More dirty, dirty politics

I've been meaning to put this up for a while. It's a nifty little 45-minute flick called Money as Debt, which I find fascinating, primarily because I have always been bit baffled by the very concept of money and a whole whole lot baffled by the idea of credit, and now I know why!

Maybe it's all batshit liberal mindrot, but if it is, it's the really good stuff that gets even Ron Paul loonies excited.

Credit where credit is due: I found this (weeks ago) on Ashlee's blog (good on you, darlin'!). I highly recommend visiting; she is both a better writer and a far more frequent updater than I am.

Never a dull moment at the Sehgyeh Wehgukwoh Hagweon, Part 3

Jeez. You guys. You'd think someone whose already spotty update record takes a six-week hit might actually lose readership. You'd think a blogger who spends most of what he does write whining about how tired he is might, I dunno, alienate a few folks. You'd think that y'all had better things to do, what with the collapse of Western Civilization and all. But no.

Which goes to prove what I've said all along: all of you sweet and loving people are plainly out of your tiny minds.

Seriously, though, I'm touched. It's not difficult to lose contact, to wait for the next go-round and pick up where things leave off; god knows I've done it plenty of times. And I'm still convinced that these posts are a bit like some vacation slideshow, where you sit and watch and go "Yeah, I get it, you really were in Korea" (only less interesting, because it's not like I actually talk about Korea all that much). So it's a thrill (a kind of weird thrill) to know that you guys really do read this stuff and really do wait for more stuff to read.

Particular shout-outs to Dad, Jesse, Lauren, Rob (thanks for that; I hate Internet people just a little bit more now), and Ronnie who posted comments the day I posted. Extra-special super hugs to Claire, who somehow actually tracked me down on my work email that like, no one has to make sure I was still alive. Excellent job, kiddo. Best. Guilt trip. Ever.

And so, just so you know all that fresh, hot guilt isn't going to waste, I'm making a promise here and now to update every week. I'm not promising it'll be good, or even long, but I do promise to get something up here once every seven days, give or take, at least to prove I'm still breathing.

So, that. I guess now I should get on with the updatin'. There definitely has been news.

Things started mostly in September with Haseyo getting sacked. Now, I can't say I didn't see it coming, but it did go down in a fairly squirrelly fashion I'm not particularly comfortable with. Here's the deal: Haseyo is -- how do I put this politely -- a shameless letch. Seriously. Love the man, and he was a stout fella to me those first couple of months, but he's a bit, uh, single-minded, and -- more to the point -- not shy about it. This is not exactly an asset in a country so socially conservative that holding hands on a first date is considered trampy. Not surprisingly, he had a bit of a reputation, and of course, that's no good. I think, considering, that Andy was building a case against him since July or before. He actually pigeonholed me about it about three weeks in, asking me about his "one-night stands;" and later, when he was driving me to the hospital after my accident, he wanted to know if the student who had helped translate for me earlier was one of Haseyo's girlfriends. And, of course, not a word to Haseyo. The whole thing was, frankly, kinda creepy. Finally in September, the day before Chuseok, Director Kim got him in his office and fired him, ostensibly for falling class attendance.

I should say here, unequivocally, that Haseyo never schtupped a student. Of this I am sure. If he had, he'd have told me. Really, he'd have told me all about it.

I guess he's landed on his feet though. He got to stay out the month and look for new work. Andy (in one of his more "what the fuck?" moments) even wrote him a recommendation letter. And so now Haseyo's in Seoul teaching kindergarten, making more than the rest of us, with his own cubicle and computer.

And Hooker Hill in walking distance.

What bugs me is that this is probably the first you've heard about this.

Well, fuck me. I just can't run out of reasons why I'm so very, very glad I'm not in the United States right now.

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1 - Armytimes.com Article

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1 - Militarytimes.com Forums

Not a joke, kids. Check the URLs. And then freak out and leave. Or consider taking advantage of your second amendment rights.

Christ, I hate being right.

Political Interlewd

Huh. Well. So some of my additional news (which I didn't get to over the weekend; sorry) was that I voted. Absentee and online, which probably means that whatever I marked, I voted for McCain and Palin. Well, as I've been saying a lot these days, gosh, I'm glad I'm out of the country. What follows is what began as a reply to an email I got yesterday with a couple of poliblog links. Good old-fashioned paranoid liberal mind-rot, which, in this day and age, means terrifyingly likely liberal mind-rot. I recommend reading the blog posts, because they're interesting and insightful political commentary, and ignoring most of my commentary, because it's not. Except for the bit about Obama and FISA. Call me nutty, but I actually think that's important.

--- On Sat, 10/4/08, D____ wrote:
From: D_____
Subject:
To: "T_____" , "C_____" , "Niko" , "J_____"
Date: Saturday, October 4, 2008, 5:27 AM

I am sending the links to these articles only to you four, unless I get
a bite from G_____ or U_____.  I should have the confidence of my
convictions, namely the guts, to send it to them anyway, but I don't. 
This is information you probably already have but, in case you don't, I
send these to read.  The stakes are very high this November.  We really
need to take back our country.  To me, that Congress passed the
"bail-out bill" is a very, very, very bad sign.


---D_____


http://themovingtarget.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/news-from-the-vp-
debate-the-mccain-palin-coup/



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/the-battle-plan-ii-
sarah_b_128393.html

As to whether to send these on to G_____ or U_____, I hesitate to say, except to consider this: the ideologies referred to in the articles, and the ideologies of the Bush/Cheney/Rovian cabal of the last eight (or fifteen, depending on when you want to start counting) are emphatically not traditional Republican concepts. Traditional Republicans are fiscal conservatives (remember the "tax-and-spend Democrats" of the eighties?), not $630 billion war-mongers or $810 billion bailout advocates. More importantly, traditional Republicans are mostly interested in limiting centralized (i.e., Federal) government, and advocate deconcentrating power by turning it over to the individual states. They certainly aren't interested in heaping it all in one wing of the White House. Republicans, all things considered, are relatively sane folks.

These psychos aren't Republicans (as G_____ pointed out to me a couple years ago, during what was, admittedly, our one and only conversation about politics); they're Neo-Cons. And Neo-Cons are, as far as I can tell, more or less indiscriminate power-mongers. What I find deeply upsetting about them is that they appropriate Republican language in order to further their own radical goals. "No tax-and-spend" became "No new taxes," which turned into tax cuts and deregulation (for businesses and the wealthy). And, since Republicans have always tended to have more faith in laissez-faire capitalism, there's your rationale. Even Sarah Palin kept going on and on about how government has to "get outta the way" of individuals (and individual businesses), which, amazingly, is why she's for expanding vice-presidential executive power.

And, of course, what fuels all of this and gives it legitimacy is fear, both realized and imagined. Both sides tell us America isn't safe, as though safety were all that mattered. (Here is where I digress and point out that one thing that I do not like about Obama is that he voted for the FISA bill this year. You know, that bill that grants immunity to all the telecom companies like AT&T who assisted the government in its illegal wiretapping? Yeah, Obama okayed that one. And apparently Joe Biden and I are the only ones who think that wasn't cool. Chill out, kids, I still voted for him.) I often like to suggest that security and liberty are a zero-sum game -- the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Hey, the safest neighborhoods in America are Mafia 'hoods.

Another thing I like to suggest (with a certain gleeful self-righteousness these days) is that everyone go traveling. Of the vast myriad of things Americans are scared stupid of, one of the most prevalent, insidious, and long-lasting is "dem damn furriners," particularly the brown varieties. A little worldliness gives a little perspective and dispels a lot of one's extraneous, if systemic, racism.

I'm preaching to the choir, of course. And I imagine that I'm continuing to when I say that, despite my misgivings about Obama (he's really not that radical, he really is that inexperienced, and there's that damn FISA vote), and despite the apparent shallowness of saying so, I voted for him, and not in small part because he's black.

This is an interesting assessment of Palin succinctly articulating the lingering, not-quite-conscious fears people have about Obama. Hint: it ain't the "inexperience."

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo....

In her character attack, Palin questions Obama's association with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground....

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

So there you are. Obama, I strongly suspect, is not the messiah the lefties hope for. But I don't think he'll completely suck, either. And I'm pretty sure he isn't the smiley-faced spearhead of American fascism that Sarah Palin is. The thing is, as long as he doesn't completely bollix the job (and hey, even if he does, right?), we have at least four years to get used to a presidential face that isn't fish-belly white. We might be a little less terrified of "not like us." Next go-round, we might be willing to consider another one or two, or maybe a woman, or maybe even -- gasp -- a homosexual. Call me batty, but I think a little more flavor in the stew is a good thing.

Who am I kidding? 59 million Americans, remember? See you in the re-education camps, kids.

Never a dull moment at the Sehgyeh Wehgukwoh Hagweon, Part 1

Jeez. You guys. You'd think I died or something. I'm okay. Really. Dad, don't send the Red Cross after me. What I am -- what I have been for the past month -- is wiped the hell out. September has been monumentally busy. And, so you know and have fair warning, it's not getting any better this month.

I'm not really sure where to begin. Rather a lot has occurred. Really, kinda everything has turned upside-down in thirty days.

Okay, so, work. I'll start there, since that's about eighty percent of my life these days. I think I mentioned that the sked got all gnarly on me. It looked basically like this:

6.35 am: Pour myself out of bed and into a nice pair of pants. Try to remember if I washed my hair yesterday or the day before.

7 am: Intermediate conversation. I've got a book and 14 people to entertain with it. For an hour. At, I repeat, 7 in the morning. Thank god for the vending machine iced coffee. A buck for two, and I can at least feign coherence. Most of the time.

8 am: Three hour break. Go home, wash my hair (or not), and back to bed for another couple of hours until

10.35 am: See 6.35 am. Second verse, same as the first.

11 am: Adult beginners. A couple of absolutely darling ajumma (housewives). They complain about their neglectful husbands and tell me I'm handsome. If only all my classes were like this.

12 pm: Four hours for lunch. That's right, I have a 7 o'clock class, three hours off, an 11 o'clock class, and then four hours off. I guess this is to make up for getting to get up at 10 for two months. So, lunch, class prep, probably another nap. Or news, which I've been using to cheer myself up -- in the vein of "It may be rough, but at least I ain't in America." (Seriously, why are you worrying about me? Aren't you too busy hoarding gold and lynching Congress?)

4 pm: The Gauntlet. The way middle/elementary school classes work is that we alternate classes with a Korean teacher. So I have a main class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and a second class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It used to be that I only had to dread MWF, when I had my fifth graders, who were widely acknowledged as the worst class at the school. Now, with my new middle school class at five, I have probably the worst middle school class, too, albeit in a different way. Silent. Surly. And, thanks to Haseyo, from whom I inherited these kids, spoiled by the cash bribes he ended up resorting to. I've tried it a couple of times, but I always feel a little, er, dirty. Hasn't helped me anyway. Going to class feels like walking out to the parking lot at night and seeing five guys sitting on your car. Quiet, hostile, and expecting money. It is an ugly scene.

6 pm: TOEFL prep. Things have improved. I have some measure of rapport with them now. But the book is ridiculous, at least for a handful of thirteen-year-olds. It's proficiency tests for college, for god's sake. A lot of it is note-taking and outlining and serious essay-writing, and all (ideally) under a time limit. There's listening stuff, conversations and lectures and things, and they speak so fast it's hard for me to take notes. And it's mostly about boring college topics, too. It's all so advanced that I'm not really teaching English in there anymore, I'm mostly teaching writing -- stuff like taking notes and summarizing information. I've started bringing in a lot of independent stuff, articles and things. One day, we watched clips from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and I asked them to tell me what was going on. In some ways, I'm kind of back to where I was in June, winging it and hoping I can figure out what this class is supposed to be. But at least now I have some idea what I'm doing. Weirdly, this has become the class where I most feel like a teacher, not just giving information, but imparting knowledge. It's still rough; everyone in there is dog-tired and sick of class, and no one can write a decent outline (except me -- I've been getting a lot better at it), but it actually feels like we're getting somewhere, even if it is slow and exhausting. My dread fear is that one day I'll actually figure it out, and then my schedule will change, and the class'll go to some other teacher who'll have to start all over again.

7 pm: Adult beginners again. Thankfully, I end my day with a class I adore. Then it's take-home gimbap, maybe some downloaded American television (Battlestar Galactica is still the best thing on; Prison Break somehow keeps getting trashier and more entertaining; Fringe, the new J. J. Abrams show, blows white-hot chunks of suckiness, but I watch it anyway), maybe an hour or two of Spore, shower. Bed.

And this is every day. Jenn, you were right, this place is a boot camp. And this is just the schedule. This is not including the further drama, the girlfriend, the news, and what all. But these are stories for another time. Probably tomorrow.

Yes, I am a rotten, neglectful bastard. But you all knew that.

Hi. God. Sorry. No, the blog isn't retired, I'm just a bastard. A bastard with a load of excuses, for what that's worth. Okay, two excuses. Two lousy excuses. One, I have, as I mentioned, this girlfriend. I officially owe Jeremy an apology, because, even though I was kidding about his being lost in Girlville, I have since chucked my hypocritical ass into the very same gulch. Yeah well.

Two, that same ass is busy being kicked soundly by my new schedule this month. To wit, class at 7 am, and anyone who knows me knows what an absolutely lethal time that is for me. Add a total of three middle/elementary school classes, and the prospect of sitting down to write five hundred fascinating words about Korea twice a week makes my brain cringe.

I also still don't have pictures. Basically, I can't seem to get my camera's battery to charge because of the voltage difference or whatever. My solutions seem to be either to track down some sort of voltage-converting transformer box-thing, or get a new, Korean camera. My phone does take pictures, yes, and, yes, theoretically I can email them to myself and post them or something, but that takes, I dunno what, phone internet something which I don't have.

Upshot: I'm a slack-ass bastard. I'll try to catch up with emails at least in the next little while, and I'll be back on the blog with something proper soon here, I hope.

Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Really really. I had no idea it had been so long.

Special mailbag edition!

Hey, everybody! 'Sfunny. I had like, one or two comments a couple days ago, and, while I do like to respond to the fan mail, there was that poll, so I thought I'd wait a bit and address things altogether, and then like, everyone commented yesterday and I'm like, what the huh? and now I have lots of people to respond to. So, rather than write one long-ass comment on my own blog, and because I'm busy today writing a test for my fourth-graders (and too lazy to think of anything actually interesting to write about), today's post is dedicated to... you, my dear readers.

Hi Geb! Glad you could make it. No one, unfortunately, has asked me about vulnerable sector screening yet. How's Boston (transplant version)?

Claire, way to go...all the way into total blogspot anonymity. Thanks for the lengthy email update, by the way. I'm sorry I never wrote back. Not much to say, really, except thanks for the sympathy and the rhapsodizing about your new neighborhood. It was most entertaining, and I'd say you can add writing to your list of "whodathunk" talents.

Chris: Dude, anything is better than the jack-holes at the Fogg. A six-month dead, demonically reanimated, rabid baboon is better than those fuckers. Incidentally, my first paycheck totally vindicates my mad decision to leave behind that ten-grand buyout. I worked it out, and, hour for hour, I'm making literally twice as much as I made there. Tell Whitt. Please. I need to hear the "But still..." before I can properly gloat. Also, how's Boston (native version)?

Everybody: Uh, despite recent comments, my dear, dear friend Nichole is not actually hyper-violent. She's just, um, easily excitable. And a little protective. You'll a good Mama Bear, Nic.

Hi to David, too! Davey, I checked out the blog you have in your profile, and I gotta say, I'm not impressed. Three words, man: Smacks. Of. Effort. (Huh, three words...)

Ya know, Dad, it really sounds like you're hitting your stride with this whole retirement thing. Poetry festivals, camping -- camping? When was the last time you went camping? To be honest, I was a little worried while I was in Dallas that, while you certainly appreciated the rest, you might be getting a little, I dunno, bored? But this is now, what, like the fifth time you've gone out to L. A. since I left? Claire tells me you call her and go on and on about this week's concert and next week's opera and stuff -- I'm glad you're having fun, Dad, I really am. It's about time.

By the way, everyone, do y'all know Dad's moving in with Uncle Bill in California? Claire let slip in a comment a few weeks ago, but I wanted to get it all out in the open. This is, let me say, a ridiculously good idea. Yeah, "ridiculous" is the word I want, as in, it feels ridiculous that no one came up with this years ago -- except, of course, it didn't really make sense until like, last month. What I'm trying to say is that the only surprising thing about this news (to me, anyway) is how perfectly natural and sensible it sounds.

I hope you're not too embarrassed by the attention, Dad, but I think you deserve a public round of congratulatory applause.

Finally, thanks to everyone who answered the poll. Thanks Dad, for the time stamp analysis. I'm pretty sure that's what this poll thing was about. Sometimes the answers I'm looking for are different from the questions I ask. And to everyone who reads my stuff at work -- keep it up. Just don't forget it's your jobs I'm teaching Koreans to steal.