Here we go again. A new movie about the trials and tribulations of Korean comfort women has just come out. And on and on go the expats on expat sites in Korea debating about the whole thing. One girl posts, "Every time this issue comes up, people mention that Korea has had their own comfort women and haven't apologized or made reparation payments. Like that totally negates the suffering of these poor women!" Then goes on to make the all too common giant leap to the Nazis saying that if the Jews mistreated people, that wouldn't discount the whole holocaust. Reasoning that, let's be Frank, (Frank is very honest), may be the purpose of the endless reminders there are about the comfort women. Koreans want fellow Koreans to espouse the suffering and personalize it before it disappears. "Let's suffer along with the comfort women!" is the message I can't seem to avoid.
There are 46 of them left. Whether they are the genuine article or not, is moot. They're food for worms. Soon-to-be cabbage fertilizer. And maybe this is why the apparent urgency. I've heard more recently about this issue than ever before.
Before I go much deeper, I'll sum up the issue for those outside Korea who aren't bombarded with reminders about comfort women and Dokdo on a daily basis. During Japanese occupation in Korea there were an estimated 200,000 women who were forced into positions in which they provided sexual services for Japanese men. Not all of these were Korean. Lots were from the Philippines, Indonesia (Dutch East Indies back then), China, Burma, Thailand, Viet Nam, Malaysia, Taiwan, East Timor and other Japanese occupied territories. This is something a lot of people don't really mention, if they even know it, when they're bringing up that number of 200k. This statue 100 feet from the Japanese embassy in Seoul doesn't say that all 200,000 were Korean but it would be SO much better for the cause if that's what people were led to believe, wouldn't it?
The story goes that the women were mistreated, raped, beaten and so on. And if you know the Japanese record of human rights violations and atrocities during war time, this isn't hard to believe. HERE'S the part that's hard to believe: After the end of WWII, when Japan left Korea for good, none of the women said anything. The theory is that they were embarrassed by their ordeals, deeply truamatized into silence. From 1945 until 1991, nobody heard of any 'comfort women." It wasn't even a thing. For 46 years, almost to the day, they were all silent about this? Korean women? Missing a golden opportunity to complain about mistreatment? To whine, cry and moan? Maybe they were different back then, but I can't see it. Here in Korea, the older a woman gets, the more pride she takes in this skill. Ajummas are spectacular weepers and whingers and moaners! If you are having a funeral, you can HIRE one, that's right, PAY an ajumma to cry and moan at the funeral! I'm not making this up! It's not something unique to Korea, but in this country of professional mourners, a few hundred of them just kept silent for half a decade? Kept silent about rape, beatings, and who knows what? I'm sorry, but it's hard for me to swallow.
What makes it worse is what has happened SINCE 1991 in the way of comfort women demands. The old joke always comes to mind for me: How do you make a hormone? You don't pay her." (Whore moan) Ar ar.
Correct me if I'm wrong but comfort women demanding reparation payments is moaning over unpaid sex. At its essence. Probably not the best way to make their case as innocent, pure victims of the evil Japanese war machine. Just my opinion. And when I hear words that legitimately appear to be coming from the mouth of one of the few surviving comfort women, THEY are not the ones asking for the money. They ask for apologies and promises that this stuff won't happen again.
Anyway, Kim Hak Sun came out and told her story. Since then over two hundred more have identified themselves as former comfort women. Or at least, and this is my skeptical side coming out, the organization or organizations to which they had become affiliated registered them for their shares in the huge profits to come. The Korean Council for Women Drafted Into Sexual Slavery by Japan, and some other non government organizations, like the DDR rooms that sprang up when that game was popular, like the PC rooms that filled every available commercial site in Korea at the height of Starcraft's popularity, like the singing rooms that are STILL everywhere taking advantage of the most enduring trend to hit Korea, some people saw a notorious Korean wave and they paddled for it. Do you have to be a genius to see the anti-foreigner sentiment and take monetary advantage of it? I don't think so. And it has paid off, I have no doubt. Not just from the eventual reparation payments the Japanese have made. Those are probably pretty measley in comparison to public support and donations from Korean people.
Have you ever met a Korean woman who doesn't LIKE to haggle? No you haven't. One who isn't ready to go down with the ship in a heated negotiation over a 500 won piece of fruit? This is a skill that FAR eclipses their mourning abilities and it is impossible to find a Korean girl who doesn't possess it. I admit to taking full advantage of it too! If I want a good price on a big purchase like a movie camera, I'll bring a female Korean friend camera shopping with me.
So if you're saying to yourself, why was that movie made? In every war EVER there are "comfort women." What makes Korea so special? Or as my favourite blogger worded it, "Pillage doesn't happen without rape." And if you're thinking that the Korean comfort women who were the worst treated are most likely all dead by now largely because of that treatment. The ones who remain are in all liklihood some of the Korean gals who saw the Japanese soldiers carrying more money in their wallets than they'd ever see in a lifetime and decided to raise themselves out of poverty by the only means available to them. If they were embarrassed about anything for a half century, THAT was what it was. And if these women spent their earnings wisely, they have been very well off since the end of WWII and still are. So they don't need the money from Japanese reparation payments. And I've read that very little of the Japanese money actually went to the comfort women, but ended up furthering the comfort women organizations. Most, if not all of this is just speculation.
There's no way we will ever know the truth. And if there is, and I am wrong, I'm an asshole. But I believe that this is the more realistic way of viewing the whole comfort woman situation.
Either way, I'm sure it'll be an entertaining movie. Moreso if you believe it's a documentary and not a work of fiction. I don't happen to think that way. And finally, in response to that expat gal above, I think there were Korean comfort women. I believe there was mistreatment, rape and such. It shouldn't be ignored, but I have a hard time with people who are trying to inspire new anger, hatred and discrimination from it, especially in this country where all of that is on the rise. The Korean victims of this tragedy are mostly dead, and can't really be helped. Korea, despite this sad history, did the identical things to other comfort women from other countries such as Viet Nam. This doesn't negate the Korean victims, it just makes Korea look incredibly hypocritical. Especially since a lot of the Vietnamese victims of Korean atrocities are still alive and could be helped. This certainly detracts from any belief or support I could have in the Korean comfort woman cause, though I agree it shouldn't detract from the sorrow felt for legitimate Korean victims.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Friday, February 19, 2016
The Middle School Child
I don't want to complain but...
Okay, I do.
I want to complain. I feel that even though there may be many hundreds of others doing so, I need to complain a little bit about the state of affairs I have gotten myself into here in Korea for another one-year contract. If I'm not totally mistaken or blowing things out of proportion or overgeneralizing, the middle school kids here have gotten worse and the elementary school kids have gotten better!
So I guess this'll be a complaint along with a non-complaint. The little kiddies have been WAY better behaved than I thought they would be! Aside from one or two, who are nightmares incarnate and there's nothing you can do about them, so far so good! SO FAR! And if I ever feel like I just can't deal with their fighting and noise, I just give them some colouring to do! It's been awesome! SO FAR.
As for the older kids... The ones I had high hopes for... the middle school kids who I had always had such great results with in the past here in Korea and the age group from which MANY of my favourite all time students come from, correct me if I'm wrong but most of them have turned into spoiled little brats.
I remember the good ole days here in Korea when these kids had the whole world of pressure and weight on their shoulders and they treated their foreign teachers with much the same respect that was required to appease their Korean teachers. Gone are those days, my friends! Half way anyway. They still give the fake respect owed to their Korean teachers. I see a lot of Korean teachers who absolutely live for that! But to be fair, the Korean teachers are probably only that way to get SOMETHING out of their jobs. They certainly don't get very well paid!
The kids just know now the distinction between the foreign and the Korean teachers. They may even know the wage differences and that we get BOTH days of the weekend off when the Korean teachers don't. And they take total advantage of that distinction. Maybe the kids know that if we, the foreign teachers, use many of the discipline tactics that are popular here, we'll be doing things that will get us fired in our home countries. Who knows?
Whatever it is, I have noticed a distinct lack of effort on the part of the previously accomodating, maybe OVER-accomodating Korean middle school kids! What has lead to this? In such a short time?
I was told before I got here that there has been a new ruling made that delivers the middle school student from the highly stressful high school entrance examinations. These have been done away with although the even more stressful college entrance examinations remain. I was all for the elimination in that it releases these poor, overburdened kids from the stress and high expectations that probably should not be heaped upon such youngsters just to get into a slightly better, (supposedly), high school.
But now that I have seen the results, I'm not so sure...
I know it may be hard to believe but, maybe taking away the harsh and overburdening schedules these kids have had for decades, has simply made them lazy. Rather than have them take the high road and continue on in a responsibly dedicated study mode, most of these kids have fully exercised their freedom. I used to think I would have LOVED to see that! But I don't think I ever pictured myself as their teacher in that freedom scenario. It's not fun. Lemme tell you!
And much like the bosses I have worked beneath, the kids have all kinds of tactics they believe are clever and they can use to outsmart the foreign teacher, but really, in most cases, the foreign teacher has seen this a zillion times in his/her less socially repressed society and is very aware of what is happening. They are just not comfortable letting the other party know it. Because that could jeopardize a pretty sweet set of working conditions compared to the crap job the teacher can get in his/her own country. So we, the teachers, ignore the jeuvenile tactics, leading these amateurs to believe they are outsmarting us, and we try to act like we are not aware of every little trick being played on us.
Just tonight I had a whole class of people, the boys mostly, (and this is just one of many wrenches they throw into the works that I have overcome countless times in countless classes, the boy/girl thing like 16 year olds are all crippled by their shyness toward the opposite sex so you can't partner boys with girls or they feel like they don't have to talk), who wouldn't do an incredibly simple assignment hoping that I would allow them time to do it based on my wrongful perception of their English ignorance. They wouldn't fill out a form of two things they like to do for each of the four seasons. I gave them WAY more than ample time to do so. They stonewalled me. So I just switched to a reading assignment and told them that the previous page would just be homework. AMAZINGLY even while engaged in the reading, many of the students who were having so much trouble deciding what activities they liked doing in each of the four seasons, instantaneously thought of answers when this assignment became homework!
It sounds like I won a victory there but, no, I really resent being forced to resort to tactical battles with my students. The nicest classes are those in which my students assume I have earned the grey hairs I have and am not a drooling idiot. My youngsters! Those who I thought I'd be battling with to establish limits, have inexplicably given me the benefit of the doubt, something they shouldn't even comprehend yet, and they trust me to be the wizened old coot that I am and impervious to any of their feeble attempts at chicanery. I consider that a great victory! Now if I can only get the older kids to concede that victory!
It's coming, I know, but the long, long road trying all the OH SO TEDIOUS, bubble gum, video game, jeuvenile strategies and having them fail with me, is just making my 6-hour days seem just that much longer. I wish I could just grab them all individually by the scruff of their necks, (which would get me fired for violence or sexual harassment in my own country), and yell to them, "HEY HEY HHHHHEEEEYYYY! Look at my hair! Do you think I came by this naturally? NO! It's because of many, MANY little pukes like you trying the same shit you are trying to pull on me right now. Do you honestly think you are clever enough to be the FIRST who will fool me? Check your ego at the door when you enter this classroom and spare us all the bother! Let's just have a student/teacher relationship of trust, shall we?"
I am one to maybe get a little dramatic when it comes to Korea. Because it's a pretty dramatic country! So I think of the Korean people. I wonder if the Korean people are feeling the same bump in the educational road that we foreigners are. So I wonder if Koreans sit around like those of us from other cultures and just rap about old stuff. I told my young class how lucky they were the other day to have the internet to help them with research reports. I told them I had to go to the library, get on the computer, then the microfiche or the card catalogue then find a book in the stacks then page my way through it, actually reading pages and pages of information I didn't NEED TO, until I got the information I had come for. They just have to Google. And, as usual, their reaction was, meh.
I imagine a Korean elder, hopped up on soju, talking about the days before remote control air con and telling how they all feared the dreaded fan death by leaving the fans on to keep them from sweating too much on a hot summer's night. I'm the same. I have dialled a phone, used a floppy disk, eaten eggs and butter when they were dangerous, done a lot of things these kids don't recognize. Yet the tricks they are trying to get away with on me are exactly the same ones the previous generation tried, (unsuccessfully), to fool me with.
I have no doubt that they'll realize I'm no amateur and they'll stop the crap and just do what I want them to, and they'll learn more efficiently for doing so. But it still bugs me that THEY don't know that yet. I wish I could do something that would make them all realize I'm someone to be reckoned with, like take them all out to an ice rink and teach them the fine art of body checking. One at a time rattle their fillings and pound some respect into them. I'm sure that would work!
I guess what I am saying is these kids, not the younger ones, but the older ones, are really insulting my intelligence and my professional pride by not trusting me.
And I didn't have this problem the last time I taught Korean kiddies. When was that? Hmmmmm.... I guess we're going back a bit. Not including camps, where the kids don't have enough time to try their deviousness on you, wow!, I suppose it's been a long time! Maybe that's why... I haven't really taught Korean kids for more than a few weeks at a time for 10 years! But I still have a hard time thinking that things have changed so dramatically in that short a time. It's a sad reflection on this country if they have! And I'd say they have.
In a year, let's come back and see if I have any students who don't trust me. Shall we? That said, it's a lot harder to get these kids to trust you. And I'm not even saying that's bad! I'm just saying it's a pain in the arse for a guy like me trying to teach 6 hours a day, a workload that is hard enough with cooperative students.
I'd be interested in finding out what other long time teachers in Korea think. Are Korean kids worse or better? Are they less trusting? And is that a bad thing? As a teacher I will tell you it's a double edged sword. I like the new freedom afforded the Korean people. I do! I wished it upon them for so many years! But at the same time, I begrudge them the freedom that allows them to make my job much MUCH harder!
There have been many levels of change in the world over the years. Best illustrated by
perhaps.
Imagine the changes like this in Korea! Used to be the younger kid had to get quarters to play the video games that give him the vicarious experience the old war vet lived through. In Korea these days the kids have enough spare cash to BUY their own video games. Most of them. I see kids in my classes open their wallets and they have more inside them than I have in mine!
So last week I created a lesson that would out this group once and for all. I used an old stress test I made for my students in the 90's and 2000's here. Same questions and everything. It wasn't something I made up though. It was an officially recognized stress test by some magazine or psychological entity. I don't know what. But legitimate. Then I put a reading assignment on the back and told them that if they faked like they couldn't finish the stress test in English, they'd have the reading assignment to do AND it came with a page of homework questions. BOOM! A whole 30 minutes of English conversation!
All my students took the test as did their counterparts 15 years earliear. The results were magnificent! This year's batch had stress in the low numbers to negatives. Aside from the few who had moderate stress levels and these, (NO coincidence), happened to be my best students. As for the olden days? EVERY student had HUGE stress levels and most were absolutely wonderful to deal with in class. The few who had lower stress levels were the students who had behavioural problems.
This year the norm was low stress level and behavioral problems. In the good old days it was high levels of stress and little to no behavioral problems. SO what I concluded was simple. Low stress in the Korean middle school student is the gateway to behavioral problems. Maybe the older generation knew what they were doing!
I got other interesting info from the sustained English conversation too. I found that I have students who don't go to bed until 6 or 7 in the morning!!! And they don't wake up till 3 PM! There were other gobsmacking realizations about this incredibly coddled, spoiled, younger generation of Koreans as well! No chores. NONE! They get money for nothing. NOTHING! And they get a good amount of money! The minimum wage here is an unbelievable 6030 won per hour. That's like 7 Canadian bucks an hour. These kids get more than that in allowance! So NObody has a part time job! NOBODY!
I have read articles written by foreigners who were high up in big companies here like Samsung and spoke fluent Korean and worked here for many years. They say that the biggest problem in Korea is the men have no work experience in their teens, then they have a couple years in the military, and you get them applying to work at companies like Samsung in their mid twenties with absolutely NO work experience. Unless you have an airline and you're looking for pilots. Then I guess flying in the military will be good work experience. But most military experience is not all that transferable to the work force. No part time jobs, no work in their teens or early twenties. You get a person green as green can be at an age much older than such inexperience is found in most other countries.
At least in the old days they went to all kinds of classes after school and applied themselves in them. Nowadays they don't even do that! They just take up space in the classroom, chat with their friends in Korean and mess around. They have plenty of cash to spend, video games to play and no jobs or chores or responsibilities except showing up for classes. The studying doesn't seem as big a responsibility. One of my cohorts over here had a student hand in a writing assignment that was illegible. She commented that he had obviously not even put in enough effort to make the thing readable so he should do it again. The parent got angry about that comment and complained to the school. You hear of that happening quite a bit.
So it appears that a lot of the parents are actually guilty of contributing to the delinquency of their children. If they could see their kids in my classroom sometimes they might think about lowering their allowances or giving them chores or maybe letting them get a part time job. I used to just come up with a fairly interesting lesson and the kids would love it and repay my efforts by giving some of their own. The new princes and princesses I seem to have in my classes have to be tricked into doing what they all know they should be doing. I'm getting to a point where I'm about to give up putting in the effort. I could more easily just give them boring, simple lessons. It's what they deserve.
But I'm not quite there yet. Like I say, I have hope that they will eventually smarten up and just play along. But right now they are making my job a challenge. It's weird. I was worried about the younger kids. I guess you just never know.
Okay, I do.
I want to complain. I feel that even though there may be many hundreds of others doing so, I need to complain a little bit about the state of affairs I have gotten myself into here in Korea for another one-year contract. If I'm not totally mistaken or blowing things out of proportion or overgeneralizing, the middle school kids here have gotten worse and the elementary school kids have gotten better!
So I guess this'll be a complaint along with a non-complaint. The little kiddies have been WAY better behaved than I thought they would be! Aside from one or two, who are nightmares incarnate and there's nothing you can do about them, so far so good! SO FAR! And if I ever feel like I just can't deal with their fighting and noise, I just give them some colouring to do! It's been awesome! SO FAR.
As for the older kids... The ones I had high hopes for... the middle school kids who I had always had such great results with in the past here in Korea and the age group from which MANY of my favourite all time students come from, correct me if I'm wrong but most of them have turned into spoiled little brats.
I remember the good ole days here in Korea when these kids had the whole world of pressure and weight on their shoulders and they treated their foreign teachers with much the same respect that was required to appease their Korean teachers. Gone are those days, my friends! Half way anyway. They still give the fake respect owed to their Korean teachers. I see a lot of Korean teachers who absolutely live for that! But to be fair, the Korean teachers are probably only that way to get SOMETHING out of their jobs. They certainly don't get very well paid!
The kids just know now the distinction between the foreign and the Korean teachers. They may even know the wage differences and that we get BOTH days of the weekend off when the Korean teachers don't. And they take total advantage of that distinction. Maybe the kids know that if we, the foreign teachers, use many of the discipline tactics that are popular here, we'll be doing things that will get us fired in our home countries. Who knows?
Whatever it is, I have noticed a distinct lack of effort on the part of the previously accomodating, maybe OVER-accomodating Korean middle school kids! What has lead to this? In such a short time?
I was told before I got here that there has been a new ruling made that delivers the middle school student from the highly stressful high school entrance examinations. These have been done away with although the even more stressful college entrance examinations remain. I was all for the elimination in that it releases these poor, overburdened kids from the stress and high expectations that probably should not be heaped upon such youngsters just to get into a slightly better, (supposedly), high school.
But now that I have seen the results, I'm not so sure...
I know it may be hard to believe but, maybe taking away the harsh and overburdening schedules these kids have had for decades, has simply made them lazy. Rather than have them take the high road and continue on in a responsibly dedicated study mode, most of these kids have fully exercised their freedom. I used to think I would have LOVED to see that! But I don't think I ever pictured myself as their teacher in that freedom scenario. It's not fun. Lemme tell you!
And much like the bosses I have worked beneath, the kids have all kinds of tactics they believe are clever and they can use to outsmart the foreign teacher, but really, in most cases, the foreign teacher has seen this a zillion times in his/her less socially repressed society and is very aware of what is happening. They are just not comfortable letting the other party know it. Because that could jeopardize a pretty sweet set of working conditions compared to the crap job the teacher can get in his/her own country. So we, the teachers, ignore the jeuvenile tactics, leading these amateurs to believe they are outsmarting us, and we try to act like we are not aware of every little trick being played on us.
Just tonight I had a whole class of people, the boys mostly, (and this is just one of many wrenches they throw into the works that I have overcome countless times in countless classes, the boy/girl thing like 16 year olds are all crippled by their shyness toward the opposite sex so you can't partner boys with girls or they feel like they don't have to talk), who wouldn't do an incredibly simple assignment hoping that I would allow them time to do it based on my wrongful perception of their English ignorance. They wouldn't fill out a form of two things they like to do for each of the four seasons. I gave them WAY more than ample time to do so. They stonewalled me. So I just switched to a reading assignment and told them that the previous page would just be homework. AMAZINGLY even while engaged in the reading, many of the students who were having so much trouble deciding what activities they liked doing in each of the four seasons, instantaneously thought of answers when this assignment became homework!
It sounds like I won a victory there but, no, I really resent being forced to resort to tactical battles with my students. The nicest classes are those in which my students assume I have earned the grey hairs I have and am not a drooling idiot. My youngsters! Those who I thought I'd be battling with to establish limits, have inexplicably given me the benefit of the doubt, something they shouldn't even comprehend yet, and they trust me to be the wizened old coot that I am and impervious to any of their feeble attempts at chicanery. I consider that a great victory! Now if I can only get the older kids to concede that victory!
It's coming, I know, but the long, long road trying all the OH SO TEDIOUS, bubble gum, video game, jeuvenile strategies and having them fail with me, is just making my 6-hour days seem just that much longer. I wish I could just grab them all individually by the scruff of their necks, (which would get me fired for violence or sexual harassment in my own country), and yell to them, "HEY HEY HHHHHEEEEYYYY! Look at my hair! Do you think I came by this naturally? NO! It's because of many, MANY little pukes like you trying the same shit you are trying to pull on me right now. Do you honestly think you are clever enough to be the FIRST who will fool me? Check your ego at the door when you enter this classroom and spare us all the bother! Let's just have a student/teacher relationship of trust, shall we?"
I am one to maybe get a little dramatic when it comes to Korea. Because it's a pretty dramatic country! So I think of the Korean people. I wonder if the Korean people are feeling the same bump in the educational road that we foreigners are. So I wonder if Koreans sit around like those of us from other cultures and just rap about old stuff. I told my young class how lucky they were the other day to have the internet to help them with research reports. I told them I had to go to the library, get on the computer, then the microfiche or the card catalogue then find a book in the stacks then page my way through it, actually reading pages and pages of information I didn't NEED TO, until I got the information I had come for. They just have to Google. And, as usual, their reaction was, meh.
I imagine a Korean elder, hopped up on soju, talking about the days before remote control air con and telling how they all feared the dreaded fan death by leaving the fans on to keep them from sweating too much on a hot summer's night. I'm the same. I have dialled a phone, used a floppy disk, eaten eggs and butter when they were dangerous, done a lot of things these kids don't recognize. Yet the tricks they are trying to get away with on me are exactly the same ones the previous generation tried, (unsuccessfully), to fool me with.
I have no doubt that they'll realize I'm no amateur and they'll stop the crap and just do what I want them to, and they'll learn more efficiently for doing so. But it still bugs me that THEY don't know that yet. I wish I could do something that would make them all realize I'm someone to be reckoned with, like take them all out to an ice rink and teach them the fine art of body checking. One at a time rattle their fillings and pound some respect into them. I'm sure that would work!
I guess what I am saying is these kids, not the younger ones, but the older ones, are really insulting my intelligence and my professional pride by not trusting me.
And I didn't have this problem the last time I taught Korean kiddies. When was that? Hmmmmm.... I guess we're going back a bit. Not including camps, where the kids don't have enough time to try their deviousness on you, wow!, I suppose it's been a long time! Maybe that's why... I haven't really taught Korean kids for more than a few weeks at a time for 10 years! But I still have a hard time thinking that things have changed so dramatically in that short a time. It's a sad reflection on this country if they have! And I'd say they have.
In a year, let's come back and see if I have any students who don't trust me. Shall we? That said, it's a lot harder to get these kids to trust you. And I'm not even saying that's bad! I'm just saying it's a pain in the arse for a guy like me trying to teach 6 hours a day, a workload that is hard enough with cooperative students.
I'd be interested in finding out what other long time teachers in Korea think. Are Korean kids worse or better? Are they less trusting? And is that a bad thing? As a teacher I will tell you it's a double edged sword. I like the new freedom afforded the Korean people. I do! I wished it upon them for so many years! But at the same time, I begrudge them the freedom that allows them to make my job much MUCH harder!
There have been many levels of change in the world over the years. Best illustrated by
Imagine the changes like this in Korea! Used to be the younger kid had to get quarters to play the video games that give him the vicarious experience the old war vet lived through. In Korea these days the kids have enough spare cash to BUY their own video games. Most of them. I see kids in my classes open their wallets and they have more inside them than I have in mine!
So last week I created a lesson that would out this group once and for all. I used an old stress test I made for my students in the 90's and 2000's here. Same questions and everything. It wasn't something I made up though. It was an officially recognized stress test by some magazine or psychological entity. I don't know what. But legitimate. Then I put a reading assignment on the back and told them that if they faked like they couldn't finish the stress test in English, they'd have the reading assignment to do AND it came with a page of homework questions. BOOM! A whole 30 minutes of English conversation!
All my students took the test as did their counterparts 15 years earliear. The results were magnificent! This year's batch had stress in the low numbers to negatives. Aside from the few who had moderate stress levels and these, (NO coincidence), happened to be my best students. As for the olden days? EVERY student had HUGE stress levels and most were absolutely wonderful to deal with in class. The few who had lower stress levels were the students who had behavioural problems.
This year the norm was low stress level and behavioral problems. In the good old days it was high levels of stress and little to no behavioral problems. SO what I concluded was simple. Low stress in the Korean middle school student is the gateway to behavioral problems. Maybe the older generation knew what they were doing!
I got other interesting info from the sustained English conversation too. I found that I have students who don't go to bed until 6 or 7 in the morning!!! And they don't wake up till 3 PM! There were other gobsmacking realizations about this incredibly coddled, spoiled, younger generation of Koreans as well! No chores. NONE! They get money for nothing. NOTHING! And they get a good amount of money! The minimum wage here is an unbelievable 6030 won per hour. That's like 7 Canadian bucks an hour. These kids get more than that in allowance! So NObody has a part time job! NOBODY!
I have read articles written by foreigners who were high up in big companies here like Samsung and spoke fluent Korean and worked here for many years. They say that the biggest problem in Korea is the men have no work experience in their teens, then they have a couple years in the military, and you get them applying to work at companies like Samsung in their mid twenties with absolutely NO work experience. Unless you have an airline and you're looking for pilots. Then I guess flying in the military will be good work experience. But most military experience is not all that transferable to the work force. No part time jobs, no work in their teens or early twenties. You get a person green as green can be at an age much older than such inexperience is found in most other countries.
At least in the old days they went to all kinds of classes after school and applied themselves in them. Nowadays they don't even do that! They just take up space in the classroom, chat with their friends in Korean and mess around. They have plenty of cash to spend, video games to play and no jobs or chores or responsibilities except showing up for classes. The studying doesn't seem as big a responsibility. One of my cohorts over here had a student hand in a writing assignment that was illegible. She commented that he had obviously not even put in enough effort to make the thing readable so he should do it again. The parent got angry about that comment and complained to the school. You hear of that happening quite a bit.
So it appears that a lot of the parents are actually guilty of contributing to the delinquency of their children. If they could see their kids in my classroom sometimes they might think about lowering their allowances or giving them chores or maybe letting them get a part time job. I used to just come up with a fairly interesting lesson and the kids would love it and repay my efforts by giving some of their own. The new princes and princesses I seem to have in my classes have to be tricked into doing what they all know they should be doing. I'm getting to a point where I'm about to give up putting in the effort. I could more easily just give them boring, simple lessons. It's what they deserve.
But I'm not quite there yet. Like I say, I have hope that they will eventually smarten up and just play along. But right now they are making my job a challenge. It's weird. I was worried about the younger kids. I guess you just never know.
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Pound for Pound
I like the sport of boxing. There are few sports if any more pure. Some say wrestling or MMA use more moves and are a better test of fighting ability. True. I agree. But I still love boxing. But like many things, it has been ruined by money. In fact you could almost trace its demise to one stupid hair having, English sodomizing jagoff: Don King. But I don't want to talk about the negatives here. I want to concentrate on the postitives.
Boxing, without a doubt, has produced more really good movies than any other sport! I like boxing AND I like movies. So here I was watching "Someone Up There Likes Me," for the third or fourth time and thinking. I was thinking about all the good boxing movies. "Raging Bull" about Jake Lamotta, a lifelong friend of Rocky Graziano, about whom the Oscar winning "Someone Up There Likes Me," was made. All the "Rocky" movies about a mythical fighter they made a statue of in Philly. Yeah, a statue! He's a hero to people there and he didn't even exist. Although some think he was based on Rocky Graziano, Marciano or Jake Lamotta or maybe even Rocky Basilio. I think if someone wanted to make a boxing movie about another great white hope, Italian boxer, Basilio would be the guy. He BEAT Sugar Ray Robinson! In my mind if you beat Sugar Ray, you could have a movie made about you. But he did other stuff too. Watch. Just watch. It won't be long if it hasn't happened already. It's like trying to think of the next comic superhero they'll make a movie about. You know it's coming, just not when.
Walk into a pub and if it's any kind of pub you should be able to get a great conversation started by asking what the best boxing movies of all time are. Rockies, Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Cinderella Man, Southpaw, Balboa, The Boxer, The Champ, Someone Up There Likes Me, Diggstown, Ali, The Greatest, The Harder They Fall, When We Were Kings, The Fighter, I'd throw in Snatch even though it totally doesn't belong... Do you notice anything about this list? Something GLARING about it? I hate to sprinkle gasoline on an already raging inferno but, this list of moveies is sadly lacking in black boxing heroes. Muhammed Ali, being the exception, there were so many interesting black boxers out there whose stories were just as compelling as the white boxers forever enshrined as heroes by Hollywood by these movies.
* I didn't include Tyson although I DO think it was a great movie. But it did more to diminish a fighter than idoloze him so I kept it off the list. And Mike Tyson has not been a very heroic guy so I can understand his life story not being made into a movie yet. After he's dead and can't beat shit outta the writers, it'll probably be made into a tabloidy sort of movie. But not yet. He's still adding time to it. Also, it was a documentary. I didn't include "Pound for Pound" either but it's just as fun to watch as most of these.
It could be said that a movie about Mike Tyson should be made. His story would be WILDLY entertaining! Where is THAT movie? I could be wrong but I haven't seen one. Even if they need to stretch the truth a little. These are the movies I'm talking about. Hollywood seems to have concentrated on white boxers.
But Tyson is not even the most unbelievable omission the dipshits in Hollywood, and in movie making countries all over the world, have totally neglected at their own peril. What about Sugar Ray Robinson? Come ON! If you talk to boxers and boxing experts he is practically the unanimous choice for best boxer ever. He is called "Pound for Pound" the best ever but since his fought in several classes during his career, THAT distinction isn't quite as necessary. It is a distinction that was invented for him and best describes him, (appologies to Roy Jones, Floyd Mayweather and Pac Man, and such).
If you knew more about him, you'd be right there with me I'm sure wondering why this guy's life story hasn't been made into a movie. If any REAL reason exists, it might be that his story is one of few in the world that just might be too Hollywood even for Hollywood! The guy could, I am almost positive, have had an even more impressive record if he were more like Tyson or George Foreman in his younger days and went into every fight trying to KILL the opponent. Well, he didn't. Unfortunately the night before his fight against Jimmy Doyle, he had a dream that he knocked him out and he was going to die. He actually didn't want to fight. He told everyone he wasn't going to fight that night. But, because of the MONEY everyone would have lost if the fight was cancelled, Ray fought. He DID knock Doyle out and he DID kill him.
Is that Hollywood enough for you?
If not, here's some more, because it doesn't end there! It goes on and on! This guy had one of the longest careers a fighter can possibly hope for! There are several fighters he fought epic series of fights with. Jake Lamotta said, "I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabedes!" Lamotta fought him and BEAT him in Robinson's 41st fight. In 128 fights, including two draws, that was his only loss until Randy Turpin of England beat him for the second time and instantly became the toast of England. Lamotta fought him to a loss 5 other times. This is Jake Lamotta, the Raging Bull we're talking about here. Movie seems to have excluded Sugar Ray for some reason... 127 fights with only 1 loss? Never be duplicated. Tell you why...
In the beginning of his career, Sugar Ray Robinson was just a 19-year-old "Ray Robinson" beating a kid named Valentine for the 1939 Golden Gloves featherweight division championship. For some reason Youtube had good footage of this fight. Take advantage of that fact, I implore you! Not sure where the footage went for the ensuing 6 years but in 46 he fought a guy named Riccio and won with a 4th round TKO. The 3 weeks later fought Cliff Beckett and won. Then SIX DAYS LATER fought Sammy Angott. This is a former lightweight champ! They went 10 rounds but Ray got the unanimous decision. Then STILL in the same year meets Tommy Bell and beats him to become the welterweight champ. That's 4 fights in just over a month. THIS is another BIG reason why this STUD was far superior to the pussy fighters of nowadays who need months to fully recover from a bout and then months more to train for the next fight. 6 days! That makes everything he did at least a little bit more impressive!
1947 isn't so clear, oddly. There is some Bigfoot/Zapruder film of the bout with Georgie Abrams and some SWEEEEET 6-punch combinations and silky moves the boxing world didn't see until many years later. He was obviously toying with his opponent. But I saw a vid in which Robinson said that after the Jimmy Doyle fight, he just couldn't hit anyone hard any more. He became a different fighter. Finesse, defence, scoring points and not knocking the guy out. Many believe this detracted from what could have been an even greater career! Who's to say? If he continued on taking chances on the knockout, he could have been Buster Douglassed. And then he never would have had the most amazing record in boxing ever: his 91 fight unbeaten streak. Or his 127 fights with only one loss. Of course if you are in a half decent pub, you can debate these things.
Just gonna list some of his stats here now and let you mull them over. In 200 bouts. Well let's not just shrug that off. 2oo bouts! ONE hundred is a lot! 200 is unheard of! But in all that time he wss knocked out guess how many times? 1. Joey Maxim. For that alone I'm sure Joey Maxim could have a movie made about him! He has the third most wins of all time. 175. Archie Moore has more with 183 and Willie Pep has more with a 229-11-1 record. I suppose if you were to make a film of the statistical boxing king, Willie Pep would be the man. Get this: he fought Sugar Ray Robinson! Under a pseudonym and LOST. If that's not enough to make a Hollywood movie, he survived a plane crash in which the co-pilot and two passengers died. He recovered and went on to an amazing career. But in the featherweight class. Had 6 wives, all which he said were "good housekeepers." Because they went on to keep the house. 0-6 outside the ring, his record inside was much better and since he's yet another Italian, white dude with a great and colourful boxing career, you wonder how long it will be before it is immortalized in film.
The stats in Ray's career that are probaly most impressive are the multiple times he has won championships. Now this, again, will probably not be repeated because in his time everybody KNEW who the two best fighters were and they wanted them to fight regardless of if they had fought before. This is one of the MANY things Don King fucked up. Ray's career is stained with losses to dudes who he almost always gets a rematch with, and almost always in a hurry, and he beats them. This, while good for his career, proved to be bad for boxing betters and promotors. Enter Don King who won't put the top two guys up against each other unless it's a bazillion dollar fight that rivals the Super Bowl in viewership.
Anyway, I said I'd shy away from that sort of negative.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Why the actual SHAZBATT hasn't there been a Hollywood movie, corny as we know it is gonna be, written about the life of the best boxer EVER?"
But here's the thing: They're doing it! Apparently they have a movie coming out in the future about Sugar Ray. I sure can't wait for that! I hope it's as good as some or all of these titles we've listed here. And maybe in 2020 if you walk into a bar and ask what the best boxing movie ever was, maybe this one will be mentioned.
I sure hope it's that good.
Boxing, without a doubt, has produced more really good movies than any other sport! I like boxing AND I like movies. So here I was watching "Someone Up There Likes Me," for the third or fourth time and thinking. I was thinking about all the good boxing movies. "Raging Bull" about Jake Lamotta, a lifelong friend of Rocky Graziano, about whom the Oscar winning "Someone Up There Likes Me," was made. All the "Rocky" movies about a mythical fighter they made a statue of in Philly. Yeah, a statue! He's a hero to people there and he didn't even exist. Although some think he was based on Rocky Graziano, Marciano or Jake Lamotta or maybe even Rocky Basilio. I think if someone wanted to make a boxing movie about another great white hope, Italian boxer, Basilio would be the guy. He BEAT Sugar Ray Robinson! In my mind if you beat Sugar Ray, you could have a movie made about you. But he did other stuff too. Watch. Just watch. It won't be long if it hasn't happened already. It's like trying to think of the next comic superhero they'll make a movie about. You know it's coming, just not when.
Walk into a pub and if it's any kind of pub you should be able to get a great conversation started by asking what the best boxing movies of all time are. Rockies, Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Cinderella Man, Southpaw, Balboa, The Boxer, The Champ, Someone Up There Likes Me, Diggstown, Ali, The Greatest, The Harder They Fall, When We Were Kings, The Fighter, I'd throw in Snatch even though it totally doesn't belong... Do you notice anything about this list? Something GLARING about it? I hate to sprinkle gasoline on an already raging inferno but, this list of moveies is sadly lacking in black boxing heroes. Muhammed Ali, being the exception, there were so many interesting black boxers out there whose stories were just as compelling as the white boxers forever enshrined as heroes by Hollywood by these movies.
* I didn't include Tyson although I DO think it was a great movie. But it did more to diminish a fighter than idoloze him so I kept it off the list. And Mike Tyson has not been a very heroic guy so I can understand his life story not being made into a movie yet. After he's dead and can't beat shit outta the writers, it'll probably be made into a tabloidy sort of movie. But not yet. He's still adding time to it. Also, it was a documentary. I didn't include "Pound for Pound" either but it's just as fun to watch as most of these.
It could be said that a movie about Mike Tyson should be made. His story would be WILDLY entertaining! Where is THAT movie? I could be wrong but I haven't seen one. Even if they need to stretch the truth a little. These are the movies I'm talking about. Hollywood seems to have concentrated on white boxers.
But Tyson is not even the most unbelievable omission the dipshits in Hollywood, and in movie making countries all over the world, have totally neglected at their own peril. What about Sugar Ray Robinson? Come ON! If you talk to boxers and boxing experts he is practically the unanimous choice for best boxer ever. He is called "Pound for Pound" the best ever but since his fought in several classes during his career, THAT distinction isn't quite as necessary. It is a distinction that was invented for him and best describes him, (appologies to Roy Jones, Floyd Mayweather and Pac Man, and such).
If you knew more about him, you'd be right there with me I'm sure wondering why this guy's life story hasn't been made into a movie. If any REAL reason exists, it might be that his story is one of few in the world that just might be too Hollywood even for Hollywood! The guy could, I am almost positive, have had an even more impressive record if he were more like Tyson or George Foreman in his younger days and went into every fight trying to KILL the opponent. Well, he didn't. Unfortunately the night before his fight against Jimmy Doyle, he had a dream that he knocked him out and he was going to die. He actually didn't want to fight. He told everyone he wasn't going to fight that night. But, because of the MONEY everyone would have lost if the fight was cancelled, Ray fought. He DID knock Doyle out and he DID kill him.
Is that Hollywood enough for you?
If not, here's some more, because it doesn't end there! It goes on and on! This guy had one of the longest careers a fighter can possibly hope for! There are several fighters he fought epic series of fights with. Jake Lamotta said, "I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabedes!" Lamotta fought him and BEAT him in Robinson's 41st fight. In 128 fights, including two draws, that was his only loss until Randy Turpin of England beat him for the second time and instantly became the toast of England. Lamotta fought him to a loss 5 other times. This is Jake Lamotta, the Raging Bull we're talking about here. Movie seems to have excluded Sugar Ray for some reason... 127 fights with only 1 loss? Never be duplicated. Tell you why...
In the beginning of his career, Sugar Ray Robinson was just a 19-year-old "Ray Robinson" beating a kid named Valentine for the 1939 Golden Gloves featherweight division championship. For some reason Youtube had good footage of this fight. Take advantage of that fact, I implore you! Not sure where the footage went for the ensuing 6 years but in 46 he fought a guy named Riccio and won with a 4th round TKO. The 3 weeks later fought Cliff Beckett and won. Then SIX DAYS LATER fought Sammy Angott. This is a former lightweight champ! They went 10 rounds but Ray got the unanimous decision. Then STILL in the same year meets Tommy Bell and beats him to become the welterweight champ. That's 4 fights in just over a month. THIS is another BIG reason why this STUD was far superior to the pussy fighters of nowadays who need months to fully recover from a bout and then months more to train for the next fight. 6 days! That makes everything he did at least a little bit more impressive!
1947 isn't so clear, oddly. There is some Bigfoot/Zapruder film of the bout with Georgie Abrams and some SWEEEEET 6-punch combinations and silky moves the boxing world didn't see until many years later. He was obviously toying with his opponent. But I saw a vid in which Robinson said that after the Jimmy Doyle fight, he just couldn't hit anyone hard any more. He became a different fighter. Finesse, defence, scoring points and not knocking the guy out. Many believe this detracted from what could have been an even greater career! Who's to say? If he continued on taking chances on the knockout, he could have been Buster Douglassed. And then he never would have had the most amazing record in boxing ever: his 91 fight unbeaten streak. Or his 127 fights with only one loss. Of course if you are in a half decent pub, you can debate these things.
Just gonna list some of his stats here now and let you mull them over. In 200 bouts. Well let's not just shrug that off. 2oo bouts! ONE hundred is a lot! 200 is unheard of! But in all that time he wss knocked out guess how many times? 1. Joey Maxim. For that alone I'm sure Joey Maxim could have a movie made about him! He has the third most wins of all time. 175. Archie Moore has more with 183 and Willie Pep has more with a 229-11-1 record. I suppose if you were to make a film of the statistical boxing king, Willie Pep would be the man. Get this: he fought Sugar Ray Robinson! Under a pseudonym and LOST. If that's not enough to make a Hollywood movie, he survived a plane crash in which the co-pilot and two passengers died. He recovered and went on to an amazing career. But in the featherweight class. Had 6 wives, all which he said were "good housekeepers." Because they went on to keep the house. 0-6 outside the ring, his record inside was much better and since he's yet another Italian, white dude with a great and colourful boxing career, you wonder how long it will be before it is immortalized in film.
The stats in Ray's career that are probaly most impressive are the multiple times he has won championships. Now this, again, will probably not be repeated because in his time everybody KNEW who the two best fighters were and they wanted them to fight regardless of if they had fought before. This is one of the MANY things Don King fucked up. Ray's career is stained with losses to dudes who he almost always gets a rematch with, and almost always in a hurry, and he beats them. This, while good for his career, proved to be bad for boxing betters and promotors. Enter Don King who won't put the top two guys up against each other unless it's a bazillion dollar fight that rivals the Super Bowl in viewership.
Anyway, I said I'd shy away from that sort of negative.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Why the actual SHAZBATT hasn't there been a Hollywood movie, corny as we know it is gonna be, written about the life of the best boxer EVER?"
But here's the thing: They're doing it! Apparently they have a movie coming out in the future about Sugar Ray. I sure can't wait for that! I hope it's as good as some or all of these titles we've listed here. And maybe in 2020 if you walk into a bar and ask what the best boxing movie ever was, maybe this one will be mentioned.
I sure hope it's that good.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
In Honour Of My Good Friend's Birthday I'll Title This Korean Comfort
Time for an update.
Since I'm sitting here doing nothing and my computer is back from the dead, let's start with those two things, shall we?
It's the holiday LOOONG weekend and I'm enjoying the frig out of it doing nothing! Happy year of the monkey, everyone! Okay, now to be more like me: I have a wicked cold. I mean hide under the covers, tingle when you move, two TP roll a day, ab work-out coughing, wicked cold! But at least I haven't had to work through it! I find myself getting better at finding positives where they aren't so obvious. I look over at the trash can literally heaping with snot sogged clumps of toilet paper and feel the entire 360 degrees of my core BEGGING me to not cough or sneeze or blow my nose for just a few minutes, but no can do. I HAD plans for the holiday weekend but it seems the powers that be had others.
I probably didn't help matters much when on Saturday I went out and bought my wifi router. See, I needed a router to have good enough wifi to use a printer here. I've been buying printing at an exorbitant rate for all my teaching needs. The hagwon where I work HAS a copier and STILL I'm paying a lot of money to copy out lessons and laminate stuff. It happens when you are teaching 30 hours a week. So I needed to SPEND money to SAVE money. Get a router and a printer and STILL within a couple of months I'd save. Seriously I think I spent about 100 bucks in the month of January printing stuff out. Well, there was laminating and buying other stationary too I guess. But it's still a big expense.
So I was out in the driving sleet, with a cold, walking INTO the wind, UPHILL, to E-Mart on Saturday to get a router. Not exactly true, I went to Hi Mart and another place too but E-Mart had the best deal. I was walking around in the cold, wet snow. With a cold. For hours. Then I bought groceries and walked home, UPHILL, in the cold and driving... no wait a minute I took a taxi. But still waiting for it and getting in and out...
I guess it was a lucky thing I did because the next day I was in no shape to do anything. I stayed in the house. The day after THAT was Monday, Sunday in the States, and at 8:30 AM the Superbowl was on. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Sunday during my do nothing day, I did SOMEthing. I cleaned up the house. Swept, and used the crappy mop I bought at E-Mart. Some things in Korea are not created equally. Mops, buckets, garbage cans, bread bags, the list goes on. Try to find a trash can when you need one to avoid littering. I dare ya! But go into ANY squat, sit or freestyle toilet and low and behold, there ya go! Full of used toilet paper. The only trashcan in the country you DON'T want to see, and, BOOM, there it is! And bread bags... Now that they actually HAVE a few of the things we recognize as bread here in Korea and not the sweet, white poundcake shaped like bread that we've all mistakenly bought, NOW they have to mess with the packaging! Can somebody PLEASE tell me who the genius is who decided to SEAL the bread bag and then twist it and tie it off with a twist tie or the usual plastic bread clamp? You know the ones we made finger flingers from. EVERYthing is the same except that stupid seal! There is no possible way to get into your bag of bread without rendering the bag twist and twist tie or bread clamp utterly useless. Somebody DO something, PLEASE!
But anyway, mops. I had to pay about 20 bucks for a mop that looked like a dry mop. Well it IS a dry mop. But the only thing I could find otherwise was one of those sponge mops. Don't like those cuz how long does sponge last? So I buy a dry mop so that I can wet mop with it. This is the very definition of compromise and you find yourself doing this a lot in Korea. So I had to sweep the floor 3 times. While we're on the subject, brooms, no not just brooms, practically ANYthing used for cooking or cleaning, where height is an issue, is designed for someone 5 foot nothing. The longest brooms you can find have you bowing down like a humble servant you probably ARE if you are sweeping up someone else's hair and toenails. Single men are, you will find in Korea, an all but non-existent target market. But I found one! I found a broom with a NORMAL length handle! Or stick, or shaft or whatever the working end of a broom is called. But with that long shaft came sacrifices. The bristles. Seriously! How much science goes into the bristles of a broom. For 100 years people used HAY! They STILL do! I SAW them while I was still in the country in Icheon! Hay brooms all over the place! They had shafts no more than a foot or two long but... This is what I'm saying. If you want bristles that don't suck up, or leave behind the dust and dirt, you settle for a short shaft. If you want a long shaft, you get shitty bristles. Well I'm a long shaft man. Shut up, you filthy pigs, I know what you're thinking.
With all the time I spend bending over the sink, which isn't even up to my nads, cooking at my stove, which is LOWER, and bending over to do other cleaning chores, I wanted the luxury of a long shaft, standing erect as I used it oooOOOOOH MY GOD! Stop it you gutter denizens! Suffice to say I have a shitty broom AND mop because they both have long sticks, or handles or shafts.
So I swept 3 times, mopped with a wet dry mop, then went around picking up clumps of dust and dirt WITH MY FINGERS that neither managed to pick up. Least I didn't have to bend over too far. Also I sprayed and scrubbed some more of the windows and tiles around the house that the previous tennant had neglected during the summer and had grown thick with black mold. Not my first battle with THAT I assure you. In fact I think if it hasn't contributed to my present state of health, it certainly hasn't been good for it. That black mold is just no good! And it thrives in Korean summers, lemme tell you! No avoiding it without vigilant cleaning. And the dude who was here before me was a Korean bachelor. About 5' 10 I'd guess. Too tall for cleaning I reckon.
Then after the house had a nice, bleachy smell to it, I watched some live NHL hockey. The Canucks lost, of course, but their newest player scored. A cheesy goal. Ar ar. Little joke there for the Canuck fans.
I downloaded a few movies and watched one or two. I was LOVING the fast internet and the fast wifi! And since I was pretty sure I'd be in the house for the entire long weekend, since I was feeling worse and worse health-wise, I thought that was a good thing. Then, without any kind of deterioration, warning, reason, clue as to why, the old laptop just died. Dead. I mean I couldn't even get it to boot up. I got a black screen for hours. Not blue, black. It was turning itself off as fast as I could turn it on. I let it sit for a while and managed to start it in safe mode and try every trick I knew but nothing was making any difference and even in safe mode everything took FOREVER! I was up at 5 AM, (which I was every morning I had had the cold), trying enything I could on my computer and finally at halftime, 10:30ish?, I was able to watch the second half of the game. I STILL don't know what happened to my computer but it remains a mystery. This booting I'm on right now took half an hour. Just to get to a point where I could do anything.
I suppose it has something to do with the history of this computer. I bought it in Indonesia. First mistake. They sold me a computer with several months off its warranty and a shitty battery so that a few month into its life the battery died. I couldn't use it without having it plugged in. When I got to Korea I took it to an Asus dealer. I had only had it half a year but they said my one year warranty had run out and the price they asked to fix it was more than I had. This is not the kind of computer you just buy a battery for either. It's sort of sealed. So the average layman can't work on it. So I have just been plugging it in and using direct power for about a year now. I think now that I'm in Korea and I have sizzling fast internet and wifi, I may have overloaded my crippled computer and just burnt it out for a day. It's STILL not working right. But I get my good computer in a month or so. Probably longer. We'll see. Let's make that our third topic.
I packaged up some stuff before leaving Canada and my brother Mark agreed to store it for a month or so till I got settled in Indonesia. Well that turned into a year and a half of trying desperately to find a job and a legal contract so that I could get that shipment sent. Mark needed the storage space so he transferred the stuff to my Mom's house. I have already paid over 500 bucks for the shipment, (then cancelled the shipment but told them to re-route it, when I found out I couldn't get a KITAS, (proper work visa in Indo)), and now found out that it's going to cost almost as much again to send it to Korea. But I'm going to get that done Thursday, day after tomorrow, when banks open up again here. After that I'll just have to wait and hope the company is for real and not scamming me. THEN when it gets here I'll have to pay to take it from Seoul to Gangneung. A pretty penny I'm sure.
But It'll be worth it! The TOTAL helplessness I felt when this computer was down! I don't EVER want to feel that way again! I could write a song about it! I'm telling you! Just to type on a keyboard instead of having my sausage fingers dragging A's into S's and such on my phone and/or tablet, is a stress reliever! I mean take the lyrics from almost any heart-throbbing, overzealous love song and apply it to this situation. "I don't wanna live without you..." "How am I supposed to live without you? Now that I've been computing on you so long..." "Gone gone gone you been gone so long... You didn't have to leave me, didn't have to run, didn't have to go without a word to anyone." "Baby come back. Any kind of fool could see. I was wrong. And I just can't live without you."
And so on. Feel free to comment with songs I have neglected. I am living on a fine, fine line between technology and quasi-tech. I could still get on the internet and do stuff with the phone and the Kindle, but I can't type, make lessons, watch live streaming sports, download good stuff or see anything on my BIG MASSIVE 8 inch screen without it! Talk about a dire state of affairs! Hahaha!
Really puts things into perspective eh? I bet it wasn't more than 10, definitely 15 years ago when this would have made no sense to me at all. Back then I was PROUD to be the only dude in Korea who wasn't enslaved by a beeper or even worse a "handphone." Things change. They do.
And I guess that's one of the reasons I am, lo and behold, back here again. In Korea. I guess it's like the two things we've talked about already. It absolutely sucks that I couldn't go see my beloved friends in Seoul and watch the Superbowl with them and play with the kids and drink and B.S. with the adults, who are my age and my kind of people! And I have a cold, and my computer is slowly fading away and daily challenging my skills with it until I feel like a computer EMT. And I feel like Mike Tyson has done a body blow workout on me. DAMN that sucks! But I got to stay home with a cold and that gave me a good excuse to be lazy and do nothing while at the same time avoiding terrible travelling woes during holiday season in Korea. So, despite sucking, this weekend has turned out to be okay.
This is the very kind of silver lining thinking that allows people like me to stay in Korea. It's not that it's all bad. God no! There are all kinds of great things about Korea that I miss when I'm not here! I absolutely love the food! I TRAVEL to food festivals to eat a particular type of food. Like this summer when I went with the entire Peet/Spiwak clan to the ChunCheon Dalk Kalbi Festival. We had Dalk Kalbi for lunch and Dalk Kalbi for dinner. The time we were there was nothing compared to the time spent on an overcrowded train. But we ALL thought it was worth it! Cuz dalk kalbi is just that awesome!
Like going to Suwon to see the Kimchi museum. NONE, exactly NONE of my students are aware of this museum. I have been there and tasted the wares! I've had plenty of Koreans tell me I've seen more of this country than they have. And for that privelege I am grateful. As am I grateful for the freedom to bitch about it the way I do. There are contries where this post would be blocked and I would be thrown in jail. Not here in Korea. And I say, "Korea," because other than name, the NORTH of Korea is not the same. It doesn't qualify for much of the good things I have to say about Korea. (South). So much so that I don't feel the need to ever say "South." Or type it.
I saw a post online tonight on Facebook written by a Korean dude about how bad Korea is. And while I found myself agreeing with every single point, I found myself DISagreeing with the whole point of the article. Or what I thought it was. It was yet another thing here like every contract I've had. You'll find bad things about it. You'll get ripped off. But when the dust clears, anh, it's not so bad. Is it? I think the guy who wrote this article was, and is, like I was at one point, and still am from time to time, an idealist, and would accept nothing less for Korea than perfection. I can only think of one other place I am like that for: Canada. My own country. I want only what's best for Canada and REAL Canadians and will accept nothing less. I feel that the writer of this article may have been like that. But I put up a comment that defended Korea. I noticed many of the people agreeing with this guy had been in Korea for over 10 years. Like myself. One guy said he'd been here for 22! So I said that the guys who are echoing his bad comments about the country seem to be staying in it. Probably due to this theory of mine that even after the bad, it's good. That should be a tourism slogan! "Korea: After the bad, it's good!"
At any rate, even in this nice 5-day weekend there has been some bad, but over all it's been good. Same with my first month and a half at Mac Hagwon. There has been some bad but overall it's been good. I'm pretty sure the worst is behind us now. If we go on for the rest of the year like we're going now everything will be clickety click. I put together my schedule and my attendance forms for my classes tonight. 3 hours it took me. For the month of February. I'll do that again next month. But as long as they let me do my thang and don't rip me off, we'll be just fine. I think we'll be just fine.
So what have I said? In the grand scheme of things. Is there no pure good? Is there no pure evil? Does the belief in one or the other absolutely say something about the believer? All I know is that here in Korea there is an overwhelming negativity among the locals and foreigners alike. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a Korean. I've heard close friends describe the sacrifices and obligations and roles they have to play to make it here. I had to do that too but, as I've said a gozillion times, here in Korea, it's to a completely different extent. I think. But we all find some positives if we can and we derive our inspirations from them. A skill all foreigners, VETERAN waygooks, (foreigners in Korean), seem to take advantage of here. I'm not saying people don't do that in their own countries, just, as I've said a gozillion times before, it's more extreme in Korea.
So while these people were slagging Korea, Korean people amongst them!, I'm changing from my resting "Korea sucks" and compassionately delving into the realities of my more prudent "Korea is pretty darn good," mode. And I comment as such. Something I told them, they won't see often. But that goes for this post as well. Won't see it often. Although I suppose I have begrudgingly praised Korea more than usual in my latest posts. This one even moreso. Despite the minor complaints about mops and trash and bread bags, I am where I want to be. Korea has provided me with comfort. And though it comes with its challenges, which I will continue to whinge on and on about, I love this place. Oh shit, did I say "love?" Yikes! Well, I want the reader to know that I have had the precise amount of alcohol required to stretch the word, "like" into "love." But how much worse is it if I had said I like Korea? Really? I do. And I am sure these pages will contain many reasons for that like. Or "love," as I have so drunkenly labelled it.
I have to drunk dial and drunk facebook a whole bunch of people. So I'll see you later.
Since I'm sitting here doing nothing and my computer is back from the dead, let's start with those two things, shall we?
It's the holiday LOOONG weekend and I'm enjoying the frig out of it doing nothing! Happy year of the monkey, everyone! Okay, now to be more like me: I have a wicked cold. I mean hide under the covers, tingle when you move, two TP roll a day, ab work-out coughing, wicked cold! But at least I haven't had to work through it! I find myself getting better at finding positives where they aren't so obvious. I look over at the trash can literally heaping with snot sogged clumps of toilet paper and feel the entire 360 degrees of my core BEGGING me to not cough or sneeze or blow my nose for just a few minutes, but no can do. I HAD plans for the holiday weekend but it seems the powers that be had others.
I probably didn't help matters much when on Saturday I went out and bought my wifi router. See, I needed a router to have good enough wifi to use a printer here. I've been buying printing at an exorbitant rate for all my teaching needs. The hagwon where I work HAS a copier and STILL I'm paying a lot of money to copy out lessons and laminate stuff. It happens when you are teaching 30 hours a week. So I needed to SPEND money to SAVE money. Get a router and a printer and STILL within a couple of months I'd save. Seriously I think I spent about 100 bucks in the month of January printing stuff out. Well, there was laminating and buying other stationary too I guess. But it's still a big expense.
So I was out in the driving sleet, with a cold, walking INTO the wind, UPHILL, to E-Mart on Saturday to get a router. Not exactly true, I went to Hi Mart and another place too but E-Mart had the best deal. I was walking around in the cold, wet snow. With a cold. For hours. Then I bought groceries and walked home, UPHILL, in the cold and driving... no wait a minute I took a taxi. But still waiting for it and getting in and out...
I guess it was a lucky thing I did because the next day I was in no shape to do anything. I stayed in the house. The day after THAT was Monday, Sunday in the States, and at 8:30 AM the Superbowl was on. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Sunday during my do nothing day, I did SOMEthing. I cleaned up the house. Swept, and used the crappy mop I bought at E-Mart. Some things in Korea are not created equally. Mops, buckets, garbage cans, bread bags, the list goes on. Try to find a trash can when you need one to avoid littering. I dare ya! But go into ANY squat, sit or freestyle toilet and low and behold, there ya go! Full of used toilet paper. The only trashcan in the country you DON'T want to see, and, BOOM, there it is! And bread bags... Now that they actually HAVE a few of the things we recognize as bread here in Korea and not the sweet, white poundcake shaped like bread that we've all mistakenly bought, NOW they have to mess with the packaging! Can somebody PLEASE tell me who the genius is who decided to SEAL the bread bag and then twist it and tie it off with a twist tie or the usual plastic bread clamp? You know the ones we made finger flingers from. EVERYthing is the same except that stupid seal! There is no possible way to get into your bag of bread without rendering the bag twist and twist tie or bread clamp utterly useless. Somebody DO something, PLEASE!
But anyway, mops. I had to pay about 20 bucks for a mop that looked like a dry mop. Well it IS a dry mop. But the only thing I could find otherwise was one of those sponge mops. Don't like those cuz how long does sponge last? So I buy a dry mop so that I can wet mop with it. This is the very definition of compromise and you find yourself doing this a lot in Korea. So I had to sweep the floor 3 times. While we're on the subject, brooms, no not just brooms, practically ANYthing used for cooking or cleaning, where height is an issue, is designed for someone 5 foot nothing. The longest brooms you can find have you bowing down like a humble servant you probably ARE if you are sweeping up someone else's hair and toenails. Single men are, you will find in Korea, an all but non-existent target market. But I found one! I found a broom with a NORMAL length handle! Or stick, or shaft or whatever the working end of a broom is called. But with that long shaft came sacrifices. The bristles. Seriously! How much science goes into the bristles of a broom. For 100 years people used HAY! They STILL do! I SAW them while I was still in the country in Icheon! Hay brooms all over the place! They had shafts no more than a foot or two long but... This is what I'm saying. If you want bristles that don't suck up, or leave behind the dust and dirt, you settle for a short shaft. If you want a long shaft, you get shitty bristles. Well I'm a long shaft man. Shut up, you filthy pigs, I know what you're thinking.
With all the time I spend bending over the sink, which isn't even up to my nads, cooking at my stove, which is LOWER, and bending over to do other cleaning chores, I wanted the luxury of a long shaft, standing erect as I used it oooOOOOOH MY GOD! Stop it you gutter denizens! Suffice to say I have a shitty broom AND mop because they both have long sticks, or handles or shafts.
So I swept 3 times, mopped with a wet dry mop, then went around picking up clumps of dust and dirt WITH MY FINGERS that neither managed to pick up. Least I didn't have to bend over too far. Also I sprayed and scrubbed some more of the windows and tiles around the house that the previous tennant had neglected during the summer and had grown thick with black mold. Not my first battle with THAT I assure you. In fact I think if it hasn't contributed to my present state of health, it certainly hasn't been good for it. That black mold is just no good! And it thrives in Korean summers, lemme tell you! No avoiding it without vigilant cleaning. And the dude who was here before me was a Korean bachelor. About 5' 10 I'd guess. Too tall for cleaning I reckon.
Then after the house had a nice, bleachy smell to it, I watched some live NHL hockey. The Canucks lost, of course, but their newest player scored. A cheesy goal. Ar ar. Little joke there for the Canuck fans.
I downloaded a few movies and watched one or two. I was LOVING the fast internet and the fast wifi! And since I was pretty sure I'd be in the house for the entire long weekend, since I was feeling worse and worse health-wise, I thought that was a good thing. Then, without any kind of deterioration, warning, reason, clue as to why, the old laptop just died. Dead. I mean I couldn't even get it to boot up. I got a black screen for hours. Not blue, black. It was turning itself off as fast as I could turn it on. I let it sit for a while and managed to start it in safe mode and try every trick I knew but nothing was making any difference and even in safe mode everything took FOREVER! I was up at 5 AM, (which I was every morning I had had the cold), trying enything I could on my computer and finally at halftime, 10:30ish?, I was able to watch the second half of the game. I STILL don't know what happened to my computer but it remains a mystery. This booting I'm on right now took half an hour. Just to get to a point where I could do anything.
I suppose it has something to do with the history of this computer. I bought it in Indonesia. First mistake. They sold me a computer with several months off its warranty and a shitty battery so that a few month into its life the battery died. I couldn't use it without having it plugged in. When I got to Korea I took it to an Asus dealer. I had only had it half a year but they said my one year warranty had run out and the price they asked to fix it was more than I had. This is not the kind of computer you just buy a battery for either. It's sort of sealed. So the average layman can't work on it. So I have just been plugging it in and using direct power for about a year now. I think now that I'm in Korea and I have sizzling fast internet and wifi, I may have overloaded my crippled computer and just burnt it out for a day. It's STILL not working right. But I get my good computer in a month or so. Probably longer. We'll see. Let's make that our third topic.
I packaged up some stuff before leaving Canada and my brother Mark agreed to store it for a month or so till I got settled in Indonesia. Well that turned into a year and a half of trying desperately to find a job and a legal contract so that I could get that shipment sent. Mark needed the storage space so he transferred the stuff to my Mom's house. I have already paid over 500 bucks for the shipment, (then cancelled the shipment but told them to re-route it, when I found out I couldn't get a KITAS, (proper work visa in Indo)), and now found out that it's going to cost almost as much again to send it to Korea. But I'm going to get that done Thursday, day after tomorrow, when banks open up again here. After that I'll just have to wait and hope the company is for real and not scamming me. THEN when it gets here I'll have to pay to take it from Seoul to Gangneung. A pretty penny I'm sure.
But It'll be worth it! The TOTAL helplessness I felt when this computer was down! I don't EVER want to feel that way again! I could write a song about it! I'm telling you! Just to type on a keyboard instead of having my sausage fingers dragging A's into S's and such on my phone and/or tablet, is a stress reliever! I mean take the lyrics from almost any heart-throbbing, overzealous love song and apply it to this situation. "I don't wanna live without you..." "How am I supposed to live without you? Now that I've been computing on you so long..." "Gone gone gone you been gone so long... You didn't have to leave me, didn't have to run, didn't have to go without a word to anyone." "Baby come back. Any kind of fool could see. I was wrong. And I just can't live without you."
And so on. Feel free to comment with songs I have neglected. I am living on a fine, fine line between technology and quasi-tech. I could still get on the internet and do stuff with the phone and the Kindle, but I can't type, make lessons, watch live streaming sports, download good stuff or see anything on my BIG MASSIVE 8 inch screen without it! Talk about a dire state of affairs! Hahaha!
Really puts things into perspective eh? I bet it wasn't more than 10, definitely 15 years ago when this would have made no sense to me at all. Back then I was PROUD to be the only dude in Korea who wasn't enslaved by a beeper or even worse a "handphone." Things change. They do.
And I guess that's one of the reasons I am, lo and behold, back here again. In Korea. I guess it's like the two things we've talked about already. It absolutely sucks that I couldn't go see my beloved friends in Seoul and watch the Superbowl with them and play with the kids and drink and B.S. with the adults, who are my age and my kind of people! And I have a cold, and my computer is slowly fading away and daily challenging my skills with it until I feel like a computer EMT. And I feel like Mike Tyson has done a body blow workout on me. DAMN that sucks! But I got to stay home with a cold and that gave me a good excuse to be lazy and do nothing while at the same time avoiding terrible travelling woes during holiday season in Korea. So, despite sucking, this weekend has turned out to be okay.
This is the very kind of silver lining thinking that allows people like me to stay in Korea. It's not that it's all bad. God no! There are all kinds of great things about Korea that I miss when I'm not here! I absolutely love the food! I TRAVEL to food festivals to eat a particular type of food. Like this summer when I went with the entire Peet/Spiwak clan to the ChunCheon Dalk Kalbi Festival. We had Dalk Kalbi for lunch and Dalk Kalbi for dinner. The time we were there was nothing compared to the time spent on an overcrowded train. But we ALL thought it was worth it! Cuz dalk kalbi is just that awesome!
Like going to Suwon to see the Kimchi museum. NONE, exactly NONE of my students are aware of this museum. I have been there and tasted the wares! I've had plenty of Koreans tell me I've seen more of this country than they have. And for that privelege I am grateful. As am I grateful for the freedom to bitch about it the way I do. There are contries where this post would be blocked and I would be thrown in jail. Not here in Korea. And I say, "Korea," because other than name, the NORTH of Korea is not the same. It doesn't qualify for much of the good things I have to say about Korea. (South). So much so that I don't feel the need to ever say "South." Or type it.
I saw a post online tonight on Facebook written by a Korean dude about how bad Korea is. And while I found myself agreeing with every single point, I found myself DISagreeing with the whole point of the article. Or what I thought it was. It was yet another thing here like every contract I've had. You'll find bad things about it. You'll get ripped off. But when the dust clears, anh, it's not so bad. Is it? I think the guy who wrote this article was, and is, like I was at one point, and still am from time to time, an idealist, and would accept nothing less for Korea than perfection. I can only think of one other place I am like that for: Canada. My own country. I want only what's best for Canada and REAL Canadians and will accept nothing less. I feel that the writer of this article may have been like that. But I put up a comment that defended Korea. I noticed many of the people agreeing with this guy had been in Korea for over 10 years. Like myself. One guy said he'd been here for 22! So I said that the guys who are echoing his bad comments about the country seem to be staying in it. Probably due to this theory of mine that even after the bad, it's good. That should be a tourism slogan! "Korea: After the bad, it's good!"
At any rate, even in this nice 5-day weekend there has been some bad, but over all it's been good. Same with my first month and a half at Mac Hagwon. There has been some bad but overall it's been good. I'm pretty sure the worst is behind us now. If we go on for the rest of the year like we're going now everything will be clickety click. I put together my schedule and my attendance forms for my classes tonight. 3 hours it took me. For the month of February. I'll do that again next month. But as long as they let me do my thang and don't rip me off, we'll be just fine. I think we'll be just fine.
So what have I said? In the grand scheme of things. Is there no pure good? Is there no pure evil? Does the belief in one or the other absolutely say something about the believer? All I know is that here in Korea there is an overwhelming negativity among the locals and foreigners alike. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a Korean. I've heard close friends describe the sacrifices and obligations and roles they have to play to make it here. I had to do that too but, as I've said a gozillion times, here in Korea, it's to a completely different extent. I think. But we all find some positives if we can and we derive our inspirations from them. A skill all foreigners, VETERAN waygooks, (foreigners in Korean), seem to take advantage of here. I'm not saying people don't do that in their own countries, just, as I've said a gozillion times before, it's more extreme in Korea.
So while these people were slagging Korea, Korean people amongst them!, I'm changing from my resting "Korea sucks" and compassionately delving into the realities of my more prudent "Korea is pretty darn good," mode. And I comment as such. Something I told them, they won't see often. But that goes for this post as well. Won't see it often. Although I suppose I have begrudgingly praised Korea more than usual in my latest posts. This one even moreso. Despite the minor complaints about mops and trash and bread bags, I am where I want to be. Korea has provided me with comfort. And though it comes with its challenges, which I will continue to whinge on and on about, I love this place. Oh shit, did I say "love?" Yikes! Well, I want the reader to know that I have had the precise amount of alcohol required to stretch the word, "like" into "love." But how much worse is it if I had said I like Korea? Really? I do. And I am sure these pages will contain many reasons for that like. Or "love," as I have so drunkenly labelled it.
I have to drunk dial and drunk facebook a whole bunch of people. So I'll see you later.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Another example of why I don't speak Korean
Well it's Seolnal here in Korea. I won't type that word again because it is my least favourite Korean word. Why? Well that's a long story. Most people here haven't grasped the fact that Korean can't be "correctly" spelled. Every week I have a few kids ask, "Teacher, how to spell, Kimchi or Gangneung, or whatever?" To illustrate the point, take your pick of a dozen arguments online about this. It is an absolutely perfect illustration of my job security over here. The Korean language has no short I vowel sound. If you don't know what that means it's the sound of the I in "it," "sit," or "shit." I could have said "spit," but blue bloggin' this morning.
The short I sound doesn't exist in the Korean language or alphabet, and they never use it. (Even when saying "eet," "seet," or "sheet." But that is, I believe, the most common mispronunciation English receives. French, Russian, Spanish, I think most speakers of other languages have trouble with it. At any rate, whether you use a K or a G as the first letter in Kimchi, (the official spelling of many former K words like Kwangju and Kangneung, two places I've lived here, changed years ago from K to G and nobody pronounces them any differently), the "ee" Koreans are FIGHTING for at the end of the word, is the identical letter and pronunciation as the FIRST I in the word. They are both pronounced as "ee" by Koreans so they're not really wrong about the last sound and its spelling, they're just wrong about the word. Militantly wrong. I have heard the word spoken a million times and probably just over half the time it more closely approximated a K sound followed by an EE sound, the M is undisputed, nor is the CH, and then another EE sound. So Keemchee should be the spelling with Geemchee as an allowable alternative. Never seen either used. Job security.
I can't write Korean letters on this but the kiak, the original letter in the Korean alphabet, is properly pronounced, as it astutely says in this argument, about half way between a G and a K. "An extra hard G sound," as one person puts it. It has always been one of MANY confusions to me about the Korean language that when they double the kiak, it DEFINITIVELY sounds like a K. So why not just have the single kiak always sounding like a G? It's the same with the T and D, P and B, but we won't get into that. I am almost convinced that it is a very real part of the national pride in their language amongst Koreans that it is a complicated language. To them it seems that complicated equals sophisticated equals smart. Linguistically, I would lean toward the opposite. But oh my GOD never say that to a Korean! King Sejeong, (another word that can be spelled a dozen ways), was a genius! He's the guy who created the language.
Weeellll, judging from the number of undereducated retreads who have climbed to the educational elite postitions in the businesses that are the universities of Korea, and who just take papers written by their underlings and affix their names to them, King Sejeong might well have been a total plonker. Again, don't say that to a Korean! And he didn't invent the language, as you will be told by his biggest fans in Korea, he just gets credit for the alphabet, "Hangeul," (need I say that I have seen THAT word Romanized several different ways as well?). It is most commonly spelled "Hangul," with the U getting the appropriate English reading of the OO sound, which is not the proper pronunciation. It is an EU sound. The short A vowel sound doesn't exist in Korean either so usually the double whammy mispronunciation occurs when a rookie reads it spelled the usual way. The A gets pronounced more like the A in "hand." It's "Hahn geul," not "Han gool."
I think Hangeul IS absolutely brilliant!!!! for Korean. Nothing else. You will also be told that it is so brilliant that anything can be spelled with it. Uh, no. No it can't. Shut up and eat yer geemchee.
The reason Hangeul is so brilliant in my estimation is because it is simple. It took me no time at all to learn it. Ironically the hardest language I've ever been exposed to has the easiest alphabet. The scholars that King Sejeong took credit for were actually pretty good. But none of them are on the 10000 won bill. Here's a list of the faces we see every day here on the Korean won. Again, the word "won" could be spelled "weon" or "wun," I've even seen it spelled, "wurn." The vowel sound is one we don't have in English. Sort of half way between short U and short O. "UN," and "ON," are equally wrong. Somewhere in between, with a W in front, is the correct pronunciation of the money here.
So anyway, the reason I absolutely hate the word for the Korean celebration of the Lunar New Year is because it ties a few of these pronunciation oddities together and then adds the one that I think is MOST bizarre in the language, and all in one word. Maybe the most bizarre in any language I've ever been exposed to. I now live in Gangneung, the former Kangneung. I remember back when I first came to this city early in my days in Korea. I had only mastered the simple parts of the Korean alphabet so I had a big shock in store for me when I looked for the Kangneung bus. I found one that was headed to Kang Leung or Kang Reung. The letter for R and L is a malleable one too. I had no idea HOW malleable. Yes, friends, they sometimes use the R and L letter for the N sound even though they have a perfectly good N letter in the alphabet. But wait, it gets better. The Korean word for Lunar New Year is Seol nal. That letter for N is used. But for some reason NOBODY spells it that way. Weirder still, very few people SAY it that way! It's spelled Seollal and every time I say, "Seol nal," my students make fun of me. So is the N letter pronounced as an L in Seolnal? Sort of the reverse of the L letter being pronounced as the N in Gangneung? The answer is I don't know. And I'm at the point, having been here over a decade and not learned the language, I'm at the point where I can say proudly that, you know what, I don't really give a shit. Or a spit.
One of my friends here in Kang or Gang, Gong or Kong, Kahng, Gahng, Leung, Reung or Neung, started a thread on what she thought was the proper spelling of Seollal. I think she spelled it "Seorlar?" I can't remember. I said, "But it's the Lurnar new year not the Seorlar new year." Some other people got right rude on the thread! Name calling and commenting on how it's a totally wrong spelling. FOREIGNERS! One called her "fucking stupid." Incredible!
Folks, Korean and English are polar opposites and trying to spell one languages words with the other languages alphabet will always end in failure. Witness the entire country of people, Korea, who learn English through Korean, (because of their zealous pride in it), and have the exact same pronunciation difficulties simply because they are using Korean sounds for English words. It ain't that complicated. THIS is why the youngsters these days can say, "Ant," and not "Ent." They'll still say "ent," but have the ability to say, "ant," when corrected. They're learning young enough. But there's still a whole generation of people who can't do this. The bad habits are entrenched. They valiantly spend half their incomes trying to unstunt their language learning abilities, but rarely succeed. I'm just here, along with many others, trying to make this new generation the last one that makes these cherished and nurtured mistakes when learning English.
That being the case, who, then, will they put on their money? Hmmm....
They'll need a new entry on that webpage with the money. "Beloved rapper and dancer, hated landlord, Psy, is Korean treasure number 45,001." Gangnam Style used to be Kangnam Style I'd like to point out.
Anyhoo, it's, well, you know what it is. Lunar New Year time here in, well, you know where I am. I had planned to go to Seoul, (or Seo ool), to visit the Peet/Spiwak residence, buy some stuff I can only get in Seoul, watch the big game with them, but evidently they all have the flu or Zika virus or Ebola or whatever. The whole house caught it and it's been a great big vomitous mess for the last week. Patient Zero, as Heather calls Kelly, is fine now so I have hope that maybe everybody will have recovered by 8:30 Monday morning, but it's a slim hope. Besides, I have an ague of my own. Two months here and two colds. I guess having so many students exposes me to a lot more germs. My first year here I remember having 9 colds. I'm well on the way to busting that record. So I'm up at 4:30 or 5 drinking lemon tea with ginger in it, playing Simpsons Tapped Out and blogging.
Those are the perfect things to be doing on a snowy weekend here in the, um, city where I live. I'd guestimate we got about 8 inches of snow yesterday. And, damn the cold, I was out in it stocking up for the ghost town this place will be on Monday and Tuesday. During Lunar New Year everyone goes to their Grandmother's house in the coutry and celebrates. With the snow AND the heavy traffic there would have been yesterday, I think I'm glad I didn't go to Seoul. But I got a lot accomplished being currently on the mend. I got my wifi router so that now I can get a printer and stop paying so much for photocopies. I bought some other stuff for work too. Got the wifi set up even though I had to do it all in this language I refuse to learn. I bought an E-Mart pizza, my first pizza in this city. Two months without buying a pizza. I'm proud of that. It was not good, but it was BIG so I'll have some for the duration of the holiday I reckon. I also bought the fixins for chicken soup. That's what I'll be doing today. And if I go to Seoul to watch the game, I'll bring some for my fellow convalescents.
So I'm loving the holiday and the days off, but I hate that word. Incidentally, my favourite Korean word is "Goguma," the word for sweet potato. Jennifer, the friend who posted that string about "Seorlar," said it's actually, "Gogooma."
What EVER!
The short I sound doesn't exist in the Korean language or alphabet, and they never use it. (Even when saying "eet," "seet," or "sheet." But that is, I believe, the most common mispronunciation English receives. French, Russian, Spanish, I think most speakers of other languages have trouble with it. At any rate, whether you use a K or a G as the first letter in Kimchi, (the official spelling of many former K words like Kwangju and Kangneung, two places I've lived here, changed years ago from K to G and nobody pronounces them any differently), the "ee" Koreans are FIGHTING for at the end of the word, is the identical letter and pronunciation as the FIRST I in the word. They are both pronounced as "ee" by Koreans so they're not really wrong about the last sound and its spelling, they're just wrong about the word. Militantly wrong. I have heard the word spoken a million times and probably just over half the time it more closely approximated a K sound followed by an EE sound, the M is undisputed, nor is the CH, and then another EE sound. So Keemchee should be the spelling with Geemchee as an allowable alternative. Never seen either used. Job security.
I can't write Korean letters on this but the kiak, the original letter in the Korean alphabet, is properly pronounced, as it astutely says in this argument, about half way between a G and a K. "An extra hard G sound," as one person puts it. It has always been one of MANY confusions to me about the Korean language that when they double the kiak, it DEFINITIVELY sounds like a K. So why not just have the single kiak always sounding like a G? It's the same with the T and D, P and B, but we won't get into that. I am almost convinced that it is a very real part of the national pride in their language amongst Koreans that it is a complicated language. To them it seems that complicated equals sophisticated equals smart. Linguistically, I would lean toward the opposite. But oh my GOD never say that to a Korean! King Sejeong, (another word that can be spelled a dozen ways), was a genius! He's the guy who created the language.
Weeellll, judging from the number of undereducated retreads who have climbed to the educational elite postitions in the businesses that are the universities of Korea, and who just take papers written by their underlings and affix their names to them, King Sejeong might well have been a total plonker. Again, don't say that to a Korean! And he didn't invent the language, as you will be told by his biggest fans in Korea, he just gets credit for the alphabet, "Hangeul," (need I say that I have seen THAT word Romanized several different ways as well?). It is most commonly spelled "Hangul," with the U getting the appropriate English reading of the OO sound, which is not the proper pronunciation. It is an EU sound. The short A vowel sound doesn't exist in Korean either so usually the double whammy mispronunciation occurs when a rookie reads it spelled the usual way. The A gets pronounced more like the A in "hand." It's "Hahn geul," not "Han gool."
I think Hangeul IS absolutely brilliant!!!! for Korean. Nothing else. You will also be told that it is so brilliant that anything can be spelled with it. Uh, no. No it can't. Shut up and eat yer geemchee.
The reason Hangeul is so brilliant in my estimation is because it is simple. It took me no time at all to learn it. Ironically the hardest language I've ever been exposed to has the easiest alphabet. The scholars that King Sejeong took credit for were actually pretty good. But none of them are on the 10000 won bill. Here's a list of the faces we see every day here on the Korean won. Again, the word "won" could be spelled "weon" or "wun," I've even seen it spelled, "wurn." The vowel sound is one we don't have in English. Sort of half way between short U and short O. "UN," and "ON," are equally wrong. Somewhere in between, with a W in front, is the correct pronunciation of the money here.
So anyway, the reason I absolutely hate the word for the Korean celebration of the Lunar New Year is because it ties a few of these pronunciation oddities together and then adds the one that I think is MOST bizarre in the language, and all in one word. Maybe the most bizarre in any language I've ever been exposed to. I now live in Gangneung, the former Kangneung. I remember back when I first came to this city early in my days in Korea. I had only mastered the simple parts of the Korean alphabet so I had a big shock in store for me when I looked for the Kangneung bus. I found one that was headed to Kang Leung or Kang Reung. The letter for R and L is a malleable one too. I had no idea HOW malleable. Yes, friends, they sometimes use the R and L letter for the N sound even though they have a perfectly good N letter in the alphabet. But wait, it gets better. The Korean word for Lunar New Year is Seol nal. That letter for N is used. But for some reason NOBODY spells it that way. Weirder still, very few people SAY it that way! It's spelled Seollal and every time I say, "Seol nal," my students make fun of me. So is the N letter pronounced as an L in Seolnal? Sort of the reverse of the L letter being pronounced as the N in Gangneung? The answer is I don't know. And I'm at the point, having been here over a decade and not learned the language, I'm at the point where I can say proudly that, you know what, I don't really give a shit. Or a spit.
One of my friends here in Kang or Gang, Gong or Kong, Kahng, Gahng, Leung, Reung or Neung, started a thread on what she thought was the proper spelling of Seollal. I think she spelled it "Seorlar?" I can't remember. I said, "But it's the Lurnar new year not the Seorlar new year." Some other people got right rude on the thread! Name calling and commenting on how it's a totally wrong spelling. FOREIGNERS! One called her "fucking stupid." Incredible!
Folks, Korean and English are polar opposites and trying to spell one languages words with the other languages alphabet will always end in failure. Witness the entire country of people, Korea, who learn English through Korean, (because of their zealous pride in it), and have the exact same pronunciation difficulties simply because they are using Korean sounds for English words. It ain't that complicated. THIS is why the youngsters these days can say, "Ant," and not "Ent." They'll still say "ent," but have the ability to say, "ant," when corrected. They're learning young enough. But there's still a whole generation of people who can't do this. The bad habits are entrenched. They valiantly spend half their incomes trying to unstunt their language learning abilities, but rarely succeed. I'm just here, along with many others, trying to make this new generation the last one that makes these cherished and nurtured mistakes when learning English.
That being the case, who, then, will they put on their money? Hmmm....
They'll need a new entry on that webpage with the money. "Beloved rapper and dancer, hated landlord, Psy, is Korean treasure number 45,001." Gangnam Style used to be Kangnam Style I'd like to point out.
Anyhoo, it's, well, you know what it is. Lunar New Year time here in, well, you know where I am. I had planned to go to Seoul, (or Seo ool), to visit the Peet/Spiwak residence, buy some stuff I can only get in Seoul, watch the big game with them, but evidently they all have the flu or Zika virus or Ebola or whatever. The whole house caught it and it's been a great big vomitous mess for the last week. Patient Zero, as Heather calls Kelly, is fine now so I have hope that maybe everybody will have recovered by 8:30 Monday morning, but it's a slim hope. Besides, I have an ague of my own. Two months here and two colds. I guess having so many students exposes me to a lot more germs. My first year here I remember having 9 colds. I'm well on the way to busting that record. So I'm up at 4:30 or 5 drinking lemon tea with ginger in it, playing Simpsons Tapped Out and blogging.
Those are the perfect things to be doing on a snowy weekend here in the, um, city where I live. I'd guestimate we got about 8 inches of snow yesterday. And, damn the cold, I was out in it stocking up for the ghost town this place will be on Monday and Tuesday. During Lunar New Year everyone goes to their Grandmother's house in the coutry and celebrates. With the snow AND the heavy traffic there would have been yesterday, I think I'm glad I didn't go to Seoul. But I got a lot accomplished being currently on the mend. I got my wifi router so that now I can get a printer and stop paying so much for photocopies. I bought some other stuff for work too. Got the wifi set up even though I had to do it all in this language I refuse to learn. I bought an E-Mart pizza, my first pizza in this city. Two months without buying a pizza. I'm proud of that. It was not good, but it was BIG so I'll have some for the duration of the holiday I reckon. I also bought the fixins for chicken soup. That's what I'll be doing today. And if I go to Seoul to watch the game, I'll bring some for my fellow convalescents.
So I'm loving the holiday and the days off, but I hate that word. Incidentally, my favourite Korean word is "Goguma," the word for sweet potato. Jennifer, the friend who posted that string about "Seorlar," said it's actually, "Gogooma."
What EVER!
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Crude Awakening
As I said a couple of posts ago, if you look desperately enough, you can find some positive in just about anything. Korean dramas. I find no redeeming qualities in ANY soap operas or dramatic shows of this sort. None. You get stupider every time you watch them. Korean dramas, much like many things about Korea, are just a more extreme example. You get EXTREMELY stupider every time you watch them. But if not for the people in Korea and a mind meltingly large number of OTHER countries killing brain cells with these things, we wouldn't have THE KIMCHI SLAP!
I LOVE the kimchi slap! What a fantastic idea! And this week's kimchi slap goes out to my long time friend, Tony Braga. We went to school together so I've known Tony a good 35 years probably! I saw him just a few years ago in Calgary. We met up for beers a couple times. The years have been kind to him. He's looking good for a guy our age. And I notice he likes to wear some smooth threads. That's why this kimchi slap is gonna hurt a little extra. Do you know how hard it is to get kimchi out in the wash?
The kimchi slap was well earned, however, by sending me an invitation to like the "Energy East" pipeline page on Facebook.
Energy East. Let's start with the very politically misleading name. We're meant to assume that this "East" means eastern Canada, which is the end of the pipeline, sort of, and it would be very helpful to the originators of this environmental disaster in a euphemism if we'd all just assume the energy derived from the oil product in the proposed pipeline from western Canada to eastern Canada, will be enjoyed by eastern Canadians. Or ANY of the jobs or benefits. But that's not the case.
I really don't need to say much more than Stephen Harper was a huge proponent of Energy East for you to be absolutely sure that it will benefit his home country: China. THAT'S what the "East" means.
Tony is an Albertan. We went for beers when I was living in Calgary. Ironically Albertans believe oil has helped their province and that the pipeline will help them too. I need to warn you that that link could harsh a lot of mellows so click at your own risk. 37 years of oil spills in Alberta. The stats are unbelievable! An average of two crude oil spills a day! That makes 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of just about any other substance you can think of putting in a pipeline – from salt water to liquid petroleum. And we're not talking a guy spilling some Quaker State while changing the oil in his car, or in Alberta, his truck. We're talking HUGE. One being the Nexxen China largest land oil spill in history. But they apologized, so...
It's projected to originate at the oils sands in northern Alberta and go to Eastern Canada to refineries and shipping points, (to China), in New Brunswick and Quebec. The pipeline will use a lot of existing pipe that is now part of Trans Canada Pipelines natural gas transport. And we all know Trans Canada Pipelines has a stellar safety record and those old, used, pipes have NO chance of rupturing, leaking or, like exploding. RIGHT???
The plan is to increase production at the oil sands in Alberta by 40%, which, and this is in no amount of doubt, will vastly increase carbon emissions. This is why Harper was among the people faking like he didn't believe in things like that and kept Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol and carbon taxes and such. So, it will damage the air. The air that we ALL breathe.
And, at the risk of sounding like our ex-ruler, let's be clear, (shudder), this is NOT your normal crude oil. It will be bitumen, something that needs to be treated and heated to become a hazardous chemical coctail far beyond the hazard of just plain crude oil. "Dilbit" or diluted bitumen, costs an estimated 10 times to clean up as regular crude oil, and both are virtually impossible to completely clean up, let's be clear. Just ask the people who live near the Kalamazoo River.
Listen. Tony, and everyone else. The Energy East pipeline WILL have spills. And the cost of cleaning them up and the damage to our beautiful country doesn't even compare to profits to Canadians. And there will be FEW Canadians who profit, you can be sure of that. Our oil industry is set up to be that way. Extracting corporations, from other countries, get almost all the profit. That's crown land, folks. That's OUR oil! It belongs to the people of Canada, not China.
What I told Tony is what I've posted a few times before. Refineries at the source. It should be illegal to transport unrefined bitumen. PERIOD! It's too fucking dangerous. We don't need long, purposely drawn out environmental studies to show that. We have eyes.
Secondly, the Chinese will build those refineries. And they will employ Canadians. Not their nephews who they send over on fake student visas either. REAL Canadians who need jobs!
Thirdly, we will implement a taxation system like Norway's instead of basically GIVING the oil away. The taxes collected, (for the first time), will go to Canada Pension. There will be 1.1 million litres a day! Well, if you talk to politicians who DON'T want the pipeline, it's 1.1 mil. If you talk to reps from Alberta who WANT it, they'll say, "About a mil." These are PRECISELY the jackwads who should have nothing to do with this decision because they're all obviously salesmen talking dollars and cents when we need them to be thinking about facts and common sense.
I say we shouldn't even THINK about this project until we are guaranteed refineries at the oilsand site and HUGE taxes on the extracting companies that will be contributed to EVERY Canadian's pension. It hasn't scared people away from Norway's oil. Why would it scare the oil thirsty Chinese away from Canada? And, so what if it does? Right now there's such an oil glut in the world that the risk is even LESS worth it! The barrels the oil is sold in are worth more than the oil right now! The oil ain't going anywhere. Nothing wrong with saving it for our country's future. When it's worth more and we, (hopefully), have some government that is more responsible and actually cares about the Canadian people. Or when the Canadian people can actually decide stuff for ourselves that affects us so intensely.
I dunno, maybe I shouldn't kimchi slap Tony. Maybe I should take a dead, baby seal covered in bitumen and slap him with it. Hell, I think we should line up all the politicians who are playing money games with this crucial, life and death issue, and give THEM a black baby seal slap.
It couldn't hurt.