over

I came here because I wanted to become a man. That's an embarrassing sentence to write, not just because it reeks of grandiloquence, but because it's true. At 25 years old I still felt very much like a kid, or at least not yet an adult, and it was due to my own shortcomings and shortsightedness. When the thought of teaching English in Korea took root in my brain, it mingled with this sense of inferiority and resulted in an acute paranoia that if I didn't do this thing I would regret it the rest of my life.

I didn't like it here from the start. About five minutes after I landed in South Korea for the first time, I seriously considered just getting on the next plane home. That thought would recur to me several times over the next 6 months or so. I didn't like my coworkers, I seemed ill-suited for the job, and I didn't have any friends. I did little outside of sleep and work. Sometimes I would go out drinking with some coworkers who annoyed me to no end but hey, there are only so many nights you can sit at home alone watching Arrested Development again. 

On weekends, with nothing better to do, I would take 8 hour walks, walking until I got lost and then trying to find my way back home. I remember staring at the calendar on my desk every day, thumbing through all the months until I got to December, when my contract was up and I could go home again. I would go to a website that had a date duration calendar, which would tell me exactly how many days I had to go. It all seemed impossible and interminable and I tortured myself with these things. 

Then, sometime around month 7 or 8 something good happened. I made friends. Three of them. They lived near me and every night after work we'd get dinner and drink some beers and play darts and it was heaven. Soon I started to think, "Hey, maybe I should come back."

I did come back, to a different city. I made different friends, and visited the old ones, and I started to get pretty good at the job. But looking back now, I was probably a bit out of control. I drank too much, went out too much, and didn't take care of myself, and I soon found myself in a hospital bed at death's door.

I don't know if it was my brush with the great blue yonder, or a side effect of the massive amounts of prednisone I was taking, but in the months after I had a bit of a personality change, the kind of maturity that comes with accumulating some bona fide life experiences. 

I went home and then I came back again. Three years seemed perfect to me. A beginning, middle, and end. But then something unexpected happened; I fell in love. So I came back, and this time I stayed, not just 1 year, but over 3 now. And during that time I got married and now we have a daughter. The possibility of spending the rest of my life here became very real. So it's time to shit or get off the pot, and I'm not sure which one I'm doing but it's the one that involves going home two weeks from today. 

I find myself going to bed with anxiety, like I did in the weeks before I first came here, though the cause of that anxiety is quite different now. I have a family to take care of now, and I don't really know how I'm going to go about doing that just yet. I hate to end this blog with some hackneyed "if there's one thing I've learned through all this, it's..." statement, but suffice to say I have faith things will sort themselves out.

seats

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. -Sun Tzu

subway

I take the subway to and from work.

changes

It stands to reason that a good thing to write about is some of the changes that have occurred during the year and a half gap between meaningful posts.

revival

I figure it's time to dust off this old blog here.

halfway decent

I'll tell you what, you blink and 6 months go by.

liar

On Tuesday, my boss told everyone in the office that we'd all be meeting for lunch the next day. All the teachers, 20 total- 15 Korean, 5 foreigners- would meet up before work and eat. Sounds great, right? Who would ever turn down a free lunch? Well, I would.

embrace

The other day - not this one, the other one - I taught a class of elementary school kids. Toward the end of class, with about 5 minutes left, I was out of stuff to do. In order to burn the last 5 minutes, I had the idea to set up a reading competition between the class. The left side of the room, 6 kids, against the right side of the room, 6 kids. Whichever class read through the 5 page story fastest, paragraph by paragraph, would win.

Upon announcing this proclamation, the left side of the room erupted in protest. They were none too happy with this arrangement. I asked what the problem was. "They are smart," one of them said, pointing to the right side. "We're stupid."

What could I say to that, really? Were they wrong? Well, I wouldn't designate any kid as stupid, but even at the time I realized that perhaps the right side of the class was loaded with better readers. But hey, I had 5 minutes to kill here, so the games must go on.

The right side went first, and read through the story flawlessly in a minute and a half. The left side started out, and started out well. Then, about halfway through it, they abandoned all pretense for speed and began reading the story in goofy voices. Each kid laughed their way through each paragraph in a unique way. They ended up taking well over 2 minutes.

When they finished, I told them that if they had kept trying their hardest they could've won. They all looked at me and kinda shrugged, as if to say, "C'mon, man. They're the smart kids. We were dead to rites."

At the time I was kinda annoyed, but looking back now I admire that attitude. They knew they had no chance, and instead of risking disappointment they took matters into their own hands and just had a couple minutes of fun. In a hyper-competitive culture like Korea, that attitude will serve them well, I think.

Learn to embrace failure.

bread and butter

If this blog has anything resembling a running gag, it's me revealing the various gifts I receive from my employers for holidays such as Chuseok or the Lunar New Year. If this blog has another running gag in addition to that, it's me being self-deprecating and belittling the work I do. This post will have both of those things. My bread and butter.

hangman

Let's get this out of the way early: Hangman is the worst. I remember not even liking it when I was a kid. For one thing, it's practically impossible to lose a game of hangman. And, even if you did, who gives a shit? It's vastly inferior to other classroom games, Seven-Up, for example. Remember Seven-Up? Now that's a game.

moment

It's interesting how things happen. They happen suddenly. There's a second when things change. They go from being this way, to, a moment later, that way. Death is like that. One second a person is here, the next they're not. Birth is the same, just opposite. In a second it starts raining. Water boils and freezes. There's a moment when you fall asleep. The sun rises and sets, days begin and end, all in an incalculably small speck of time. It might feel like these things happen slowly, but they don't. There's always a moment, and then things aren't the same anymore.

yell

I yelled at a class today.

breaks

I don't mind working. But, with any job, it's nice to have a break now and then.

inconsequential

For about ten minutes today, I may have been doing the most inconsequential work a human has ever done on this planet. 

hodgepodge

I can get worked up sometimes.

always sometimes

The days keep going by. I suppose that's an unremarkable observation. In fact, I've never lived a day I couldn't say that about.

philistinism

There's a new guy at my work. I say new, but in fact he's quite old. He's been in this country longer than I have. 11 years, to be exact. I like to have coworkers who are older than me and have been in Korea longer than I have, because, well, I've been here over 4 1/2 years now, and I haven't really improved my station in life. I'm pretty much in the same situation I was when I first got here, albeit making slightly more money. Nevertheless, 4 years of lateral movement. But when I meet people like this new guy, I can tell myself at least you aren't him. 

chimaera

It's been 5 weeks or so since my last post. That's longer than usual. I was about to write something about how you can always rely on me to return eventually, but I must tack on this caveat: if tomorrow the NBA Draft Lottery is a catastrophe for the Sixers, and I don't post anything for another 5 weeks, it's likely that I hopped a plane to Papua New Guinea and have elected to live out my days there in solitude. 

analogies

I put thought into this. I want you to know that.

I don't just sit down and start writing some bullshit. Maybe I used to do that, but even then the sitting down was a precursor, a requisite, part of the process, of writing something for you to read.

study

Yesterday, a student of mine, a middle school boy, walked into class about 15 minutes late. He was limping a bit and had a big brace on his left leg. I asked him why he was late. "A car hit me," he said.