It’s my own fault that I terrorize myself by looking at low-brow blogs like People of Walmart and Texts From Last Night. There are others; that is by no means a complete list. I like laughing at the absurdity of humankind as much as the next person, and these blogs are easy media consumption. Sometimes delightfully grotesque. Click shock click shock. But I’ve come to hate some of it. Especially People of Walmart. (If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s a blog that posts pictures of sad fucks dressed nuttily or doing nutty things in Walmarts.) It seems more worthwhile to laugh at people whose social position and influence calls for satire. The awesome, illuminating justice of satire. I don’t want to a kick a person when they’re down. And what I’m seeing in those photos are people who are really, really down. Somedays I see my grasp on sanity slipping, and I wonder if in ten, fifteen years I’ll be photographed wearing shorts several sizes too small with my lard ass hanging out of the top carrying a teddy bear and browsing the aisles of a chain super store for cat food, though I don’t own a cat.
Maybe that’s paranoid. One of my virtues is my outstanding self-doubt.
I just hate anything that exposes people in a way that they weren’t asking for, or art as pointed social criticism doesn’t justify. As much as I love Jane Austen, I’m glad that her sister destroyed some of her more personal letters. I’m sure it would have been great reading. I don’t give a flying fart about celebrities’ personal lives. Sexual transgressions by public figures is only interesting when it violates their own oppressive religions and ideaologies which they cynically expouse to get votes.
So who would I deem appropriate for some massive derision? It seems that the Palin family is exposing themselves quiet nicely. Sarah Palin’s nearly incomprehensible influence on the national dialogue of my country – yes, she should get it and get it good. Celebrity and politics, oh boy oh boy. The engagement has been on for some time. The Palins have definitely stepped up to the altar.
While getting ready for work today I listened to a new podcast. It’s a kind of sketch comedy from what I gather called WireTap. One sketch stood out. It was the correspondence between Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (of Metamorphosis) and Dr. Seuss. Samsa wrote looking for a cure to his curious condition of being a gigantic bug, and Dr. Seuss responded in that Dr. Seussian way (Something about I fear I’m useless as you remain Suessless). It wasn’t necessarily the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, but god damn it was fucking awesome. Such a clever, unexpected combination. It’s a part of the CBC Radio.
Today was my second day back from vacation. During my vacation I accomplished nothing of use. I went to many a noraebang, played an awful lot of darts, met many people who I will likely never meet again. That’s all beating around the bush. All of those activities were accompanied by copious amounts of late-late night drinking. They’d be unenjoyable if they weren’t. One night Molly and I tried to continue our drinking and the only bars open in Itaewon were on Hooker Hill. It was daylight. If you were thinking we left quickly because it was scummy and scummy men wouldn’t leave us alone and thought they had the right to touch us, you’d be right. Listen, we’re wholesome girls who just like to drink a lot. Innocently. I never used to stay up this late drinking. I only did it once as a teenager, and I did a lot of substances as a teenager. Nothing to the point of a problem, I was just fooling around. My point is is that I think we don’t value our time here very much, and we egg each other on, and we do have a lot of fun too.
Some things have changed at work. There is a new restriction against physical punishment. (See, hitting the students has always been technically illegal, but not enforced.) Well, all physical punishment is out. No more standing with their arms above their heads, squatting in uncomfortable positions, or whacks with a stick. Some of the teachers use a recorder, you know, those musical instruments kids played in elementary school. The plastic bastard cousin of the flute. Instruments of art as punishment. I’d prefer to whack them with a really big, bristly brush. Or spray paint them. This new prohibition was announced at a meeting which I did not attend. I then talked and talked about my knowledge of punishment in American schools. Lunch detentions, after school detentions, suspensions. Sending the kids out into the hall, a staple I remember well, is frowned upon here. The kids could run away, they’ve said to me. In my earlier teaching days I’d send the kids into the hall and make them leave their shoes inside. They aren’t running away without their fucking shoes. Definitely not in the winter. I never used much physical punishment anyway. I only ever made the kids stand up with their arms above their heads. I once, probably in my first month of teaching, whacked a male kid hard on the shoulder who was doing something dangerous that nearly took out three girls. I still haven’t stopped feeling ashamed of that. Really, really ashamed. Moving on. It will be interesting to see what the teachers will arrange. I think it’s great. Not necessarily because I think a whack or two is the most destructive thing for students, but because they don’t take it seriously. It isn’t real punishment for them. I can’t help but feel that taking time away from them is far more effective. Plus I have seen too many instances of adult Koreans hitting each other. It’s upsetting.
On a related note, in my first months here I saw a male teacher roundhouse kick a male student several times, break his sandals, and smack him in the head during a student field trip. I took this sneaky photo of this teacher’s atrocious behavior and then stormed away to smoke a cigarette and think about hitting the fuck out of this teacher. (The student’s crime? Wearing sandals when he should have been wearing sneakers on the field trip. Notice he only has his socks now)
What a fucker. This photo didn't really capture all the fuckedness of it. Fuck is a word we use when we are being fucking lazy thinkers.
Another change, and this less welcome, is that instead of seeing my kids once a week (which was scant time with them anyway) I now see them once every two weeks. This even more effectively demotes me from kind-of-teacher to babysitter. I also have to teach the dreaded second grade, along with the first and third graders. I feel positive about teaching again, despite professing a few posts back to being an anti-teacher.
Tonight I finished reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the seminal feminist literature published in the early 1960′s. It wasn’t so long ago, only a few decades, that a woman was discouraged from doing anything except getting married and having kids. She was considered incappable of anything else, and if she strived for it she was unfeminine, insane, would probably become barren from the stress. There was a disturbing chapter where Friedan linked the rise (rise?) in homosexual men to the effects of overprotective, smothering mothers. I haven’t yet finished an introduction she wrote for the book in 1997. I’m hoping she recants that. Yeah. Anyway, it was informative. For a long time I’ve shunned reading much related to feminism because I didn’t want to be angry, or see the prejudice. I tried to name myself apathetic on a lot of things because I wanted to be above it all, and cool, and, well, you know. All those dumb things some of us think we should be when we’re self-absorbed teens and early twenty-somethings. Not to say I’m still not self-absorbed.
Speaking of me, my hair is pretty damn long these days. I came to Korea with a pixie cut but it’s down to my shoulders now. I forgot what a pain in the ass longer hair is. Styling and all that. It feels gross sometimes because now when I shed hair the hair is more pronounced and when I shed hair on myself it feels creepy, like bugs.
Speaking of my other obsessions (besides my hair) CHRISTIAN BALE. Oh my God. I came to this coffee shop hoping to rewatch American Psycho but I forgot my headphones. Because I can’t, though, lets just put this right here. Beautifully done. So funny, so creepy, and that is one beautiful man.
I tried to make another video this afternoon, but you know, I really should stop putting embarrassing videos of myself online. My mac’s video making software is trying to protect me by not working.
Teaching the English summer camp is more tedious this time around. There are seventeen students, and many of them don’t understand me. I feel so awful that they don’t understand me. How alienating for them! Their lack of comprehension isn’t doing any wonders on my personal appraisal of my teaching ability either.
Ms. Choi has been lamenting the students’ obvious boredom with the reading material I’ve given them. I agree! They are bored, and four of them are totally lost. I thought it appropriate to reminded her that I wanted to choose a comic book (pictures are enlightening and engaging for ESL learners) or a small novel which had annotations in Korean. I was overruled, however.
I still miss the elementary school kids. They were such a sunny spot in these English camps.
The pinatas we’ve been making haven’t suffered any disaster so far, like the balloon popping prematurely or someone knocking one off of the table. Unless a student decides to brutalize theirs before they’ve been decorated I think we’re in the clear.
I’ve been spending my ample free time after camp doing nothing of use. (Oh, only a month ago I was dying for direction and ready to pursue something. And what now? I’ve been watching all of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movies that I can. Mysterious Skin was awesome. Watch it.) Consuming is much easier than creating anything of my own, but I know which one would be more engaging and fulfilling.
I’ll have my summer vacation in a week a half. I don’t know if it will be possible to go to Shanghai. I’ll need to renew my Korean visa, which probably won’t give me time to get a Chinese visa.
Ms. Choi chose the topic for the weekly English broadcast. It was about Korean and ethnic Korean actors breaking into Hollywood. (Last year the Korean superstar Rain starred in a remarkably shoddy martial arts movie. Like all of the Koreans who were typecast into martial arts roles, they all played Japanese characters, much to their dismay I’m sure. Actually, how can you be dismayed when you get paid the big bucks for something that may be artistically reprehensible but ethical? Yeah.) I haven’t done any stories about celebrities this year because I don’t really think they are all that interesting. Plus if I’m going to put a lot of time into making the broadcast, I’m damn well going to do it on a topic I find interesting. I mean, I show the kids pictures of erupting volcanoes and corpses. That’s gotta be kind of interesting to them.
To make up for how much they probably enjoyed the celebrity portion of the broadcast, I gave them a mini lesson about the word “gross” and illustrated gross things with a lot of pictures. I heard a class squeal down the hall from the broadcast room when I showed them a photo of cockroaches climbing on a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Awesome.
I shouldn’t claim I don’t find any celebrities worthy of talking about.God damn that is one fine man.
