The Normalization of Greed

 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:

I followed Gretzky's career closely. Back while he was getting lambasted by many who were looking for a flaw in his greatness for making way too much money, I thought it was excessive too. I would have been happy for a million bucks back then to retire on for the rest of my life. Even less. This would be my high school and university years when I had plenty of life left. NOW I'd still be happy with a million bucks to retire on. Even less. I have fewer years left now though.

That illustration with Ago da .com is just one way all of this inflation has happened and has happened so quickly. 

Robert Reich

@RBReich

The clearest picture of corporate greed in this country is CEO-to-worker pay ratios. At the 100 lowest-paying major US companies, CEO pay averaged $17.2M in 2024. Median worker pay at these companies was just $35,570. That’s a ratio of 632 to 1. How can anyone defend this?

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.

Pedo Pumpkinhead

 I just registered for my final master's course... again. I've taken three consecutive terms off due mostly to logistical problems that arose in Canada with taking online courses. I did one while living with brother Rob and Sis-in-law Terri, and one while staying at sister Jenn and brother-in-law Marty's, but that was it. So of the four countries in which I've done courses in my international M.Ed., I'm back in the one where it has proven to be most doable. I reckon I'd better be because this capstone course has so far proven to be anything BUT doable in itself. Here's the description: "Students will conduct the planned data collection..." okay stop right there. This is just one of the problems I had when I did the first week of this "capstone" course last winter. Do we plan the data collection or do we actually conduct it? The teacher I had didn't seem to be able to distinguish the difference. It continues... "and analysis activities contained in their applied research proposal and prepare a capstone project consisting of a deliverable..." and they've had to parenthetically decipher this term because nobody who attempted this monstrosity, again, including the professor, could define it or even why it had to be ciphered in the first place. My guess is that old two meanings of "academic" again. Let's complixify, obfuscate, and confuse in order to appear more "academic" or "sophisticated." The term "deliverable" proved to be highly academic since it was a practical irrelevance. "(a curriculum product or curriculum management plan) and a rationale..." again this needs to be parenthetically un-academified ... (a final written report that describes and interprets the results of their research)." 

Here's the problem, the rub, the built-in absurdity of this exercise in futility that makes a monster of a mere academic activity: because of liability infringement and ACTUAL data collection meeting with issues of intellectual property, the university has had to alter this program to one of secondary research. That is, the student will find OTHER people's research that was done after meeting the complicated conditions that infringe no laws or personal rights and freedoms of the school, students, or parents thereof, and ACT as though it is their own. Again, during my first crack at this enigma, this led to confusion over exactly what we had to fabricate and what had to be genuine. For instance, I had to come up with the name of a school and a principal of that school and create two phony letters, one asking for the school's permission to conduct my research, and one granting it. I made up the name "Terry Fox High School." It turned out that there IS a Terry Fox High School so I couldn't use the name because it was too real. Then there were things that the professor at first called "amazing" and later told me were not real enough. You can imagine the frustration.

It is my opinion that they wanted research projects to be published in order to give the school more credibility in their search for regional accreditation. Students have been trying to write these fake research projects for a few terms now and the school has since achieved regional accreditation from the same accreditation body as Berkeley and Stanford. So why can't we just write normal thesises? Thesi? Theses. Third time's the charm. What a brilliant illustration of academia we have right there!

The school wants us, like every course wanted us, to include in our theses how studying at the University of the People has broadened our educational philosophies and "informed our pedagogies." So they want us to incorporate some of the learning we've encountered along the way into these, our capstone courses. Fine and dandy! Let's do THAT! I'll write about things I enjoyed about my studies till now. Why in the name of Paulo Freire do we have to engage in this academic chicanery? It makes no kind of sense at all! It almost makes me, and plenty of the other students, want to quit after three years of study and achieving A's in every course. I REALLY don't want to do this! While writing a proper thesis would be enjoyable, this ersatz research project will be the exact opposite of enjoyment for me. Had I known this bogey was what was waiting at the end of this academic rainbow, I seriously wouldn't have embarked on this pot of gold Wipeout obstacle course! And that this abortion of proper education need be spawned while concurrently teaching full time makes it all the less appealing. 

But I gotta finish, right? After all the time and money invested... even though the "almost master's" helped get me the job I currently have. Anyhoo, attempt number 2 is due to begin Sept. 3, brother Rob's birthday. That will be roughly the start of my second semester of teaching here in Korea as well. Maybe exactly. Not sure. I'm also not sure if the wifi in the dorms where I live will be good enough. Unbelievably, here in Korea, the most wired country in the world, we have shitty connectivity. This caused problems in Canada with Perrla, the online program through which I write my papers and store my research. When I was using a phone hotspot at my Mom's place because she had no internet Perrla did not work. I PAY for this service and somehow ALL of my stored books, research papers, studies, and information I need to incorporate into my capstone bullshit research project disappeared. They were gone like Kaiser Sosay. Pffft! I'm hoping that just had something to do with the slow internet I got with the phone hotspot, but I'm also not sure about that. Suffice to say I am expecting this final course to be a long and arduous journey of pedantic, electronic, and academic woe. But with an attitude like that I can only be pleasantly surprised, right?

Check this out. Scroll down till you see my face and read. We're not opposed to fracturing a few facts up in this bitch.

I've let this post die on the vine. Sour like damp clothes forgotten in the washing machine. I have other things on my mind, but, since this is MY blog and nobody's the boss of it but me, I'm just gonna continue this post as tangentially as frig. Ever write a comment on someone's Facebook post that is pure gold and you want it to be seen by more people than might view the comment? I just did that. Now that I think about it, it won't be seen by more people HERE, but I want to post it nonetheless just for posterity... to have it written down somewhere it might be stumbled across in the future. It was a comment about Trump's undoubtable inclusion in "The Epstein Files." It's hilarious that the people of the country are so invested in maintaining the self-delusion that Trump didn't support Epstein's pedophilia, or that he isn't one himself, that they have this clandestine, Ian Fleming-esque title for the whole affair. James Bond's newest adventure, The Epstein Files! But Trump isn't Bond, he's Blowfeld. (intentional misspelling) Anyways, here's the comment: 

In my opinion, to a lot of people wealthy enough that they can DO anything, life loses its luster. They tire of humdrum pastimes that have been done by people who are not as extraordinary as they believe themselves to be. They begin to seek out activities that their wealth allows them to GET AWAY WITH. Trump is not the problem. He's a highly visible symptom of the money sickness that is the problem with the American culture. The first step in solving this problem is admitting it exists and Americans are socialized to believe their country is unbroken. Empire destroying hubris. It's a symptom not unique to Pedo Pumpkinhead.

Pedo Pumkinhead. lol I don't know if anyone else has used this moniker for His Orangeness but I believe I invented it. I hadn't heard it before my fingers typed it this morning. Go ahead and use it if you want. 

Well, I think I know my Halloween costume this year.

I gotta finish this post! Holy crap! Longest post EVER!

So I just taught my last class of my first semester. It's now Thursday, Aug. 14. It's a long weekend in Korea. I didn't teach the whole 10 weeks but most of it. There were a ton of things wrong but that's the beauty of coming here when I did. Me and two other teachers are going to be able to mold this program into something that (besides being profitable) will actually be educational! We've already taken major steps to make the next semester much better. The biggest of those was to hire more teachers. And instead of doing four rounds of mock IELTS tests and the other 6 weeks from IELTS books we just copied, killing as much forest in tree country N. America as a small forest fire, we chose texts. We all had more than 30 students in our classes this term. We're teaching IELTS so we need to try to replicate IELTS test conditions as closely as possible. No chance of doing that with classes of 30.

I mean there's just no way. So our job was to suffer through the hot as balls Korean summer with students who didn't want to be here in classes that were too big for any teacher to teach... and we did it! Congratulations to Lawton and Dima, my co-teachers. They were also instrumental in brainstorming tweaks and changes, and (frankly) major renovations to the curriculum so that the incoming 5 or 6 new teachers won't have to navigate their ways through what we did this term. I think we did pretty good. (I know. Just shut up with your grammar correcting. I'm off the clock.) Pretty well...

So now it's a long weekend in Korea. We all were told we needed to submit grades, attendance, and report cards.... TODAY. But after giving his head a shake, our BALLI BALLI leader Absi decided there's no reason to ask for all that BEFORE THE SEMESTER IS OVER. We still have to teach one more class Monday! So he graciously gave us the weekend to do all that. We're STILL gonna submit all that stuff before the semester is over, but at least we get the weekend. Truth be told, I was gonna do it all this weekend anyway. I have an appointment in Seoul August 20 with Amber to do a quiz night in Hae Bang Chon. I will NOT be missing that! Plus I have to buy shirts, food, glasses, insulin, and a few other things I just can't get in Sokcho. I'm not gonna say Sokcho is a hole just yet. Maybe I'm just not finding the good places to shop. But if my ten trips to the bank before I could get an account here are any indication, I'm in the fuckin sticks folks. Gangneung was a cosmopolitan metropolis compared to this backwoods berg, as far as I can tell.

But we're off for the long weekend. And so are the students I teach. They've been okay, but highly unmotivated and whiney to be honest. I even taught them the Korean phrase, Jing Jing Daejima. It means don't whine. But they still whine. It's hard for me to submit to their (FREQUENT) requests to mark them present when they're absent, but this school makes them do all sorts of shit, like banking, immigration, visa gymnastics, that even I, a grizzled veteran of Korea have an absolute ball-breaker of a time trying to accomplish. And they always have deadlines. Plus they have my classes, other classes, Korean classes, and (none of them have) jobs. I totally relate to them! Sept. 3 I start a part time job too studying my final class of my master's. Not to mention that I am in the same dorms as them and the air con is shyte at the best of times. So I really WANT to mark them present when they are absent, but according to Korean visa laws I can't. In fact I am in danger of being considered an enabler or abettor or co-conspirator if I contribute to their voluntary breach of student visa laws. I could even be punished. Fined. Deported even! 

Today my student Prakash, who has sauntered into class late on most days without a care in the world, suddenly needs no more than 1 absent to get his scholarship. I have erased several of his lates and VERY lates. He knows he's received more clemency than he deserves because I'm sensitive to the student plight here. Now he wants to push it more. He even sent me an email. I know if I consent to this casual class attender and give him his 1 absent in a term when he should have at least half a dozen, I'll just be opening the floodgates. I'll be making the next semester harder for myself AND all the other teachers. But the scholarship is significant! Like sometimes 70 or even 100% tuition paid! This kid is from Bangladesh or Nepal (not sure which). He's not from a rich country although I think he's rich in his country, which causes this entitled behaviour. I'm in a quandary.

And this is just ONE kid. It's the hardest place I've ever taught by a long shot already! It seems like every kid, and they ARE kids, has their own special set of circumstances that I could be a hardass about or sensitive to. I've been lecturing more than I like to just to get these kids to an understanding that they are here, it sucks, but rather than bitch about it, it would do them a world of good to embrace the suck and come out with a higher degree that they couldn't hope for in their countries. I can't be too sensitive or they take advantage (like kids if you give them an inch they'll take a mile), but I can't be too tough on them cuz they're trying very hard to do something that will earn them the approval of untold relatives, friends, and maybe themselves. I don't know them well enough yet, and probably never will, to be privy to THOSE deets. 

The three teachers have decided that we will be pretty forgiving, even though it is an absurd chance to take for kids we hardly know, shouldering the culpability, and the possibility of punishment as severe as deportation, for their absence when we're positive they just shut the alarm off and turned over for another hour of sleep. But in their situations it is probably the right thing to do. We just have to find a way to keep up our strict exteriors and not let on that we're just powerless softies underneath. I haven't had kids but I've suffered plenty of the whips and scorns of parenthood!

I need scotch. This weekend when I'm finalizing grades and attendance for these truant students I think the best thing I can do is take a stiff belt and fudge the totals so they'll qualify for their scholarships. Despite the fact that few of them have. Due, of course, to circumstances that I dare not share......

What the hell? I'll do it all for Liberation Day. That's what August 15th is in Korea. I'm pretty sure it's the day they were delivered from Japanese rule. In a way I'll be liberating my students. ha ha ha. Even though I'm pretty sure some, or maybe most of them have just been lazy. I have some students who come to every class, even on time, and they have the same circumstances as the ones I might be playing Santa Claus to. There is NOTHING, I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I hate more than rewarding the bad students while penalizing the good ones. 

I'm sure somewhere in the bowels of this blog you can find this story but I'll tell it again because it comes to bear. I once taught at a college in Yangju called Seojeong College. There they hired me without sharing the most important factoid that they obviously wanted to hide because they needed an honest person who would balk at the job if they were aware of this factoid. I, in fact, worked an entire semester at this "school" before I became aware of this undisclosed factoid. You see there was a 70% minimum grade at Seojeong College. I had a few students who had never come to class that I was being told at grading time to bestow upon their goldbricking, greazy hides a 70% grade. I would not be able to pick them out of a line of murder suspects, but I was being ordered to give them 70%. This, I looked up in the academic laws of Korea, was compulsory academic fraud. I seriously DID look it up and not only are we supposed to disobey employers to demand or even suggest we commit academic fraud such as this, we are OBLIGATED to report them to the authorities. So I was in a quandary then too. Report them - lose job. Sign falsified grades - lose academic integrity.

What would you have done? I said screw you, screw you, screw him, screw her, I'm not doing this. So they sent a barrage of people who fancied themselves to be superior negotiators, each with their own transparent and deceitful plans to get me to comply. I batted them away like mosquitos at a Korean summer barbecue. Finally the guy who I had dealt with most, my translator, the man who I could not have survived at Seojeong without was given money and told to take me out to an expensive dinner. There we talked and he said what all the other suitors had tried to ply me with. Sign the grades please. I gave him the two options I gave everyone else: You doctored my grades to give everyone 70% or more, you sign them, I won't. Option two: I'll sign the REAL grades. 

I don't think I need to explain but I will. You see, all the good students' grades were NOT doctored. They stayed as what they had earned doing the weeks and weeks of work that I had assigned them. The only grades that were altered were those of the people who hadn't put forth sufficient effort, hadn't had sufficient intelligence, or hadn't attended class at all. In short reward the shit students and PENALIZE the good ones. The exact opposite of academic integrity. What kind of teacher would I be to agree to such a travesty?

But my cohort, I'll be damned if I can remember his name all these years hence but he was a nice guy, said, "Okay, the school has just paid for us to eat a nice steak and shrimp dinner. Please sign the fake grades. You don't need to use you actual signature." So I signed "Homer Simpson" and lo and behold, the grades went through! I quit that job after my one-year contract was up and after signing "Homer Simpson" to 4 semesters of doctored grades. His was the signature that I had to use to form a successful marriage between me and Seojeong College I guess you could say. 

Try explaining THAT at the interview for your next job when they ask you why you quit your previous job. I have been put in similar positions more times than I want to think about here in Korea, yet, it's still the best place I've ever worked.

So anyways, long story short (TOO LATE) I don't think it'll be my largest accosting of my little angels of integrity and honesty that I have okayed with my little devils. You know the ones that sit on our shoulders. We've all had to choose between one or the other on many occasions. Suffice to say the thought of progressing toward something better (and maybe more honest) has hastened my reluctant support of the devil on my shoulder this time. Me and my shoulder angel talked about it and agreed that down the road we'd probably be kicking the devil's arse. We're losing the battle but winning the war.

Ever wonder why I drink? Ever wonder if I was drunk while writing the blog post you're reading? Right now? Yes. But I earned it. 

And, at long last, I have completed this post!

Back in RO, Back in the RO, Back in the ROSK

 I'm back! In the Republic of South Korea. Or the R.O.S.K as nobody calls it. I'm watching my beloved Kia Tigers play while typing this. I have all my lessons planned and copying done for the week. Did all my laundry and shopping today too. Most importantly, all the paperwork and pencil-pushing powertrippin' hoop-jumping is done. So I'm here for the year. The first pic of the day is the best:

It's only temporary until the card comes, but it sure is beautiful isn't it? That's my alien registration card/paper. So I'm officially an alien once again. This will allow me to do some things like get an apartment, phone, cable, a bank account, you know... exist. I thought it was cause for celebration. My first Cass since coming back. I had such a bad cold I didn't have another one. Yes on day 2 of my latest tour of Korea I caught the requisite aircon cold. My second day kicked my ass and the third day was the field trip to the Korean Folk Village. It was about a million degrees and 101% humidity but I walked about 10,000 steps around the place trying to replicate some old photos from 1997. Here are two of them:

I don't know if you can tell how badly I wanted to drop to the ground and have about a 12-hour nappy-poo, but I was doggin' it big time! You know how the first days of a cold are when you just don't want to do anything? This was one of them. 

I got one of the girls to take this one. I wish I had taken HER pic. She looked really good in her hanbok. A few of the students wore Korean traditional clothes during the visit. I thought that was cool of them. 

This was one of my students even though the original was just a random Korean dude who jumped on the paddle like a Banshee. Whatever that means. 

It was okay to be in a bit of a lying position actually. If it weren't frowned upon I might have taken a nap on the whoopin' bench but, alas, whoopin' benches are for whoopins. 

This was with my friend Park Ki Pok. I wonder what he's up to these days...

And the overzealous volunteer paddler. I wonder what he's up to these days...

I also replicated a pic of me eating some of the hanging corn. One of my students took that pic and hasn't emailed it to me yet. There was one of me and Ki Pok in the jail too but I couldn't find the chairs inside the jail. That may have changed. Other than that the Folk Village was almost exactly the same. 

It hasn't been a really rough transition although the cold didn't help. It's almost gone as I type this. Only 3 really bad days. I think the moment it sunk in that I'm back in Korea was standing in the immigration line-up after the Hong Kong to Seoul leg of my flight. This is what I saw on the bag of the person in front of me:

BTS luggage tag. This was not a Korean either, we were in the foreigners line-up.

After getting through that line-up I met my good friends Amber and DB and Guns and Claire with Hyun Woo. It was great to see them all! 

We sorta had lunch together. I had 2 CORONA??? beers. That's all they had at the airport restaurant where we ate. We didn't have much time though. Everybody was working the next day including me and I didn't even know if I had a place to sleep that night. 

I tried to get a U+ phone at the airport but they said I needed to go to an official supplier if I wanted one that could make purchase verifications or some crap like that. Not sure I really DO want one like that but waited for another day. 

Amber and DB went home (they live in Incheon) and Guns drove me from Incheon to the Seoul Express Bus Terminal where I caught a bus to Sokcho. Sunday afternoon Seoul traffic. I coulda biked quicker I think. I was wired. No sleep for a day and a half. Poor Guns. I was just talking non stop and Claire and the boy were sawing logs in the back seat. Anyway, I made it to Sokcho where Lawton picked me up at the bus station and drove me to the campus. Lawton is one of the other teachers. 

I think I got to the dorms at around 7 PM and there was a bed with a plastic covered mattress and no pillow or blanket. The teacher I was going to replace, Don, gave me a pillow and blanket and I took the plastic off the mattress. The aircon wasn't working and it was hot and muggy. I would have slipped off the mattress otherwise. Next day Don sold/gave me some stuff and I'm better sorted sleep-wise. But even in the sweaty Korean Monsoon night I was able to sleep. I didn't come close to catching up on my sleep but I slept like a dead man. Next day I learned about the limited usage of the air conditioning.

First of all the 2-4 AM is bullshit. I tried. Noon while eating lunch is right. Also there's air available to cool off after showering around 6 or 7 in the morning. So the hours are off but still... come ON man! Luckily, one of the things Don sold me was a fan. It's getting a lot of use lemme tell you!

Other than that though the room in the dorm is excellent! Great big desk with LOADS of room. A full sized fridge. Wardrobe and dresser. A decent bed. I had to scoff a chair from the building I teach in but other than that I'm set up. I have a shower room. and toilet that are separate. Never seen that. I like it. Also have a sink in the bedroom. I'll make that into a cooking area soon enough. I'll get used to the limited air. Hey, this is for free.

What I may not get used to is the incarceration portion of the dorms. Every night the doors are locked. Can't get in or out if we tried. I don't think anyone can. If it's not some sort of illegal confinement or a violation of freedoms, it's definitely a fire hazard. This is the sort of shit that people cry, "We should have done something!" about AFTER they are shoveling up charred remains of the unfortunates who could have easily escaped the blaze but couldn't get out the mag locked doors or through the barred windows. 

This is temporary but might be long-term temporary lodging. 

Just warshed the bedding in the coin laundromat today. What a find that was! Dryers! 

Not a bad place to plan lessons from.

So that's where I am crashing now. It's clean, big, and pretty much free. The internet comes and goes but not bad. 

THIS, however, this is where the magic happens. The magic of taking mock tests and learning how to take those tests better. That's IELTS. It's not the most challenging of gigs. Loads of marking and photocopying so the workload is up there, but I don't get to be very creative very often. The first week was probably as close to my old teaching days as I'm likely to get for this year. But while I'm thinking about teaching literature to students who really want to learn I can look out my classroom window and see this:

Yup that's Sorak Mountain in the distance. 

Here it is from an intersection in town. Tantalizingly close! Oh sure I can walk to the beach in 15 minutes but I'm a mountain man. Beach SMEACH! The mountains are beautiful. And speaking of beautiful, the campus is nice like most here in Korea. It's great to live in the place with the highest concentration of greenery in town! The other day some of the students were shaking a tree right above the soccer field, which is right outside the dorm doors. I noticed some fruit falling. It was an apricot tree. I picked one up and ate it. Nice and sour!

This is the kind of stuff you see springing up around Sokcho these days. It's becoming a big resort beach town. It's hard to tell how big that building is from the pic. It's right off campus. Just down the road from the main gate. 

This is the main gate. Jong moon. You can see what looks like a church but is actually a library. 

This is what I am going to call Windmill Lake. It's just to the right of the blue security shack above as you exit the uni. It's a pretty popular place for students to contemplate their futures.

Here it is at night. I'm told there are fish in Windmill Lake. I bet there are some carp in there. Who know though, maybe a bass or two. It'll be a while before I try my luck I think. 

This is walking up the hill (of course) from the blue shack. The building on the right is where I teach. Behind the trees on the left out of sight is the kee sook sa (dorms) building. That's where I'm typing this now. You can see lots of flags and signs about global this and that as you walk up the hill. This is the global campus. It would be nice to have a wider variety like I did at Gongju Dae. All my students are from Bangladesh and Nepal but hope springs eternal. The goal is to get students from other parts of the world and make it a truly global enterprise.

Well, I think I'm going to catch the 11 PM air conditioning and then call it a night. The Tigers lost. Boohoo :-(

So it's nose to the grindstone for a year. Thanks to everyone who made this possible! This could be a pivotal year in my life. I'm feeling odd right now. What is this strange belly/brain combo? Might be positivity. I'll need more time to look into this...

And Back To Korea...

 This was me last night eating steak and prawn dinner with Tyler/Rachel, Dylan/Danielle at a really great little place where Thursday is steak night. It was delish! 

I don't know exactly when Dylan shot this pic but judging from the look on my face, it might have been when I was regaling the group on the previous three days' adventure in ticket booking. How would you describe my facial expression? Confused with a hint of anger and maybe some overtones of offense? Perhaps in the spirit of my choice of apparel on the evening "Oh my FUCK! Not again!"

But before you tighten up your bindings for yet another trundle down How-Can-All-This-Shit-Happen-To-Just-One-Guy Lane, check out what Dylan and AI did with this pic! First he filtered it with Japanimation like the Spirited Away style and this is what came up:

Gotta love those Japanimators! They got rid of the wrinkles in the shirt (not to mention its wearer), shaved my arm hair, and got rid of about 50 lbs. of gut weight. Look at the stuff on the shelves and the finishing of the T-shirt animation. That is spectacular! But wait, there's more! He also put the pic through a Simpsons filter and made a long-time dream of mine come true. Behold, me as a Simpsons character:

Isn't that something? I love the beer! They also cut the arm hair and the wrinkles but left me a Homeresque gut and, of course, amputated one finger from each hand. Technology! Just when you're ready to condemn it all it totally redeems itself!

And now, as promised, the ordeal of finding the best ticket to Korea. Pour yourself a stiff one and wake the kids and get some coffee into them. This is an odyssey. I have a 5-hour layover in Vancouver and a few hours in Hong Kong where I'm hoping to add to this. It's not over yet...