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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!)...

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 so rts 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 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.

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 r...

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 millio...

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.

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.

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...

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!

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...

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.

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. A...

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 idiosy...