Monday, December 06, 2004


just imagine the message we're sending....

Xenophobia

Xenophobia is officially fear of strangers, but what do you call a fear of travelling home for Christmas? The Phobia list has a word for fear of trains and train travel (Siderodromophobia), but what of the fear of returning to one's 'homeland'? (Yes, that's a cheap play on the word 'Homeland Security', that ever-so-3rd Reich-ish sounding name)

Well, if you find a word for it, let me know. I'm officially suffering from fear of the Homeland....of course, it could be worse, I could be North Korean and suffering from fear of somebody else's Homeland - or just being North Korean might totally suck....

It's finals week over here in college-land, and every day that I wake up I try to be grateful for this job which fell on my head like Manna and saved me from languishing in China, selling a product that no one really wanted to buy (American Education) or, more accurately, a product that no one actually believed they could use (since they would never get the visa in the first place)

I'm sitting pretty, at least for today, because I got up early to go play Faculty Soccer, only to discover that the game was cancelled on account of rain - yesterday's rain. Now that's my kind of pansies - I'm also grateful that in order to schmooze with the long term faculty here, I'm not required to grovel in the dirt in ritualistic macho fantasies like Rugby.

Do I need to get up early? Absolutely. For some reason it takes me an hour to get showered and dressed, half to eat, and half to do my exercise and putter around doing things in this tiny 10 X 10 studio. All of that just to get to work at 11 on a Tuesday morning, which is my perfect world's version of Monday at 9. Yeah, this is the best job ever!...

Worst of all is that I neglected to mention that I live only 90 seconds from the office - and maybe 3 minutes max to the classroom. Doesn't get sweeter than that. I keep thinking of David Byrne's song 'Lazy'...

Gotta run and go give those little stress monkeys their final test. The only hard decision is whether or not to wear the 'knife-through-the-head' prop as a goodbye gift to them.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

I'm Back! On Iraq!

Finally figured out how to get back on my blog site, and building this up again will at least give me something to do during Christmas vacation besides donating one of my kidneys to my ailing neice...

Speaking of Iraq, sometimes it seems as though we in Korea are right next door. We are, as some of you may know, daily subjected to the presence of thousands of U.S. soldiers, from the street point of view one sees mostly the grunts in the bars of Hong Dae (my neighborhood, the 'Ginza'/'Times Square' of Seoul) against military regulations (seems there was a knifing incident a while back that put this neighborhood off limits to them )

So the other night I was out with my partner in grime, Regan the Kiwi...Being young and foolish, he loves to hang out in a place he refers to as 'The Dirty Bar'. Actually, the official name of the bar is "The Bar" if one is to believe the sign hanging over the door. Like most bars in this area (actually in the neighboring 'Ginza' district) it is small, dingy and dirty. I don't know what makes this bar any dirtier than the rest, but it certainly qualifies for the name.

The dirty bar is usually full of English Teachers and their girlfriends, English Teachers looking for girlfriends, and girls looking for English -teaching boyfriends. Did I leave any permutations out? Oh yes, and the aforementioned, illegally trespassing soldiers.

I don't normally 'fraternize' with anybody with a crewcut or a near-mohawk, but this night, something struck me about these three lanky, gawky, insecure types who had somehow put their testosterone behind them long enough to have a short conversation.

They were from Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York, probably from poor families. They seemed, like most cannonfodder, a little nervous but generally clueless about what lay ahead of them. I plucked up my nerve and confirmed that they were being sent to the battlefields of Iraq.

For a moment, I almost felt as if I were living in the era of Vietnam, and watching the innocents about to be shipped off to the slaughterhouse, where one either ended up becoming a butcher onself, or another parcel for the meathook...

I touched my forehead and then theirs and said "there. I've loaned you my angel. Just try to remember that the people trying to kill you are just that...people who just want you to leave their country." I didn't say it exactly like that of course, but to preserve our mutual face we didn't need to mention the unmentionables. They were at that very minute technically AWOL, because of the military proscription on this neighborhood - so both of us decided not to throw stones at eachother's glass hovels.

2 days after that I was in the fleamarketplace and looking at piles of rubbish that people thought was worth selling, and came across a whole box (about 25 kilos) of 'medallions' (like medals without ribbons) that had been minted for the u.s. army - god knows how they give them out, in what sort of ceremony - for different companies and battalions, with all of their arcane insignia and pseudo-neo heraldry. We found several from Iraq, with the map of Iraq on the background, and 'Operation Iraqi Liberation' printed on the edges with the date 2003.

Jeez. The war is old enough for its detritus to end up in a Korean flea market junk pile. That's not just tragic, it's weird.

nuff for now.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

cloudburst

Last night, Beijing turned from a desert into a swamp. It amazes me how the right weather condtions can make almost any Asian city look and feel like Bangkok. Of course there's no 24-hour pad thai around the corner from here, but there are some pretty decent Chinese restaurants.

What about Chinese food in China? What's scary to me is to see the rapid proliferation of KFC (Kill for Cash) and MacDonnie's springing up all over the face of a land that for so many thousands of years, prided themselves on their good taste in food. What does this say about the Chinese, and what does it say about the human race in general?

Sometimes it seems as if the only thing 'Chinese' about the China of the future will be the color red in the McDonald's decoration scheme....

Back to the thunder and lightning...big,Volkswagen-sized drops of rain drenched the inner courtyard. Our poor little thirsty goldfish were probably out there with their little gasping dry mouths to the heavens; just the same day, I had noticed that the larger ones were forced to swim on their side, just in order to navigate the shallow pond...

Now the morning has developed quite nicely, it looks beautiful outside but I'm still trying to decide whether I should register with the police, as per the law (Chinese law says foreigners must register within 24 hours of arrival..not very practical if you've come off a long flight and don't speak the language). It's such a pack of complete nonsense, this whole business of registration- they would have me spend most of my vacation time fooling around with this kind of nonsense...