Linda Without Borders

Si-a-me-ese, if you ple-ease

2012-01-27T22:00:00.000+09:00

Tonight we went to dinner at another fabulous (and fabulously affordable!) little Thai restaurant, and we saw a Siamese cat.

Get it? A Siamese cat. We're in Thailand...which used to be... Get it?

It's so wonderful. I really don't know how Bangkok can ever top that, so we're off to Phuket tomorrow.

"I can feel the devil walking next to me..."

2012-01-26T23:30:00.000+09:00

Coming to you from Bangkok now...this is one of those epic cities, with one of those epically associated songs, i.e., the one from which I took the title of this post, that gets stuck in your head the entire time you are here. What's a person of my generation to do? You spend years of your life listening to the song on "Flashback Friday" lunch hours and the odd dance floor, and then here you finally are - of course "One Night in Bangkok" is going to be stuck in your head the entire time. You only wish that you could actually get a verse, or a bridge, or even the rest of the chorus stuck in there. Something besides "One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster...da duh duh da duh-duh..." and so on. Because, news flash: that "night in Bangkok" is actually depressing. Ain't no pearls in the nasty nightlife scene, and precious few oysters. But I will get to that in a second.

First, I must report that earlier today when I posted as my Facebook status that my generation is cursed to have that song play in our heads when we finally travel here (high five to those of you who quickly felt my pain with your Likes and Comments), Brian's response was not appreciation for my wit or sympathy for my predicament - oh no! His response: "It's not my generation." My god. What a difference a few little years make. He is so not of the 80s in the way that I am. HOWEVER, I maintain that it has less to do with the actual age/few years than the fact that I have an older sister, but he has a younger brother. So on top of the few years, I skew older in things like music (having been influenced by, say, my sister's Whitney Houston-Wham!-Cyndi Lauper-cassette-buying ways) and Brian skews younger (90s rap, mostly).

We also have this conversation all the time when I reference The Brady Bunch - because, yes, I do that all the time, as there is an appropriate Brady Bunch quote/anecdote for every life situation - and Brian reminds me that he and his brother did not grow up watching Brady Bunch reruns, to which the only sane reply is, naturally, their loss! - right? Somehow Brian doesn't quite understand how very much he is missing there. But he is in turn surprised that I didn't watch Saved by the Bell. Which, no. Not even the same league, OK.

ANYWAY. Back to Bangkok. Yes, I think the devil is walking here, and just down the street from where we're staying, in fact. OK, kidding! There is no devil, just the unfettered depravity of my fellow man. Wait, you ask, am I calling the old men who retire/visit/"tour" here,spending their nights purchasing bar girls and/or bar ladyboys, evil? Why, perhaps I am! Is that judgmental of me? Why yes, I do believe it is. Soooo OK with being judgmental of these men. Soooo all kinds of OK with that. I was actually horrified by what I saw last night in Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy. And of course, it's not really the blatant or weird things that horrify you - it's the little things, like when you sit talking with your friends enjoying your beer, supposedly on this ironic "exploration" of the seedy randomness of Bangkok's red light district, and in your line of sight are the five or six young Thai women of the bar across the way, doing their thing, namely, waiting for foreigners with money to walk in, and then soon enough one does walk in, say, a 50- or 60-something man, white polo shirt, shorts, casual, and then he's taking her hand and smiling and they sit at a table, and ewwww! ewww! eww! the same things is happening thousands and thousands of times to all these young women and behind the curtains of these bars' doorways the "shows" are going on and the girls/ladyboys are wearing numbers so they can be picked out and requested like cattle or slaves in an auction...it's quite horrible. I wanted to be dutifully amused by the seedy part of the Bangkok scene, as one who grew up listening to "One Night in Bangkok" is supposed to be, but instead it really made me hate humanity. I mean, you know, more than usual.

The whole situation reminded me of something that happened in the 90s, back when I used to still hang around Mormons (instead of watching Saved by the Bell). So, when Schindler's List came out it got a lot of buzz, and then a lot praise, and then a lot of Oscar nominations, and so, you know, people wanted to see it. Even Mormons. Slight problem: Mormons aren't really "allowed" to watch R-rated movies. I mean, some don't really care, but some prophet or other said not to and it's a rule that a fair amount of them stick to, ESPECIALLY at BYU, which is where most of the ones I hung around at that time were. Specifically, this one fabulous English professor at BYU, Cecilia Konchar-Farr, who was questionably fired/not given tenure. Her last semester teaching there happened to be early 1994, as Schindler's List was marching toward its victorious Oscar night, and many a curious BYU student really wanted to see it - heard it was so good - but it's rated R. So, then, the discussion always turns to why the movie is rated R. Like, is it full of the f-word? Violence? Naked people? Nudity is really a no-go for lots of these rule-abiding Mormons. (Have I mentioned that BYU's on-campus theater edits the R-rated movies before they are shown there for students?) So Cecilia reports that yes, she did see Schindler's List over the weekend, and yes, it was great and fantastic and moving and meaningful and important and all that. Then, she says, in a moment filled with the logic and clarity that escape so many religious people so much of the time, that all this fuss about "Is there nudity? Is there a sex scene?" in it really seems to miss the point. "It's the Holocaust," she says. "It is the murder of hundreds and thousands and millions of innocent people. Of COURSE it's a mature theme. Of COURSE it's rated R. But you're not worried about the savage, systematic persecution and murder of millions of people, you're worried about seeing someone naked?"

I mean, she makes a really good point, yes?

That's how I felt last night. Because, no lie, I got really kind of pissed off at one point and I kind of yelled at my drinking companions. I wanted to discuss endlessly just what motivates men to come to Bangkok and be horrible and depraved and purchase other humans, and at some point they got tired of my fascination with this subject that I could analyze and scrutinize for hours, and I was yelling and weeping and wailing and gnashing teeth (well, 2 or 3 of those anyway) and I looked like the jerk. Which, probably I was a jerk, because I was frustrated and furious and appalled and also just plain sad. I mean, I literally would just get tears in my beer when I stared across the road too long at the scene playing out in front of us. And nobody likes it when their drinking companion starts wailing and draws the other happy drinkers' attention. But part of me wanted to shout, "What's wrong with all of you [tourists/backpackers/business travelers/police/guidebooks]?! You're missing the point! Of COURSE I'm upset and volatile and crying and screaming and angry in a public place and embarrassing my friends. Why aren't all of YOU? You're not worried about thousands of young women who face such a dearth of life choices that this is their better/only career option, and you're not offended by the desperation emanating from these despicable men who buy the women, but it bothers you if I cry and rant about it in a bar, because that is unsophisticated and unbecoming and uncool?"

Yeah. Bangkok.

But I am actually really enjoying Thailand! Tomorrow I will blog about happier things!

"Not much between despair and ecstasy..."
- good ol' Murray Head and the ABBA guy and Tim Rice, who wrote the song

Building in Siem Reap The Southeast Asia Odyssey Continues

2012-01-03T23:30:00.000+09:00

I apologize for not blogging often during this week as we build in Cambodia with Habitat for Humanity on our Global Village trip. I want to again thank the wonderful friends and family who donated to Habitat to help make our trip possible. I have not been online much at all this week, but here is the basic situation: Our team of volunteers is divided into two groups. My group works on a house made of wood, so there is lots of sawing, hammering, nailing, and painting, much of it done while precariously perched on makeshift scaffolding. Brian's team works on the brick house, a five or so minute walk away through the village. We all meet together at "our" house for lunch. The team leaders are great and do creative things to help us get to know one another. It is surprisingly not that hot while we are working, and our hotel is rather nice. Because the cost of living is so cheap in Cambodia, and because there are many many many hotels for the on-the-rise tourism industry in Siem Reap, we are able to stay at a good place, a bit more comfortable (and bigger) than my accommodations on previous Habitat builds. There are massively cute children at our worksite who are all smiles, like many people in Cambodia. All in all, it is shaping up to be a great experience.

New Year in Siem Reap Day 8 of our Southeast Asia odyssey

2012-01-02T00:44:00.000+09:00

Happy New Year! Do you know where Siem Reap's biggest party is? Well, I do now. It is on Pub Street, in a restaurant/market/nightlife area just across the cutest little river bridge ever from our hotel, and boy did we do it up to ring in 2012. Brian and I saw a little bit of the street party set-up while we ate lunch earlier on Saturday, and then after our first dinner with fellow Habitat for Humanity build team members, a few of us headed out to celebrate New Year's Eve with the masses. The entire city of Siem Reap must have been there, plus foreigners galore. There were crowds, dancing, packed streets, pubs, balconies, beer for $1, kegs, random flashback tunes, shots of something pink to drink, dancing to Khmer songs in an electric slide-like group movement, fireworks above the river, lit up bridges, lanterns in the water, illegal fireworks shot from the crowd, smoke, more tunes, more beer, all kinds of good stuff, and it was all just lively and fun.

January 1 was a great day. I approve of 2012! Our Habitat for Humanity team is a great group of 21 people (I think) plus our leaders and the local affiliate employee and volunteers. I am so excited about this project and about everything I have been learning about Cambodia, its history, its people, the Khmer culture, the language, the history and historical influences...it's all so wonderful. I think I should have regular enough wi-fi this week to keep you updated as our build progresses.

I love new years and starting new projects and new good things!

A Fond Farewell to 2011 Days 4.5 - 7 of our Southeast Asia Odyssey

2011-12-31T19:44:00.000+09:00

And now here we are in Siem Reap, ready to kick off 2012 with our Habitat for Humanity Global Village Build. I love New Year's Eve. I like resolutions, festivity, out-with-the-old-in-with-the-newness, and party hats. I'm less fond of amateur hour in the bars, but I actually do like crowds and pubs and street parties and the like. From the looks of things, the market/restaurant area just across the little bridge from our hotel here in Siem Reap is getting ready for one big shindig tonight. I will definitely be shindigging!

A recap of the second half of this week:

Day 4.5: Wednesday night in Sihanoukville post-baguette, we mostly relaxed our sunburned tired selves. It was wine Wednesday in our Beach Road Hotel bar, and we enjoyed our glasses on one of the wicker/cushioned couches near the bookshelves, from which I plucked Heart of Darkness and finally read it. (Totally a Book You Should Have Read in College that I never did.) I finished it the next day and can't say I entirely understand it.

Day 5: The last full day in Sihanoukville...sigh. I enjoyed breakfast and iced coffee on the second floor of the restaurant in a hanging cushioned/wicker swinging chair that overlooks the Beach Road activity. The day consisted of sun, the refreshing hotel swimming pool, good eats, and of course a sizable chunk of beach time. Have I mentioned that the beach in Sihanoukville is lined with restaurants and bars and you can either sit under the roofed part of them or in beach chairs on the sand where they will bring you menus, food, and drinks? It's really quite fantastic. As were the barbecued prawns we ate there on Thursday. In the evening we relaxed, had some more food and drink (falafel at a Middle Eastern place on cushions, rum/pineapple mixers while we packed) and then saw live music, a band of three middle-aged guys playing all sorts of classic rock. I am fascinated by these Sihanoukville long-termers, I tell you. Fascinated.

Day 6: Friday the 30th, we returned to Sihanoukville and we had air conditioning for the first third of the bus ride. Yes, that means we did NOT have air conditioning for several hours, including the crawling-through-traffic-on-the-approach-to Pnomh Penh part. But that's OK because they left the bus front door open for air flow as we sped down the highway. (For the record, I think that was the right choice.) It was fun to come back to Phnom Penh - I like that city! - and back to our same guesthouse from last weekend. In the afternoon we visited the Tuol Sleng museum, which is a building that was used as a prison and torture chamber for 20,000 people during the evil Khmer Rouge reign. It was simple, sparse, and haunting. The evil people who ran the place took photos of every incoming person they subsequently tortured and slaughtered, so the museum displays just row after row of mug-shot-like photos. You just walk up and down these rooms staring into the eyes whose fate you unfortunately know. There were seven prisoners who survived Tuol Sleng (seven! out of 20,000+!) and the paintings of one of them are displayed, depicting torture that happened there. It's all pretty grisly, and important.

After that we had another delicious, cheap dinner and a drink at the Foreign Correspondents Club, or the FCC as they say in Phnom Penh. Have I mentioned the lizards? I am overly fond of the lizards on the walls of these airy tropical courtyard restaurants (mostly because they eat bugs, but also because lizards are fun). The FCC, our guesthouse, and a ton of other eateries and watering holes are along the riverfront, and it was a lively gathering spot on Friday evening. We enjoyed our stroll past soccer-like games, break dancing, other group dancing, and the like. Later on we met up with another member of our Habitat for Humanity team who was also in Phnom Penh on Friday.

Day 7: The boat to Siem Reap is a marvelous thing. I mean marvelous in that there-are-no-U.S.-tort-lawyers-in-sight way. A bit cramped inside with no sign of emergency exit procedures (or even emergency exits), the boat was a little stuffy. But were we sealed in? Oh no! As the high-speed -- keep that in mind, that's an important detail -- boat travels from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap in five or so hours, passengers are free to stroll outside on the foot-wide ledge and clamber up on top of the long, tube-like speeding vessel. Railing? Seats? No, no, don't be silly. Just twenty or thirty travelers splayed on top, sprayed by waves if you lean too far over, and not inhibited by anything so mundane as safety precautions. It was a great way to breathe fresh air and watch the country pass by. And, you get to wave and be waved at with all the people in fishing boats along the way. A bit of a wild ride, but communal, convenient, and kind of awesome. Brian took a video so we can share our ~~peril~~ fun with you.

And then we were in Siem Reap. Such a different feel from Phnom Penh but already charming with its small river, our incredibly friendly hotel staff, and a slew of restaurants all packed together and clearly getting ready for the big New Year's wingding hullabaloo this evening. And now I will also go get ready for said whoop-te-do. Off I go, then.

Let's make those resolutions. Until 2012, y'all!

Christmas in Cambodia Days 1-4 of our Southeast Asia Odyssey

2011-12-28T21:29:00.002+09:00

Brian and I departed Korea on Christmas Day after a year of teaching in Andong. As I have previously mentioned, the time flew and we can't believe it's over, or that we aren't exactly sure where we'll be working next year (although it is likely to be teaching English in Asia again). Unfortunately, my laptop has been having some persnickety issue in connecting to certain wi-fi networks, namely those in our guesthouse and hotel, so I have been unable to blog for my adoring fans before today. I will have to give a brief summary. Just to set the scene, Brian and I are sitting on the second floor of a French restaurant on the Beach Road in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, enjoying free wi-fi and about to enjoy some fromage, salade, pain, and so forth.

Day 1: Incheon-Hong Kong?-Bangkok-Phnom Penh...Christmas mostly consisted of flying. We didn't realize until we were at the gate in Seoul that we were going to be stopping in Hong Kong. We did have to deplane there, but despite the free internet I was unable to post an update from there because the browser did not satisfy Google/Blogspot. Then it was on to Bangkok where we walked a LOT around the airport, and then finally to Phnom Penh for a most wondrous evening welcoming us to Cambodia. Lots of people were wearing Santa hats, like in the airport in Thailand and in the bars in Phnom Penh. Good festive times. We stayed in the Waterview Guesthouse on the river in Phnom Penh (including a balcony!), walked around the night market, and sample a few watering holes, including one where Brian could watch a bit of the NBA Christmas day game.

Day 2: After another spell walking around Phnom Penh and sampling its delights, including cheap breakfast and iced coffee and crowds and street crossing (the trick is to saunter, not try to dash through the motos), we headed in a van with other traveling types from various guesthouses to the bus station to catch our bus to Sihanoukville. After a long wait at the bus station ON the bus, and a several hour bus ride, we pulled into this ridiculous tourist beach town, found our hotel, and found the beach. My initial impression of Sihanoukville is one of just being generally startled that it exists. I mean, two months ago I had never even heard of it. I know that some of you have heard of it, but most of you have not. And yet, here I sit gazing out over throngs of travelers from all the Western world, strolling to their hotels, beach bungalows, restaurants (French, Greek, Indian), used bookstores, massage parlors, bars-a-plenty....bars with, like, 75-cent beer, I might add. Cambodia is cheap, including this developed, backpacker-laden tourist beach area. We got in some beach time, some food-in-one-of-the-many-restaurants-on-the-beach time, some hotel bar time, and some DJ party-in-a-bar-on-the-beach time on that first night.

Day 3: Tuesday I got to sleep in with no alarm for the first time in ages, and after several nights in a row of few hours of sleep, thanks to leaving Korea, packing, final noraebang night, etc. Tuesday was relaxing. We sat on the beach for a long time. That is, after all, the main event here. We sat on beach chairs, ordered lunch, read, splashed, sunned, and watched scores of other travelers do the same, comfortably, with chairs and beach umbrellas and open patio establishments stretching in both directions. Night consisted of the fabulous Beach Road Hotel bar again, then dinner at a wonderful guesthouse bar called Monkey Republic across the street, where we had delicious burgers. Mine was of the vegetarian variety. I have already declared that I am so happy, these past 72 hours, to be back among the vegetarians, and the acknowledgement of vegetarians, after Korea. We ended the night a few doors down at The Big Easy, another guesthouse with bar, this one showing Brian's Arsenal game on the big screen, and several small screens.

Day 4: Wednesday was boat trip day. For $15, you get a boat ride to nearby islands, snorkeling, and breakfast and lunch included. We boarded the small boat with 20 other people - and mind you, this is not your typical ferry, but rather a long fishing-type boat that looks like this, very Cambodian/Vietnamese, and wooden. And small. But, nice breeze! - and set "sail" with the outboard motor chugging in my face since I was lucky enough to land in the back row. We stopped for brief snorkeling off one of the islands, where you couldn't see much but I did get to see a bunch of black sea urchins nestling on the rocks, and one of our boatmates stepped on one, getting a spiky part embedded in his foot - ouch! We spent the midday on the main island where there are some "services" (bungalows, a kind-of bathroom, and a kind of bar, at which Brian could order what I think was a green coconut to drink - for real, a straw in the top), and where our crew cooked our delicious lunch while we lay around on the beach chairs reading and relaxing, occasionally getting up to swim or snorkel. On the way back to Sihanoukville we stopped off of the third island for some more subpar snorkeling (but yes, with sea urchins). Now we are back in Sihanoukville, where we just ate wonderful baguettes and fromage, thanks to those awesome French for colonizing the place.

I wonder if anyone who doesn't get my sense of sarcasm is reading this? At any rate, today on the island I finished the book I started reading on the plane to Phnom Penh, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, which details the horrible things she and millions of others experienced under the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. I highly recommend it to any of you who are grappling with the concept of Linda in Cambodia, trying to work out what is this place and what happened here and why have we been so scared of it since the 1970s - it's an interesting look at a history that has been pretty much ignored in the U.S., as far as I can tell.

Sihanokville trips me out by its very existence. Also, I feel like I could be anywhere. There's nothing paticularly Cambodian about it, other than that it's here. It's one of those places that would make Julia Sugarbaker say she wants to see "the real Cambodia," with Suzanne replying that she was perfectly content to stay on Serendipity Beach. Part of me is looking forward to going back to Phonm Penh and then on to Siem Reap so I can remember what country I am in. But there is a small part of me excited to lie on the beach and do nothing again tomorrow.

And then there were two...

2011-12-22T00:00:00.001+09:00

...days left of teaching in Andong! Can you believe it? Can I believe it? Furnishings have been sold, final gatherings have been somewhat organized, favorite restaurants have been frequented, glasses have been raised, clothes have been piled neatly for packing purposes. Perhaps most importantly, I only have to have two more showers-that-don't-stay-hot-very-long in the coldest bathroom ever. I think I have concluded that it is preferable to have a cold shower in a hot bathroom (hot, i.e., the tropics) than a hot-two-minutes-warm-one-minute-cool-cold-hurry-out in an ice cold bathroom. In fact, even a hot hot piping hot shower that would stay hot long enough to actually, say, wash and condition one's hair is still totally negated when the bathroom is ice. Two more mornings of this! I am sorry, new people who are coming to teach at Avalon, whoever you are, but you will be taking short showers for January and probably most of February. But hey, it's Korea, which means the sa-u-na and jimjjilbangs are just down the street.

I know the biggest news this week has nothing to do with our impending departure from Korea, but rather Kim Jong Il's departure from this mortal coil. (Granted, he did most of the coiling...) I talked about it with my students who were of a certain age/fluency, and they all mentioned economic worries before war worries. There is a little war worry, though. Sigh. Seriously, people, how many deaths will it take 'til you know that too many people have died? (as a certain wise troubadour once wrote)

Come to think of it, as long as I'm quoting wise troubadours: "And so this is Christmas..."

I am off to Cambodia this Christmas day. For those who didn't get the memo, Brian and I are ringing in 2012 with a Habitat for Humanity trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia, to be followed by a sojourn in southern China and the Yangtze River, and then a month in Thailand doing our CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults). Knowing we will be spending the bulk of this winter on the beach and in tropical climate cities has made it impossible for me to really settle into this freezing-bathroom, poorly insulated apartment that we were moved into on November 1st, or to happily hunker down in coat and scarves the way I would if I were actually spending the winter here. I am just ready to go be warm. And so we shall...after a few more slightly terrible Korean beers, and noraebang tunes, and one fine train ride from Andong to Seoul...and maybe even some farewell Outback cheese fries.

My second Korea stint draws to a close! And, I spent another year living out of the U.S. -- I'm allowed to move back to California now.

The Ajumma Coffee-Sharing Protocol

2011-12-14T19:08:00.000+09:00

Less than two weeks left in country and I'm still having confusing cultural experiences. (This is a good thing, btw.) So a couple days ago there I am riding the bus back from Seoul to Andong. How it works when you ride the express bus in Korea, usually, is that you buy your happy little (affordable!) ticket and then ride a decent, clean, comfortable bus to your destination. You get an assigned seat. In this case, I was number 12. The seats are two seats together on the left side of the aisle, and one seat alone on the right side of the aisle by the other window. In other words, the first row is 1-2 together, then seat 3. The second row is 4-5 together, then seat 6. And so on. When you get a multiple of 3, you know you will be in the seat alone on the right side, so I knew in seat 12 I would be in the fourth row in the single seat.

I boarded the bus and noted it wasn't too full. In the fourth row, an elderly couple were sitting together in my row, in seats 10 and 11. There was a suitcase placed in front of seat 12, in the area between the seat and the seat in front - where my legs would be when I sat down. I stopped in the aisle, showed them my ticket, and they hurried to move their small suitcase, wedging it between their legs on the floor of their pair of seats. It would have been nice for them, obviously, to have it in the seat they had thought would be empty, but they quickly moved it when they saw I'd be occupying the seat.

Within a couple minutes, the bus was ready to leave and there were still only seven or so people, total, on board. I thought to myself, "Self, you can move to the seat behind you, the couple can put their suitcase back here, you can have a bit more privacy, and everybody wins." (I hate sitting right next to people in a movie theater, too, when there are other empty rows. Why do people do that? When someone comes and sits right next to me, I totally move.) And so in this case, as the driver began to reverse, I moved to the seat behind me (15, as you know if you are paying attention) and signalled to the elderly couple that seat 12 would be free after all and they could go ahead and put their suitcase back there. Of course they said thanks and stuff, and I tried to say "It's OK, no problem" although I was worried that the phrase I know for that, "Kwentchanayo" is not formal enough, because it is a polite form but not honorific. So, afraid of having not been respectful enough to my elders with my verb ending, I sat in seat 15 and started reading my book.

A bit later, here came Ms. Elderly Suitcase, to the seat behind her, with their thermos of coffee. It's one of those stainless steel, colored, sturdy thermoses people take on trips, with a lid that doubles as a cup. She sat down and held it out to me, offering me a cup of coffee. I tried to politely decline, once again fretting about my verb endings. I was trying to throw in a sup-ni-da or a su-seyo somewhere to make it all formal and honorific, but still I kept saying "Ah-ni-ye-yo" (No) and "Kwentchanayao" (It's OK). Anyway, I think she thought I was just doing the polite refusal thing, twice, and a third time she insisted, poured the coffee in the cup, and gave it to me. Then she went back to her seat.

So, what on earth is the protocol here? I mean, I had to drink it. (I think?) Would I drink it in the U.S.? No way. I'd think a fellow bus passenger was trying to poison me.So there I am sipping this random coffee and wondering about the etiquette. Do I drink it all? Do I drink a sip and then give it back to her? There's a thing in Korea about not totally emptying the dishes or pots or side dish bowls in restaurants, I heard, because it indicates you want your host to serve you more. I definitely did not want to be served more, as I was overwhelmed even being served the one cup! I drank half of it (tasty! mixed with milk! and apparently not poison) and then really tried to decide what to do with the second half. Meanwhile, Ms Elderly is back in her seat with headphones listening to music and oblivious to me. Finally I was like, whatever! and I drank the whole thing, then went back in the aisle, crouched next to her, got their attention, handed the cup back, thanked them a lot, and went back to my seat.

I mean, there was really no need to thank me for moving my seat. Anyone would have done the same thing, seriously! There were so many empty seats on the bus! And it was better for me anyway! I was so overwhelmed by the coffee thanks.

The funny thing is, I am reading the book Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, in which the new bride is totally out of her etiquette element at Manderley and has no idea what's going on with servants, menus, protocol, wings of the house, and whatnot. I was just reading it and thinking to myself, "Wow, I don't have to worry about fancy rules like that" when Ms Elderly comes and rocks my world with her proffered coffee thanks.

The view from here!

2011-12-09T18:26:00.001+09:00

Have I mentioned the view from our new building? I mean, it really is a great view! I love looking out over Andong, nestled as it is in its hills, whether day or night. The view is probably the best thing about living in our new apartment. (Note: there were not a lot of contenders for this title.) Anyway, I try to take a moment every day to appreciate the view, because I love it. I don't know which time of day is the best. Many times I have found myself on the back stairway between my 5-6 p.m. classes, gazing at a glowing peach-pink-purple sky and the city lights that glow softly as dusk approaches. The front of our building faces downtown, and when nighttime has fallen over the city, the red sparkles and neon splashes punctuate the darkness and highlight the rectangular buildings. At midday, the decidedly non-rectangular buildings are the ones that catch my eye. Those are the traditional Korean houses of Andong, which are in the next block in either direction, a flat layer of old-style Korean rooftops in between all the modern apartments, stores and offices. The mix of old and new perfectly encapsulates what Korea seems to be all about. The ring of hills around the city and the river add their natural beauty, and I have come to know the line of trees atop a far east hill as well as I knew the E-Mart sign when we lived in Ok-Dong. In short, I try to not take for granted the view from our Dang-buk-dong digs.

I know what you're thinking: that I could post a picture of said view(s) to share with you all. You might be one of those a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words types. Well, not me. I am more of the belief that a thousand words are worth a picture. (Or, you know, 260.)

Oh hello there, December

2011-12-02T19:49:00.001+09:00

"J'ai souvent constaté chez d'autres cette espèce d'instantanéité dans l'emploi d'une langue étrangère, après un travail inconscient d'incubation préparatoire ; il est remarquable d'ailleurs combien peu de mots suffisent pour exprimer les pensées les plus usuelles." - Arnauld d'Abbadie, Douze Ans de Sejour dans la Haute-Ethiopie

December! What! And I have not even learned Korean yet, or sung nearly enough songs at the noraebang. And yet, here we are, with only three weeks more in Andong, Korea. I have to pack!

Today, I read the passage quoted above and it rang true. Roughly translated, he says that he is always telling people that there's a revelatory moment when you can all of a sudden sort of use a foreign language that you have been working at learning, and that it's amazing how few words you really need to express the most common thoughts. Naturally this resonates with me the most from my Spanish, which I learned a-travelin' just as this author was learning Arabic on the road back in the day. I totally remember observing my brain make rapid progress in Spanish; in fact, it was almost as if I could note the physical occurrence and see my brain improve from Sunday morning to Monday night. There was a sudden moment where I just understood more. I totally get what my boy Arnauld is saying here. As for Korea - sigh. If only we used the language at all in our daily lives here! This is the same problem I ran into in 2005-06. All day I am paid to specifically not speak Korean. Then I go home to my apartment. Really, restaurants and stores are the only places I use the Korean language, unless I make an effort to set out to do so, and even in the shops and such people English us a lot. I've learned a bit - I learned to read and say a few phrases last time I lived here, and I've learned a bit more this time, but it's just crazy how little Korean the expat English teachers get away with knowing. I mean, even in Daegu many teachers don't read 한글 (hangeul - the Korean script), and in Seoul? Those people could probably get away with not even learning 맥주 (maekchu - beer) and 감사합니다 (kamsa hamnida - thank you)! Although everyone should always learn "thank you" in every language wherever they go even if they are just there for a day. I even learned it for my brief (wonderful!) stint in Turkey - then promptly forgot. (Ahh, right, teşekkür ederim - thanks for the refresher, Google translate!)

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes. December. It's beginning to feel a lot like winter, especially inside my classroom. Yes, I said inside. I have been teaching class in a coat/jacket for three weeks. We have heat now and everything in our newly "renovated" building but I have windows that are maybe like the thickness of a Ziploc bag...one of them doesn't even shut all the way...lots of my students just wear their jackets in my classroom. Our apartment upstairs has some draft/insulation issues, too. But have I mentioned we have only three more weeks here?

There will always be more things to do in Korea, but for now it is time to wrap it up and focus on our upcoming trip to Cambodia where we will see many wondrous things and help to build a house.

In other news, let's see.. my artistic endeavors in Daegu have ended (for now), I'm still picking up a few scraps of the Korean language here and there, I'm still managing to drag my cold self out from the blanket under which I huddle to make it to kickboxing once in a while, I'm reading about my boy Andrew Johnson and really digging his plebian, common man, pro-labor self. Let me just tell you that if Andy Johnson were alive today he would totes be #Occupying. And he is so not a fan of the organized religion in the USofA, circa 1850. It's pretty awesome. I remain fascinated by the prez bios I read.

Oh, also? I could use some new music recommendations. What are you listening to?

Hurrah for December! I love Christmas! I will be on a plane this Christmas Day but I still love it.

"Black Friday" Whoring

2011-11-26T12:37:00.001+09:00

OK, so there are three things wrong with this so-called "Black Friday" madness. I mean, even besides the fact that "Black Friday" is a stupid phrase that people/the media/shoppers use, in order to feel like they are a part of something cool that is bigger than them, when in reality retail workers meant it as an insult to call a day "Black" - as in, hello, this day is so awful and terrible and full of needy, chaotic, and nowadays violent shoppers that we are going to equate it with depression and economic freefall. But even getting past the nonsense of the name and the cult and the wicked behavior (violence is not acceptable, ever! violence in shopping is unacceptable plus crazy!) and the pushing of the start time earlier and earlier until it is now "Black Fri-Thurs-Ruin-My-Holi-Day," even getting past all that, I think you Friday crazy-shoppers need to take a good, hard look at yourselves.

1. Selfishness: I actually like Christmas shopping, a lot. I hate shopping the rest of the year, but I like picking out Christmas presents for people. And when I worked at Borders for many holiday seasons, I liked the holiday shoppers, too. Humanity just generally acts better when people are thinking about others instead of themselves, and customers buying holiday presents acted better than stupid customers the rest of the year who were in constant sense-of-entitlement mode. The problem with what the day after Thanksgiving (or day OF Thanksgiving, awful!) has become is that these people are no longer thinking about others, for whom they are buying gifts, but thinking only about themselves and the dollars they can "save" on this or that deal.

2. Amateur Hour: Much like Valentine's Day in restaurants or New Year's Eve in bars, the Friday has become the amateur hour -- the day when everybody goes out to do something they clearly are not very good at. Their lack of sophistication (or even intelligence) shows.

3.Prostitution: But I think I've realized that what bugs me about this "Black Friday" nonsense is how the selfish, amateur behavior admits desperation on the part of the shoppers. I'm baffled that people are willing to so freely admit their desperation, and it reminds me of why I don't understand men who go to prostitutes. I mean, my whole take on that situation is: don't you feel bad about yourself, guys? Here you are, wanting to, shall we say, "hook up," and you have to PAY someone to do it? Your looks/charm/wit/intelligence/kindness/graciousness/compassion/any other wonderful qualities are lacking, so you'll just go buy affection/intimacy/pleasure? I find that so pathetic that it is amusing (if it weren't also tragic for the ones who are unfortunately forced into prostitution in many cases). Wow, you're such a manly stud, "banging a hooker." And you had to PAY her to like you for the evening/hour. How do you not feel like a total loser after that? Anyway, that is what the Black Fridayers have come to remind me of. They are so terrible at what they are trying to do (shop), and so clearly incapable of selecting gifts from the heart for their friends and family, and apparently so awful at finding a good deal with their own intelligence and other personal attributes, that they bring about the dismissal of soul/quality/finesse and instead are sold a commodity masquerading as something true.

Let me be clear: I am not talking about people who happen to want to start their holiday shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. That shouldn't have to be a problem. (And hey, it's good exercise for U.S. people to actually have to walk from a farther away parking space for once.) I am talking only about the crazed Black Fridayers. The distinction is abundantly clear to all of us sane people, but I am afraid that some of the crazies might be in denial about themselves, like someone who believes that a prostitute really loves him.

Post-Thanksgiving Post

2011-11-25T10:30:00.000+09:00

First of all, I am pleased to report that my Andong, Korea Thanksgiving went well, and the Sam Adams-drinking plan was a success! Although we spent the equivalent of $30 each to have a night out instead of the approximately $10 we would ordinarily spend if we drank cheap Korean beer, I felt justified celebrating in Sam Adams style because it was a U.S. holiday, and the Adams family lived just down the road a piece from ol' Plymouth Rock, you know. There happened to be a big concert event at Andong University last night, which a few of our foreigner teacher friends attended; afterward they also stopped by the "world beers" bar and together we watched some of the replay of the concert. We tried to spot our friends in the crowd and gazed admiringly at the soju ad lady (famous/popular/beautiful) who hosted the event, and so on. It reminded me of something that would happen at a Thanksgiving at home in the States, with the end-of-the-evening group of people who haven't yet dozed off finding something random on television to watch, with whoever is left at the gathering offering (not-so)witty commentary.

As for today, I couldn't be happier to not be shopping, but I wouldn't be shopping if I were back home in the States, anyway. I would, however, be making fun of shoppers from either place, and losing respect for anyone who actually went shopping on Thanksgiving Day. I truly hope that was a bust. Shame on any of you who participated in Thursday shopping! Meanwhile, I really hate the phrase "Black Friday." It's stupid. It's not as offensive as, say, "family values" or one of those other phrases tossed around in political rhetoric that not only doesn't mean anything but is actually used to obfuscate what the talking head is really saying while manipulating voters and/or public discourse. But it's still stupid. I think people use the phrase "Black Friday" to try to sound and feel like they are a part of something, in this case, the day-after-Thanksgiving media-promulgated shopping day. Gaaargh.

I did manage to talk about Thanksgiving in each of my four Thursday classes. In a couple of them, we did a Thanksgiving crossword or USA puzzle. I had my more advanced speakers go around the room to say one thing they are thankful for, turkey-day-dinner style. All in all, it was another decent day at my decent job, apart from the fact that our new building is freezing cold and my classroom is the most freezingest coldest.

And so November winds down. I have been doing NaNoWriMo, churning out a spectacularly crappy quantity-not-quality of words, and although I fell behind mid-month, I just might finish/"win." I am starting to get into the pack-up-my-life state of mind. I can feel Cambodia getting closer and closer! We will be there so soon! Thank you so much to everyone who donated to our Habitat for Humanity trip. What a wonderful cause.

I love the holiday season! I'm so excited to start thinking all sorts of Christmasy thoughts now!

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-25T03:30:00.000+09:00

Apparently there's some U.S. holiday today or something? That's funny. I don't have the first clue what any of my U.S. peeps are up to. I have not heard from a single family member about their plans for today. The only news I have? Photos that friends have posted on Facebook of their pies and other concoctions.

Then again, there's been so much going on here in Korea, I had hardly noticed that the holidays are here. A shame, because I love me some holiday season. Most of that "so much" going on in Andong involves us getting ready to leave: arranging the flight to Cambodia, preparing for our Habitat for Humanity volunteer build there, attempting to make some semblance of arrangements for next year, and trying not to freeze in the poorly insulated building we now live and work in, notably in my frigid classroom on the two-exposed-walls end of the hallway with windows that don't shut, let alone seal. Brrrr.

It's such a contrast from 2005, the last time I was in Korea for Thanksgiving. I was more aware of and interested in Thanksgiving that year, as evidenced by A Distant Nation my Community, that year's T-day entry. Then, I was "new" to Korea - still adjusting and noticing and observing with wide eyes. Now I am on the way out. Then, I was very much in touch with what was happening back home, and dozens of people wrote to me about their Thanksgiving happenings, sharing wonderful stories. I guess I just live a more isolated life now.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Is it some combination of Facebook, people's reluctance to communicate via personal e-mail, and all of us just getting older and more spread out? Is it the intermittently anti-social me, who lives with Brian and therefore never actually craves human interaction anymore? I really have been thinking about that, seriously. Now that I live with someone, it is soooooooooo easy for me to not make the effort to go out and do things and talk to people. How do other people avoid this trap?

Well, anyway, tonight I will drink a delicious Sam Adams beer, because last week I finally discovered a bar here in Andong that carries those delectable bottles. Only ten and half months here that I didn't know about it, no big deal, right? As for next year's Thanksgiving? A mystery!

Enjoy the football, eating, and most of all, the gathering!

And nothing lasts forever...

2011-11-21T18:34:00.001+09:00

...even cold November showers! Or, I should say, our November showers most certainly do not last forever because there is not enough hot water in our apartment. So frustrating. For those of you who don't know, Avalon moved on Halloween, both the school and the teachers' apartments. We are now closer to bustling downtown Andong, not that we were that far to begin with (Andong is not that big). Avalon entered into a partnership with MBC, one of the Korean news networks, and we don't really know the details of it except that it means we moved into a new building, expanded our academy's size, increased the number of classrooms and teachers and subjects, and did all this in a former (small) hotel that has now "been renovated." I say "been renovated" in quotes because I would not exactly say the work was done when we moved in, or even now, three weeks later.

I wasn't particularly excited about living upstairs from work, as I like some personal space, but here we are in the "penthouse" as I very jokingly call it, on the 6th floor, with a two second commute to work on the 4th floor to teach our English classes. The first day here we had no electricity until 8pm, and no hot water, and no stove, and no washing machine and no refrigerator. All of these things slowly but surely trickled in during the first two weeks. Internet has been problematic. There is a wireless network for the whole building, and our computers in our classrooms are fine but up in the apartments there are still continual problems with the internet experience. The other big things are the stove and hot water. The "stove" is a tiny two-burner plug-in hot plate that is about half as big and sturdy as the one in our old apartment (and most other English teacher apartments I've seen in Korea); I really think is the plastic Barbie doll play kitchen version. It takes about 20 minutes to boil some water. Brian the chef is not happy, and I feel sad about this. As for me, I am most miserably because I absolutely cannot take cold showers, so I take 3-minute showers these days. Different tasks get allocated to different days, such as washing hair, conditioning hair, etc. I hate this. I mostly hate it because the bathroom is so cold (no heat in there) that a 3-minute shower isn't enough to get you all warm and toasty anyway, so it is almost as bad as taking a cooler shower. (Almost)

Let the record reflect that I am well aware these are "first-world problems" as they say. But here's my thing about that: you can't expect people to live in a situation that has certain requirements and then not provide them. Maybe everyone doesn't deserve to live in shameless modern luxury. OK, granted. But then, people who lived in previous time periods without hot running water either lived in the desert (the cradles of civilization!) or boiled water, or both. We have a burner that is tiny and doesn't heat up, and no way to make a fire to boil water without burning the building down, and no bathtub anyway. (The shower is a corner of the tile in the Korean bathroom.) It's one thing to say an airplane or a car is a modern luxury, but you don't send someone up in the air and then say, "Oh, too bad! We're out of fuel! You are so picky and dependent on modern conveniences!" as the plane falls out of the sky.

At least we can work our heat (thankfully it was warm the first day, when we couldn't). I love Korean ondol heating, and I actually come upstairs often when I have break periods between classes because my classoom is FREEZING. While many of the classrooms in the hallway have classrooms on either side and one exposed outside wall, my classroom is on the end of the hallway and I have two exposed outside walls...and more windows than some other classrooms (windows thin as paper)...and a window that doesn't shut...the board I write on in class is ice cold to touch first class of the day. My kids keep their jackets on. We have heat in the classrooms now, which is better than the week before last, now the weather has turned even colder so it's still freeze-ola in there.

The thing about all this is that Brian and I are only five weeks away from leaving!! So part of us has been trying to get settled, and get everything fixed, and all that, and the rest of me is totally in the mindset of "Screw it, only 32 more days!" kind of thing. It's a frustrating way to be thinking. So not living in the moment. Booo!

And it's also so weird that we are leaving so soon!!!!!!!!!! Can you believe we have finished 46 weeks in Andong? Wow! And we still aren't sure about our plan for next year. But, first things first, we are flying from Seoul to Phnom Penh. We will kick off 2012 volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a kingdom of wonder (that's their slogan, I didn't make it up) that has seen a lot of troubles and danger and floods and problems (although being cold is generally not one of them) but has also got fascinating history, temples, rivers, coast, cities, food, people, and so on to visit.

Meanwhile, in our last five weeks back here at the ranch, we are no longer in the hip, up-and-coming nightlife area called Ok-Dong, so we now live in Dangbuk-dong, near different restaurants and bus routes, farther from the city bus terminal but closer to the city train station, closer to the rows of Andong jjimdak restaurants (the spicy chicken stew specialty) in the downtown market jjimdak stalls, but father from all the fabulous Ok-Dong places we had come to love, farther from E-Mart, closer to the hospital and doctors, farther from two of the three bars where the Westerners mostly hang out, closer to some other bars, closer to downtown shopping and coffee shops, farther from the Tous Les Jours where they love me and Coffee Beach, farther from my kickboxing gym, but still a nice walk home from kickboxing class.

"And so it goes, and so it goes, and so will [we] soon, I suppose..." as Billy Joel sort of sang.

November Holiday Roundupin reverse chronological order

2011-11-11T12:57:00.001+09:00

November 24, U.S.: If you go shopping on Thanksgiving night at WalMart or anywhere, you are ~~part of~~ the problem. Forget slippery slopes, this was a total free fall. 7 a.m., 6 a.m., 4 a.m., who needs sleep when we can just go SHOPPING!, Black Black Black Friday, trampling to death, and now this. You know what, retailers of the U.S.? Forget you! (I put it that way because this is, of course, a family blog. Heh.) And you know what, holiday shoppers of the U.S.? Forget you, too! DON'T GO SHOPPING ON THANKSGIVING. And, p.s., don't go shopping at WalMart. We have been over this.

November 11, U.S.: Veterans Day. I posted on Twitter and Facebook the following great idea: in honor of all the veterans, let's not have any more veterans. The first comment I received was a request to explain what that meant. I didn't answer right away; I thought I would give everyone a little time to think about the simplest way to not make any more veterans.

November 11, Korea: Peppero Day (although I feel like Beppero more precisely conveys the pronunciation?) is here again, and what a doozy! 11/11/11! So many sticks! Unfortunately, they have "cancelled" Peppero Day in some of the elementary schools here. (Isn't that just an old joke? "That's it! We're cancelling Christmas!") My students initially told me a few days ago that one of the elementary schools here in Andong was cancelling it, and we talked about bad behavior and troublemakers running riot with the chocolate sticks. Then I heard from some Daegu teachers about Peppero cancellations, allegedly due to unsafe Peppero being imported from China. Where, apparently, Lotte factories are up to no good. Then someone else said the schools just don't wawnt to deal with all the trash a day of the 11-like Peppero sticks produces. Damn it, someone get to the bottom of this!!! (I am allowed to say "damn" on my family blog. I just made that rule.)

November 1, Mexico etc.: All Souls' Day/Day of the Dead. Oops, I forgot to celebrate. I was too busy on the first of the month enjoying my first full day in our new apartment, waiting to see at any given moment whether we would have any of the following: electricity, hot water, a refrigerator, a stove, keys...you know, luxuries like that. I might add that we also don't have a television, which while clearly not essential to life is in fact in our English teacher contract (!) and also at this point hilariously NOT a "first-world problem," as they say.

How will you celebrate this month? Anyone who is thinking of going shopping on Thanksgiving night, tell you what - why don't you donate ten of those dollars to Habitat for Humanity, by clicking here, instead. That's a better thing to do, I promise.

Starkville Indigo

2011-10-29T00:56:00.000+09:00

Don't those two words, starkville and indigo, just sound so perfect together? This may be part of why the song "Starkville" is one of the highlights of my career as an Indigo Girls fan. It's a wonderful, perfect piece of them.

"If you were here in Starkville..." the song begins. It is a melancholy song, but also lively. It recalls, and it looks ahead. It's a song about vast expanses between things that are connected, such as distant geographical locations and human hearts.

I put "Starkville" on my 25K training run playlist, because of the steady drumbeat and the "I went running for my health/I watched those headlights turn to moonlight and finally/I was running by myself" part.

"Starkville" is an Amy song on the album Become You, which came out in 2002. I think of Become You as a transition album, a kind of link between two different Indigo Girls eras. It could be that I am projecting two of my different eras of fandom onto the Girls themselves, but I think musically my theory holds up. I think you could play any of the first five or six albums, and then you could play Despite our Differences or the latest, Beauty Queen Sister, and someone might not at first realize it was the same band. (If there's a flaw in my theory it's All That We Let In, but we'll analyze that another day.)

There is a lot to love about "Starkville." For one thing, it offers up lines like "I'm haunted by geography" and "My regrets become distractions" and "I call you on a whim just to say/morning birds are singing/but I could not do them justice/so I hung up and I fell back to sleep."

It also has "I'm in love with my mobility, but sometimes this life can be a drag." That's another thing to love about "Starkville."

And I haven't even mentioned the "I was hell bent on agony back then" part. Really, "Starkville" is a song for people who have ever appreciated someone else and who are now appreciating where they are. And who they are. (The whole of Become You is good for this, I might add.)

My friend Finn, who inspired this post, has a deep, true appreciation for "Starkville." When we all lived in L.A., he and some others came over to my apartment on my birthday. He said he had not got me a present, so he made up a dance to "Starkville" for me instead.

I cannot provide you a link, because the only hints of "Starkville" I can find online are craptacular videos that "cannot not do [it] justice." But I can urge you to purchase it from iTunes or (gasp!) buy it on CD in a music store. It's worth it.

A great thing about being an Indigo Girls fan is having spent so many years watching and listening to Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, watching and listening to their growth and contributions to the planet. "Starkville" is such an Amy-esque Amy moment. A link between her past and present, too. A look at all that there has been and all that there is to come and all that is now.

Oh, and total bonus: it has harmonica!

"The rains came down and the floods came up..."

2011-10-24T00:33:00.000+09:00

Did you know that Hurricane Irene had a devastating impact on Vermont? Have you been reading daily news updates about the damage, floods, FEMA efforts, people who lost their homes, and years of clean-up work ahead? Most of us have not been hearing about this at all.

An ABC news report noted that homes, bridges, roads, and the state's emergency operations center were washed away. That's a fine mess to be in. I also read that a dozen or more towns in Vermont and New York were cut off. Like, there you were in your town, with no immediate way to the outside world (short of some far-reaching medieval catapult-like device, maybe?), which is something that I think we all take for granted all the time: that we can just somehow, whether on public transportation or in a car or even on a bicycle or on foot, hit the road and go somewhere else. Oh, and? People died. The governor of Vermont called for "all the help we can get." But within a few days, the media and, as importantly, the public had moved on to other things.

I was here in Korea when Irene did her thing. I was aware of Irene. I read internet updates, scrolled through a gazillion Facebook updates about it on my news feed, and watched tons of live coverage on CNN International -- of the build-up, and of the raging waters. The watching. The waiting. The Anderson Cooper live at the water's edge in New York City. The obligatory reporter clutching a pole to not be blown away. All the breathless excitement with dramatic pictures of crashing waves, with journalists a-plenty dispatched to the scene, for the anticipation and thrill of the event. But reporting the after-effects? Well, that's just maybe too depressing. Naaah, we need to move on and find some nasty, bleeding, volatile coverage of something else to get people riled up, as opposed to a calm, methodical, deep digging report about what people in Vermont and other northeast states are going through after the fact.

The question is not "why don't we see the next several months of devastation and disaster recovery on our TV newscasts?" You know perfectly well why we don't: because the viewing public would change the channel. The real question you should be asking is why you would change that channel.

Also, I daresay it has become trendy in the years since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans to be scornful of FEMA and The Government, in a general, dissatisfied, heckuva-job way. But lambasting any and all public officials is probably not the solution either, because a friend of mine in northern New England reports that it has actually become a political football kind of topic there now. Political candidates are very aware of how they come across on the issue, so the danger is that it becomes all about the stance instead of about the real impact on people, their lands, their homes, their mortgages, and their lives.

My Napikoski family hometown of tiny Millers Falls, Massachusetts is in Western Mass, close enough to the Vermont border that sometimes it was closer to drive to Vermont for dinner or a particular store or event than to the next bigger town in Massachusetts. I am very familiar with the area and have spent quality time in Vermont, both as a child visiting with family, and also on my own when I lived in Boston. Since my grandma died and my dad's generation of siblings sold off the house, I haven't been back to Millers Falls. I'm not sure how the river close by my grandparents' old home fared in the storm. I try to imagine it. I am trying to imagine all of the towns in Vermont and other areas Irene hit. I am wondering if some of the cute covered bridges I remember washed away. I am wondering who the people are that were swept away in the raging waters.

The excitement died after landfall, but the flooding continued for days after that. The story wasn't over. How can we get people to pay attention to the end of these stories?

My thanks to Kamron for inspiring this blog post. You, too, can choose a topic for Linda Without Borders this month when you make a donation to my upcoming Habitat for Humanity trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Interestingly, Cambodia has also recently been hit by devastating floods, with a death toll in the hundreds.

And the world keeps turning and turning...

Grocery Shoppers Need to Get in Line!

2011-10-21T11:11:00.003+09:00

What is it about grocery store lines that makes people think they have the right to push, shove, and crowd the person in front of them? I'm talking to - well, most of you people. This isn't one of those things where I think "there are two kinds of people in the world - all my friends and all the stupid people." No, regrettably, I fear many of you are guilty of this one. You are so impatient in grocery store lines and when you hit that conveyor belt and the little space between the gum/magazine racks, you lose your minds. Not to mention all sense of politeness.

I mean, can you imagine that kind of activity in a line somewhere else -- the bank, or Starbucks, say? Pushing up against the person in front of you, advancing to the counter before they are finished, and all the shifting! The impatient shifting!

To be honest, it cracks me up. And you know what else it does? It slows me down. That's right, you impatient grocery shoppers. You are only making it worse for yourselves. As soon as someone bumps me from behind, which usually happens when the person in front of me (sometimes two in front of me!) is still paying, I plant my feet, and I do not move until it is my turn. That really freaks out some of the line freaks: "Oh my god! Everyone moved up three inches but this lady in front of me is NOT MOVING UP THREE INCHES!! What do I do?" Shove shove shove. But I remain fixed. I have actually had someone tap me before and say, "Ma'am...?" and gesture to the six inches or whatever of space I had not moved up into. I said, "Oh, are you referring to the few inches of space in front of me?"

Then, when I pay, I usually do so with a debit card but as a Visa purchase, not a PIN purchase. You know what that means? I sign my name. You know what that means? I have a really long name. I can sign it quickly, just kind of do the capital 'N' and then a squiggle for the rest. Or, in cases like these, I can neatly, painstakingly, carefully write in beautiful cursive the a-p-i-k-gotta love those cursive Ks, looped back around, neatly, neatly, -o-s-oooh! here's another k!-i. Aaaand, don't forget to carefully dot the Is! I have had clerks in stores reach for the receipt three or four times before I am actually finished. I love it. The person behind me, meanwhile, is having absolute fits.

They need to chill out. It will be their turn when I am finished, and not before.

This blog post was written because Karen Curtis, who kindly donated to my upcoming Habitat for Humanity trip to Cambodia, selected the topic of people who crowd her in the checkout lines. But I happen to not only agree with her 100% that crowding in the store checkout line is rude, but also I take it to the next level of actively trying to slow those people down. So, that view is my own, but I had no problem giving you my interpretation of this issue. I think you all need to calm down in the grocery store lines! And don't touch me.

Ulleungdo? I Ulleungdid!!

2011-10-07T13:20:00.001+09:00

Ulleungdo (pronounced like ooh-lung-doe, as in doe, a deer...) is an island 100 kilometers or so off of the Korean peninsula. Don't worry that you have never heard of it. There are other islands off of the Korean peninsula you have probably not heard of, such as Jeju, a popular travel destination for honeymooners and other travelers around these parts that the U.S.-Korean military industrial complex partnership wants to spoil with a giant useless violent military base, and Dokdo, which is really more of an islet or, you know, rock that is nonetheless extremely important to Koreans who repeatedly remind anyone who is listening that "Dokdo is Korea!" Which is to say, Dokdo is not Japan's. Apparently some small right wing extremist part of the Japanese population actually cares about perpetuating the fight over these rocks in the East Sea (not called the Sea of Japan here!), thus firing up the entire Korean population, while the rest of the world remains blissfully ignorant that Dokdo exists at all, much less that there is a fight over which country it "belongs" to. Korean students will look you in the eye and tell you that Dokdo is an important international issue, and you feel kind of bad telling them that while Kim Jong-Il and the North/South tensions and nuclear threats (real or imagined) are top global issues, Dokdo actually might rank somewhere around 3,675th.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I was in Ulleungdo. For the three-day weekend. October 3rd was a holiday here in Korea, Foundation Day, so we had a three-dayer and Brian and I hopped the ferry from Mukho harbor to Ulleungdo with the Climbing in Korea Meetup group. I like islands, and I liked this one. It was a very Lost-y island, with less sand and beach, but about the right size and cliffs and rocks and an adjacent smaller island and natural beauty and mountainous bits and a waterfall and a basin. It used to be a volcano. Or, it was formed from a volcano. You geologists let me know the proper way to describe that. Maybe both.

Among our Ulleungdo activities we rode a cable car, gazed in the direction of Dokdo but did not have a clear enough day to see it 90 km away, ate honghapbap, slept in a minbak across the street from the water with the other folks from the group, saw a whooooole lot of squid being dried/eaten, saw the bright lights of the squid fishing boats at night that lure the squid to their doom, and climbed Seonginbong, the highest peak on the island. The 984-meter elevation hike was the main adventure, although that was a very full day (Sunday) because after our hike we did a bunch of other walking, sanchae bibimap eating, rock gazing, oncheon bathing, and relaxing. We explored the villages of Dodong-ri and Jeodong-ri and Cheonbu-ri and Sadong-ri while we were there. All in all, a good time was had on the island although our best laid plans for returning went agley when the ferry was delayed due to sea conditions, so once we got back to the mainland we couldn't get back to Andong Monday night and instead had to stay the night in Gangneung, on the coast north of Donghae/Mukho, and then take the 6 a.m. train back to Andong Tuesday morning. Good times, just like when I got trapped on Catalina Island off the coast of California for a night and had to call in sick to work. Or, rather, call in trapped-on-an-island. I was afraid that might happen again. Why am I always getting stuck on not-so-desert islands?

Ulleungdo! Just Ulleung-do it!

A Comparison to Hitler

2011-10-06T14:07:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I mentioned that Hank Williams Jr. did not in fact set out to compare Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, but I also mentioned that if he had done so, it would not have been a mortal sin (as it were), in my opinion. Of course, there's this whole "free speech" thing people like to jabber about (but not actually practice), but there's the additional fact that comparing someone to something extreme to make a point is a valid rhetorical tactic. Also, I frankly think that comparing oneself to Hitler ought to be encouraged. After all, who could possibly make you look better in a comparison than Hitler? If I compare myself to Gandhi, or Voltaire, or Gloria Steinem, or Steve Nash, well, then I have a lot to live up to. But Hitler? Let's take a look:

Hitler: Spoke fluent German
Me: Did very well in German class in high school

Hitler: Leader of Nazi party, chancellor, head of state
Me: Student government secretary

Hitler and Me: Both Tauruses!

Hitler: Wrote a famous book, Mein Kampf
Me: Wrote a lot of stuff, absolutely none of it famous (yet)

Hitler: Responsible for the deaths of millions of people
Me: Responsible for the deaths of dozens of insects, including cockroaches and one particularly memorable centipede in the bathtub

Hitler: Anti-communist
Me: "Communism is just a red herring." - Clue

Hitler: Racially motivated policies
Me: Cheese enchilada-motivated policies

Hitler and Me: Both sang in the church choir when we were young

Hitler: Decorated for bravery in World War I
Me: Pacifist

So those are some of the ways that I am like or not like Hitler. Now, you try!

Write a Song About It, Hank

2011-10-05T12:45:00.001+09:00

First of all, I rarely watch Monday Night Football. I don't watch it at all this year, over here in Korea. I frankly could not even have told you that Hank Williams Jr. was part of the show opening, so I certainly won't miss him when he's gone. And I never watch Fox "News." I am not the biggest Obama fan and I am not even the smallest Hank Williams Jr. fan. You might say I don't have a dog in this fight. But:

1. I have serious misgivings about the whole idea of "solving" problems by very publicly punishing certain outspoken celebrities.
2. Did anyone actually take a look at what Hank actually said?
3. Hitler. Why does anyone still take this bait?

Earlier this year Kobe Bryant, in the heat of the moment of an intense basketball game, called a referee "faggot" and suddenly the entire nation(/world?) was weighing in on what he "deserved" as a punishment. I know, because none of us have ever called someone a name in the heat of the moment, right? And when the NBA fines him some ridiculous amount, we all collectively feel satisfied because - why? What exactly did we do, there? And why is it outrageous for him to say that but not outrageous for men to throw around the words "pussy" "douchebag" and even the more clinical "vagina" as derogatory insults to each other? I maintain that the answer is the currency, the hot topic-ness, the "It Gets Better" trend, of acknowledging that people need to not be jerks (or worse) to homosexuals. It is not because of any actual sincere reflection about what it meant to use that term or what it means as an insult. The same is true in this situation. I actually fully support ESPN in standing up to Fox and ~~Clowns~~ Friends, and I wish more people would call them out on their 1.outrageous statements 2.lies 3.just plain nonsense. But choosing a political issue to publicly condemn someone for a statement is problematic. It's like this big show. It's not an honest look at what it means to have Hank Williams Jr. be a part of your program - it's just being caught up in the hysteria of the moment.

Furthermore: I saw all these headlines like "Hank Calls Obama 'Hitler'" and that is not what happened! What he SAID was that Obama and good ol' John Boehner playing golf together was like Hitler and Netanyahu playing golf together. This, my friends, is what we call an analogy. He exaggerated to make a point, because that is something that people do in arguments. When pressed (by some talking head who could just smell a controversy, and therefore ratings, on the horizon) he explained that many people consider Obama and others in government the "enemy" right now, thus cementing in some people's mind the Obama/Hitler comparison. But he didn't actually start running around calling Barack Obama "Hitler."

And here's a question for you: So what if he did? IF Hank had actually compared Obama to Hitler, so what? Why shouldn't he be able to do that? I mean, sure, he should then have to explain his thinking -- because there has been a U.S. White House occupant this decade who charismatically sucked people in with lies and perpetuated the slaughter of many, many people and his name is certainly not Barack Obama. But seriously, it's like the internet joke that within a certain amount of time someone will bring up Hitler to render any argument pointless. Why do people still fall for this? You seriously can call someone Satan and it goes over better than calling someone Hitler, but everyone still gets all high and mighty and the hysterical response just feeds the hysteria. I guarantee you Hank could have said it was like Satan playing golf with Jesus and no one would have cared and everyone could still have Hank on their football game on Mondays.

Now what really needs to happen is that all of you who went crazy on the Dixie Chicks in 2003 when they said they were ashamed of Texas/George W. Bush need to get together with Hank Jr. and call up the Chicks to apologize. And everyone - everyone! - needs to be able to have a feisty political discussion because feisty political discussions are awesome and they don't need to end with public shows of punishment or defriending on Facebook or whatever other simple-minded response people choose that feels good for two seconds but does nothing whatsoever to inspire or illuminate.

OK, maybe I am the smallest Hank Williams Jr. fan. I do love me some country music. But not when it's about "God told me to be a Republican fighting in Iraq." Stick to crying in my honky tonk beer and we can talk.

Control my blog for a day!

2011-10-02T00:11:00.000+09:00

This month, you get the chance to make Linda Without Borders about whatever you want. How, you ask? When you support my upcoming volunteer trip to Cambodia with Habitat for Humanity, I will blog about any topic you choose. Big or small, you name it. Got a burning political or social issue you feel passionate about? Is there a band/artist/book/company that the blogosphere needs to know? Just want me to talk about your favorite pizza toppings? The choice is yours.I know many of my friends and family are already supportive of the wonderful work of Habitat for Humanity, but I wanted to find a way to "give" you something in return for your donation. And so you get a piece of me - my blog!

Make a donation (any amount) by clicking here.
And then, let me know the topic you choose.

BONUS: While any donation to my Habitat for Humanity cause will get me to blog (and tweet!) for a day about the topic of your choosing, you can kick it up to the next level with a $75 donation. If you donate $75 to our Cambodia trip, I will blog about your choice of topic AND I pledge to read/watch any one book/movie that you name, between now and when I leave for Cambodia. We all have that book or movie that we insist our friends/family should read/watch. Or maybe you know of one that I have particularly neglected (genre fiction, anyone?) for some reason. Bring it on! Make a $75 contribution, and I will do your bidding.

Brian and I will finish our year-long contract teaching English in Andong, Korea this December. We have decided to take the Habitat for Humanity trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia as our next step. We will ring in 2012 building homes alongside Habitat partner families and doing our small part as volunteers to make a positive contribution in the world.

Just to recap:

Habitat sets a minimum $10 donation, so for $10, my blog will be turned over to your heart's desire for one day.
If you donate $25, I will also include a link to your web site or a site of your choosing to promote.
If you give $75 or more, I will not only blog and link to you, but in addition I pledge to read any book or watch any movie of your choosing -- you name it! -- before my Cambodia trip. I will do it, when you make a $75 donation.

The donation link, one more time:
http://www.habitat.org/cd/gv/participant/participant.aspx?pid=90563082
Thanks to everyone who supports Habitat for Humanity!

China highlights

2011-09-27T09:26:00.007+09:00

At long last, Brian and I traveled to China.

We went for our Chuseok vacation. China! A large, diverse country... the most populous...the oldest continuous civilization on Earth... ridiculous amounts of history, culture, nature, cities, food...it was exciting to even contemplate, and truly exciting to be there. Of course, Chuseok vacation is only a few days long, so it was a brief trip. We selected two major cities, Beijing and Shanghai, for our introduction to China. The minute we stepped on the Air China plane in Pusan, I saw the red-with-gold silk of the flight attendant's shirt inches from my face and heard the telltale plucky musical notes. I turned to Brian and said, "It totally feels like we are in China now." The instantly China-invoking music is what you hear at every Epcot Centeresque evocation of China, only this time it was really a Chinese entity playing it.

Highlights:

Day 1: Going to Beijing
Upon arrival at the airport, I watched from the airplane window as baggage handlers loaded boxes and boxes of something into cargo holds. "There go the Wal-Mart goods," I thought to myself. Our first day consisted of travel, eating in airports and planes, reading Chinese newspapers (in English - the papers for expats, I mean) and a long walk to the City Walls courtyard hostel. Because it is very close to the Forbidden City, it is not very close to a subway stop because they haven't built/can't build underground underneath the Forbidden City. Makes sense. I got my first glimpse of a lit up Forbidden City building as we neared our accommodations. We were also staying extremely close to the Hou-Hai nightlife area, and we stepped out for an introductory drink. I instantly fell in love with this scene: in the middle of Beijing, a lake surrounded by bars, lanterns, restaurants, music, clubs, cute pedestrian stone bridges, people walking talking selling things, and so on.

Day 2: Beijing's Sights to Behold
All anyone could jabber about Beijing before we got there was the pollution and traffic. Sigh. They do the same thing with Los Angeles and Washington D.C. sometimes, too (two of my favorite U.S. cities). Look past it, people. We rode the bus to the Summer Palace area, which definitely slowed to a crawl in the congested area of small, crowded streets but also allowed us to see a lot of Beijing streets, malls, the zoo, universities, and so on from our bus windows, giving us a nice taste and feel for the city. We had lunch at a famous dumplings restaurant, then spent the afternoon at Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City palace. I think Tiananmen Square was one of my top two must-do destinations in China, along with the Great Wall. It's just SO famous and historical and symbolic and human rightsy and interesting. I couldn't believe we were actually walking there when we got there.

After a brief happy hour drink in our hostel courtyard -- really, this courtyard hotel thing is a must! -- we headed for cocktails at the rooftop bar of the Emperor Hotel, overlooking the Forbidden City and the other lights of Beijing as evening fell. Stunning! If you don't stay at our City Walls Courtyard hostel, stay at the Emperor Hotel instead, just for the view from that rooftop bar. After that, we ate amazing hot pot, which we figured out as we went along, and then we went north for another little pilgrimage to the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, which if you don't instantly remember then I have to question both your sanity and just what the heck you were doing in August of 2008! The best Olympics since 1984, easily! Brian and I had so much fun watching from our Brooklyn apartment three years ago: Shawn Johnson, Michael Phelps, and everyone, really. And now we got to see the spot where it all went down. Our last stop for the night was a walk along Ghost Street, a sea of food, red lanterns, and people milling about enjoying them.

Day 3: The Wall Is Great
Obviously, one goes on one 's first trip to China and one is excited to see the Great Wall. We chose the Mutianyu section, where we spent a couple hours hiking, taking pictures, and marveling at the fact that we were actually at the Great Wall. Oh, also I did cartwheels on the Great Wall, because why not? It's big. It's wide. It's long - even though the idea that you can "see it from space" is kind of silly. It's so important! And the mountains are so beautiful! It was fun to climb and trek around the watchtowers and take the toboggan slide back down the mountain. The Great Wall, as Brian and I talked about while there, is one of the two or three biggest, most famous, most significant and recognizable places to visit in the entire world, up there with the Pyramids in Egypt, we suppose. Wonderful! We rode in a van with our little tour group and then all had lunch together, a meal consisting of various Chinese dishes spun around the lazy Susan in the big round table.

Back in the city, we had our regular evening chill-out drink in the courtyard and then dined on famous Peking duck (have I mentioned I am not a vegetarian in East Asia? I am really looking forward to getting back on the vegetarian train in 2012.) We then enjoyed strolling around the nearby brightly lit street of thronging people and modern shops (as in, Gucci, not someone selling a Mogwai), as well as the other nearby street of a million snacks for sale including snakes, scorpions and various animal body parts. Finally, we went back to Hou-Hai, my new favorite nightlife area in the world for some lakeside music and bar-hopping, capped with a final drink at a tiny rooftop bar.

Day 4: Get Me to Shanghai
We were going to fly from Beijing to Shanghai at 10 a.m., but we missed our flight and ended up spending a lot of time in the Beijing airport that day. Oh well - at least there was a Starbucks. There was also, I might add, a place to use the Internet where Gmail took sooooo painfully slowly long to load that we thought the connection was crap until we loaded a different web page and it took about half a millisecond. Ahhh, good ol' Google's war with China! Finally, we flew to Shanghai and beheld yet another amazing city. Our hotel was an actual, business-y friendly hotel, complete with concierge and doormen and all that, and I must confess it felt wonderfully luxurious after the hostel (although it didn't have a cute courtyard and 30-cent beer!) Speaking of beer that cost more than 30 cents, for our first Shanghai night we headed to the clouds - the Cloud 9 bar on the 87th floor of the awesome and tall Jin Mao Tower, which is right next door to the also awesome and even taller Shanghai World Financial Center. While we sipped our drinks, we gazed at the view of the nighttime city, although the view was occasionally obscured when a CLOUD WENT BY, only to quickly reappear, until the next cloud went by of course. Oh, don't mind me, I'm just sitting up here in the clouds having a peach cocktail.

Besides having our heads in the clouds, we immediately knew we were in an international, mega-cosmopolitan, worldly city because we suddenly a)had French news from TVMonde 5 on the hotel television and b)encountered service industry personnel who - gasp! - expected tips. Man, does spending time in Korea/Japan/even Beiiing spoil you with that whole no-tipping thing. Some of my strongest memories of returning to the U.S. from Korea in 2006 are the outrage I felt in bars after ordering a bottle of beer: I just paid for this! Why do I have to peel another dollar bill off of my stack?!

Day 5: Possibly the Coolest City in the World
Shanghai was a mix of foods, drinks, cuisines, skyline, the most spectacular architecture, interesting buildings every time you turned around, shopping, history, rivers, streets, people, subway, parks, you name it. We did our little walking tour along the Bund (including "Back Bund") and learned about historical buildings by the Brits, French and others who ran the city with their international concessions back in the day. We sipped coffee and tea by the water, watching a flotilla of coal barges pass by on their way to the harbor, while tourist boats darted in between. We ate. We visited the site of the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (Mao et. al.) We ate again. We loved the park. We loved the pond in the park. We loved fruit smoothies at the bar by the pond in the park. We had another amazing view from a rooftop bar for happy hour, this time of Pudong and the super-tall skyline as dusk fell and the place lit up. We shopped. (It's true: even I shopped in Shanghai.) We ate again. We could get used to this.

Day 6: Back Home to Korea
We got up early to head via high-speed Maglev express train to the airport for our quick Shanghai-Daegu return flight. Did I mention the high-speed train that takes you from the city to the airport in 8 minutes? Like the Heathrow-Paddington Station high-speed train, but maybe even faster? When is the U.S. going to figure out that this is the answer? ("Never!" cry the corporate oil emperors.) We knew we were heading back to Korea when ajummas started shoving into us at the boarding gate. I left China eminently satisfied and already plotting my return trip. Which, oh yes, there will be a return trip, because I have a double entry visa.

The best:

Rooftop bars
Beijing nightlife
The Wall That Is Great
Every time you think "Man, 100 yuan?!" you just have to remind yourself that's still really only like 14 bucks.
Me, every time we drank tea, talking about "all the tea in China."
Brian joking while we ate that if we didn't finish everything on our plate we could think about the starving children in China - next door! (Our cliche-derived snark is endless, really.)
Shanghai. Just, everything about Shanghai.

The worst:

Only me being so dumb I didn't learn any Mandarin language. So lame of me!I can sort of recognize the characters for Nii-hao and that's about it.

China! China China China! Those two cities really exceeded my expectations. And mind you, I did not have low expectations. But Beijing and Shanghai have got it going on!

Thoughts on Death and Freedom

2011-09-22T13:42:00.002+09:00

Naturally, I am sad and distraught to hear that the land of the free and home of the brave -- also known as "my" home country, the U.S.A. -- has killed another of its citizens, officially and in the name of "justice." Killing in the name of justice is just as terrible as in the name of religion. But we do it. (Well, the executioners do the actual deed -- but there are so many more responsible, like when oil companies, defense department contractors and fictitious presidents are all responsible for the deaths of millions in their awful wars. )

But killing in the name of justice when there is SO MUCH DOUBT as to the convicted person's guilt? That is just pathetic and evil. Any 'tween can tell you the U.S. justice system is supposed to find guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." Not so for Troy Davis.

I saw a tweet from Melissa Harris-Perry suggesting "something to do with the pain": donate $11.08 to the Innocence Project, taking the amount from the time they killed Troy Davis, at 11:08 p.m.

The death penalty is one of the most flawed aspects of the U.S. legal system. The way it is enacted, upheld and applied has been shockingly bad. Innocent people have been exonerated too late. It has been unfairly doled out. It is so thoroughly and essentially problematic that multiple states have got rid of it, investigated it, declared a moratorium on it -- and many countries in the world have done the same. Ended it. Ended the practice of killing citizens.

I am donating to the Innocence Project, a great organization I have learned a bit about over the years. But I wish there was something I could do for the innocent people who have been strapped to a chair or gurney or whatever, to see their government -- the people who are supposed to protect and serve and organize and take care of society -- kill them. I can't imagine anything more frightening then watching people calmly, methodically kill you. But when it is the people you are supposed to count on to protect you, like parents or spouses or your society's government? What can be worse than that?

A bit later, with CNN International still playing in the living room as I got ready to go to work, I saw the jubilant U.S. citizens who have been freed from prison in Iran. They landed in Jordan and bounded down the steps from their airplane. They made a statement to the media expressing their profound thanks to those who helped free them, and their hope for freedom for all of the political prisoners and people unjustly locked up around the world.

What an unsettling moment. Some live and go free. Some die. The world keeps turning. What is each of us doing to make sure the part we play leads to peace and actual justice?

To China

2011-09-10T00:24:00.002+09:00

Well, the Korean Chuseok holiday is upon us, which means one thing to us foreign English teachers: 5-day weekend! And 5-day weekend means one thing to me: hop a cheap flight to China! At long last I will see Beijing and Shanghai. And not much else, because we have only five days. China is huge, and I wish I could go there for five months right now. Alas, I will have to save that for another time.

There are so many interesting things to think about, when preparing for a trip to China: what will I eat? will I master the tones in the basic Chinese phrases I plan to use? what will it be like to go without Facebook for five days? and so on. All these questions and more will be answered when we return next week. Happy Chuseok to all! Except most of you aren't celebrating it and don't even know what it is, but that's OK, too!

Facebook and Caller ID

2011-08-29T19:42:00.004+09:00

OK, who around here remembers the late 1980s and early 1990s? Try to take yourselves back...picture it...all of a sudden there was this thing called caller ID. At first, very few people had it. Prior to caller ID, if you wanted to know who was calling you, you answered the phone. In between answering the phone and caller ID there was the whole answering machine call screening interlude (that was something we did before voice mail. You actually heard the message while it was being left! Good times) but soon enough we moved on to a magical device that told you who was calling when the phone rang.

I thought those people who needed to know who was calling them before saying hello were, frankly, a little paranoid. But OK, so, then the next thing happened: people on the other end were outraged! How would kids spend hours prank calling their neighbors, how would adolescents stalk their boyfriends and girlfriends, without anonymity? So they retaliated with a new invention: you could BLOCK your number on caller ID. Ha! thought the newly blocked callers, triumphantly. I shall save my privacy! A little paranoia from the other direction.

Or maybe, those calls would not get through, because the first set of paranoids quickly upped the ante by refusing to accept blocked calls. Maybe you dialed someone's phone number around 1993 and got a message that you could unblock your call for just this number by pressing some button or other. The paranoia was flying fast and furious, now.

And, then, ten years later everyone got a cell phone and checking the identity of callers became so automatic that all that early 90s paranoia became just ancient history for the kids today -- until it got transferred to Facebook.

The Facebook news feed is the new home for paranoia. "Facebook has done it again!" a friend's status will warn you. "Copy and re-post this so you can warn everyone your privacy settings have changed." There are blocking of friends, hiding of posts in news feeds, and the latest bit, an attempt to not be left in the dust by Google+, of deciding post by post whether to share it with everyone or some people or some other people.

Yet, it's Facebook. Facebook! The idea of being paranoid about one's privacy while on Facebook remains a marvel to me. But then again, I clearly don't understand these things, as I never once in my life shelled out one red cent or spent one minute of effort on caller ID, call blocking or not accepting blocked calls.

August! Fly by she must!

2011-08-23T13:24:00.003+09:00

There is just so much I've been meaning to say to you, dear blogosphere.

First of all, I am sad to note that the deliciously hot summer seems to want a cooling off period. "Already?!" I cry, indignant. It is still August. It should still by steamy and sunny and hot and summery and there should be none of this layering and shivering that I experienced yesterday. I can't believe how many people whine and moan and complain about the hot Korean summer when it's over so quickly! But then again, people like to complain about all sorts of things in Korea and lump them into this giant mash of I'm-Better-Than-You-Let-Me-Tell-You-What's-Wrong-and-Nonsensical-About-Korea, even when they are things that have nothing to do with Korea, like weather.

Anyway, so yeah. The time is a-flying and we are quickly approaching the end of the second third of our year in Andong. Also, we are in a three-month period where we actually get some holidays and vacations, which makes this time go even faster! We just had a week off in August for our academy's summer vacation, during which we were able to take our favorite little ferry boat over to our favorite neighboring country of Japan and experience all sorts of Japan wonderfulness again. Much swooning! Next up is Chuseok, in September, a thankful harvesty festival that gives us another 5-day weekend and a chance for a slight excursion somewhere. Finally, there will be a 3-day weekend at the beginning of October, and at that time will also be Andong's famous international traditional mask and dance festival, right here in our little city, drawing travelers and culture lovers and dancers and tailgaters from all around the world. Or maybe I should say, we the foreigners will be doing the tailgating, by the riverside. Our personal contribution to Andong's festival week!

I want to give you a play by play of our Japan trip, when time permits, but the short version is that it is amazing (still) and that we climbed Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is not actually as hard as it sounds. (I knew this already, because I am a savvy traveler, and I have known Fuji things for many years.) While the peak is 3,776 meters, it's not as if you start from 0. You start on the mountainside. And there are so many people who do the climb during the official climbing season, and there are mountain huts where people stay overnight when they climb in time to see the sun rise, and there are people at said huts selling water and other drinks, and the atmosphere at the summit is downright festive, really. Walking around the crater at the top is a bit more wild-like -- we joked that we were on the moon -- but even that walk takes you to a weather station and stuff. You never really feel like you have left civilization. The only thing you really have to worry about is altitude sickness. Well, that and wrecking your knees on the downhill trail. It's a brutal one!

The other accomplishments of our summer? We got in some beach time in Busan, spending a few delightful weekends there. We discovered that our favorite thing to do is go lie on Haeundae beach for the afternoon and then head to the Sajik Stadium in Pusan for a Lotte Giants home baseball game. Although I had been kind of partial to the Samsung Lions, what with them being Daegu's team and having blue for a color and all, it turns out in the end I am a Lotte Giants fan. A good time is had by all at the Korean baseball games. And, like most things around here, it is sweetly affordable for us English teachers. Such a grand life we lead!

The Lotte Giants may even end up in the playoffs, as they have climbed into fourth place in the eight-team Korean baseball league. Meanwhile back at the ranch (the U.S.A.) my Braves are well on their way to securing themselves a playoffs spot, too. Yay!

I will breathlessly rave about Japan as soon as time permits.

Don't even think about switching from iced coffee to hot, people! Summer, summer, summer!

Cheongnyangsan aka Mt. Cheongnyang

2011-07-28T13:01:00.003+09:00

This past weekend Brian and I had a mini-excursion to a gorgeous mountain/hiking/Buddhist temple provincial park on the outskirts of Andong, a mountain called Cheongyangsang. We've been meaning to go there to do some hiking for months because we've seen friends' pictures of an awesome sky bridge hundreds of feet in the air that connects two of the peaks. However, on our short excursion this past weekend we didn't have time for the sky bridge hike but instead did a different couple of paths. There are half a dozen or so trails for climbing to this mountain's several peaks, and I do believe we could return there weekly for a few months and manage to have a different experience every time. Some of the trails take longer - we went with a short one due to our bus schedule requirements that day.

Cheongnyangsan is beautiful!! I'm talking stunningly pretty with flat rock peering out from thick green mountainsides, uniquely shaped peaks, and a cute little tourist village with minbaks, markets, restaurants, and so on. Our short hike took us up to Cheongnyangsa (note the lack of final 'n'), which means Cheongnyang temple. Now, I have seen my fair share of Buddhist temples in Korea, and I adore them, but this one was really, really well placed in some spectacularly gorgeous scenery perfectly overlooking the mountain as the late afternoon sunlight dissipated. I am a fan.

I am also a fan of the frog pond at the temple...well, it's not necessarily a frog pond, but it's a little pond in a stone enclosure that sure has frogs in it now. I could have stared at them for hours. There were dozens, and they were black/brown on top, kind of blending with the surroundings, but with orange undersides, and they would flop around in the water every once in a while, turning as if to show off to us their bright bellies. I love frogs.

Cheongnyangsan verdict: highly recommended, particularly Cheongnyangsa.

Afterward, we headed back into downtown Andong and strolled by the park just in time for the evening guards/drums/bell-donging ceremony. I could have stared at that longer too, even though I was being bitten by mosquito monsters, but we were on our way to a delicious dinner at a new-to-us restaurant that served a soup whose name I've forgotten. It's like dongjongjigae - I butchered that, but I do love that soybean-derived soup we get with rice all the time - only with the beans in a more whole form. It's really rice-and-bean-like, which may be why I loved it, although this restaurant also had the best side dishes of any restaurant I've been to in Korea (a statement I don't make lightly!) Brian found the restaurant because he's cool like that; my job is just to eat and then promptly forget the names of things I've eaten.

I suppose that particular mental block of mine could use a bit of examination. Like, some people can't remember dates, or names, or faces - I can't remember food names very well. I don't think it's a Korean thing, even. I am not particularly obsessed with names of foods in the U.S. either. I'm not much for talking about and describing food, although I do like eating it.

This week has been reasonably boring at work. We have two days of testing in our elementary level classes, which should feel like Easy Days at work but instead to me just further emphasized how many middle-school evening classes I have to still teach even on elementary testing days. I'm so looking forward to our new schedule, about four weeks away, although I'm definitely wary in a devil-you-know sense.

Meanwhile, I am entirely fixated on our next adventure, which is barely more than two weeks away: our triumphant return to Japan! Once I get there, I might never leave! (Just kidding, Japanese immigration authorities. Or at any rate, I would obtain legal gainful employment before staying, don't fret.)

Lovely, Dark and Deep

2011-07-07T20:38:00.006+09:00

Well, my middle schoolers are back. I guess they couldn't stay away forever, as I had suggested. My Tuesday/Thursday evening middle school class consists of three, sometimes four, remarkably bright eighth graders who look and act to me as if they are more like 15 or 16. They have a good command of English usage, excellent vocabulary, and stellar class behavior. Their reward? Poetry!

'Tis true. Poetry is not dead. Today I needed a lesson plan for them and I decided we would spend the class reading and discussing "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Most people in the U.S. (and the rest of the English-speaking world? do tell!) recognize the last line, "And miles to go before I sleep." They might even know it's repeated, and that it comes from a poem where a speaker and his horse are in the woods. The first line, "Whose woods these are I think I know," is also reasonably well known by English speakers.

So I decided my brilliant Korean middle schoolers could and should handle it. We started class discussing some key vocabulary: snowy, downy, frozen, harness and queer. After having them make sentences with those words, I next practiced the form "Whose ____ this is I think I know. It's [so-and-so]'s" with various objects in the classroom. Then we moved on to plurals, like "Whose pencils these are, I think I know. They're Emily's." So they were prepared to understand the first line.

Man, it is such a great poem. I'm not afraid to say it. Even after reading it many times over the years, I still physically feel the emotional wallop of that last stanza. Luckily, my students know what a symbol is and does. After we read the poem once, we discussed it stanza by stanza. Then I had them read it again, each student reading the whole thing aloud, and after each reading I would ask a different question about it, like "Which words in the poem help you picture the scene?" (frozen, dark, snowy, horse, etc.) or "Why do we say, 'I promise'?" or "What will happen to our speaker next?" We also talked about the man off in the village, and the fact that the speaker is reflecting on what his horse thinks.

After almost an hour, we were ready to move into the all-important reckoning with the repeated "And miles to go before I sleep," to discern why it would be said twice. I love hearing students offer ideas I hadn't thought of. I articulated for them the idea that the first line keeps us in the literal story, but that repetition really makes us veer off into the symbolic, with "sleep" becoming that final sleep.

Naturally, their homework is to write about their reactions to the poem. I think we will write our own poems next week. I had them write weather-related poems when I had most of these same students in an evening class two (academy-)semesters ago. But now we're getting into meaty stuff.

I do have lots of ideas, but if any of you have suggestions for a poem or two that I should teach to my middle schoolers, feel free to comment!

No offense, middle schoolers, but feel free to never come back

2011-07-05T15:29:00.005+09:00

The great thing about teaching so many middle school-age evening students this semester is not having to teach them. I think at this point I may have actually had more middle school classes cancelled than not cancelled since this particular 12-week Avalon hagwon semester began.

I previously blogged about my busy(ier) schedule this semester, compared to my first two teaching schedules this year at Andong Avalon. But having so many middle school classes cancelled, I may actually have come out ahead in the deal, even when we had to take on a couple extra classes during our co-worker's brief vacation.

The reason for all these cancellations is basically their semester final exams at regular school -- they spend a few weeks really ramping up their school studying and even when they do come to English academy, it's to work with the Korean-speaking teachers to study for said school exams. So I have been blissfully free - well, comparatively - in the evenings for a couple of weeks. Only a few classes here and there. And I have been loving it! And needing it, since my afternoons are a bit hectic, as are my mornings, my nights, and the space in my brain.

One thing taking up my time, besides reading lots of good stuff, is planning our upcoming summer vacation. I am so excited! We are going to go back to Japan and hit up three or four cities we didn't go to the first time. Yay!

Half and Half

2011-06-26T00:53:00.004+09:00

As we approach our halfway point -- I. KNOW! -- it is time to reflect on the first six months of Our Year in Andong, Korea.

I suppose there is an argument to be made that we haven't spent six months here at all, seeing as we spend a good chunk of our weekends galavanting about to other parts of the country. But I do so love to galavant about. At any rate, we are spending the current weekend at home. I'm talking never-left-the-house-or-even-put-in-my-contacts-today at home. That is serious, for me. I actually loathe not leaving the house on a given day and I am kind of creeped out by people who have more than one day every, let's say, year that they don't leave the house. But, I had a lot of things to get done today in the apartment and on the computer, plus the monsoon rainy season has arrived and there's basically a biblical flood outside our window the past three days, so you really don't want to go anywhere unless you have to, and you bring a change of dry clothes.

Speaking of that, I had this handy dandy emergency poncho - and it disintegrated! I bought it several years ago and I've had it with me on my various journeys, especially the Habitat trips to Honduras and Tajikistan, but I never actually ended up using it so it has just sat in the little plastic travel-size bag it came in when I bought it at Target or wherever. Yesterday I got it out of the closet because the aforementioned rain was doing its thing but we totally had to go on an errand and to work, and I couldn't take the poncho out of the plastic bag because it was in tatters! It was made of polyethylene. Wikipedia tells me that it shouldn't dissolve unless it is exposed to UV rays from sunlight (it was in our darkened entryway closet) or maybe if this one Canadian bacteria eats it. I am so confused. What happened to my polyethylene?! So much for having an emergency poncho.

Anyway, back to reflection. For the most part I am satisfied. Our job is very laid back and I love our boss, co-workers, and lack of people breathing down our necks as we carry out our job duties. I like my students and I like the books we use and I love living a three-minute walk from work. I mean, we really have nothing to complain about whatsoever. We are still making our way through trying all the restaurants in our neighborhood, and I seriously have become a frequent EMart customer -- it is so handy having an EMart so close I can see it from our apartment building. Eyeglasses, haircuts, wine, even the occasional Chee-zuh De-luk-suh Pi-ja can all be had a stone's throw away.

It has been fun hanging out in Daegu, taking the Korean class (which has now ended), and occasionally popping into the Commune, my favorite watering hole on the planet. I have enjoyed our weekend sojourns to Seoul and other cities. I was devastated to discover that Mi Casa Loca, the Mexican restaurant in Seoul to which I pilgrimaged once a month during my first Korea tour of duty, apparently closed both its locations, but we ate at On the Border in Seoul on our last trip there. We have enjoyed other weekend trips to Yeongdeok on the east coast, Mokpo on the southwest coast and Jeju Island. We have hiked, attended random festivals, seen a few Buddhist temples, been to at least various norae bangs, hit up an oncheon bath, and otherwise done the basically required awesome things to do in Korea.

As everyone knows, I think, by now, our trip to Japan in February over the Lunar New Year holiday was a mega highlight, and we are planning to go back there for our upcoming summer vacation to see a bunch of cities we didn't see the first time around.

I have been reading but can always read more. My most recent endeavors have been The Aquariums of Pyongyang and my latest prez bio, Franklin Pierce. He was BFFs with Nathaniel Hawthorne and I am really digging learning about U.S. history from 1820-1860. It's fascinating stuff. I think I am in the mood to start reading a bunch of fiction, now, for the summer months. I've been writing a bit but not enough. I recently started a kickboxing class at a gym a few minutes walk from our apartment. It's a great workout and I'm so glad that a friend who also teaches here in Andong told me about it!

I could definitely go without ever drinking Cass beer again, but our local foreigners' favorite bar that we gather in many weekends has some decent imported bottles. I get in feisty political discussions from time to time. We've started having a monthly book swap among the Andong English teachers so we don't have to spend all our money (and room in our suitcase) on books we buy here. There are barbecues and other adventures. It's an OK time in Andong, I must say. I just have had so many other things on my plate - I am never actually looking for things to do. I'm not even going to the movies every week - we've only seen a handful in the theater this year! Super 8, Paul, Source Code, True Grit, The Adjustment Bureau, Morning Glory, Harry Potter 7.1, and maybe another one I'm forgetting.

So Korea is going well! But now that the halfway mark is approaching, it's time to start thinking about what is next! Craziness. Last time I left to Korea, I moved to Long Island and went to Hofstra for law school. I definitely won't be making that mistake again. Actually, we do have several tentative post-Korea plans, which shall not be revealed at this time.

Oh, and my sister is about to have her baby. Like, in the next 48 hours. A fourth nephiece for me, and I won't even meet her (they think it's a her) until 2012.

Well, keep on keepin' on, 2011.

What CAN we say about the military?

2011-06-08T15:18:00.004+09:00

I know people who either serve in, have served in, or have family members serving in the military. This means that every time that I, who would like to have an honest conversation, utter or type a word about the role of the military in anything, there is no shortage of people who want to tell me I am "anti-" or "attacking" or "against" the military. I find it so disheartening that people who apparently genuinely applaud freedom, courage, standing up for what is right, and a whole host of other qualities have such a knee-jerk reaction to any comment about the armed forces. There appears to be a resistance to using those noble qualities to speak truth to power if the military is even remotely tangentially involved, let alone if the military is implicated in doing something wrong.

It's highly distressing. I can't think of other parallel situations. People discuss things that are all over the map in terms of topic, level of seriousness vs. frivolity, local vs. global, personal vs. political, etc. But when you say something about the military, you are apparently supposed to refrain from critcism - even when you are crticizing higher-ups who make policy, far from the front lines - or else you are roundy condemned for not supporting the military. Why isn't there any room for debate? Why is everything divided into this "you're-either-with-us-or-against-us" mentality? Why are so many assumptions made about who the speaker is, what s/he does, or what s/he thinks as soon as s/he brings up the military in anything other than the context of "Let's have a parade for heroes."

I find it so, so sad and disheartening.

All hail June!

2011-06-01T20:47:00.005+09:00

A new month and a new Avalon semester have dawned. Avalon, the lovely hagwon chain for which I work, splits the year into 12-week semesters, so unlike my previous Korea gig, at this job my schedule changes regularly. At my old job, it worked like this: we stuck with the same kids unless they had to combine a class (usually due to attrition) or they changed things around when a new class of first day "Hello-my-name-is" beginners was added, or unless the kids reached the end of their progression through the 12 levels. At that point, though, some of them would invariably stick around and join a "special class" in the evenings, so the teacher might still have them as students. Here, at this current job, we have much the same drill of youngest kids first, later elementary age in the afternooons, middle school after that, and the most advanced English speakers in evening special classes, but here everyone's schedule changes every 12 weeks. And every class is on the same 12-week schedule, not staggered like at my old job, so here everyone is in oral tests at the same time, and final written tests at the same time, etc.

Anyway, all this is just to say that my schedule changed today and out of my three schedules I have had since working at Avalon, this one is my third best. Yeah. The main thing is that where we all used to have one (and, occasionally, two) free periods during the elementary school onslaught from 4p-7p, now neither Brian nor I has that break. We just teach the 40-minute classes back to back, with 5 minute breaks in between. My prep period is before that, and before that I teach my youngest kids in the "Pre-" class (they are first graders). I start teaching at 2:35pm, whereas in prior semesters I didn't start until 3:15. And, I also have four evening classes instead of three this time around. The evening classes are in longer blocks, and most of them meet twice a week.

No one is really interested in all this minutiae, I'm sure, but it's what my brain apparently wanted to spew forth onto the blog. My first semester here at Avalon was downright leisurely. Now, I still don't think of it as running me as ragged as The Bad Ones (the bad hagwon jobs, of which there are many), but I am just not exactly thrilled about the next 12 weeks. Ah well, in those 12 weeks we have two, count 'em, two three-day weekends, plus we will have a summer vacation of one week, turning the 12 weeks into 13 weeks, if that makes any sense.

Kids are always coming and going from this place, much more often than some other schools. Kids drop out all the time, probably finding cheaper English instruction elsewhere, to be honest. So the numbers are in flux, but we also just had one of our foreign co-teachers, a lass from Scotland, depart at the end of the semester, and we went from four native-English-speaking teachers to three. We probably won't get another one for this semester based on the looks of the schedule.

Let's see, what else is happening? Our boss took us to Munkyeong Saejae this past weekend, which is a mountain hamlet up in the north central hills. The weekend event was the 16th annual Barefoot Festival (exact name translation unknown, but something like that) where people walk barefoot up a mountain trail, or in shoes, whichever suits your fancy. We walked up the trail in shoes and saw mountain streams, stone walls, and the gate that served as a gate between Gyeongsangbuk-do (our province) and Seoul back in the day. There was also a concert and a raffle and we ate and drank. There is generally eating and drinking to be had whenever and wherever in Korea.

June! Summer! I am ready for some excitement! I am not ready for the vast amounts of students who will be keeping me away from said excitement.

A trip to China is the next item on my hoped-for agenda.

One Year After the Mountains

2011-05-26T22:50:00.003+09:00

One year ago was my first day back from my Tajikistan odyssey. It was a fabulous bit of travel because it also involved stops in Ireland and London as well as a couple wonderful days in Istanbul. It was a great Habitat build because the people in the Tajikistan office affiliate are awesome, and the location was so interesting. It was definitely good for me - as it would be for anyone - to connect with people in a village so far off one's beaten path, so different in life experiences and yet so similarly willing to sing goofy songs after the lunchtime bowl of plov has been devoured.

It was also interesting because on that trip I came across many people who were also travelers, wanderers, thinkers...and the wanderlust became a theme of the trip, specifically, that one must cast away whatever is tying one down. I found myself repeatedly involved in different conversations with different people in different countries about how I should just go, go, go. At the time I was feeling "stuck" in Chicago, even though I loved my new city of Chicago, and I had some discontent churning around the back burner of my brain. I marveled throughout my Tajikistan odyssey at how well-placed people kept cropping up to say things to inspire me to go back out globetrotting, from random Bosphorus acquaintances to the fellow Habitat builders.

I have found it difficult to describe the experience in Garm - it was such a far away village in misty mountains that lay in front of bigger mountains, and when you peeked past those you glimpsed the peaks of a lifetime. I will never forget first spotting those 6,000+-meter high crags when I got high enough on the hill outside of "downtown" Garm. I will never forget seeing those same jagged snow-capped points from the air, a group of them covering miles and miles and miles.

As it happens, today was a strange day in Korea, for a variety of reasons, for us personally. So it was a day that gave my brain a lot to contemplate all around.

Tajikistan made me feel full of good things, and made me think things are worthwhile. Also? I was pretty terrible at hurling mud at walls to reinforce them. But we all have different skills in life, I suppose.

"And I believe it could be someday it's going to come..."

2011-05-23T11:56:00.008+09:00

Although (obviously) there was no prelude-to-the-end-of-the-world rapture on Saturday, there was a cosmically significant event for 10,000 Maniacs fans, of which I am one: at their Chesapeake, Virginia show the band played "Peace Train" for the first time in 20+ years! Seeing as I am around the world, about as far on this sphere as you can possibly be from Chesapeake, Virginia, I got to watch it in a 2-inch video on Facebook. I am not complaining!

I consider 10,000 Maniacs one of the greatest bands of the late 20th/early 21st centuries. They are hard to categorize, although they hung out comfortably in the alternative-folky-college-rock category for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Their sound was unique and interesting. In My Tribe, in particular, is a strong desert island disc candidate of mine.

As it happens, that album contained a cover of "Peace Train" when it was originally released circa 1987. Shortly thereafter, Cat Stevens famously spoke out about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. Obviously, that or any other fatwa is insanely stupid, and Cat Stevens' comments have been subject to debate and interpretation, but at the time, circa 1989, many people interpreted the comments of newly-Muslim Cat Stevens to be supporting the death of Salman Rushdie. This led Natalie Merchant, then-lead singer of the Maniacs, to refuse to ever perform "Peace Train" again, and the band had the song removed from In My Tribe. I originally listened to In My Tribe on cassette, but in 1994 when I found myself wanting to replace the cassette with a CD, I used the then-new internet to search for someone selling a copy that had "Peace Train."

There's an episode of my beloved sitcom Designing Women in which Julia protests pornographic exploitation. At one point, Mary Jo questions whether Julia is wrong to want to "censor" porn magazines. Of course, Julia clearly explains the difference between protected speech and commerce, in a great Designing Women exchange with the magazine's publisher. Elsewhere in the episode, Mary Jo talks to Charlene about censorship and mentions the Cat Stevens kerfuffle. Of course, it has precious little to do with the pornographic-magazines-point of the episode, but Mary Jo does make an interesting point that when Cat Stevens uttered his possibly misinterpreted remarks in favor of the fatwa, people protested by burning his records, which essentially meant that they were advocating freedom of speech for Salman Rushdie's art by destroying Cat Stevens' art.

Then again, people should have the freedom (I think) to burn things as their own symbolic speech - so on and on the layers go. Julia Sugarbaker is totally right that the porn proprietors are not expressing themselves artistically and would shut down their magazines (etc.) tomorrow if they weren't turning a profit, so the whole high-and-mighty freedom of expression argument is basically bullshit. But Cat Stevens is so totally separate in my mind.

And now 10,000 Maniacs have performed "Peace Train" again!

Holy Mackerel!

2011-05-08T22:42:00.003+09:00

Today we headed out to a salted mackerel place near the Andong Dam and the Wolyeonggyeo Bridge, famously the longest pedestrian wood bridge in Korea. Or maybe the longest pedestrian bridge in Korea, period? At any rate, it's cute around there, and we strolled across the bridge and gazed down the river at the Andong skyline while we waited to meet our friends for some famous Andong salted mackerel. I guess Andong became famous for this specialty because, being inland, the Andongers had to salt the mackerel while it made its way from the coast.

Other Andong specialties, in case you are interested, include the famous Andong jjimdak (which is a delicious spicy chicken stew that you need multiple people to eat because it always comes as a giant helping), Andong beef, and Andong soju. I am personally no fan of soju, and while they tell me the Andong soju is "different" and "better" it still does nothing for me.

But salted mackerel? Does a lot for me. It was so delicious. We just picked the deliciously soft fish off the bones from the plate and ate and ate and then ordered two more fish to eat. I can't believe we haven't got around to trying salted mackerel before now! I had this idea it would be expensive but it's totally not. We really are spoiled with so many restaurants to choose from around here, right in our neighborhood, within view of our school and apartment. It's actually an effort to try them all, an effort that we have not yet come close to achieving in the first tertile of 2011.

The Wolyeonggyeo bridge and Andong Dam are a mere ten minutes or so vehicle ride from downtown. Andong is not a big city. And yet I somehow still have so many cute and delightful spots around here to explore.

Last weekend Brian and I headed to Bonjeongsa, which is a temple a 25 minute or so bus ride from downtown Andong in the other direction. It was one of my favorite temple visits thus far in Korea, from 2005-2006 or 2011. It was really nice and peaceful, and so green! It was a great two hours of strolling up and down and around. There's tons of hiking to be had up there, too, so it's good to know that Bongjeongsa is available within completely easy striking distance, now that the warm weather (i.e. lack of ice) is here.

Other things keeping us busy of late? Let's see: we're getting ready to roll into the end-of-semester testing period at work, our weekly Korean class in Daegu is going swimmingly, and we had a Cinco de Mayo party with the other Andong English teachers on our rooftop because, conveniently, May 5 is also a holiday here in Korea, Children's Day. Also, Brian and I have a new fascination with watching Criminal Minds on TV. Mostly because it's on, is why one gets into any random U.S. tv show while living in Korea, but this one Brian discovered first and then convinced me to also watch, and now I find myself caring about the characters and getting sucked into the grisly but compelling stories, too. Of course, we haven't actually figured out exactly when it will be on, as the TV schedule can be a little unpredictable on SkyHD and some of the other English channels, but it is never long before it crops up again.

This past weekend in Daegu we saw the movie Source Code. Um, not really great, but an OK enough diversion for an hour or so. Definitely not great though. Let me emphasize that again: plausibility and tight logic were not by any stretch of the imagination part of this film. I am sure I will end up watching Water for Elephants soon, because I bought and read the book, but I'm not really holding out high hopes for it (and I also thought the book was overrated).

By the way, while I was looking for a picture of Wolyeonggyeo bridge to share with my adoring fans and I came across this fifty-year-old article about a different bridge in Andong, which might be an interesting read for some of you. I personally found it interesting that the population of Andong was only 40,000 during the war. It's around 180,000 nowadays.

Have I mentioned that we have been here in Korea for 18 weeks out of 52, in other words, more than one third of a year?

The End of an Era? (I hope)

2011-05-03T10:39:00.004+09:00

It is my fervent hope that the death of Osama bin Laden will be the end of an era in at least one aspect: may it finally bring an end to the last decade of insufferable country music built around the theme of "God-told-me-to-be-a-Republican-and-go-kill-in-Iraq."

I mean, this stuff is really terrible. I am ordinarily an unapologetic fan of country music, but the last decade has been a time of crisis, a kind of country music Dark Ages. I suppose you could say it started with Alan Jackson within the first few months after September 11, 2001. In his otherwise quite lovely, heartfelt song "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" he sings about the emotions of "that September day" and it's all very touching, but the chorus has the line: "I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran." First of all, "the difference between" would have apparently thrown off his rhythm, so we have "the difference in," but secondly, the Iraq reference is so jarringly out of place in a song about September 11, a song released in the fall of 2001, that you'd almost think Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld put him up to it. To be fair, Alan Jackson doesn't actually lay any blame for 9/11 at Iraq's feet; he simply states - repeatedly - that he is a simple man, and he essentially makes it a virtue to be unaware of world politics/geography and specifically the Middle East, which must be relevant, because 9/11 was terrorism, right? Ick.

There are way worse songs though. In particular there is Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" which finally got me to turn off the country radio for a good long while, circa 2003. That song justifies the Iraq invasion ("some say we don't need this war" etc.) by singing, "Have you forgotten?...We said we'd get the ones behind bin Laden..." etc. No, Darryl, we have not forgotten. But they aren't in Iraq, you twit.

Not everyone follows country music, but I suppose I don't have to remind even those of you on the outskirts of country strummin' about the Dixie Chicks nonsense, when they were chastised, condemned, threatened, cursed, and run out of town just short of tar and feathers (although the equivalent of tarring and feathering was done to their career). The problem? They spoke out about George W. Bush, warmonger extraordiniaire. They were well within their rights and, as Texans, had suffered under him longer than many of the rest of us, but noooooo... in the country music Dark Ages, it was forbidden to utter anything against the Torturer-in-Chief or anything that interfered with the oil-based killing sprees.

There are others. I've heard a bunch that I can't identify, because I'm telling you, I had to stop listening the way I used to; I just couldn't stomach it. So I'm only tangentially aware of things like Toby Keith's song, which I believe is called "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," that actually has the following couplet: "You'll be sorry you messed with the U.S. of A./We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." I heard that one recently in the deliciously cheap and smoky country bar Grand Ole Opry in Seoul's foreigner-heavy Itaewon district and watched two dozen U.S. soldier faces light up as they sang every word. Toby Keith's song, which is ostensibly just a harmless ass-kicking patriotism party, doesn't explicitly mention Iraq so it's not as bad as some, but it takes a fierce stand against being against the current wars, in that whole "you're-not-supporting-the-troops-if-you-want-them-to-come-home" way.

Meanwhile, former top-of-the-charts singer/songwriters like Mary-Chapin Carpenter who wrote poetic ballads contemplating personal September 11th stories were ignored by the Nashville machine. I guess in "Grand Central Station" she forgot to mention any countries that had nothing to do with Osama/Al Qaida. Oh yeah, and she also wants peace. You remember - peace? Actual freedom? Freedom from violence and fear?

So maybe, just maybe, the death of Osama bin Laden can put an end to this era, the Dark, Dark decade of crappy George-Bush-bought-me-a-ticket-to-Iraq-but-God-assigned-the-seats* country music that ended up boomeranging country listeners who wanted something else in the totally polar opposite direction and recently landing us in the plucky guitar and plaintive warblings of Taylor Swift.
*not an actual country song lyric of the last decade, but it might as well have been

Can we PLEASE get back to really awesome country music now? I'm thinking a little 90s-era Martina McBride could serve as a reminder that my beloved country peeps are capable of invoking patriotic imagery for socially conscious reasons:

"Let freedom ring, let the white dove sing (ahh! notice! a peace symbol!)
Let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away
Let the guilty pay
It's independence day!"
-from her Burning Bed-derivative exploration of escaping domestic violence, "Independence Day"

Proof that Sarah Palin and Reince Priebus are Lunatics

2011-04-28T11:49:00.003+09:00

We now have official proof that Sarah Palin and, for good measure, Republican party chairman Reince Priebus are totally, utterly, completely bonkers. Menace-to-society level nuts. President Obama gets his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii (which, by the way, Hawaii is clearly so totally over the mainland freaks at this point) and releases it and says we don't have time for mainstream fools like Donald Trump to stoke the fires of fringe fools like the birthers and here we go, thank you, let's all have a nice day.

And then Sarah Palin, twit(terer) extraordinaire, and Reince Priebus say that OBAMA is using the birth certificate to distract the country from its real problems? That Obama is?!?!?

They are crazy. Why do any of you people take them seriously? Why??

The only thing I can take seriously about the Republican party and/or right-wing evangelicals at this point is that they willingly put violent warmonger George W. Bush and his murderous crew in the White House to go kill and torture tens of thousands of innocent people to protect their bullshit Texas oil money. You people in the United States need to stop bitching about gasoline prices at the pump and start bitching about the cost of gasoline, in blood and lies.

April Days

2011-04-27T13:04:00.002+09:00

Normally around this time of year, I find myself noting that, as usual, April sucks. Then I bring T.S. Eliot into it for good literary measure. This year, my distinct lack of bloggage has also meant a distinct lack of complaining about April. This brings to mind a couple of questions:

1. Was this April any better than your (and by that I mean "my") typical April?
2. What is up with my distinct lack of bloggage?

Tough questions, those. Let's start with April. I guess it was better than a lot of Aprils in that it Didn't Suck. But, like all my other 2011 days, it has just gone by far too fast! In a blur! And I totally don't have time to enjoy and/or contemplate my days right now. I hate that I don't have that time. I'm big on the enjoying and contemplating.

Of course, it has been a very springy spring of an April, and I still hate spring, with all its unsettled manic-depressive weather careening back and forth between cold and not cold. But I haven't really had time to contemplate that, either.

It is perhaps this not-having-time-to-think thing that is behind my distinct lack of bloggage, to answer question #2. They say that no man can serve two masters, but I feel like I'm serving three. Unfortunately, I can't really explain all the details for public interwebs consumption, but let's just say that I'm working full-time while also working on another project in my spare time while also having a fair amount of time taken up by another ongoing project. It makes me seriously, deeply, intensely want to have ONE full-time gig and to have that one full-time gig be my creative writing pursuits. Alas and alack.

I'm pretty sure that's what's behind the restless unsettledness. Bring on summer - it's better for my mind. Spring irritates me. Then I can at least hope for some summery life contemplation.

My Thoughts as Aries Turns to Taurus

2011-04-20T13:09:00.005+09:00

Lately I have become more and more interested in going to Nepal. Obviously, as any traveler would, I have had a desire to visit Nepal for a while, but lately I have been making rough plans, seeking out more information, etc.

Today I watched this, and thought again about how ridiculously easy my life is and how ridiculously easy are the lives of pretty much everyone I know reading this blog.

Government, rather than blowing up people and "protecting" our oil interests, should be focused on protecting humans around the world - yes, the entire world - by creating visions of peaceful, sustainable development in all corporate endeavors.

Government, and the citizens who accept their government's rhetoric, let alone the crap rhetoric that comes from talking cable heads, should be ashamed of themselves for creating false us/them dichotomies and inventing excuses to unleash violence in the world. Governments and corporations should both have an eye toward peaceful prosperity. Corporations should be taxed, and they should not be allowed to exploit people. And any citizen, "business" owner, or other enslaver who so much as negligently benefits from another human's enslavement (in domestic work or other trafficking) should be prosecuted. That means you, southeast Asia "pleasure tours." And you and you and you, corporations in Dubai/Abu Dhabi. And you, seedy nightlife all over the U.S. and other countries.

Sometimes I marvel that our world considers itself civilized at all.

Donald Trump Pulling a McCain

2011-04-08T20:42:00.004+09:00

Oh, Donald Trump. Why? Why why why? Why couldn't you just stay cool and awesome so I could like you and support you as an edgy, interesting, splashy candidate for presidency/celebrity/random attention-grabbing? You got SOOOO many points a few years back when you totally schooled Wolf Blitzer about the George W. Bush murderous wars and lies. Donald, when I watched you in that interview, I was so mightily impressed I didn't think I would ever have to go back from liking you. You looked Wolfy in the face as he sat there yammering about how Bush et. al. thought there were WMDs and you said, "Come on. I don't believe that. And I don't think you believe that. You're a smart young man. You know as well as I did that Bush lied." You did what none in the U.S. media would do: speak truth to power.

But now? First, you go on Piers Morgan jabbering about China being our "enemy," like our straight up legit enemy, and not in some quasi-meta-economic way but seriously. You're wrong Donald. And by the way? We don't want another president who's out looking for enemies in the world instead of trying to make friends. Then, this week, you decide to join the birthers? The birthers? Of all people! Please tell me this is a joke. Please tell me you're doing this to attract all the crazy right-wing fringe to yourself so you can stop worrying about the Palin-Beck-Gingrich-sometimes-Huckabee wackiness and just get Romney or Giuliani or someone maybe a little bit sane to actually get the nomination.

I'm worried it's not a joke. I'm worried you have been poisioned by the same batshit-making poision they gave to John McCain sometime between his (actual) maverick days and the time when he started massively psychotic behavior like defending Bush's Iraq policies. I know that the Republican powers that be have some way of making you edgy, interesting ones lose your minds when you flirt with power in that party. Why? Why couldn't you have just stayed cool? Is this your penance for having spoken the Bush truth to Wolf?

As if it's not bad enough that our government is squaring off like my 9-year-old students and we could really use a little Millard, now we have to be disappointed by you, too.

Shame on you, The Donald.

You were so close to being awesome. Now you're just one of them.

Zeitgeist Obsoyo

2011-04-02T20:55:00.002+09:00

OK, so, having been in Korea for the past three months I have managed to remain blissfully unaware of a few things longer than some of you people stateside would remain unaware of them. Not things that actually matter in the world (see, e.g., Egypt, Libya, Japan, tsunamis, radiation) or other things that matter in my world (see, e.g., the Oscars) but, you know, a few things that just fly under my overseas radar. Like a bestselling book called Heaven Is For Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. I heard a little about it a few weeks ago and it didn't really register, but now I have learned a bit more. It has come to my attention that many, many, many of you are taking seriously a)the story about seeing heaven - "for real" b)of a 4-year-old boy c)written with his father d)who is a pastor e)and, just for good measure, has the last name "Burpo."

Please cite your reasons for lending any credibility whatsoever to any of the above.

I'm waiting.

Land of the Flying Time

2011-03-24T14:40:00.003+09:00

Well, look at what we have here: spring! Although, you all know how I feel about spring. (Or do you?) It's so manic-depressive. I'm cold, no I'm warm, no I'm windy, let's have sunshine, let's have rain, hahaha fooled you! it's snowing again!, are you warm yet? Wanna go on a picnic? Too bad - it's 35 degrees (fahrenheit). And so on like that. To all of my fellow Phoenicians who bemoan Arizona's lack of four seasons, don't. Three of the seasons are great, but that fourth one is just a little tease. I hate spring.

Anyway, now that it's warmer, and we've established that by that I mean not-freezing-every-single-day-although-I'm-still-wearing-a-jacket-but-we-can-actually-go-hiking-even-though-we-still-turn-the-heat-on-at-night-sometimes, a thought has occurred to me: Time is flying!

Brian and I have now been in Korea for almost three months! Three months ago today we were sipping wine around the Grand Rapids Christmas Eve table pointing to Andong on the atlas and contemplating 2011. And now, 2011 is nearly one-fourth contemplated.

Some highlights:

Brian touched Asian soil for the first time. I figured out what it's like to come back to Asian soil.
I have also figured out what it's like to live in Korea without starving. Which is to say, with my allergy to seaweed I decided to eat a bit of meat this time around instead of being the hungry vegetarian martyr. I'm shockingly more content than I was in 2005-06! Go figure!
We went to Japan! Oh, beloved Japan. So sad about the devastation there. Hiroshima is one of my top ten cities in the world since our Lunar New Year vacation there. Lovely Japan.
I'm newly digging Anderson Cooper. Watching CNN International is so much better than flipping by CNN in the states. I have started checking in with my buddy Anderson somewhat regularly, as he is on at the perfect sitting-around-checking-Facebook-eating-a-late-breakfast time here.
I have not been reading nearly enough books in 2011. What's up with that?
I'm surprisingly content kicking it in the small city of Andong, although we do go away pretty much every Saturday. Mostly we've been going to Daegu, where we had our little weekly Korean class. 안녕하세요! 이름이 린다 예요. 미국사람 이에요!
We also went to Yeongdeok and the southeast Korean coast one weekend, to attend the Yeongdeok Snow Crab Festival. Yes, it was awesome. We stayed the night at an oncheon hot spring bath/guesthouse.
Spent a day or two in Pusan, one of my other favorite cities.
I had my first Korean ski trip at the High1 resort in Gangwon Province, not too far north of Andong. It was certainly cold, but I loved our Overlook-like hotel and had a great time with our awesome boss and his wife.
There has also been plenty of noraebang action. A Korean stint without noraebang action would be totally unacceptable.
The only real dismaying news at all is that there WAS a Dunkin' Donuts in Andong, up until a few months before we arrived, but it was gutted and turned into some dumb clothing shop. I've had to settle for getting my DD fix when we are in Daegu or other big cities. There are plenty of coffee shops in Andong, just no DD. Brian and I are weekend regulars at Rosebud, in downtown Andong.
Other things we have enjoyed in downtown Andong include but are not limited to the street food vendors (we have our favorites), the downtown market, Andong jimdak (spicy chicken stew) in the downtown market, and the hangover soup place.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

When are you coming to visit?

Beware the Ides of March, indeed

2011-03-15T17:17:00.005+09:00

The Ides of March - a recurring theme on this blog. (What can I say? I'm an English major dork, remember?) This year seems to the most beware-worthy in recent memory for me, what with the whole potential catastrophic nuclear meltdown disaster happening one island away, in Japan. It's so very sad, for all involved. Today's news seems to have become more grim throughout my work day, with official Japanese government announcements about the harmful radiation and whatnot. It's kind of a mystery what we would even do if there is more radiation spewed from a future explosion AND the prevailing winds do shift to bring it to Korea. I mean, we'd see it on the news and tap into the expat teachers network and hope our boss is helpful and see what everyone else is doing, I suppose. It's really weird to contemplate experiencing such a massive scale disaster - even one that is still theoretical - in another language, especially a language in which I am about Level 1.5 out of 10. We'll see. I speak even less Japanese, so good thing I'm not there.

A lot of people are talking about how this has made them suddenly "rethink" their pro-nuclear energy stance. I find that interesting for two reasons.

1. OK, so our process of getting/harvesting/using nuclear energy is not guaranteed to be totally safe. I think that is fair to say. Even with the many precautions, wholly unforeseen events can happen in terrible combinations. The thing is, though, NONE of our processes of getting the vast amount of energy our "lifestyles" require are totally safe. Think back on two of 2010's most gripping news stories: the BP Oil Spill and the rescue of the Chilean miners. There you go: two ways of getting energy that are not guaranteed to be totally safe. There are always risks. We ask a lot of our planet, and we can't pretend that there aren't costs.

2. It's so - reactionary! For the last decade, roughly since September 11, I have been struck time and time again by how reactionary the U.S. tends to be. (Think instituting a shoe removal policy in airports after the shoe-bomber incident, etc.) I'm not saying people shouldn't react to things. I mean, sure, you can close the barn door to prevent any more horses from leaving, if there are any left. But I'm continually struck by how many incidents bring out the reactionary hysteria, clamor or outrage, and how few times I observe forward-thinking, thoughtful, progressive philosophy or discussion. I'm sure some people blame it on the news cycle, MTV-generation attention spans, or what have you. I don't know what the root cause is, but it's really widespread.

Nuclear Reactions

2011-03-15T13:26:00.003+09:00

I did not spend this past weekend worrying about explosions at nuclear power plant reactors in Japan. I spent the weekend on the southeast coast of Korea (which, for you geographically impaired types, is closer to Japan than the rest of Korea). We relaxed at the Bugyeong hot spring and adjoining pension/guesthouse, strolled through the seaside towns and villages, and attended the Yeongdeok Snow Crab Festival. We ate crabs on Saturday and Sunday. I must confess they were delicious...I'm so sorry, crabs...

I was not wired for most of this journey. We did check in with the news on our guesthouse TV late Saturday night and heard a bit about the nuclear plant explosion situation, but I didn't do most of my thinking about it until Monday and Tuesday, back in Andong and back to work. Along with many people in the world, I continue to read and watch and check in with news, hoping for the safety of all people, whether they are currently close to the Daiichi Nuclear Power Station or far, far away or - like me - living on a nearby peninsula where prevailing winds could possibly bring a cloud of radioactive gas in a worst case "total meltdown" scenario. I hope the experts and workers are able to continue the cooling process. I hope the workers dealing with the situation also remain safe.

Among other thoughts, I find it interesting and slightly bizarre that back in December, when I was preparing to come to Korea this time, everyone's biggest fear was a paranoid, breathless "Oh-my-gosh-what-if-the-axis-of-North-Korean-evil-launches-a-nuclear-missile-at-you?" and now instead of that happening (which, duh!) we have moved into an actual nuclear scenario involving Japan and nuclear energy.

Let's continue to hope and work for safety and the best possible outcome, everyone! And go easy on the rhetoric.

You CAN Go To Jungangno Again

2011-03-08T11:10:00.002+09:00

As has been reported, I am once again in Korea, birthplace of this blog back in October of 2005. It has been interesting to see what is different this time around and what is the same.

For starters, obviously, I am in a different city. Brian and I have set up shop in Andong, a small city known for its late summer/early fall traditional mask and dance festival. Sometimes Andong is called "the capital of the Korean spirit" although it's mostly posters in tourist offices and on bus terminals and whatnot that call it that. I mean it's not as if anyone said, "Welcome to the capital of the Korean spirit" when we got here. It's a nice little slogan, though. (What's YOUR city's slogan? Huh??) Andong has about 180,000-190,000 people, a hip, up-and-coming area called Ok-Dong (where we are staying), two multi-screen movie theaters, folk villages and museums, lots of Confucian heritage, a gazillion restaurants and coffee shops, a river along which one can run, an E-Mart (this means a lot to many expats in Korea), bars and hofs and noraebangs galore, etc. In other words, there's stuff to do and a lot of it is like other cities in Korea.

We are about an hour and ten minutes north of Daegu, my 2005-06 stomping grounds. In fact, we go to Daegu almost every Saturday right now. And that brings me to the title of this blog entry. Naturally, when we first got back to Daegu, I had an immediate sense of, "Wow, how fun! I'm in Daegu again!" which was even stronger than my "Wow, how fun! I'm at Incheon airport again!" that happened when we first landed. But overall, I would say it felt incredibly NOT-weird to be there. Jungangno, as you may recall from 2005-06, is the central shopping/restaurants/nightlife/neon district of Daegu. We walk around there pretty much weekly. Many things are the same (like my beloved commune's lonely hearts club watering hole!) and many things are different. I see restaurants I recognize and restaurants I don't recognize. My favorite restaurant, Outback Steakhouse, where you recall I treated myself to cheese fries once a week because as a vegetarian allergic to seaweed I was starving in Korea, has moved across the street. The movie theater that was next to it in that old building is also closed, and there is a newer, bigger movie theater down the block. Little changes like that.

I also feel like there are SO many foreigners wandering around Daegu's Junangno, which compared to Andong is true, but probably isn't actually more than were wandering around there in 2006. One thing that's different: all the Andong teachers and apparently a lot of Daegu teachers are all hopped up about this Canadian owned bar/restaurant called The Holy Grill, which was not here back in my day. The first couple weeks we were here, Andong English teachers were actually talking about regularly hanging out at The Holy Grill when in Daegu, but giving me blank looks about the Commune! The sacrilege! I was like, "What the h is the Holy Grill?" They all said, "I know it's been around a few years....it must have been here when you were here..." but, no. Turns out it started in 2007. Believe me, I would have known if in 2005-06 there was a place around the corner from Commune's with quesadillas and potato skins and other Western-food appetizers to be had!

So anyway, Jungangno is the same, but it is also different. And that's pretty much how life should be, I suppose.

Annoying Group of People #4: The Whiners Suing Groupon

2011-03-04T13:27:00.003+09:00

I hate customers' sense of entitlement. Sometimes people just really frost my gizzard, and whiny, too-entitled customers are high on the list. I read today that there is a class action suit against Groupon because Groupon deals have expiration dates. SO some numbskulls have brought a class action against Groupon in Illinois, where gift certificates are not allowed to expire. There are a few other states like this too - I personally greatly enjoyed my time as a Borders floor manager in California and Massachusetts (as we all know), and in those stores we occasionally had whiny, entitled customers who came in with some gift card they'd had sitting around for ten years demanding we take it. Here's the thing: the smug ones who got all uppity with me, declaring, "I know you have to take this gift card! It's illegal for it to expire!" were sort of sad when I would magically override the expiration date in the register with my mysterious managerial powers because GUESS WHAT you dumb-ass customer? We KNOW the law, too! And we have workarounds! Wow, our nationwide company operating in multiple states actually knows how to operate in those states! Can you, my dumb-ass customer, also function in multiple states, or do you have trouble even leaving your house in the morning and/or finding your own state on a map?

But back to Groupon. I read today that the cl-jack-ass-action lawsuit says Groupon is not actually a coupon (which can expire) but a gift certificate (which can't expire) because customers purchase the deal. What a bunch of losers. I have personally bought deals from Groupon-like deal suppliers (and I subscribe to Groupon, too, but I just happen to be out of the country right now) and I can personally tell you it is not that hard to read the expiration date. Some loser is pissed because he never got around to playing Whirleyball at an amazingly good price. OH WELL. I think he had six months to use it, but he wanted the minimum requirement under Illinois law for a gift certificate, which is five years. Too bad, buddy, I think people who commit such acts of idiotic self-entitlement should be sent off to Libya to help protect demonstrators from murderous government forces and then maybe they'll think twice about what is really "unconscionable" (and yes, they used that word in the lawsuit. Unconscionably short expiration dates.)

First kill all the lawyers? How about first kill all the clients who bring such jackass complaints to lawyers in the first place?

Addendum: Natalie's Black Swanning

2011-02-25T10:20:00.002+09:00

Kudos to The New York Times' Carpetbagger, who in predicting the Oscar winners called Natalie's accomplishment what it is. I quote: "Ms. Portman, who spent a year learning to do swan arms and shedding weight, has won some important precursor prizes."

Thank you. That's right. She dropped weight and learned to do swan arms, as I mentioned yesterday. She did not - I'm looking at you Darren Aronofsky, among others - she did not "become a prima ballerina" in a year. Jesus.

The Home Oscars Stretch

2011-02-24T12:34:00.005+09:00

The Oscars are almost here! Well technically, the Oscars are almost there - since I'm over here in Asia. But although for me it will be Oscar Monday morning instead of Oscar Sunday, I am still excited and still only a few days away.

So, I know what you're wondering: have I had a chance to see all of the nominated flicks? And the answer is - no! Gaaaah. I have done terribly this year. I suppose some people would not consider it terrible to have seen 8 out of 10 Best Picture noms and anywhere from 3 to 5 of the noms in the acting categories ... and that should be up to 9 out of 10 once I see True Grit this weekend. But I have only gone to one movie since being in Asia this year. (I've also watched a few DVDs and movies on television, so it's not that I've stopped watching movies, fear not.) Why the difference from when I went to an English-language-movie-a-week in 2005-06? Well it's just one of many things different this time around for me in the R-o-K. It's slightly different living in Andong and it's totally different being here with Brian. The whole planning-things-with-another-person means I get less done.

Anyway, I also seriously need to figure out what's up with my computer's virus protection issues so I haven't been watching the nominated flicks by any devious routes. (Last time I was here I had a cheap desktop computer that I bought for $100 from a departing English teacher and didn't really care what happened to it. I should probably do that again.) The point of all this is that - well, there are several points. Here they are:

I simply can't say whether Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman or Michelle Williams deserves to win in the Best Acting categories, because I haven't seen those flicks. (Biutiful, Rabbit Hole and Blue Valentine, for those of you out of the loop.)
Apart from them, I can unequivocally say that Annette Bening is the best and she should win Best Actress. This is no offense to Natalie Portman in the usual "ugh" sense, but just in the "you-must-be-kidding-me" sense. Natalie certainly gasped and sniffled and starved and freaked out through Black Swan but come on. As for the ballet jabber, you will note that most of the shots you see of Natalie dancing in the film involve her arms and upper body, and the long shots en pointe etc. are her double. Which, yes, she had one even though all you hear in the media is that she "learned ballet" in a year for the movie.
And by the way, the film itself is a tad overrated and I'm pretty much astonished Darren Aronofsky stole Danny Boyle's directing nomination.
Because 127 Hours was astonishing.
And I would love to see James Franco win, although I can get behind the Colin Firth thing too. He certainly did a lot, subtly and otherwise, for his performance in The King's Speech.
I don't know what to think about the Best Picture win. The King's Speech? The Social Network? Both were good, but frankly 127 Hours was better and Inception was strikingly better - I'm so surprised it's not in the discussion more. Maybe people will vote for it since Christopher Nolan was robbed of his directing nomination. Maybe True Grit will win, which I find fun even though I haven't seen it yet. It could be this year's Shakespeare in Love?
Sometimes I just sit here and think, "Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right and Winter's Bone got nominated for Best Picture? Really?" Out of those, Winter's Bone is the one I am least skeptical of, but Best Picture? Those are such ten-nominations-not-five nominees.
But Annette Bening should still win. Because her performance was inspiring, amazing and I daresay flawless.
I haven't seen the animated nominees (fact: I haven't seen ANY of the Toy Stories, ever.) Nonetheless, I am so passionately in love with The Triplets of Belleville, and have been since 2003-04, that I am rooting for The Illusionist by that association alone to upset Toy Story 3 (which, btw, is also a ten-nominations-not-five Best Pic nominee).
I love documentaries! But I've seen only Exit Through the Gift Shop and Inside Job. Both were great and either could win and make me happy. I'm not counting out Restrepo, which I was planning to watch instantly on Netflix until I learned you can't watch instantly overseas. Which is pretty much my last Netflix straw.
Christian Bale was phenomenal and is entirely deserving of his frontrunner status for Best Supporting Actor and an eventual win.
Melissa Leo was great too, and I will be happy to see her win but there are other possibilities there. The most fascinating in that category, even more than the 14-year-old, is Jacki Weaver, who was obviously great in Animal Kingdom, which we saw at our awesome theater in Chicago for which I am nostalgic. Jacki Weaver made the film a couple years ago and has since been doing her theater thing in Australia and now suddenly everyone in the U.S. is discovering something from which she had totally moved on! So funny.
If Black Swan wins cinematography over Inception and all the rest I might throw things at the TV.
This has been known to happen before, but is still depressing: I haven't seen ANY of the makeup nominees! Sorry, Paul Giamatti! I'll update my virus protection, for reals.
I loved the 127 Hours music (duh, I loved everything about that movie), but is Gwyneth going to sing? I'm into that.
More than I am into, for example, Anne Hathaway singing, or doing anything. Which brings me to my biggest ugh of the whole thing. GOD DAMN WHY IS SHE HOSTING? Grrr. That announcement almost ruined my entire Oscar season. Why can't she just go away? Why does everyone fawn all over her? If she makes a single "Oh-my-god-I'm-so-fat-tee-hee-let's-encourage-Ana" reference (as she has managed to improvise or get written into all her movies like The Devil Wears Prada and Rachel Getting Married) I will throw something at the TV. Shut up shut up shut up. You are not fat, but you certainly are annoying. Why don't you get that written into your scripts instead?
James Franco is so awesome that his awesomeness just may be enough to cancel out her annoyingness. Here's hoping.
The Visual Effects and Sound categories, always a source of movies that would not be Oscar nominees for any other reason, are good this year: the latest Harry Potter (and I've actually seen it!), Unstoppable (ha!) and even TRON: Legacy. Good times.

OK. Even though I am not totally ready, I am ready. As soon as I see True Grit.

Konichiwa!

2011-02-13T22:24:00.006+09:00

I have totally not been blogging enough (at all) about our time in Korea. I am now going to remedy that by, um, blogging about Japan. Sorry, Korea! I will get to you eventually. (Meanwhile, if you're really hankering for Korea bloggage, feel free to click the Korea label on the left side of my blog page for all the 2005-2006 Korea ramblings your heart desires.)

So, Brian and I traveled to Japan from February 2 - 5. What an amazing taste of an awesome country that quickly catapulted to a high ranking in our lists of world destinations. We were both Japan first-timers, unless you count the layovers I had in Tokyo Narita airport a few years back, lying around for hours and buying water in the international transit zone with my U.S. dollars and getting change in yen. But we all know layovers don't really count. This, then, was my proper introduction to Japan.

Hurrah for Japan! It's a totally interesting, pretty, historic, convenient, delicious, clean, awe-inspiring, lively, relaxing country. We spent time in Hiroshima and Fukuoka (aka Fukuoka-Hakata). Both of those cities are in the southern/western half, not up top and not next to Tokyo. We took the ferry from Pusan, Korea to Fukuoka, Japan, a delightful three-hour hydrofoil adventure. It's fun to take a boat and then go through customs! But the actual boat trip itself is pretty much like being on an airplane, as you go into an inside part, sit in assigned seats in rows, and watch cheesy en route entertainment. You can't go outside because it's a high-speed ferry and you would fall off and die.

Going to Hiroshima was essential. It was basically a pilgrimage for me: to see the sight where such destruction was unleashed, and to see how the city has channeled its rebirth into a true commitment to peace on earth. "When will we ever learn..." We stayed in a fantastic hostel about five minutes' walk from the peace park and peace memorial museum. The museum is one of the better museums I've been to in the world, with history, photos, dioramas, recorded testimonials from survivors, tattered school uniforms that burned through to children's flesh, a watch that stopped at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, etc. Everything there is super-interesting, like the twists of fate and clear weather that made Hiroshima the target.

There is also a display of copies of the telegrams sent from mayors of Hiroshima to world leaders every time a country tests another nuclear weapon. Year after year, the Hiroshima mayors ask the world to please seek peace and a world free of atomic bombs. There is a letter to (Nobel peace prize recipient) Barack Obama as well. And yet, the nuclear tests march on.

I cannot recommend the city of Hiroshima highly enough. It is sobering and bizarre to think you are walking around where the entire city was flattened and people were incinerated. On the other hand, it is an amazing city with a fabulous rebuilt downtown area and, I might add, tons of delicious restaurants. Hiroshima's specialties are oysters and okonomiyaki, and we definitely had our share of okonomiyaki (minus the seaweed flakes, for me). Happy hour, a used English bookstore, a sushi party at our youth hostel, a karaoke room with fellow travelers, a walk around a Japanese garden, a hike up to the peace pagoda ... I want to go back to Hiroshima again and again and again.

To cap off our lovely Japan trip, we stayed a day in Fukuoka before catching our return ferry to Korea. Fukuoka is so lively! That's the best word I can think for it. Among the amazing things they have are this great system of street food/drink stalls. They're basically little benches around a bar/grill, with plastic tent-like "door"/walls, so you can pop into one of these street stalls and drink on a Friday night and have a snack and chitchat. We passed by tons of them, but we actually had our sights set on hitting up an izakaya for our Friday night drinking and snacking. I'm so glad Brian was on top of that, figuring out that we needed to go to an izakaya, because we found one and ate yummy food and met the coolest people in the world everywhere we went. Japan totally has it all going on, and have I mentioned how clean and convenient everything is? And efficient. The efficiency is something to behold. We got to take the famous bullet train between Fukuoka and Hiroshima, and of course I am now in love with the bullet train. Fast and fabulous.

In short - we will be going back to Japan, and I now totally understand all you Japan people I've known over the years who are in love with/obsessed with that country. It is a great place to be. I have a new language to learn, clearly...

This is not a Patagonia ad...

2011-02-01T14:14:00.003+09:00

...but it really could be. They're just that awesome, Patagonia, that they inspire me to write about them unpaid. (Not that I'm one to shy away from writing things no one asked for.) Of course I refer to Patagonia, the company, not Patagonia, the region which I really, really, really want to visit. For the weekend of January 29-30, I had to settle for the high wind-swept mountains of Korea.

Brian and I got our first taste of Korea skiing at the High1 Resort. It's a pretty new place, in Gangwon province (north of us), sort of near Taebaek. The mountains were beautiful and our hotel was nice, kind of an Overlook-hotel type feel, minus the murderous Jack Nicholson character - and our staff all seemed to be fully alive. The resort, which includes several hotels and mountain condos and whatnot along its windy roads, is pretty new (new enough to not even be mentioned in my 2004-05 edition of Lonely Planet Korea), and government dollars have helped build it. Gangwon Province used to be all about the mining, but now there's not so much mining, so they're all, "I know! Tourism!" Lo and behold.

Well, I'll tell you what, it was COLD up in them thar hills. I love me some skiing, but frigid winds whipping at your pummeled face and even the occasional ski-lift sway are another story. My toes and one or two fingers refused to stay warm, despite their layers. I totally had to tuck inside the mid-mountain hub building for an afternoon churro snack. Yes, you read that right: churro! I was only too delighted to see that is what High1 Resort decided would be the perfect mid-ski pick-me-up.

But here's the thing: even when I was freezing, and every part of me felt the fierce icy air, my arms and upper body did not. Why? Because thanks to Patagonia, I own the warmest shirt in the world. I totally bought it from their website on sale - was it clearance? I should hope not! - the other year, to have something warm to run in. I bought two of their Capilene long-sleeved outdoor sports shirts in fact - one Capilene level 4 and one Capilene level 3. I promptly discovered that I could go running in the Michigan or Chicago winter with only the Capilene 4 shirt for my top half layer. (Hat, gloves, etc. of course ... but no additional shirt layer needed for the run.) I'm telling you, it's the warmest shirt in the world. The even lighter Capilene 3 shirt is good for cool days, rainy runs, and not-quite-the-coldest-day-in-the-world runs. I adore both shirts and can't think of a better purchase I've made recently. I was reminded yet again on the ski lift, while every part of me felt the cold except the part that was covered by the warmest shirt in the world.

Tomorrow's the big day!

2011-01-24T23:28:00.003+09:00

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it's Oscar nominations time! Tomorrow! Oh boy! And I have watched only three films this month. Boo hoo is right. This is a result of my being in Korea and being unable to run out and watch 2 or 3 movies (in English) every week. The three films I did watch this month were Eat Pray Love (love it!), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (liked it, I think because I never watch any HP so everything was interesting to me but old hat for everyone else), and The Green Zone (I freaking loved this movie and highly, enthusiastically recommend it to everyone right now!)

So. Oscars. The big contenders that I need to see are True Grit, Blue Valentine, Another Year, Rabbit Hole and Toy Story 3. Nor have I seen Biutiful or Conviction, which may well give us some acting nods. Overall, though, I had a good November-December of movie watching and think I am poised to be over 50% when the nominations come out tomorrow.

My story, to which I am sticking, is that 127 Hours is the best film of the year, along with Inception. If either misses out on one of the TEN Best Pic nods I will be incredibly frustrated. It is sort of depressing to see how many people have foregone-concluded that it is between The Social Network and The King's Speech for what will actually win. I want to see a 127 Hours surprise! That said, I liked TSN and TKS a lot. The King's Speech is more than another British piece with people flouncing around to get Academy attention, really. It is dynamic, funny, touching, and an interesting history lesson/thoughtful look at humanity. It was amazing to me what Helena Bonham Carter can do with, like, five seconds of screen time, by the way. As for Black Swan? Sigh. It was entertaining, but it was just so...self-aware. I tend to hate that in everyone-loves-me Oscar contenders.

Actress-wise, I am loving the whole BAFTA thing, that is to say, the whole putting-Hailee-Steinfeld-from True Grit in the LEAD actress category. Every year, people. Every year some actress' performance is called supporting when it's clearly not. Some years, though, the Academy (and other Award-giving bodies) get it right and make that actress a Lead Actress nominee in spite of a Supporting Actress campaign. (See also: Kate Winslet, The Reader) I love it. Since I haven't seen the movie, I can't comment on her over Jennifer Lawrence, whom I did like in Winter's Bone. Nor have I seen Noomi Rapace in ~~The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo~~ Men Who Hate Women. But I can say this: we do not need to nominate Julianne Moore for The Kids Are All Right. Annette Bening should win (yes, win) (yes, over Natalie Portman's swan) for TKAAR and that's all we need for that.

I thought Christian Bale's performance in The Fighter was one of the most marvelous things I've seen in quite some time. He'll get a nomination, for sure.

I don't really have any surprise predictions or secret thoughts on what's in store...I would like to see an editing nomination for 127 Hours...and Jeremy Renner was the best thing about The Town, in my opinion. It would be pretty bad-ass if Hye-ja Kim, the Korean star of Mother - which we watched at the fantastic cinema across the street from us in Chicago - gets an actress nomination! But I'm not counting on that. Jacki Weaver for supporting in Animal Kingdom is a more likely foreign-actress-in-a-movie-United-Statesians-never-heard-of-much-less-saw bet.

Oh boy! Oh boy! I'll be back tomorrow or the day after to talk about the big announcement!

"Why Don't Mexicans Learn English?"

2011-01-20T14:13:00.004+09:00

This is so amazingly awesome that I am going to paste below in addition to providing the link at least twice.

The question was asked:

"Why don't Mexicans have enough gratitude for America to learn to speak English? Are they too stupid? Too lazy? What — they can't learn two or three words a day? Is this asking too much?"
-- Took Four Years of Spanish in High School

The U.S. government shares your concerns. Its Dillingham Commission released a 42-volume study on the waves of immigrants that concluded, "The new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old . . . Generally speaking, they are actuated in coming by different ideals, for the old immigration came to be a part of the country, while the new, in a large measure, comes with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country." The Dillingham report went on to fault the new immigrants for their lack of assimilation and English skills, constantly contrasting them with earlier generations of immigrants, and urged clampdowns on immigration. Sound familiar? That's because the Dillingham report appeared in 1911, and the inassimilable masses at the time were eastern and northern Europeans. The Dillingham Commission proves that the time-honored conservative anecdote that earlier generations of immigrants walked off the boats, chopped down their multisyllabic surnames and learned English immediately is bull-pinche-shit. American racism is a carousel — and here we are again.

The above is from the Phoenix New Times column "Ask a Mexican" by Gustavo Arellano.

Of course, those of us who went to law school and studied/worked in immigration law already know that those mythical fully assimilated previous generations of immigrants never actually existed. But I'm sure the assimilation myth will continue to be screamed from the rooftops by angry Americans. I wish those Angry 'Mericans would read, for example, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America wherein they could learn, as I did, about how very entitled Mexicans are to the land of the Southwest United States, and how very NOT entitled Polk et. al. were to it when they marched in and took it.

New Yearage

2011-01-06T23:20:00.002+09:00

Howdy do, blogosphere!

Well, would you look at that. 2011.

You'll never guess where I am...well, actually you might. But that's not the point of this entry, so we'll leave that for another day. (I'm still somewhere in the northern hemisphere, as the above language notes.) The point of this entry is to think about New Year's resolutions. Usually I am really into them, and this year I was so busy and consumed with getting ready for my big New Year's adventure that I never even thought about resolutions - seriously, me, didn't get around to thinking about them - until the night of December 31st. Someone brought it up and I was all oh, yeah - well, if I get on a plane and fly around the world on January 1st does that obviate the need to make a resolution or two?

Of course it doesn't! It just delayed the resolving. Now that I have time to think again, I find my brain turning to resolutions (partly because now that I have time to think again I am catching up on a dozen or so blogs that are all talking about end-of-year and new-year stuff). I think one of my resolutions is about not being angry. Being outraged, in an "if-you're-not-outraged-you're-not-paying-attention" sense is still OK, but anger is different. The thing is, I'm actually not really angry, ever. Hardly at all. But people think I am, sometimes, when I'm not. I find my brain thinking about some kind of resolution for that.

Related to not making people think I am angry, incorrectly, I have also been thinking about etiquette and charm. Part of me actually would like to go to a full-on Southern belle charm school. Another part of me prefers my more Western, renegade outlook on life. But lately I have been thinking about that distinctly Southern talent of telling people basically to go !@$%* themselves while all the while being so sweet and proper and polite that you never stray from proper decorum. I really want that talent. A little while back, during a social gathering a person I know broke into a conversation between me and two other people, because that first person had heard the rest of us talking passionately about a world news issue, and told us to stop talking about politics. Naturally my response was that we all clearly saw no reason to stop talking about politics. The person continued to press the point that there was "nothing we could do about it anyway" (which is not actually true, of course) and also, that I am in the wrong for "trying to convince people" I am right. (Amusing on several levels, that.) In a few minutes, the person left, one of the people from the conversation said, "I don't care if you talk about politics," and the evening went merrily on. But I was left thinking about what I would have said IF I had that distinctly Southern belle sugar-slopping talent that I don't have. It's interesting to ponder.

Anyway, none of this is quantifiable whatsoever, and there have to be some quantifiable resolutions, so I'm toying with simple increase: to read more books, and to travel to more countries, than I did in 2010. I think those just might be my resolutions.

Merry Christmas! and Movies!

2010-12-26T08:55:00.004+09:00

Since we last talked..since you last read me...you know what I mean, since then I have seen The Fighter and Black Swan. Interesting pairing, to be sure, and not just because Darren Aronofsky was/is connected to both. I didn't see them on the same day. I liked The Fighter better. I didn't dislike Black Swan, but I didn't love it. For something that is getting a lot of breathless wow-that's-so-amazing talk, it's pretty predictable. A lot of it is shocking - but very little, if anything, in it is surprising.

Natalie Portman, who used to bug me, officially does not annoy me anymore, because she has been entirely swept away by Anne Hathaway, whose very existence at this point is like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard for me. That said, in this movie, Natalie Portman is kind of annoying, in a psychotic-annoying way. You want to slap some sense into her, tell her to stop with the high-pitched little girl voice, tell her to speak from the thoracic diaphragm (the same diaphragm we later get to see prodded and poked like a water balloon), and tell her to run far, far away from her equally(?) psychotic mother and the decorated-in-pink bedroom in mother's house. Of course, if Natalie Portman's "Nina" did any of these things, we wouldn't have a movie, so you don't really want to tell her to do them.

But what you really DO want to tell Natalie Portman, Darren Aronofsky, and any sound mixers who might be listening, is to knock it off with the sniveling fear breathing in Every.Single.Scene. You know - that quick inhale kind of thing like when the about-to-be-offed horror movie character is slowly walking down the dark basement stairs and isn't saying anything, but you know they're scared because of their quick, quiet, shaky inhales. Natalie Portman does an awful lot of that in this movie. I'm sure all her acting was heartfelt, but when you watch the film it comes out more like a remix of all the times she did that one on top of the other, like you might see in a Daily Show collection being forwarded around You Tube of every time Fox News said some crap over a month.

I rather enjoyed The Fighter. I liked the Massachusetts-ness of it and the way certain lines and bits and ideas were hit pitch perfectly, and I liked that it made me care about what goes into a boxing match (because nothing previously in life has made me care about this), and I liked hearing "Saints" by the Breeders, which catapulted me back to the mid-1990s. But most of all, I liked Christian Bale. Whoa! Christian Bale, man! He absolutely, completely, totally, 100% blew me away with the awesomeness that he brought to this performance. There is one confrontation scene between him and Amy Adams that is close to perfection. I'm a little sad that he is going to be, obviously, put out there as a Supporting Actor, because he was really more of a co-star in the film, but you know how it is.

Melissa Leo and Amy Adams might both get supporting actress nominations, and I'm not sure who would win out of those two. Perhaps they'll cancel each other out and Jacki Weaver will win. I really don't think Mila Kunis should win. No offense to Black Swan, but just no. It was really quite fluffy in a way, a kind of Baby-Jane way. Not lighthearted by any means, but not totally seriously dark, if you see what I mean.

This is my Christmas Day prediction of which films will get the ten Best Picture slots, roughly in the order I am sure (roughly!), with the ones I've seen in bold:

The King's Speech
The Kids Are All Right
Inception
The Social Network
127 Hours
The Fighter
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone
Black Swan

Part of me thinks The Town replaces Black Swan on this list. Maybe tomorrow I will post another list with that prediction. I don't think either one should get a Best Picture nom. Here are the films I think SHOULD get Best Picture nominations, admittedly only out of what I've actually seen:

127 Hours
Inception
The Fighter
The Social Network
Inside Job
The Ghost Writer
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Maybe Winter's Bone

The Ghost of Awards Season Past

2010-12-20T05:29:00.004+09:00

Sometimes it is hard to see the Oscar-nominated documentaries until they are released on DVD. It is sad but true that many theaters don't play the Oscar-nominated documentary films, even during awards season. Those that do play in theaters have brief stints and are rarely promoted much, so you probably missed some of this year's possible nominees such as Restrepo, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Inside Job, or even Waiting for Superman (which did get more attention than others, since everyone likes to complain about public schools and suggest that abandoning them for charter schools is a "solution.")

Anyway, if you're feeling sad to not be watching this year's potential Academy Award-nominated documentaries, I suggest you do yourself a favor and watch an Oscar nominee from last year, the excellent The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. It tells an essential story about our remarkable recent history that has been all-too-soon forgotten. I can only offer my profound thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who is still out there trying to right wrongs, and to those who are helping to spread his words and other truths - including truths about our government.

In light of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, the Dubya & Co. lies that have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our government's continuous stream of lies to the American people about military destruction around the world, you owe it to yourselves to watch this film. If you're on Netflix, you can stream The Most Dangerous Man in America on "Watch Instantly." What are you waiting for?

For those who (for some inexplicable reason) don't believe my recommendation, I'll share a few quotes from the film, which are eerily similar to things you are hearing in the media right now about Iraq, Afghanistan, and attempts to prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. There are also great bits in the film where you see four presidents in a row lie about the importance of us fighting in Vietnam to support "democracy." Ahem. The U.S. government is still up to those same rhetorical shenanigans.

For the anti-WikiLeaks crowd, you have a tricky leader, who is not a crook - right?
"Now listen here: printing top secret information - I don't care how you feel about the war, whether they're for or against it-you can't and should not do it. It's an attack on the integrity of government, and by god I'm going to fight that son-of-a-bitching paper. They don't know what's going to hit them now." - Richard Nixon
For those who voted for Dubya (or failed to vote against him in 2004), who believed the U.S. media's WMD cheerleading in 2003, who accept Obama's decision to keep Guantanamo open and who look at all the evidence of torture and still say our soldiers and spies are "defending our freedom," this one's for you.
"I staked my freedom on a gamble: if the American people knew the truth about how they had been lied to, the myths that had led them to endorse this butchery for 25 years, that they would choose against it. And the risk that you take when you do that is that you'll learn something ultimately about your fellow citizens that you won't like to hear, and that is that they hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it." - Daniel Ellsberg
For everyone:
"The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has usurped power and is acting as an outlaw government. It is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and reality of what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it." - Daniel Ellsberg

It's High Time to Talk About Flicks!

2010-12-16T09:46:00.003+09:00

Movies, movies, movies! What's the only thing that's better than going to the movies? Going to the movies during AWARDS SEASON!! It's that time of year, and I'm happier than a pig in slop. (Hey, this is still a family blog. A Communist family, maybe, but a family nonetheless.)

Those of you not keeping up with all the jokes/allusions/sardonic wit in the previous paragraph, this one's for you: behold, my first crop of 2010 Award Nominee movie recommendations. I will now share my opinion about the Golden Globe-nominated films I have seen thus far.

MUST SEE MUST SEE MUST SEE

127 Hours: This movie was better than I thought it was going to be. And I wasn't expecting anything too shabby. This movie worked on so many different levels. This movie was about so much more than That Scene - you know the one, the one everyone is writing about and clearly I'm guilty now, too. But here's the thing: after all the build up for That Scene it actually went by so fast I was like, "Oh, is that all?" Which is not to say James Franco was not all kinds of awesome in every second of the film, including That Scene. Anyway, the canyonlands are beautiful, life is beautiful, humans are capable of amazing things, humans connect in amazing ways, Jesus Lord & Savior had nothing to do with it, and Danny Boyle sure knows how to make a film that says all that. And you should all run right out and see it.
Inception It's between this and 127 Hours for my favorite 2010 flick so far. Inception was intelligent and gorgeous and intriguing and riveting and I was so spectacularly impressed at how well it pulled off everything it did. I was breathless and I could barely move while sitting in the theater watching it. We all overuse "riveting" but this one really was.
The Social Network: I don't have much to add beyond what anyone else has said - yes it was great and witty, yes Justin Timberlake is really an actor, yes all but, like, two of the females were depicted as stupid/sluts/stupid sluts, but the larger point there is that the World of Big Business still functions that way and that's part of the deathly competitive b.s. problem, you see, of all the male venture capitalists who think everything and everyone is their property... I will add that Andrew Garfield is quickly becoming one of my new favorites. Between this and Never Let Me Go he blew me away this year. I had thought no one was paying enough attention to him, but now I see that the drunk Hollywood Foreign Press has been paying attention to him, so good for them!

GOOD ENOUGH

Winter's Bone - This movie just kind of quietly sits there, and then certain piercing moments reach up and grab you and shake you up a little bit, and then you mellow out again but you're a tiny bit on edge, now, and wary of everyone around you, and you contemplate loyalty and fierceness and survival, but it's still all so understated, which I really like. Yes, Jennifer Lawrence is great. I don't think she'll win an Oscar or anything, but I like the way everyone in this movie really comes across as how people really are. Which includes, for many of us, messed up but struggling along the best we can.
Animal Kingdom - I hadn't really thought about these two having anything in common, but now that I think about it both Winter's Bone and Animal Kingdom explore the concepts of family, survival, and family survival all intertwined with family loyalty. Good stuff. Good performances, nothing particularly mind-blowing about the story, but well crafted and holds your interest and builds the drama and all that. I liked it. You really feel the tension at certain points and want so desperately for the characters who have had the misfortune to stumble across this creepy world of crime to get out alive.

O-VER-RAT-ED
(which does not mean the same thing as "I didn't like it")

The Kids Are All Right The singing Joni Mitchell dinner scene? Stunning. I liked many things about it, but I was actually weirded out by how people were falling all over themselves to praise it the most. It was like they were really proud of themselves for loving it, which is really ironically funny in light of the magnificent scene in the film in which Annette Bening's character takes overly-proud-of-themselves-organic-farmers'-market-shoppers to task. I loved her character. Julianne Moore's character was a flighty bitch who I daresay does not deserve the forgiveness she asks for. Good flick. Just everyone try not to pat yourselves on the back quite so much when you walk out of the theater after seeing it.
The Town So like, I wanted to love this, but I did not love it. The main plot, the thrust of the drama, the I'm-not-spoiling-anything-because-this-is-the-entire-premise, that these two characters fall in love is - um - why? Why are they in love again? We have no idea. They have no idea, and we have no idea, and it really kind of ruins what otherwise might be a great movie. Jeremy Renner is wild. Lots and lots of guns, especially at the end there - hoo boy! I enjoyed knowing from personal experience exactly where in Boston they were pretty much every scene.

EH...NOT SO MUCH

The Tourist Oh, Angelina and Johnny, you barely held my interest. At least you had sweeping vista-like shots of Venice to help take our breath away. It's hard to say which is the crazier move on the part of the Golden Globes, nominating this for Best Picture or putting it in the Comedy category.

Red Also inexplicably nominated, also inexplicably in the Comedy/Musical category. I'm not even sure that Helen-Mirren-holding-a-gun is enough for me here, as it apparently is for many, but she does do that, if that's enough for you. I kind of wanted this to be better, like I wanted it to be even more fun-better. It held my interest better than The Tourist, though, I'll give it that.

And yes, that's all I've seen, of the Golden Globes anyway. I'll be kicking into Awards Season high gear soon. Like, this week and next. I'm kind of in denial about the animated movies I have to see - Tangled will surely get an Oscar nom, and I've actually never seen any Toy Story and now I have to figure out whether I watch all three, or just this one, or what. But I am all kinds of eager for this new animated feature from The Triplets of Belleville dude that is just coming out and which I hope gets the third nod.

I love awards season!

Let's Get a Few Things Straight

2010-12-13T09:49:00.003+09:00

Red herrings abound! Julian Assange sits in prison on sexual assault charges that may have been cooked up by a CIA operative, and now we are all supposed to stop talking about truth and the imperialist U.S. and write off WikiLeaks and call Assange a bad man? Not so fast. But also not so fast: those of you who hurl the word "feminist" around as some sort of accusation? You disgust me too. To be clear, the disgust goes in basically this order:

1.Rapists, murderers* and other torturers are the most digusting
(*please note: "murderers" includes those in charge of the war in Iraq etc.)

2. Anyone, CIA or otherwise, who would use a bogus rape charge to distract the rest of us from an issue is an affront to actual rape victims everywhere

3. Slightly below them are jingoist, knee-jerk right-wingers who never met a false dichotomy they didn't like and have divided the world neatly into with-us/against-us or Christian/terrorist or "pro"-military/anti-military categories (that last category being highly suspect, since the "pro"-military people are also apparently the ones who want the troops to keep getting killed in bullshit operations in Afghanistan and Iraq? yes, that part is definitely confusing)

4. Anti-feminists in general - I would rank them higher, but so many of them fit into one of the above categories that I needn't bother

Afraid to Speak Truth to Power

2010-12-10T05:36:00.003+09:00

During most of my daily activities, I have very little occasion to feel fear. Even when I have a bizarre, creepy dream - ahem, last night - in which two giant tarantulas take up residence in my bedroom and Stephen King comes over to help me deal with them, I wake up not so much afraid as just shaking my head at what it all means.

Yes, I am aware that this makes me extremely lucky. There are people all over the world, here in the U.S. and in every other country, who feel fear every single day. I live a remarkably easy life, even when it's not being compared to that of someone who is abused, trafficked into slavery, denied basic human rights, or subjected to bombing/marauding/killing by military forces.

In light of the foregoing, I find it interesting that the thought that makes me a little afraid today, the only thing kicking in those stomach butterflies of trepidation, is: what will my government do to me if I speak my opinion about WikiLeaks? The answer is supposed to be nothing, right? We're all supposed to have freedom of speech, and we're supposed to be able to express our opinions without any government law stopping us. We're "free." Right?

It's disgraceful that I am afraid of what U.S. government forces are going to do to people who speak out in favor of WikiLeaks. I have not done anything illegal. I am not a "hacktivist." I haven't even read most of the leaked cables. But I can't believe the campaign of bullying and intimidation being used to try to stop WikiLeaks from releasing information.

INFORMATION. Words. Speech. What is the U.S. government so afraid of in those leaked cables? What could be worse than the video of murder by Apache helicopter soldiers that was released last April? Although, seeing as there is apparently Guantanamo info in upcoming cables, I hesitate to even ask that question. You'd think it couldn't be any worse than what we already know about torture by the military and CIA, but who knows? And why do all these "patriots" like Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell (who called Julian Assange a "terrorist") and apparently every mainstream news editor issue a nonstop stream of I-bleed-red-white-and-blue rhetoric while overlooking the fact that speaking an opinion in favor of WikiLeaks is now seriously frightening?

I think about human rights defenders around the world (including those featured in Speak Truth to Power) who face the fear and speak out anyway, often resulting in harsh punishment, "disappearance," and death. I admire their courage.

I hope everyone continues to speak the truth and calls out the intimidation of WikiLeaks (and Amazon, and PayPal, who apparently succumbed to the bullying) for what it is. Three cheers for Daniel Ellsburg for boycotting Amazon and calling for a whistle blower to reveal the intimidation that led to them barring WikiLeaks from the site.

I feel a little afraid. Interestingly, we're planning to go see Fair Game later today. That is probably not going to make me feel any better.

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #5

2010-11-25T06:13:00.002+09:00

Today I am thankful that I can walk. I went for a walk, in fact, today -- a lovely jaunt of about two and a half miles around Brian's Grand Rapids neighborhood (where we are holed up for this holiday week). I love walking. Lately, I have been going for more brisk walks, setting out to do so, because working from home as a freelancer has me a little stir crazy. I never used to be one for spending much time at home. I always enjoyed my commute, moving around and doing things. In evenings I liked to be out and about, even for random things, instead of plopping down on the couch. I still prefer this. But working from home and being behind in work and organizing and finances and accomplishments really puts a damper on my preferred lifestyle. So at the very least, I walk.

There are walkabouts, there are walks-for-hunger-and-breast-cancer-awareness, there is walking the dog. There are artists' walks, a la Julia Cameron (love those!) There are lots of random reasons people walk. And then, there are people who can't walk. Also, there are people who can walk, but don't walk.

I am very thankful that I can walk.

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #4(And, this is my 500th blog post!)

2010-11-24T12:15:00.002+09:00

What an exciting milestone! I started this blog a little over five years ago when I resigned from my Borders career (ahem) and went to Korea to teach English, hence the triple entendre of the title. And now, here I am, on post #500 - and thinking about heading back to Korea soon! Isn't life interesting?

Today I am thankful for - you probably could have guessed this - reading! If you check out my literary supplement blog you know I have been known to babble to the interwebs about the books I read, but even without the bloggage I just love, love, love books. I also am thankful for being able to read other things - magazines, directions, road signs, contracts, maps, and so on. I am routinely blown away, if I stop to think about it, that humans created written language. I even love to read about reading and language. I marvel at how writing is a talent and a skill and a love of mine, and what that means about the physiology of my brain. I marvel at how much enjoyment a book can bring. I can't imagine a world without War and Peace, among other great works of literature. Reading. Reading reading reading!!!! I am thankful for it.

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #3c/#3d

2010-11-23T04:28:00.004+09:00

Grandpa Curtis September 1915 - September 2010
Is it weirdly cosmic that three of my grandparents were born in August except the one born September 1st? I'll leave that to the astrologers. I actually just recently blogged about the passing of my mother's father, because he died two months ago. I can't even believe it has been two months already. Grandpa Curtis was a legend. A golfer extraordinaire, a faithful companion to his dog(s), a man who supervised the construction of power plants across the nation and may well be partly responsible for the electricity powering the computer on which you read this. A jokester (in a sly, sardonic way), a teller of stories, a man who famously "hasn't been to a movie theater since Patton in 1970" but was among the first in our family to pop up with an AOL address back in 1996. A man who has seen much of the seas (in the Navy) and all of the U.S., except that he doesn't count Texas. Grandpa has pined away for Grandma from the day of her death in 1997 until his dying day this fall. Grandpa made us all frustrated and sad when he acted as if he was alone on his island of suffering that no one understood, but we also were grateful to him for keeping her memory alive. I can honestly say that on some deep, cellular level I thought Grandpa would be around forever, and also that I am glad he got to live as much life as he did.

Grandma Napikoski August 1922 - May 2007
I moved to Boston in November of 2002, and after a life in the Southwest/West I was now close to the New England side of the family for all sorts of holidays - they even get together for Easter and stuff, good Catholics - and other random occasions. The only regret here is that I didn't have a car while in Boston. Now that I knew the way (can we say Route 2?) I could have zipped out to Millers Falls every other week on my days off. Instead I was forever hitching rides with my aunt or cousin who lived elsewhere in Massachusetts. Anyway, I got to spend time at Grandma N.'s house with actual adult conversation. It was the sad time of her life, because Grandpa was gone and her health started declining more rapidly as well. But we talked. Many of the things I did were not part of her world: I constantly jabbered about Dante or traveling to Cuba or politics or teaching in Korea or whatever. She would comment matter-of-factly about career, marriage, saving money, settling down and other traditional notions of success, but she certainly listened and offered support to everything I said. I was glad that we reached a point of laid back, comfortable conversation.

Grandma Napikoski liked to knit. She was a talented, prolific knitter. She did other crafts, too - very crafty, especially with the fabrics. When I entered the downsizing portion of my life, the t-shirts I never wore had to go, but I wanted to somehow keep the ones from special events, high school plays, and the like. Grandma made me a fabulous quilt out of my t-shirts. I think she really liked the project. She was involved with her church in that tiny little New England town and made a gazillion crafts every year for their holiday sale.

Thanks to my sister, who now has three kids, I got to watch Grandma Napikoski be a great-grandparent. I liked seeing the delight in her eyes around multiple great-grandchildren, and I'm glad my sister made the effort to travel across the country to see her. Grandma really wanted to stay in that house in that tiny town up to the very end. She was basically the last holdout to not get online and join the emailing, but we always exchanged tons of letters and cards, and I'm glad we kept doing that. I like letters. We kept writing when I left New England for New York. Grandma N. passed away at the end of my first year of law school. I'm sad that my aunt saw to it that the big old house got cleaned out and sold right away, because the visiting-Millers-Falls era of our life truly came to an end.

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #3b

2010-11-23T04:00:00.002+09:00

Continuing my thankfulness for grandparents, here's...

Grandpa Napikoski August 1919 - July 2002
I knew Grandpa Napikoski, my dad's dad, less than I knew any of my other grandparents. I feel bad about that. They lived in New England and I lived in the Southwest until the year he died, actually. Grandpa loved fishing and he loved the Red Sox. My early memories of him are going out on the fishing boat (with no idea what I was doing, really, but it was still fun) and him smoking his pipe. I totally have no problems smelling pipe smoke - maybe because I have pleasant associations with it.

I was fascinated by their New England house which from my perspective had four stories (including attic and basement) because in Arizona almost everything was on one level only. I was most fascinated by his cellar full of tools and just lots of stuff. I am sad that he died just two short years before his beloved Red Sox broke their curse to win the World Series. The first time I went to a Major League baseball game (not counting spring training) was when he took us to Fenway Park. I wish I knew more about his wants, hopes and dreams in life. He worked for years at the paper mill there in Millers Falls, Massachusetts, and made sure he provided for his family and sent his five kids off to college. When I visited them at age 3, 8, 11, they would always plan fun activities like big lobster dinners or a boat ride up the Connecticut River. He asked the usual questions, "How's school?" and the like, but I was shy and didn't know what to say beyond a few answers. I realize now I should have just babbled. Why not? Babbled and listened, too. They flew out to Arizona to see us a few times during my teen years, and I'm pretty sure I sat through the obligatory dinners and then rushed to the other room to call my high school best friend and talk about dumb stuff. I did attend the grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary party in 1997, the first time I really related to my grandparents and the aunts/uncle/cousins on that side of the family as a person and not as a silly child. I'm glad I had that experience.

I was on a road trip, coincidentally, from L.A. to Boston in the summer of 2002. When the traveling companion and I reached Boston, where she was moving, we planned to drive out to western Massachusetts to visit my grandparents before I had to fly back to L.A. One thing led to another and after a couple days in Boston we had only one more evening. Meanwhile, my grandpa had gone into the hospital. He had been in and out of the hospital for a few things, and I thought nothing of it, except that it was a little weird to bring a friend to introduce to them to the hospital, but still, we tried to make a go of it. It was raining, those long summer New England rains. I didn't have a clue that I should take Route 2, so we took the Mass Pike to Route 9 somewhere in the middle of Massachusetts and then drove on that as the wet and visibility got worse. I had a vague idea, based on being driven around by my dad on various visits, what to do when we got near Amherst, but it was taking us forever and getting later and later. I was confused at Deerfield, even though I kind of recognized a parking lot, where we stopped to ask directions and call them. It was 9 o'clock and I wondered if it was too late to even go to the hospital. I called the house but got no answer. After more fretting, we ended up driving back to Boston, aware that we had blown the plan, but I knew I'd be back in Massachusetts in the next few months and I would just see my grandparents then, when we had more time. The next morning, as I was packing my suitcase, my grandma called and I got on the phone, ready to babble an apology for not making it out to visit the night before. Instead, she told me grandpa had died. I called my boss in L.A. and said - Yo, I am going to this funeral, sorry I've already been on a three-week vacation but it's getting extended.

My grandpa's father and grandfather came from Poland. They shortened the name Napierkowski to Napikoski in the U.S. A lot of that family didn't have offspring. My dad's sister's kids have all sorts of different last names, and my sister changed her name when she got married. I wouldn't change my name anyway, but I do feel like I'll be one of the few people with the name Napikoski in this world, and I like to think I will leave some creative legacy that spreads it far and wide.

Next up: Grandma Napikoski

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #3a

2010-11-23T03:20:00.003+09:00

Today I am thankful for my grandparents, all four of them, and thankful I got to know them while they were alive. They died in 1997, 2002, 2007, and 2010; therefore I was at very different stages of adulthood for the final years of each of their lives. I was also suspiciously available (i.e. with no full-time job to which to report) at the time of each of their deaths--I'm not sure what the cosmic significance of that is, but it certainly meant that I was able to go to each of their funerals and reflect on their lives. (This was going to be all one blog entry, but I discovered I had a lot of babbling to do about each grandparent, so I'm splitting it up into four.)

Grandma Curtis August 1918 - October 1997
My mother's mother, Geraldine Curtis, was a fantastically accomplished musician, particularly as a piano player. From a young age, she dazzled the people in and around her home in Payson, Utah, with her talent. She could play anything and everything, she could play by ear, and she sang quite a bit with my grandpa, too. She also suffered from severe arthritis that wreaked havoc on her hands and fingers, eventually bringing her to the point where she could no longer play. When my sister and I were young, we spent lots of time at the grandparents' Sun City, Arizona, house and always wanted her to play the piano. She would do so on Christmas Eve, playing any Christmas song we wanted to sing as if it were the easiest thing in the world. I play a little piano - it's not the easiest thing in the world at all, for me, and I certainly can't bust out everyone's requests without blinking an eye. I imagine she was already in great pain during the 1980s, after years of arthritis, but she pushed through it to at least make Christmas Eve magical and special for her granddaughters. Eventually that stopped, and we would all sing or do other Christmas Eve stuff, and everyone mourned the loss of Grandma's music and they still talk about little else when she is mentioned.

There was even more to her, though. She was funny in a quiet, offbeat way. For example when my mom informed her I was traveling off the beaten path to Cuba, news that provoked responses in others ranging from angry political to cautious I-would-never-do-that homebody, Grandma's comment was, "That Fidel Castro is so ugly." Hey, she was entitled to her opinion, eh? Grandma also kept up on the pop culture of the day via People magazine and she had an impressive command of soap operas. One day as a bored adolescent I was at her house and decided I was going to start watching a soap opera. This was going to be a diligent project, so I had to get all the facts from the beginning. I selected The Young and the Restless, probably because a)it was on and b)it was not General Hospital or Days of Our Lives, the ones all my friends/classmates/their sisters/their mothers watched, and I wanted to be different. I turned on Grandma Curtis' TV and she totally started telling me the back story of each character that appeared. I think she hadn't watched it since the 1970s, but it's really easy to pick up with those things, as any soap opera viewer knows. She had all the dirt - it was a great time.

I was still a young, young adult when Grandma died, and I was just getting my life in L.A. started. I felt terrible that I had not got to know her even more than I did. At the same time, she was there for every phase of my life: she made up a mini-mythology with a legend for each family member that just thrilled me as a toddler, she came to my elementary school and junior high band concerts, she cooked roast beef and got out the box of wind-up toys when I came over, she attended my play at the high school summer theater workshop I attended in Utah and a friend of mine who was also there heard her whispering excitedly to my grandfather "There's Linda!" when I made my entrance, and she and my grandpa came to sing with me and my mom in the Messiah chorus one December, probably the last time I (willingly) stepped foot in a church. I remember sitting in Barnes & Noble for hours the week after her funeral reading about arthritis and trying to figure out what life meant.

Next up: Grandpa Napikoski

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #2

2010-11-22T04:19:00.004+09:00

Today I am thankful for airplanes. I didn't mean to make this so technological invention heavy; tomorrow I'll do one about people. But I am really, really thankful for airplanes. Every time I fly I sit in quiet, grateful awe that I can get to any country in the world in one day. It's ridiculous. The airline passengers around me and their complaints and stress are so unfounded, and so unfortunate. I wish they would "stow it" as Mel would say. If they are unhappy about their security checks, their airfare, their leg room, their stupid carry-on bags, their precious few minutes of delay sitting at the gate, and so forth, why don't they just go to the bus station? Seriously. Get over yourselves, folks. You can go ANYWHERE. Fast. It's a miracle, and you should be thankful for it, too.

This year, in May, I was able to realize my goal of traveling to Tajikistan with Habitat for Humanity. Tajikistan! If I had attempted to travel there from Chicago in May 1910, I might still be on my way back in November. If I had set out in May of 1810, or 1710, I might still be on my way *there* in November. I owe my world travel to airplanes. I think about this all the time. I think about the Mark Twains and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Marco Polos and the marauding forces of the Roman Empire who had to invest far more effort and time than I do to travel the world.

I am completely, totally, enthusiastically thankful for airplanes.

Thanksgiving Week Thankfulness #1

2010-11-21T08:31:00.002+09:00

A lot of people are using their Facebook status updates this month to post each day a different thing for which they are thankful. I am not doing this because not only do I tend to keep my FB status a bit less sentimental than that, but I also don't generally do anything that predictable with my status updates. However, with the actual week of Thanksgiving upon us, and because I need to write a blog entry to procrastinate some other work I'm trying (not) to do, I decided that I could use this blog to say thankful things.

Appropriately enough, today I am thankful for --> the internet. Email. Wireless networking. Our whole glorious global age of communication. I was thinking about this earlier as I stood in my kitchen eating chips and salsa. (The chips and salsa have nothing to do with it, really, but I'm just setting the scene.) I dislike talking on the phone. It's not something I dislike because it's unpleasant (like carrot cake) or stupid (like Twilight) or because I'm morally opposed to it (like war, or WalMart), but I just really freakin' do not enjoy the telephone. I grudgingly use it to conduct business, as efficiently as possible, but I just can't tolerate phone-calls-as-leisure-activity.

Of course, to some extent calling a friend or family member can be a "task" in the sense that it is a necessary thing to do in order to accomplish something else -- such as finding out how they are doing, or making plans. However, almost everything I need to do in this lovely, fabulous world in which we live, I can do with a specific email or a text message. And a great deal of keeping up on others' lives in a general sense is accomplished by Facebook (and blogs, for those of us who are really awesome). There are those pesky few who can never seem to reply to e-mails or who - seriously - still don't send/receive text messages. But overall, I am saved by the internet from having to use a telephone to invite people to events, find out about the birth of babies, ask for advice, network, let people know I'm thinking about them, recommend a book, find out someone's current address, etc. I LOVE IT. I can dimly recall the world in which friendships were maintained largely, if not only, via telephone. Ugh. Back then, I wrote a lot of letters. Is it any surprise that I so greatly enjoyed the gang-of-friends life in the college dorm? We just wandered out into the hall to see what was happening. None of this pesky telephone stuff.

Thank you, internet! And no offense, Alexander Graham Bell. It's nothing personal.

To All Who Say Their Desire for "Change in Washington" Motivates Their Voting Choices Today

2010-11-03T07:12:00.004+09:00

First of all, if you want to "change" everything and therefore you cast your vote for Republicans, all Republicans, and only Republicans, then your logic fails me. What it seems you really should be doing is voting against every incumbent. Logic: get some! It's free! And yes, I also made fun of Democrats who voted for "change" in 2008 (and used it as a campaign slogan) here and here because it sounded just as dumb then.

Secondly, another great way to change Washington? Third-party candidates, my friends. Or, third and fourth and fifth. The Greens and Libertarians come to mind; stop dismissing them and then complaining that Washington is "business as usual."

Finally, when I hear my friends and people on the radio and other random squeaky-wheel strangers talk about how after these past two years they are tired of it all and just need to vote the "ruling" party out, I think back to 2002 and 2004 when we had a murderous administration headed by monsters who were not only profiting from wars they had lied their way into (and which they had plotted from their first days of taking power), but also actively torturing people around the world and who to this day continue to detain, torture and kill thousands illegally, unethically and unconscionably. Then I realize that these crimes were not enough to motivate my friends, people on the radio, and random squeaky-wheel strangers to "change" things and vote those thugs the hell out of D.C., and I am shocked and saddened to see where everyone's priorities lie.

No thanks to anyone in the U.S. "news" media, I might add, for all of the above folly/murder.

Happy election day!

Why It's OK For Jon Stewart To Have a Rally

2010-10-30T22:17:00.003+09:00

The self-righteous people who are trying for this whole "Well, now, gee, he's a comedian and a political satirist and I just don't know if that boy should be involved in some 'Merican politics, there" are really bugging me. Who came up with this crazy idea that political satire is somehow separate from politics?

Voltaire - who wrote one of the best books of all time, Candide, which contained brilliant satire - was so political that he got banished from Paris and while he lived in exile he certainly gave the powers that be a piece of his mind. He and his friends basically invented human rights activism. He was outraged by the death penalty after becoming involved with the case of a wrongfully convicted young man tortured on that awful wheel thing.

Swift - who modestly proposed - was also politically active and he totally hung out with government insiders and was even a pamphleteer. (Which, for those of you who think "media bias" is something you invented, means he disseminated one party's viewpoint on purpose - and that happened in the U.S. newspapers of the 18th/19th century too, by the way. They took a political stand on behalf of their chosen candidates.)

Henry Fielding - Tom Jones and much more - was politically active and held government positions! Like chief magistrate!

Why would people who write and talk about society, politics, and the ideas therein not have a rally? It makes no sense to me. Besides, have you even listened to Jon Stewart talk about it? I have. He was fascinated by the way Glenn Beck's and others' rallies - the rallies themselves - were communication tools! The rally IS the medium - which IS the message!

AND - and! and! and! - why does it bother you if a "comedian" wants to have a rally but not when Republican actors become governor of California and one of them even became president?

I have a lot of work to do today (and I am not at the rally, not in D.C., wasn't necessarily planning to go anyway) so I'm going to make this quick. I am sick of people dividing everything into two categories and then trying to shove everything into those two categories. I was sick of "Republican/Democrat" and "With us/against us" years ago. I am sick of "You either like Obama or you want Bush back" (and the vice versa). NEWS FLASH even though we've been over this already two years ago but OBAMA DIDN'T RUN AGAINST BUSH! Bush didn't even have a protege running for prez. It's not as if it's Andrew Jackson with his little friend Martin Van Buren, when the national election was a kind of vote of approval on a previous president because MVB was seen by many as an extension of Old Hickory. What is with all the people longing for Dubya to be back in D.C.? Dubya Bush of all people?! For heaven's sake! Are you kidding me? He's a monster. And why are they focused on his economic policy? He lied his way into evil wars and supported murder and torture! This is not OK! Everything else pales in comparison!

OK but none of that is the point. The point is that of COURSE Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have the right to have a rally. And, to "be" political, as political as they want to be, as if that's somehow distinct from skewering politicians. I am so tired of people who say it's somehow OK to talk about everything "except politics." Don't they know that the personal is political??!?!

My advice to you is that you stop saying stupid crap and go read a Mark Twain book. Or any book, really.

Go...Texas?

2010-10-16T04:50:00.003+09:00

Damn Yankees. I refer, of course, to the NYY. As if they weren't problematic enough, with their mega-payroll and their superstars and their snotty attitude and their just generally epitomizing the worst things about New York, namely, the belief held by ~~all~~ ~~most~~ all New Yorkers that New York is the best! the greatest city in the world! there's no other place worth living! you must be joking to say you would live somewhere else! why would I live anywhere else! I'm from here! here is great! it's New York! it's the only place worth being! I've been out West; I went to Pennsylvania once! wait, how many other states are there again? -- yeah, as if the New York Skankees weren't problematic enough just inevitably showing up in the MLB playoffs and causing me to weep and wail and gnash my teeth, my policy of rooting for whatever-team-plays-against-the-Yankees is being seriously tested for the second year in a row because starting tonight they are playing in the ALCS against Texas.

Texas? Texas?! I have a general sports policy of rooting against Texas at all times in all things. College football? The University of Texas is in serious contention to be my least favorite team, only giving me fits of neutrality if they play Alabama. Basketball? The San Antonio Spurs are pretty much the nemesis of this Phoenix Suns fan, and it certainly isn't difficult to wish losses upon the other Texas NBA teams as well. NFL? I couldn't possibly care less about the Dallas Cowboys, and I roll my eyes every time I have to hear about them or their billion dollar stadium or their fans or their claim to be "America's team." And there is never a good reason to root for any Texas team in baseball, either, least of all one that has been owned by George Dubya Bush for the love of god.

But now we find ourselves with an ALCS of the New York Yankees vs the Texas Rangers. Shudder to think. And I have to figure out whose loss I want more. And you know what? I kind of think I want the Yankees to lose more. So there you go. I mean, once the World Series comes I will be rooting for the National League, regardless, even though either the Giants or the Phillies will simply remind me that they crushed my Atlanta Braves to get there... One way or another, the Yankees just need to get off their high horse and not repeat their World Series championship.

It's such an unfamiliar position to be in, but - let's go, Texas!

Grandpa Rondo Curtis, R.I.P.

2010-10-10T01:08:00.005+09:00

Early last week, I got the unexpected news that my grandfather had died. He was 95 years old, and he had been in a physical decline, but it nonetheless took me by surprise, if nothing else because my mother, uncles, cousins, sister, and I were all still emailing one another every couple days trying to decide what to do about whether and how we should get additional in-home assistance for him as his health was declining beyond what even his part-time aide/friend could handle.

Grandpa Rondo was a stalwart, sardonic, and kind gentleman. He was full of stories about the past and commentary on the present, he was always ready with a joke or a snack when people came to visit, and he was a golfer extraordinaire. And I do mean extraordinaire, hitting holes in one and winning senior tournaments and "shoot-your-age" tournaments and getting new golf clubs for his birthday at age 92. We thought he would never stop golfing - but, as I said, then came this year's decline in physical health that took us by surprise, even though it shouldn't have.

Grandpa always had a faithful canine companion by his side, but he also suffered a severe loneliness during the past 13 years (almost exactly) since the death of his wife, my grandma, Geraldine, the piano prodigy who wowed her family and all of Utah with her musical prowess before the rampaging arthritis wrecked her fingers too badly for her to play anymore. Grandpa has reminded us since she died, daily, about the void her passing left in his life.

I am glad that our family got many chances to visit him over the past few months, including filling his Utah house with a couple dozen friends and family members for his 95th birthday party a couple of weeks ago, complete with bagpipes! And yet, I will always wish I had spent more time - just one more visit per year, perhaps, or one more phone call this month, or a few more letters and cards this summer, in addition to what I did.

Rondo was my last surviving grandparent. I lost them in 1997 (Grandma Curtis), 2002 (Grandpa Napikoski), 2007 (Grandma Napikoski), and now 2010, Grandpa Curtis. I am really grateful that I got to know all four of my grandparents, something I know not everyone in life gets to do. I am also glad that I got to know them, although some better than others, as an actual adult, and not just a shy child or petulant adolescent with better things to do than go to grandma's house.

I am also glad that Brian and I got to travel to Utah and participate in Rondo's funeral service with loads of family members, his neighbors, and his golfing buddies. I am grateful that my cousin made a slide show of pictures and music that gave us a chance to look back on a life that spanned a mind-boggling century. It was a reminder that all century-long lives are mind-boggling, too.

The days of this past week and a half since getting the news have been a whirlwind, with funeral and travel arrangements, the family gathering, the time spent at the mortuary and the grave, and the trip back home to Chicago. Now I settle into my world without grandparents, and watch their legacies live on through me, and try to honor them.

"Fifteen Artists Who Have Influenced You" Meme

2010-09-25T23:33:00.002+09:00

The RULES: Fifteen artists who have influenced you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than five minutes. Tag friends (including me, because I am interested in seeing what artists my friends choose). Quickly, and in no particular order. Go!

Vincent Van Gogh
Leo Tolstoy
Virginia Woolf
Amy Ray
Rene Magritte
Voltaire
Erin McKeown
Lucinda Williams
Meryl Streep
Leonardo Da Vinci
Henry David Thoreau
Herman Melville
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Atwood
John Lennon

"Crating"

2010-09-20T13:20:00.002+09:00

Sometimes I really hate people. Well, that's mean to say "hate." (Rhymes with crate, go figure.) Perhaps I should just say, sometimes people really disgust me. Well, this is one of those times: I'm thinking about this trendy new phenomenon of "crating" dogs. I am not entirely sure who got the bright idea of locking up sentient beings in even smaller spaces than they were previously being locked in, but I would like to slap that person, if I weren't a pacifist.

When dog owners, mostly urban young professionals and young parents that I've seen, but perhaps it's other dog owners too and I just don't know them, start talking about crating their dogs, I feel uneasy. It all comes back to the basic idea of my disgust for people who get pets and then act sort of bewildered that the pets aren't like cute little stuffed animals that can be a cute addition to the decor or can be ignored for weeks at a time. No, real pets have needs and feelings, and they need to eat, drink, play, sleep, MOVE AROUND, walk, run, defecate, and exercise. *yes this includes cats, who need to walk and run and roam free and not be trapped in a few rooms their entire lives* But someone somewhere got the bright idea that when they need to leave home for 12 hours a day (or more) they can stop their dogs from "damaging" things or from "being anxious" or "causing trouble" by safely putting the dog in a crate. Then, they went and made "crate" a verb, which is a sure sign that you have someone doing something insidious and wanting to cover it up with double speak or corporate-like jargon.

After living in New York City and now a densely populated part of Chicago, I have vast amounts of disdain for city dwellers who just HAVE to have a dog even though they do not find it equally mandatory to have room for this dog to roam, exercise, go in a yard, etc. But the crating phenomenon is so not limited to dogs locked up in city apartments. The crating is a typical delusional self-important thing that extends to small towns, suburbia and the like.

And why am I so upset today about the crates? Even more than usual? Why is my blood boiling just as it does when the selfish delusional cruel monstrous cat owners start trying to justify declawing their cats? I'll tell you why. Because in the course of one of my freelance jobs copy editing article title selections for a web site, I have the distinct privilege of coming across actual web searches that people have done. Honest-to-god sentences (or, often, sentence fragments) that people have typed, looking to the internet for answers. Sometimes these are just amusing (e.g. "How to Git Your GED") ([sic], very much [sic]) but other times, like today, they are infuriating. I just came across:

"How to Cure Your Puppy Soiling in a Crate"

Cure? It's not a freakin' disease, but here's an idea genius. If you want to "cure" your puppy from soiling in a crate, maybe you should try not locking it up in the goddamn crate for hours and hours! What a concept, you selfish moronic fools. God I hate people. Don't even get me started on birds in cages. Seriously, don't.

I just get so saddened when I realize that these idiots are the "good" ones, that is to say, the ones who make some semblance of "liking" animals in the first place. God help us. God help all creatures great and small.

Well, then

2010-09-20T09:38:00.002+09:00

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
-- Hermann Goering

Just a little something to think about next time you're busy simultaneously doing the following:
1. Jabbering about how the U.S. must unfailingly support "Israel"
2. Badmouthing every German, Dutch, French, etc. person who was alive during the 1930s/40s but did not personally house Anne Frank in his/her attic
3. Claiming you of course are entirely innocent and righteous with regard to the atrocities perpetrated by Dubya/Cheney/Halliburton et. al.

Oprah for Mayor of Chicago

2010-09-10T03:23:00.002+09:00

Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley has announced he will not run again. Oprah Winfrey is ending her beloved daily show this year. Coincidence? I think not!

Here in Chicago, there has been lots of talk for the last 48 hours about Who Will It Be? Who of the many contenders will be the next mayor? Daley has said he won't endorse any candidate to succeed him, but the newscasters of Chicagoland have breathlessly pontificated on which other influential Chicago figures will offer up their opinions. That's when it hit me: Oprah shouldn't just offer up her opinion. She, herself, should be the next mayor!

I had this epiphany yesterday evening. This morning, Thursday, I picked up the Chicago Tribune (of course we get it home delivered! we love our paper!) and naturally the lead story is Daley: "A Daley-less landscape" reads the headline. But above that, in the little top-of-the-page preview of what's in another section complete with smiling Oprah picture, it says "THE FINAL SEASON - she is promising farewell moments, but what is daytime TV going to be like without Oprah?" She's pointing, and in the picture of Daley right below her he is is pointing...it's like some cross-town conversation...is anyone listening?

Oprah for Mayor!! Who's with me?

LSAT, Schmell-Sat

2010-09-07T01:21:00.004+09:00

Law school really should be harder to get into. Much, much harder. And I'll tell you why I say this. I say this because I was randomly reading the blog today of some twentysomething lawyer who kept mixing up "astronomy" for "astrology."

I could also reiterate here some of the many clueless things uttered over the years by law school classmates of mine, such as "Without spell check I would never have made it out of undergrad!" or, always a classic, "I've never even heard of Liechtenstein." I would not want anyone who utters the above mentioned confusion representing me in a court of law, or anywhere.

A lot of people in the law association/forum/newsletters/blogosphere worlds float the idea that law school admission should be more competitive because soooo many graduating JDs are unemployed thanks to the (scapegoat) recession. It has been big news over the past few years that the Big Law Firms to which many a law student aspires to sell his/her soul have been laying off people left and right, deferring or outright canceling job offers they extended the previous summer to law students entering the final year of school, and finally just ceasing to hire as many people, period. With non-profits and many a government agency also struggling to come up with hiring and operating budgets, freshly graduated JDs are pretty screwed, and lots of people are pessimistic about the profession and how it has operated for so long. The answer, some say, is that law schools need to stop admitting endless numbers of students, which saturates the job market and creates way too much supply for too little demand.

Now, I do agree with this. Law school is a complete and total racket. Law schools charge an ungodly amount for tuition and they basically are the profit makers for their university. They don't cost anywhere near as much to run as, say, a medical school or even many other graduate programs. So, universities love it because they bring in millions from the law school tuition, and the law students pay it because they believe they are becoming educated and credentialed for a promising career. Really, even if they get a law job they are likely to be miserable, but they are also potentially going to be working at McDonald's while owing $100,000+ in student loans. So, many people agree that the situation sucks. Law schools really should cut in half the number of students they admit each year. But they will never do it, because they would be giving away like a billion dollars. It's hard for anyone to say no to a billion dollars, even people who don't consider arguing for things they don't believe in to be an admirable trait.

But why I really think law school should be more competitive is that as with anywhere else I have found myself in life, with the only possible exception being my job in public radio, there was so much mediocrity there! Now, granted, I took the route that many people don't take. I actually never doubted for a second that I would get into law school, and I ended up choosing the lower-ranked school that offered me a full tuition scholarship over the partial scholarship offered by a top 25 school. Many applicants go to the highest ranked law school they can get into, period. Law school applicants live and die by The Rankings. (Another part of the racket; US News plays along, too.) I didn't care that much about The Rankings because I was never interested in getting a job in a law firm, and I knew this way back when I took the LSAT (the law school admissions test). I just wanted to get a formal legal education because I was interested in it and I wanted to use it to strengthen my international humanitarian work and provide background for my potential run for Senate one day. So instead of applying to the five or ten or twenty or however many schools those who have to worry apply to, I applied to two, and then almost as an afterthought after being accosted by them at a law school forum I applied to Hofstra (who waived the application fee) and went there thinking it'd be cool to live in New York and blah blah blah.

So anyway, the point is that yes, while I did foolishly end up spending more time on Long Island than anyone needs to in one lifetime, which accounts for some of the mediocrity I encountered (two words: Jersey Shore), I wasn't thinking about my classmates in particular when I started thinking about this today. I was definitely thinking about the lawyers out there who find spelling among the more difficult things they have to do with their day and who don't know the difference between astrology and astronomy.

Sometimes I wonder if medical school is like this, too, but I tell myself it's not. I tell myself that my doctors really and truly do know things. I'm not sure I want this illusion to be crushed if it isn't in fact truth.

The LSAT will continue to strike terror into the hearts of many, and people will continue to debate whether it should be as important as it is in the admissions process, and so on and so on. I personally enjoyed taking the LSAT (more than I enjoyed many things about law school, actually), but I also think it's the least of the problems with the law school admissions process. If I were a law school admissions committee, I would require a good GPA, letters of rec, and some sort of LSAT score, but I would also put people who had work, volunteer, and travel experience in the yes pile, and 22-year-olds with none of the above who have lived in the same 30-mile radius their entire lives in the no pile. As for the maybe pile? I think I would give them IQ and spelling tests. And maybe for a tie breaker they could point out Liechtenstein on a map and define astrology.

I would rather have a Scalia representing me, no matter how violently I disagree with his politics and his general attitude, than someone who lacks native intelligence. That, it seems, is the essential conundrum of law school and the legal profession: much of the time, you're forced to choose between the idiots and the assholes.

Waylon Jennings and John Lennon Were Cool - Together!

2010-09-03T02:18:00.004+09:00

Everyone should be listening to Fresh Air's "Country Music Week" this week on NPR, even if you think "Oh, not me, I don't like country music" or some other such foolish thought. First of all, there's the fact that Fresh Air is one of the best interview shows and best radio shows ever and (much like a Charlie Rose) Terry Gross does awesome interviews that are interesting whether you take some silly stand against the career of the interview subject or not. I don't listen to (much) rap but I would listen to an interview of a rapper on Fresh Air in a heartbeat. Secondly, these are bona fide for real country peoples, not Nashville pop stars, with archived interviews from people like Willie and Waylon, Merle Haggard and George Jones, and the daughters of Charlie Haden singing three-part harmony, and the like. Third, you might learn something - it's good for you!

For example, I learned one of the coolest things ever. I learned that Waylon Jennings and John Lennon were hanging out together "cutting up," as Waylon put it, at the Grammys one year. (I think it was the Grammy Awards. Some music award event like that.) As if that in itself is not awesome enough, Waylon then told John Lennon, "Hey, you're funny! I didn't know you were funny. Thought you were all serious and stuff." Which, admit it, isn't that the same thing you were thinking when you read the line about them "cutting up" together? And John tells Waylon that he didn't know Waylon was so cool either, since everyone in England thought he was just an Outlaw running around shooting people in the studio (based on a legend in which he - jokingly? - brought a shotgun after threatening to shoot the next musician who played pick-up notes. Apparently Waylon hates the pick-up notes.)

Waylon Jennings and John Lennon hanging out together in a mutual admiration society, probably doing shots and just blathering on about life. HOW AWESOME IS THIS TO IMAGINE?! And I never would have known, but for Country Music Week on Fresh Air. Even Waylon told Terry at the end, and you could almost hear the surprise in his voice after a lifetime of repetitive interviews that all asked the same thing, that he had really enjoyed the interview, because she asks "some good questions!" Damn right.

I hereby enlighten you - twice!

2010-08-21T00:21:00.002+09:00

Honestly, there are two things you should check out right now that will be time better spent than random internet perusing and Facebook checking:

Worldview 8/19/2010
Andrew Bacevich, the most brilliant person I have heard in quite some time. He's not a pacifist. He's not a warmonger. He is a retired colonel. He critiques Obama's policy. He critiques Dubya's policy. He critiques Eisenhower's policy, for goodness' sake. He probably knows more about U.S. war policy than every squawking head put together. I was privileged to hear him speak live in Chicago last night. I want more of him. Much, much more.

There is no "Ground Zero Mosque"
Tons of bonus points for using my favorite quote, by Pastor Martin Niemoller. (Now if we could just stop using the stupid term 'ground zero' as a description of where the WTC twin towers used to stand, that would be awesome....sigh, a girl can dream.)

And so in conclusion...

2010-08-18T11:20:00.002+09:00

OK, ready? Here's the entirety of my thoughts on the whole let's-build-a-mosque-and/or-community-center-near-where-the-World-Trade-Center-was "controversy." Ready?

I DON'T CARE * I DON'T CARE * I DON'T CARE * I DON'T CARE * I DON'T CARE

Is that clear enough? Do we need specifics?

"This country was founded on freedom of religion..." DON'T CARE
"But radical Muslims were behind 9/11..." DON'T CARE
Obama said... DON'T CARE
They have the right, but is it wise... DON'T CARE
An affront to New Yorkers... DON'T CARE
The families of 9/11 think they should... DON'T CARE
"Hallowed ground" OH GIVE ME A FREAKIN' BREAK + DON'T CARE

This is the lamest controversy ever! (Well, wait. No it's not. I take that back, universe. I'm not testing you, I promise.) But I Just. Don't. Care. Build a mosque, don't build a mosque. Invite the community. Protest. Scream. Yell. Pretend you even know on which street the thing is proposed to be built. It's so not interesting. It's just more 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 which is all anybody can ever fall back on to say or do about anything ever. Look, New Yorkers have a weird, creepy, fairly annoying sense of having each been individually, personally attacked on September 11, 2001 (stemming from their inability to ever actually leave New York, I guess? somehow?) but even some of them think the community center which includes a mosque can be built wherever. How long do we have to keep this totally boring debate going? I'm just curious.

Well, obviously...?

2010-08-17T05:21:00.003+09:00

OK, I love Amazon's targeted recommendations as much as the next person, but really? Today I received this in my inbox:

"As someone who has purchased or rated The Portable Voltaire or other products in the Specialty Boutique - New & Used Textbooks category, you might like to know that Sharpie Liquid Mechanical Pencil is now available. You can order yours for just $3.59..."

Seriously, I don't get bothered when internet commerce tries to make connections to sell me more stuff. I'm not one of those privacy freaks who's all, "Oh my gosh my PRIVATE INFORMATION that I've put on the WEB to make my life more convenient is totally being LOOKED AT" or whatever. But I would at least like the connection to be, well, a connection! Come on, Amazon. The Specialty Boutique has both textbooks and pencils and you thought you'd email us all? No. No, I don't think so. Stick to recommending me Indigo Girls albums I already own when I check the price on their new one; that seriously has a better chance of success. Try as you might, you cannot convince me that Voltaire has anything to do with this best of all possible mechanical pencils.

Authors, party of six!

2010-08-12T13:02:00.002+09:00

I never duplicate entries between this main blog and my literary supplement blog, but this one I just had to share in both places...

~~Everyone knows~~ Some people know that one of my favorite little games to play with myself is to imagine all of the celebrities who share my birthday (May 13, btw) at one big birthday dinner party, because it's quite an eclectic mix: Harvey Keitel, Stevie Wonder, Bea Arthur, Dennis Rodman, Mackenzie Astin, Stephen Colbert, and the latest addition, Robert Pattinson. Well, tonight I just happened to glance at my Goodreads profile (paying attention to something else entirely) and there's a whole "Linda's favorite authors" section where the first six who happen to default to the front page, complete with pictures, are: Fyodor Dostoevsy, Virginia Woolf, Nelson DeMille, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Quindlen, Gloria Steinem.

Suddenly, I was playing a new imaginary dinner party game. Imagine the possibilities! I mean, obviously, Fyodor and Leo could go off in a corner speaking Russian, but I don't think either is the type to do that. Nelson would obviously have to talk to Leo about how he totally used War and Peace in The Charm School. Which man would hit it off with which woman? Virginia clearly had opinions about Leo and Fyodor; what would she make of Nelson? They might be surprising friends. What would Virginia think about the latter century feminists, Gloria and Anna? Would Anna act like a journalist, or a novelist? And with Leo and Gloria at one table?! Two of the wisest people ever. Ever! World peace might just spontaneously come into being, just from them existing in each other's presence.

God, this is a fun game. Endless fun.

The one thing I must have to be truly alive

2010-08-08T08:46:00.003+09:00

The other week I listened to Atul Gawande on NPR's Fresh Air. He was talking about a recent article he wrote for The New Yorker about what medicine and doctors should and shouldn't do to make the end of life more humane. It was fascinating stuff. I mostly know of Atul Gawande from his book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, which I touched many times in my Borders days, but this is the first time I've listened to him talk.

In the Fresh Air interview, he talked about how taking lots of drugs and having lots of medical intervention when one is old and/or terminally ill often do nothing to prolong life any longer than a non-drugged hospice route. He also talked about how hard it can be when it falls to family members to make end-of-life decisions, especially when the patient's wishes are unclear. He gave an example of one son or daughter - I think it was a daughter? - who asked her father what was his minimum quality of life for which he would actually want to be saved. The man said that as long as he could still eat ice cream and watch football on TV, that would be sufficient for him and he'd still want to be alive.

Atul Gawande pointed out that this ice-cream-and-football life may not be enough for some people. They might insist that they be able to walk around, or cook for themselves. This made me think about my minimum standard. I mean, I generally want to be able to travel, and go out, and write and run and swim and hike and explore. Sure - these are all things I want from my life. But if it came to that kind of decision about the minimum acceptable quality of life? The answer was instantly clear to me: as long as I could still read books, I would still want to be alive.

Note that this does NOT mean being read to. I hate being read to. No books on tape, and I would obviously have to be able to see, and be able to hold a book. But that is my answer. Reading. What's yours?

Just a short blog entry today

2010-07-27T01:06:00.003+09:00

Seriously, when are you people going to stop being shocked by "grim" news from Afghanistan? Seriously! When?

It's grim. Sending young men and women somewhere to kill other people is grim. (So is sending old men and women, but reality is we basically mostly send young ones.) Stop being shocked by this! Stop! I wish you would act a little more shocked at yourselves for being hoodwinked into thinking any war is "righteous" or "necessary." War = murder. Government-ordered murder that profits people who already have power, giving them more money and power.

Three cheers for WikiLeaks! May it continue to release documents that describe reality. And maybe one day, you will stop finding grim reality "shocking" and start changing it.

What Goes Through the Minds of Internet Users

2010-07-16T02:26:00.005+09:00

One of my part-time freelance jobs involves editing online content. In the course of this gig, I get some pretty amazing insight into humanity, because I get to see what people search for on the internet, in all its raw, eyebrow-raising, sometimes horribly misspelled glory. I assure you that this is often not pretty. Not pretty at all. I'm totally not going to repeat some of the disturbing searches here for many reasons, not the least of which being that some of them are illegal and I quite frankly don't want the frightening individuals who search for those things to land on my blog. However, I will share with you two that delighted me.

One person asked:

"Is the Juno hamberger[sic] phone edible?"

Which is just awesome, really. Another had this simple query:

"Stuff to Think About"

It's kind of interesting, and kind of wistful. Somewhere in the world, a person sat at his/her computer and wanted to find some Stuff to Think About. I would venture to say that there are a lot of options out there to fulfill that request.

GPS, Schmee-PS

2010-07-13T07:41:00.008+09:00

I recently had the privilege of spending a few days in Indiana. During the time I was there, I had the chance to sit on a front porch swing, see many cornfields, and contemplate the use of GPS.

The first two are pretty straightforward, so I will just skip to what, for me, was the most fascinating part of the visit. It was not the ubiquitous use of GPS, but how it was no longer even noted by the users. Five years ago, when my first friend or two had a GPS navigator in their cars, it was pretty much the center of attention of the ride because it was so novel. It was also annoying, and it generally caused more problems than it "solved." Two or three years ago, when a few more people had a GPS telling them where to turn and such, especially when they went Out of Town (aka "No! Don't make me look at that big scary map! Waaaaaaah!! Mommy!"), it was officially becoming a pervasive part of the landscape. People began to joke together about the perceived personality of the guiding voice and the symbolism in "recalculating."

But this month, on my visit to Indianapolis, there was no comment whatsoever upon the use of GPS, as opposed to not using it, other than in my head. It was accepted as a given, you see, by multiple people in multiple situations. And I am wondering when we crossed that line.

I dislike that line. I have no use for a GPS, and I'll tell you why: because I know how to read a map/figure out where I'm going/ask for directions/read context clues/use problem-solving skills. There are several things I can think of off the top of my head that I dislike about GPS dependence, but I'll just concentrate on that main one here. When I see someone so quick to pop an address into his/her GPS, I know something about that person. It's not necessarily that s/he doesn't know how to get somewhere, but that s/he doesn't know how to figure out how to get somewhere. That disturbs me.

It's not only the people we happened to see in Indiana, of course. I commented on some random blog just the other week because I was astonished at how amused the blogger was by herself and her utter inability to drive anywhere without GPS - even in her own metropolitan area! And when we were in Istanbul, one of my Habitat trip mates was all about using her handheld GPS to find her way to Istanbul landmarks, which were generally right in front of her once she looked up from the device.

Also, what I want to know is: are the people in the GPS cult even half as aware as the rest of us that it's not foolproof? That in the same way being able (usually!) to check your bank balance online is no substitute for knowing how much is in your checking account, being able to (usually!) get on-the-spot directions from a "magical" technological voice is no substitute for knowing where you are.

Important note: It is possible that my GPS-lovin' friends who read this blog will think this is an "insult" that is "directed" at them. I have already stated that this is a commentary on the widespread use of GPS, therefore not directed at anybody in particular. Also, oh well -- we are in fact adults now, and there are some things you should be capable of when you are over 25. Reading a map is one of them.

Holidays, where the "days" part is arbitrary

2010-07-09T00:56:00.003+09:00

Yesterday I ran in the Chicago Bastille Day 5K. No, there's no need to double check your calendars. You haven't skipped ahead in time a week; yesterday was not in fact Bastille Day. But, it was the day that Chicago saw fit to hold its Bastille Day 5K. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Chicago seems to have some serious issues figuring out when to celebrate holidays.

We first discovered this within a month of moving here when it was time to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Brian and I woke up, spiked our coffee, headed downtown, met up with friends, watched the Chicago River be dyed green, hung out in the throngs, popped in and out of taverns, and just generally enjoyed the revelry all day long. This all happened on March 13. Now, seriously, at that time I just thought, "OK, Chicago is full of amateurs, but I'll have to accept it." I would just have to accept that the Chicago Irish were not as hard core as the New York Irish or the hardest-of-all-core Boston Irish who blow off work and head out to the bars at 7 a.m. on St. Patrick's Day. They have no use for the Saturday before. I figured, you know, all those Midwest-work-hard values maybe prevented Chicago people from doing it the way the cool kids do. But we were so ~~worn out~~ fulfilled from our Saturday-before celebration that we didn't even bother doing anything on March 17th. What a shame.

Last week was Independence Day also known as, you know, the 4th of July. The fourth. Here in Chicago, there were fireworks on the 4th (we enjoyed a panoramic view of the downtown Chicago fireworks and the various suburban fireworks shows from the rooftop of a friend's 30-story apartment building) but the major disappointment - apparently - was that the fireworks show on the 3rd had been cancelled this year. Um- what? Yeah. This was really disturbing for people. Some people in fact didn't get the memo, and showed up with their lawn chairs on the 3rd to watch the fireworks that weren't happening, but which apparently have always happened in the past - on the 3rd of July. Why? I DON'T KNOW.

And then, yesterday, I ran in the Bastille Day 5K. On July 7th.

What is wrong with you, Chicago?! You wonder why you play third fiddle to New York and Los Angeles as far as being the U.S.' Most Awesome City and Stuff? Well, geez, learn to read a damn calendar. Maybe more people would travel here on their vacations if there were some kind of predictability as to whether you'll actually be celebrating the holidays when they arrive! I guess Chicago figures, you know, why be so conventional as to actually celebrate a holiday - on the holiday?

Anyone want to come celebrate Christmas with us? Brian and I are guessing it will be around December 20th this year. No guarantees, though.

The Art Institute of Chicago

2010-07-05T03:32:00.003+09:00

On Thursday, July 1st, Brian and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago. For those of you who don't know, the Art Institute is one of Chicago's prominent sights to be seen. First of all, it's huge and gorgeous, with cool architecture and all that. It's downtown (the Loop!) near Grant Park and it is famous and has been a significant part of the art world for years and years. (Side note: I love the phrase "art world." I rather like imagining art as being a world.)

We went on Thursday because admission is free from 5 p.m. 'til it closes at 8 p.m. on Thursdays. I am a big fan of going to museums at the times they offer free admission. This is how I saw the also-famous-and-important MoMA in New York, too. I love that most museums offer free days and/or free portions of days. You should check out the museums in your town - they probably offer free admission at some point, which is entirely awesome.

So, about the Art Institute of Chicago? I was totally blown away. Lots and lots of art. Of course there is far more than one can see in a few hours, which is why I plan (I had already thought of this before going) to visit it more than once, probably one Thursday per month. If I worked downtown, I might even wander in there every Thursday after work. Wandering solo through museums and just kind of seeing what catches your eye is a great way to visit them, as opposed to trying to systematically see every piece.

However, there are definitely more than a few destination pieces in the Art Institute of Chicago. Among them is American Gothic. I was so excited to see it! It's SO famous. And, as Brian pointed out while we were looking at it, it's so often parodied that it's interesting to see it and remember what their actual faces really look like in the painting. His face is so - set. And she's kind of gazing off to the side. There are lots of emotions captured in the work. As we wandered through the rooms of the Art Institute, I knew we were about to enter the room with American Gothic but you don't even have to wonder where it is, because first you see the obligatory crowd in a semi-circle, standing in front of it taking pictures with their cell phones. It was the same thing with Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night in MOMA. I rather liked standing in front of American Gothic, surrounded by people looking at it and discussing it in multiple European languages.

Speaking of Van Gogh, a few of my boy's paintings are at the Art Institute of Chicago. I swoon! I loved looking at more of his stuff. I totally get him so much. All my feelings of reverence and connection for him and his life and his madness and his art came flooding back to me as I wandered through the Van Gogh room. There are tons and tons of European and impressionist and Monet and other paintings, too - and that was just a small part of the entire Art Institute.

I really liked Monet's Haystacks series. And we spent a while in the O'Keefe/Stieglitz room, where I discovered that I rather enjoy Marsden Hartley's paintings.

Oh, and we saw two other mega-famous paintings there, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and Georges Seurat's A Sunday on the Grande Jatte. They're big. A Sunday on the Grande Jatte is really big.

I like the Art Institute of Chicago!

Want to read more things about art?

And I Ain't Talkin' About Vuvuzelas

2010-07-01T05:05:00.004+09:00

So, there are two things really bugging me every time I watch the World Cup, and it seems they're not bothering anyone else.

1. There is a little snippet of music that you hear multiple times when watching a game, especially when it's going in and out of commercial, or to or from the announcers or whatever. It is played while the visual on the screen is the FIFA 2010 logo with the drawing of the player doing what I think is called a bicycle kick. I can't decipher the words or identify the language but the syllables sound something like "ih-no-mah-mah-my-eh." I actually wrote to ESPN to ask what it is, and they said, "That's the FIFA theme; contact them." Then I wrote to FIFA and they pointed me in the direction of some entirely different song,"Helele" by Velile & Safri Duo. I listened to that in its entirety on YouTube and heard nothing similar to the snippet played during the games. Please note, I am NOT referring to Shakira's "Waka Waka," the official song of the World Cup, nor K'Naan's "Waving Flag." WHAT IS THAT LITTLE BIT OF MUSIC?! And why can't the people who play it every freakin' day multiple times identify it? I need to write to ESPN again, clearly, and find someone who actually is resourceful to answer my question. Or I just need an ESPN insider to go look at a dang production log and tell me what it is. Please? Thanks.

2. Another thing you hear during every broadcast is a shout-out to the armed forces peeps who are watching from 175 countries around the world. Sometimes they even show a gathering of soldiers in Afghanistan excitedly watching and cheering for a U.S. goal or whatever. So, that's all spectacular and I'm happy for them that they get to watch it. (I know I listened to the Armed Forces Network radio station a ton while I was in Korea for a dose of news and music in English!) Here's the part that bugs me: um, 175 countries? Seriously?! Does it not disturb anyone else that U.S. armed forces have set up shop in 175 COUNTRIES around the globe? I mean for god's sake! And you wonder why people think you are violent imperialists? Sheesh. And I can't believe how nonchalantly it's mentioned, like it's the most natural thing in the world. What?!

These two things are bandied about repeatedly every single broadcast, and all anyone cares to inquire about is vuvuzelas? Really?

God, Schmod

2010-06-30T03:00:00.004+09:00

I am blogging about this for the sole purpose of ranting without doing what I want to do, which is hit reply all to a family email. You might be thinking, "But doesn't your family read your blog?" You'd be surprised. Some of them do. Others are less supportive. I'm not certain my sister has ever read it. Anyway, if they get offended by something I write here, that's just too bad for them because it is my blog for my thoughts, whereas if I emailed it to them, it would be rude of me, you see.

So here's the deal. My grandpa lives alone in Utah. He is 94, very soon to turn 95, and has overall been doing pretty fabulous in these later years, but recently been declining physically and causing us all much concern. All of us in the next two generations send gang emails to one another including when we visit him, reporting on what we did while there in his town (from changing light bulbs to cooking him meals to taking him to a doctor's appointment) and in this past year the conversation about him needing to possibly move out of his house into assisted living has really been stepped up into high gear.

But my grandfather doesn't want to move into a random assisted living apartment, nor does he want to leave his Utah home nestled at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Front mountains, down the street from the cemetery where my grandma's grave is located, just to move to a town in Arizona or California where my mom/sister/uncle/cousins happen to live their lives. I totally understand this. Most of us can. So we have been trying to figure out what he needs in order to stay. Basically, he needs assistance, but he has been resistant to assistance, such as having a nurse or home aide or help with bathing or any of that. Part of it is not wanting to be a burden, part is probably a bit of denial, the usual. Anyway, here's my point.

This past week, a bunch of my family were there and accompanied him to his doctor and were extremely concerned about his physical state, including among other things dehydration and not sleeping enough and weakness and needing assistance. As my uncle and his wife (a professional nurse) worked on the situation, they happened to call (regarding another matter) and speak with one of our many relatives in that Utah town, a cousin's daughter, and it turned out her son-in-law just happened to finish nursing school and could use a job between now and when he is licensed in August. Long story short (way too late!) he has been hired to help as a kind of personal assistant, who can do all the things that will greatly assist my grandpa on a daily basis. And he's part of the extended family, as opposed to a stranger or company-provided nurse, so Grandpa's pleased and we're all greatly relieved and basically it's just a big ol' win-win situation for everybody. So you know what happens now?

The phone call to the cousin's daughter? Was "inspired." (FYI, for those unfamiliar with the Mormon connotation of that word, it doesn't mean "out of nowhere.")
My sister? "Wonders what Grandma thinks of all this." (Yes, been-dead-for-13-years Grandma.)
Those were the first hints. But a midday email today really just laid it out there. "God has answered [Grandpa's] prayers and our prayers by sending someone to help," is the word from my uncle and aunt.

I suspect there are two kinds of people reading this blog. Those who understand exactly why those statements make my skin crawl and those who agree with the statements. On second thought, maybe there's only one kind of people reading my blog and the latter have long since abandoned ship. Who knows? Here's what I know:

We --the 2nd and 3rd generations -- have all been working to problem-solve. Some of us have sacrificed great amounts of time and other things to do so. Some of us (like me!) have sounded like a broken record for nearly two years about doing more to put the word out to our cousins and extended family in that town about what Grandpa needs. I for one am totally stoked that we could tap into things like a cousin's son-in-law who lives two blocks away and just finished nursing school and needs a job for the next couple months. "Call it chance or call it fate," sings Mary-Chapin Carpenter, "either one is cause to celebrate..." But no - it's all because God has answered our prayers. Gaaaaaahhhhhh.

What does that mean, then? If my family had prayed harder last spring, the relative would have finished nursing school sooner? If they had waited to pray, another cousin would finish nursing school instead? (Actually, that part might be true. There are lots of cousins to go around in Utah families.) That Grandpa can somehow "deserve" or "not deserve" help based on how spiritual everyone is about it? That kind of thinking sickens me. Does it also mean that somehow during the past two years we just weren't good enough? I could go on. I'll stop now.

And I will send a shiny happy family email about the new hired assistant cousin, but I will not be joining the chorus of praise for some capricious God who has apparently decided we're worthy of a solution to our problem.

If you are not laughing out loud, do not type LOL

2010-06-28T00:17:00.002+09:00

I don't usually blog about the internet (so meta!) but I think it's high time to comment on the use of "LOL." My basic comment is that you should stop using it if you misuse it. You know who you are. And if you don't, please, allow me to tell you.

First of all, it bothers me that people use "lol" as a synonym for "ha ha" or "I was being funny" (or more accurately "I think this is funny"). Wrong! It stands for "laughing out loud." It began in the early days of internet use to actually convey a message to someone: "What you just said was funny enough to make me laugh out loud, even though my conversation is silent, taking place over a computer network." It was never meant to be used in reference to your own things you are saying - it is about the other guy!

Secondly, it is overused. Third, it is inaccurate. Are people really laughing out loud when they type it? I think not! Fourth, would you do that in a real conversation? Every time you said something (you thought was) funny, would you alert everyone to that fact? Not unless you are really annoying you wouldn't. God, I want people to stop with the "lol."

From the Who Knew?! files...

2010-06-21T21:43:00.003+09:00

I just read about an upcoming event in Boston at which a retired colonel will be speaking about the recent attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla. What struck me about the retired colonel was the biography of this speaker. Ready?

"Ann Wright, a retired US Army colonel, spent twenty-nine years in the military and later served as a high-ranking diplomat in the US State Department. In 2001, she helped oversee the opening of the US mission in Afghanistan. In 2003, she resigned her post at the State Department to protest the war in Iraq."

Really. A senior diplomat protesting Dubya's war? In 2003? Someone with decades of military and diplomatic experience sure that what Bush was doing was wrong? And it didn't get much press coverage? Why, I don't believe it.

Wait - you mean she wasn't the only one? There were other people in the U.S. government who strongly protested Dubya Bush, and they didn't get press coverage, either? No!

My point -- in case you are too dense to get it -- is that it was pretty easy to see in 2003 how pathetic the U.S. media were. At some point that year I gave up for a while on all U.S. news sources -- yes, including the New York Times, with all its WMDs talk, and NPR with its self-righteous nonsense about "fighting terrorism." But when it's not 2003, it's sometimes a little harder for us to see just how pathetically the U.S. media supports the government's propaganda and deception, whether about war, Gaza, or oil drilling. But we sure do like to criticize other countries and label them as "not free" and call their news reports propaganda.

Above Europe

2010-06-19T08:39:00.002+09:00

Did I mention that I flew over the Alps? I really should have taken a picture when I was flying over the Alps. A-MA-ZING. Basically, when I flew from Istanbul to London after my Habitat Tajikistan journey, there was not a cloud over Europe. Seriously. Not a one. Clearest day ever -- and I had a window seat!

Because of the fancy little computer screen on the aircraft that shows roughly where the plane is on its route, I could see where we were in terms of countries and borders. Then I would bust out my Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring map to see more specifically. Oh, the mountains of Bulgaria. Oh, wow, that over there would be Sarajevo. Oh, hello, Slovenia, we'll see you in the World Cup in a few weeks. (Just kidding - I wasn't actually thinking about that at that moment, although it is what reminded me today about my flight over Europe, as I remembered flying over Slovenia.) Oh, here's Italy...wow, I think we're going right over....yup...there they are...OH MY GOD! The mountains! The snow-covered Alps! And they kept going, as we flew over Switzerland and then into France, where farmland resumed until there was water and then, England.

It took a little while to fly over the Alps. I spent the time comparing them to the mountains of Tajikistan that I had also been privileged to see from a window seat when we ~~fled the polio~~ left Dushanbe. The Tajikistan mountains were higher, and pointier. The Alps were rounder, and as we got to the outskirts I could spy a hamlet or two. Slovenia has some of the Alps, you know. Did you know?

So, anyway, yeah. I've been flying over mountains.

Laying Over: British Isles

2010-06-14T23:23:00.017+09:00

On my recent trip, I mastered the art of leaving the airport during a layover. My days of roaming an international departures area for hours upon hours have come to an end. It's not that I didn't think of you as a second home, San Salvador Comalapa International. But you know, "home is where the heart is, and my heart had to roam" (sang Travis).

So on the way to Istanbul I had Dublin. My first time in Ireland, and wow! It was, as you may have heard, green. I had read that getting into the Dublin city center could take 45 minutes and probably 45 euros for a cab each way, so I opted to instead see a little town nearer the airport, Malahide. There was Malahide Castle - again, so much green! - and then actual Malahide was a seaside town where I wandered, visited the bookshop, visited the coffee shop, talked to amiable people, observed all the Irish people doing typical 11 a.m. weekday things like chatting at a sidewalk table, pushing the baby in a stroller, playing tennis, and so on. Then I sat by the sea to write postcards.

There was such a great feel to the place. I instantly wanted more of Ireland, from the second my cab pulled away from the airport. (This could be the danger of leaving the airports, I suppose.) It is also interesting to me to be in a place that feels foreign while still being in English. I like comparing it to how it feels to be in places that feel foreign partly because there is a language other than English. The vast majority of my foreign travel has been in countries with languages other than English. Of course, that being said, Ireland is actually totally bilingualed out. I quickly discovered that all signs are in two languages, English and Irish. Turns out Irish is an official language under the Constitution although it is the first language of relatively few people. The Irish names of towns on road signs and the like seem so charming and poetic to us United Statesians, for whatever reason, with our wistful love of Irish things. But I was so amused by this that I had to take a picture when it came to the H1N1 sign in the airport. I love that the word is "fliu."

On my way back from Istanbul, after Habitat, Tajikistan, mud, travels, Turkey, travails, Dushanbe, Garm, epiphanies, etc., I flew through Heathrow. Again - first time in England. Again - only five hours. Plus, I allowed extra time because it was Heathrow, and I am glad I did, since when I came back through security it was 3 p.m. and there were marauding bands of stroller-wielding flying families everywhere, so the lines took about eighty-five minutes. Anyway, the trick to leaving Heathrow quickly is to take the high-speed Heathrow Express train, which gets you to Paddington Station in central London in about fifteen minutes. It's genius! It also costs 18 pounds each way, 32 pounds round-trip. But I had been pretty careful about my budget, and, like I said, I had never seen London.

Well, now I have! I walked and walked and walked. Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square, the London Eye, Houses of Parliament & Big Ben, and there it is - Westminster Abbey! This is when I became sad to not have a whole day or two there, because I would have loved to go inside and see my poets. I consider it a taste of London to whet my appetite.

Around Trafalgar Square there were a gazillion tourists and school groups on field trips, who amused me with their chatter. I was walking down the street behind one group of 10-11-ish-year-olds, and they were babbling with one another("My family's Welsh on both sides. My mom's full Welsh."), jostling, linking arms, when suddenly one of their little friends up ahead came running back saying, "Hey, you know what? That's 10 Downing Street!" and they all were immediately pulled away from whatever they were doing and into this moment at this site. They grabbed their cameras and one child said, "I wonder if David Cameron is there" in that way 'tweens have of saying things to reveal their knowledge which would be really annoying if done by adults.

Then, of course, I rode the Underground, bringing my subway-train-light-rail city tally to twelve. Speaking of Downing Street, remember when we were all led to an insanely criminal war while for some reason England blindly followed George W. Bush as a puppy follows a really twisted, wack-job of a master? Good times.

Newbery Medal Winners

2010-06-14T05:27:00.002+09:00

Today I was startled to discover that I have read only ten of the 89 Newbery Medal-winning books. Ten! I am stunned. As a child I read a handful of them - but only a handful, clearly - and a few years ago while working at Borders I decided one of my life reading projects would be to read all of them. To that end, I acquired the first one, The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon (1922), which by the way is definitely one of my absolute favorites of the ten I have read (the other being Louis Sachar's Holes, 1999.) I read a couple more after that, too. And still - only ten?!

Clearly this Newbery-reading project deserves a little more time and attention from me.

How many have you read?

Good Sports

2010-06-12T03:56:00.006+09:00

And now for something (completely?) different: USC vs. North Korea

As Brian and I like to remind each other, courtesy of a fabulously hilarious Onion commentary, "Professional sports is very interesting." (You should definitely click on that link to read it after you read this blog entry of mine.) There is certainly a lot of sports excitement swirling around me right now. For one thing, the Chicago Blackhawks just won the Stanley Cup after a decades-long drought. Good for them! I witnessed much joyous revelry just outside our apartment windows on Wednesday night after the Blackhawks' victory. Then, of course, there are the NBA Finals, although I am still a little too devastated by the Phoenix Suns' loss to really get into the whole Amazing-Happening. I really, really thought one-eyed Steve Nash and his team of BFFs were going to do it this year. Crushing! Steve does get to report on the World Cup from his birthplace, South Africa, though.

And that is biggest of all, of course, right now: the World Cup started today! (And I correctly predicted the 1-1 tie between South Africa and Mexico!...on some silly Facebook app that rewards me with nothing.) For those who haven't heard, I even went so far as to invest in the World Cup this time around. Ever since attending a World Cup qualifier while we were in San Pedro Sula, I have deemed myself a new fan of the Honduras national team and I am cheering for them, in addition to the U.S.A. In consultation with Brian, I placed a small wager on Honduras getting out of their group, and we think that has a chance.

I also have what most call a foolhardy bet on North Korea to win it all, because, as I joked, with a mere $10 bet I could pay off my law school loans if I win. In case you aren't aware, that's because North Korea is the longest of shots. Not only are they not a powerhouse, and maybe not even good, but they are in the toughest group, with Brazil, Portugal, and Ivory Coast. (For those not in the loop: yes, the Cote d'Ivoire is good, too. North Korea is totally cursed.)

Here's my point: yes, part of me acknowledges that my North Korea bet is a bit of a sarcastic move. But there is more to it than that. It is also a symbolic statement about the way much of the world - and I daresay many of you - write off North Korea in the geo-political scheme of things. When I first went to (South) Korea (it's one country, people! It should be again!) and read about the extremely limited options for visiting "The North," the general response from people was one of horror: "Why would you want to go there?!" I hate that mentality. I got a fair amount of it about Cuba a decade ago and hated it then, too. First of all, if you've got issues with a country's government, you don't have to hate its citizens. They are just people, too! I was similarly adamantly opposed to any and all threats to boycott the Olympics in Beijing. The best thing you can do is gather dozens of countries together for the Olympic games, in peace and friendly competition. (Or have your Korean students write about it.)

In fact, the minute someone ever says, "Why would you want to go there?" I take it as a sign that I most definitely want to go "there," wherever it is, because people in the world need to travel, and need to meet other people in the world, and should be free to visit any country they want to. ANY country - including Cuba, or Iran, or North Korea.

Travel embargoes may be the dumbest thing I've ever seen passed off as legitimate national policy. The thinking seems to go like this: "We, the U.S.A., are awesome and free. That country there? They are not free. They are bad and terrible and monstrous. Just to prove how awesome and free we are and how not-free they are, we forbid our citizens to go there." Hello?

Because North Korea is such a "pariah" and really, more accurately, such an unknown entity to so many, I will cheer for them even more.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my alma mater USC is having a little trouble in its own sports departments, you may have heard. The institution and some of the athletes - who were decidedly not supposed to be professionals and/or getting paid - committed a bunch of dastardly deeds and are now being punished -- oh, wait. Actually most of the wrongdoers have LEFT THE UNIVERSITY and the punishment is being meted out on some athletes playing there or being recruited to play there now. I know a two-year ban on post-season play sends quite a message, but it doesn't really effectively punish its target. In that sense, it's a lot like some U.S. foreign policy.

Meanwhile, just as things were getting underway in South Africa, tragedy struck. Nelson Mandela's great-granddaughter died in a car accident, now under investigation for possible drunk driving guilt by the chauffeur, on her way back from the big, celebratory, star-studded World Cup kick-off concert. Nelson Mandela himself understandably did not therefore attend the South Africa-Mexico match today. I have been thinking so much about him over the past year, and especially in connection with his nation's sports after seeing Invictus and reading Playing the Enemy. I am so sad for him, and wonder how much tragedy and sorrow one amazing, peaceful, brilliant man has to suffer in his lifetime? He is so much more newsworthy than Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo's egos.

Let's all think about our sanctions and bans and boycotts, and more importantly, let's all come together to watch the world play nicely, in friendly competition. Let's admire the magic of professional sports, where people are pushed to be better than they are. I hope that the guilty Trojan parties can acknowledge that they made mistakes, and then strive to be better. I hope the NCAA can acknowledge its mistakes, too. I hope that North Korean political leaders can acknowledge their mistakes, and most of all I hope the bullying U.S. can be kind enough and open enough and honest enough to acknowledge its many U.S. mistakes and give North Korea a reason to play along, nicely.

I shall cheer for my team U.S.A. - but I shall also cheer for "my" other teams. I like the World Cup. I like the world.

Comforts and Zones

2010-06-09T08:26:00.002+09:00

When I was in Tajikistan, there was a lot of talk among my fellow Habitat volunteers about "comfort zones." I suppose the general understanding was that Tajikistan is pretty far out of most people's comfort zones. It wasn't any one person; several people on the trip used that phrase several times. As I reflect on this, I think: why do we hang out in our comfort zones, anyway?

I mean just in general. Who ever said we're entitled to this so-called comfort zone? Whether or not you are salivating to travel the world, as I am, I would also apply this statement to life. Movies, let's say. Or books. Why not read something you wouldn't normally pick up? Why not, for example, start a project where you discover a new author for each letter of the alphabet, or go to the independent/arthouse movie theater to see what's there instead of paying $12 for some entirely predictable slam-bang blockbuster? Why not try that new Ethiopian restaurant? Why not take the bus to work one day a week instead of being petrified to leave your car at home just that once? Et cetera.

The funny thing is, I was more "comfortable" in Tajikistan than you might think. That's another reason why I am fascinated by the phrase "comfort zone." It reflects a mentality of certain things being good/known/familiar, here in one's little corner of the Earth, where you can vegetate your whole life without ever having to live in a different state or even city (those people horrify me) and where you always know what to expect. Boo! Hiss!

Tajikistan is just one example. Although frankly, I dug it there, mudslides included. And by the way? I went hiking, and even rustled up a happy hour. I guess some of us make our own comfort zones, because the comfort zone is obviously mental, not physical. So why does far-flung travel scare people so much? Why are there people who never go on vacation except to visit relatives? Beats me.

But it's funny to me that we are so proud of ourselves when we "step out of our comfort zones." First of all, because of the psychological buzzwordness of it -- we all kind of mentally pat ourselves on the back when we talk about these things in this post-psychobabble era, as if by identifying our comfort zone we have solved something about ourselves. I think we have only just named the problem.

Speaking of redemption and forgiveness...

2010-06-05T02:03:00.002+09:00

In other news that the whole world is talking about while U.S. conveniently ignores it, the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla was outrageous and deadly and wrong. Israeli officials could take a lesson from umpire Jim Joyce, who made a huge mistake, took a perfect game away from Galarraga, apologized, and not only made his peace with it but brought a lot of other people to make peace with his blown call as well. I love atonement. It's one of my favorite themes. Israel has so much still to learn about it.