Healthy Living in Korea: Fighting!

In my quest to get healthy I have turned my attention to the last frontier of rebellion and craziness in my life: food. And drinks. And stuff disguised as food. In the states I was a vegetarian. Not because I don’t enjoy eating animals. Because I do. But because it is bad for the earth and terrible for my digestion. I’m also lactose intolerant. I LOVE cheese, milk and pretty much everything bad for me, but I feel like shit if I eat them. Anyway, when I traveled though Europe and arrived in Korea I kinda gave up my vegetarian lifestyle in exchange for more freedom and, well, being able to eat at restaurants. I believe in being flexible, especially with food. But now summer is coming and I’m less than three months from heading back to the states and I want to look and feel good again! Quitting drinking was definitely a step in the right direction, and now I’m going to try limiting meat to just once a week. I’m also going to try to go pretty much vegan during my workdays.

The big catalyst for my new found enthusiasm is the latest book picked by the book club I belong to. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is about a family that decided to move to the Appalachian mountains and start a farm. Their main goal is to only live on what they can grow or buy from their neighbors. The rule is pretty much everything should be sustainable and if they don’t personally know who raised/ grew it, they can’t eat it. It is written by a wonderful novelist (the mother of the family), Barbra Kingsolver with help from her family and contributors.

In my opinion, we have gotten WAY too far away from where our food really comes from. Most people don’t have a clue about what fruits and vegetables are in season when, or even what continent they are grown on. One thing I will say I desperately miss about the USA is the space to grow a garden and the awareness of global food issues that has really started in the last ten years. I can’t wait to go to a farmers market and know none of the foods were grown with pesticides. I really hope the world comes around to these “liberal” ideas about growing food before it’s too late and the topsoil has been completely raped of all nutrients. Please check out this book if you are interested in these issues!

뭐 말해요

I don't do much anymore and subsequently there is less to write about. Interesting things are happening on the Korean peninsula although I am acutely aware as to how amateurish any opinions I might have on the subjects are.

First, we're going to war. That's right, the tensions are at an all time high and still these kids keep coming to their after after after after school school. They should be reinforcing bunker walls or piling tins on wooden shelves in cinder block rooms. The North is coming with their starving army ready to rape and pillage and shell. At least that's what the bond market is telling the Won which is dropping like a mobster's quarry in the East river. Don't get me wrong they've made some pretty aggressive moves and no one really knows why. The Lee administration was taking a harder stance and has been more unwilling to give them food aid as they're about to experience another epic famine. North Korea has cut all lines of communication and lambasted the South with their typically hyperbolic rhetoric, all this for correctly surmising that the North torpedoed their ship. War would be practically suicidal for both parties involved. The North has enough artillery along the DMZ to do some serious damage to Seoul and Gyeonggi-do, which would probably put the Won at about 2000.00 or more to the dollar, so I would be making $1000.00 a month from $1900.00. As it stands I've lost 200 dollars in monthly income in 7 days because of this bullshit (only 5 trading days). Anyway, the North would certainly lose their regime and Korea would be unified with a substantial amount of pain, like two Asian virgins on their wedding night. So there's no incentive for anyone to do it, unless the North's leaders ended up drinking their own Kool-Aid about the superiority of the North Korean army. It's not going to happen now please put my currency back.

That reminds me of another bone I have to pick with the term Kool-Aid. This term generally comes from the mass suicide of the Jim Jones cult. What 김종일 and his posse up in North Korea do with their propaganda certainly resembles an ideology that has completely lost touch with any sort of reality and is a bit death cultish. The Obama Administration's economic policies are not comparable to this sort of mass insanity. So, ignorant right-wing assholes, when arguing about the efficacy of a Keynesian economic programme please refrain from referring to people who believed that taking cyanide would take them to a heaven planet. Thanks, the non insane people of the world.

Also, it's election time. And I thought that the American electoral process was a moribund spectacle. While we certainly spend much more money on electing untrustworthy representatives to positions of power, the Koreans do it much more vigorously and with a style that is all their own. Buses and tiny trucks with people's faces plastered on them like a racing team. Lady doctors with glasses and men attempting to look as casual as an ajosshi can look adorn every building from my aparte to the river. The intersection at my school is daily taken up with their antics. Ajummas standing on each corner dancing a lame macarena to the toneless jingle that someone's put together and chanting the name of the candidate that pays them (I assume, do they publicly humiliate themselves on streetcorners willingly), speechifying acolytes in tiny stages on the edges of the intersections blocking the turning radii of buses, daily occurrences. This country needs some noise ordinances.

Was this interesting? (y/n) Am I cute? (y/n)

Class Stupidity

As many of you know, I work at an all boys, public, middle school. I work 9-5 and generally do the same work as my Korean co-teachers, although I am able to do many more fun things with my classes than they are. Anyway, this semester the Office of Education (I’m not sure if it’s the one in Seoul, or in Jeollanamdo) has decided that all the English teachers must “open their classes.” This basically means a lot of extra paperwork, and on specific days parents, teachers, and the supervisors can come into your classroom and observe while you are teaching. So normally, if I wasn’t in Korea, I would say this sounds like a good idea. I would actually like feedback on my teaching methods since I’m such a new teacher and all. But in Korea this idea takes on an entirely different meaning. Basically it’s all for show, just one big charade that totally fucks up my day/week and causes my students a lot of stress. People just wander in and out of the classroom, talking amongst themselves and distracting the students. Usually the students are “prepped” for these classes, they are given the material before hand and we have to run through what we’re going to do the week before just so they are prepared. After my first open class I have refused to do this though. Why? Because it totally fucks up the rhythm of the lesson. Not to mention only five parents came to my first open class, anyway.

What really pisses me off about this situation is that they changed my schedule so that I can have three open classes back to back on Monday morning next week. All low level classes. In general, I’m not sure why I teach these classes anyway, the students don’t know English. They basically refuse to learn it. So we play games, I teach them basic vocabulary words and just generally try to entertain them for 45 minutes a week. So WTF do the parents and supervisors want from me? Who knows. But I’ll bet they’ll be expecting their students to speak English in my “conversation” class. Well, they don’t. Sorry. I get it; my co-workers don’t want to open their classes so they changed my schedule so that my classes will be open and they can just stand in the back, translating when necessary. This is how it works in Korea.

Today I asked one of my co-teachers why we have to do the open classes. He said, because the office of education said so. I said, I know, but WHY? What is the purpose? He said he didn’t know. Hey, I went to college, I can think critically about things, I just can’t figure out what the point of these open classes is.

Next month I have an open class where all the native speakers and Korean English teachers in my area will come observe my class. They will probably miss classes to do that. Afterward I will not be assessed in anyway, instead the Korean teachers and supervisor will have a meeting, all in Korean about who knows what, while the native speakers just chat. It's a complete waste of everyone’s time.

This semester, in all, I will have four open classes. These classes are a total waste. They just can't allow things to go on without stressing out as many people as they can. If they haven't stressed enough people out that week or month they feel like they're not doing their jobs. If anyone knows why the fuck we’re doing them, let me know!

Don't run, walk.

Out at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers calls to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles of athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The best he can do is submit to the system and give Nelson the chance to pass, as he did, unthinkingly, through it. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become first inside, then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

- John Updike

This passage of Rabbit Run resonated with me as I read it yesterday. In the novel, Rabbit leaves his wife and tries to drive away from Mt. Penn, Pennsylvania to escape (boy can I relate, but I did a much better job in the end). He ends up coming back and shacking up with another woman in Reading who was kind of a prostitute. He acts like a conscienceless prick the whole time absorbed in this search for the feeling that he's lost, like the perfect golf shot (didn't I write this novel?). Anyway, through his unconscionable refusal to use contraception and the mores of the times he spreads his seeds like the instinctual creature he's nicknamed for. Here he realizes the hard truth. The same hard truth that I, and I hope, for their sakes, most of my fellow twenty somethings are struggling with realizing. That you are not, in the words of Tyler Durden, "a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

It's sort of a liberating realization. That is, when you get past the vision of yourself that you've built up since childhood. Ones determination to right the wrongs of the previous generation, or finally live the correct way in the face of all the people, like robots beating our their lives in monotones, living the wrong way, is going to eventually seem ridiculous. The substance of life is misapprehended in childhood. In childhood the promise of life and the strength of the sensation of life are congruous, and a time when that strength is dampened by detachment and age, and the promises about what life holds cease to apply to you, seems impossible, like death. But then you realize, that this is life. This is what they've been talking about all along, you've just been misinterpreting them, and they've been letting you out of mercy. There is joy and potential but realistic joy and potential and there are going to be many many minutes and hours and days and years wasted and forgettable, and plenty to be cloyingly sentimental about. But in the end you should apprehend what is real, and the ability to deal with life in actuality is a liberating phenomenon because you're finally free of the illusion and free to take real steps.

This is why I disdain but understand religious joy. Sure I can find joy and love in a lie when it's believed but reality is in front of me and imagining substituting reality for a happy lie is akin to attempting to retain my childhood, even into old age. At least that was real, even if, after it has passed the attempt at retaining it seems pathetic and desperate. And beyond desperation it seeks to reject the truth that is elemental and impossible to actually reject because of fear. The worst of our motivators, fear. The fear of liberation and thus responsibility, the maintenance of the illusion even after the nature of the illusion is irrevocably realized, that is too much. I'll take life as it is because it's all there is.