I did a post called Pedo Pumpkinhead that I thought might be a bit inflammatory so I just took it down. It was the post I worked on longer than any other in my blogging career and I decided to trash it anyway. This is a theme...
I've registered for classes again. After 4 semesters in a row of registering and dropping my FINAL class of the master's. Odds are looking better and better that this might happen again. Sept. 3 I'm due to start. If they are expecting the same things as last time I started this final course, I may have to drop it again. I originally thought that I would have ample time to study and work at the same time. I was told I'd be teaching 21 hours a week with a 14-student max. I planned on a lot of hours after class since this is IELTS teaching and that usually requires a lot of testing, marking, and grading. But things are not exactly the way I was told they'd be. I finished the first semester on the 18th of August after a long weekend of calculations that made me feel more like an accountant than a teacher. But I got 'er done! 31 students. It's too boring to even get into detail about how I had to convert band scores and test scores to percentages, weight them, calculate, then turn them into letter grades, but it was arduous! THEN I made report cards giving detailed advice on individual strengths and weaknesses for each student. AND we (Dima, Lawton, and I) were told to submit all of this BEFORE the last day! And this is not to mention meeting with the other two teachers, brainstorming ideas for next semester's curriculums, writing and submitting syllabi, meeting the new teachers online, or at least one of them, giving advice on what to expect because there really isn't an orientation package or anything like that, attending a formal grad party and meeting the other professors, and all of this just the week before.
What I'm saying is I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. Busier than I had expected, and I expected to be pretty busy. Add to this a couple of other new additions to my duties - 9 hours of office availability per week and working and/or being available to work during semester breaks, I am beginning to question whether or not I WILL be able to work and study concurrently. I may need to drop the final course again. It has required a LOT more work and time than any course to this point in the program and I may have to drop it making the fifth time in a row, which could result in negating the 3 years of study I've put in. So I have THAT oscillating blade over my head getting closer every day.
On the brighter side, one of the reasons I had to get out of Canada, or more accurately TWO of the reasons were to get my dental and physical health taken care of. My 50,000 kilometer tune up that was about 250,000 kilometers overdue. My two-year+ stay in Canada trying to find work that would allow me to eat AND take care of that sort of thing also got trashed like my last blog post.
I've been nursing a tooth with a hole in it for about a decade now making sure to brush with toothpaste right in the hole every day a couple of times. I'm talking a hole I can put a toothpick into .
A dentist told me long ago that I should have it pulled but if I wanted I could keep it for maybe another year or even two. NObody expected it to stay in my skull for as long as it has! But it's getting pretty painful so I have an appointment in Seoul to get it yanked on Thursday. That's August 28th. In Seoul. That's 2.5-3 hours from Sokcho. So it's not a day trip for me. I'll need to get a room for the night and while that used to be cheap and simple, our world has decayed like my tooth during that decade so that it is a pain in the fucking ass now to get a room and it's triple the cost.
30 to 60 bucks I used to pay. This is usually a "love hotel" but the rooms were clean and I had private toilet, shower, and TV. Sometimes even a fridge or coffee or maybe a computer or a closet or a heart-shaped jacuzzi, or mirrors on the ceiling. Depended where I stayed, but there was plenty of selection. On the weekends the selection diminished so I'd end up staying at the Itaewon Motel, a dirty, mosquito ridden dive, but I could always find a room without the hassle of booking in advance.
Nowadays, like just about everything else, middlemen have gotten involved and fucked things up. Now we need to book rooms in advance. Bookink.com, Tripp.com, Hotells.com, none of which I can type correctly or they will be auto-linked and I will get ads everywhere from them. Probably so will YOU if you read this. I looked through all kinds of postings on those sites before my trip to Seoul on the 20th. I can't count the number of times I found a decent deal (which is now 60 - 100 bucks), filled in all the information including card number, pressed purchase and was given a message like "Your card was rejected," or "This listing is no longer available." I double dog dare you to try to phone when this happens too. They have diabolically eliminated THAT option for most places. Sound familiar? I just went through this a coupla months ago when I was booking my flight to Korea. The worst thing is we don't have much of a choice if we have one at all. HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN SO FAST?
I wouldn't even mind so much if these sites were honest. But what are the odds of that? "Slim, where ya'all headed?" "To catch up with None. I reckon I just saw him ridin' outta town."
I'll give you a forinstance. Happened to me on the 19th. AFTER looking through all these scam sites and spending hours filling in personal information (that I KNOW they are sharing for money) I found a place on a website a lot of people over here in Korea say is pretty good. It's Pagoda dot com but without the P. They did to me what I just did to them - they took the pee outta me.
After a few hours of frustration, even going to the websites of the places I wanted to stay, trying to cut out these greazy middlemen, and finding prices in the 100-dollar range, I found a place for 25 bucks. I looked for the warnings that all the other sites had saying "This is a bed in a 4-bed unisex room" or something like that. No warnings, no pictures of bunkbeds that all the hostel sites I'd looked at seemed to have. There WAS, however, a pic of a pretty decent looking single room. So I started the lengthy registration process once again. THIS time when I got to the "purchase" part it worked! EUREKA! I had just reserved a room for 25 bucks and it was close to all the places I was planning to visit in Seoul! All the hard work had paid off. I felt a sense of satisfaction that renewed my faith that maybe we're not ALL trying to screw each other. Then I got the email confirmation.
The email confirmation HAS the information that was missing in the FuckingAgoda.com listing. This is a bed in a 6-bed unisex room. First thing I did was go back to the ad on my phone. This scam site doesn't work on my computer. Probably some scumbaggery THERE too. So I check the ad super carefully and there it is: a pic of the bunkbeds. Oh the single room is still there, but one of the later pics in the ad - one you don't get to unless you click on the extra pics - was of bunkbeds that had curtains? I DID see it when I browsed the pics but thought it was laundry facilities and someone was washing sheets or curtains and this was a hanging rack. Curtains on bunkbeds? Never heard of that. I determined that if I ever got to this hostel, I was going to see if the bunkbeds ACTUALLY had curtains.
I can't sleep in a 4-bed hostel room never mind a 6-bed hostel room. You might check a previous post from when I actually started my flight to Korea. I stayed in a 4-bed hostel in Vancouver. I forget what it cost me but over 100 bucks I think. I got practically no sleep. The few minutes I DID sleep I probably snored and kept the other guys from sleeping too. I wasn't about to do that again. So when I got to Seoul I went to the hospital and set up my every 3 months diabetes visits with a hospital I had done so with before, then went to the hostel to see if I could do anything about this scam. You see, Ag go da .com has customer service but when I complained they said I needed to include my email in the complaint. You know what's coming don't you? I did just what they asked me to and got a message saying "You're email is not valid." It was an AI so I called it names for a while to put it into compassion mode "I'm sorry you feel this way; I deeply apologize for any inconvenience; I can relate; I sympathize with your feelings; BUT if you want actual help I humbly request that you fuck off." I'm paraphrasing. I also got several banner ads, follow-up emails that helped even less, and plenty of interruptions in youtube vids with ads for A fucking goda .com to boot.
Just for fun I applied for membership in one of the Ago fucking duh programs. They asked for my email THERE too. I put it in and they said, "Okay, great. That email checks out. Let's continue." Of course I told THAT AI too where it could continue to... Or it might have been a worker in Manila or Mumbai but I don't think so. It was much too efficient.
Anyway, I reached the hostel and told the owner Tony that he'd better check his ad on A god da .com because it's awfully misleading. He asked me what I meant and I told him. He said that shouldn't be. I said it was only this site. The others had the right information (AND, by the way, pictures of actual bunkbeds, not double-decker flying carpets or laundry racks). He seemed innocent. Probably not, but I put my hackles back down and asked, "Do you have single rooms like the pics in the ad?" He showed me the exact pic I had seen. The price? Yeah around 100 bucks like the ad on the actual website sans middleman. So I checked in.
I KNOW! I contributed to the demise of Western (or Eastern) civilization. Tony won't change the ad. It made him 100 bucks. The website's not gonna change it. They got THEIR cut too. I had just REWARDED the cheesy business practices I am currently railing on about! Why? Because I had a heavy backpack, it was about a million degrees in Seoul and my back and crack were as swampy as the Everglades. I needed a shower and a change of clothes before I went to Trivia with Amber and Krystle. And there you have it. We get browbeaten with inconveniences so that we surrender to the browbeaters to avoid further inconveniences. They've worn us all down to nubs. Nubs who settle for deception, sketch, and cheap chicanery. And I'm as guilty as the next guy. This makes me feel even WORSE!
We often ask ourselves, "How did this happen?" "When did this happen?" Here's a sobering thought:
That illustration with Ago da .com is just one way all of this inflation has happened and has happened so quickly.
Just crunch those numbers. Do some thinking on this. Work it out in your brain. I figure things like if the worker has enough money to buy 2 or 3 new pairs of shoes a year, the CEO's think they should be able to buy 1,264 to 1,896 pairs. That's up to 3,792 new shoes in 1 year. 4-6 new shoes in a year sound reasonable to me. For many it's probably not enough. Anybody, even Imelda Marcos, care to defend 3,792 new shoes a year? Even Marcos only had 1000-3000 pairs of shoes and that was a lifetime of footwear obsession! NObody thinks Imelda Marcos was normal or even sane. But the average CEO is not only given credit for sanity, they are REVERED in our fucked up cultures! What has fucked our cultures up? The systematic normalization of greed.
You have to ask yourself how it has become normalized. What methodology has been employed? Just refer to the previous paragraph. Do you ever find yourself contemplating things like that? Probably not often, or at least not often enough to get pissed off and do anything about them. Hell, you're lucky to have enough time to read this blog post in which I have done the work FOR you. Why? Because you're married and/or have kids and you are too busy going apple-picking, to brunch, or to the Yarn Barn with your wives OR driving your kids to figure skating, going to parent/teacher conferences, or brushing, vacuuming, filling, and maintain healthy algae/chlorine levels in the pool. You ain't got time for researching the shit our owners don't want us to know!
Ever wonder why that conspiracy theorist uncle everybody has is like that? Cuz he's single. And those aren't silly conspiracies, (most of them) they're normalized greed that has conspiratorially been labeled "conspiracy" by co-conspirators who don't want you to know about their conspiracies!
But you don't need to do research. Just look ANYwhere. Do you play any phone games or video games? Remember when a million was a MASSIVE score on them? Now even a billion is just okay. We all want MORE than a billion on our games, don't we? I have one. I spin on the Game of Thrones slot machine every day. It is a BRILLIANT illustration of what I'm talking about! I got up to almost 6 billion coins today! That's incredible, right? Then I spun a few more times.... aaaand they're gone. Didn't even last an hour. 6 BILLION coins didn't last an hour.
And the quotes in the slot machine are from the show. Especially Little Finger. Remember him talking to Sansa saying how funny it is that when we have goals or dreams and we work and fight for them then finally achieve them, we always want more? That's bullshit! I think the average person is happy (not to mention very lucky) to do that. It is absolutely NOT normal (or funny) to immediately want more. But our society teaches us that it IS.
"Chaos is a ladder." What a fucking scumbag! Chaos caused by greed that is. Cersei shouldn't have called off the guards she sicked on him to illustrate that knowledge isn't power, POWER is power. She should have let them slit his throat. If she weren't afflicted with the same mental sickness she would have. But she saw him as a way for HER to get more power which is the same as money.
Only the ladder is real. The climb out of chaos is all there is. Everything else is just deception created by our owners. This speech is like a dog frothing at the mouth and attacking its owner. Rabies. It needs to be put down. Anyone who lives like this is sick. It's fitting that it follows a comment by Varys, "Who doesn't love to see their friends fail?" These could be the two most distasteful characters in a show absolutely lousy with vomitous villainy. Yet some LOVE these two! Our society does. And they're systematically teaching us to love this antisocial, (psychopathic?) chaotic philosophy too.How have I stayed so immune other than remaining single and childless? It helps that I am not in an English speaking country and can't understand Korean I think so the propaganda all around me is mitigated by ignorance. Yet still I surrender to companies like Ago Da .com! I could easily see the owner of the site being a character like Little Finger or Varys. We can't surrender to this scum or everything we've worked hard at will just be trashed.
In closing, I will provide another quote that I think Vary said about Little Finger and it too is in my GOT slot game: "He would burn the world to the ground if he could be king of the ashes." These are the people causing chaos. These are the people normalizing greed. These are the people we promote to positions of power, wealth, prestige, honour, and leadership. We've got to give our heads a shake, wake up from our culturally enforced stupors and knock that shit off or we'll be living in a pile of ashes from whence no Phoenix shall rise.
