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.
