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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!

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.

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...

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.

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 ma...

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.

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!)...