A Personal Rule of Thumb

 When I was young I had lots of friends. School is good for that. But I had some friends I didn't meet at school. When my Mom had my sister (the youngest) there was a family that helped us out a lot. The Zurwicks lived down 6th Ave. from us right beside the public pool that is now condos. There were two boys in the Zurwick family I thought were cool. Dean was older than me and Robin was younger and during the summer of my sister's birth I hung out with them sometimes. My mom was friends with Donna, their mother. I don't know how they met but it sure was a good thing they did!

Anyhoo, one day Dean and Robin were lighting firecrackers in the open field outside the swimming pool. Their dad Marian was a millwright and he worked at the Celgar pulp and paper mill. He could fix anything. I didn't see him much or get to know him well but my favourite thing about him was the way he swore. He was not a native Canadian. He spoke with a Slavic accent and overused what might have been the first two English words he ever learned. To be precise, they were more than two words that over the years he had transformed into two more tactile words of his own making. These words were Godam and Snbitchin. Almost every sentence included them. For example, "Donna and her Godam, snbitchin coffee!"

Marian Zurwick made a good living. Because of this, Dean and Robin had stuff. Stuff that I didn't have. REAL equipment for playing street hockey; awesome records and tapes; tools for fixing things like bikes; Marian could even sharpen hockey skates. For free! And, of course, they had firecrackers. Aside from the danger, the noise, the fire, and the all-around coolness of blowing shit up, firecrackers were even cooler because I don't think they were LEGAL at that time. I don't think I ever had any of my own and wouldn't even have known where to buy them if I could have. So when my brother Jeff told me he was going to the Zurwicks' to blow off some firecrackers with Robin, I invited myself along. 

I have already turned a short story into a longer one than intended... to arrive at the climax of the story, one of the firecrackers was a dud and Robin threw it away. I said, "Hey, I'll take that and before Jeff could pick it up, I got it and put it in my pocket. Normally the fuses on these little red bombs were three or four inches long, but this fuse had burned down to less than half an inch without igniting. It was fun to watch Robin blowing up his string of firecrackers and coming up with interesting things to blow up with them, but having my own was even better. I figured I would lengthen the fuse somehow, light a fire and throw the firecracker in, or maybe open it up and light the powder on fire later. But when all the other firecrackers were gone, Robin and Jeff asked me where the dud was. They convinced me that if we threw the firecracker as soon as we lit it, we could do it safely. I was far too easy to convince of things like this when I was young. So I held the firecracker between thumb and forefinger with arm cocked and ready to throw it while one of them stood behind me and lit it. I think it was Jeff. Whoever it was managed to light it and get out of the way, but I didn't have quite enough time to throw it and it blew up in my hand. 

I'm not sure why but my thumb took the bulk of the blast. It was an instant of pain-free impact that I felt while hearing the "BANG" followed by increasingly intense pain that quickly passed anything I had felt before and continued. I was shaking my hand, jumping, squeezing it between my thighs, shaking it again, and yelling, "GODAM SNBITCHIN GODAM SNBITCHIN GODAM SNBITCHIN," for what seemed like 5 minutes but was probably only 15 seconds. It felt like my thumb had been blown off but it wasn't quite so bad. There was blood coming from underneath the thumbnail but I only lost the upper-inside corner of it. The rest of it went black for a month or so.

Many, many years later I was working what was by far the best job I have ever had by every known criterion except one - enjoyability - and that same thumb was in danger again. I had a job drilling for Hy-Tech Drilling near Eskay Creek gold mine and we were putting together the drill piece by piece fairly close to the mine camp. Since we were so close we didn't use helicopter like normal, but a crane was used to lift the pieces, which all weighed around a ton. The drill shack and base of the drill with the motor were already set up and we were dropping the mast into the drill shack and attaching it to the base. I was in the shack steadying the mast when it suddenly swung a bit too much crushing my thumb between the mast and the drill shack wall. My thumb literally exploded on both sides of the nail. I'd like to say I was jumping around saying, "Godam snbitchin," but I don't think I was. Oh there was jumping around and there was swearing, but I had since met some smoother slangers to emulate. In Northern Canada where most people are somehow involved in mining or logging, there are folks like Marian Zurwick who have repurposed the Queen's English to suit their surly, salty purposes so elegantly as to qualify it as no shit artistical to my way of reckoning. I probably slipped into some oft-spoken, well-weathered northern poetic imprecation or two. I can't remember. I know you might think I'm exaggerating, but the bleeding stopped pretty fast so I just duct taped it and kept working. That's a northern Canadia poem right there! "Fucking thumb blew up; If it ain't fucked, you got duct; Thumbs up to that, eh?" <------ A northern Canadian Haiku. I thank you.

The reason I had gotten the job on the drill was because one of the drillers, Fraser, had cacked up a hand by getting it caught between a pipe-wrench and the drill jaws or something like that. Long-term drillers all have stories of hand injuries and many are missing fingers. 

To this day I haven't worked for a more honest company or a better boss than Hy-Tech Drilling or Harvey Tremblay respectively. I haven't had a better wage, or a job that is more highly sought after since either. There's a way people in those days used to look at me, a nod of respect, an acceptance that I had... It was an offer to be a member of that northern community and I refused it to start my education career in Korea. 

Who knows if this'd be so easy to type if I hadn't? 

The Cult of Inconvenience Part II

 So, where were we?

I had just tried to do a visa run to Osaka and ended up with a new phone plan. Pretty much. So I called Mr. An at Sokcho Immigration and told him and he was upset. He can't keep postponing and I have to get on this. So I said it might be easier (Now remember the title of this post. "Easier" is more accurate) to get a D-10 looking for work visa. He says, "That's a good idea. You had one recently." I said, "HOWEVER... I checked online and (after great pain and suffering) found that the earliest appointment I could book on HiKorea would be 3 weeks down the road and HiKorea is notorious for not working. Could I get a D-10 visa by going to the Sokcho office and negotiating it there? Well Mr. An had been helpful but this, evidently, exceeded his helpfulness limitations. But I said it didn't matter anyway because my former employer who had already fired me, withheld my dismissal notice pay, and cancelled my visa - ALL illegally - were now withholding my letter of release, which is a key component in acquiring a D-10 visa. I had discussed this with Mr. An before and he'd promised to talk to the uni about this... TWICE! I asked if he had had any luck (trying to persuade them to obey the law) and he said no. I told him I had read that sometimes when employers are being uncooperative, it is possible to get a new job in Korea without the letter of release, maybe it could be waived as part of the D-10 visa too? He said that couldn't happen.

So back to Itaewon to visit my travel agent. I made sure not to go on a Friday this time. He got me the same one-day visa run to Osaka for the same price. However, it came with added inconvenience: I had to land at terminal 1 and transfer to terminal 2 for the flight back to Korea. But since there was 5 hours between the flights I figured that shouldn't be a problem. The steal of the day was the flight OUT of Korea. I had managed to find a dirt cheap ticket from Seoul to Vancouver on March 10th and bought THAT too. It was cheaper than the ticket to Osaka and as such made me feel like I had gained back the lost 300 bucks from the first crack at Osaka - and THEN some. In fact, this would have been a good day all around... if not for another customer missing a flight. Unlike me, this customer had not been late. In fact he had arrived a few hours before check-in for the first flight of a multi-connection trip. Unfortunately for this person, there were slowdowns at the airport (I think it was in Thailand) and HUGE check-in lineups and it was taking people over 4 hours to check in. This caused chaos and confusion and several tickets were being transferred and rebooked by several travel agents and Khawaja was doing what I always do when I try to book an immigration appointment on HiKorea: just when he thinks the ticket is booked - BAM! someone else gets the seat and he has to start over again inputting information. Who knows how websites like airline ticket sites and immigration appointment sites prioritize applicants? I don't know but I always fly low-class and I'm pretty sure that gets minimum priority. The E-2 visas are like low-class so same thing. It comes down to money like most of the ills of this world. The Cult of Inconvenience lesson 3: Have money. 

Have you ever talked to someone who is wearing an earpiece? I remember several years ago the first time it happened to me. I was on base in Yongsan. It was July 4th and the American military base in Seoul was opened for the public to see some of what goes on there. There were tours of tanks and planes, carnival events, mini golf, a concert featuring Hoobastank, and, of course, fireworks. It was a fun time. I had had a few beers and was in a temporary toilet making room for a few more when the guy at the urinal beside me said, "Hey, how's it going?" I said, "Hey not too bad, How are you?" He goes, "Good, good. I'm at the Yongsan military base." I said, "Me too. (weirdo) It's nice that they opened it up today. Have you been in the tanks? It's like a thousand degrees in there! 'Course I was almost too big to fit..." He says, "I dunno. Some guy thinks I'm talking to him." As he went to the sink to wash his hands I saw the earpiece. That was awkward. But a funny story.

At the travel agency I was sitting right in front of Khawaja, face-to-face, eye contact even, and he'd start talking. For a few syllables I'd think I was with him but then realize he was talking in Hindi or Indian accented Korean or some other language so he wasn't talking to me. I'd even ask questions and think he was answering but false alarm, he was talking to someone else. Then during a break in the hectic action of rerouting his other customer he WOULD occasionally talk to me and I wouldn't be ready for it. "What? Sorry, me? Did you ask me?" This is NOT a comfortable position to be in. I was doing this for EASILY 2 hours before I had both of my tickets purchased. This was Jan. 20th and I would fly on the 21st.

I got to the airport (as you can imagine) WELL before check-in time and although the line-up was lengthy, it only took about an hour to do check-in, customs, and... there was no immigration. There was just a station to swipe my passport and press my fingerprints on a screen. No immigration officer to officially end my E-2 visa and collect my alien registration card. Convenience, right? No grumpy immigration officer making you take off your hat and glasses and glaring at you to judge if you resemble your passport photo enough to pass through this port. Well, as is far more often the case than we are socialized to believe, this technology turned out to be the exact opposite of a convenience. We shall return to this...

But I just shrugged and went to my gate and waited to board. Though I was not able to bring my carry-on kimchi, the flight went off without a hitch.

I had to laugh at this tv that flashed some of the various flight rules in sequence while passengers made their ways through passport/boarding pass check, on the way to the luggage x-rays and customs arches.

The booze bottle looks like cologne to me, but the funniest part is the kimchi. Although I get it, kimchi can be a dangerous biological weapon in the wrong hands. 

There was only one part of the transfer that caused me trouble. I hadn't taken much cash with me. I only had about 15 bucks worth of Korean cash in my wallet, but, for convenience, when I got my debit card from my bank in Sokcho (the same day as getting the shitty phone service) they assured me it was international and that I would be able to use it at international bank machines. So I wasn't too worried... I tried to find an international bank machine or even a currency exchange booth. This proved to be more difficult than expected. Fukuoka airport has them everywhere and they were no trouble with my Korean cards in the past, but I couldn't find either in Osaka. I DID find an area for buying transit tickets and started to worry a bit because it said that cards were not accepted there and neither was foreign currency. 

At Kansai International Airport! Come on, Japan! In Korea I find that all too often CASH is not accepted. But you'd think that at an international airport you'd be able to use your card or exchange currency. You know, for convenience. But that would mean it was something given a crap about wouldn't it?

At any rate, if you look at the top pic, it says "Free shuttle bus to terminal 2." So it turned out I didn't need the cash or card. 

There wasn't much to Osaka Terminal two and it was only a short trip around a water reservoir to get there. So I had the majority of my 5-hour layover to kill just waiting for boarding time. I was hungry and more urgently thirsty so I went to the CONVENIENCE store in Kansai Airport Terminal Two to test their convenience. I swiped my card to try to purchase this can of beer and it didn't work. I had to put it back.

There was one complicated phone/cash machine in the terminal so I tried my card there. I got right down to the final step and got the message that my card would not work in the machine. I ended up going through another process on the same machine exchanging my 12,000 Korean won and ended up with about 1200 Japanese Yen. That beer was 480 Yen. I couldn't even get 3 of them and I was hungry too! I'd have to get through the rest of the day on snack food.

Then I thought of something I hadn't thought of in half a year or more: my Canadian card. Would it work? I checked the shelves of the "convenience" store again but there wasn't much that would make for a convenient meal for me.

A guy can't survive on Super Mario, Transformers, and Hello Kitty alone. I found a pork cutlet sandwich and some peanuts and brought them up to the same girl at the checkout counter. I waved my NEW card at her and said, "Canada ca do." She ran it through and YAY, it worked, but BOO I paid the airport "inconvenience added" prices for them. I also had to suffer the worst (probably usurious) currency exchange rate available to man, and I noticed in this month's Canadian bank statement an unexplained 15-dollar service charge that, no doubt, is for the "convenience" of using my Canadian card internationally. So it was about 100 bucks for a sandwich, some peanuts, and a couple beers. How's THAT for convenience? Cult of convenience lesson 4: International banking is nothing but a few keystrokes, so very convenient for banks. They just pretend it's inconvenient and requires additional fees.

So, I got back to Korea on the flight just before things at Incheon Airport shut down. Lots of shops, customs, currency exchangers, etc. were finishing their shifts. I DID, however get into a long line-up for actual immigrations officers. There were a couple of Chinese flights arriving and the passengers illustrated Cult of Convenience lesson 5: If you want convenience, just be an asshole. The Japanese, Korean, and whatever else passengers from my flight had lined up in the snaky customs lines marked by the airport stanchions. The passengers from the Chinese flights were unabashedly unhooking straps, crawling under stanchions, cutting in the orderly lines as bad Chinese tourists have well-earned reputations for doing. I think I might have scared a few to the back of the line with the death-glares I was distributing, but not all of them.

By the time I got to the immigration agent I opened my passport to my E-2 page, handed in my alien card and my ticket from Incheon back to Canada on March 10 and said, in Korean, that I wanted to cancel my E-2 and visit Korea until March 10. I don't know why this confused the agent. Maybe the fact that I was speaking Korean, that I know the process, or that I had done a no shit one-day visa run - something quickly becoming a thing of the past because of - now you're getting it - the cult of inconvenience. 

No, it turned out that she was confused because I was supposed to have done all this when I LEFT Korea. Remember? When there was just the machine for immigration? And there was no way I could have done this? Machines causing problems again. It happens a lot, it just doesn't get much publicity. So we fall all over ourselves to voluntarily hand over 100% trust to a lot of machines that cause a lot of problems! This is a large part of the cult of inconvenience. In this way we are bringing it upon ourselves.

I was taken to the main Immigration office and given a number. I waited for a few other people who had some issues with immigration, then I got to the window and the immigration officer started speaking Korean to me. I couldn't understand because when Koreans speak to foreigners who are just learning the very difficult Korean language they don't speak slowly. If anything they speak faster. I've speculated about this before. Is it to demonstrate their superior skill in the language; to make the foreigner envious of that skill; or maybe it's just an added inconvenience. Who knows? So basically, she downshifted into broken English and told me everything I had just done. "You go to Japan. You come back same day. You cancel E-2. You start visitor visa. You exit Korea March 10." I said, "Yes." She said, "Why you can't speak Korean?" I said, in Korean, "Very difficult." I've found that this often appeases people who ask this question, which leads me to further believe my theory about why they speak so fast to foreigners. It worked again. I was done. 

The trip back to my hotel from the airport was as tense as the original trip the other way had been in my last post. I cut it very close, but I made it back just as the Juan subway station was closing up. I am back in Korea and legally visiting on a tourist visa till March 10.

Next adventure: To see if I can overcome the cult of inconvenience in the form of "rigor" (more accurately rigor for rigor's sake) in my pursuit of an online master's in Education. Spoiler alert - the news ain't good. 

The Cult of Inconvenience

 This was going to be my "first trip of the year" post but Fate and my habit of self-sabotage to create blog fodder dictated otherwise. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to the full understanding of this post. You have to know about my long history of being screwed by Korean (and for that matter ALL) telecommunications companies. Because of that and the inconvenience of living in Sokcho, I had a useless phone plan. You have to know about the insane problem we all have settling into Korea nowadays because banks have a rule that you need a cell phone to get an account and most cellphone companies have the rule that you need a bank account to get a cellphone plan. At least a decent one. I needed to get paid so that's WHY I settled for a useless cellphone plan. Yes, although Korea is advancing in banking and cellphone technology, it is regressing in banking and cellphone convenience, at least for foreigners. It's all part of what I am going to entitle this post, the cult of inconvenience and, like so many things, it's not like Korea is alone in this, they just do it more openly and to greater extremes than other places. And the cult of inconvenience, one of the Satanic butt-babies of capitalism run amok, is nowhere more evident than in the travel industry. 

My case against my former employer is still ongoing as far as I can tell. (actually I think it's done so that's why I'm posting this today). I have been awarded my dismissal notice allowance that they illegally withheld for over six weeks and I have been told that the matter of my improper dismissal with zero just cause on the shabby grounds of "this teacher refuses to break the laws we order him to break" has been referred to the appropriate agency, board, or commission. (But I think they lied when they told me that) I have no idea what that means in terms of punishment for the school or damages awarded to me but I guess I'll just wait and see. (It means no punishment for the school and no awards for the hardship this caused me. Basically the government forced the university to pay me what they legally owed me and nothing more after booting me out of my home and forcing me to live for weeks in hotels eating out every meal. I get the punishment, they get the convenience) I also have no idea what that is doing to my immigration status and THAT makes me really nervous. The problem is I have no way of getting ahold of the Sokcho Immigration Office except for waiting for Mr. An to call me. He's the guy who has been extending my stay while this battle has raged on. But since my phone plan includes about 5 minutes of outgoing calls per month, I can't call him. I also can't call the 1345 general immigration information hotline (which, in the spirit of this post, really ought to be toll-free if convenience were a thing anybody gave half a hunk of shit about any more), and, again because INconvenience is IN, the HiKorea webpage and other pages like it where we once had the ability (with difficulty and frustration) to check our immigration status has been purposely upgraded in its difficulty and frustration for the users. Every time I put my information into those websites I get a message back that says, "No information available." From past experience I think this has to do with the creative spellings that are sometimes used for VERY important governmental agency websites. I have sometimes played Boggle and shuffled the letters of my name around and come up with the spelling the agency used, but often it's too hard to do so I've given up. It really sucks when you don't even know if the spelling is the problem and you try and try and try and... the cult of inconvenience 101.

So what I had to do was try to locate some payphones. For a place so phone-obsessed, and where there used to be payphones on hiking trails, they have successfully rid this country of them in a short period of time. They are HARD to find now! But I managed to find a few and even then when I tried to call Sokcho Immigration or the 1345 COLDline I would wait while they played music or told me how important my call was but all agents are currently busy with other callers, and then suddenly, "All agents are still busy, please call back later." This was followed by either a dial tone or a busy signal. I had managed to reach someone using a friend's phone to call 1345 and the person told me I had one month after the date of dismissal to change my immigration status. Since that time Mr. An had been calling me and asking if I was going to get a D-10 looking for work visa or leave the country or what. All I could tell him was I was waiting for the work grievance to be settled so he kept extending. Well now that it was partially settled I wondered if I needed to do something about my status. Both Mr. An and the guy at 1345 had told me that the employer HAD cancelled my E-2 visa shortly after dismissing me. Again, this should not be allowed since this presupposes the university had legitimate reason for dismissal, which, AGAIN again, they didn't. Now that the visa's cancelled, if it is decided that they fired me for any bad reason, I can't go back to work. I don't want to and imagine nobody ever does, but this makes buying out the employee's contract the only solution. I believe the government organizations see this as an extremely extreme thing to do (especially for a foreigner) and since the foreigner probably won't be able to make his/her case in Korean while the employer will, it's a tall task to get an unfair dismissal ruling to say the least. Oh I could do it with a lawyer to argue my case in Korean. In fact I have had several tell me I have a slam-dunk, open and shut, can't lose case here and they guaran-damn teed that I could get my contract completely bought out by the employer. But two of them told me that amount of money wouldn't cover their fee, one offered me his services for 8 million and another gave me an offer of 3 million retainer, some out-of-town expenses, and one month's pay contingent upon a ruling in our favour. My contract buy-out would probably have been about 15 million. But there are no guaran-damn tees in life and if there are, you don't get them from lawyers especially if you are a foreigner making a case in one of the most foreigner-hostile countries on the planet. Believe me, this hostility, or if you want to be more euphemistically PC, this "xenophobia" has represented the largest inconvenience of all for me in Korea and if I just added up all the money it has cost me, I could retire comfortably. 

But, as for my visa situation, I thought that maybe the best thing I could do was make a visa run to Japan. I'd leave the country, turn in my alien card, cancel my E-2 visa for sure, and return on a visitor visa. Sometimes you also need to have a plane ticket OUT of Korea when doing that but I planned on negotiating that once I got to Japan. At any rate, since I couldn't reach anyone I went to a travel agent I had used before named Khawaja at Nishaw Travel. This was Thursday and I wanted a ticket to Japan and back on Friday. He found me one for 7 AM to Osaka. Normally I am the guy who shows up WAAAAAY early for flights just to make sure I don't miss them. For this reason I hadn't even heard of a rule that check-in closes an hour before flight time. Well, that's the rule for Jeju Air, which was the airline for my flight. I guess this is something everybody knows so Khawaja just didn't tell me. Anyway, just to be sure I checked the good old internet. Google AI informed me that I definitely would be able to catch my 7 AM flight by taking the subway from Juan to Geomam then to the airport. Catch the subway at 5 and you'll get to the airport a little before 6 which will give you plenty of time to check in. 

Here's where my self-sabotage kicked in. Why did I trust the internet? Why did I trust Google? Why didn't I think of transfer time which is NOTORIOUSLY lengthy in Korea? Why didn't I ask the travel agent whose job it is to know these things? It all seems like no-brainer stuff NOW. I think I was just panicked about overstaying my visa and incurring a million-won fine. That's a thousand bucks. I didn't want to wait till I was able to get in touch with anyone, I just decided I had to go. But on Friday morning at 4 AM when I was getting ready I wasn't worried so much about my visa situation, I was worried about making my flight and thinking to myself every 30 seconds, "Why do I do these things to myself?" I got to Juan Station at 4:30 and already there were people waiting for the subway. This was encouraging. But we waited and waited while more and more people arrived. Finally at 5ish the train arrived. Well I had looked on the good old internet and discovered that from Juan to Geomam was 23 minutes and Geomam to Incheon Terminal 1 was 27 minutes. So if I spent ZERO minutes transferring between Juan and Geomam, and from Geomam to my flight's check-in counter, I could get there before 6 AM. 

I KNOW, EH? What a dope! Anyway, we got on the train at 5ish and it just sat there till 5:30. It went pretty much the way Google said. It WAS 23 minutes to Geomam then I literally RAN with all the other passengers through the LONG transfer and just barely made the train to the airport, which WAS 27 minutes. I guessed right at the 4-way intersection that I always guess wrong at and I made it to the check-in counter by 6:20. Not bad, not bad at all! The cute, young girl wearing the fake Jeju Air orangish uniform looked at my ticket and said, "Check-in for this flight is over." I said, "Yeah I thought it might be. Okay, what can we do?" She just looked blankly at me. Several other people asked for her help so it looked like she was just helping them before she answered my question, but she never answered my question. She had no idea what could be done. I gave her suggestions like, "Can I get a partial refund? Can I get on a later flight? Can I get my money back for the return ticket?" She just continued to look like she could help, but couldn't and didn't. The best she could do is look at my itinerary and tell me I have to contact the travel agent. Right. At 6:30 in the morning.

So I bypassed her and went directly to the Jeju Air ticketing window. There was a sign on it that said something like "We only take money, we don't give any," so I immediately figured there'd be no refund forthcoming. It turned out I was right. When I got to the window there were three young, pretty girls dressed in the flattering, form-fitting, orangy Jeju Air uniforms. Pretty but useless.

The girl who "helped" me was absolutely gorgeous! I wonder if people are less likely to lose their shit with pretty young girls. I had seen her before. Not HER specifically and not SEEN specifically, but I knew this girl. Oh yeah.... back to my struggles with telecommunications! "Hello I would like to cancel my Telus cable please?" "I am sorry, you can't do that here. Is there something else I could do?" "What else can you do?" "Anything but cancel." "Well how can I cancel? I've tried the place where I signed up and I've tried the website, they both referred me to you." "I understand your confusion and frustration sir, but I regret to tell you that there is nothing I can do to help." IT WAS HER!!! Only she wasn't Filipino this time, she was Korean and she wasn't on the phone, she was in person. But essentially the same person. These are what I've labeled the "buffers." They are middlemen, or usually middlewomen, put between customers and people who have the abilities to HELP customers. They are not actually employees of the actual company, nor do they know any actual facts or have any actual information about the company. They are there to tell you how sorry they are for the inconvenience it is their livelihoods to create. The cult of inconvenience lesson 2: the buffers.

As you might expect, the gorgeous buffers were highly empathetic but just as highly unhelpful. So I got back on the train to go back to the travel agent's office in Itaewon. I got to Itaewon and had Mcdonald's breakfast for lunch. It was about 8:30 but remember I was up at 4 and had breakfast then. Now comes one of my sidetracks. Not quite as aside as my usual sidetracks, but still an aside. Take a guess how many Americans enjoy coffee every day. According to the good old interweb up to 73% of Americans drink coffee every day. The average person has 3 cups a day. Do you know how many drink WATER every day? About 75%. Yeah. Coffee is like water to the American. Now, how many of those Americans drink their coffee black? 20%. The vast majority of Americans "color" their coffee with cream, creamer, milk, or some dairy substitute. And I am one billion percent positive I have had Mcdonald's coffee in Korea with one of these:

But there is a fad that might be more popular than the cult of inconvenience here in Korea and that's coffee. Not REAL coffee but the trendy, expensive, maybe Italian-inspired, environmentally horrible bean juice that comes in the cups that people "on-the-go" think make them look busy and professional so much they sometimes carry empty ones around and pretend to caffeinate like little kids having a coffee party. You can tell what I think of those. I prefer Dunkin Donuts, Tim Horton, drip coffee. That's what it's called now. My music is called classic and my coffee is called drip. But that won't change me. I'm a classic drip. And although Mcdonald's HAS the uppety high-maintenance Americano coffee now with all it's additives, they still offer the drip coffee that's made in a pot with no "tamping" or "frothing" or fluffing or buffing. And they have actual milk that they put in the "lattes." Go figure since latte literally means milk. But I double dog dare you to try to get milk or cream or any kind of whitener or lightener in your coffee at Mcdonald's any more. It's just not done! It's really hard to get it anywhere actually! It just seems wrong to call it "Americano" and not offer milk which 80% of Americans put in it, especially at the most American restaurant in the world. I asked politely and in Korean if I could get milk in my coffee and got lied to. The Mcwench actually told me they don't have milk there. That's all I'm saying about that.

Except that it gave me another thing to be pissed off about on this day. So I made my way up the hill to my travel agent's office for the first time that morning. I had already reached my goal of 6000 steps. My phone doesn't record if they are uphill steps like in Itaewon or running steps like in the airport train transfer so I had more than my fair share of exercise for the day. One positive. Gotta cling to the positives sometimes. Ac centuate the positive e liminate the negative... If only life were a song!

As I am getting to the top of the hill where my travel agent (and damn near EVERYTHING in Seoul) is, I realized something: it was Friday. Being unemployed I lose track of the days of the week. Had I thought yesterday while buying my ticket that the next day was Friday it might have been enough to make me think twice about getting it. It seems like I always have this inconvenience when buying my air tickets. You see Friday is the Muslim holy day and my travel agent is a Muslim. It is not my purpose to start slagging all religion here but religion DOES seem to participate in the cult of inconvenience, does it not? How many Christians would rather be watching football on Sunday than sitting in church? I remember thinking of the absolute rip-off it was being all dressed up and in church during a large portion of my two days off of school per week every time I was forced to go to church. I daydreamed all through Sunday School about tobogganing and street hockey and bike riding and football and hockey card trading and mountain climbing and who would win a fight between Spiderman and Batman... I tell ya I've been inconvenienced enough by religion in my lifetime! But on this day it wasn't even MY religion that inconvenienced me. I got to the shop that Khawaja works out of and the door was locked and nobody was there. It was a cold day but there's a couch outside the shop so I took by backpack off and sat on the couch.

See the sign? And you can see the couch too... directly below the sign. What you CAN'T see are the pigeons that live in the neighbourhood. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. 

I sat on the couch unable to dial anybody with my crap phone plan and unsure if Khawaja had received the text messages I had been sending him since early in the morning from the airport.

Then my first bit of good luck for the day.

They say being shat on by a bird is good luck don't they? Well one of those pigeons landed on that sign, hung its arse over the edge and bombed me. 

I guess I was lucky. Here's how I have to reckon good luck in my life: You can see that the shit hit the steel railing and the corner of the couch. I just got the splatterings on my sock and pant leg, not the main load of the shit so yay, good luck for me! 

I shit you not, this really happened! 

Let me back up. I typed that I was unable to call Khawaja but that's not true. I had changed my phone the day before while waiting to get my ticket to Osaka. Just a couple doors down (or more accurately, UP) from the travel agency is a phone shop. It's run by another Muslim. I don't know where these guys are from but they speak several languages. Korean, Hindi, English, and some others. Probably Russian in there too. I asked the phone guy about it and he says you have to live and deal with folks all day long who speak Korean. That's how he learned. I have never done that or, frankly, wanted to do that. Anyway, he gave me a cheaper phone plan with unlimited calling and data. Friggin' Sokcho crappy phone plan DONE! So in reality THIS was the one positive to come from the whole story.

But it's not over yet. While waiting for Khawaja to get outta church I called the airline to see if I could get a refund for my ticket. I got the erstwhile "Our operators value your call but they value doing nothing just a little bit more..." Then suddenly somebody answered! It was a girl who couldn't speak English. This is Korea. All the English helpline workers can't speak English. I can tell you that in the time I've been here this has gotten worse, not better. They used to at least make an effort. But Korea is becoming MORE protectionist and less global in their own country and they expect people to use their language when they are here. Even if you don't particularly love being here.

The girl told me she'd get an English speaker to call me back. I said, "Sure you will," and hung up. To my surprise - convenience! An English speaking lady called me back! So I explained my situation and actually we had a good laugh together about my shitty day and I DID include the birdshit story you better believe it! She was nice, but not nice enough to give me good news. She said I probably wouldn't get much back, but she wasn't sure because... you guessed it, I would have to talk to the ticket issuer. Is this the way airlines do business now? They relinquish all responsibility for their tickets to the people who sell them? And the people who sell them? Do they get the airlines' refunds if someone misses a flight? And they have a choice of whether to share it with the ticket purchaser or not? Is this how it works? It was getting close to 1 PM. That's when my return flight from Osaka to Seoul was due to take off. Would I forfeit the refund if I didn't locate Khawaja by then? Is THIS why he wasn't answering my calls?

I wandered around Itaewon. To tell the truth I was looking for a beer but nothing is open in the morning in Itaewon. Nothing with beer anyway. I had a coffee at Paris Baguette. I asked politely in Korean if they could put a little milk in it. THEY DID!

The day was looking up. I would have rather had a beer. I would rather have had cream too, but it was a good cup of coffee. I wasn't even halfway through when I got a text from Khawaja that said he was at the shop and I should go back again. But I finished that coffee before doing so. 

It was my 4th trip up the hill to the travel agency but I finally got the deal settled. I only got the taxes back. I don't know if this is Jeju Air's rule or Khawaja's rule. He said the two parts of the trip are considered one ticket so I couldn't get a refund for the return ticket. Again, his rule or Jeju's? I think maybe he pocketed some money for the refund even though I worked just as hard as he did, maybe harder. But, travel agents are not looking out for our convenience either. What could I do? 300 bucks down the shitter! 

By the time I had received my refund - my paltry, insignificant refund - it was past noon. It was too early for supper and STILL none of the pubs were open. It would have been DAMNED convenient to have a place to grab a beer at noon on THAT day let me tell you! But it was probably better that there wasn't, so with my tail between my legs, pissed off, shat on, and fully shitkicked by the world and the cult of inconvenience, I slouched home to Incheon. 

Stay tuned for part two.

First Hike of the Year

 Since early December the majority of my thoughts, efforts, writing, talking, texting, chatting, and stress have been about the whole work situation. Because it is not, as yet, resolved I STILL can't get into it in any detail here. 

Instead, I'll tell you about something I did today that was good. A few things. We'll start this year off on a bright note. I'll do what everybody says I should do: I'll say "Yay," though I walk through the valley of death. But I will fear no evil though I have no rod, staff, or shillelagh to comfort me. I shall hike and it may restoreth my soul. And lo (and high) I didst hike and it was good.  

I have been getting my steps every day since moving into my capsule abode, not just because I need to go out for food, but to keep my sugar down and my spirits up. I haven't hiked anywhere that would get me fresh air or allow me to commune with nature though. And, to be honest, no stairs, no grade, 6000 steps is a cinch. It hasn't really been challenging. Aside from getting me out of the hotel and giving me seen time instead of screen time, the walking has not done a world of good. I have seen a little bit of Incheon but a lot less than I'd like to because I've been so caught up in research, rules, and legalities. During one or two of my outings I noticed a little green on the GPS not far from where I am staying. Today after watching the US get knocked out of the World Jr. Hockey Tournament and watching the Canadian boys dispatch the Slovaks with aplomb, I decided to take a shower and then go for a better walk than usual. 

I almost walked right past it but found what was called Moonlight Park on Naver Maps. I know it 

doesn't look like much but that's what I wanted. I haven't hiked for a long time and it wasn't long before my body was screaming that at me. 

It was just a puny hill with some exercise equipment and I saw a few adults and a few kids playing on swings and exercising on equipment. It was pretty easy to tell that there was a path up one side of the hill that looped over to the other side and came back down again. The side I was on had stairs and as I am always saying, I said today with the whiniest tone I could get away with in public, "Stairs..." But luck was mine and there was a path right beside the stairs. I took that right up to the top. 

At the top I was confronted with my first choice of the day. If you had heard how I was wheezing, coughing, spitting, and sputtering all the way up the puny, little hill you might have suggested I turn around and go back down to the road where there is a hospital. St. Mary's Hospital I think it is. 

Truth be told I had expected to make it a lot farther before hitting the wall than a hill that had about 50 stairs. So although everything in my pudgy, soft, sedentary body was telling me to just pack it in before I cough up a lung or stroke out and die on a hill in Korea like so many of our fallen comrades, I pressed on. But this was no Heartbreak Ridge, this was no Pork Chop Hill, this was no Khe Sanh, Langdok, or Hill 364 where so many of Walter Sobchak's generation gave their lives to die face down in the muck, if this was skiing this wasn't even the bunny hill! I pressed on out of embarrassment not heroism. I chose not to loop back down and be done with it. I saw an opening in the fence and I went through it.

This was what awaited me. "Awwww stairs.... ;-(" I had to get to the top of these stairs without stopping because there was another hiker coming down and I didn't want his to see me stopping like a girl's blouse. I even held my breathing as much as I could as I passed acting like the hike wasn't destroying me like Anthony Joshua did to Jake Paul. My whole body was feeling like Jake Paul's jaw looked the next day. 

I almost felt like I was in prison or the military and I HAD to keep going or get KP or a longer sentence. Maybe it was the cheery barbed wire narrow enclosure. I dunno...

But eventually it DID open up and it started to look more like a hiking trail and less like a tour of Vietnam. 

Although Vietnam never gets this cold. Or has this type of foliage. Or Korean signage. Yeah, bad analogy. 

At any rate, if you notice, the hike leveled out too and I was able to catch my breath for the first time. This invigorated my aerobic ambitions and renewed my resolve. I kept plugging on.

It may sound like I'm well into this hike but I'm sure this was at like the thousand step point. I had a second decision to make. 

Although it has been a while I am an experienced hiker of the Korean hills and I pride myself on being able to follow the trail maps even if they don't have English and my Google Translate camera is not working.

Well, this map had no English and my Google Translate was not working. A lesser man might have turned around at this point being so close to where the hike had begun and almost (but not 100%) sure to find my way back the way I had come. 

But I read the word Byeongweon. That means hospital. It looked very much like I could keep going, get off the green where I was and onto the brown trail, go by the gazebo, then back onto the green trail and down to the hospital. That's pretty much where I started.

I soldiered on. The decision was not made lightly for you see there has seldom been a hiking trail, road, highway, track, subway tunnel, path, or any form of thoroughfare in Korea (in all of my experience) that ends up or comes out where you might expect it to. This could have meant for all the world that I was just making the half-way point farther away since I might have to just turn round and retrace my steps all the way back. Was I ready for that? Well, I actually felt like the worst was behind me. I had hit the wall, scaled it, and Humpty Dumptied down the other side without needing any of the King's men or horses to put me back together again. Nobody? Ever wonder what help the horses could have been putting a big egg back together? Just me? 

If you blow this pic WAAAY up you'll see a lady in full Korean hiking regalia like I described in a previous post. Even the guy in front of me had his fancy boots, pack, and titanium hiking stick. 

Another decision. Should I walk all the way up that graveyard hill or should I turn right where I think the hospital path is? Do I satisfy my curiosity or keep it simple? I bet I know what you think I did. But I was feeling the burn now. The rush of exercise that I hadn't felt since working out at the gym at the university I no longer work at. I also thought it might be a good view.

This was about half way up. It WAS, as it turned out, a good view. I can't tell you what those buildings are. I think the circular one is a coliseum where they take all the foreign workers who have disobeyed the Korean employers who ordered them to break Korean laws and make them fight lions, tigers, and ligers for the amusement of the ruling class. 

But I could be mistaken.

It was a 20% grade and I did it without stopping. Well except to take that picture above. But I wasn't breathing as hard as when I summited the bunny hill. So I was feeling proud. 

When I got to the top, this is what I saw. More graves. I don't know what I was expecting. 

Beyond the path continued and there were even more graves, but I looked back down the hill and saw something that made me turn around and go back down.

By golly it was the Gazebo!

20% downhill? It's a lot easier than 20% uphill.

So in no time I had reached the gazebo. 

Here's where I had to make another choice. Should I use some of the exercise equipment here and make this a full body workout?

There was bench press, curls, twists, sit-ups, pull-ups, flies, and of all things...

Yeah! This machine gives you all the exercise of hiking up a mountain without actually hiking up a mountain although you need to hike up an actual mountain to get that even better than the real thing feeling of the machine that makes you feel just like you are hiking up a mountain. 

It reminded me of those people who go to concerts and film the whole things on their phones looking at the phone screen version of the real thing they are capturing electronically. 

Maybe I should have just watched a few episodes of Hiking With Kevin Nealon. 

I left the gazebo area and immediately found another decision pole with three arrows on it, one of which had the word byengweon on it. I followed that trail.

It got thin and woody. Nobody else was on this trail. I started thinking that maybe this was a different hospital. Maybe it wasn't St. Mary's just down the road from my capsule hotel. Maybe I'd have to just turn around and go back.

Oh well, at least I was going downhill. 

This empty lot is where the trail came out. It was completely surrounded with fence. There were some signs in red that I couldn't understand and STILL Google Translate camera refused to translate for me. 

Luckily I found a hole in the fence and went out to the street.

This was the street. I just walked a little bit along this street and suddenly I saw the byeongweon. It was an angle I hadn't seen St. Mary from before but I was pretty sure it was her.

Before long I got to the main crossroad and saw an E-mart 24. It was the E-mart 24 at the end of my road! The one that's not open 24 hours but never mind. I had come off the mountain ON MY ROAD!

This NEVER happens! And I looked at my step count. Just below 7000. Pefectamundo!

So you can bet I'll be doing that hike again! 

The cherry on top was that I realized I had skipped lunch and I had been craving a sub with some soup for a while. There was a Subway right on the corner. I'd never noticed it before. 

But before I get too excited I noticed while buying my Italian cold cut combo that my alien card was missing from my wallet. I didn't panic because all my cards were there and so was the cash. Nobody would steal a person's alien card. I mean, unless they're lucky enough to look exactly like me.

I then remembered I had been to the pension office in Incheon the day before and the guy had kept my passport, bank book, and alien card. I had to ask him for them back just before leaving. I must have only got my passport and bank book back. So now I have to go back to that office on Monday. That's the kind of hiking I've been doing lately. It's not as healthy.

Hopefully they still have my card there. If not I could be in trouble. 

Tuesday I have a meeting in Gangneung during which I just might need that card. I have no doubt it will lead to some really great content for this blog too. 

Whether or not I'll be able to publish it remains to be seen...

As always, wish me luck.

Conspiracy and Contrivance

"Where tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith

"The rich man's primary dilemma is how to extract money from those who have none." Dave MacCannell

You can quote me on that. 

You've seen the sentiment of Jefferson in the pages and posts of this blog before and you've seen that quote by Adam Smith. I think it's one of my favourites because of the delicious irony of the "Father of Capitalism" laying down the all time best burn on capitalism! This post will be about one tiny part of capitalism.

Capitalism is an unsustainable cycle and the end of the cycle will be marked by rebellion because those in charge of trying to sustain the unsustainable must revert to tyranny. The sign that we are approaching the end, and that very tyranny is when the rich have impoverished the poor to such a state that they now have to devise tyrannical ways to extract money from those who have none. This sounds like an impossibility but, credit where credit's due, wealth is a great motivator and from greed have ingenious enterprises arisen. In short, the rich have figured out how to get money from people who have none: give them the (false) hope of getting some. If that's not tyranny, what the hell is?

I have used this example before on this blog but it was an eye-opener to be sure! In China there are great hoards of people, sometimes euphemistically labelled "migrant workers," who go from job to job hoping that they will eventually find one that pays. They work a month for a company, (and in China this is rarely a month worth of 9-5) hope that at the end of the month there will be pay, but if not they move on and try again. They don't have legal recourse, nor the time to pursue it. They go from one exploitative employer to another, many dying during the process. This is China's major contribution to the "global economy" and don't kid yourself, we all take advantage of it. In fact most countries have imported the idea. I worked for a company called Hwasheng in China and every month they hired a different girl to help me with visa issues, translation, and general settling into China. Not one of these girls were paid. At the end of the month the old girl would leave and a new girl would arrive. The most curious part about it was that none of them ever seemed that upset or rebellious. Maybe, like Korea, the younger generation in China has been trained well not to stand up for themselves to delay the end of the Chinese iteration of capitalism, but it'll happen. 

Lotteries, scams, cons, politics, dreams, myths, rags-to-riches stories, Disney movies, they are all designed to give the destitute hope of rising out of poverty and maybe even becoming rich someday. But there are pithy aphorisms that keep the poor in their place. The rich invest most of their money and spend the rest. The poor spend all of their money and invest the rest. Or, the rich buy assets while the poor buy liabilities they think are assets. In truly capitalist countries the worlds of the rich and poor are so far removed from each other as to prohibit even a rudimentary understanding of the other. I've just used the word "invest" but wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about doing it and the vast majority of the really really good investment opportunities wouldn't even be open to my broke ass. 

I'm no expert on most of these scams and schemes but I'll tell you one in which I am experienced and becoming more and more privy to the diabolical inner mechanics of: education. What is education if not the dream of improving ones station in life through learning? Nobody goes to university just to get smart. They go expecting to obtain knowledge and skills that can make them money. Who clings to education as hope for the future more than the poor? And who but the downright despicable exploit this hope?

Imagine if you will a school... Well, not exactly a school. In fact not in any tangible way is it a school by educational standards. In fact, let's start again...

Imagine there's a wedding or some such social occasion. By pure chance this wedding is attended by some highly unscrupulous people who have somehow lucked into positions of wealth and power. They might be inheritance wealth, flim flam or mafia wealth, it doesn't much matter. They engage in what Adam Smith calls that seldom encountered diversionary conversation with each other. As dependable as the natural phenomena that make the world go round, the conversation between businessmen swings around to contrivance and conspiracy. They want to do the unthinkable: they want to hijack the good names of others to untarnish their own. They want to do something so unprincipled that the public will believe they are principled. They want to build a lucrative business by cheating people, but they want that business to appear as something honourable. They want to get rich and become reputable at the same time. One of the wedding guests suggests they become "educators." It was so successful after the Korean war when Korea was a poor country and the citizens of Korea wanted to rise out of poverty that they shouldn't have too much trouble selling the idea to some other poor countries like, for instance, Bangladesh or Nepal. The sweetest part of the deal is (thank you China) there are lots of businesses in Korea who don't want to pay the wages that privilege has caused Koreans to expect. Why not get these students jobs too? Restrictions on international students working while studying have eased significantly due to some tenacious lobbying by fellow businessmen. These kids are so broke and 5 thousand won and hour looks like so much money to them, they'll jump at midnight shifts gutting fish or waiting tables for abusive bosses who pay way less than minimum wage. And by being such a valuable source of cheap labour in the community, business irregularities might be overlooked by regulators if, say a law or two might be fractured. 

"What kind of laws one might ask? Well first of all we will need to attract good, reputable teachers in order to look legit, so we'll offer them a contract of 20 hours a week. A lot of universities allow teachers to get away with working this little or even fewer hours but not our 'school.' We'll add more hours to the teachers' duties once they are trapped in the country and have signed contracts for a full year. We'll give them abstractions like on-call hours and nebulous rules like give every student as much counselling as they require and we won't clarify anything - certainly not in the contracts - but we'll create an atmosphere of militaristic unquestioned authority and cultivate fear and intimidation by giving public official warnings for violations of these ambiguous rules. OUR teachers will work Korean hours, not the lazy hours foreign professors enjoy, and we'll even include a clause in the contract that says we won't pay them for these hours whether they exceed 40 a week or not."

"But isn't that illegal?" 

"They signed the contracts agreeing to it. And besides, with all the low cost labour we bring, who's going to split legal hairs here?" 

"BRILLIANT! But what if one of the teachers challenges the rules or even the laws?"

"We'll fire them. For a foreigner the legal recourse is so convoluted and even the government agencies to contact are so bogged down with purposely complex rules and regulations, most of which are difficult or impossible to find in English, that only a friggin' idiot would challenge us. Besides, we pay so little that they'd run out of money before they could complete that challenge. Why, we won't even have to pay the legal one month of pay in lieu of notice. It'll take more than a month for the teacher to get the government to do anything and that's only if the teacher can figure out how to do that."

"I don't usually say this but I'm kinda glad I came to this social event! Screw the teachers, screw the students, and screw the law, we're gonna make a pile of money outta this!" And a round of cigar smoking, pretentions drink drinking, and self-congratulatory back slapping ensues. 

Bent on Walking Straight Lines

 Not too long ago while coming home from Quiz night in Songtan I heard a girl who was descending one of the requisite calisthenically yo-yoing staircases in most transfers between Seoul subway stations trying to conceal her sobs and it caught my attention. Before we get to the girl, I recently read that Koreans walk 10,000 steps a day

and found in the description the partially satisfying explanation of why. The explanation included walking aps and hiking popularity in Korea but the real reason I vibed with was BMW. Bus, metro, walk. I had to put my own comment on the Facebook post, which has since gotten a few likes, that said something like go anywhere in Seoul by subway and if you have two or more transfers - there's yer 10 grand. And although there are escalators and even the moving sidewalks in many of these pilgrimages between subway lines, they are often under repair or just turned off. In a country so image-conscious I don't think it's a stretch to say that the subway lines are purposely made to involve superfluous stepping and when the average weight of Koreans rises above a certain level, ambulant assistance devices are "repaired" or turned off and worse still in summer the air conditioning on trains is turned down. Paranoid Uncle Dave again? Maybe... but if it's not already the plan, if someone shows this post to Lee Jae Myung, it might soon be. Transfers between subway lines will be lengthened and maybe scattered along them will be fitness stops like on the hiking trails with pull-up bars, sit-up benches, and other exercise equipment. Koreans will start a fad (and buckle up Adidas/Nike/Reebok/Puma/Under Armour and Lulu friggin' Lemon, you're about to get Korean fadded!) and transit takers of all sorts will get decked out to the nines in their fitness attire. Speaking of the Korean hiking popularity... they are something to see! 

There is no gadget, or accessory that the avid Korean hiker won't buy, for double its worth, just in case they might need it on their next hike. I've been on 2K fun walks in the park and seen ajummas and ajoshis like the ones pictured with their backpack radios playing bongjak music and their tin cups tinkling while carabinered to their Everest-worthy packs along with other supplies or the latest Labubu. They don't go halfway. So get ready Korea for subway sweatin' to the oldies. Leotards, pony tails, spandex, headbands, and leg warmers that'll make Seoul Station look like a 1980's Bally Total Fitness. 

And I'll get no credit. The person who read this will claim it as his/her own patriotic idea, be paid millions to become minister of fitness in the country, and Korea will show the world how they cleverly keep their citizens slim and trim. It wouldn't be the first time I've made other people rich...

But back to the girl. I tried not to let her notice I noticed. It's something I see more frequently than I'd like and being pretty close to the very real suffering adolescents go through in Korea, I have a soft spot for them. Most countries start piling on the pressure for PISA tests when the kids are around 14. Here they are trophies to be compared to others by competitive parents their whole lives. Trophies to be shown off, or failures. Overworked and underplayed was the very first impression I got of the kids in this country and it's the same in Japan and China. Everything is better when you run it like a business, right? So how 'bout raising kids that way? Spend, even OVERspend, but only if the shareholders get good ROI and always stay ahead of the competition. 

Of course there was no way I could have known that this was what the girl was crying about even though the dreaded Suneungs had just taken place and this year's were exceptionally evil! The suneungs are the college entrance exams, an 8-hour test that basically decides if you were worth giving birth to and if you should bother to try to succeed any more. EJU's in Japan, Gaokao in China. Suicide statistics are hidden all over Asia so as not to have these educational abscesses excised like they should be. And if you think you've seen cheating... like the hyper-capitalist system that inspired them, these "standardized" tests are LOUSY with cheating. And why not when the exams are the epitome of difficulty for difficulty's sake? And, of course, it's always the kids of the wealthy who can afford instruction not in getting smarter, but in how to BEAT these diabolic exams that have an unfair advantage. The English part of this year's suneung is a good example:

If you watch the above video, read the comments. I read one from a Korean guy that said this test just made the multi-billion dollar after-school industry sometimes called the "shadow" education of Asia, a lot more money. 

As Fate would have it, I stopped on the subway platform right in front of a bench and waited by the doors. The crying girl sat on the bench and I heard her sobbing, sniffing, and tapping away on her cellphone. Then I got on the train and she sat directly across from me. Now I could SEE her face. Her face was not pretty by Korean or any standards but she reminded me of many students I had had in Korea who were not the beauties this society provides with so many advantages. This made me empathize even more thinking of the bullying some of my favourite female students had to put up with from the popular kids and wondering if this wasn't part of her sorrow. She convulsed with a fresh sob and I saw impossibly large and lava-like tears slide down her cheeks before she covered her shame with her hoodie hood and fought back the next round of convulsions. I sincerely wanted to sit beside her and squeeze her with an avuncular arm softly consoling her with wise placation spoken in Korean but language deficiency and social mores about "creepiness" prevented me. 

She got off the train before I did. I will never know what caused her heart to break that day and she will never know I even cared. Neither sat right with me. For the rest of the night and even in my dreams that night I questioned whether I was right to do nothing. I questioned whether society should put so much pressure on such young kids. I questioned whether we should really call ourselves "civilized" when we have created such a fear of UNcommon sexual deviance that it precludes common courtesy and compassion. I thought of parallel stories I could write in which I just gave her a silent hug and she went on to a happy life or I did nothing and she lost all hope and spiraled into depression. I also thought of how I would never know if she would live a happy life or not. Worst of all I wondered if she might become one of the hidden suicide statistics of Asia. 

Just yesterday I found myself walking down a narrow Korean sidewalk in the anodyne, give little offense, stranger in a strange land being a good ambassador style that I have found necessary in streets, grocery aisles, subway stations, hiking trails, bike paths, roads, pretty much anywhere Koreans move themselves from place to place. It's a constant source of annoyance and it has graced the pages and posts of my railings before that Korean people, and to be fair, most people in Asia, seem bent on walking in straight lines. (self chuckle) Bent on walking straight lines. That is just subtly contradictory enough to be a book title or a sweeping statement that could be used to sum up a large group of people like the kind George Carlin described when he said, 

An old couple, one that might don untold fortunes worth of hiking paraphernalia to go for a hike and see the colours on one of the mountains of Korea on a fall weekend were walking a trifle straight-linedly toward me. As is my still unabashed proclivity, I got out of their way. Now, the sidewalk was not even wide enough for two but they did not abandon fully abreast formation as they advanced on my position. I could see no sign of that changing. So I did not just move over on the sidewalk, I had to move over to where the telephone and lamp posts were and actually put one foot off the curb and onto the street that was bumper-to-bumper with automobiles. As I did so out of fantastically unacknowledged courtesy my shoulder bumped against a lamppost. On the lamppost was a sign that had been hung with a metal clamp and the clamp was tightened with one screw. The screw held the two razor sharp sides of the clamp together. It was a cold day and I had on my newly purchased winter jacket the left shoulder of which now has a gash that will either have to be sewn or will get larger and larger until the jacket needs to be thrown out.  

Sick of Academia

 Well, here we go again. Of all the ways I could start a post I think THAT statement might require as much of a "NNnnnnngo on..." as any. This is the first week of my final class in my MEd studies. Yes, I am STILL banging my head against the wall trying to get this master's degree. Other than grade school nothing has come easy for me educationally and it has had almost nothing to do with intellect. Socio-economic status, lack of government or any other kind of support, and just bad breaks have made me think if I had my druthers I'd go back to that naive boy of 18 who thought his brain was all he needed to leave a great big mark on this free, egalitarian world full of honesty and justice and I'd tell him to learn to drive heavy equipment or install air conditioning systems. 

But I suppose intellect HAS had something to do with this straight gate and narrow path down Academia road I've chosen in that I'm too stupid to give up. However, today I think I may have come face-to-face for the first time with the very real prospect that I might have to do just that. Eleven arduous courses into this venture in which I've had to suffer the group project bullies who feel safe enough to be their genuine asshole selves behind their keyboards; pedants posing as educators trying to quantify and mathematize things that every true teacher knows defy those processes; courses singing the praises of progressive education that are taught in highly instructor-centered, passive, incessantly rubricked, summatively assessed, hypocritic methods; and maybe worst of all wading every week through "academic" studies like so many Vietnamese swamps trying to push aside the weeds of pretentiously specific terminology designed partly to exclude those outside the realms of the educationally elite, and erudite scientific diction that accomplishes the exact opposite of educating usually in highly structured, highly repetitive, highly anal, preset template form that aside from a few precious nuggets of educational edification are largely ceremonious rights of passage into the academic Mecca of publishing. 

Now, to my Kurtzian horror, I am tasked with producing one of these soul-sucking Faustian documents so as to gain the privilege of entrance into the higher echelons of academia that may be available to me if I tuck twig and berries and just get this humiliating paper written and submitted. Honestly, how much better could life be for me if I get my master's now at the ripe old age of 58? I may have missed the boat on this one. But I might just be in that frame of mind because I looked at the "Capstone Project Guide." This is the format of the final project I am expected to formulate and submit in the next 8 weeks. Just the notes on the format of this monster of unprincipled capitulation to all that is wrong with education are enough to make me yearn for the freedom of not being a student any more for the rest of my life. I got to the 7 page point and just lost all hope. These are just NOTES on the final project. It's going to be a study comprised of a curriculum and a rationale. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? But read on... 

Originally this thing was designed as a primary study done by teachers on (presumably) their students. I know this because I remember back when I first heard about it saying, "Well it's summer, where the hell am I going to find students to collect data on?" Then I guess the school ran into accountability and liability problems getting permission from students, parents, schools, and whatever other legal or governmental agencies were required to avoid being sued. Our world eh? 

So NOW we have to do a fake primary study using secondary resources and data. A ha! Now it's getting more complicated. But still plausible, no? 

It WOULD be if the school and teachers could come to a consensus on how to do this damn thing and what should be real and what should be fake. So here's a brief summary of the format. See if you'd touch this thing with a ten-foot pole. (or without the aid of Chat GPT)

1. Highly formatted title page.

2. Abstract. Single paragraph double spaced with no indentation describing in one paragraph (250 words or so) an educational problem you've encountered and the solutions to it you are proposing.

3. Title again. Headings must be centered and bolded using upper and lower case letters. Text below must be double spaced with indented first line. Provide a brief overview of your project including a) (fake) school, b) problem, c) intervention, d) target audience, e) purpose or goal, f) your role in the project. Close by describing how this deliverable is divided into 3 sections: Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation.

4. New page. Planning. State the problem... AGAIN. Include the following: 1. Problem (YET AGAIN) in one sentence. 2. How it manifests itself 3. Evidence to support claims of the problem (how is this different from number 2?) 4. Scope and significance of the problem. 5. With whom and how you collaborated in identifying the problem. 6. Potential consequences if the problem is not addressed.

Now here we get into the problem of what should be REAL and what should be MADE UP. I think the best way to do this would be to use your current teaching situation and write about ACTUAL problems and interventions but use no specific names or information so as to give the appearance of secondary rather than primary research. See how Mickey Mouse this is? I don't know why they don't just let us write a thesis. Do some research and write a paper   ---   like the format EVERY SINGLE ONE of the previous 11 courses has taken!!! My theory is that they needed to publish lots of papers written by students in order to better qualify for regional accreditation. But they HAVE ACHIEVED that and it's nothing to sneeze at. Same accreditation body as Berkeley and Stanford. So why not just abandon this bullshit and let us write theses? Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh we're far from finished. Organizational Context with a list of details including collaboration genuine or fabricated I don't know, history of this problem in other places YES this means I have to do research so despite having to describe the uniqueness of my project, I have to include past research showing how NON-unique it is. Causes of the problem AGAIN, and possible barriers or challenges.

Intervention. Describe for the fifth time what you are doing only this time they suggest a table, graph or other visual. 

Believe it or not... Purpose Statement. State the purpose in one sentence. State your expected outcomes.

Review of Literature. Okay, good. I get to use some of the learning from the other courses to support my study. "Any lit older than 5 years should be labeled "siminal."" So must include RECENT projects and lit and theories related to my topic. Again don't do what they tell me to do and make it something unique or there won't be any. 

Project methods.

Stakeholders and audience. How they would be impacted by your project. Just an excuse to use the very academic sounding word "impact." 

Intervention implementation plan. Is this like maybe METHODS? Well you need to give details like a timeline (again should I fudge some imaginary timeline of when I did what I did when I didn't? OR should I really do it and pretend like I didn't?) HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT? Wait it gets more fucked up.

There will be three separate sections. One is PRIOR to implementation, one is DURING, and section 3 will be, you guessed it, afterwards. So do I just make up learning outcomes? "EVERYTHING went as planned and all my students are now fluently speaking English!" Woohoo!

Expected Outcomes. Discuss expected outcomes and ACTUAL outcomes. Actual or made up? Make up your fucking minds! "I thought my plan wouldn't be so successful but it turns out I'm a genius."

Provide a lead-in like "The following questions guided this project..." So for the SIXTH time, what are you doing only like we're now playing Jeopardy and phrasing our answers in question form.

Data sources and collection procedures. Describe each data source separately. Must be SECONDARY. Don't forget that. 

Data analysis. List the sources AGAIN. Describe how they were analyzed. Ummm I fucking READ them and THOUGHT ABOUT them. 

Limitations. Describe the weaknesses in your project. Like the overarching weakness of it being complete bullshittery? Identify areas that could not be improved. The whole thing NEEDS to be improved but I can't do that. 

Ethical Issues. How were ethical issues addressed and mitigated? I don't think they will be. I can't possibly do this without Chat GPT. 

There are pages more of separate sections like sections 2 and 3 of Implementation, Process Analysis, Data Analysis and many other superfluous sections to add more rigor for rigor's sake. But I want to stay on this ethics section. I am getting a very familiar feeling here that you may recognize from any of my most recent posts. NOWHERE in the course description did it tell me I'd be subjected to this Herculean task of a capstone course. I assumed, like most of the hundred or so students with whom I collaborated during the course, that we'd be writing standard theses. I feel pretty safe in saying that not a single one of my cohorts in this program would rather subject him or herself to such an academic abortion. But I don't think any of us knew what was in store for us. Has the past three years taking this course been yet another in a long list of SCAMS?

I'm sure getting that feeling. How bout you?

At any rate, if nobody notices this and they don't kick me out of the school, there IS a possibility of getting this damn thing done. I am pretty much decided (and this is what I meant by the first line of this post) to drop this fucking course yet again. But in the 8-10 weeks I have to wait till it is available again I can do all the research and data collection FOR REAL here where I'm working, I'll have to make it look like I haven't done it and keep it anonymous by (and I'm not making this up) creating a fake name for the school and the principal for the permission forms I need to fill out. At least the data will seem more authentic that way because it will be. 

I have written an email to my prof asking if my current situation and a curriculum adjustment plan on how to make things easier for international students studying in university in Korea and in English will be a viable project topic or not. If not, I officially give up. If she says it'll be okay then I'll need to conduct all this research while teaching the next semester here and implement my strategic accommodations and interventions, record them all, make charts and graphs, and write up this horrifically and unnecessarily complex academic study.

I'm kinda hoping they'll say that since my major is in secondary education and I'm in a university it won't qualify. Then I'll be done. I think, believe it or not, I'd feel better about that than actually having to go through this tribulation. It will certainly not have been a waste and I could write a good educational essay or two, or even a book, including what I've learned that is not sanctioned in any academic way. That would be FAR more satisfying to me!

You know what the crazy thing about this is? I didn't even come close to finishing. There are several more pages of hoops to jump through described in the Capstone Project Guide. 

Fuck it Dude. Let's go bowling.