What To Do, What To Do…

Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve finally completed the accounting certificate program I started three years ago before I left the States. Add to that the fact that my classes for the year are finished (we’re doing nothing but self-study sessions prior to the final exams next week, and there’s no way I’m attempting anything other than showing a movie after exams are done) and, well, let me allow the Stone Roses – cough, er, ah, I mean the Soup Dragons to sum it up for you…

Despite the lack of a parade, bronze statue, banquet in my honor or other momentous event to celebrate my completion of the certificate program (I can’t even attend the graduation ceremony, since it’ll be next June in LA and I’ll be here then) it still feels like a pretty significant achievement. It seems strange now to think back to that moment in late 2008 when I was a copiously moustachioed (long story) temporary mailroom clerk at a music publisher in LA, watching the world economy fall down around me, and coming to the realization that, as an adult over 30 without a decent job still struggling to cover basic expenses in a highly competitive job market with over $50,000 in student loan debt and mounting credit card balances, maybe it was time for a fairly radical career change. I didn’t exactly picture myself right here, right now back then – I’m not sure what I was foreseeing back then exactly, other than a tiny light at the end of an otherwise rapidly dimming tunnel. The process wasn’t easy – at times before I left the States to do this job I was doing production work six days a week, thirteen hours a day and trying to complete all my coursework on my one day off. (Whenever conservative, “54 percenter” types get on their high horses and say things like, “Why don’t these lazy unemployed people get jobs?” or, “Why don’t these whiny liberal arts majors go back to school?” I really want to shake one of them by the shoulders and say, “Why don’t YOU try actually doing that some time, and find out how easy it is?!?”) Now here I am three years later, sitting at a desk in Korea reading “Anna Karenina” on my computer whilst managing self-study sessions for antsy, exhausted high school students. Crazy world.

As welcome as the change from intermittent freelance work to a full-time job has been, at times it’s felt like I’ve been working sixteen-hour days, five or six days a week for the past two years. The amount of study required for my certificate program has varied wildly from quarter to quarter as different courses had much different workloads. My first year here I was even trying to complete a TEFL certificate and take Korean classes one day a week while I was studying, working and trying to maintain a modest home. So this sudden realization (more in the accounting sense than the mental sense in this case) that I suddenly have very little to do at work and much less to do at home has been kind of a shock to the system for me, like taking a fish out of dirty pond water and suddenly putting it into a clean new fish tank. I honestly have no idea what to do with myself, to some extent. I’ve been growing pretty tired of playing the handful of video games that I own. A friend of mine has been trying to get me to join some online games with him, but I’m concerned that I don’t really have the motivation to become competent enough at a game to play it in a competitive environment. I’ve been too lazy to go back to the local video store since the “Haeundae” incident of earlier this year, and since watching DVDs on my TV involves moving my laptop to the floor and rerouting some cables I’m often too lazy to carry through with the effort. (I know, that doesn’t sound like a lot of toil and trouble, but think about it – when do you want to watch TV the most? Exactly – when you have absolutely no desire to put any sort of effort into entertaining yourself.) I’m genuinely trying to make an effort to read books, but, you know, they’re books. Snore. Plus books have to be bought or downloaded and I hate reading off the computer at my desk. (Please keep in mind while reading this that this is a recounting of my attempts to relax, and as such gross sloth is not only acceptable, but also a key element of the pursuit.) It’s getting too cold to go outside and hike. I’ve been exercising every day at my school’s fitness room, but that only kills an hour or so every night. I’ve been considering buying a guitar but I want to wait until I come back from vacation this winter to see what my finances are like before I invest in one. The stuff on TV is in Korean and the people outside are talking the same gibberish for some reason. So in the meantime I’m at somewhat of a loss for how to fill my waking hours in the evening. Mind you, I just completed my coursework yesterday, so this is still a rather new problem. I’m sure I’ll have it figured out in a few days or a week. Either that or I’ll finally figure out how it is that people can actually bring themselves to sleep for eight hours a night. (It seems like such a waste of time to get more than six or seven. I mean over a lifetime, that’s like… [fumbles with calculator] 57,816 excess hours lost to somnambulance? Unacceptable.)

Vacation planning has occupied some of my time at school. Now that I’m going back through the guidebook I bought for my trip to Malaysia, I’m starting to realize that I don’t have the time or money to do everything I originally wanted to do on the trip. Part of the reason is that the guidebook goes into lush detail describing exciting trekking and scuba diving adventures available in Borneo, which are wonderful to read about but generally too expensive, too time-consuming, too far-flung or too far out of my expertise in outdoor sports. So far I’ve only discovered one or two adventures that I really wanted to partake in and could reasonably pursue that I can’t squeeze in because of time and logistical constraints. Regardless, I’m really looking forward to the trip. It’s probably best that I don’t try to pack too much into my itinerary so that I can take an afternoon off to rest if I need it or squeeze in some sort of adventure that I hadn’t anticipated if I want to. There is such a thing as overplanning, despite what the more fastidious elements of society (and Word spell-checker) will tell you.

Christmas is coming. Christmas in Korea is weird because Korea has all the Christmas trappings with no actual Christmas. There are Christmas trees and Christmas decorations and Christmas music everywhere, but as Westerners understand the holiday, there’s no actual Christmas at the end of all of it. It’s kind of a big Christmas tease – all the Christmas foreplay with no Christmas release at the end. (You’re quite welcome to keep that mental picture, by the way.) In Korea, Christmas is mostly a time for young couples to get together and have dates. Yes, somehow Korea decided it needs a *third* Valentine’s Day instead of Christmas. This definitely does not jibe so well with my mental picture of what Christmas should be, which involves family and gifts and cookies and a fireplace and eggnog. (LOTS of eggnog.) Some of my friends here in town are planning a celebration for the night of Christmas Eve, but it still doesn’t seem the same (despite the fact that I have gone to great lengths to attempt to make eggnog from scratch for the party). Granted, I can’t exactly import my family (or a fireplace, for that matter) into the country just to celebrate Christmas, but Christmas looms large on that list of Western things you just can’t get here (along with really good pastrami, baguettes that aren’t rock-hard, dry red or white wine, and, unfortunately, store-bought eggnog).

Meh, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll probably touch base again some time after I arrive in Kuala Lumpur for vacation, or perhaps after I get back to Korea. OBLIGATORY CLOSING SONG!

(Postscript: I was going to include a link to the White Stripes video for "Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself," but that turned out to just be Kate Moss dancing in her underwear, and that seemed kind of sexist. So I'm including this video instead:)

(Other Postscript: Hey, Eastbound and Down, Season 2 is available on iTunes now! My problems are solved!)

Three Weddings and Two Festivals

Hello again. Don’t tell anyone but I’m penning this at work. I also spent all morning working on some accounting homework I was too tired to do last night instead of working on lesson plans or school-related stuff. My 1st graders are in Jeju on a class trip this week so I had no classes yesterday and only one today, and I’ll have only one tomorrow and none on Friday due to some test. The nice thing about this job is that there almost always seems to be a day or week off when you really need it. It could be an unexpected holiday (the anniversary of the school founder’s death, for example), an unexpected test, the county’s sports day, a mid- or end-of-semester exam, the week before an exam when your co-teachers ask you to allow extra classes or student self-study during your class period, Korea’s national end-of-high-school exam… The list is endless. It’s almost enough to make a guy feel put upon when he actually needs to teach a full week of classes with no weird scheduling conflicts. Almost.

It was already several weeks ago, around the time of the midterm exams (which were absurdly early this semester… we only had about 4 1/2 weeks of my class before the mid-term break, in part because of Chuseok and that self-study week before the exam) that I started to reflect on just how quickly time flies here. It seems like only yesterday that I was coming back to school from the summer session and contemplating how much longer I should wear my short-sleeved shirts to work, and already today I had to wear a cardigan to work for the first time since last winter. (It was 3 degrees outside this morning and still the school has all the doors and windows in the stairwells open. I would like to put forward the motion to recognize that COLD AIR IS NOT FRESH AIR, PEOPLE.) Winter vacation in Malaysia, my brief jaunt home to the States and even the next contract are all looming near-future events now. It’s a strange thing to contemplate. Maybe I just don’t have enough to occupy my mind here other than the intricacies of the US tax code (it’s a course I’m taking this quarter) and the passage of time. Maybe I need a new hobby. Maybe I should get a pet. No, wait, I already abandoned one pet back home, I don’t need to put another living thing in limbo here. Maybe I should grow a plant instead. Meh. I should probably wait until next spring to do that. Oh well…

The news this time around is all pretty bland. I’ve been using my school’s fitness room daily and I’ve dropped some weight. I’m already down a pant size and I was using yet another new notch on my belt for a couple days before I brought that pizza home from Costco last night. I wonder if my friends will even recognize me when I come home to visit. (Not that I’m bragging or anything.) I went to the Jinju Latern Festival earlier this fall with some other foreign teachers from my town, but we didn’t want to spend the night so we had to run to the bus station just as they were launching the fireworks and lighting the lanterns on the river. I had a good time, though. I likewise made an underwhelming trek to the Liquor and Rice Cake Festival in Gyeongju. Originally I was planning to make a weekend out of it to explore the city – maybe even rent a bicycle and cruise the sights, which I’ve been meaning to do, if only as an excuse to ride a bike again. As it turns out one of my co-teachers got married that weekend (more on that in a moment) so I decided to do the festival as a day trip instead. I left early to make the trip up to the Seokguram stone grotto in Gyeongju (which was a little bit of a disappointment – the interior is behind glass and the exterior is covered by rocks and grass so it’s hard to get a really good look at the impressive stonework involved in building the thing) and was supposed to meet up with some friends from my town at the festival later in the day, but my friends cancelled at the last minute. It didn’t make sense to try to get in touch with people I know who live in Gyeongju at that point since it was obvious I wouldn’t stay too long, so I circled the festival, bought a ceramic shot glass on a string that resembles a bell (I can see where that might come in handy in the future at least), ran into the same English teachers I usually see at festivals that involve heavy drinking (they’re nice folks, don’t get me wrong, it’s just funny how it always seems to be the same people), dodged an angry Phillies fan who didn’t much like my Cardinals cap, sucked down all the free samples I could, bought a largely unremarkable bottle of makgeoli and headed back home. It’s good to acknowledge when you can’t force a trip to be a good time and know to cut your losses.

So yeah, one of my co-teachers got married. I found out about the wedding at the beginning of the week when it happened. Before that I had briefly met her boyfriend, but I had no idea they were even engaged until I got the electronic invitation. The invitation was pretty impressive, albeit delivered only a short time span before the impending nuptials. Apparently there’s a thing they do here for “modern” style weddings where the bride and groom get together before the wedding and do a photo shoot at a photography studio for the invitations. The bride and groom wear different dresses and tuxes (respectively, of course) and pose together in various rooms with various complementary tchotchkes. (There was kind of yester-tech-y feel to some of the stuff in my co-teacher’s pictures – old television monitors and stuff like that – which appealed to my inner geek. I would share the pictures but I’m not sure if the invitation is still online and I’m sure that would be an egregious violation of my co-teacher’s privacy.) They threw in the obligatory hanbok photo at the end of the set as well, to keep the traditionalists happy. My first reaction was, “Hey, the groom’s not supposed to see the bride in the dress before the wedding!” but that reaction was soon mitigated by the realization of how much made sense about the arrangement. The way I see it, there’s all this pressure on a bride to pick the right dress for the wedding, and then she wears it once and stuffs it in a closet either forever or until she feels like pulling it out and making herself feel bad about how much weight she’s gained. With this photo shoot thing, the bride gets to try out every dress that she could possibly want for the wedding, and gets a souvenir for the effort to boot. So the bride can try out the short and flirty dress without worrying about scandalizing the great aunts, or go for the dress with the ridiculously long train without worrying about practical issues of mobility, or whatever. Plus, if you’re going to only wear the thing once, why not buy one and rent five? Makes perfect sense to me.

The wedding itself took place in this purpose-built wedding hall that was a little like a giant wedding airport. There was another wedding scheduled for my co-teacher’s wedding terminal something like 50 minutes after our scheduled start time, which I knew because everything scheduled in the hall was listed on big LCD monitors all around the building. The employees at the wedding hall were already setting up flowers and photos for the next wedding as my co-teacher was completing hers. When I met my co-teacher just before the wedding, she was perched in an out-of-the-way annex in her dress (she went bold and got the one with the long, unwieldy train, by the way) on what I could only describe as a bridal throne. This was a slightly strange experience for me, since my reaction was, “I know you, I see you and work with you every day at work, but now you’re in a strange room on a throne. What am I supposed to do here?” Luckily it didn’t last long. All the staff from our school was invited, and everyone who came showed up without their spouses or families, the same way you wouldn’t consider bringing your spouse or your family to any other work function. The ceremony was mercifully brief, with a big showy light show and a song from the groom, and everyone who attended talked through the whole thing like it was no big deal to be talking through a wedding. After the ceremony we all filed down to the banquet hall for a buffet dinner, except for the bride and groom who were apparently spirited away to some other private family ceremony. I was in and out of the place and on my way home within an hour and thirty minutes. Honestly I have to admire the efficiency.

Some of you are probably reading this and thinking, “Oh, how awful, they’ve Westernized their marriages and it’s so terrible because it’s so us and white and not at all them and Asian.” As you may have guessed from my tone, I’m thinking that your thinking is full of shit. Lots of people in the modern world choose to have modern weddings instead of traditional weddings. I think most of the best weddings I’ve been to have dispensed with as many traditions as possible. One set of my friends, for example, had a non-traditional wedding that I thought got everything exactly right. When they got married, they put everyone up in a hotel for the weekend (not a super fancy place, but a very nice one), wore regular clothes to the ceremony, brought their dog, did the vows like it was no thing, and had dinner and everything else immediately after the ceremony, more or less in the same room. (My gift to them was to convince all of our mutual male friends to grow moustaches for the wedding. The wedding pictures are freakin’ amazing.) In my opinion, this is the way to do a wedding. No prince and princess shit necessary. Just let all of your friends and family get together in one place at one time, get everyone a little tipsy, get them to buy you some appliances and celebrate your relationship. Let’s be fair, whatever realization you had that you wanted to be together, and whatever promise you made that you would stay together, probably happened long before the wedding, and if making that promise legally binding really means that much to you then you’re probably not very good at keeping promises. So in short, and especially as someone with a Y-chromosome, I like the wedding-in-a-big-box concept. One-stop shopping. Find the best product at the best price and pay the guy. No muss, no fuss. Wedding traditions are all kind of ridiculous anyway. One of my other co-teachers told me that traditionally Korean couples had two weddings, one in the bride’s hometown and one in the groom’s. The ceremony took place and the spouse’s parents’ house and the whole village was invited. I’ve also been told that traditional Korean ceremonies involve a LOT of standing, bowing and more standing, like to the point of being kind of brutal to watch. Also, traditionally it was the first time the bride and groom had ever met. A wedding like that, while a nice tradition to preserve and cherish, doesn’t really work in the modern context. So there’s no reason not to have a modern “Western” wedding for your co-workers and extended family and do the traditional stuff somewhere else while your co-workers and family fill up on ham and raw salmon. Traditions are great and all but there also comes a time for them to step aside and let modernity take over. For example, when my cousin got married she had a non-denominational ceremony outdoors. Nothing unusual about that in this day and age, really. Up until the moment just after the toast, when one of the groom’s relatives yelled, “Mazel tov!” I had never thought about the fact that my cousin’s new husband was Jewish. (My cousin, like most of my family, is extremely blond and Lutheran.) I’m guessing the religious differences weren’t all that important to my cousin and cousin-in-law, or they had found a way to work them out, since they got married and all, but if they opted for a strictly traditional ceremony they would have had to argue about whether there’s going to be a priest or a rabbi and who has to convert and all that shit. There’s no reason to have to do all that personal stuff publicly. So anyway, the moral of this story is, if you insist on getting married for some dumb reason, please keep shit short and simple like they do in Korea. And please have an open bar, because cash bars are lame. Also please feel free to get totally gay-married because there’s no reason to make a fuss about that either because marriage is lame anyway. Meanwhile, I will be here, remaining single, and being not at all bitter about it.

Alright, that’s enough local color commentary for now. Nothing that exciting is looming in the immediate future. I’m currently in first place in my friend’s fantasy football league and looking forward to the fact that this situation could never possibly change and there’s absolutely no way that I will suffer any sort of comeuppance. (Not that I’m bragging or anything.) I’m bound for Busan this weekend to enjoy Halloween and a hopefully not-cancelled-due-to-rain fireworks festival. And one of the other teachers is asking me to go to the fitness room now so I’d better wrap this up. Mazel tov for now, suckers.