, taxing and restricting its purchasing and selling and use so heavily. For a reputationally liberal nation about drugs, ours is peculiarly the opposite about this one. I wonder whether the problem is in the drug or the nation, honestly. Would any drug, really, be dangerous to the health of a society, if it were a society that was in good health to begin with? I imagine that among a truly vital population, some drugs could be incorporated recreationally, while more dangerous ones would simply have no market due to lack of interest. In my own case, as always, a couple of beers are typically plenty.

Do you live alone? Or, do you have your own room, or a bathroom that is only used by one person at a time? If you responded ¨yes¨ to any of the preceding, and you plan in the future to stay at hostels, be prepared to learn about all the idiosyncrasies and strange habits you never knew you had. All those habits that you exercise unknowingly, suddenly become exposed when you´re faced with being behaviorally social in environments where you are not accustomed to it, such as in bedrooms and bathrooms. You feel the need to normalize your habits in order to not stand out, as does everyone else. Everything else about hostels, particularly the prices, is great.

On the Airline Companies

In my own experience over the years, I´ve found that if the tickets are purchased in good time, and you do your part to make it all smooth, so will the airlines most of the time. But as soon as you want to make a change or cancellation, your pockets start to empty out, and quickly. I also have found that when purchasing tickets online, the companies pull out all the stops when it comes to surcharges and subtle manipulation. They offer all kinds of extra services, such as seat selection for a fee (why would that cost money in the first place?), meal options for a fee, and soforth. Finally, as you click past the various options trying your damnedest not to add extra charges by accident, they start adding charges for you! First it´s the online booking fee (which is about the same as the phone or in-person booking fee, and therefore a total load), and then it´s the credit card surcharge (should I have mailed them paper cash to avoid that one?), and then it´s airport fees and fuel surcharges and anything else that can be dreamed up.

In short, airline companies are completely full of shit. They try to convince you that you need to be paying extra money for things that are quite plainly their responsibility to pay for as the company providing you with a service. Hell, add ¨employee salary¨and ¨aircraft maintenance¨to the list of additional fees and you´ve pretty much covered the whole operation without touching the ticket price itself! Imagine if your restaurant bill had the meal price, tip, and ten dollars´s worth of ¨additional charges¨ for the carpet cleaning, dish soap, roof tile maintenance, and the chef´s clean whites? You´d want to chew out the manager for being a grubbing little cheapskate, I bet.

On the Future

I'm writing the remainder of this entry from snowy Leeds, UK. It's a still day and I've had the opportunity to finally meet my new aunt-in-law, Amy, who is a wonderful person through and through! I'll be here for 6 or 7 days, before flying back to Korea briefly to connect with Cholong and have some in-person conversations about our future that absolutely must be had in person, and then I'll be on my way back home around the beginning of February.

But then, after all this time away from Victoria, and now a little bit of time away from Seoul, I feel that Seoul is almost as much a home as is Victoria. I miss Mr. Kim's galbi, I miss Thunder Chicken, I miss my kids at Hwarang elementary, I miss the mountain hikes around the outskirts, and I miss the little life of routines and playfulness that Cholong and I took a year to develop and fall into complete comfort with. In a perfect world, we could take with us all the best experiences of our lives, in a little pack around the shoulder to be opened and relived at any moment. We try our best to create this world, through social networking, music, photography, and any other means possible to keep ourselves connected whether through distances of geography or through time. We are helplessly drifting forward, and as we look back on those sweet memories, it gets harder and harder to grasp their colours and flavours the farther away they become, and every time we do grasp at them, their shapes alter slightly as if they were of clay never fully hardened.

If you were to ask me what the most significant thing I've learned is, since September of 2008, I'd have to say: I've gained a true appreciation for the value of settling down, of finding a partner, of the prospect of having a family, and of giving oneself to another in that deep and utterly vulnerable way which allows for joys not available to those who keep all the responsibility for their happiness in their own hands.

From Barcelona

2010-01-09T01:07:00.000-08:00

Times have been good. I´m working on posting photos, but the hostel computers have time limits and typically don´t like people plugging in their USB cables. All in good time.

I hope everyone is well back home, back in Korea, and back wherever else you all are! I tell ya, the wealthy demographics in the world are so spread apart, they go just about everywhere to travel and study and meet lovers and do everything else! Would we be so inclined to live this way if it weren´t for the close contact kept thanks to the internet?

Madrid was great. I think the best part was staring ito Bosch´s ¨Garden of Earthly Delights¨at the Prado. Great stuff. Today Em and I may also hit up Barcelona´s picasso museum!

Signing in from Madrid. Hola!

2010-01-03T07:11:00.000-08:00

The culture shock even during this first day has been bewildering, confusing, and tiring. I've spoken Korean thank yous to a number of shop keepers, and I keep passing things and accepting things with both hands, Korean style. Everything is different, the buildings, the people, the sounds, even the smell of things. I'm tired, and frankly lonely and sad, missing what feels like two separate homes and emotional connections on opposite sides of the world at the same time. The hostel is nice, albeit smokey and full of people my age with drinking and drug stories to which I simply cannot relate. God help me I just don't binge or pass out or fight or deprive myself of sleep or make any of these stories that get passed around the bar table by my generation.

On the upside, I can speak more Spanish than I previously thought. Somehow, those dozens of hours doodling on my desk in the back of Ms. Ciccone's class through high school weren't a complete waste.

Looking back, I remember having the same sad and lonely feeling my first day in Korea as I do now. I felt desparate and lost that initial night in September '08, but it all picked up over the course of the first week. I can only hope the same will happen here in Europe. I'll write a long entry about Korea with photos at some point, but for now I'll say that it was a great experience, and that I think I grew into a better sort of person from it all. I've also found love, and with a little luck that love will come to Canada some time sooner or later. I didn't realize what I had, what we had built, until I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was leaving. Cholong, you and I can pass this test, I'm sure of it.

Leaving Korea

2009-12-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

I'm going to Madrid on Saturday, after 16 months in Seoul, South Korea. It's been a good time here in just about every way.

I'll be home in Victoria around the end of March, after a bit of touring through Europe, India, and possibly Thailand. Wish me luck, and I'll be home soon! I'm packing the computer now, so the next post will likely be from Spain.

2009-12-25T18:21:00.001-08:00

2009-12-24T01:08:00.000-08:00

I saw Avatar. It was very good. Some may like the plot and characters, and some will not. I think it depends on whether you've already seen films like Dances with Wolves, and Pocahontas, because if you have, you've already seen the plot of Avatar. The script was thin and stretched a bit too far. The visuals however, are more than worth it. Once you're settled in and enjoying Pandora, you'll be willing to forgive and forget any script problems.

That movie officially crosses the line in my mind of knowing how movies are made. Until Avatar, I could see how shots were constructed and how CG is used to suppliment the sets and characters. But Avatar just doesn't make sense anymore... the digital and physical realities are so blended that there's little way to intuitively separate the two. I think this is what people mean when they say Avatar is some sort of revolutionary film.

Today was my last day of work. It was a bit sad, but only a bit. I think I'll genuinely miss about 10 kids (out of 80), and one or two coworkers.

Here's the latest single Chocolate Love from "Girls Generation". You can't walk down a street without hearing this song blaring from the speakers of a cell phone store, cafe, or gift shop. This will be their third single to invade the public sphere since my arrival in Korea. Personally, I still like the first, "gee", the best. And don't ask me what chocolate love means, because I have no idea. Some of the English phrases, memes, and t-shirts that emerge from Korea's pop culture are truly baffling.

Winding down

2009-12-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

And winding up! My time in Korea is down to a mere 12 days. Four of then will be spent working, three on a hiking trip, one is Christmas, and the remainder will be spent organizing and preparing and seeing various people and buffets off for the last time.

I'm saving a large number of pictures to be made into an entry about life here, as well as some extra to be posted after I get home. But for your pleasure, here's a photo of delicious, delicious pig feet (in the middle):

Do not be alarmed. In all fairness, you probably eat just as many pig feet as Koreans do, only in the form of hot dogs and luncheon meat.

Inbox

2009-12-18T01:08:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days I've spent several hours (and there are more to come) organizing, filing, and purging my email inbox.

It's painstaking, because there are all kinds of attachments and photos and valuable letters worth keeping, so I need to look at most things before they are deleted.

And here's the thing: I can see an entire relationship run its course simply through emails. In the start, they're kind, friendly, helpful, and generally written with a sense of reaching out one's hands out to the other. As time passes, the emails become more practical, simply setting plans and occasionally bickering. Soon, we started to pick little fights and respond passive-aggressively. Eventually, the writings are consumed by issues and problems and over-reactions to words and events that, at the beginning, would have been utterly forgettable. Finally, there are the post-breakup emails, where both parties try to make some sort of amends, in the "we were both wrong, so it's all mostly a wash" style of diplomacy.

I suppose the lesson is one of learning patience, one of seeing the problems of the future that nearly all couples face, and learning to handle those problems in a way that either leads to their solution, or as clean a break-up as can be had. Many relationship problems, I believe, are only magnified by the fact that after six months or a year, both people are running out of new things to say to each other; each person knows and possibly despises the little weaknesses and idiosyncrasies that the other person displays. And often we (I, anyway) intentionally magnify problems in order to 'win' the emotional battle of the day.

There is also a lesson of self-awareness. If you've got those emails still, look back on the fights you had with your ex, just once, and see how simple the solutions to most of them are just my removing the momentary emotional heat from the context. On the opposite side of this truism is the fact that sex never seems as good in hindsight (even just a minute or two into hindsight) as it did in the moment. If only we could find a way to indulge the positive emotions endlessly, while preventing the negative emotions from clouding our best judgement.

In defense of Tiger

2009-12-15T22:01:00.000-08:00

Imagine you're a tall man. You're 6'3, well built, and very handsome. You're in the prime of your life and career. You are obscenely rich, worth somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. You are a professional sports athlete, among the most famous, recognizable and ground-breaking athlets on the planet. You're a married man, but you spend much of the year travelling around the world on the professional circuit, staying in classiest of hotels and getting sports massages, while amassing seven-figure paychecks for tournaments and product placements. There are literally millions upon millions of beautiful women who would have you for a night or a lifetime without one moment's hesitation.

I'm not saying he should have done it, or that he couldn't have helped it, but I do understand.

Google it.

2009-12-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

Google's been under fire for "posting" unpleasant things at the top of it's search results. Last week it was anti-semitic websites at the top of the list for the search term "Jew," and just this week it was a doctored image of Michelle Obama (to make her look like a monkey) as the first result for an image search of her name.

First, people may as well stop being offended by things on the internet. It's a free medium, and many of its users are accessing it while in a private setting. Unconventional content is a norm, and understandably so; the internet doesn't have the compelling behavioral pressures of a social community, and its content reflects that.

Second, it's not google's fault. I don't know what their search algorithms are (and they would baffle me anyway if I did), but they're just giving you the results. Google, not unlike a binocular company, isn't promising that you'll like what you see, it's merely trying to give you as good a view as possible. Just because the people in the building across from mine aren't in shape and have horrifying sex with the blinds open, doesn't mean I ought to be mad at my binoculars. Or my neighbours for that matter. Hypothetically.

Les Stroud's "Survivorman" vs. Bear Grylls' "Man Vs. Wild"

2009-11-27T17:34:00.000-08:00

Manliness of main character (10 points)
Camera work and production values (10 points)
Usefulness of survival advice (10 points)
Overall realism of show (20 points).

Category 1: Manliness of main character

Stroud comes out strong in the manliness department because in his show, he's in the wild for a full week rather than a mere 48 hours. He's also alone with no crew, making the ordeal that much more difficult.

Grylls, on the other hand, is much more daring and balsy when it comes to what he decides to do on the show. He goes out of his way to eat absurdly disgusting foods, ascend and descend absurdly dangerous cliffs, and he also makes sure to involve large dead mammals as food and/or clothing in most of his episodes; a manly decision there is no greater.

Digging deeper into their pre-show lives, we find that Grylls pulls ahead for manliness. According to Wikipedia, he's paramotored over the Himalayas (I don't know what that means but it sounds hard), set the world record for highest indoor freefall, crossed the North Atlantic in an inflatable boat, and, I quote, "rowed naked for 22 miles in a homemade bathtub along the Thames." The fact that he made his own bathtub really ices the cake, IMO.

Also, his name is Bear.

Stroud was a liberal arts major, who worked at MuchMusic and spent some time as a garbage man in Toronto. We should also knock off a point for Stroud because on his show, he spends quite a lot of time complaining about the loneliness and fear that he experiences in the wild. Manly men feel no such things!

Grylls: 10/10

Stroud: 5/10

Camera work and overall production values:

Bear's show has to be the winner for this category, but only just. The fact is, there's a full camera crew following him around, so they can bring loads of equipment and set up much more dramatic shots and angles throughout the show. The fact that Bear doesn't have to mess around with the cameras like Stroud does, allows Bear to move faster and be unburnened in his exploits. Often, dramatic moments and animal encounters are missed by Stroud because he has to 'set up' every shot himself.

Stroud does get points, though, for capturing some of the less tangible and more beautiful aspects of the wild environments. His shots tend to linger and viewers are given a better sense of what it's "really like" to be out there, rather than just an entertaining show.

Grylls: 8/10

Stroud: 7/10

Usefulness of survival advice

This is a tough call to make. On the one hand, Stroud tends to accomplish much less than Grylls, but that's mainly because Grylls has situations and opportunities "presented" to him, i.e. set up in advance, so he can demonstrate how to execute various survival techniques. Wild boars, dead sheep, and other usefull animals just tend to show up. In terms of the sheer quantity of different advice and demonstrations, Bear Grylls' show is the winner.

But that's not all there is to this category. One key difference between the two shows is that Bear brings a flint stick to easily start fires, while Stroud does not. Learning to start a fire (and generally stay warm) is usually top priority in reality (along with finding water), and firestarting methods are taught regularly by Stroud. Stroud also (and I think importantly) discusses the psychology of survival; he speaks of learning to overcome desparation, fear, exhaustion, and loneliness. This stuff is indespensible to real survival situations.

Stroud: 9/10

Grylls: 7/10

Overall Realism

Stroud takes the most impotant category without even much of a fight. It's not to say that Grylls' show isn't real, but the fact is simply that Strouds filmed experience much closer represents likely survival situations than does Bear's. Survival in the wild is a cold, lonely, terrifying, energy-depleting, and generally extremely taxing experience. Without a gun or help from others, you'll be lucky to get more than a squirrel or a rabbit for food in an entire week.

Stroud quit filming episodes after three seasons because of the physical toll they were taking on him. That's as real as it gets.

Bear's show has its realism, however. He doesn't have to drag 50 pounds of camera gear around with him and film all his own shots, for example. In this way, Stroud makes it even harder than it has to be, or would in reality be.

Stroud: 19/20

Grylls: 14/20

Deductions: -2 points for Bear, for faking it.

Bonus Points: +2 points for Stroud, for emphasizing the importance of wildlife preservation and good ethics in every episode of his show.

Final Scores

Les Stroud's "Survivorman": 42 points
Bear Grylls' "Man Vs. Wild": 37 points

2009-11-21T06:04:00.000-08:00

Well, inspite of being a bit ill this weekend, I made it to the dentist for a checkup and cleaning. Only 60 bucks, x-ray included for good measure.

I think the reason people hate the dentist is all the very small metal things... some are just a little bit too pointy, some a little bit too scrapey, and some spin around at uncomfortably fast speeds. And all of them go into your mouth. I know it's not a torture chamber, but if I wanted to own and operate a torture chamber, I'd just buy a dental office and add some straps to the chairs. It'd be a turnkey operation.

And the good news is, the dental hygene streak continues! Looks like I'll make it to 25 without a single cavity. Brush and floss daily, kids. It'll save you a ton of money in the long run.

2009-11-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

I think that I've lived in more places (I mean to say apartments/houses) than most people my age. Since I left home at the age of 21, it's been six. If you include my living spaces before that (my parents lived separately; they both moved around a fair bit and I was with my father on weekends/summers), you can add seven or eight more to the list.

One thing that never fails to surprise me is that, when I move from one place to the next, I always have more stuff than I thought I did. You think it's going to be one car-load, maybe two. Then it's four. Things just tend to fill up boxes faster than you expect them to. One blanket and a couple of pillows; that's a box right there. A few books and a blender; there's the next box. Add to that your computer desk and modest CD collection, and the borrowed van is full already.

But the older I got, the fewer things I wished to accompany me to the next apartment. Every time I moved, I moved fewer things and gave up more. Before Korea, I threw out tons of old stuff, furniture, clothes, etc. But I also boxed up a bunch of things that, at the time, I thought were indispensible, and left them in my Grandmother's basement. That was 14 months ago, and now I can barely remember what it was that I boxed up or why I thought those things were so important.

And my grandmother, in her patient wisdom, predicted this would happen the day I asked to use her storage space. "Your aunt left 10 boxes of things in the basement when she moved to Toronto. She said it was all necessary and now she doesn't want any of it. I just want you to remember that!"

And then there are the books. I must have eight boxes of them down there, and I never knew which ones or how many to drag around with me when I moved about. I don't even know why I kept them at all; I rarely re-read the ones I've read, and about half I've never read more than a few pages of... and may never finish. I think when I go home, it'll be time to clean house... I'm going to try my best to pass along most of my old books to the used store on Fort st., and send most of my kitchen stuff to the goodwill. The piano books will have to stay with me.

And I think it will be time to say goodbye to the desktop computer. What's the point? All they do that laptops don't is play games and music louder and better. I don't need that.

The reason all this is in my mind is because I'm right now in the process of downsizing everything I have in Korea into one travel backpack, for Europe/India come January. Mailing things home is for the most part more expensive than the value of the things I'd like to mail. It's frustrating and painful, trying to plan this sort of trip from a foreign country, especially having lived here for more than a year, and not coming back before returning home to Canada. I cannot leave anything behind that isn't to be trashed or given away.

When it rains...

2009-11-08T18:40:00.000-08:00

Well, third time's the charm. My hike got rained out yet again... I was ready for a bit of the wet stuff, but then it started to pour down like Noah himself was ready to set sail on the morning of my departure from the park's nearby town. The town is called Gurye, and what I'm writing here now about it will probably contain more detail than any other (English) source you can find online. I ended up staying in Gurye for three days on account of my cancelled trip, and it was a pleasant time; the town had a few stories to tell, which added a silver lining to the disappointment of not being able to hike.

When I first arrived early Friday afternoon, the weather was wonderful, and I hoped dearly that it would stick.

The view from the motel window, facing Jirisan National Park

But, it did not. It turned on Saturday, so I postponed the hike until Sunday morning. Come sunday it was even worse, so I stayed in town snapping photos and trying to have a good time amid the on-and-off rainstorms. My first mission on Friday night was to find something fun to do. Over the course oof several hours, I managed to give myself a tour of almost the entire town, and in spite of about 25 bars (known as Hofs in Korea), I couldn't for the life of me find any people, especially people my own age. Following a trend in every small town, Gurye's population consists almost completely of people under 18, and over 30. Everybody else has moved along to take a crack at a better life in the world of big-city diversified labour.

Finally, as I was about to retire bored back to the Motel, I saw someone through a third-floor bar window waving me in. Someone with blond hair of all things! I had stumbled across two of Gurye's four (count 'em) western residents. At first I was relieved and excited, because maybe a fun weekend was in store just yet, but after a few minutes it because clear that these two were a nerdy, unfun lot. A guy and a girl, both on contract with the public schools and living with Korean families on a homestay program; all they could do was talk about work, work, and work. Aside from them regailing me with small-town ESL teaching horror stories, it was a boring night.

The best story they told was of a guy they knew who came to another farming village nearby on a govt. ESL program, and was made to live on the floor of an unfurnished, abandoned shack. The facilities consisted of a hose, a hole, and a hot plate... for bathing, shitting, and cooking respectively. This gave me some perspective, to compare Seoul's ESL teacher apartment "horror" stories to.

Anyway, Friday was the last I saw of the other westerners. I spent saturday trotting around town and the countryside all around it, just observing daily life, admiring the Buddhist temples (which were outnumbered greatly by neon-lit Christian churches) and taking in the clean air. Korea's highly seasonal climate produces that wonderful intoxicating smell of decaying leaves in November; it reminded me much of childhood hikes around Goldstream in the late fall.

From the town's overlooking hilltop

Saturday night was something else altogether. Around midnight while I was in my room enjoying a movie and a bottle of soju (again, my room was as much of a party as any bar in town), the nearly-empty motel filled up with Korean businessmen, followed quickly by the clacking of high heeled shoes up and down the hallways. It was a notorious "love motel" after all. I swear there were people fucking like rabbits to the left, the right, and across the hall from my room. The women were faking it. Sleep was difficult.

Sunday saw intermittent bouts of heavy rain. Storms in Korea are strong, but inconsistent and fleeting, as though they're simply passing over, merely on their way to their destination. Rain falls as clouds race across the sky, breaking to sunlight and back to rain with only a moment's notice. I hiked up to the hilltop over the city, and found some other interesting sights including a very traditional street market (open only on Sundays), selling mostly food, and all of it was as fresh as food gets (alive in some cases). I was discouraged from taking pictures for some reason, but I saw saw whole and half-pigs for sale hung up on hooks, live fish in barrels, and all manner of fruit and vegetables. The town's population looked thin and overworked, but healthy.

Sunday market

Traditional Korean graveyard

Burial plots are always of families, and there is always a bulbous lump on the ground where the body lies. This graveyard was on the back side of the city's overlooking hill.

The fall colours in Korea are absolutely beautiful. And I even found, amid the sea of green, orange, red, and yellow, a lone plant on the hillside who was following the beat of some other seasonal drum, in full November bloom.

2009-11-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm off to Jirisan, for take two. There are clouds in the sky, but I'm taking my shot anyway... loosely prepared for rain this time. I'm hoping, it being november now, that it might just be cold enough to snow instead of rain up on the ridge (5000ft) where my hike takes place.

I'll be back on tuesday with photos. I'd like to give a shout-out to the swine flu outbreak and my school's alarmist policies, for making this 4-day trip possible.

Additionally, here's an article for your reading pleasure while I'm away. I promise, it's pretty funny. Cracked is kindof my guilty pleasure in Korea, and this article is a good one.

http://www.cracked.com/article/139_5-ridiculous-ancient-beliefs-that-thrive-internet/

2009-11-04T04:32:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been having dreams nearly every night. Long ones... memorable ones. Last night I had a dream that I was near death, and chose to have my body frozen on the hopes that future technology could revive me and regenerate dead tissue.

So, along came the future, and suddenly I "woke up" inside a clone of myself. Scientists explained to the clone that they'd used brain matter too make him, and duplicated hard-wired memory patterns to make the clone feel as though he was the same person. The thing was, somewhere in the process, the original "me" got transferred into the new body, but I was only able to experience the physical senses that the new body was experiencing. I wasn't able to have "his" emotions, or speak, control the body in any way. I could only think, listen, see, etc... as though the brain were supporting two separate inner "I's" and one of them was a mere observer.

It was strange and melancholic as I watched the clone go about his business, because I soon became incredibly bored. I begged (upon deaf ears) for him to take more chances, to leave behind his possessions, to become fearless, even to put his life on the line for a thrill or two. Having lost control of my body, all I wanted it to do was everything I could never have done if I were in control.

And the other part of the dream, the backdrop, was that it was in the distant future. It's difficult to explain (as dreams often are), but the scenery was highly detached and technological. buildings didn't have windows, people walked uniformly, cars were silent, and in place of a total lack of anything natural, all the architecture was painted a chlorophil-green and plastered with forest murals. Nobody seemed to have any kind of relationship with their surroundings, as though any of them could simply leave their life for a new one half the world away and not pay notice.

Night on the Town

2009-11-01T03:34:00.000-08:00

It seems an unspoken maxim that you haven't really partied in Seoul unless you've partied until the subways start running again in the morning. See the thing is, most of the residential areas are a very expensive cab ride away from the clubbing districts, so on a night out one must choose between taking the late train around 11:30, emptying every pocket for a cab, or taking the morning train at 6AM. And the choice really is a difficult one, because unlike in Canada, Korea has no (enforced) laws regarding liquor service and venue closure limitations. Popular joints just stay open until the sun breaks and people clear out on their own.

Anyway, I figured I should have at it at least once. And it was an alright time. Apparently I'm a good dancer (that's an opinion from two real no-foolin' females, though one of them might have been saying "I like your red vest" instead of "I like your dancing"), and our social gang got up the pace at a club for a solid 6 hours after shots at a dingy basement bar had grown boring. Sitting on the 6am subway semi-conscious next to other burned-out partiers and early shift employees of various sorts felt a little like a rite of passage. It's one of those things where the satisfaction of being able to say you've done it is better than the actual memory.

But at the club, I just can't "lose myself" the way all the dance mix songs tell me I'm supposed to. That blasted inner monologue just never stops. But it's still ok to dance around, especially since I have a girlfriend, which releases me (at least partially) from the urge to partake in the fiercely competitive mating game on the dance floor.

And that's probably the other reason I'm not normally one for the clubs. I never meet women there, and I'd probably stink at it if I tried. When it comes to meeting women, conversation is my strong suit... flirtation, word play, saying interesting things, that kind of stuff'; Put me on a music-blasted battlefield where the weapons are immaculate personal grooming and toned muscles, and I pretty much don't stand a chance.

Happy Haloween

2009-10-31T00:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm about to go downtown partying in full costume, in a country where Halloween isn't celebrated. Should be interesting, if anything.

Now, I've seen a lot of useless junk at stores in my life (especially in Korea), but I think the most useless junk ever produced has to be Halloween stuff. It's literally designed to stay intact(masks, shirts, everything really) for three or four hours. The vest I bought for tonight (old-timey stage performer get-up) doesn't even have washing instructions on it.

Anyway, happy Halloween everyone!

2009-10-29T20:08:00.001-07:00

For the second time this semester, two of my grade 2 students started fighting about evolution. We were on about monkeys and one kid says "Humans come from monkeys." Then the next kid says "No! Humans come from God!" The two looked like they were about to come to fists.

So I calmly explained that they were both wrong. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor; one doesn't come from the other. Parental calls be damned, Christian elementary school be damned. This is 2009, and I can't in good conscience nod and smile while some poor kid tries to convince me that humans don't share a biological history with the rest of the animal kingdom. "God didn't make people. Your church is honestly wrong about that," I said. What would you have done? Was that a bad idea? I'm supposed to be a teacher and I don't want to use my authority to re-inforce (even tacitly) that kind of thing.

Swine Flu

2009-10-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

It's official; two children have caught it at my school, so far. There are also dozens of absences today, partially because of a large number of sick kids and partially, I think, because of freaked-out parents.

There's a law in Korea that if a school has 5 or more confirmed cases of H1N1, it must close for a week (AKA an unscheduled week-long paid vacation for yours truly). I don't know if this is some kind of moral deficiency, but a significant portion of my soul wants three small children to contract a potentially deadly illness so I can have a vacation. A kinder phrasing might be that I want the school to close for everyone's safety! :P

Additionally, I've taken my own personal precautions against the virus. First, I've been including in my classes basic hygiene pointers (eg. "Stop putting all your school supplies in your mouth," "Don't sneeze into your hands then touch everything and everyone around you," and so forth). Second, I've placed a moratorium on high-fives. That was tough, as high-fiving the foreign teachers is pretty much a set-in-stone tradition in Korea. Third, I'm just generally keeping my hands spotless and the rest of me at a certain comfortable distance from the kids.

2009-10-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

I'm giving up the 10k dream for now. I've been jogging probably 40 times in the last few months and I simply don't like it. In fact, I really hate jogging. And my progress in terms of distance has been minimal.

So, I booked my Jirisan hike for two weeks from now. It'll be nice to be up in the mountains while the leaves are changing colour in Korea's intensely seasonal climate.

But then, what of the new year's hike?? Well, I may go back to Jirisan again for new years, OR, if I really want to be ambitious, I might find my way to the only higher mountain in Korea.

2009-10-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

Remember back in the day, when a pencil was just made of wood and had an eraser on the end?

Well not these days. Now, the geniuses at the stationary companies decided to make pencils plastic and clickable, with erasers sold separately (as well as lead refills). So now parents have to buy three things instead of one to do the exact same job (which is, of course, to write wrong answers on paper and erase them by teacher demand). ADDITIONALLY, these new pencils are equipped with designs, holograms, comic characters, and all kinds of little stupid adjustable grip things.

When did it happen? When did the day come that stationary became the enemy of the teacher? It takes about 5 seconds to see that all this stuff is designed so that kids have more to eff around with in class.

You know how many pens actually survive until the ink runs out? You know how many pencil "refills" actually get used, compared to the number that get dropped on the floor and crushed? You know how many erasers get used up before they're ripped to pieces or jabbed full of holes?

2009-10-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

Korea will be in the rear mirror in less than three month's time. How can I now develop the things that can't be carried over? Is it worth building sand castles before a rising tide?

But I'm careful not to take this line of thought too far, because it leads very quickly to the thought that death is inevitable and every moment is, in a way, a priceless investment with diminishing returns as we age. I really, really don't want to be caught thinking about the future that way!

So the Buddha said that there are three sorts of people with respect to their responses to hardship and insult. The first are like stones for whom the anger is engraved upon them permanently. The second are those like sand for whom anger is only drawn for a short time, and the third are like flowing rivers for whom the anger's shape is washed away into the flow almost instantaneously. I'm not angry about a thing, but I like that little parable.

The Promised Land

2009-10-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

So what do you do after you've experienced one of your greatest dreams? How do you come down from it? What happens the next morning? Do you try to have the experience again?

If you know me, you know I love food. I really do. More than most people. And I love a buffet.

So yesterday I went to what can only be described as the single greatest place with four walls and a ceiling in the world. It was a very swanky restaurant; one of those three-forks-next-to-your-plate kind of places, and it was a buffet. It was VERY expensive, and I should thank my mom for picking up the tab on my three-months-early birthday dinner.

In roughly the following order this is what I had at the buffet over the course of two hours (I wrote it all down on an old recipt at the restaurant):

king crab
ahi tuna sashimi
sushi rolls (made on the spot)
raw beef
jumbo shrimp
corned beef
salad
spare ribs
pan pizza
softshell crab
dim sum
lamb chops
spring roll
bread & butter
rib eye steak
escargot (snails!)
shark fin soup
sea cucumber
eel
more pizza
---
garnished custard in a martini glass
ice cream buffet (mango and strawberry in my case)
fondue (there was a bonafide chocolate fountain!)
cherries jubilee
tapioca pudding
chocolate cake
butter tart square
tiramisu
belgian waffle with whipped cream
---

This is, I repeat, what I ate, and it represents only a portion of the whole selection. I am visibly fatter.

Every meal I've ever had has been in a sense a slight disapointment, because it either wasn't quite filling enough or quite delicious enough. This restaurant was the perfect combination of extremely high-quality well-made cuisine and near unlimited-ness of options and quantities. It was more than any one human being could possibly enjoy in a single meal.

I don't even know what to do now. Food just doesn't taste the same. I looked upon my lunch today with nothing but contempt. I don't even care what's for dinner later. Other than for survival, why should I even eat again?

2009-09-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

With the world's current population and technologies, pretty much every Earthly adventure has been done, and done again, and done to death. Getting to the top of Mt. Everest isn't even remarkable. Crossing Antarctica is a walk in the park.

It seems the only way to make these sorts of feats worthy of, say, publication, is to be part of some identity group (ranging from nationalities to disabilities) which hasn't yet had a member make the feat. For example, if I were a one-legged, blind, pregnant Japanese woman, climbing Everest would still be worth a newspaper article.

The other way, if I'm just a plain old physically able white guy, is to impose upon myself some kind of arbitrary limitation to make the feat a lot harder than it needs to be. Like, if I try to cross the Atlantic on a row boat, or climb K2 in my underpants, or run with the bulls in Pamplona on a pogo stick. You read ridiculous stories like that a lot these days.

I suppose the third way to make one's adventure worthy of publication is to make it political. Like, if I go to some jungle to promote the environment, or promote the plight of whoever to get whatever it is they need to get.

2009-09-29T16:22:00.001-07:00

One of the worst decisions that a group of ants can possibly make is to set up a colony on the grounds of an elementary school. I can only imagine what they'd think of human nature if they were able to think about such things.

2009-09-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

2009-09-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm signing up for a 10k event that's being held just over a month from now in Seoul. This was one of my new years resulations, and it's time to make good. At the moment I can run a little over half that distance without dying, so there's some work left to do. It'll be jogging every day and a renewal of my diet (which has been on hiatus this month) until the big race.

As for my other new-years resolutions: "Figure out a career path"; well, I've figured out the next step anyway (music!), and with luck it will become a career path. As for hiking Korea's tallest peaks, I've done one of the two, and my attempt to get to the highest one at Jirisan got rained out. I'm planning to take a second and final shot in the dead of winter, immediately after Christmas. This is the only time I can get the 4 days to take the trip to the South of the Korean peninsula to the park!, and it's going to be really f-ing cold up there. At least shelter reservations won't be a problem, and the icy scenery will be gorgeous. Brrrrrrrr......

2009-09-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

Whenever a website tells me something is "free," it usually isn't. We all know this already. But it's become so bad now that the word itself has reversed in meaning in my mind. When I hear "free" in any context now, I assume I'm going to be asked for money in a moment.

And that's the thing about the lack of regulation on internet advertising: as we adapt to the lies we're told, the advertisers have to tell increasingly preposterous lies and invent even more deceptive schemes. I get emails now telling me I've suddenly won tens of millions of dollars, with absolutely no catch, in a European lottery. I'm told that I can have free ipods and cell phones and computers and software products and all I have to do is "click yes."

It's this lottery mentality they capitalize on. Like trying to imagine millions of stars in the galaxy, or millions of molecules in a drop of water, we're inadequate thinkers to conceptualize millions of possible outcomes in a lottery-style draw. Not being able to do this, we come to the quick conclusion that it's worth the minor effort (clicking yes, or spending a dollar, or some such action) to get a chance at such a disproportionate payoff. We all know the internet schemes nearly 100% bullshit, but we click anyway on the extremely small (perceived) chance it's a real deal. Imagine if someone was just handing out free scratch lottery cards at the mall. You'd take one just for the hell of it, wouldn't you?

Just remember a simple principle about people on the internet: they can fall into two categories: people who are trying to make money off of you, and people who aren't. The people who aren't will never give you anything for free, and the people who are will only give you something if you end up giving them something of greater value in return. Usually this is money, and occasionally it is your time and effort filling out countless surveys and signing up for credit cards with exorbitant interest rates. There are no free lunches online!

2009-09-23T21:48:00.000-07:00

Breaking routines is difficult. Even more difficult is dealing with a routine that is broken for you against your will. Every week on thursday I've got lunch one hour later than the other days. At the 11:40 buzzer, I suddenly get hungry like one of Pavlov's dogs salivating to the little jingling bell. But on Thursday lunch isn't until 12:30. Imagine running in a marathon, but right when the finish line is just in sight, some officials grab the tape and move it back another mile or two. It's a sick and twisted social experiment, I say.

Bonus

2009-09-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

We're supposed to get bonuses for Chuseok (Thanksgiving), but instead my school elected to give me a 15 pound box of Korean pears. The box was large and rectangular, so that on my scooter it forced my legs to stick out the sides and inhibited my steering somewhat. I thought, on my way home, that I might die for these pears.

Common Sense

2009-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

This is something most workplaces simply can't run on. I've had more infuriating arguments with bosses than I could possibly remember, and in most of them, considered out of a certain broad context, I was right beyond any doubt. What makes these kinds of situations even worse, as you all know, is that usually the boss is, in a sense, arbitrary; your job isn't that great (restaurant serving in my case for several years), and the nincompoop in charge is just someone who's been at it longer than you and decided to make a career in the industry.

Let's use an example: At Denny's, there was a top-down policy that wrong orders (food cooked by mistake) can't be eaten by staff. This infuriated staff, because we all had to pay for our meals, and it made a lot more sense to simply put out the occasional wrong orders at the staff table for everyone to pick at family-style. Such orders were common and diverse enough that, over the course of a shift, everyone would get in a free meal's worth of food. Additionally, giving wrong orders to the staff wouldn't be a complete waste.

Now, if Denny's restaruants were staffed by mature grown adults who all exercised responsibility and common sense, giving wrong orders to staff would work well. But they aren't staffed by such people, and it only takes one or two cooks to start "accidentally" making wrong orders and turning a tiny amount of trust into a scheme for bilking the restaurant out of its food. Sadly, as the upper-level folk at Denny's know, this is exactly what would happen at most branches if the policy of throwing out wrong orders were overturned.

Take this simply as an example of the structure of many disagreements between employee and employer. There is often a regulation that, considered independently of its context, seems paternalistic and disrespectful, as though no employee can be trusted. People who are smart and responsible feel like they're getting no respect. They're right. But the company is also right, because the rule is really only meant to apply to those who would take advantage if given the chance. Unfortunately, a rule has to apply to everybody, and the larger a company is, the greater disconnect there is between those who write regulation and those who must follow it.

So, you'll see countless disagreements where the employee is right at that particular instance and context, but really it's just an example of the company enforcing a rule that serves greater good than harm in the big picture.

Some people see this conclusion as a reason to be less argumenetative with bosses, and others see it as a fundamental problem with any company large enough that the ownership loses touch with the employ.

2009-09-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

These news links I post tend not to last, so get it well it's hot.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html

Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong have written competing articles under commision by the Wall Street Journal on the question of "Where does evolution leave God?" The best part is, they're less adversarial than these kinds of discussions typically are, because each author didn't know what the other would be saying, i.e. neither is a response paper, though they do try to anticipate each other. It's what you'd expect if you know the authors, but if you don't know them well, I strongly recommend the read!

2009-09-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

Well, the family below me is moving out today. All kinds of racket through the night (apparently I live above a bunch of procrastinators) kept me nearly sleepless. I'm looking forward to having new neighbours; these ones made me feel down; the whole family unit seemed to be held together only by thin threads of duty and obligation. I'm especially pleased to see the husband of the house go; ever since he got taken away in handcuffs for putting his wife in a stretcher (though he was back a few days later... such is life in some Korean marriages), it's been awkard to say the least. He knows that I know, and I can't help but fire off an occasional hard look when our paths cross at the front entrance.

This is the third or fourth neighbour I've seen go and be replaced now. Also, a number of public improvements have been made in my area of town, including an ongoing project to beautify a local river with stone embankments and walking paths, as well as newly-built hiking trails and staircases on the nearby mountain. Changes are always gradual in a town, but all added up, Sanggye-dong looks quite a bit different than it did a year ago.

Feels a bit like I'm in Korea on borrowed time these days. It's really only 3 months and change before I'm on a plane to, as it appears at the moment, Spain. A friend of mine in Canada by the name of Emily (do you read this blog Em?) and I will embark on a nearly-three-month backpacking trip through Europe, India, Nepal (maybe), and Thailand. It seems the Kosher thing to do these days for middle-class 20-somethings to trot around the globe finding themselves, posting facebook photos along the way. I don't know about wisdom, but there certainly is inner strength to be gained by spending time out of one's element.

After that it's home. Six months, give or take, from now. I can see the Victoria airport already, my family at the arrival gate, and grandma's van in the parking lot.

I've been playing a lot of piano this year, and I've decided to have one more go at music school auditions in April. I'll apply at UVic and perhaps UBC. Hell, maybe even McGill if I have enough material ready. Playing the piano is the only dream I've consistently had, that could also be a career. Every other idea that crosses my mind feels like a plan to just make money. I was born into such a priveleged position on this Earth that I can and will put down my betting chips for more than a comfortable life. I need to know where this music path goes, even if it means venturing into my 30's without a pot to piss in. So be it!

2009-09-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty much never on facebook these days, but I just checked in on a group that I founded a couple of years back and it's up to 38 members. That's pretty darn good I think, since only people named Jared can join.

"Jareds against Jared Fogle the subway guy", is the title of the group.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2446000921

I made it because only I and other Jareds know how annoying it is to hear "oh, Jared, like the subway guy" from people when introducing ourselves.

Full Circle

2009-09-11T18:55:00.001-07:00

September has brought with it a flood of memories, thanks mostly to the change of the season, and the various sights and smells that it has brought with it. Jogging around town yesterday I couldn't get last September out of my mind and all that's changed since then.

As of late, an email from my grandmother has been stuck in my mind like a smudge of superglue on the tip of one's finger after fixing a vase. I proposed to her the possibility of a second year in Korea at some point soon (maybe in March, or September of 2010) and she asked me whether that might just be "a postponement" from getting my career path sorted out.

For the record, talking about the future with my grandmmother has been extremely helpful, thought-provoking, and informative. On this one point though, I don't know. I really don't. But I can break a few things down:

I can see myself in music someday, but I don't feel ready to hit those university classroooms again. Too soon, frankly. And during my time in Korea, I've made a load of money (some of which will be saved), lost some weight and gotten a lot healthier, travelled, made a bunch of friends, learned a new culture and a bit of a new language, and met a stellar girl who makes me wonder if I won some kind of relationship lottery without knowing. If these things don't all add up to living fully and productively for a bloke my age, then I'm fresh out of ideas.

I've also got a sense of teaching. As it turns out I like children, and they seem to like me as well. I did some research, and apparently an Honours degree in Philosophy doesn't qualify me for admission into any 2-year teaching diploma program because my discipline doesn't directly translate into a high school subject. If that's not complete hogwash (like I couldn't seriously teach English or History to a bunch of 16 year olds) I don't know what is.

As for a career as an elementary teacher in Canada, I just don't think it's quite for me. I don't think I have the warmth inside me that children should receive from a teacher full-time.

In spite of it all, Grandmother's point stands not fully refuted. I don't know what my career will be. I don't know about more education. I am starting to lose faith in the usefulness of another degree of any kind, having seen dozens upon dozens of graduates with BA's and BSC's and MA's kicked out the campus door with diplomas in hand, only to fail to find careers and end up in Korea gazing emptily at the culture and jobs at a loss for how any of their years of education could possibly apply to the working life. If the gods give me a son or daughter (as this does happen unintentionally the majority of the time) I haven't the first clue how or where or into what job I'll settle - that set of decisions would have to be made on the fly.

There is, in short, a sizable list of things to do, and contingencies to prepare (or at least be mentally prepared) for. Though this list, I imagine, might only get longer as I grow older and the responsibilities pile on, especially in relative length to the number of years I have left to live.

Farewell!

2009-09-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

Ty was one of the "original four", along with Sean, Jordan and I, who came here wide-eyed and jet-lagged a year back at the same time and to the same job and the same god-awful boss and same smelly apartments:

Ty is the first to leave, Sean having moved on to another job in Seoul and Jordan and I having extended our contracts by varying degrees. I spent one of my first nights in Seoul with Ty and Jordan at a dingy basement kareoke room/whore house being badgered by unattractive hookers either to buy more beer or accept their services. It's been good times since.

The soju and kalbi industries have already lost stock profits, and far fewer parties around Sanggye-dong have a life. The above-pictured fellow's been an insightful and interesting friend, a game night-lifer, and an all-around good, moral, stand-up guy. A fellow avid Seinfeld fan, Ty was a kindred spirit in conversations hashing out our social and romantic idiosyncrasies and the way they come into conflict, especially in a foreign culture. It was a hit not only to lose a good friend here in Korea, but also to see a friend depart on about the same day that I had initially intended to do the same. It's kept me up thinking quite a lot.

Anyway, best of luck to you buddy. Sorry for posting all the least flattering (i.e. most hilarious) photos of you that I could find!

2009-08-30T23:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of coming to Korea. My original plan was to be on a jet home right around today. All in good time.

2009-08-25T17:46:00.001-07:00

"Now son, every month a woman has this time when she gets very angry, at everything. And usually men are the everything. It's like a tire fire; trying to put it out only makes it worse. You just gotta let it burn. Grab a beer and let it burn."

- Hank Hill

August

2009-08-22T23:38:00.000-07:00

The ride brochure was just too tempting. I had to go to Lotte World, Korea's Disneyland.

It's an indoor and outdoor complex, the indoor section being one of the largest indoor theme parks in the world. They even had (not pictured) a full loop-to-loop roller coaster inside, which I rode. It was the first real roller coaster I've ever been on, and it was fun but also nauseating. They also hold periodic parades and dance shows.

For the second of the three cool things I'd planned for thie month's vacation time, I went with my girlfriend to Jirisan National PArk for a camping/hiking trip. The original plan was for 5 or 6 days, the first two or 3 with my girlfriend, and the remainder on my own hiking across the mountains in the park. The latter got rained out, but we still managed to get in our camping, and I did one good day-hike to the top of the park's eastern peak. When I reached the top, I was surrounded by tourists who came up via a road I didn't really know about. Cheaters, I say. The next day we went back to the same place for my girlfriend's sake, on that road (she's not the hiking type so much). It was a treat to get out in the open air, and do some camping and hiking, as well as see one of Korea's most famous and ancient temples.

The third and longest of my trips was a week in Beijing; I stayed in a nice hostel and did about as much as can be done in that period of time. The weather was consistently over 30 degrees, but still times were great, and I met a number of people along the way.

Karen and Devon, a couple of artistic-type Vancouverites.

Also: you may remember I vowed to lose the weight so that I may buy normal clothes at the department stores in Korea. Done and Done. I've dropped 20 pounds, bought new clothes, and I'm looking to drop 20 more for a lean-ish 180 before the year's end.

I've seen a lot of Engrish in the last year, and Beijing did not disappoint. There was some great stuff, and I only managed to phograph a small portion of it all. Shopkeepers were ready to give the boot to anyone taking pictures of the merchandise (and I did get said boot a couple of times).
The Forbidden City was under renovations. Still a good place to go.

Piper. Another of the Vancouver folk. A spunky, fashionable 18-year-old bent on proving to the world how mature and experienced at life she really is. And ironically, for her age she's not got nothing really to prove. That's yogurt, she's drinking, as well. They sell it in ceramic reusable cups with straws for 50 cents. A healthy way to go as far as street food is concerned, so long as you aren't concerned about people selling yogurt on the street in 30 degree weather.

This is what you get when you throw down 50 bucks on a single cup of tea. I thought, why not, right? It's China, the place to be for tea. In addition, I learned the traditional tea ceremony ritual (surprisingly complicated), and got a free tastle/emblem thingy as a gift from the owner of the place.

As for taste, it was clearly several levels up from the stuff you get at the grocery store. But I was not in the right league, the same way I couldn't appreciate a 50 dollar glass of wine; that sort of thing requires a refined (a.k.a. experienced) palate.

Pancakes. Or so the menu claimed. A good lunch anyway.

Now, I can tell you that Peking Duck is the greatest food on the planet. How can an animal be so delicious? It doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary perspective... you'd think such a tasty creature would never survive as a species on account of just that. The restaurant I went to for this also had the funniest menu I've ever seen in my life. There must have been 25 great Engrish titles, but I could only snap some as the staff weren't pleased with me taking the pictures, and obviously staying for the duck was my priority.

I don't know about "Great"; It was a pretty good wall.

You know what about a hundred people have said to me in Asia? They say I look kind and not threatening. They say I appear trustworthy and positive by nature. They go out of their way to tell me this, men and women alike. It seems that western men on the whole have a reputation in Korea (and China it would seem) for being the opposite of that, and I'm an exception. Frankly I don't know what they're talking about. I scare myself just looking into the bathroom mirror in the morning.

Also, I have a nihilistic, cynical streak that seems to go unnoticed by people other than those who know me well enough.

Not too shabby a summer vacation if I do say so myself. And I've got a week to spare before work starts again. Lately I've felt energetic, inspired, and generally on the upswing. It's time to start preparing some bigger travel plans for January and February!

2009-08-13T22:10:00.001-07:00

"Be careful in Beijing, Jared. Sometimes people will try to kidnap you and steal your organs."

- Tom

Thanks Tom. Thanks for the tip.

2009-08-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

"Eternal happiness for a dollar? Hmmmm... I'd rather keep the dollar."
- Mr. Burns -

While entering a national park to go for a hike, I saw an older western lady haggling with a vendor over a couple of hiking poles. She was ruthless, catty, suspicious... really the ultimate haggler. I thought, I'm sure if we both went to the same markets and stores here in Korea and bought the same crap, she'd come out having spent less money by a good measure. But then, I don't think I'd come out any less satisfied with the purchases and overall experience. In fact, I find the more worried I am about pinching pennies here and there, the less happy I am when I actually hand over the money.

And people say I'll get ripped off that way. If I travel to poor countries and buy stuff, I'll get a bad price, I'll get taken advantage of, I'll be made a fool. Ok, so be it. If others want to scrimp and save instead of giving a few extra bucks out to vendors in impoverished countries who can barely put food on the table, then by all means. I'll gladly trade those extra dollars for a stress-free trip paying prices for things that I believe are fair.

That's always how I paid for things in my life anyway; I'm not so concerned with the lowest possible price, but rather with what price I believe is reasonable given the product or service purchased. In poorer countries, at a market, the initial 'rip-off' quoted price before haggling is usually what you'd be likely to pay back in your own western country for the same sort of thing. I don't have it in me to get in a fight with much poorer people about giving them as little money as possible.

2009-08-12T18:50:00.001-07:00

For more than a few years as a child, I was bent on becoming some sort of a field geologist. I had (and still have) an impressive collection of rocks and fossils; I spent the lion's share of my allowance many weeks on that rock store near Mayfair mall. I loved the rock and crystal store in Sidney too. I could (and still can) identify quite a few more kinds of stones and gemstones than most people.

These days the notion of being a geologist is baffling to me. It's not up my alley in any way.

I also remember, as a 13 year old, reading WW2 books to no end. There was never a career in mind, but I learned a load about that war, particularly about the battles and weapons and machines.

As I read those WW2 books, I listened to classical music. Classical music was my genre from day one. That, and the B52's for some crazy reason. I can't say how many times I've heard Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto, but I still fall in love with it every time. My dream was, and today still is, to play that concerto, symphony on my left, crowd on my right, and the lights shining down. It's the only thing I really want to do that pays money. To put it another way, it's one thing I wouldn't stop pushing for even if I had millions of dollars.

Everything else I want in life either costs money, or is free. That's the truth of the matter.

2009-08-12T03:39:00.000-07:00

"I'll have... a vanilla... one of the vanilla bullshit things. You know whatever y'want, some vanilla bullshit capa-thing. Whatever you got. I don't care."

- Larry David (at Starbucks, from Curb Your Enthusiasm)

2009-08-11T00:12:00.000-07:00

Well, my big hike got rained out. We (girlfriend and I) managed to get in a couple of nights at Jirisan National Park, one camping and the other at a nice little pension. I also managed to take a day-hike up to Nogodan peak at the west side of the park (this was intended to be my kickoff for the trek across) and back down. There are some nice pictures that I'll post. But as it happens, the typhoon that just had its way with China moved north and is now dumping all kinds of rain on Korea. I thought about whether to just do the hike in the rain, because I really don't mind rain that much, but two reasons stopped me; first, I didn't have my shoe spikes for that kind of hiking weather, and second, there'd be no good view of anything because the ridge path is right up there in the rainclouds, giving the appearance of plain old fog all the way.

Anyway, the hike is being re-scheduled for winter after my contract is up. I'll get those pictures up soon enough.

2009-08-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

I was watching a Discovery Channel show about how they make perfectly smooth telescope lenses for observatories, and as it turns out there is a technology like sand blasting, but instead of sand they use individual atoms. They didn't explain how this device actually functions, but they proved it darn well buy taking a single hair from the show host, putting it under an electron microscope, and proceeding to inscribe his name into the hair width-wise, quite neatly at that.

The first thought that hit my mind was that this sort of technology is only possible thanks to a massive division lf labour in industrialized workforces. Renissaince men aren't really around much these days, because technologies are so well-developed that to be innovative in any one field tends to require years upon years of training in that specific field.

In fact most of our famous recent technological leaps (e.g. steel, steam engines, aviation, combustion engines, computer chips, lightbulbs), weren't at all leaps but the products of numerous small-step developments, failed experiments, inventors you've never heard about, and lessons learned. Those history-book "eureka!" moments rarely happened.

Some famous and indispensible technologies, such as penicillin and vulcanization, were discovered entirely by accident; they were merely beneficial byproducts of failed experiments to do other things entirely.

Anyway. Speaking of atoms, my toothbrush cup fell off the toilet and shattered in the middle of the night. The bathroom window was closed (so no breeze), and it sat there motionless for hours upon hours before suddenly just falling and scaring the bejesus out of me at 3:30AM. But, I suppose it wasn't ever motionless. When I last threw my toothbrush into it yesterday evening, It must have started sliding toward the edge of the slightly-curved toilet top at a pace so slow that it took half the night to travel a millimeter or two.

This will be my last blog for some time. I'm going camping/hiking for 5 days starting tomorrow, followed by a week in China with only one day in between. I'll check in from China, and compose a big photo blog from the two trips when I come back on the 22nd.

So, UVic has an MA program for writing, that accepts people from non-writing disciplines. I'd have to come up with some sort of portfolio and mission statement, but it sure is a tempting idea because it would mean a post graduate degree rather than more undergraduate work. Does anyone think I could cut it was some sort of writing-type-person? Travel writing? Fiction? Dave Barry-style humor editorials about the soul-crushing mundanities of daily life and custom? Corporate catch phrases? Obituaries? Erotica? Hmmm, scratch the last one; I'd have to change the title of my website.

Personal post; please skip if you're not interested in the mundane details of my life.

2009-08-03T05:27:00.000-07:00

I tell ya, teaching English in Korea does have one perk: Korea is mighty close to lots of other great travel destinations. For less than 400 bucks, I've booked a round trip flight to Beijing and 6 nights at a well-reviewed hostel that is right downtown near the Forbidden City. That's breakfast included!

See, I've got some serious travel plans stewing up for January/February/March, and it's time now to get in a bit of practice going it alone. But then, it's not really "alone," is it? My girlfriend said to me as I made the plan "...but you'll be all alone in China for a week!", to which I replied "Well, there are 1.3 billion people there."

Oh god, I just quoted myself. Apologies. Never again.

Anyway, that's happening on the 15th. For the rest of my August vacation I have planned this: one week of relaxing and working on my Korean (Rosetta Stone is such a stellar program, I actually feel bad for downloading it illegally), followed by a few days camping with the girlfriend at the edge of Jirisan National Park, followed by us parting ways and me hiking across the park. Reservations for the park shelters have been made, and I'm really looking forward to this 3-day hike to Korea's highest mainland peak. Then it's home on the 14th to do the laundry and pack for Beijing! After Beijing, I'll settle back in and go to work a week early to play piano for a few hours each day, and of course study more Korean. I've got two piano concerts planned, one set (in my mind anyway) for the beginning of October and a second for the end of December. There is much work to be done, as I'll hopefully be recording one or both performances on DVD to use as auditions for music schools should I be away from Canada come audition time next year.

I do miss home. My sister is growing up so fast, and I'm here across the Pacific.

2009-08-03T03:43:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I deleted over 200 people from my facebook friend list, leaving only people who I think represent my real-life family and social circle. I invited everyone I know to follow in my footsteps.

Well, a few people said it was a good idea, but nobody seemed to follow.

Anyway, my next big move, which I hope everybody emulates, is this: I have completely stopped looking at the comment sections of every website I visit, excepting only the blogs of people I know, and this site of course.

This applies especially to youtube.

Honestly, I can't read youtube comments for more than 30 seconds without losing a few IQ points strait up. It's like watching Flavor of Love in terms of eroding a viewer's higher functions.

2009-07-29T20:40:00.000-07:00

This is the latest hit single from what I believe is the most popular music group in Korea. K-Pop at its very best, it is. It's kindof catchy, and it'll give you a whole new definition of 'skinny' in celebrity culture. Western pop stars look like a bunch of manatees compared to "Girls Generation." Enjoy.

TOM

2009-07-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've written about Tom before; he's the receptionist/liason/general stuff guy at the BCM office.

But here at Hwarang Elementary, there's a constant and raging debate as to whether Tom is a good guy, and as to whether we should or should not like and/or respect him. Jordan and I (and Ty, but he doesn't work at Hwarang; only at the BCM office) like Tom; we think he's a bit of a mopey sad sack, but that in the end he's a generally good guy who can be relied upon to get the job done. He's taken Jordan to the hospital, and helped me with several random affairs relating to my visa, banking, learning to work the water heater at my apartment, and online shopping the Korean websites. He even came out with the three of us once and stood by watchfully as we got completely drunk and stumbled around the neighbourhood karaoke bars.

The other foreign teachers here really, really dislike the guy. It's 7 to 2 here against Tom at the lunch table discussion. My coworkers have nothing but bad things to say about the guy, and for good reason; they have stopries of Tom completely screwing up hospital visits (i.e. forgetting to book appointments), blowing off meetings, taking way too long to help out with things, and ignoring phone calls and requests. The one girl who works here, Jes, even tells me that Tom's made a decidedly sexist remark to her (which in Korea isn't exactly a shock, but still!). It's like there are two Toms.

But then the question is; what do you do if your experiences with a person (say an acquaintence or coworker) have been positive, but the experience of others (who you respect) with said person have been negative? Should I change my opinion of Tom? He's always been good to me, but he seems to have been a jerk to others. I try to follow a philosophy of only judging people by way of my own experience with them; forming opinions from water-cooler gossip, even that of friends, can be dangerous. Hmmm.

And on a side note, it aggravates me when people say they don't judge others. How is that even possible? You have to judge people by their actions and beliefs and appearance in order to function as a member of society! How do you decide who (if anyone) to lend money to, or tell a secret to, or go into business with, or date, or have as a boss/employee, or marry, or have kids with, or even so much as to eat a sandwich from?

2009-07-28T03:55:00.000-07:00

How far would you say is the peak from my vantage point in the below picture?

Well, the sign thinks it's a little more than 300m. The signs are totally useless when I go hiking, because they only tell you how far something is if you were getting there by way of helicopter. Sometimes it takes me an hour to go 0.5k because it's all just twists and turns and stairs and rocks to climb.

My part of town (it's a big city, and you can only see about a quarter of it here on account of the pollution). For Victoria readers, each one of the apartments in this photo is about the size of View Towers on Fort Street (that giant grey monstrosity, you know the one).
When people move into condos, they don't bother with the elevators. All the buildings are pretty much the same, with large deck doors, so there is a huge market for these lift companies that run around town all day helping people move in and out of their apartments. Believe it or not, the service is only about 50 bucks, for one condo's worth of boxes/furniture.
Ty and I took everyone else out to get some boshintang; i.e. dog soup. Here are the inagural moments for Jordan, and Caitlin (from Halifax):

Korean-style dessert: sweet rice cake with beans. It's okay.
I ran into a student and her friend (my student is photo-shy) while waiting for Jordan in town, so we all went for dinner.

My plant. It had all of 2 leaves when I inherited it from a couple of Canadian friends two months ago. Their job was so terrible, their boss so bad, that they just up and left one day with absolutely no notice, money be damned. Word was the small academy they worked for had to close, at least temporarily. Anyway, I've nursed the plant into good health and it's been growing steadily.
Summer camp is almost finished here at the school. All in all it's been fairly unfun as it's focused heavily on just teaching more english.Frankly, the whole work atmosphere has been a downer lately; all our manager can seem to do it make things more complicated than they need to be, and dole out negative comments and useless criticisms. Nobody in the English department likes their job... I'm not sure I can last until the end of December, and what makes it worse is that if I were to try to quit earlier, my company would screw me around to no end.

But there are good times. Today we all went to the zoo.

A Bengal tiger. Right after this photo, the tiger got up and started doing the female tiger nearby. The looks on the kids' faces were priceless.
The number of documented arachnid species is somewhere around 100,000.

And here's the award for most depressing picture of the day:
For some reason they made the chimp cage a lot more like a maximum security prison than the other cages. Hell, even the tigers didn't have a fence; just a wide trench and walls on the side. This is because the chimp is immensely more intelligent than the other animals. It'd figure its way out of anything other than this sort of cage. What a miserable-looking creature.
And amid the fully-enclosed bird exhibit, something stands out...

That's right, a plain old seagull. It's zoo-worthy here in Seoul.

2009-07-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

I generally enjoy the Harry Potter movies. The latest one was, in my own mind, the best of the lot to date, and I'm a bit PO'd about the producers choosing to make two more instead of one. I want to see how it all ends (honestly I have no idea), and they've surely got enough money already. Imagine if they'd tried to pull some kind of crap like "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Part 1" on us.

Anyway, my co-worker Jessica, a Harry Potter fan, said "You wouldn't have enjoyed the movie if you had read the book." She, obviously, didn't like the movie.
What a curious statement, though. It was almost as though she thought the movie didn't deserve to be enjoyed by anyone because it didn't do justice to its source material. She didn't say that, to be clear, but I got that impression.

Isn't a movie a whole different sort of medium? I fully expect an adaptation to emphasize some of the source's material and trash other parts. Movies have more constraints in terms of narrative, time, and character development, while they have all kinds of advantages in transferring imagery and sound more clearly. Books rely heavily on the imagination of readers. Movies are imaginative visions laid out in finished packaging. Therefore, it is up to HP fans to mediate their expectations when they enter the theater to see an adaptation of a fantasy novel.

And on the topic of LOTR, I was happy to see the movies shed so much from the books. Giving every blade of grass it's own freakin paragraph my be all fine and good for Tolkien fans who like to get into the world, but the hypothetical 15 hour motion pictures that would have been required to "be true to" the novels would have been a disaster.

Anyway, my thought is that we should expect different things from movies and books, and not expect an adaptation from one to the other to be the way we imagined. The HP movies aren't made for the book readers, they're made for people who want to go see a movie.

Generally, the fewer expectations one has going into a theatre (or into many of life's activities), the less of a chance there is to be disappointed. Enjoy things for what they are!
------------

And one other thing: I know the word "muggle" is supposed to mean a normal person; i.e. without any witch/wizard powers. I get the suspician, though, that it's used among fans as a mocking term to describe people who aren't into HP.

2009-07-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

Tom is the "Manager of General Affairs" guy at my employer's office building. That means he pretty much does everything that needs doing, that doesn't neatly fit into any other job category. Usually he's on reception, but I see him organizing schedules, wooing potential clients, handing out fliers, and so on. Another part of his job is to keep the foreign teachers set-up in terms of utilities, rent, visas, health, and so on. "Tom" is his English nickname BTW... he's Korean.

Every time I order something online I have it sent to the office, because I'm not home during the day. Tom always sends me an email when it comes but he never just says I have mail, unless it is literally a letter. He always says what it is that's been delivered, as though I don't already know. Here's the most recent few:

To:
Jared (jsfaber@hotmail.com)
Hi Jared,

You've got a pack of Korea 6 years Insam (hongsam).

Sincerely Yours,

이원옥 부장 배상
Tom Lee, The Manager of General Affairs Nowon BCM

To:
Jared (jsfaber@hotmail.com)
Hello Jared,

You've got a package of Energy.
Sincerely Yours,

이원옥 부장 배상
Tom Lee, The Manager of General Affairs Nowon BCM

To:
Jared (jsfaber@hotmail.com)

You've got a tent.

Sincerely Yours,

이원옥 부장 배상
Tom Lee, The Manager of General Affairs Nowon BCM

2009-07-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

The eclipse was every bit as awesome as the news outlets are saying it was. It even cooled down somewhat in Seoul.... staying around 25 degrees, when it would normally be over 30 on a sunny July day like today.

2009-07-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I planned my next hiking trip. It'll be to Jirisan National Park, hiking for 4 days, and spending three nights in the park itself. It looks to be something in the 50km distance this time.

I wanted to reserve three shelter spots, but getting a shelter reservation is like getting to be the 9th caller on a radio show. The online reservations open up at 10am 15 days before the day of stay, and thousands of people click exactly at 10 to fill just a few hundred spots in 4 or 5 shelters. Anyway I got shelter spots at Nogodan (southeast) and Jangteomok (west side). Problem is the second night, where I have nowhere to stay since I can't get from one place to the next in a single day (looks to be about 30k), and I couldn't get a reservation in the middle-area shelters. So, I bought a tent online and I'm just going to sleep outside, bears be damned. They're supposed to be mostly vegetarian anyway. Technically, sleeping outside isn't legal at Jirisan but a number of people do it anyway for the same reason I'm going to.

Tents have changed a lot since my childhood days camping with my dad. The tent sleeps 3, weighs 7 pounds, and can be set up in about 2 minutes. It cost 31 bucks. The tent I had with my dad as a child weighed probably 30 pounds, took 25 minutes to set up, and cost several hundred dollars.

2009-07-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bit better today, and back at work. The doctor's note I was ordered to get on threat of a pay-dock penalty stated I needed 5 days off. That completely backfired on my bosses, but they just insisted I come to work after one day anyway, making the same threat. They also won't pay for the doctor's note, so I'm out 20 bucks either way.

Let me repeat: They forced me to go to the doctor on my own dime, and then ignored the doctor's recommendation.

I explained to my boss that teachers in my part of Canada get (I believe) 10 paid sick days each year, with no bullying, no innuendo, no suspicion, and a general level of adult respect. This seems pretty normal and reasonable in my mind. My boss looked at me like I came to Korea from Pluto.

This is all very typical of how english teachers (and most of the workforce) are treated in Korea. I'm not saying it's a bad gig here, but if anyone is considering ESL teaching in this country, I'd advise them to be prepared to work while under the weather, and to be willing to listen to a whole lot of BS from managers. Truthfully, it is an exercise of setting one's dignity and intuitive sense of fairness aside at times for the sake of keeping the job steady.

Sick.

2009-07-20T02:22:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fellow, but I'm a lot healthier than people think. I can hike with the best of them, run farther than probably almost anyone per-pound :P, and I never call in sick.

But today I called in sick (for tomorrow... they want 12hours notice). I'm burning up, I look like a god-damn tomato, and my head is thumping with every heart beat. The (best) girlfriend (in the known universe) is coming to the rescue later this evening with meds and a hug.

Honestly folks, I can tell you two things from the heart:

1: The last time I took a (real) sick day was in the first week of September, and that was on account of jetlag. That's 40-odd days short of a year.

2: there are few tormets I've experienced that are worse than having a burning fever in muggy, windless, 30-degree weather.

In the mean time, I'm lying here in my lucky underpants (calm down, ladies) with an ice pack on my head and the AC cranked up to "You might jump off a building when you see your electric bill" mode, watching The Office UK.

Carpe Diem!

p.s. Yes, I do have lucky underpants.

2009-07-19T21:55:00.001-07:00

CNN ran an article asking what the world's greatest achievement is. People posted the computer, fire, internet, printing, getting to the moon, the airplane, music, and more.

I'd have to go with language, and representative government (a.k.a. by the people, for the people, of the people) as the close second, and evolutionary theory as third. The second is in a sense more genuine, because theorists are arguing more and more convincingly that language structures are in fact innate.

Language emancipated us from the rest of the animal kingdom; It changed everything, as it allowed for communication, trade, barter, and of course the recording of history. Representative government emancipated us from Hobbes' state of nature, and it is the single greatest leap of selflessness and co-operation in the history of a terribly violent species; included in this leap is the abolishment of slavery, a worldwide practice until very recently in our hsitory. Evolutionary theory emancipated us from religious and supernatural explanations for the complexity of the biological world.

Want to join the pen15 club?

2009-07-18T03:54:00.000-07:00

It was in grade nine math that my friends and I played a game called "penis." Basically, you take turns saying 'penis' out loud in the middle of class. The first person starts with a whisper, and the next person and bit louder, and so on. The winner is the person whom nobody is willing to try to top, volume-wise.

2009-07-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

Ever notice that, whenever you use the word "reality" in a sentence, you're talking about something bad?

I find that depressing.

2009-07-14T17:15:00.001-07:00

I was fully four hours early for work today. There was a mix up with the schedule, and while my boss swears she told me, I don't believe her. I came at 8, and I could have come at half past 12. BAH. I thought about going back home, but honestly the less driving I do in this city the better.

I'm doing very well these days at chess on facebook. Out of 45,000 users I'm in the 92nd percentile (ranked about 3300th right now), and since probably half of the people who are higher cheat with chess programs, that's a pretty good rank for an honest player.
I play people sometimes and I know they're cheating. The game gets tough and their position tight, and suddenly their moves become extremely intelligent and heavily abstract. Especially at amateur level chess, it's not difficult to see when moves make a dramatic increase in quality.

So I think in January after work ends in Korea, I'm going to travel a bit. I'm looking at two particular ideas, the first being to attend a muai thai fight camp in Thailand for a month (learn something new, and see Thailand), or the Annapurna Circut (20ish-day trek) in Nepal. Or both.

And when I get home, who ever said I have to do something academic? maybe I'll pool my monies together, take out a loan, and buy a business. There's a successful deli on sale right now in downtown vic (I'm looking at the MLS listings), just to give an example. I think I'd be darn good at running a small business of that sort, and I wouldn't have to deal with bosses anymore (other than the tax man). I have a general problem with authority, to be frank... especially incompetent authority and especially arbitray authority. Whatever I do for a career, I want to be my own boss.

Rain

2009-07-14T03:28:00.000-07:00

- From my balcony

It's been like this, completely non-stop, for about 15 hours now. The streets are starting to flood, and the river bed near my house that's usually either dry or a creek, is raging up to the brim of the embankments. I have never in my life seen this kind of rain. Even my Korean friends say it's remarkable for Seoul as monsoon rains go.

2009-07-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

More cops in the alley the other day. This time the resident crazy old lady was trying to stop a fight between a drunk man and a small but rather burly housewife. Korean men, you see, don't have big statures; most adult men are relatively skinny and not usually much over 5'9. The housewives are also small but they've had a lot of, how shall I say, life experience (i.e. abuse and thankless motherhood and really tough times all-around). So the man and woman got into it pretty good, and as I was getting my shoes on to help the old crazy lady break it up, the housewife began to get the upper hand. By the end of it, the man had pulled out a few fistfuls of hair but the woman had delivered him a pretty decent beating.

I don't want to be sexist here, so I figured it was a fair fight and didn't intervene. The man was clearly the aggressor, but the woman was kindof egging him on too, in order i think to get him in more trouble when the cops came. The cops did come and as usual, everyone started trying to blame everybody else.

Now, don't think all this domestic violence I write about is representative of Seoul as a whole. I happen to live slightly in the outskirts, in one of the poorest parts of the city. It's got literally dozens and dozens of tiny brothells, seedy bars, and large families (grandparents included) all living together in very small apartments. Incomes are very low. Alcoholism is absolutely rampant.

Jordan moved to a different area of town a month or two ago. His apartment, across from mine, was really shitty (mildew smell, no good window, cramped layout, no A/C, etc..) His new area is a lot nicer. There are no drunken men stumbling around at night, no screaming domestic disputes, no garbage smell in the streets, and the families and buildings are generally just nicer and more... middle-class. Stores are more expensive too.
But I don't want to move like Jordan did. In addition to my girlfriend living within walking distance, I actually enjoy the character of the neighbourhood. On paper it's horrible in every way, but for some reason I like it. And it's cheap. Kim-bap (traditional rice/seaweed roll) is half the price compared to what it is in Jordan's part of town.

2009-07-10T02:39:00.000-07:00

This guy is my new hero.

The worst smell in the world.

2009-07-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

Koreans recycle nearly everything. There are different pick-up services for cardboards, plastics, compost, and garbage. Generally, people produce almost no landfill-destined household garbage; it's quite something. Most of the pickup services are privately operated... people take the plastics and sell them in bulk to processsors, and so forth. I could and should devote an entry to the ultra-poor recycling pick-up people, many of whom literally pull their entire inventory by hand in metal/wood rickshaws.

Anyway, about the worst smell in thr world: the compost guy in my neighbourhood runs a three-wheel modified motorcycle with 6 large open compost buckets in tow. If you are unfortunate enough to get behind this thing, it's hard to believe. The first time I did, I nearly lost my dinner, and my korean neighbours had a good laugh sitting on the side of the alley. Let's keep in mind that the compost guy collects every form of week-old putrid food waste in a several-block radius. Also keep in mind that the typical korean diet is heavy in fish, meat and all things pickled.

And I always find myself wondering... why does that dude do that job? It has to be one of the worst jobs in the country (also, in part, because he operates only at night).

2009-07-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

Third blog in a single day. I was just about to leave school, on the front step tying my shoes, when the rain just fell out of the sky like the gods turned their shower on. It's monsoon season here and you never know when it's going to go from sunny to incredibly rainy in a matter of hours. I really don't like driving my scooter in that kind of rain, because it is a genuinely dangerous thing to do. It rains so hard that, when I'm driving in it, I can open my mouth and get a pretty good drink.

I know they say motorcycles (and scooters to a smaller extent) are for crazy people; just look at the injury and death statistics, right? Well yes, but I think those statistics reflect to a degree the kind of people who are inclined to buy motorcycles in the first place. In other words, if motorcycles didn't exist, people who would otherwise have bought them are probably the same people who will get into more car accidents on average anyway. Motorcycles get into more accidents for the same reason muscle cars do; those sorts of people have a need for speed, and they're looking to be dangerous and push the limits of what is rational for self-preserving humans to be doing. I am not one of those people. For me the scooter is a cheap conveyance.

But the other thing that I really do concern myself about is the fact that motorcycle injuries are a lot more unpleasant on average, because the machine has absolutely no protection built in. It's a calculated risk that I take, like the many calculated risks we take every day when we drive, cross a street, take a cab, get on a plane, use a power tool, eat at a restaurant (coming from a former Denny's employee), or have sex with someone we don't know all that well (not that I do that every day!).

2009-07-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

It's almost time for another photo dump. In the next couple of days, once I find the time, I'll get a bunch of pics together and make a good entry of it all.

In the mean time, I wonder if our genetic code prevents us from being happy, or satisfied, with our lives. It makes sense to say that an individual constantly unsatisfied, constantly seeking to fill his belly and get more power and more money and more procreative opportunities will likely live longer and procreate more - i.e. dominate the gene pool on average. If we were so easily contented by our actions as we wish we could be, we'd probaby never have made it as hunter-gatherers, when there really wasn't much spare time or energy available for us to sit about and enjoy ourselves.

It is said, after all, that Ghengis Kahn probably fathered children in the thousands. His Y chromosome, according to genetic researchers, still exists today all over Asia and even in Europe. One can't say so much about history's cool-headed, relaxed, Epicurian pacifists.

2009-07-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

Kim Yu-Na is the famous Korean figure skater, currently the reigning world champion and record holder for high scores at the world championships.

Since I don't watch figure skating, the only place I have the privlege of seeing this national hero is in the Lotte Mart (box store) coupon book, smiling with brand-name yogurt in hand. No joke.

Very nearly every commercial on television, nearly every poster advertizement and internet pop-up, features a celebrity of some sort, ranging from movie stars to TV personalities to athletes. The west's celebrity worship doesn't hold a candle to South Korea's.
And the interesting thing: celebrities don't even think not to go commercial and hawk every product imaginable. From cars to food to booze to air conditioners to medicine, there's a celebrity-centered commercial for it on TV right now. And these people are as famous for their advertisements as they are for their career skill-set. Music videos double up as ad jingles very regularly; the new Big Bang (boy band) song "lollipop" is also the name of a new high-tech cell phone, and the video appears identically on the music channel as well as on regular channels in commercial form.

Anyway, if you thought you could go to Asia to escape the shallow corporate materialism of the west, then think again. It's even worse here.

2009-07-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

Bobby Hill: "I just wanted to say, you don't have to worry about me because I'm never going to have sex."

Hank Hill: "Woah now Bobby, don't say that!"

Bobby Hill: "But I thought that's what you wanted."

Hank Hill: "Well, yes, if you were my daughter. But you're my son!"

Bobby Hill: "... Why is it not okay for girls but it's ok for boys?"

Hank Hill: "It's called the double standard, don't knock it. We got the long end of the stick on that one."

2009-07-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

Man have it bad.

I've spent the better part of my life being told about how good men have it today in the industrialized world, and how women make less money, have less power, and live under more pressure to conform to certain images and stereotypes. I've been told that life as a women is harder, more burdenous, and more thankless than that of a man. And the longer I walk this planet, the less I believe any of it.

Look at all the worst, most back-breaking, least social, most mind-numbing jobs: they're filled by men most of the time. We sneer at the society in which nurses and teachers are mostly women, but aren't those jobs (these days) very well-paid, as well as highly rewarding and a great contribution to society? Women also, statistically, have shorter working hours than men in developed countries. Lately, women have been dominating western universities in both grade point averages and in total enrollment numbers.

Men face huge pressures when it comes to meeting women. Women need only to sit there and look pretty; men need to be smart, funny, well-to-do, confident, and charismatic. Men face a trial by fire every time they try to get a date.

Men don't live as long as women do. Men are more likely to have heart attacks and develop stress problems. Workplace injuries and deaths effect an overwhelming majority of men over women, because men almost exclusively do the most dangerous, hazardous jobs.

Men don't get taken seriously as fathers. "Paternity leave" is still thought by many to be a joke. Court systems automatically put the burden of proof on the divorced men when it comes to custody cases, and assume by default that the mother would probably be a better caregiver.

Fathers don't see their children as often. I'm not sure why so many feminist thinkers want women out of motherhood and into the workforce... to be a full time parent, with one's expenses paid for by some fool who spends his days sitting miserably behind a desk, sounds like an ideal situation.

We can (and do) walk by homeless men, broken and torn up by drugs and poverty to within an inch of their lives, and not look twice. Homeless men are lazy, irresponsible, or weak; they must have done it to themselves, right? How often would anyone even think to scoff "Go get a job" at a homeless woman?

On sinking ships, in burning buildings, in murder trials, the lives of men are simply less valuable; their deaths are less remarkable, less tragic, more acceptable. In war (just and unjust), it is the job of young men, some still teenagers, to fight, lose their limbs, lose their sanity, and even die.

So in some sense you might say the world is male-dominated, in that men tend to be the gatekeepers and people of power, but that promised land isn't as great as it might seem from below the glass ceiling.

2009-06-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

We're all told to be 'polite' about our students on the report cards. This means, usually, that we can't call a spade a spade when it comes to the students who are disrespectful little pricks all the time. We have to pussyfoot around everything; "uncontrollable" becomes "energetic," "constantly interrupts" becomes "enthusiastic," "disrespectful" becomes "independent," "loud-mouthed little asshole" becomes "high-spirited."

And no mark can be bad. It's literally impossible to get an F in anything, for any student. The lowest grade I can give is "improvement needed." And even then I'm told by my boss not to use it, and to give "average" as the lowest score for any student in a category. How can "average" be the lowest?!? We're literally teaching our children that the only kind of success is being better than other people.

It's this ridiculous overachieving culture where every student has to be the best at everything. Nobody is allowed to be average, nobody is allowed to be doing just plain 'ol fine. Academic inflation. University graduates can't even find a damn job.

2009-06-28T20:00:00.001-07:00

Why is it that high-level politicians always resign (or get pushed hard to resign) after cheating on their spouses? What's so special about politics? Imagine if every person in the world had to quit their job if they cheated on their spouse.

Public service isn't really related to marriage fidelity. In fact politicians tout exactly the opposite! It is after all a founding principal of both Canada's Charter and the US Constitution that people have a right to personal privacy. And yet it doesn't seem to apply to the people in charge of executing these documents in the public name. I think politicians have just as much of a right to hate their marriages as everybody else does.

"It's about trust." That's the jist of the argument against. If the SC Governor's wife (to use a topical example) can't even trust the dude, then neither can the electorate, right? What baloney. He wasn't elected to be a marriage counselor, or even a good husband, or even a good man for that matter. He's basically got a desk job, making policy decisions and reviewing state senate documents. Everything public about his job is about getting re-elected (i.e. the less important part). I wouldn't much care if Stephen Harper went doodling around with other women in Argentina. Have at it. Just so long as he does good work vis-a-vis his job description.

More to the bigger point: Can the United States begin to elect different kinds of people to its highest offices? How about a single person? How about a non-religious person? How about someone who has no kids? How about a vegetarian? Dennis Kucinich is a but of a nutbar, but he's the sort of guy I'd like to see elected (sans the nut bar-ness).

2009-06-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

I remember when I first saw The Lion King. I loved that movie, and still do. But I remember when Mufasa explans the circle of life to Simba in response to his question about the apparent unfairness between the predators and the prey. Mufasa, in short, explains that while the lions eat the wildebeast, the lions eventually die and fertilize the ground that the wildebeast eat to live. (Logically, on a molecular level we're all cannibals).

In spite of James Earl Jones' deep and calming voice, and the clever harmony of it all, I still thought that was a pretty bum deal for the wildebeast. They have to die by tooth and claw, while the lions, presumably, die in a less terrifying way.

It makes me wonder whether it's right to teach kids that the natural world is basically a fair place, because on the one hand you want to retain their innocence, and on the other you don't want to lie and set them up for too big a disappointment. Should I teach my future kids that Santa is real, or should I inform them camly that our socio-economic status and cultural leanings are the main determining factors in what presents they'll receive? Should I teach them about dog heaven, or about dog decomposition? Hmmmmm...

2009-06-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

Drawing a blank. I'm procrastinating from writing lesson plans for the school's upcoming english summer camp. I'm in charge of "nature" day morning lessons (there are 10 themed days, and afternoons are devoted to games/activities), and I have to develop lessons for high-level english students, middle, and low-level.

The low level kids (mostly younger) will learn about growth and life cycles.
Middle level kids will learn about the above, plus kinds of climate (specifically Korea's).
High level kids (mostly older, and very smart) will learn the above, plus a lesson on how ecosystems are balanced on evolutionary and climatic principles --- and the human effect on this balance.

Why am I writing this here? This is the dumbest procrastination ever.

2009-06-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

If there was one piece of advice I could give to men all over the world for how to get a woman really into them, it would be this: wash the dishes. If you're at her house and you've finished dinner together, just stand over the sink and do it yourself; tell her to relax for 10 minutes. It works like magic.

2009-06-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my life I can confidently say I am beginning to have a worldview. That is to say, arguments I make on many different fronts and subjects are beginning to mesh together to form a cohesive kind of web of thought. My views about ethics, metaphysics, culture, and aesthetics are, I think, at the early stages of harmonizing with each other in my mind.

Integral to this was the realization that university is not the highest place to be, intellectually. Nowhere is! Universities have cultures and subcultures and biases and strong financial influences just as every other organized institution does. I am so grateful to philosophy for teaching me methods of thinking, rather than teaching facts, or teaching me what to believe about the world. There were never any right answers when it came time to write an essay, only arguments more and less cohesive and compelling. This was to the incredible frustration of many first year phil. students, so used to the high-school style right-or-wrong education, but to my delight! It's at that point, in first year, that one realizes whether philosophy is a good path to take. The same wall is hit or surmounted by Literature students as well, I think. This is why I found my dabbles in other departments to be boring; they tended to teach me things I could just as easily have learned on my own with a library card, or teach me ideologies with a lack of criticism. Philosophy, or rather an education in it I believe, requires discussion and debate and interactivity, almost by definition.

2009-06-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

It's been pissing rain all day.

I'm impressed with my clothes. I've bought no new clothes (other than hiking gear and undergarments) in 10 months, and they've been good to me the whole way. My washing machine mangles and ties them up pretty well every time, and they've been soaked by the acidic rain accidentally while hanging out to dry a bunch of times, and they've even been frozen solid on a few occasions in the winter.

The truth is, my 215lb body and 36" pant size qualify me as morbidly, horrifyingly obese in South Korea, such that all major department stores (and smaller stores) don't carry any clothing that fits me. Let me repeat: a "34 pant waist is the largest size a human being can buy in SK without taking one of two other possible options. The first is the internet, and the second is going to Itaewon, the sleazy, hooker-laden westerner district full of loud-mouthed American soldiers and overpriced knockoff western pubs. There one can find clothing for fatties such as myself, as well as large shoes.

I'm taking the third option, which is to conform my body to the selection. With God as my witness, I'm not buying any pants or shirts until I can buy then from Lotte Mart down the street like everybody else around here does.

Please (don't) Eat Tasty Animals

2009-06-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

I really loathe PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) these days. I loved Peter Singer's book "Animal Liberation," which, when it was published in the 70's, gave a philosophical groundwork for the entire animal rights movement. The ethics of animal welfare and utilitarianism are compelling and quite a lot more relatable than most people know. I think there is a very powerful case to be made on utilitarian grounds that animals ought to deserve sincere, detached, rational moral consideration and treatment, particularly the most developed and intelligent mammals. PETA is screwing all of this up, by, for example, saying that Obama should not have swatted a fly during a news interview.

http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/06/peta-wishes-obama-hadnt-swatted-fly

People who simply like their steak are now given the impression that the only folks out there who really care about animal rights are a bunch of nutcases. PETA is simply not a representative of the case there is to be made.

Before Singer's movement arose, the consensus was (for the most part) that moral communities could only consist of members who could either participate in said communities through their own moral actions, or at least be able to understand the rational nature of moral justification. Utilitarianism has been around for hundreds of years, but it didn't consider animals as pain and pleasure-feeling beings on account of behavioural reasons. It was thought (in the Christian tradition) that humans were imbued with a special faculty that transcended the movements and reactions of their brains and bodies. Call it the soul, or self-awareness, or consciousness, or what you like. Animals, until the behavioural sciences were overthrown, were thought to be creatures that merely imitated, or gave the impression of, pain and pleasure. Immanuel Kant, for example, believed that animals ought to be treated humanely only for reasons related to the emotional health of their human owners, and not for their own sakes.
So Singer (and others) came on to the scene and argued compellingly that the capacity to feel is not limited to humans. (It seems like an obvious case these days, but it was developed over decades.) And neither, they argued, was the capacity to have relationships and social heirarchies and cultures unique to humans. Therefore, it was concluded, we need to give animals moral consideration even though they can't do the same in return, and even if they are unable to understand the gesture.

The considerations are complicated. Some people extend this line of thought to the subjugation of animals, arguing that the idea of ownership of animals is itself immoral. Others do not. Some believe that using animals for food is always immoral (when it's not necessary for survival anyway), while others believe it is ok to the degree that the animals are treated in a humane manner. The question of what animals warrant ethical treatment is largely empirical, since ethical treatment is offered on the basis of a creatures capacity to benefit from it meaningfully. There are countless other questions and details and disagreements within the circle of Utilitarianism and animal rights, and I urge anyone to read Singer's book, especially it's latest edition.

And don't listen to PETA. Their case is predicated on emotional pleas, scare tactics, horrifying imagery, and sexy celebrities. They are to philosophy what Fox News is to journalism, or what the WWE is to sport.

2009-06-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Ok let me get this straight. Everyone in the world is having a big snit about Iran's allegedly sham presidential election, but the real leader of the country, whose very title includes the word "Supreme," isn't elected at all!

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is out there, telling everyone what to do and personally deciding whether to validate the election results. Until that guy's office is up for election, I'd say this whole news story is a bit of a joke.

2009-06-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

The crazy lady was at it again last night. She lives a few houses down... she's about 60 years old but it's hard to tell because she dyes her hair. She's about 4'11 and maybe 85 pounds, and she goes around the alley and adjacent alleys picking screaming matches with what appear to be random strangers. But, after 10 months of watching and hearing her, patterns have emerged. There are two ladies next door to me she screams at, as well as a tailor shop keeper and a chinese food delivery owner at the end of the alley. I have no idea what her beef is. I asked my girlfriend for a translation one time, but she said it was almost as much jibberish to her as it sounds to me.

It's these tiny little apartments crammed with entire families, grandparents included. The claustrophobia and total lack of personal space or personal anything for that matter must drive everybody nuts. Not even the most loving and forgiving family could stand the living situation my neighbours have. Hell, even I feel a little claustrophobic in my apartment, and I live alone!

2009-06-16T02:54:00.000-07:00

'Nuff said.

2009-06-14T16:09:00.001-07:00

Due to semi-illegalities, it is ambiguously named "nutritious soup" in Korean, and not listed on any menus. It was delicious. It was unsettling. And I'll never look at a dog quite the same way again.

When in Rome!

2009-06-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

So there are two kinds of kids when it comes to doing crafts or building projects: there are the kids who want to make the creation better; to improve and perfect it to the best of their ability. Then there are the kids who want to vandalize it, or try to undermine the effort in some way.

E.g. I once had kids making bridges from wood blocks. There was one boy who made an amazing bridge, with a lot of effort and detailed work (for a grade 4 anyway). There was one other boy who spent the whole time poking the bridge and threatening to tip it over. You could see it in their eyes. All one boy wanted to do was make it right, and all the other wanted was to watch it crumble.