My Embarrassing 25-Year Identity Crisis
may 28, 2010 01:58pm – in Korea
If you're one of my friends, you've seen my erratic tweets, and maybe received a panicked instant message from me. Yes, I'm going crazy. It's not your imagination.
What brought it on is my slowly but surely draining bank account, a useless degree, and noticing that my late twenties were well on their way but having nothing to show for it all but two music videos and a bunch of unfinished projects.
It's not as easy as it once was to calm me down with endless refrains of "there's still time" and "you can't be a failure at 25." These used to help, but I'm waking up to a bigger and darker realization: If I follow my noble ambitions and fail, as I always promised to do, it's not the fault of others for not recognizing me as a writer. It's nobody's fault. It just happened.
Maybe it was my dad's pep talk yesterday. "When I look back, I was just a blip in the history of the city of Ontario," he said during one of his tangents. He also kept reminding me that "plenty of people have jobs they don't like." The implication being that I'm not any different from anyone else. I used to be different; I was too stubborn to do that.
I've been applying for jobs I don't really want. As video work and writing work have begun not paying the bills, I've started trying to gitta jawb. It almost worked. Maybe if I wear a tie or smile more, the next one's in the bag, but no luck so far. My scattered, baffling job history tells the story of someone who had dreams and ambitions, but not a career path. Some people, you could probably guess their personality pretty accurately from their resume. You could probably look at mine for instance and say "this seems like a guy who can never find his cell phone."
I could (and I'd forgive you for feeling like I SHOULD) just get in line and march in lock-step to the drum beat of the corporate masters like, well, pretty much everyone in the world. This is a move many before me have made, and refer to in retrospect as "growing up." I can't say for certain where I earned a get-out-of-dead-end-job-free pass. If I, for some reason, woke up and decided that it was time for me to get a job in marketing at Tyrannicorp, I'm sure you'd agree it'd be a stretch given my qualifications.
So to recap: 1) I want to make movies and get paid for it. 2) Realizing this is tough to do, I've been looking for humbler jobs 3) The humbler jobs aren't forthcoming and 4) I'm pretty much out of money, which brings me to that realization I was talking about: I'm tumbling down the mountain of my ambitions, toward my career as a barista.
I say "career as a barista" sincerely. I would (and perhaps will soon be) be padding my resume and pounding pavement for weeks to get that barista job. Even those don't come easy right now. That's a big plate of the proverbial pie and I am, at long last humble enough to eat it.
So I'm not above shitty work to weather the storm, that's neither here nor there. My dad's pep talk went in a much more surprising direction than that: He said I shouldn't get a shitty job. He wanted to pursuade me that If I pour every ounce of my blood sweat and tears into it, I could get a business going making web videos for people, or at the very least "videotaping bar mitzvahs."
Four years ago I finished my first feature screenplay; an epic historical sci-fi action comedy. At 21 I was sure to the point of smugness that wealth and fame were close at hand. It wasn't a question of whether my script would sell, it was a question of how much I'd get. No one pounded down my door trying to get that script, so I co-directed a music video that was on MTV2, but famed movie producer Joe Longcigar never called us. Some hiccups followed that, but suffice it to say I've had some mountaintop moments of high ambition, and some deep, existential valleys to go with them. I say all that in order to make a point: scrounging and struggling for the opportunity to videotape bar mitzvahs was never where I saw my life going.
But, let me re-emphasize, I'm prepared to go to these lengths to scrape by. Plenty of people have it much worse.
Still, "plenty of people have it much worse" is no mantra to live one's life by. It is a consideration, however when I look back on my decision to go into moviemaking to begin with. When I was 17, and I decided that, in fact, filmmaking was for me, I was heavily under the influence of Traffic and Fight Club. Hollywood was taking chances on some real tough, anti-establishment material. I also discovered foreign films like City of God around that time. Making movies seemed noble and important. I was going to make gritty movies about social problems (The kind of movies I was planning to make were later encapsulated perfectly by Children of Men.)
I live in Hollywood now, where there's not much mention of movies as important social statements. The idea of moviemaking as primarily a business venture was once, to me, and I'm being sincere here, something only hardcore cynics would talk about. I'm not saying I got blindsided by hollywood superficiality after I moved here; I became jaded a long time ago. What I am saying is that what I really wanted to do at one point was "make a difference" through movies. STOP LAUGHING, DAMN IT.
Of course you can make a difference through movies. You can steer the course of people's lives, especially impressionable teenagers. You can accidentally persuade them to try and make movies too, like what happened to me. But I don't blame the movies. I also blame the "be whatever you want to be" rhetoric my generation was raised on (To be fair, Fight Club warned me about that, but I didn't listen).
The path toward being a filmmaker had a vague and glowing endpoint. Respect and fame were there at that finish line, but not any sort of job title. Upon graduating, conscious of my mistake, I used to say I felt like I'd just majored in winning the lottery. I was studying the techniques of great writers and directors. I certainly wasn't studying the techniques of people who have jobs in Hollywood. My greatness would carry me past all that nonsense.
I've done a lot of writing, but the prospects were always impossibly grave when it came to entering them in competitions or mailing them to agents. I didn't work my way into the Hollywood system in order to curry favor. I never had any internships (in fact I resent the very idea of them, but that's another tirade entirely), and I never got myself a job as the assistant to the personal assistant of the secretary of the guy who cleans up Michael Bay's pubic hair clippings. I could make excuses where working in this town are concerned, and say I tried and was defeated. The fact is I don't have the stomach for it.
It's not weakness I'm admitting here, but call it that if you want to. I simply don't have the stomach for the climb-the-latter approach to "making it" among any city's snarling corporate monsters. It doesn't matter if they're the giant, cannibalistic insects at a Dallas oil company, or the the fanged mutant octopi on Wall Street. Me and those guys, we just don't mesh. And I didn't realize it when I got into this with my precious good intentions, but that was going to prevent me from paying my dues in the 9-5 world here.
Honestly, I thought for 25 years that I was uniquely talented among my peers. It's taken up until today for every last burning ember of that delusion to burn out, and for me to see myself as "just some guy." It didn't hurt realizing that now well into adulthood, I'll never be considered a "whiz kid" (which is to say it hurt quite a bit). The fact that I was anything but "just some guy" was what assured me that I never needed to consider the course of my career. "That'll all sort itself out when I get famous." I've paid lip service to this concept over the years, but I've never internalized it before right. this. second.
Forgive me if this is taking on the tenor of a suicide note. I'm not in a state of despair right now. Far from it. And I still want to make movies. I'm just starting to suspect that I need a real career. Not a job, mind you, although I need one of those too. Filmmaking is an interest, or even a passion. But come on. A career? Is it really a career? Really?
My mind is awash with heavy thoughts right now. The light of morning might not shine well on the words I'm writing. But right now I'm back to where I was when I was 18: I feel like I can make a difference in the world. I just have to figure out how.
The Ten Commandments of Twitter
may 03, 2010 02:09am – in Korea
By Mike Pearl
As an avid Twitter user, I have watched users join, peak their head around, and ultimately bail. I've watched users join, grok it, and stay. And lastly I've watched users join, fail to see the point, and stay anyway; This is the problem crowd.
The ones who "get" Twitter seem to intuit a set of guidelines that make following them a pleasure. The rest are wandering in the desert, living lives of Twitter Sin, needing to be shown the error of their ways. For those who need it spelled out for them, I say unto thee: Follow my commandments, or I shall not follow thy tweets.
1. Thou shalt not double or triple tweet on one subject. If the thought is too complex for 140 characters, simply link to your blog where you can be more detailed, or skip the thought altogether. Otherwise your followers likely won't read it. They've come to Twitter to read the compact wisdom that a character limit creates. Think of this limitation as a gift, and don't be afraid to take the time to rigorously self edit. Push toward that character limit; Seeing an overcomplicated thought chopped up and simplified into a tweet is part of the fun.
2. Thou shalt have a point of view. Those who don't tweet are in the right to criticize Twitter as a place where narcissists simply announce every banal event of their lives. But it would behoove those who wish to use Twitter to its fullest to not follow said narcissists. There is nothing inherently wrong with tweeting that you made toast, but what does this toast say about your life? What larger concepts or problems does this batch of toast speak to?
3. Thou shalt not exceed three tweets in one hour. Unless there's an election being stolen, and Twitter is being used to fuel a popular uprising, there's not usually anything so urgent going on that you must tweet moment-by-moment. Most likely what you're documenting if you do this is your stream of consciousness, mixed with some remarks about what's making you LOL at the moment. And most likely what I'm reading if you do this is something else.
4. Thou shalt self-deprecate, not self-aggrandize. That plate of fines de claires oysters you're enjoying? That yacht ride you're on? Yeah, we hate you for it. Yes, all of us. If your commentary about the oysters is that they're not up to your standard of freshness and you feel like that's all the commentary Twitter deserves, I won't be following you for long. A bit of cutting self-awareness or irony in moments like this can save you from ending up on Tweetingtoohard.com
5. Thou shalt distill the list of who thou followest down to those thou actually readest. Another option is to use the new "lists" feature, and put all your real life friends on it. This will ensure that rather than shitting your thoughts into the abyss, you're keeping alive the concept that Twitter is a conversation. It's frustrating when you @reply to one of your friends' tweets and they don't even notice.
6. Thou shalt keep the meaning of thy tweets transparent. Think of twitter as a room you enter throughout your day to have a conversation with some friends. If you walk in just to quote a song lyric without attribution, or say the word "Pineapple!" without anything around it, yes, we're confused. Mission Accomplished. But we're not thinking "What an interesting point of view this friend of mine has." We're thinking about unfollowing you.
7. Thou shalt not just complain. This may be a rule for how you conduct yourself more than a rule of Twitter. Are you a complainer? No one likes a complainer. Twitter is here for you if you have a problem, but if all you do is whine, you're not doing it right. Here's how you can self-test: When you post about your problems, have people stopped @replying? That's because they're not even reading your whiny tweets anymore.
8. Thou shalt not be a link regurgitation machine. The occasional link with commentary is a welcome part of the global conversation that is Twitter, but are you just copy>pasting everything you're reading on Digg? Your friends probably would have seen that lolcat eventually on their own. Either that or they already did. You're not The Internet's central meme filter or tastemaker. Leave it alone.
9. Thou Shalt strike a balance between in-group and out-group tweets. You should definitely post special tweets just for your close-knit group of friends. But what about the friendly acquaintances and well-wishers who follow you? Don't make them regret reading your tweets. Post for the general population 50% of the time or more. And whenever possible, start an insiders-only tweet with an @username so outsiders won't even have to see it.
10. Thou shalt not use Twitter as just another place to feed updates from other web services (like Facebook, Flickr and Youtube). As I keep saying, Twitter is a conversation. If your only contribution to the aforementioned "room" is that occasionally a robot walks in and announces that you marked a YouTube video as a favorite, then we get what you're hinting at: "Don't bother following my Twitter. If you're really interested, make friends with me on a site where I am active."
shock video
february 21, 2010 09:51am – in Korea
Apparently this idea was just too shocking for Ian to handle.
WFaNFC
december 24, 2009 02:02pm – in Korea
Working For a Nuclear Free City is a band from England. Their album "Businessmen & Ghosts" is so long that in the time it takes to listen to it you could listen to four Weezer albums. Five Weezer albums if, in between discs one and two, someone asked what you were listening to and you answered.
I like them, and they sound like this:
Noticed Today:
november 08, 2009 08:12am – in Korea
The light fixtures in most Starbucks bathrooms look to me like the aliens from Naked Lunch.
I. Drink. Soda.
october 17, 2009 07:53am – in Korea
I drink soda at the rate of about a liter a day. Recently a growing contingent of people smugly brag that they don't drink soda, and do so with an obnoxious "that stuff'll kill ya" tone of voice. I don't begrudge them their inclination, and far be it for me to demand that they explain themselves. But God help me, I just don't understand what's driving them to exclude this simple pleasure from their lives, or think less of me for not doing so. Soda is AT WORST a relatively harmless vice. Although it wasn't always...
Some people (My ancestors, probably) have shied away from drinking regular water whenever possible for thousands of years, preferring wine, mead, beer or whatever alcoholic drink was lying around because bad germs can't reproduce very well in alcoholic drinks, and also because they get you drunk. I'm not saying our species has learned to avoid water because it's somehow dangerous, but on the whole, cultures generally seem to get around to finding something more fun to drink, as evidenced by so many distinct, separate cultures figuring out on their own how to make booze.
Carbonated soft drinks came along in the thirteenth century. The first thing that would have been close to what we have now was called Dandelion and Burdock. It was fizzy (due to slight fermentation) and sweet, and the flavor would have been close to root beer since it came over time to have sassafras root extract added. Dandelion and Burdock was later proven to give people cancer due to a chemical that got in there called safrole. Non-carcinogenic versions of these are still available.
Through the ages, most of these soft drinks have been hyped up with supposed medicinal properties, in spite of all the cancer. Water was first carbonated on its own in the late 18th century by suspending it over beer and trapping the carbon dioxide as it dissipated. As soda fountains became popular, it stood to reason that they would pop up in pharmacies since the syrups that would be mixed in would all be marketed as medicines. Today, people can no longer be swindled into thinking something with no nutritional value is actually medicine. Ever. Never happens.
Not the least of these ersatz health tonics was the stimulant-heavy Coca Cola, with coca leaf extract, in addition to extract of kola nuts, which are rich in caffeine, and about ten other euphoria-inducing stimulants. Initially, the cocaine in Coke was a huge, jolting dose. Now, while there is still coca leaf extract in Coke (contrary to popular belief), there's probably no cocaine in it. Though there probably is still extract from kola nuts in it.
And that real kola nut taste is probably why it tastes good. kola nuts have been gnawed on in in Africa for thousands of years, and remain popular in conservative Muslim countries where they can't drink alcohol. That's how they dose themselves with caffeine, while we take it in our beverages. Today, real kola is absent from most "cola" drinks, replaced with cinnamon and vanilla and caffeine that was made in a lab somewhere.
Today we have canned "energy drinks," which are delivery systems for massive doses of caffeine. Not content to call a caffeine high "energy," they also supplement you with dubious extracts like guarana, a plant that gives you "energy" because there's caffeine in it, and taurine, a chemical extracted from bile that has a long and confusing list of health effects (cats need to eat the stuff every day or they go blind, but there's no scientific evidence that it gives you energy). Most damning of all, however, I don't hear anyone ever sip an energy drink, and say anything positive about the flavor.
As for me, I'm concerned, as you might have guessed, about the excessive carbohydrate content of the sodas I drink. There's a well-known debate raging over whether the high fructose corn syrup present in most sodas at the moment is unnatural, or harmful to people. A peer-reviewed 2007 study seemed to prove that HFCS, disturbingly, suppresses feelings of fullness, and promotes type-2 diabetes. High fructose corn syrup, it should be noted, is hugely different from the delicious glucose syrup (probably "Karo" brand) that your mother uses to sweeten fudge. High fructose corn syrup is not available as a retail product. It's a chemically complex substance, the synthesis of which requires safety goggles, and involves small amounts of sulfuric acid. In my opinion, HFCS doesn't taste quite right. It's not quite as bracing as artificial sweeteners, but the flavor is not quite as soft and agreeable as sugar.
To me, when it comes to sugary sodas, you can't beat "Mountain Dew Throwback," made with honest table sugar (admittedly not something that occurs in nature). You likely know that Mountain Dew has a lot of caffeine, and is favored by extreme athletes, but did you know that in each batch of Mountain Dew there is a faintly noticeable, but real, drop of orange juice? I like the faintly tropical, citrus, taste, well suited to greenish yellow color. Some people find the color repellant, and I can see why. My other favorite soda is cactus cooler, an orange-pineapple concoction you can only get in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. Unfortunately you can't get it with table sugar instead of corn syrup. But both of these are for special occasions. I have a hard time keeping my conscience clear about knocking back a 12 ounce drink with ten calories per ounce, no matter which -ose I'm dealing with.
This is why I usually drink diet cola all day long. This means I consume enormous amounts of the non-caloric sweetener aspartame. Aspartame is such a controversial compound that in a 1999 press release, the FDA, well-aware that the stuff had fierce opponents, called it "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved," in an effort to dispel rumors. On one hand Aspartame has not been proven to have any detrimental effects on human health in literally any reasonable dosage (to wit, eighteen cans of diet cola consumed all at once is the stated limit lest one suffer possible side effects like "momentary nausea" and "headache," but this limit was placed by determining the lowest dose deemed positively harmful, and dividing it by 100). Articles preaching the dangers of aspartame also advertise that it will give you brain seizures and cause you to -of course- gain weight (conventional wisdom states that if any words of wisdom are counterintuitive, they must be true), but these don't cite credible evidence. Oh and it'll definitely cause cancer, according to your aunt.
Aspartame is one of the many flavoring additives we allow to be put in things we consume. But being sweet without any calories, it's perceived, at least in my observation, as something that must be too-good-to-be-true (And why? It doesn't taste THAT good). It's true that there's a warning about it right on the can, but that's because it causes brain damage in people with phenylketonuria, a genetic disorder that effects one in 15 thousand people. It's true that it hasn't been around very long, and you're right, it took until smoking cigarettes had been around for a while for people to realize it was giving them cancer. Never mind that cigarettes are a crude combustion of plants and paper, while aspartame is a single, refined chemical compound. Aspartame is, essentially, guilty until proven innocent. Or have the bastards at Nutrasweet (formerly a division of the notorious Monstanto corporation, so we're talking about bastards of the highest order) gotten to me?
Another more convincing argument against drinking soft drinks is the damage they do to the environment. In some countries like Mexico, Indonesia, and South Korea, you can get sodas in reusable glass bottles. Here in America, and most other countries, they come in cheap, disposable containers, or, worst of all, at mom-and-pop restaurants they come in styrofoam cups. The Horror. Despite the relative efficiency of recycling aluminum, most recycling is still an enormous burden on our resources. What's more: plastic recycling is laughably inefficient.
(A store shelf stocked with better-tasting Mexican recipe coke, featuring [natch] table sugar among other subtle differences.)
To answer this in my own mind, and probably nowhere else, I've recently purchased one of 7 Eleven's more absurdly American products: The 64 ounce "Ultimate Gulp" reusable plastic soda mug. The advantages of buying soda this way are numerous. In addition to purchasing just the liquid, without any disposable container, I prefer the taste of Diet Pepsi from a fountain to any other diet cola in a can. I can also add a drop of Dr. Pepper, which I find masks the aspartame aftertaste. Lastly, every fill-up is 1.9 liters and only costs 99 cents.
(A mating pair of "Gulps" in their natural habitat.)
Still, these arguments are of no help when I make a first impression on someone with my Ultimate Gulp in my hand. It doesn't help that it's decorated with holographic football players and the words "YOU WANT SOME OF THIS" (That's not a question). The fact is that in our culture, I'm a strange specimen. As a relatively socially conscious person and a soda drinker, I'm outmoded in this century, like the odd baseball player who still smokes cigarettes. I should be getting my caffeine from cups of coffee, a more socially acceptable drug delivery system. But it's more than a drug for me. I love the fizz, the sweetness, the hissing sounds, the bubbles, the whole experience. And if you don't like it, well look at my cup. Do I look like I care?
Qualified! Episode 1
september 04, 2009 06:09am – in Korea
New blog series about me looking for a job. Comments on this site have been disabled for the foreseeable future due to a weird malware issue.
Wichita!
july 25, 2009 03:19pm – in Korea
Wichita is the biggest city in Kansas. To a jaded Californian, that sentence MUST be followed by a joke to the extent of "that's like being the sexiest woman on the cast of The Golden Girls." But I'm finding Wichita agreeable. Can I say that?
Yeah, from a car, Kansas looks more or less like you'd expect. Yates Center, Kansas, where I have a few more relatives, calls itself "The Hay Capital of the World."
Wichita itself is more cosmopolitan... Within reason. But I like the feel of the place. It's like if you took the feeling you got by being in The Orange Circle, or Brea's Best (Two places most of my friends know about) and made that feeling into a major city.
The picture above (kudos if you're one of the relatives pictured, and you see this blog and leave a comment) is one of a few pictures I took inside Old Mill Tasty Shop, which, in California would be called something like "Lucille's Rockin' Diner & Malt Shop." But this place was just born in the thirties, and has carried on with the same foods without ever looking at itself and saying "Hey, people come here out of nostalgia," and putting pictures of elvis on the wall and blaring goofy surf music from jukeboxes.
I got a chicken salad sandwich heavy with mayonnaise I saw them making. There were malts and floats and the coke, in all seriousness, has probably ruined me for any other coke I'll ever drink anywhere.
We're staying at the Broadview Hotel. A local landmark whose history includes hauntings, basement stills and visits from Al Capone.
This is the lobby.
I can't imagine this is someplace where I could live. But on the other hand, it makes San Francisco, where I just came from, seem phony by comparison.
chat room experiment
may 09, 2009 07:40am – in Korea
Japan, at last
april 28, 2009 10:46am – in Korea
You never thought I'd update this site again. That hurts, man. Have a little faith in me. There will be a few more of these as I catch up over the next week or so.
Shanghai
march 19, 2009 11:44am – in Korea
I've been in Shanghai for three solid days now. I think I get it. I'm going to go to Suzhou next, it looks like a place with much less to do, and that's what I'm looking for.
Yes, I got my big bag.
Lockout
march 16, 2009 01:05am – in Korea
Updating from Lotteria, a huge McDonald's-style fast food chain. It's 1:00 am, and the place is open 24 hours. My flight leaves in eight hours. And I don't have my big bag, which means I might be going to China for two weeks with only what I'm wearing. All my gadgets and documents are safe and sound next to me in my little bag.
The situation is that the friend I've been staying with is MIA. I have the key to his apartment, but the deadbolt is locked, and to my surprise, the deadbolt key is broken or wrong. I actually think he's in there because I can hear his cell phone ringing when I call, but he's in such a dead (possibly actually dead) sleep that he doesn't come to the door no matter how much I pound, yell, and call. My bag is in there.
I feel terrible for being several days a leech on three square meters of floor space, and several gigabytes of bandwidth a day. And for not arriving in time to be in bed at the same time as him, but all the same, my stuff is in there, and I need it.
So I'm waiting for something to happen. For the Ambien to work its way through his system, or to find out in two weeks that he died in there. I'll check back in a few hours, when he should be getting up to go to work.
A Dead Horse, Beaten
march 03, 2009 08:13am – in Korea
To be spoken to in English pains me. Invariably I ask directions/order food/apologize to a stranger for bumping into them in Korean, and invariably they chime back in English. For over a year this among the first in my battery of complaints. It's been tough going for person who, when he arrived here, would throttle you half to death if you told him who directed Jules et Jim rather than presuming that, naturally, he already knew. To address me in English after I'd already begun in Korean was like fetching me a children's menu when I'd asked for the wine list.
To say that I've changed meaningfully somehow would be overstating the case a little bit. When I left I hoped to return as some kind of enlightened soul, and never, ever again think about the mundane problems and petty frustrations that bothered me before. The reality is that when I come back, I'll be the same guy I was before except a year older. I'll have changed, but no more or less than anyone else I'll catch up with when I get back. Damned if I didn't TRY, at least, to make myself into some kind of Ubermensch. I learned to play the drums here; I learned as much as I could about the local culture; and I tried - God help me - to learn Korean. But if I really got anything out of this, it was the realization that sometimes I'm not nice enough to people, simply because they cross invisible barriers they had no reason to know were there.
I should mention that I also set out to constantly defy what I perceived to be the wrong-headed, hurtful assumptions about foreigners, and consequently I exhausted myself every day trying to look poised and coolheaded among a bunch of nonplussed strangers as I mounted one daring-do after another. "Behold! I can buy a train ticket." "Stand back! I'm going to put my possessions in a locker." "Look on, ye mighty, and despair as I check movie times, and I can do it BY MYSELF!" In the event that I furrow my brow, scan the same spot twice when looking for something, or stare blankly at something I've been running the risk of a stranger coming out of the woodwork to bark in - ahem - *English* at me in an effort to smooth out whatever difficulties I'm having. The NERVE! WHAT AM I, A CHILD?
Yes, the Koreans have very itchy good Samaritan triggers, God love them, and it makes me mad. I don't know why. I've tried to intellectualize this response I have, and I can't actually see a flaw in a cultural quirk where people leap up to help each other at the drop of a hat. "Can't get the money in that coffee machine, huh? Here's a crisp bill for that tattered one." "Hey, you're hiking without socks! You'll get a nasty blister. Lucky for you I brought an extra pair." These are real examples I've witnessed with the helper and helpee both Korean, and total strangers. But try and help me, and I'll put your lights out, pal. Best I can figure, in America we have an unwritten cultural law that says if you give unsolicited help to another person (Mike Pearl, specifically, but I don't think I'm completely alone) you are explicitly calling him stupid.
My own obnoxious habits are especially to blame here. I'm a person who was told from a very early age that he was sharper than the other kids, and as a miserable failure at sports, my smarts were all I had to keep me going through school, snarky know-it-all that I may have been. When I emerged from my cocoon of adolescent bitterness (When this occurred is a matter of some dispute: as early as 17 by some estimates, and by others, later this year.) I had picked up a nasty habit of always always trying to sink the battleship of other people's ignorance with the red peg of my brilliance all day every day (often when I try it, I misfire and wind up losing my own aircraft carrier.) It's a habit I fight all the time.
To compound my litost (that's a Czech word I got from Milan Kundera that I'd really like to turn into a bona fide loan word [Dear Oxford English Dictionary...]) I have failed to learn Korean to any degree except what you'd call "survival." So while I've been kvetching about the Koreans harshing my intellectual buzz it would have been easy to destroy me with a simple quiz: "Alright smart guy. You don't want to be treated like a foreigner? Put up or shut up. Do it. Say something in Korean. Go." And I'd choke, and I'd have nothing. Sure, I can stumble through "What a lovely purse" or "Your child is excellent at soccer," but seeing as they'd sound about as eloquent as "Bag pretty!" and "Son soccer. Good job!" you can't entirely blame people for wanting to bail me out.
Here's where I differ with them though, and sometimes I think I really do have a case. I've come a long way to be able to cough out even the ugliest broken Korean. It's obvious I did more than memorize a page of useful phrases and to not acknowledge that achievement with so much as a response in kind is, well, at the very worst a little tactless. Yes, they all got tortured through a few years of English in school. That's their tool for communicating with foreigners. The resulting situation is that both parties assume this other person is not going to understand them in their language, and lucky for that person "I've learned a little of theirs." What happens next is a kind of fight, both people struggling to steer the conversation into the other person's native language.
BUT if their English clearly outshines my Korean, I'm beaten, and the conversation will be entirely in English. And hen you have a conversation with some helpful old lady, or a convenience store worker who's never had an English class in his life there's still going to be the odd "No" or "thank you" learned from television, and thrown in, I suppose, for fun. It's up to me to figure out how not to find that kind of crap annoying.
At the worst of times I've taken to a kind of schizophrenia. I've overheard the nastiest things said about my race by strangers in a restaurant who were probably talking about the weather. I've concluded that absent-minded shoves in my ribs, or loogies spat in my path were messages of cultural rejection. I've spent walks home from work just dying for someone to blurt out a drive-by "Where are from?" so I could start a shouting match or maybe even a fistfight.
On the other hand I've been driven to depression. I've come to conclude in no uncertain terms (until I rethought it, of course) that international travel by Americans does nothing but spur outrage, and feelings of intrusion that are completely justified, and that at the next opportunity I should get on a plane and go back to MY country with MY people, and leave THESE good people to THEIR own, well-deserved way of life, agitated no further by the burden of foreigners who don't understand their culture or least of all their language.
I've never felt a kind of ecstasy to balance out my misery. I've never been lost in my adoration for Korea, or written a letter to someone just to say "Wow! this place is GREAT." But all around me, even as I write this are people who are satisfied with the way things are here, who couldn't give a rip if this blog just said Koreans are a bunch of ignorant dog-munchers. But I've reached a point now that I wish I could have left behind a better impression.
If you could somehow aggregate the impressions I've given strangers during my time here into some kind of Matrix, I'd get a very high score in the categories of independence, apprehension of history, and eating spicy food (not to mention perfect marks in "looking dour and dutiful"). I'd get middling to poor marks in spacial reasoning and poise despite my attempts to look adroit at everyday tasks. But tragically, after a year of brushing off or barking at people who tried to help me, I'd fail general niceness. Color me ashamed.
Blog 22: The End of an Era
february 09, 2009 11:06pm – in Korea
Posting
january 18, 2009 09:54am – in Korea
PIcture Blog 2
january 07, 2009 03:07pm – in Korea
Today I feel the need to purge myself of some pictures that have been festering on my SD card.
I love this picture. This is the installation of a brand new bell that sits in what we westerners would call a "pagoda." There are bells just like these all over the country, usually built in the last five years, probably manufactured all in the same place. Note the plastic wrapping. Ringing them usually indicates to the listener that they should be mindful of "filial piety" or permanent duty to one's family.
River in Guryeh on the verge of freezing solid in the grip of Korea's cruel, dry winter.
There are three things over to the left, if you were wondering.
A healthy snowfall in Gwangju only stays on the ground for 12 hours or so.
Jeung Shim Sa around Mudeung Mountain on New Years day, after a New Years Eve whiteout.
Picture Blog 1
january 07, 2009 02:54pm – in Korea
A rocky beach in Mokpo riddled with flotsam and jetsam.
Me in and around Mudeung Mountain park near Gwangju.
A closeup of some Mudeung Mountain flora that looked better in full-size.
Damyang's famous bamboo forest.
Pretty steep for a free drink.
Essay on Futurism
january 04, 2009 06:10pm – in Korea
I haven't even re-read this yet. I already know I'm not going to like some things (mostly at the beginning) when I do.
Is it just me or is civilization arriving at a state of near perfection, and yet no one acknowledges it?
As we learn more and more about generating power efficiently, and about how to get work done automatically, people tend to get alarmed (and rightly so) that people will lose their livelihoods, or that humanity is becoming too reliant on machines and automation.
But step back. Using the example of an ancient civilization, you might say they had the same goal. The Spartans didn't want to to farm, or waste time on maintenance, and so by some stretch of the imagination, you might think that by enslaving an entire neighboring society called the Helots they were just trying to automate things. They would certainly have thought of the Helots as something other than human, undeserving of freedom, and therefore something like a robot. The Helots did all the labor the Spartans didn't enjoy, and the Spartans spent their time studying, and training as fighters. Not what I would have chosen, given all that free time, but it got them off.
Like the Helots, a peasant (or slave) class has been a reality for thousands of years. Over time we (humans) are beginning to prefer nicer ideas about all humans being equal, without concern for race. But it seems that without regard for a person's race, the rich use their money and power to make things just so that they devote their time to leisure, and most humans have to work every day of their life, doing something they hate if they want to eat.
And history has progressed marking the progress of the powerful. Reading history books means reading about who owned what, how they got it (generally by war). And it's all because having access to more resources means things become easier, and if you can get that resource, more people in your society will have more time for leisure.
It's hard to see it, but I think things are getting easier. In Hans Rosling's Ted Talks he makes a convincing case (using very clear statistics, and an earnest and humane delivery) that the globalized world, though there is still clearly poverty and war, is feeling the benefits of technology and civilization. It seems, from looking at his graphs, that violent death is being reduced on the whole. Violence is reported on the news constantly, sure, and it's unquestionably gruesome and unnecessary, but the numbers say people are living longer, and increasingly, not dying from violence and starvation.
And it will be easy for a person with a conservative outlook on life to read this and say "well, sure. That's because society is fine, and people everywhere should just hop on board." And I don't agree with that at all. I think the infrastructure of society is still terrible, and oppressive, and based around the leisure of the rich and powerful. And I think were society is going will result in a huge increase in leisure time for the peasant classes all over the world. But only if we look at the state of our species from a long way away, and really try to understand what our lives are supposed to be like.
I tried Googling (in quotes) "People are happiest when," and it overwhelmingly produces two results: people are happy when their loved ones live around them, and people are happy when they do work that is not beneath their dignity, especially work that is creative (Noam Chomsky also famously said something to that effect). You'll also see some cynical remarks, but people on the internet are surprisingly consistent about the secret of happiness.
So I'll get to my point. People, it seems to me, want to live in small, familiar communities, and spend their time doing something they like. So the idea of life, then, is to make it so that we can spend as much time as possible doing something we enjoy, and spend that time with our family and friends.
This seems painfully obvious. But the realities of humanity's past contribute to assumptions about culture that might soon be proven false.
Almost all cultures mercilessly hammer home the idea that hard, bruising work is the daily duty of a virtuous person (Protestants, for example, or Koreans) and for thousands of years of human development, that was certainly true. An ethical person did his part to contribute to the acquisition of food, the building of shelter, and the maintenance of the infrastructure of the community. An unethical person just has a slave do it.
And it seems like inevitably, we scatter ourselves around the world, or all over our cities. We move to be close to work (or choose some awful work just to be in a convenient location), rather than concern ourselves with something that seems frivolous if I say it: living next door to our friends.
I'll try not to sound hysterical, but in the next hundred years it seems like we're edging in on the technologies we need to make food production automatic, or nearly automatic. Maybe not The Singularity, but little things like Toyota's solar powered car project, and Honda's Asimo, despite their pie-in-the-sky, 1938 World's Fair vibe, are talked about with a straight face. Whether these are clear examples of the kind of efficiency our future has in store remains to be seen.
On the other hand, less hysterical, more practical technological marvels to consider, thanks to simple ingenuity. There are huge shifts going on. As our world's agricultural system reels from the decline of cheap fossil fuels, it is beginning to consider efficiency in a much more direct way, like this example where the interaction of multiple species on the same farm result in less work for the farmers themselves. Enough ideas like this, shared worldwide result in efficiency of a different kind.
I'm saying that in the next couple of centuries, through a combination of technology, and the free exchange of ideas, we as a species, might figure out a way to eliminate labor, or at least wind up with everyone working a few hours a week.
There are still clashes of ideologies to consider. Technology certainly won't be what finally brings us world peace. Most likely the opposite is the case. And sorting out our notions of what makes a community or a society if the nuts and bolts of the economy suddenly shifted like I'm suggesting it might won't be nearly as simple as I might seem to be saying.
But I must know, am I crazy to think that if we allow ourselves to reconsider what we as a species want out of life, it's possible that the concept of work might someday become outdated?
The Year in Media
december 29, 2008 02:23pm – in Korea
I think David Letterman effectively hammered home the irrelevance of "Top 10" lists when he started doing his "Top Ten" segments however many million years ago that was. A list of top ten non-sequiters really goes a long way in showing that these numbers are arbitrary.
Then Nick Hornby swung things around with High Fidelity, in which he splattered every event in a person's life onto neat little top 5's. That sort of had me organizing things into lists for a while.
This year I saw a "Top 10 Top 10 lists" post on a news aggregator site that I use. Also Roger Ebert's streak of reliable top 10 lists of movies ended this year, when he couldn't help but post a top 15.
Generally I like to break down my top ten lists of movies and albums at the end of the year just for my own personal satisfaction, but I'm not going to do that. It's a tidy way of wrapping up a dull year in an interesting way, but It's been a really wild year, and I'm just going to post my thoughts, disorganized, sure, but at least not forced into an artificial shape.
Deaths Of Famous People:
As I get older, I notice more and more famous people dying. Naturally this is because as I get older, I become aware of more people. This year, Heath Ledger died, which was strange, and started off the year in death with a huge bang. Then a bunch of other people died, but the one that really effected me has been George Carlin.
Carlin was getting old, but he didn't seem close to death. Elizabeth Taylor seems close to death. George Carlin was, to me, heading into his slow decline away from dignity and relevance, but certainly due for another decade of tribute shows, and lifetime achievement awards. He died though, and maybe it was for the best. Hunter Thompson killed himself long after he felt embarrassed to still be alive. Carlin was still performing, still relevant, and dying now saved him a lot of time in tuxedoes, smiling politely as Larry the Cable Guy dedicates a fart-themed song to him. Still, two days after I found out he died, I quietly cried about it.
I also cried after Paul Newman died, and I watched this:
Movies:
This year was full of movies I know I'm going to remember. Possibly because seeing them in Korea gave them a strange context, but also because there were just a lot of great movies.
Hellboy II was one of my favorites of the year. Guillermo Del Toro consistently makes brilliant movies, but this one took everything I loved about Hellboy and then added everything I loved about Pan's Labyrinth (and nothing I hated), and mashed them together to make something equal parts awesome, blow-em-up spectacle, and feast of the imagination. These are platitudes, so I'll be specific.
This scene in particular gives the hero of a movie (a totally muscle-ripped demon with a huge gun) a huge moral dilemma (no spoilers here), he makes his choice, and the result is the coolest and most beautiful visual from any movie this year. There's also this part:
The Angel of Death was just so cool. And then the part where they go into that underground world that is what Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter movies should look like, but doesn't.
By not relying completely on CGI, Del Toro lets his characters and the monsters seem to inhabit the same world, and that gives them a palpability that's lacking from most other fantasy movies.
There was also Wall-E, which WAS my favorite movie of the year.
I would work 9-5 at a desk for the rest of my life and be okay with it if the desk were at Pixar.
Music:
Keeping up with music for me means seeing live shows, and I have not been able to do that this year for the most part. There have been a few concerts of derivative local punk that made me miss crowding into tiny rooms and feeling the buzz in the air as everyone prepared to b serenaded by a person they really admire. The most fun I've had at live shows this year has been playing the drums at a few of them, with one exception.
In music, for me, this was the year of Jens Lekman. He has practically been the soundtrack for my trip to Korea (and literally the soundtrack to one of my video blogs), even though he released his most recent album last year. To make matters more perfect, I was in Seoul when I unexpectedly happened upon a Jens Lekman concert. For one fantastic hour (in a room mostly full of foreigners) I was transported back to the musical environment where I felt at home.
I also caught up with the music of Cat Power, Built to Spill, and Broken Social Scene. I don't know what my life was before these artists. In particular, Cat Power. Without this song:
...I couldn't have made it through the year.
Most of my favorite NEW stuff from 2008 was the new stuff by artists I already loved: David Byrne (and Brian Eno), Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and Sun Kil Moon.
I also loved Fleet Foxes, just like everyone else. I have lost my enthusiasm for music videos, frankly, but this Fleet Foxes video is just wonderful. Modest in ambition, perfect in concept, and solidly executed. I'm jealous.
Also, I'm announcing here that I am NOT, in fact, staying the extra six months. I expect to be back in California (after some backpacking) in April.
Korea Music
december 14, 2008 11:32am – in Korea
There's a ringing in my ears when the test commences, but it does nothing to hinder my listening. The robotic instructor tells me in the clearest, loudest English possible to read a text aloud. He says the same thing at the same time to the other test takers in the other blue cubicles. Before our voices are recorded we're allowed thirty seconds for a dry run through the passage, some boring blurb from the lifestyle section of a local paper with no context. I opt out, but the others, in their nervous, jittery voices all have a go at the same time. It's like a Greek chorus at first, pronouncing in austere unison that "Boating enthusiasts will be delighted this Sunday when America's Cup winner Brad Janelly will be visiting Mason county." Sensing the awkwardness of their deliveries, after the first sentence, the volume of their voices dies down and the timing breaks apart.
Two weeks ago I said yes when my boss asked me if I wanted to take the TOEIC speaking and listening test intended for ESL students. I meant that at that exact time and place, taking a test of my ability to speak my mother language sounded like a laugh. I did not say that two weeks later I wanted to brave an unforgiving December morning with a hangover nagging me to please lie down and place my hands over my ears. But it cost about seventy five dollars of someone else's money, and there'll be questions about it later at work, so here I am.
After the test I get my phone back from the phone box. None of the people who work at the English language testing center speak English at a functioning level, but I don't have to ask any questions; Mine is the only confiscated phone that has a name sticker on it that says "Mike" instead of "이남준" or something.
In the lobby is a coffee vending machine. One of the questions on the test was about vending machines. I had to discuss whether or not I liked them. I found out during the test that yes, I do apparently. Everyone else who took the test must have just learned the same thing about themselves and now they're all lined up, dying for that cup of freeze dried coffee that they value so much. Out the window I see a chilly breeze blowing people's scarves against their faces outside, and my headache is on the run, but it's not going down without a fight, so all indications are that I'll be having a hot cup of powdered "Maxim" brand coffee too.
Outside I take big sips to finish it before a taxi stops. The hot liquid hits my stomach and the warm feeling is like someone telling me good news every time I swallow. It reminds me of being a kid, drinking hot chocolate after a day of playing in the snow. I usually drink coffee slowly and savor the taste, but this feeling in my stomach is too good. I'll have to do this every time I drink coffee. I feel stupid, like this is how everyone but me drinks coffee, and I've been missing the point. Then I think it over. I'm just cold right now. I'm not cold every time I drink coffee. Sometimes this is the way to drink coffee, and sometimes the other way is better. Crisis averted, and just in time to catch a taxi. There aren't trash cans in public here, so I put the paper cup in my pocket.
The driver is an affable-looking man with rosy cheeks and an argyle sweater. I instantly want to talk to him, but I know it's pointless. I say the line of Korean I always say to taxi drivers when I want to go home. "Take me to Dong Myong church please." He says "Dong Myong Church. I understand," and we start moving. Then, curiously, he blurts out a long string of words phrased as a question, but as usual, most of it is meaningless to me. Usually taxi drivers smile in bemusement, and ask me in a patronizing tone if I speak Korean. He didn't say anything about that, and now I'm really curious.
We're stopped at a stoplight now. "My Korean is not very good," I say in Korean, and the driver nods, forlorn, as they always do. Then I go on"...but please say that one more time." He doesn't, but he thinks for a second, then presses his hands together as in prayer, and bows his head.
"Ahhh." I say. "No." He wants to know, obviously, If I'll be attending church today. It's Sunday after all. I take a moment. "My home is near the church," I manage. The driver nods, and repeats my words back to me with slightly better phrasing and pronunciation, a technique I use when teaching English. We both nod, happy to have communicated.
He switches on the radio and changes the station. Taxi drivers in Korea largely listen to the news. Others listen to music by sorted genre, like anyone else. Most of the taxi drivers that listen to music choose "trot," a highly tolerable, up tempo polka type music meant to be danced to. Some listen to "popsong" which means oldies in English, and a significant minority listen to the insufferable downtempo love song genre called "ballad" which is populated by boy bands, and is what you usually hear in restaurants, and blasting at concert volumes when you walk past certain stores downtown.
This driver isn't listening to any of these. This is is some kind of flute playing a haunting, repetitive melody, over an irregular, nervous beat tapped out on what sounds like a paper drum. I have a thought when I hear it, that some music, newer music, rock for instance, is played on instruments adapted for a different purpose than their inventors intended. This music, on the other hand, sounds like it's being played by the inventor himself.
The driver taps the face of his radio, and says in English "Korea music."