The Black Lung.

I'm in Seoul now, sittin' pretty in my apartment in Hapjeong. The last few days have been relaxing except for the ridiculous bitter cold. I think they've got colder cold in Korea. Last night was supposedly 27 degrees fahrenheit but I seriously felt like I could have reenacted the last scene from Titanic with my nuts.

I took my placement test for Korean classes on Monday morning and ended up running into two other fulbrighters who were in the same building taking the class. Turns out there are 5 other fulbrighters in the class I'll be taking for the rest of the month and 2 others, including my roommate, who are taking the class one level above us. Talk about orientation revisited...

So since then, I've just been trying to get myself situated to my new place and also hanging out with people at night for dinner, drinks, and hookah bars. My apartment leaves something to be desired: as yet, there's no hot water, heat, or gas for the stove. On top of that, my roommate has expressed a strong preference for the bedroom, which means that I'm sleeping in the common room. I'm really okay with this, except that the common room contains a grand total of nothing, while the bedroom has a bed, desk, closet, and the only internet connection. We're going to have to work something out in terms of how to split the rent...

Oh right, why the black lung? My body definitely isn't accustomed anymore to the exorbitant amount of hookah I've smoked in the last couple of days, so there's been some trouble getting the engine started in the morning. Nothing serious, just some coughing fits. Next stop, cancer!

And finally, bubbles and hookahs go hand in hand wonderfully. Try it if you ever get the chance.

When Sandwiches Collide...

Ah, the taste of freedom. Nothing beats it.

Today was the last day of my winter session, and thus the first evening of a month-long vacation. My next class starts on March 2nd. Until then, I'm living in Seoul, rooming with another ETA, Ryan, and taking Korean language classes 4 days a week. Projects for Seoul: get to know the city, join a gym and get large and in charge, get to an intermediate level of Korean, try not to anally ravage my bank account.

But really, the central topic of the day is sandwiches. And when sandwiches collide... cultures dive for cover! Man, that would be a sick tagline for a movie.

For my final winter session class, I wanted to have a party to reward all my girls for their hard work. I did a fun activity earlier this week where I provided ingredients and a recipe for peanut butter, jelly, and banana sandwiches. The girls, working in pairs, had to construct a sandwich with one person blindfolded while the other read the instructions out loud.

The whole making plus eating combo turned out to be so fun that I decided for our party the students should write up recipes in English, bring in their own materials, and prepare the food in class while giving a sort of mock cooking show. And let me tell you, if there's any better way of abusing authority than forcing your subordinates to make you food, I don't know what it is.

One group of students decided to make ham and cheese sandwiches. Great! Simple, quick, and delicious. However, our familiar and presumably immutable concept of the ham and cheese sandwich comes with certain caveats in this here Republic:

1) There's ketchup.

Okay, that's not so bad right? Well, the girls ask me if I have any leftover peanut butter and jelly from the previous class. Sure enough I do, so I'm guessing "Cool. They're going to make PB&J's too. It's good to have variety." But then...

The sandwiches collided.

The maw of the earth opened and civilizations fell. The curtain of the tabernacle tore in two. Cthulu rose from the sea. And peanut butter and jelly fused with ketchup and mayonnaise in an unholy and unnatural union.

The ingredients of the sandwich, then, are as follows: Bread, ham, cheese, ketchup, mayonnaise, peanut butter, grape jelly. It honestly wasn't half bad, but really strange. Like the spirit of two sandwiches had possessed the body of a single sandwich. My brain desperately tried to make sense of what my body was ingesting and a sense of vertigo accompanied the rapidly shifting form of its conclusions in my mouth.

Alright, I'm taking this one too far, I know. Here are some pictures from class. I hope you're ready for cuteness.

Simple Pleasures.

The teacher's office is awash with new blood. That is, slews of incoming freshmen girls are walking around in hordes. I don't know why they're here. Maybe for an orientation or something. They're all dressed in plainclothes, which ironically makes them all look older than their uniformed seniors-to-be.

Remember that crack I took at my school's gym teacher a few days ago? I just found out one of my favorite students, a sweet, smart little girl, is his daughter. Oh the irony of life! She deserves better. I will adopt her and raise her as my own. As GOD meant her to be raised.

Yeah, sometimes I scare myself too.

Last night was immensely enjoyable. It was my second episode with alcohol since returning to Korea, and it was just what I could have hoped for on a work night: relaxed, interesting conversation in a relatively quiet place with good friends. Grilled chicken and sausages, rare pleasures in my Korean life. But the high point of the evening was most definitely the playground.

Let's talk about playgrounds.

I don't think any of us truly outgrew playgrounds. They just stopped being a normal part of our daily lives and we got used to the absence. Like all adults, we convince ourselves that we are somehow too good for the indulgences of our youth, that we have grown too sophisticated for simple pleasures. But somehow I can distinctly remember every time I've been to a playground in the last 6 years. It's only a handful, so it's not that hard, but there's something wondrous each time about reliving that bliss of haplessly spent energy, exertion for the sake of exertion.

Our adult selves have been conditioned to instrumentalize everything. How much is my time worth? How can I be more productive? Am I making the most efficient use of my energy? Of course there are things that we do solely for amusement and gratification. Sports, movies, going to the beach. But think of the analogous adolescent activities associated with these things: not sports, but games... not movies, but cartoons... and how about building a sandcastle on the beach or burying a friend in the sand? I wonder how many grown adults can remember their last snowball fight.

I guess the point of all this, unsurprisingly, isn't actually the merits of playgrounds. It's the disowning of our youthful spirits. The self-consciousness and arrogance of the "wizened" to believe that they have outgrown their inner children, when, in fact, they have grown entirely around them. And that's why playgrounds will always hold a special place in my heart: they allow us to reconnect with that certain, wonderful shape of our minds where things weren't complicated by goals and pressure and expectations.

Passing Time.

There are three clocks in the room. This is, by any contrivation of the space they occupy, unnecessary. The small size, the cluttered, but not disorganized, arrangement of dusted furniture; the clocks stand out prominently in their excess. Their ticks and tocks meld discordantly, the once would-be harmony lost to the minutiae of every mechanically artificed minute, the imperfection of each cog and wheel. They were set, once, with care and precision, placed with forethought and deliberation in those redundant places. Regarded, admired, by at least one. As much as anyone can conceive of a clock being born, it is when it begins to fulfill its function, as with any tool: not as a contraption in a shop or a box, but as a timepiece, viewable, on a wall or a desk. These clocks began their lives together. They have been alive for a very long time.

New Year's Corollary.

Is it cheating to add a corollary to my New Year's resolution? Because I think I need to.

I am not obligated to post when I am traveling during weekends or if people are visiting. This past weekend falls under the latter.

Jonah is here in Pohang for 5 nights, which I find really funny. Pohang is in no way a hot spot, a hoppin' scene, the place to be, or any combination thereof. I understand that he has "friends" here and of course there's that highly dubious possibility that he "likes spending time with us," but I still don't think I'd pick this location just for a pleasant place to lounge about if I were in his shoes.

But, then again, I don't have any delusions of ever knowing how that man's mind works.

The weekend was enjoyable. Yet again the biology of my liver and metabolism baffles me because Jonah and I split a 5 liter growler of stout beer (you should have seen the size of the jug... it brought tears to my eyes) and I was more or less completely fine after that. A bit of walking and generally high spirits afterward and I was buzzing pretty hard, and then a couple of soju bombs at the next bar did me in pretty good, but holding 2.5 liters with relative composure is an astounding feat for me these days.

Sunday, brief reunion with Rachel, which marks the first full convening of JART in over a month and a half. Neat! We did a pretty typical Pohang routine: eating lunch, eating ice cream, having Traci wander off without telling us when she sees something shiny 4 or 5 times, and ultimately ending up at the same juice cafe we always go to, where we sit and chat for at least an hour. It's a pretty solid routine.

We ended up at Alyssa's homestay because her family had invited us over to dinner, sans Rach because she had to go back to somewhere stupid that's not Pohang where she lives. It ended up being really fun. She has an adorable homestay family that's extremely atypical from a lot of Korean families in many ways, and then sort of jarringly traditional in others. Anyway, all the kids are really high-spirited, talkative, and intelligent, even the youngest 9 year-old son. I don't think I've ever played a more enjoyable game of spoons in my life; entertainment value is almost always proportional to how excited people are after all.

Then home, lesson planning, and bed. 7am alarm. So long weekend, hello week.

School Ties.

I'll talk about gym teachers in a moment.

I am really loving my job right now, but I know it won't last long. I'm teaching a 2-week special winter break session in which the best students from the 1st and 2nd grade attend. With all the doom and gloom posts I made throughout the first semester, how to explain this drastic change in my state of mind?

Literally, take almost all of the nigh intolerable factors from the previous 4 months out of the equation and that's where I'm at now. 6 students per class that give a shit instead of 35 that don't. No co-teacher supervision. 4 consecutive hours of work in the morning. The teacher's office is at 1/3 normal capacity due to the off season, so no cultural claustrophobia.

I get up at 7am every morning for this, an hour and a half earlier than normal, but it hasn't been the least bit difficult. Why? Because I actually feel like I'm making some difference in my kids' lives. I plan my lessons quite intently, knowing that the students will be receptive. To quote a surprisingly inspiring speech given at a teacher's conference last month, "I wake up deliberately... because I'm excited to face the day."

I'm also getting paid extra by-the-hour on top of my normal monthly stipend for doing this. I've never worked at a job that has paid by the hour before, and I can't describe how satisfying this is for my OCD. I've actually calculated how much I make in a day down to the minute, and I run scenarios through my head about exact projected expenses I'll have for the week: incidental costs like taxi and bus fair, cans of soda, and I subtract it from the total. There's a small boy deep inside me obsessively washing his hands in glee right now.

So, long story short, I am enjoying my work. Now about gym teachers.

There's a quote from "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle" that I've always loved, partly due to its accuracy, partly due to its execution in the movie. It's when Kumar tells off the douchebag cop and says to him, "You were probably the big asshole in your high school ... then graduation day came and we went to college and you went nowhere. And you thought, 'How can I still give them shit? I know, I'll become a cop!' Well congratu-fucking-lations! Your dream has come true!"

That's kind of how I feel about gym teachers. At least the ones that I've known.

And I don't make this judgment at all because I think they seem uneducated or lonely or anything like that. I make it for the sole reason that they seem to take extreme pleasure in mistreating those that are subordinate to them and, worst of all, excessively profess superiority in the dumbest, most trivial skills.

They get frustrated, they get angry, they punish. Because you can't throw a frisbee? Because you can't jump rope 25 times without tripping? For the love of God, these people are grasping at straws for a reason to be alive.

I write about this because back in September (yes, I'm that backlogged on things I want to write about. I have a page-long list that's still growing faster than I can kill it) I was personally subjected to my first gym teacher bullying in almost a decade. The Korean gym teacher at my school is notorious for the corporal punishment he gives out. There's hardly a time I've seen him in the office without a crowd of girls kneeling around him, getting their wrists slapped or hair pulled. He's loud, obnoxious, and arrogant.

These days, everyone says hello to me except him. All I get is an impassive glare before his eyes avert dismissively. But back in September he was still sizing me up. He invited me to play badminton with a few other teachers. I laughed and did my best flustered foreigner impression, and said that I had never played badminton, so he'd have to teach me. No problem, he says.

Now I'm fairly athletic, and well over a decade of video gaming and a few years of serious sports in high school have left me with a degree of hand-eye coordination that I'm rather proud of. Here's the point: it is extremely easy to be mediocre at badminton. The shuttlecock (yes, let's all say it together once to get it out of our systems. Ready? Go. Shuttlecock.) is relatively large and slow-moving for a racquet sport, and a good hard smack, even misdirected or uninspired, will send it back over the net.

So I'm doing well. I'm holding my own. I've NEVER played badminton before, so I'm pretty happy with my performance, which means I'm having fun. Well, 20 minutes in, Captain Testosterone stops the game and comes over to give me a 1-on-1 about how to play badminton. Make sure you hold the racquet this way, when you step to hit the ball do it this way, always swing the racquet this way. Ok, that's cool, thanks for the tips. I could really get used to this sport if there's easy regular access to it.

I try it out. It's awkward changing from a freeform style to an actual technique. I switch between them so I can actually return a hit once in a while. Then I hear a "No! No no no!" and Mr. Testicles is walking toward me waving his hands. He physically pulls me aside and he mimics the step and hit technique from before. He actually has me count "1, 2, 3" in time with his steps, and then continue to count as I do it for myself. He nods in approval and walks back to the court. As I try to follow him, he stops me, says "no", and points back to where I was doing my idiotic 3-step routine. The teachers continue to play.

And I do it. I practice it. You have no idea how simple this technique is, it's only 3 steps for God's sake. But the kicker is every time I get bored, stop, try to watch them play, this guy glances at me and makes a motion with his hand for me to continue. My pride is seriously inflamed. I understand if I'm bringing down your skill level, but you could just ask me to sit out if you wanted to play a real game. Or maybe you should take responsibility for your actions and not invite people you actually have no desire to play with.

It all just screams overcompensation to me. I believe that he tried to see me as a peer for a moment back in the teacher's office, but when he realized that he could hit a shuttlecock better than I could, all the old instincts came back to him. Pick on this guy. Put him aside. Show everyone that I'm in control, that I'm better. That's respect.

Big news for you buddy: you are a sad, small man. And it's not hard to see that I'm not the only one who doesn't respect you around here.

Gonads and Strife.

Yeah, ok... so I failed my New Year's Resolution about posting immediately after making it, but maybe I'm just warming up to it. Gotta get into the routine right?

So here is an anecdote from today that may or may not be satisfactory for an inaugural post.

I did it again. I zoned out. Completely lost track of time. Something about the space: the homogeneity of the walls, the echoing silence. Time and responsibility melt away as physical and mental relief coalesce, enfeebling the senses. My mind is a prisoner within my body within that wooden box.

A door opens, a man coughs. I snap back to attention, to reality, to panic.

20 seconds later I flush. I am 5 minutes late to class.

Clich-ay.

New Year's Resolutions:

1) Update blog. Every day.

2) Work out. Every day.

3) Respond to at least one email from an old friend. Every day.

A wise woman once told me that you need to make your resolutions quantifiable, otherwise you can let yourself cheat whenever things get too inconvenient. Hence, the importance of "every day." And with the inception of this post, so begins my self-injunction. Wish me luck!