My coworker, who liaisons with the financial office, has yet to confirm or assuage my fears about my two years worth of severance pay.  My contract with SMOE is also unclear about when I will receive the severance pay. My coworker says that I’ve received the pay after I’ve finished every contract year, and I say (and I’m paraphrasing) “Bullshit.”  I’m of course worried that I’m irresponsible enough to be wrong, and that a couple of thousand dollars has disappeared under my delinquent observation. I attacked Mrs. Kwan today with more questions, hopefully thinking that the problem was the language barrier.  She apologized for the confusion, for which I don’t hold her accountable, and she asked me to not worry.  I replied, “Oh I’m definitely going to worry.” That surprised her.  But Monday – Monday is to be the day when the necessary staff will be in the office and can answer my questions.  Cross your fingers for me.

My departure date is getting closer now; I have just two more months in Seoul.  I am not amped up and nervous like I was in the summer when I thought I was going to leave in August. I’m pleased, all in all.

My English camp classes are going well. The kids are great, and the teacher training provided by my district last month, surprises of surprises, was actually helpful. I feel like a much more competent teacher than I did during my last summer English camp.

In the summer my life just wasn’t very grand.

Oh yeah, and happy new year.

Related Articles

• Dreams of Severance Pay Severed? (slackerspeaksloud.wordpress.com)
• South Korea: Should Foreign Teachers Be Tested for HIV? (time.com)

An Acute Case of KS

I’ve  had a roaring KS day like I haven’t had in a long time.  KS being a term some friends and I coined to be discreet when we complained; it’s short for ”Korea sucks.”  We used it as shorthand for “We are foreigners and sometimes this different place and different culture is frustrating.”  The important part is ‘sometimes.’

So you have a KS day once in a while.  But today was more like a FK day. I’m sure you can work that one out for yourself.

This acute case of KS was brought on by the poor infrastructure of my school.  The toilets and the heating are appalling.  These are basic facilities that a school must provide for its students and its staff!  Earlier today I was damn near foaming at the mouth because of the inconveniences, the incompetence and the want of hygienic practices. I would like to find whoever is in charge of these parts of the school, and I realize it may be a long, bureaucratic chain, and I want to clock them all on the nose.

First, the heating. It’s hovering at or below freezing today, and the hallways and the student bathrooms are not heated.  They’ve never been heated.  They just don’t heat them, much to my continuing disgust.  It’s colder inside the hallways than it is outside.  The teacher’s offices and the classrooms are heated, but I can’t imagine the temperature is above fifty-five.  Everyone, including myself, is wearing all of their outerwear in the offices and classrooms.  Any time a door is opened – or left open by teachers and students who are clearly too inconsiderate to justify their continued existence- the meager heat is overtaken by a bitter chill.  All of the surfaces are very cold to the touch, and my feet and hands couldn’t get warm.   School ends tomorrow, but I have three weeks of English winter camp where I and the students will suffer and shiver in these poorly heated rooms.

The toilets – can I  describe the many squalid conditions of the toilets without lapsing into a string of unenlightening, heartily meant swear words?  I will attempt fortitude. Ahem.  There is one teacher’s bathroom, and, bless the lord that I don’t believe in, it  is heated in the winter.  There are three toilets in the women’s: two squatters and one western style toilet. I always use the western style toilet for my convenience and because I would wreak havoc on the squatter toilets. My aim is not professional, and I don’t think my coworkers deserve to encounter such biological horrors.  The western style toilet in the women teacher’s bathroom has been clogged for two months.  I am outraged, and I can only rely on informing my coworkers about the problem who may or may not understand me and may or may not have the time to inform whomever the hell needs to be informed to get a fucking plunger and fix it.  Some of the teachers, lovely as they are, may not understand me though they think they do, or, much more insidiously, will nod emphatically to avoid speaking English or admitting that they haven’t understood me.  Out of necessity I have had to use the toilets in the student’s bathrooms.  I’ve always had a good opinion of these kids, but after seeing how they treat these bathrooms, I wonder if they are house broken.  Shit, blood, piss – it’s all over the squatters and the western style toilets.  Because the school does not have janitors, the students clean everything, including the bathrooms.  A bathroom needs real cleaning, real chemicals, someone professional.  Do you think middle school kids would thoroughly clean a bathroom? If so,  then I have some beach side property up my ass you may be interested in.  On the walls of the bathroom stalls are old, dried bodily fluids.  The plumbing in Seoul cannot handle toilet paper, so the paper is thrown away in trash cans, or on the floor.  Feces is on the floor, all over the toilets, on paper in trash cans or smeared on the walls.  Feces, and I know I shall wow you with my medical expertise, does not increase one’s  health when exposed to it.

So basic! Toilets and heating.  Without these properly mastered, how can a school stay open?  Korea, as I often invoke when I am appalled at something, is an OECD country. How is this permissable?

A KS day takes two: me and Korea.   Some days things here, like some days things anywhere, can overload my occasionally fragile circuits and turn me into something that snarls and snaps and stares glumly.  I admit culpability for having bad days, but not all disgust is misplaced.

For Christmas Santa Claus brought me a bladder infection, so I had to go to the hospital to get some antibiotics this afternoon.  I usually go to a hospital across the street from me.  Because of the language barrier I cannot even call to make an appointment, or insure that they have a urology department, and I definitely need my coworker Ms. Choi along to translate and shuffle me around to the various stations.  I was not thrilled about having to tell her about my problem (despite trumpeting it on the internet) because I’m afraid of the judgement of my Korean coworkers.  It’s a very different society here.  What one does is under a microscope, especially as a foreigner, and (as my friend Matt said about living in Japan) though you are excused from the rules of polite society, you may also be excused from being treated politely. I’m afraid they’ll gossip about me, and as this is something women get often, and often because of sex, and Korea is very rigid about what women can and cannot do, I felt all the inconvenience of explaining my symptoms to a coworker and being chaperoned.  In the waiting room Ms. Choi asked me if I got a bladder infection because I drank too much on Christmas.  With what delight did I hear that!  Not only does one not get a bladder infection from drinking, but I was also being accused of unsavory behavior (for a woman) which induced the sickness!  Misinformation about health and shame for suppossed immoral behavior - her question validated my concerns.  Though mostly I was just thankful she helped me, and helped me graciously.  It was what I saw before we went into the hospital that took my KS day to a FK day.

It was snowing and a man, a patient of the hospital, exchanged a few angry words with a woman. Perhaps she was his daughter or his wife.  She moved away from him, back toward the hospital doors, and quick as can be he grabbed her hair at the roots, twisted her head, and pulled her along with him.  She yelled and he pulled her and she tried to get away from him.  Vaguely restrained by Ms. Choi, I tried to give him the evilest teacher glare that I could muster, shocked as I was.  He let her go before I could decide what I would do if it went any further.  He was in the hospital for a broken arm.   He deserved another.  Ms. Choi studiously avoided looking at the scene; I looked in hopes to shame and dissuade him.  That poor woman.

And thats how a KS day becomes an FK day.

(But, to illustrate that I’m able to appreciate the good when there is good, I’d like to brag that my doctor’s visit -with tests- and my week’s worth of antibiotics cost under twelve dollars. Suck that, America.)

Last night I was exiting an elevator and a heretofore unknown to me Korean guy, probably a student at Korea University, yelled at my retreating backside “I’m fine!” and then “Thank you, and you?”  (You see, in Korea they do not greet each other in this manner, so it is seen as odd. Also it’s a phrase drilled into them since elementary school.)  As Kristin, who by the way totally doesn’t get into the same fit of pique as I do, said, they do it to entertain their friends.

This happens a lot and it ticks me off.  When I think about other ways in which cultures clash and the horrific effects, I feel bad about being ticked off at something so benign.  But if a friend of mine back home shouted “hola” and “como estas” to someone who appeared to be Latin American, I’d be inclined to punch my friend in the face or give them a terse lecture. Of course the interplay of cultures here, for me, is quite different than the stereotypical interplay of American and Latin American cultures in my home country. It’s not a fair comparison, I know.

I turned my cold teacher stare on the fellow in question and said, “That’s not cute.”

So I got in a cab, feeling pissed and trivial for being pissed (too much perspective just nullify’s all of one’s joy and hurt, doesn’t it?) and the cab driver spoke with me in broken English.  He told me he liked America. I told him I liked Korea. I chanted that cheer, Dae Han Min Guk (clap clap clap clap).  He told me he liked George Washington. That one threw me. Then he pointed and said East Sea. You see, right now the American military and the Korean military are holding joint military exercises to threaten NK for the recent attacks, and the US brought the George Washington aircraft carrier.

When one is so isolated, it’s small exchanges that hold a big sway. The cab fare was under 3 thousand won, but I felt guilty about my distaste for some aspects of Korean culture so I gave him 5 thousand won and bolted before he could give me the change.  I like Korea, I do, here cab driver, have a tip!  I think if you weigh all of my social interactions with Koreans not working at my school and cab drivers, well the scales may tip to the side of the cab drivers. Not very deep conversations, but still.

At lunch today I was talking with the divine little Mrs. Kim. (She does so much! A full-time teaching job, a two year old and a new baby on the way, and she is in the process of applying to grad school to get a doctorate in English literature.) Our co-worker Ms. Choi is getting married and we will be attending the ceremony next week. I would be uncomfortable attending the wedding of a coworker in the United States, but in another culture I’m even more worried I’ll wear something or do something to embarrass her.  Appearance is highly valued in this culture.  Fucking Americans, well, we’re like the casual epicenter of the world. Little Mrs. Kim told me that when she got married three years ago that one of the foreign English teachers who worked here at the time came and wore flip flops and that her guests asked  her (Mrs. Kim) about the foreigner’s flip flops after the ceremony. (They don’t wear flip flops here, pretty much ever.) Good lord in heaven, everything we do is under scrutiny.  Lots of people laugh it off, all of the attention, but I think it’s quite sick.  I live in Seoul! Seoul! The vibrant capital!  A mountain studded metropolis! Not some isolated village.

 

Blame it on the exercise of writing and why and when we do it, or blame it on my sometimes gloomy (though I prefer to call it realistic) sensibility, but I don’t often say this here enough: I’m happy with Seoul.  When I’m busy and happy , but especially when I’m busy, I don’t come to my blog as often, and so I don’t say it.

One more time: I’m happy with Seoul, my lifestyle. I’m basking in my upcoming trip and my uncharacteristically clean and organized apartment.  I’m enjoying my job, my students and the company of my co-workers. (I teach all of the school now. I have over a thousand students!)  Life’s good.  A friend asked me why I was happy, and I said I didn’t want to dissect it.  I think when you take it apart and name the components they don’t always add up to happiness, even though I did just that now.

But life isn’t all rainbows and kitties.  This week strangers have been making a lot of unsolicited, rude comments about my body.  I am overweight even for America, and in Korea they consider Beyonce fat.  They are quite severe.  On Friday night I told one rude guy at a bar to sit and spin.  Sit and spin mother fucker, I said, among other things which I honestly can’t remember.  I said them firmly, angrily, justly, but I wasn’t shrill.  In my defense, he absolutely deserved it.  Then I closed my eyes and started subtracting by seven.  Forty minus seven is thirty-three.  Thirty-three minus seven is don’t throw your drink on him.  Thirty-three minus seven is uh twenty-five no twenty-six.  Twenty-six minus seven is if I threw the bar snacks on him that wouldn’t be so bad.  Fuck.  Forty minus seven is thirty-three.  Thirty-three minus seven is don’t make a rude comment about the reputed size of Asian men’s dicks.  Etc etc.  Anyway, I didn’t do anything stupid and he left the bar with his friend pretty quickly.

Maybe I should say what he said?  Molly and I were sitting at a crowded bar on Friday night.  I mean, around the bar, not at a table.  It was great.  The bartenders had done a lot of juggling tricks with liquor bottles, and they did several cool stunts with fire.  They gave away some free drinks.  All the young patrons were clapping and yelling when the bartenders did a particularly difficult trick.  So was I.  We both took a lot of photos.  All of mine turned out blurry because I wasn’t willing to use the flash and potentially fuck up their vision while they were tossing around heavy glass and flaming sticks.  Then we played a game of darts on an electronic board.  I won, but only by thirteen points.  We sat back down at the bar, she chatted with two Korean guys for a little bit.  A man a few seats down from me asked the bartenders who spoke English to tell me that I’m pretty.  My usual response to flattering but unwanted attention is to call them a liar, with a grin on my face, and then call them Pinocchio.  One of the guys that Molly had been talking to made a disgusted, disbelieving face.  I said, Yes, do you have something to say? And he said, oh, you’re pretty from the neck up.  Cue my disbelief and my severe potty mouth.

Last Saturday in the late morning Molly and I went to the nearest KB Star bank so I could transfer her the money I owe her for the plane ticket to Thailand.  It was a beautiful day.  Bright blue sky, warm.  We didn’t succeed because we had the wrong account number. I was trying it a second time.  I turned back to her to tell her that it was a no go when I saw an old couple, maybe in their sixties, pointing at my body and talking together.  Pointing at my body and talking about me!  I said to Molly, “Look at these rude people!  They are talking about me.” And she looked and said, with satisfying and parallel disgust, “That’s so rude.” We left, and I tried to reason myself into being calm.  They are from a very different world than I am, etc etc.  But still, I didn’t think I signed up to come to a third world country when I signed up to come to Korea.  Think whatever you like, you rude people, but how cruel is it to openly ridicule me when they aren’t the only people in the bank who speak Korean?  And am I so other worldly that they don’t think I can see them? We aren’t in the country, we’re in Seoul.  They didn’t look poor, they looked quite well-off.  Just so rude. They sure make me feel like I’m an animal in a zoo.  I asked one of my wonderful Korean co-teachers about this and she confirmed what I already suspected.  They wouldn’t treat a Korean this way.  It would be considered very impolite and probably down right nuts.

I found out two hours later that in my haste and anger I left my card in the ATM.

I get my fair share of flattering, kind compliments from Korean men and women too. But the rude shit does make a bigger impression.

You Can’t Spell Irresponsible without Responsible

Today was the first day of English summer camp.  I teach the same students for a total of three hours.  There is a twenty minute break squeezed in halfway.  When I started this job I never would have thought I’d be able to fill up three hours of teaching time with middle school students.  The first day is always easy sailing though.  And thanks to having worked on three previous English camps I have a lot of material already prepared.

The camps I taught before consisted of two different classes.  One class were middle school students and the other class were elementary school students.  We don’t have elementary students this year because we do not have another NSET.  I do miss the younger kids.  What a change to have responsive, happy, active students!  Not yet paralyzed by hormones.  Puberty, you bitch.  A friend once told me her mother’s opinion on middle school students.  They all should be sent on vacation for three years.  I would have supported that as a middle school student too.

I just spilt milk on my ipod shuffle, dress and red leather boots.  Woe is me.

There are a lot of things I like about teaching the English camps.  First, it’s a rare opportunity to teach the same students frequently (well, everyday for three weeks in this case) and get to know them.  They will relate more to you and you to them.  Secondly, I get to leave work quite early.  Today I left at twelve thirty.  And C, the class size is small.

Tomorrow they will start reading this Harry Potter knock-off book.  I’d campaigned to have them read some kind of comic book because it would appeal more to them and have, obviously, illustrations.  The knock-off is a cruddy children’s book, but I thought the verbs weren’t too hard.  There are three students who I know will be totally lost.  I’ll put them into groups and hope that the stronger kids will help out the others.  That is probably a very elemental teacher strategy.   But it seems like an ingenious idea because I’ve had no teacher training.  (The public school system has given us training, but whatever they are training us for isn’t teaching.  I think the people training us have no idea what they’re doing either.  Though I did once have a trainer for only one day who was quite good and gave me hope.)

Miss Molly and I met up on Sunday evening, struggled and failed to get her new Mac to get wireless internet, ate at one of many Korean BBQ joints in Anam and, quite unintentionally, ended up drinking with these cool Korean guys until four in the morning.

A bar called Abbey Road grabbed our attention, not much later than nine in the evening, when we were still innocently puttering.  I think it’s a part of a chain of bars, but I’m not certain.  I heard live music issuing up from it.  A Korean band was covering Paint it Black.  There were no more than four other people in the bar and they all seemed to be associated with the performers because they were recording them.  They played one more song, a song I didn’t recognize, and then packed up their gear.  One of the employees turned on a projector and played live versions of classic rocks songs.  Molly and I sent him a barrage of song requests, which he dutifully played, and we dutifully complained about the sound quality of the live versions he chose.    They clearly weren’t filmed by professionals.  The live version he played of Niel Young’s Cortez the Killer was particularly awful.  The other patrons in the bar laughed at it and called him an old man in Korean.  Molly struck up a conversation with them, and they joined us and turned out to be the pretty cool and by far the best strangers Molly has accrued for us.  Several of them spoke English quite well, were ready to laugh, and were musicians themselves.  To meet cool locals that we can converse with it obviously helped to be hanging out in a bar by a university that specializes in classic rock.  We exchanged numbers, and I think they’d be cool to hang out with again.  But the single serving friend might be safest.  No reason to sully an enjoyable if not terribly irresponsible evening (I had to work the next day) by knowing them further.  I’m just a hopeless optimist aren’t I?

I only got two hours of sleep and undoubtedly went to work still intoxicated.  I am not in the running for teacher of year.  There weren’t any classes though, and I felt the error of my ways so much that I did the unthinkable at work.  I prepared lessons instead of watching TV online.

What a killer.

Stop This Ride

Angst, my unhelpfully constant friend, was with me on Thursday night, so I solicited Molly’s company.  We went to Dongdaemun late in the evening.  Dongdaemun is a very large shopping district.  There are a few stalls, among four or five buildings that are several stories tall, which sell clothes in my size.  (In general Koreans are very fashionable.  I like the design of a lot of the clothes which I’ve bought in Dongdaemun, but they fall apart quite quickly.)  We were on our way to the shopping area Doota when I eyed this ride called Disco Jump.  We decided to buy tickets for it.  It’s a circular platform with bench seats around the edge and without seatbelts.  One more time..  There are no seatbelts.  There aren’t any kind of restraints.  You have to hold on to slippery metal bars behind you.

Here is a video someone else took of this ride. Skip to 2:30 to see some of the action.

We had to wait one turn and were able to watch a group of people before us on the ride.  Many of the women on the ride were flailing everywhere and falling out of their seats.  I equated it to the way I behaved when I was in middle school.  I once went to a water park with my friends and we hung out in the wave pool and pretended to be beat around by the waves and not in control of ourselves to get these older guys there to pay attention to us and rescue us.   I’ve noticed this kind of feigned weakness within the more fashionable and affluent women.  The older women, on the other hand, are god damned beasts and I respect that.  Some grandparents haul around heavy things all day when my grandparents could barely get out of their recliners.

I quickly changed my tune when it was my turn, though.  That ride was god damned scary.  The bars you can hold on to are slick and it was hard to maintain a firm grip.  I’m probably two times as heavy as some of the women on this ride.  My weight made me less likely to be bumped up too high off of the seat, but it also meant that my arms had a lot more pounds to support.  I was also afraid of falling out of my seat and injuring my weak ankle, or garnering another injury.  Halfway through I demanded to be let off of the ride, and I hurried away with my tail between my legs.  As Molly said, there is no way this ride would be legal in the United States.  Nor should it!  My god.  Put in some kind of restraints.  Insanity!  (I had assumed, once I saw there weren’t any restraints, that it must be gentler.  Or also that the spinning created enough force to keep you in your seat.  I was definitely wrong.)  I’ve been on carnival rides that were safer.

The upshot of this, for me, was that I was shaken out of my boredom and didn’t want to shop.  Next time I want to do therapy shopping, I should do something risky instead.  Problem solved.  Also my arms and pecs are very sore.

A combination of interminable rain and a long night of drinking thoroughly blasted all of my plans for this weekend.   Friday night was spent in Hongdae with Molly and Sally.  We played darts and visited a noraebang.  We picked up these random guys on the street quite accidentally and they came to the noraebang with us.  They sang all of my favorite noraebang songs which I chose louder and worse than even I did.  We liked their gregarious enthusiasm for coming to sing, but that is about all I liked after spending some time in their company.  At one point the Canadian was trying to convince the Brit that they needed to leave to catch a bus back to whatever town they are from, and I tried to encourage the Brit to listen to his friend’s reason.  No such luck though, and they happily stayed for the other hour that I paid for to fight for Molly’s attention and sing too close to the microphone.

If Molly and I didn’t have a penchant for western breakfast we would have only stayed out until dawn.  But the siren song of eggs and bacon called us, so we took a taxi to Itaewon.  We waited for a resturant to open with big cans of cheap beer under our umbrellas and attracted a lot of unwanted, creepy attention.  We are mostly wholesome girls who just like to stay up into the morning drinking.  (And boy are we pros at it.)  Molly cracked me up the entire time.  We laughed at the sad, crazy people, because there is little else to do, except pity them and ignore their unwanted advances.  There was one (of a few) middle-aged Korean bums who followed us around and, after we formed our ridiculous plan of attacking him with our umbrellas if he tried to corner us, he sat two more beers at our feet in a strange offering which was both threatening and pitiable.  Molly moved them nearer to him and we left our shelter and had breakfast.  Protein and chairs after such a long night are a prescription for sleepiness.  I got back to my apartment before noon and slept until seven in the evening.  Molly and I both agree now that no matter how tempting western breakfast is, we should choose ramen from a convenience store instead.

Saturday night Molly, Sally and I went to a DVD bang.  I ate many disgusting non-food foods and we watched The Soloist and then I Spit on Your Grave, some 1970′s cult classic about a woman who gets raped and beaten by these yokels and then exacts brutal revenge.  There were lots of tits and very bad acting.  I hope to expunge those images from my memory soon.  After the movie ended we talked about capital punishment and the justice system until they asked us to leave the room.

I broke my embargo of writing about personal conflicts here and it has ended up, naturally, biting me in the ass and adding fuel to the fire.  In many obvious ways this is a public space.  I should not say anything here which I do not want repeated, and, more importantly, anything about friends which I don’t actually believe.  But it still feels like a violation of something important to me.  I don’t have a very strong social circle here.   I’ve had my confidence shaken on many accounts.  But this process is a respite from that. I’m sorry to have this space sullied by conflict and gossip, and wish that my vitriol could have stayed unknown.  I’d had a rough few days and was exhausted and embarrassed.  I felt like a leper.  I was reaching out to a dear friend back home to gripe hoping to find some relief.  That’s the nature of gossip.  When we discuss other people it’s an exercise in understanding.  When other people discuss us it’s frivolous and unkind.

Bye-bye Amanda, Hello Travel Plans

I learned today that I’ll have an ample two weeks of summer vacation instead of the one week which I had been told to expect.  At the risk of making my blog the graveyard of my aspirations, I’m going to declare my intention to take a trip to China in August.  I want to go here:

Guilin, China

This week is a busy week for me, so after work today I’ve unhelpfully done none of the things which I’ve needed and planned to do.  Curses.

Saturday night was Amanda’s last night in Seoul, so I went to her place and helped her finish cleaning and packing.  We stayed up until five in the morning.  In the morning I took some photos of her apartment and neighborhood while she made some last minute skype calls to friends and family.

It was a good day for traveling. We took one of the many conveniently located airport busses.  What a perfect bus ride for her last view of Seoul! We went past so many verdant Korean palaces, old walls, and all the while the sky was a heady bright blue.  Everything was so vibrantly colored.  She was running quite late and it was a miracle she got to her plane.  She was going through security during boarding time.  Before heading back to her home state of Arizona she’s spending two weeks in Thailand, the lucky slag.

That neck scarf could put your eye out.

Sniffle. Bye Amanda!

So she’s in Thailand at the moment, probably alternating between rapturous adoration and high velocity stress.  (She’s already lost her camera.  She lost it on our trip last year to Beijing too.  Looks like I’m not the only one who is mildly prone to problems while traveling. C’mon Amanda, I’ve donated way more to the locals of the Philippines. Pick up your game!)

I wandered about the sleek airport for a while, reminiscing about travels with friends and family, feeling grateful but also a dim sense of loss.   Maybe I was indulging myself, but when I got on the bus bound for my district, it evaporated.   I’m grateful to be here still, and that was hammered home to me even more today when I learned that only two NSETs from my district were granted that elusive six month contract.

If Tattoos are like Marriage, Then I’m the Bridesmaid

When I was a teenager my Grandma told me that if I ever got a tattoo she’d take a knife and cut it off of me, which has probably been the second strangest thing I’ve ever heard pass her lips.  (The first strangest thing was when, after retelling the story of a Korean immigrant to Canada who, on a cross-country bus trip, inexplicably decapitated a fellow passenger and then taunted the authorites by further dismembering -or was it eating of – this poor man’s corpse, she giggled and giggled.  Personally I thought she was on some antidepressants that made her giddy.  Dad doesn’t thinks so though.)

I’ve never gotten inked or had any desire to do so.  Not long after Grandma’s threat my cousin Elyce, who is about one or two years younger than I, got a tattoo.  If I was a betting woman, I’d have bet on myself getting a tattoo over her.  Anyway, Amanda has several tattoos and she asked me to go with her to the tattoo parlor to get a recent addition touched-up.  Tattoos aren’t very common in Korea. Ms. Choi said only ‘the fighters’ got them, by which she meant members of organized crime.  The tattoo parlor was on the south side of the Han river, and I live on the north and hardly stray out of my four or five nearby favorite neighborhoods.  To get there meant that I had to get on a subway, of all the horrors.  The Seoul subway system is quite nice and straightforward, but I just hate traveling underground because it doesn’t afford a view of the city.  When I got to my stop I saw something really weird that I’d never seen before; it was a stationary subway car that was being used as a market.

On the way I saw a nerdy sort of young woman wearing an overlarge t-shirt that said “Delicious Story”, and there was a picture of a cat on the bottom.  My goodness I wanted to get a photo of her.

I’d met the owner of Tattoo Korea once back in the winter when Annie and I went with Amanda to check the place out.  He said he grew up in America, though he still had a Korean accent, which I cast doubt on the veracity of his claims.  He was eager to impress us and referenced drug use several times.  He sure does know how to make the foreigners nostalgic for home.  It’s an all Korean staff and they had some terrible animated Japanese movie playing yesterday.  Amanda and I played and cuddled with the friendly dog of one of the artists and I held her hand and tried to district her from the pain with a lot of half-thought out stories, like how my dad saw a sun fish jump out of the water when he was deep sea fishing once.  (My mom is the talker in the family, but my dad, who grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina, will come out with stories like these, and I have to wonder what other stories I haven’t heard.  I especially like it when he tells stories about going to see a great classic rock band with something slightly untoward happening.)

Sun fish!

Well, Amanda was pleased with her tattoo and especially pleased with her tattoo artist whose hands, she insisted, were quite big.

Lickums

"Please no more lickums."

Revenge!

Ms. Choi asked me if getting a tattoo hurt, and I told her yes.  ”How do you know?” she said.  I think she was testing the waters to see if I, too, had a tattoo.  ”Does it hurt to get shot?” I said.  She said yes.  ”How do you know?  Have you ever been shot?”.  I don’t know if she totally grasped my point.  I may have persuaded her to believe that getting a tattoo feels like getting shot.

So We Meet Again, Camel Cricket

Sam Harris, atheist dream boat.

Last Friday night Amanda and I were a few drinks in and talking on her balcony about the ethics of killing bugs, especially bugs in your home. We both agreed you don’t smoosh buggies in their natural habitat, no matter how terrifying they are.  But, when they are in my home, my stance was that they are creepy and crawly and must be eradicated. Plus, and here I was trying to quote the atheist philosopher Sam Harris, the facts we have tell us that insects don’t lead rich internal lives.  We care more about chimpanzees because they experience a greater range of suffering and happiness.  I don’t think Amanda was buying it.

Generally I’ll save beetles and deposit them outside, and I’ll allow moths to live out their lives in whatever corner of my room suits them.  But cockroaches?  Gotta go.  I evict them violently with shoes and magazines and swear words.  (She told me that she has saved cockroaches from her apartment.  Honorable, though dubious.  They infest.)  But when I find camel crickets, I’m more likely the one to leave.  About five years back Maria and I were living for free in this Scottish professor’s Chapel Hill abode while she went back over the pond.  It was a three story home in a lovely wooded neighborhood.  It was also infested with camel crickets.  When five or six camel crickets greet you on your bedroom floor every time you get up to piss at night, it’s time to admit they’ve won.  I don’t think Maria has ever really believed that I left solely because of the bugs.  Perhaps she thought I had some gripes about living with her.  I moved out because the camel crickets were stressing me out, do you hear me woman?  Terrifying.

So why are they so terrifying?  They jump extremely high, extremely far and erratically.  They also tend to jump toward noise instead of away from it, which is startling and gives me the heebie jeebies.  I’m trying to smoosh them, not be their friends.  They also look fucking freaky.

Worst Animal Ever

Check out those back legs.  That’s what propels it toward me while I scream.  They’re antennae are longer than their body too.  (Insider’s tip: spraying it with cheap, maximum hold hairspray is a good way to immobilize it’s jumping ability and not damage any surfaces it’s befouling.)

Fuck.

I’d be less afraid of a poisonous snake.  I’m not saying my fear is wise, I’m saying it’s strong.  Naturally I enjoyed going into detail about how horrible they are on the balcony with Amanda.  The next day I was taking my favored walk from Sungshin to my apartment in Jongam.  I walk up some steep and poorly designed, though charming, stairs in a neighborhood to the top of the wooded mountain and down into my neighborhood.  While walking up the stairs, in the dark, I saw something chilling.  Dun dun dun! A solitary camel cricket in the middle of the narrow walkway.  I haven’t seen one of these fearsome beasties for my year and ten months here.  No doubt I summoned it by talking about it hours before.  The stairs and walkway are the worse for wear, so there were many chunks of broken cement.  They were lobbed at the camel cricket.  Each missed killing it, the ideal solution.  (So apparently there is at least one circumstance where assassinating bugs outside of my home is permissible.)  My violence didn’t even startle it back into it’s hiding hole.  Defeated and embarrassed, I tried to find another path up the mountain, but alas the fork on this pathway led to a dead end.  I came back and it was still sitting there, bold as brass.

War wasn’t influencing it, so I tried diplomancy.  ”Go away!”  It’s antennae twitched in response.  ”Go away go away go away!”  The antennae twitched madly (or maybe I was just mad).  It definitely heard me.  It hopped back into it’s hiding hole under a particularly broken step.  It left!   We had a beautiful moment of understanding.  I jogged the rest of the way up the stairs for fear of being waylaid by another insect, which is just embarrassing and makes me feel like I have my priorities screwed up.

Try diplomacy

One of These Things is Not Like the Other (If you’re a foreigner in Korea, that other is You.)

An excess of dopamine causes people to see patterns where there aren’t patterns.  One of the patterns they see that isn’t there are people starring at them and talking about them.  If you are a foreigner in a homogenous culture (and I am) you don’t need a superfluous amount of this hallucination causing chemical to make you perceive strangers staring at you.  They most definitely are staring at you, blatantly.  On rare occasions it can be endearing.  Really, really rare.  Mostly it’s embarrassing and invasive.  Today a little girl was chasing her friends and, as she passed me, she came to a dead stop and stared at me.  Mouth agape.  That’s not so cute.  Elderly people, while passing me, will stop and turn to gawk at my receding backside.  When the foreigner rage has me in it’s grips I turn to stare at them too.

Everyone is staring at you, and no you aren’t crazy.  You’re a foreigner.