current location: living room, my apartment, Seogwipo
current weather: partly cloudy, 48°F
current music: "A Charlie Brown Christmas," the Vince Guaraldi Trio

 
it'll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives

My friend K, who spent the past three years working in retail to put her husband through graduate school, couldn’t be more excited about not being home for the holidays. After hearing her horror stories of Black Friday madness, and about the seven family Christmases she and her husband are expected to attend every year, I can’t say I blame her. At the same time, though, I don’t find myself sharing her sympathies.

While there is certainly much to despise (and I do despise a lot of it), I really do love the Christmas season. It isn’t for any reason in particular. I can’t think of any one Christmas that stands out from amongst the rest; holidays in my family aren’t remarkable by any stretch of the imagination, and, truth be told, some have been downright unpleasant. Even so, I always look forward to December because it is heavy laden with traditions.

Whether or not we admit it (or are even aware of it), we all cling to traditions. Traditions are the mile markers that allow us to gauge our position, where we have come from and where we are going. Traditions are lintels; when embedded firmly into the foundation, they help us preserve a sense of order and regularity. Whatever metaphor you prefer, traditions are what keep us sane. Everything else our lives may change, either willingly or unwillingly, but so long as we can maintain a few essential rites and rituals, we are able to keep our wits about us in an uncertain and increasingly bizarre world.

As is so often the case, the small things are what seem to take on the most significant meaning. I’m sitting here typing this and listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio (hands down my favorite Christmas album ever), concentrating on subjects of little to no importance: instant hot apple cider and almond crescents; the warmth of the car heater blowing while driving through the neighborhood looking at lights; relief mingled with sheer exhaustion after finals are over; the annoying (yet endearing) BC Clark jingle that plays at least twice every commercial break; the sharp scent of fresh sap and pine needles; how carols are most beautiful when sung in a church after the sun has gone down. Silly as it may be, without these things, Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas to me. And, without the holiday season, which normally marks the completion of one year and the beginning of the next, it seems like its absence is likely to throw off my entire sense of temporal awareness.

I’m probably more sensitive to this stuff than many people. I am, admittedly, a creature of habit. And, as a historian, I’m trained to be concerned about things like identity and tradition the past. On the other hand, tradition is precisely what makes Christmas, Christmas—not just for me, but also on the largest of scales. Try to separate tradition from Christmas—or any holiday, for that matter—and you’ll have nothing left. For what is a holiday but a remembrance of the significance of something past? Not to say that one can’t observe Christmas under strange or difficult or unfamiliar circumstances—people have done it for centuries before me, and I’ll do it this year, and probably again in the future. It’s just nicer when there’s less improvisation.

Oh well, at least I have Charlie Brown.

Siochan leat
("peace be with you")

current location: living room, my apartment, Seogwipo
current weather: mostly cloudy, 53°F
current music: "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortuante Events [OST]," Thomas Newman

might as well have "nerd" tattooed in big, bold letters across my forehead


Hey folks, I'm still alive and well. Am presently editing the heck out of my research proposal for the grad school apps. The first one is due this Friday (or is it Saturday? I'm still mixed up about the time thing); after that, it should be a lot easier, mostly a matter of cutting and pasting the names of institutions and professors into different versions of the same basic essay. The longer I work on all of this, I wonder how anyone who is a full-time student ever manages to finish one of these apps. Or, maybe I obsess too much.

I find myself thinking more than usual these days, and wishing that I had time to write more of it down. (Or, maybe it's merely a desire to procrastinate about the things I'm "supposed" to be doing.) Topics of thought have been widely scattered, but one that keeps coming back is this: why do I seem to be so disconnected from rest of the foreigners here? I'm sure there's a lot about personalities and whatnot that comes into play, but the other day it occurred to me that most of the people who come here are lost in one way or another: they don't really know what they want out of life, what they want to do or where they want to go. Korea for them is an a sort of Wood Between the Worlds, a place where you can more or less push the "pause" button on your life for a year or two.

I, on the other hand, would not consider myself especially lost. No, I don't have all the details sorted out, and I've been around long enough to have realized I'm not likely to end up precisely where I'm aiming, but I have at least a general sense of direction.

In the film Lost in Translation, the middle-aged movie star Bob Harris (played by Bill Murray) makes this statement: "The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you." I think there is some truth to that. I'm willing to view many of my disappointing experiences as obstacles that must be overcome on the way to something better. That doesn't necessarily lessen the pain of the bad times, but it makes it easier to bear.

Maybe it's all a mental thing, games you play with yourself to make yourself feel better, even though chances are you'll never get to where you think you're going. But I guess you do what you have to do.



Though my own plans are still in their formative stage, I am interested in examining some aspect of the first dissemination of English and Scottish Protestantism outside the island of Great Britain: for example, the influence of religious heterodoxy on the development of communal identity in seventeenth-century Plantation Ulster; or, the interplay between race, religion, and identity in Colonial Jamaica.


It may be obsure, it may be insignificant, it may border on jargon, but at least it's a place to start.

And really, it's a lot more than that. It's about people and how their understanding of God influenced how they understood themselves and the world around them and how they lived their life... and about having been so profoundly influenced by a few people that one is compelled to dedicate oneself to the same kind of work, with the hope that someday one will be able to have the same kind of impact on someone else's life.


And I'm not sure this is making much sense anymore (if it ever did in the first place). Time for bed.

Siochan leat
("peace be with you")

current location: living room, my apartment, Seogwipo
current weather: mostly cloudy, 55°F (downright chilly for Jeju)
current music: "Kind of Blue," Miles Davis

 
 
playing without a translation of the rulebook

For me, one of the most uncomfortable things I’m finding about living and working in a culture different from my own is that you can never be completely sure whether you have acted appropriately or not. Today I encountered two such situations, one minor and one substantial (at least, that’s how I see them), which have left me wondering if I didn’t do the wrong thing.


The first occurred at the beginning of my workday. When I arrived at school, I went into the first floor teachers’ office to pick up my class folders. The assistant director stopped me, said he needed to ask a favor. Actually, I already knew what this favor was, as one of my Western coworkers had called me earlier that morning. The school has several ambitious students (i.e. ambitious parents) who are entering a speech competition sometime in the near future, and, as we’re currently feeling the effects of the failing economy, the director offered to host an extra preparatory class for these students. The class is offered after regular hours, from 8:45-9:45, which is kind of late even by Korean standards. The directors asked one of my Western coworkers to teach this class because she’s taught in Seoul and is by far the most experienced of any of us when it comes to these sorts of things.

But, apparently something went amiss; she called me this morning to let me know that she had suggested to the directors that I should help her teach it. While the overtime pay would be nice, I knew right away I would have to say no. I already teach six classes in a row without any breaks. My schedule gets me home around 9:30, and it usually takes me another half hour or so to rustle up some dinner. If I were to agree to that class, it would put me at seven classes every day, and push dinner back ‘til nearly 11 PM. It’s bad enough eating at 10, but 11 PM is a good ten hours after lunch. Maybe I’m just a pansy, but I don’t function well when I have to go for that long without eating. Furthermore, I’m currently in the midst of grad school app crunch time—the first one is due in two weeks. (Am trying not to think about how I should be working on that essay rather than typing this.)

So, I told them I couldn’t do it. They told me it was okay, and they acted like it was okay—or at least I think they did. Try as I might, I just don’t know how to read these people. (I’ve been told that Koreans are taught to suppress emotion in their facial and body language, but seriously, these people take “stoic” to a whole new level.) The thing is, Korea, being the world’s most completely Confucianized society, places a great deal of emphasis on maintaining social harmony. In the workplace, this translates into “one does what one’s told without making waves.” On the other hand, most Koreans are fairly forgiving of foreigners, who are largely clueless about all these subtleties. So maybe totally pissed them off, or maybe it really is okay. I’ll probably never know.

In the other case, I’m not so lucky—I know for a fact that I upset my Korean colleague. I’m really tired, so let me see if I can summarize. For nearly all of my classes, I have a Korean co-teacher—I teach one day, he or she teaches the next. In the middle school classes, we use different books—Koreans teach grammar, Westerners teach reading. I have two eighth grade classes during the penultimate time slot. They are the two lowest levels for eighth grade, but are still worlds apart. When I say worlds apart, I meant that the one class more or less formulate a sentence, participate in basic conversation, and comprehend at least some of the material they read, while the other class will answer “Cartoons?” when I ask them “Does he watch TV?” The latter group has terrible attitudes and absolutely no interest in learning English. I don’t like to think of anyone as a lost cause, but when a person has been daily exposed to English language in public school since early elementary school and still is unable to make a sentence, the likely outcome isn’t exactly rosy. Quite frankly, I don’t know why their parents continue to waste their money. It doesn’t matter if they have the best teachers in the world, if they are completely unwilling to put forth any effort, they’re never going to improve. I call them my “apathetic terrors.” I have one student who every day without fail sleeps in my class. I wake him up, tell him to do his work; he looks at me, and puts his head right back down on the desk. I don’t really fight them anymore—there is no bloody point. I go through the pages as painlessly as I can, and leave it at that.

I guess they’re a lot worse for their Korean teacher. She has told me on multiple occasions that she “hates them” and “wishes the class would be cancelled” (those are her exact words). Several times she asked me if she thought we could combine that class with the one above them; every time, I explained that it would be impossible given the students’ respective abilities and attitudes. The director also asked me the same questions, and I gave the same answers. Despite this, today my co-teacher tells me, oh, by the way, starting tomorrow the two classes are combined. In a state of disbelief, I went to see the director. I took with me both textbooks and some samples of the students’ writing from both classes. It took the director about a minute before she said that she had no idea the difference was this big, and that we would have to find another solution.

I didn’t hear what was said between the director and my co-teacher because I had another class to go to—not that it would have mattered if I had, since it would’ve all been in Korean. But after my last class, I walked into our office to find my co-teacher in the midst of a heated phone conversation. I don’t know who she was talking to, but I waited around until she was finished because I wanted to apologize for causing trouble. When she hung up, she angrily told me that they decided not to cancel the class after all (despite her having told the students to the contrary), and then in an accusing tone asked me why I would ever go to the director when I knew how much she hated that class. I replied that I really was sorry, that I didn’t enjoy that class either, but that I knew that combining them would be a big mistake. Not only would I have to dumb the class way down so that the lowest students could understand (thereby creating a nightmare for the rest of the group), but I knew the bad attitudes of the lower students would influence those of the upper ones.

Actually, I’m already dealing with a smaller dose of this. There’s one student in the upper class who has a bad attitude—she thinks she’s really smart, but she’s actually pretty low-level; she never brings her book; she always speaks in Korean, disrupting class time. She quit coming for the month of October, and it was a completely different class. We made more progress that month than we had in the previous ones combined. But now she’s back, and already she’s dragging them down. So, if I were to add five additional kids who are ten times worse than her, it would be a virtual disaster.

Despite this, it would’ve been to my advantage to have the class canceled—I’d have one less class and less stress without it affecting my paycheck. But for the sake of the upper students, I had to say something. After I explained all this to her, she said that she understood, and that it wasn’t my fault. But it’s pretty clear that she’s still seriously pissed because she has to continue teaching a class she hates.


I’m starting to see that teachers walk a tightrope. They’re supposed to genuinely care about kids (otherwise, why would a person be in that line of work?), but they also have to learn how to detach enough to keep their personal feelings from interfering with their decision-making abilities at work. I really want to believe that I did the right thing—I did what was best for the kids, regardless of what I personally would have wanted. But on the other hand, I know how much of a problem this class has been for my colleague. Maybe I should’ve taken on that burden for her sake, let them combine the classes and found some other way to deal with the situation. Is that what she wanted me to do? Would that have been the good Korean thing to do? I have no idea here. I’m playing without a translated copy of the rulebook, and it’s less fun than it sounds.

current location: living room, my apartment, Seogwipo
current weather: mostly cloudy, 56°F (finally feels like fall)
current music: "Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One," the Kinks

"if you want your money, you better stand in line, 'cos you'll only end up picking up suin and baek won"

This time next year, you possibly will have learned of my death at the hands of the North Korean regime. But don't worry, I won't actually be dead. The death reports of my friends G and K and I will be part of an elaborate ruse, of which only our immediate family members will be aware. In reality, we will all be living in Norway, with K's extremely distant relatives. G and K will have given birth to their first child there, so that they will be eligible for all the benefits of Scandinavian socialism, including six months paid maternity leave, universal healthcare, and free university tuition, available in exchange for a mere 50% of annual income in taxes. (Actually, I don't believe that socialism is inherently evil, but that's an entirely different discussion....) I will likewise be getting my green card the old-fashioned way-- through a marriage of convenience-- so that I am eligible for EU/Home rates at the UK institute of higher education of my choice.

I jest, of course. (Sorry, Mom. Please rest assured that I have absolutely no plans to go to north of the 39th Parallel, however bizarrely intriguing the Ryugyong Hotel may be.) But as we huddle around the computer in the first floor teacher's office and watch the value of the won sinking lower and lower every day (currently at 1000W=$0.69, its lowest yet), devising these far-fetched escape plans is the most effective coping mechanism we have. As K so eloquently put it, "I don't care if the economy is good or bad anymore. I just want the won and the dollar to be the same so we can make our loan payments."

At least we're still making payments. Apparantly, some college grads really are running for the border to escape their debt. (Check the story here.)

Personally, I'm not impressed by the reckless behavior of these kids-- they makes things a lot more difficult for those of us actually trying to be responsible-- but what really offends me is the cold condemnation of many readers. Here's one of my favorites: "Is this what College taught you to be? irresponsible to your fellow citizens, who loaned you this kind of money, money you now refuse to repay. I see College taught you nothing, and this is the real reason you can’t find an honorable job that pays decient wages. this will haunt you for the rest of your lives, now live with it." It is obvious to me that this person lacks an understanding not only of basic spelling and grammar, but of the outrageous absurdity that is the educational finance system. It's a different world than twenty, ten, or even five years ago. I attended OSU for a mere three years, yet I saw tuition and fees increase by TEN percent PER YEAR. There's simply no justification for that kind of extortion from students. Yes, debt dodging is unexcusable, but I can sort of understand why some would choose this path.

Myself, none of that "real job" nonsense for me-- not like I'm qualified for one, anyway. I am going to grad school, but I'm not going to pay for it, not one red cent. I'll bide my time until I receive a fellowship, and if I have to stay in Korea, so be it. At least I have a job. Thank God for that.

Siochan leat
("peace be with you")