From Victoria
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.
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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