coming home and going back

i've been back in texas since early april. i came back on the hopes that i'd get a job with my buddy. i should have seen it coming but it didn't work out. so i just lounge around now.

with the exception of a few well-known urban areas (NYC, boston, chicago, SF) living in this country without a car is a mug's game. it'd be one thing if getting to/from work and food shopping was possible with public transport but having a decent social life was not. cause then, at least, you could make a sustainable effort, so long as you eschewed going out. but even having a job in most parts of this country is difficult without a vehicle.

i've got to get to somewhere where that's not the case.

Realizations long overdue

A picture really is worth a thousand words.

A scene plays itself out. Played out a thousand million times before, but every year there's a new class eager to watch, and the young faces keep the old ones entertained.

Some consider it depressing how repetitive it can all get.

The darkness, the blaring sound, the frequent libations, the din of nicotine and yearning and lost causes amalgamated into one blearing syrup that cuckolds the senses. Things that happen in such places are only mentioned in the rueful, smiling regret of youthful indiscretions later on.

Sometimes it takes an un-airbrushed picture to really make things clear.

Such places and such encounters alter currents with astounding celerity. But those feelings are like the spring melts that swell mountain streams. They run their course, and for the early-summer season they do run they are dangerous, unbridled, even beautiful. But they are as ephemeral as they are torrential, washed out as soon as the snow evaporates away.

jokes are funny, but some people shut down their humor

i've always found it funny that many people don't consider why we do the things we do. they don't wonder why we breathe oxygen, or drink water, or have our senses concentrated in or around our heads (a process called cephalization); it's enough for them that we simply do.

to wit: why do we laugh? what is the reason for laughter? i don't think we really know, definitively, but one theory i like is that laughter is the human response to the perception of incongruity. this means people laugh when they expect a thing or situation to be or turn out one way, but then it turns out a different way. this probably developed from a collective defense mechanism. that is, the ancestors of men, living in arboreal or swamp-like environments, would become tense when they saw ripples in the water or a shivering of leaves; after all, those could be signs there was a predator ready to spring forth. in short, their minds started anticipating one particular outcome of events. when the rustling stopped to reveal only the wind acting on the leaves, or the goldfish jumped up from the water, these (simian?) creatures saw an outcome different from the one they anticipated. to show that there was no immediate threat to the group/family/clan/tribe, the ones closest to the source of 'danger' started laughing, which eventually everyone shared in when they realized there was no danger. this could also be the reason why laughter is 'infectious'.

i don't mean to give you something you could more succinctly or detailedly learn by cruising wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter i mean to say that laughter is itself a human outlet for tension. so i fail to comprehend the easy offence some people take at humor.

story: i'm at a bar in itaewon this saturday, talking with fellow rugby players of my friend paul. so i meet this one lass, introduce myself and start talking to her. i'm not attracted to her (i don't think she's much attractive at all) and i was not trying to pick her up, only talk to her, in my inebriated-enough state. she says some boys embarrassed her friend a couple of weekends back. they accomplished this by getting her drunk on fair quantities of liquor, and convinced her, while she was not of sound mind, to take off her top and dance on tables. so, in a jocular voice, and nothing approaching serious reflection, she asks 'how can i get back at them?'

now i, equally jocular, proffer the suggestion that she cruise their facebook pages, learn the names of their mothers, their hometowns, and send an email, official-enough looking, from a 'hospital' in their hometowns, staffed by a 'doctor' with an uncommon but not rare name offering his condolescences for his mother's recent diagnosis of cancer. of course, this was jocularly suggested, and had it been actually followed through, it WOULD have been funny given the incredible dedication and attention to detail it would require.

at this point, the girl, who shall remain nameless, but you know who you are, lays into me, lambasting me for my lack of 'sensitivity'. it turns out her mom died from cancer. i kindly apologized to her, and reminded her that no one had a monopoly on suffering. i don't really feel i had anything to apologize for, but i didn't wanna ruin the lass's night. you see she'd forgotten that just because cancer deaths lost humor in her situation, they did NOT lose humor in all situations. in fact, there's really no reason cancer deaths SHOULD have lost humor in her situation, except that she let them.

i hope i always remember humor is a tool to relieve tension, and that i receive jokes in the same spirit in which it's given.

cold weather and the gods must be crazy

the weather for the past two or so weeks in incheon has been awesome (for what is in essence mid-winter). the temperature has not really gone down below 3 degrees, even at night, and i've been wearing a light jacket. but starting tomorrow the forecast has at least three days of maximum 0. that's right, maximum 0. I'm gonna have to break out my big jacket again, and wear the under armour longjohns, cause i can't take temperatures that cold. i'm hoping, hoping, hoping the climate augurs have it wrong (again) this time.

i also finished the gods must be crazy, an excellent (if a bit dated) film about a glass coke bottle mindlessly dropped from a low-flying passenger plane into a remote region of the kalahari which is then found by a wandering bushmen. the film follows the bottle's attendant degradation of the moral atmosphere of the bushmen camp and its leaders voyage to 'the end of the world' to dispose of it. the film is generally light-hearted and optimistic, and gives a great insight into the simplicity, warmth, openness, and even innocence of 'uncivilized' man.

cultural gaps and meldings

there was a significant amount of shit that went down after i moved out of my apartment and into my new one. first off was the fact that the cleaning job i did was evidently not up to snuff with what management felt it should be. they said they had to throw out the comforter since there was too much dog hair on it. now i'm bearing in mind that i washed the comforter, and when i moved into the apt. i didn't get a new comforter. who knows how many people had sex or threw up their sick in it before i moved in there. i took it as a given that it was washed and i slept in it satisfied. i'll take my licks for not cleaning it up to their snuff, but i don't wanna be told that having a dog is somehow dirtier than jizzing all over the comforter.

jake and brian got into a state because there's no a/c in jake's new place, and it's promised in his contract. essentially jake's gonna have to stand firm to get what he's due. i think it'll happen.

on a more promising note, i went with heidi to see the potential stud for margo. the guy has two males. the older one is evidently pretty popular in korea, he's been in a few commercials and has been studded out over 30 times. he's solid and friendly, i just worry about the soreness on his nose and his glossy eye. they keep him outside and bull terriers have skin issues, so they should really keep him indoors. the picture is of the owner and the stud, whose name is actually 'bull'. they've got a really good looking but somewhat smaller male out there as well, and i might end up putting her with him.

솔날 and brenda's parents' house

about a week ago headed to brenda's parents' farmhouse for the 솔날 holiday. they live in a small town outside of 안동 (andong).

before going i thought i'd be totally uncomfortable, since brenda's the only one who speaks english in her family. but it turns out that i wasn't uncomfortable at all, and i think brenda was overjoyed that i put in some facetime with her folks. not to mention that she, her mother and her father all cooked some real good food out there. i ate well those two days.

jake came in and he's getting along nicely, as he seems to everywhere. we're gonna pay someone to teach us korean lessons. my goal is to be able to translate between my family and brenda's when my folks come out for the wedding.

jake's already making good waves with the other foreigners in 만수동 and he's being his usual brusk but somehow still easily relatable self. The above is his 'goaded-into-it but still-happily-obliging' pose with our buddy Simon who had passed out in the arms of lady liquor previously. strangely (or not so) i wasn't asked to strike one with 'sick boy'. i'm too sullen and surly for spontaneous pictures, and of course, not near enough photogenic.

a discussion with my boss

had a discussion with my boss about my friend and soon-to-be coworker jake arriving tomorrow. in one way or another, it ventured into a discussion about divorce.

in short, divorce is a very important social issue in korea. getting divorced is a kind of mark of shame, especially for the children of the divorced couple. now, like many americans, my parents are divorced. i let my boss know my parents were divorced when i was five, and it wasn't a big deal in america. brian (my boss) then said that it is the parents' duty to stay together at least until the child(ren) is(are) ten before getting divorced, that way the children are mentally ready for the divorce even if it's not fun. i made passing mention to the question of why ten years old is the proper number rather than nine or ten, but my main problem was my boss's (problem unwitting) supposition that i was by necessity maladjusted because i was under ten when my parents divorced. soon enough, it came down to my boss saying 'well it's important we respect each other's cultures'.

while this is true in some cases and respects, it is not a universal. i mean to say that respect is earned, not given as a prerequisite. no one has to respect anyone's else culture just because it is someone else's culture. cultures are like opinions. they can be had by anybody, but that doesn't mean there aren't wrong opinions or wrong cultures.

i don't think my culture is perfect by any means. but having spent a little bit over 2 years in this country, i realize i prefer my own country's culture to this one. in fact, i would go so far as to say that my culture is better than this one. i say this because there are many things in this culture that require an individual to do some duty, which is not required in my own. an individual should stay with his/her wife/husband, because it's their duty to their families. a worker should go to dinner or drinks with his boss, because it's his duty as an employee. a person should prostrate themselves before their parents and grandparents because it's their duty to their elders.

my culture, more often that not, says 'fuck duty'. if a thing is not to be enjoyed when it's done, then it's not done. people's feeling are hurt, of course, but mainly people aren't allowing feelings to be developed where they could be hurt by the free choice of individuals. this society, ensconced for thousands of years in a rigidly stratified confucian farfreleuches dictating 'a place for every man, and every man in his place', still holds on, strongly in many cases, to the the belief in and even reverence for forms. 'this is how things should be, so this is how we'll act'.

if these people had any balls, they'd be westerners by now.