pop music profile #8

Remember G-Dragon, way back from pop music profile #5? A month or so ago, he put on his debut solo concert, and is now facing charges and possible jail time for violating the Youth Protection Act with this scandalous performance at a concert with teenagers (13+) in the crowd.

G-Dragon maintains that the song is about having an innocent dream about your ideal lover and that the performance was not meant to be sexually explicit.

I took a nap just now, and dreamt.

That happens sometimes lately.

Everyone was in my dream. Ann Arbor friends: Jane, Jamie, Audra, Hannah, Nora, WhitPow, maybe @megiddings, I'm not sure. Teacher friends: Park Mi-Ran, KoHo, Yena, Shin-Jung, maybe gossip girl #1, I'm not sure. Various "fellow" native-English-speaking teachers from Seoul who will go unnamed, because the ones who were in my dream were the ones I hate and avoid, generally speaking.

There was a party, we were all playing an absurd game where we careened around the room acting like we were ships in stormy waters, rocking from side to side and bumping into each other as much as possible. Then we all took our shirts off, and I tweaked everyone's nipples. But then Hannah's and WhitPow's girlfriends got mad at me for touching their women.

At some point, the party ended, and then all of you were gone except for Jane and KoHo (hiking teacher friend), and Jane and I were wandering the streets of Seoul and/or Paris and we came across KoHo, who was surrounded by twenty-odd feral cats. He was clipping the nails of one of the feral cats, and the cat was very angry. Also, we were all standing on the roof of a building and/or high up on the limbs of a telephone pole.

Then suddenly Jane left me on my own and I was trying to find a place to stay in Seoul, only Jane was the one who was living in Seoul and I was visiting her here and I didn't know where to stay. Then I ended up staying in this really plush lobby of some business place for free, I don't really know why. And I think this is where the rest of my teacher friends entered the picture, we were at some conference or something and Park Mi-Ran probably took care of me, the end.

새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Today was the first business day of the new year, which means even though most teachers are technically on vacation right now, a lot of people, and especially the head teachers, were supposed to come to work today. There was a celebratory lunch, with persimmons and rice-cake/dumpling soup and sake and wine, and all around me, all day: 새해 복 많이 받으세요! (sae-hae bok manee badeusaeyo! = Receive a lot of luck this year! = Happy New Year!)

Winter classes commenced this morning, as did approximately 30 cm of snowfall - which is highly unusual for Seoul. I've been told that the last time Seoul got more than 10 cm of snow TOTAL over the course of an entire winter was 10 years ago. 30 cm in one day is absolutely unheard of. But despite that, very few schools canceled winter classes. Since the roads were horrid and nothing was canceled, the subways were a warzone. I've gotten pushy about my subway etiquette, but twice I had to let a crowded train pass and wait for the next one. People propel each other on and off the trains, I was being pushed forward so quickly that I lost all balance or control of my steps, and had a moment of panic when I realized I was crossing The Gap Between the Train and the Platform and not able to Mind it in the least (i.e. I couldn't see where I was stepping, but knew that somewhere down there was a gap big enough for my foot to fall through). It was terrifying, and it put me in a really bad mood. Luckily, there was a 10-minute walk through the snow to calm me down.

3 students showed up to students' English camp, which technically starts at 8:30 am but doesn't really start until 9 am. That means 13 students woke up, saw the snow, and decided it wasn't worth it. I don't really blame them.

But only 1 teacher was absent from teachers' English camp, and that was fun. A few teachers that I truly didn't know could speak English are attending, and their grammar is perfect and their vocabulary is huge and I really can't figure out why they haven't spoken to me before, since their enthusiasm today showed that there are a lot of questions they want to ask me (about English, about life in the U.S., about my life in Korea, etc). Anyway, it was fun.

I haven't written on this blog in what feels like ages. I guess ages = one week when I'm addicted to telling you all everything (not everything, never everything, but I try) about my life here. It doesn't feel right for you to not know what is happening.

I just realized this is going to be a long post. Prepare yourself, or give up now, whichever you prefer.

I have 2 important things to tell you:

1. I've decided where I'm going for my 3-week February vacation: Buenos Aires, Argentina, to meet Audra-friend and be silly and dance tango together. Financially, I'm being a little irresponsible, and setting myself back about a month-and-a-half paying back my student loans, but I've been working hard here, and I have both the time and the money to make the trip, and a good friend to spend time with while I'm there, and I don't know when all those things will coincide again, and anyway what I mean to say is I just really want this, and so I'm going. I've bought the ticket: Feb. 6, Seoul --> Hong Kong --> Johannesburg --> Buenos Aires, 35 hours total in transit. I can't wait.

2. I was talking to Park Mi-Ran the other day, and she was telling me about some changes our school might be making to their admissions process for the 2011 school year, which would allow students from all over Korea to apply, whereas right now only students who live in Seoul can apply. In theory, that would mean that instead of admitting a group of underprivileged and largely unmotivated students who have done poorly in Seoul's middle schools, my school would admit a group of students from rural Korea who have never before had a chance to receive a big-city education and who would (probably) be highly motivated. It would be exchanging one group of students who never had much of a chance in the Korean education system for another group of students who never had much of a chance in the Korean education system. But Park Mi-Ran really hopes the change happens, because she is excited to be able to see the students working hard and to be able to watch their English improve. With our current group of students, it's sometimes hard to see improvement. With a few exceptions, they're not very motivated to learn English.

Anyway, I am getting close to the important thing I have to tell you. About half-way through my conversation with Park Mi-Ran, I realized that she was telling me about these possible changes to try to convince me that I should renew my contract at Seoul Electronics High School. It made me really happy to know that she wants me to stay, that she wants to continue working with me. What she doesn't know, and what you maybe don't know, is that with or without the projected changes to school admissions, I really really really want to stay, I think, I really really really want to renew my contract. The time hasn't come to make the final decision, yet, and it won't come for at least another 5 months, but you should know that I'm seriously considering staying in Korea for another year beyond my current contract, maybe even longer. I'm in love with my school, both the teachers and the students, and I have a lot of goals here. I don't think I'll be ready to leave until I'm satisfied that all of them are complete: 1. become proficient in Korean, enough that I can carry out any necessary conversation without resorting to English; 2. become a confident English teacher, to both high school students and adults (subgoal: get my TEFL certification); 3. travel the Korean countryside extensively, climb a lot of mountains; 4. travel to places that are more convenient to travel to from Seoul than from other places I am likely to live in the future: China, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand, maybe India.

In conclusion, I feel (and have felt for a while) that I am in this for the long haul. That feeling is subject to change, of course, as my time here continues and my perspective shifts, but right now, I'd put the cap on my time here at somewhere around 3-5 years.

Are these 2 important things I have told you making you unhappy? I hope not. Realize that I am doing both of them not to hurt or avoid any of you, but because I feel that these decisions are what's best for me right now, these are the things that are making me happy.

thursdays I meditate after school,

and then I climb the mountain behind my school with KoHo.

Remember when I was conflicted about meditation club? My attendance was spotty for maybe a month after I first tried it, but I'm addicted now. The club leader was too busy to hold the meeting last week, and I can't even tell you how much I missed it. I missed it like only a person as awkward as myself could miss it.

It's really soothing. I've gotten used to the sharing of feelings at the beginning and end of each session. At the beginning, I tell them what things are stressing me out lately. At the end, I usually try to find a silly way to describe the sensations that go on in my head during the meditation (for example, at various times I've told them it feels like: "my head is filled with water, and the tide keeps rising and falling," "electricity on my scalp," "there's a crab crawling around in my hair," etc). Today I told them it felt like someone was gently pulling my head upwards, like my head was a balloon and someone was pulling on my string.

The room where the meetings are held is so cozy. The floor is heated, and we sit on blankets/cover our laps with blankets. After the sharing of feelings, we sit in lotus position, close our eyes, and concentrate on our breathing. Then, the meditation leader (U Young-Hee) kneels in front of all of us by turns and puts her hands on the top of our heads for about 1-2 minutes each, ostensibly to share diksha (the energy of the universe) with us.

To be perfectly frank, it's this part of the meditation that I'm addicted to. The meditation itself is soothing, and it does calm me, truly. But I'm not sure that I would be making such a habit of Thursday meditation club if it wasn't for the 1-2 minutes of having someone's hands on my head. I have always loved the feeling of someone's hands on my head. It makes me feel so calm and under control and "everything will be okay." For a few minutes, U Young-Hee is my master/mentor and she will take good care of me, I know she will.

After we have all received diksha, we leave the lotus position for whatever position we find most comfortable (for me, my legs remain in lotus position, but I lay back flat on the floor). And we listen to soothing music and breathe deeply and sometimes briefly fall asleep and dream a little. After a while, we regroup and share what we felt during the meditation session (this is the part where I make up silly things).

And then we leave school, and I hike over the mountain with KoHo to the subway station that is second-nearest my school. It takes about 30 minutes. I get home at 6:30 or 7, make dinner, watch Korean soap operas, try to study Korean or lesson plan. But I am scattered all the time lately; it is hard to make myself do work.

Enough about me. How are your Thursdays?

The guy I got raw on hasn't stopped participating, by the way.

A significant portion of the English language selection at the local Bandi&Luni's bookstore.

I only want to eat clementines these days.

The positioning of this family tree intrigues me.

demon tree?

My students are insane. That is not a TREE, that is a HAND.

lolz.

Thanksgiving week, some of my 2nd grade classes were ahead of schedule. So we talked about the differences between American and Korean Thanksgiving/Chuseok, and these are the results. It would have been easier to just transcribe the funny sentences, but I felt like transcription couldn't do them justice.

Aww. Hugs!

I love this student. He is so nice and funny and tries so hard. And he came up with the words "appreciate" and "oxygen" all on his own!

Foolproof way to get the immediate attention of 95% of my students: mention sexy girls. They love talking about sexy girls.

Not sure why this student wrote "delicious" next to his name, but I like it.

This girl is awesome. She loves Britney Spears and everyone knows it. "happy good smile ^o^"/ "Idol is bling bling very new Idol comeback eyes happy" :)

This is shy-girl.

I love #2.

"Dog b/c dog is cute"!

Bana milk is a Korean drink brand. "Korea b/c Korea is peaceful"!

This guy is funny. It sounds kind of bad, but he explained it to me as approximately: "I am thankful for my friends surrounding me because it means I don't have to use guns." So, being surrounded by friends is a kind of power.

My students love it when I say, "blah blah blah," and they love parroting "blah blah blah" back to me. :)

Finally, the suck-ups. That day I was wearing baggy washed-out construction jeans (w/ 9 pockets). I guess that makes me stylish. Like a New Yorker.

it is harder and harder to get out of bed these days.

I have dreams sometimes lately. (This is really unusual for me. As long as I can remember, I have rarely dreamt, or at least have rarely remembered having dreamt.) My dreams now are often about teaching; sometimes, I wake up certain that I have overslept a class or that a certain class went really well or that a certain class went really poorly. More often than not, my dreams are filled with anxiety. This doesn't surprise me; after all, I have a lot of anxiety about teaching.

Last night I had a dream/nightmare about a lot of people that I didn't know very well in Ann Arbor. Lauren Keils, for example, featured prominently in my dream. The plot of the dream is blurry, but the main setting was definitely Orchid Lane in Ann Arbor, and Lauren was definitely the protagonist. There was a serial killer on the loose, and a lot of other people that I only knew vaguely in Ann Arbor were the victims. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I think there was a team of serial killers on the loose. Maybe they were siblings. Maybe there were three of them. Maybe only two.

Lauren was the owner of Orchid Lane (which was where all of the people were being killed), and maybe she decided to track down the serial killers in a mysterious and carefree sort of way. I have no recollection of what my own role was. There was a lot of blood in the dream, a lot of corpses.

My first thought when I woke up this morning was "what the FUCK" promptly followed by "oh FUCK, I've overslept." I rushed around to get ready for work, arrived at school, taught five classes and spent most of my in-between-classes time being depressed and deciding that I am a failure. And now I have finished my last class of the day, and my first thought when I sat back down at my desk was "I had a dream last night, what the FUCK."

My dreams bewilder me. I bewilder myself.

화장실: hwa-jang-sheel: powder room

On my walk in to school this morning, Han Tae-Gyu caught up with me again. He had a dream, he told me, that I gave him a present of soap. Twice. I couldn't tell whether he meant that he had the same dream two times, or that I gave him soap two times in one dream.

He also asked if I liked soy milk, and said that the next time he saw me he would give me a box of soy milk. They have a way of saying things to me that doesn't seem to allow me to argue, and I still don't know when it's okay for me to decline a gift. If it's ever okay.

This week is midterm-exam-week, and I have no official classes. But I still go in to work every day, and for a few hours every morning hold an "English cafe" in the English classroom, for any teachers who want to come and practice their English with me. It's fun! Despite my expectations, Kim Yeon (the overeager, rude teacher I mentioned before) has been a scarce presence in the cafe, and my more frequent visitors are 3 techies who I have had little to no interaction with previously. They've been coming every day, and staying for about 2 hours most of the time. We have coffee and eat fruit and less healthy snacks, and talk about travel and pets and language and things.

But that's all beside the point. The point was this: mountain #3: I-don't-know-the-name-of-this-san, on the south-east periphery of Seoul. I didn't actually climb this one, though.

Rather, three of my English-speaking teacher-family members and I went out to lunch together, and then Park Mi-Ran drove us most of the way up the mountain. Then we had a self-serve traditional Korean tea ceremony at the top, which was splendid.

Lunch was mostly things I've had before. But also, we had fish. And not silly fish patties or fish sandwiches, either. They cooked a small fish whole, and then put it on a plate and gave it to me. And I ate it. I pried it open with my chopsticks, and peeled the skin away, and plucked the meat away from the bones, and ate it. I didn't love it or anything, and I only ate as much as I thought necessary to show that I wasn't sticking up my nose. But I didn't gag. Apparently cooked fish is now on the list of things I can stomach, which means it's now part of my school diet. I'm continually amazed at how easily I am transitioning to a diet which scarcely resembles anything I've eaten for the past 12 years, or ever.

This is a 500-year-old ginko tree next to the Water Bell Temple, where we had the tea ceremony. Many women pray next to it for fertility, since it produces so many fruit. Also, did you know that ginko fruit smell like sewage when you crush them? It's true.

another day, another mountain.

Mountain #2: Umyeonsan (Mt. Umyeon) for the second time. It's the mountain right behind my school, and I climbed it with Shin-Jeong and Park Mi-Ran to get to a photo exhibition close to Mi-Ran's house after school on Monday.

The exhibit was of Sarah Moon (who sounds Korean by name, but is British by birth and French for all purposes).

Common themes:
1. women in high fashion
2. birds (a plethora of parrots. a fair few seagulls. one toucan. pelicans. flamingos. herons. at least 3 peacocks)
3. nipples (see below)
4. naked backs (see below)
5. ballet
6. swimmers

Fairly typical of her fashion photography.

Most of the women in her photos are pictured from behind. Their faces are almost never shown, but their backs are almost always bare and on display.

Some of the backs were photographed in contorted positions, which reminded me a little bit of Edgar Degas. Like this painting, only with more uncertainty about what position the subject is in.

Again, face is (at least partially) covered/obscured. Nipples are another common theme. In some of the photos, the nipples are actually visible; in others, they are obscured. But the nipples are always present.

Normal people/objects photographed as though they were diseased/dying/dead. This is only a pockmarked statue, but doesn't it look like a decaying corpse or someone with the plague?

Finally, at the very end, a photo with movement.

On the whole, the exhibit was a bit of a downer, and both Mi-Ran and Shin-Jeong denounced Sarah Moon as pessimistic (which I have come to understand is a pretty sizable insult here).

"It seemed like a dream. Back to my childhood, I had sad dreams. I dreamt that my mother said goodbye and left me alone." -Park Mi-Ran

Alone-ness seems to be a societal fear, here. Several of my co-workers (male and female) have expressed to me their desire to find a husband/wife so that they will never have to live by themselves. Most of my unmarried co-workers still live with their parents, and will likely continue to do so until they get married. This is a desirable situation to most of them. "I don't want to live alone," they say, and their earnestness is tangible.