mapleandbrownsugar

Death Of A Blog

2008-12-28T18:15:00.006+09:00

Death Of A Blog

I think with the coming of a baby and the establishment of a family here now, I've come to find a pattern of many new bridges recently crossed. The paths seem to knit together into a picture of an era of my life spent here - too many challenges met in this strange land of Korea for me to justify continuing to explore it as a complete outsider anymore.

I think the beginning of the end came when I was shopping for life insurance here. But certainly with improved Korean listening skills, a page has been turned and the seeming impenetrable mystery of this bizarre language and place, the complete otherness that is Korea has been to some extent resolved for me to the point where most of the signage is as recognizable and predictable as in a stroll through a Canadian city, and street corner conversations eavesdropped in on constantly reveal their regionalisms, personalities and banal subject matter. Discussions become as recognizable as any on the 6pm GOtrain out of Toronto.

More importantly and overshadowing my musings on life here in what has only recently come to define itself as a personal era marked and ended, the new adventure of fatherhood has begun with so many surprises, not only within the context of myself or family, but also in terms of this country, many of them pleasant surprises (for example, Korean LaMaze classes actively encouraging expectant fathers to be supporters and coaches in the delivery process, sonogram sessions welcoming me in - this has proved a patriotic embarassment to me considering Halifax, Nova Scotia's own IWK/Grace hospital has forcibly removed at least one father from the sonogram room *after* the mother expressed her wish for him to be present. We Canadians, we think we're so smug. How many Canucks continue to roll off the planes daily with a Messiah complex determined to save the Korean women and punch out Korean men? Canadians know so little about what's going on here much of the time. Perhaps the new generation of Korean nurses should be rolling off the planes onto the Halifax tarmac and punching the lights out of the IWK/Grace Maternity Hospital staff instead!)

So I've decided I'm retiring this blog for the time being. It is interesting to witness the death of a blog's purpose. It's also illuminating to see in more clear relief how this has served the purpose of my peace-making (or peace-keeping) with this new country. I think I'm done carefully accounting how (or whether) daily Korea should affect me as the Canadian I thought I was.

Having now seen my peace-making blog effort for what it is,

I bow...

and turn my attention to the new adventures of becoming an international parent. I hope a new blog will prove useful to me in marking the footprints I will leave in this new century, and charting the path I'll take in this uncertain world stretched out before me, in new colors I only notice now.

Thanks for reading and sharing.

And yes, they're really the same as us.

EFL Teaching As Performance

2008-11-17T20:23:00.004+09:00

I was sitting down with my wife tonight at supper and as we were recounting the day each of us had, it occured to her that my job must be quite easy and boring since I teach the same lesson all day long to different classes. She mentioned that the prospect of doing the same thing over and over again was a big deterrent to her becoming a full-time teacher.

It struck me as odd that although that was a spot-on description of what I did, from someone who knew me very well no less, nevertheless I didn't come to think of it that way at all. Yes there were moments when I was bored, but the way I did think of my job, I chose to explain to her as an expereince similar to that of memorizing an opera role to perform night after night.
Of course, what is it that classical musicians do when they learn music? After all the same damn music is there all the time, you're told pretty much what to do, right? It's not like you can change any of the notes, after all.

Well, I started thinking of a complicated run of sixteenth notes from some light-fared small-sized orchestra of the Rossini or Mozart repertoire. Yes you've got the same run to do every time, and yes you have to be healthy enough to do it, but even though you have to sing all of them in the exact same order, what happens over time is that your personality grows on it, on that music or lesson plan. It becomes like a stone wall on which vines have grown and taken shape, pulling ever so gently at the bricks, grasping at them through their pores and subtly but every so certainly, changing the contour of that wall's shape and definition.

That's very much how my personality grows on a lesson plan I have to repeat. I guess I think of it as a performance, and each time I'm polishing it or handling it slightly differently, it gives way to subtle but strong pressures that change it, the way the shape of a bone might change over time, or a thick clay pot that has not yet been baked. The first time I show the lesson, that clay pot may have a well-defined lip, nicely fluted neck and bulbous vase body, but as children ask unforeseen questions in the successive lessons, as they adapt the procedures to better fit their ideas, that metaphoric claypot lip may change to a wavy clam-shell-shape, or the vase may elongate or become more squashed.

It's never occured to me that doing the same lesson over again could be boring, because I don't think it's possible for me to do it the exact same way twice. In comparison, the sorts of windows of variables that a jazz improv musician would have to fill in each song seem like expansive boundless nebulae of outer space, next to the work of a classical musician. I don't think I could just jump straight into it. I would need a framework. I think I've come to regard these lesson plans as a performance of a sort.

So I told her I'm always "working" the lesson, surrendering it to forces of experience that make it better the next time. I think this process of polishing can be a source of joy, although not a sensational kind. It's more like the quiet kind that comes from lots of patient observation, study and quiet notating of changes over time, the way a botanist might do watch a shoot transform into a flower.

And not only that but it is also so true that no matter what job you have you are always going to have those skeletons you discover about your job, those things about the job you will not like. You are never going to get away from meeting that skeleton no matter what the job, so you may as well get around to dusting off a place beside your seat for him to come in and sit down how to live together - because you're just never going to get rid of him. He's a blood relative of our need to overcome adversity. If there is none to be found at first, our minds will spread like weeds into the soft earth beneath our circumstances and find some to complain about, I think. As far as having skeletons goes, I think having to do the same lesson for many periods is fairly tame.

I was describing to the missus about today's lesson - actually, I thought it was one of the crappiest I'd given this semester. The CD-ROM interactive content really low-balled the kids' abilities, the chant didn't have enough to work on for song time, and the activity I'd planned - a whisper-line game - was short about 10 minutes of needed fill-in time. So in a blissful moment of rolling with it and not over-thinking, I did what any composer worth his salt would do: I let the momentum extend *itself* freely into the next activity. Let me explain.

So the whisper line game was rolling along pretty well. The kids were really involved in scoring well for their respective teams. We'd gone through all the derailers pretty swiftly (the kid who cries because he doesn't perform well got back on his feet pretty easily today, and the whiners (there's no Korean word for sportsmanship, by the way - did you know that?) were at a minimum.) Then it came time to end the game as I could feel that crest of fascination receding. I could feel I'd wrung that momentum out for most of what it was worth. But the kids were still hooked on the English, juices flowing and waiting for that next one-up event.

In a moment of inspiration I got individual team members (randomly picked) to stand up, pick competitors from the other teams and have a new contest. I would speak the Korean phrase, and they'd have to utter the English phrase as fast as they could. Making them go from hearing Korean to competitive translating was one final frontier we'd not yet gone to. It was a natural choice. First person got two points.

Well, it was a smash success. The kids wailed with excitement each round. At one point I even set them up for today's new phrase 'are you alright?' (not 'are you okay', part of last week's vocabulary set) two kids blurted out last week's and one kid blurted out today's sentence and the latter won the two points to the exquisite pain of the other teams. Koreans are so marvelously dramatic at losing. They actually contort their faces like they've just drunk poison or something when they lose. And the noises. Oh the noises they make. Like a Bruce Lee nameless-Asian-henchman getting slowly skewered with a sword, man. It's so delicious to watch especially if you're the person who won. They really shouldn't make it quite so enjoyable to beat them, but they do.

Anyhow, that simple gesture - simply extending the momentum (but more truly, letting the momentum extend itself and me standing out of its way) into the next activity - transformed an adequate-but-possibly-strained-for-time lesson plan into a naturally flowing piece of performance art.

There's plenty to be happy about with that, I think. It hadn't occured to me before how much of my having been a performer has followed me into this new career.

City birds and three-year old kids

2008-11-02T21:08:00.001+09:00

I’m looking back at pictures I’ve collected and I saw this one that got me thinking back to a time when I was having trouble adjusting to Toronto life. One cold, grey, damp, blustery fall Toronto day, while I was crossing the intersection at Yonge & Eglinton en route to my 9-5 daily grind, I had this wonderfully random experience. I’ll always remember it - it was at 11am a busy time for that intersection on a weekday, and just as I was crossing I noticed a flock of about thirty pigeons flying round in a circle high above the intersection. It was pretty to see but I kept moving - until the third time they came around. Then I stopped. I walked back to the curb and watched.

It looked like the pigeons were playing a game, either against the wind or following the leader. But more interestingly it looked like they were playing an identifiably human game, one that very small children often play. It kind of looked like they were play-imitating the busy-ness of the traffic below, in the best way they could, by circling around and around, much like a child might do in a room at a social setting. They were swooping and moving in that uniform organism motion that birds often do, but they were going around 5, 6, 7 times, a gloriously free-formed contrast against the forbidding concrete lines of the skyscrapers’ architecture enclosing them, playing against these boundaries surrounding them at the corners of that space high above us. You know adult birds have the minds of 2 or 3 year old children. It was really beautiful to watch, but by the time I had my camera out ready to film it, they had settled down into the square in front of the Eglinton Mall. City birds being often quite hungry scavengers, they tend to save the energy-depleting act of flying for moments of necessity. So this was quite an unusual athletic display of playing.

It reminds me of lyrics to the band Adema's song, 'Brand New Thing'

“everybody wants to belong~
everybody's singing along~”

2008-11-01T23:25:00.005+09:00

TWO KOREAN FORTRESSES OF INDIFFERENCE: CO-TEACHERS AND THE NATIONAL TEXTBOOK

Lately I find myself really wishing I could change my K-co-teach.

She doesn't present my case at all to administration, I feel. Having been at the same previous school for five semesters, I'd forgotten to establish the climate most useful in Korean-to-foreigner work relationships - a passive-aggressive war of attrition. But I'm back on the ball starting Monday.

So far this is the way all of my concerns have gone... (minus the imagining part which only developed recently) If I walked to her and said, 'I have an axe in my forehead and it really hurts! Could you help me?' then going by the way she's mediated everything else to date, I'd have to conclude that she would then have a long meeting with the administration while I bled, and then come back, sit me down and in torturously slow yet perfect English, explain to me that they have determined that the reason I am suffering is because I have an axe in my forehead. And that would be the end of discussion. She would sit there, smugly accomplished, dutiful, suddenly interested in inspecting her attire for any possible dust, quietly waiting for me to go away, possibly wondering why I haven't yet.

I would sit there and (only for the briefest moment) imagine the fascinating and beautifully-spotted red mess it would make on her prim black suit were she suddenly decapitated at that very moment.

I calmly tell her that I already knew that when I spoke to her and could she please help me and she would say, 'sorry you have to suffer that.' That's what talking to my co-teacher about every issue is like. I don't think there was any doggie-doo in the small welcome cake I gave at the beginning of the year, but maybe I should have taste-tested it first just to be sure.

It's too bad that war of attrition (i.e. until the principal notices *and* decides the atmosphere needs to change (and that can be a long time unless you're an especially gifted person at bringing about change even across languages)) seems to be the only way for foreigners to get things moving forward in this country's teachers' rooms. But I'll be fine, I've decided. I've still got the battle armor locked away in the storage room somewhere. Ah here they are: selective language difficulties in requests for favors, the policy of saying yes but doing what you were going to do anyway regardless of what you just said, and of course the golden rule in Korea: it's better to say "sorry" afterward, than "may I?" beforehand. They still fit well.

Discussing problems embedded in the Korean national English textbook is kind of the same experience. EFL teachers of many stripes, young or old all seem to be united in their hatred of the series, which runs from grade 3 to grade 6 and does not start with any alphabet or phonics, but rips straight into 'My name is Minsu' from no precedent (unless you count Hangeul) (which of course ought to be a no-brainer for Korean toddlers, right? Just think back to your first experience with any non-arabic letter-based language. Did it not just immediately jump out at you too? No? Well we can't all be blessed with the chromosomes I guess. )

On my earlier point, I heard today about a fellow waygookin ELI who asked his co-teacher to get the IT guy to fix his projector and a week later she said, "Oh, the IT checked your internet, it's fine." Great, but he wanted the projector fixed! I'm sure that if that IT note were just scribbled out in Korean, it would probably have been done faster and handled correctly. How frustrating it must be for non-fluent speakers of Korean to be here.

But as regards the national textbook, I've had a hate-love relationship with it. Yet even in the dark of night, a light appears to have come. Let me explain.

I hated the national textbook (for the subject of English) when I first arrived. And on its own, yes it's quite awful. Zero strategic competence promoted, next to zero socio-linguistic competence promoted. I say next to zero because the applicable situations for use of its target language are obvious and well-presented, but because none of the necessary pliability/removeability of the language is introduced, no near-parallel situations and no other situations in which most of the target language could be useful are studied, explored, understood, or even imagined. It just does not reflect the way language is used, and so does not help at all in the natural process by which humans are going to dissect and use the language naturally anyway.

It's almost approached like programming, the way a robot would try to use language... patiently waiting, perhaps eternally, for extremely narrow prerequisites to be met in order to summon the studied target language recording. And although we're dealing with humans who should be able to see that and jump over it, unfortunately, with no hint of reality (i.e. bendability) in the lessons, this rigid army-method is what's promoted - indeed, it's what's rewarded in Korean English language classrooms.

Having acknowledged that, I have to say that my relationship with the national textbooks has changed drastically this year due largely to my elementary school co-teachers having published their own excellent companion workbook (student workbook and teacher's guide) which bridges a lot of gaps, and secondly the enormous amount of work that the twenty-one school teachers leading grades 4 through 6 have done here to have all materials made, properly boxed, labeled and shelved for easy reference.

All of the textbook lessons now have at least two (and some lessons as many as four) supplementary periods, both pre-lesson preps and post-lesson work (and sometimes mid-lesson) for the standard four-periods-per-lesson textbook series. And what they do is great - instead of eight cards for one-line bingo, we usually have twelve which you can do a lot more with of course. Pre- and post-lessons consistently design each unit to move from controlled learning to an end result of open or uncontrolled learning i.e. independent composition, open substitution drills, role-plays and basically freer use of the language. It's not as free as it could be, but it's a lot better than what the national textbook would leave you with. I'm thinking of making or buying a copy of each grade and bringing it to Gwangju for the next teacher's meeting and showing what my lesson plans have started to look like. In short, I am no longer dreading my textbook lessons but look forward to them. However, they still need to go a step further than they do.

Another thing is that I've started to develop a small running inventory of the unwritten but high-currency values that Koreans having in estimating what constitutes good classroom games in experimentation. I've started, therefore, to bend the rules a bit with variations on their old workhorses, knowing a bit better how they relate to the national textbook.

So my concept of the national textbook has changed. Now if I could just get the co-teacher changed, I'd be all set.

2008-10-11T14:30:00.005+09:00

Chintsy Foreigners In Korea - A Comparison

Well it's long been known that ESL in Korea attracts a diverse group of foreigners and while some of those are the types we'd like to get to know, many - it is not secret - are not. It doesn't take being here very long before the stories rack up.

When I first came to Korea, I'd replaced a fellow who was nicknamed 'hamburger teacher'. He was thus crowned because after having flown to Korea on his employer's money, he declared on his third day that he was quitting because there wasn't a 'decent hamburger stand' nearby. Clearly it was hamburger teacher's intention to use his employer's ticket to find a second job and bill them for the same ticket. In the three days that he'd worked at the kindergarten academy (the kindie hagwon) his English lessons consisted of Day 1: having the children draw the best picture of teacher's face, and Day 2: photocopying the best of which and making the kids competitively color this portrait. Sadly, not even a prize was offered. I believe he now works for a poly institute somewhere in Incheon.

The war-chest of stories of Korea's line-up of finest freaky foreigners occupies a thread of some thirty to forty pages on Dave's ESL cafe, under the title 'freakiest waygook contest'. But less sensational, though equally freaky, are the chintsy foreigners of Korea (of which there is a spicey variety) equally capable of superhuman feats of penny-pinching. I've been in Korea for a cumulative total of three and a half years and I've seen some funny posts from departing foreigners. Among the most memorable was a guy looking to sell his own socks for a dollar each. Not serious, you say, but they were declared as brand new and guaranteed never used. He was in fact trying to sell his school gifts.

There are the less-interesting, more standard variety of penny pinchers who go on strict gimbap-only diets for months on end (for those never-beens, a california roll - or gimbap - is available with side dishes and water for a single dollar (1000 Won) at any gimbap mom and pop shop in any Korean city. I even knew of a foreigner who knew the exact delivery date for the cheaper 700 Won triangle gimbaps for the Korean 7/11 store (Family Mart) and would show up just after the truck arrived and buy 20 - 30 of them for meals for the next few weeks.

In my previous city there was a foreigner who had a habit of breaking toilet tank covers when he would descend on foreigners' homes in moments of urgency to use their bathrooms. Rumored to have been embarassed over a legitimate and unfortunate bowel problem, he would work himself up into such a tizzy over the toilet flush not being strong enough to flush everything away, he would then proceed to open the tank and play Mr. Fixit, and in the process break the toilet tank top in his little spiralling black vortex of anxiety. He did this more than once. Freaky yes, but what's chintsy about him? Well, instead of covering the cost that the tenants would now have to bear, he'd shown up later at one thusly victimized home with a bottle of krazy glue in an attempt to save himself some money. I believe the report was that the krazy glue didn't work.

What binds these folks together and alows them to hide within our mostly innocent ranks of otherwise balanced foreigners who are also here to save money? Well, very few people come to Korea anymore to do culture tours (e.g. I'm just here for the culture, and I don't care about the money) and that is, to an extent, understandable. Korea pays the best of any Asian country and a lot of Westerners come here to pay off debts. But there is a point where normal thriftiness departs from the land of the sane, where said foreigner becomes, in a very different sense, a stranger in a strange land of penny-pinching craziness, and of these there are no shortage in Korea - westerners who won't even talk to Koreans in English without being paid, westerners who play church groups off of one another to see how long they can stretch out the trend of free weekend suppers, foreigners who yell at taxi drivers because the meter's 1800 won rolls over to 1900 Won close to their stop, and so on.

But in the games of socially retarded chintsy foreigner olympics, it may be possible that we've found a Gold Medal contender this weekend.

Striking out on a new evolutionary plateau of chintsiness all his own, it turns out that, recently, one foreigner deep in the countryside of Korea has been playing his own friends off as mules for his personal profit under the false pretense of 'covering house expenses' for an annual Hallowe'en party. It's widely known that said foreigner has been bragging about how much money he made last year off the backs of his friends, how little the party actually cost, and how he plans to repeat the formula for another killing. Here is an example of another strain of the same brand of socially retarded foreigner in his most flamboyant strut - to do this, he smears another local orphanage fund-raiser Hallowe'en party, plastering fundraiser posters with his own party poster, and hijacking the invite list online to distract party-goers. Now, what kind of a bottom feeder would actually go to these lengths to secure another year of 'bragging rights'?

And they wonder why Koreans are so suspicious of us.

Back home in Canada, what would happen to someone who'd have done this? No doubt an ass-kicking would be in order, or at the least, a demand for a party at the expense of the host. Let's hope this is just all a big misunderstanding and that, in fact, our chintsy foreigner will at least be opening his purse-strings in good humor and providing free booze to stave off the anger of any foreigners he duped into his charitable 'expense-covering' cause last year. Perhaps next year, holding one or more of the orphans hostage for ransom will also get tossed around as a possibility for making just one more dollar.Assuming of course the police don't arrive on a tip of drugs being distributed.

No doubt, a special edition in the chronicles of Korea's chintsiest waygooks.

2008-10-02T21:11:00.005+09:00

COUNTRYSIDE FOLK ART BIKE TREK

I've taken to heading out before sunsets and riding my new bike through the expansive fields of rice paddies that lie beyond Jangheung's brief limits. Dotting those long stretches of farms are the homes of most of Jangheung's real residents, scattered far out across the landscape, indicating their presence on these crisp autumn evenings with tiny plumes of smoke coming from the tops of tin stove-pipes poking out from corrugated tin rooftops, or blue-tile Asian style curved roofs.

On those country road evening rides, the air is just so fresh and cool, so sharp in the nostrils. As I coast down narrow farm roads that weave through endless tall-grasses, the wind carries a kind of fresh essence up off the tips of the grasses and into your lungs. It just cleanses one deep down inside like the good feeling you're left with after the burn fades away from a really good strong wasabi.

On this evening, I ran into these aging, weather-beaten and faded yet really cool throwbacks to an old Korean tradition - a kind of totem pole warding off evil spirits which may otherwise consider visiting a village. The faces are meant to scare evil spirits away. But if you continue along, the faces get warm and welcoming, presumably because you mustn't have been an evil spirit to have made it past the bouncers (I guess.)

I made it past the first set of scary condemning faces,and the next faces sure enough were warm, smiling, winking, bowing - some with lipstick on, and there's even one of a Korean noble with a woody sticking out at the passerby! Hello, what's the Korean word for immodest?

Fall is always such a beautiful time to catch photos of the sky battles between the receding warm weather fronts and the advance of the northern winter winds.

2008-08-12T21:54:00.003+09:00

JOKKU INJUSTICE RECTIFIED

(This note is dedicated to Neal Adams and all community-fostering EFL foreign teachers who stayed in Mokpo between 2006-2008)

Some of the nicest, community-oriented foreigners have left Mokpo.

Although it's always sad to see good people go, in our case (that is, in the case of the foreigner EFL community in Mokpo) it was especially sad because of an unresolved injustice that was visited upon us one Monday night when our group had just started to get enthusiastic about playing weekly jokku.

(N.B. Jokku, for those of you not in the know, is a Korean style of volleyball played with the feet and head (and chest) only, and the net is lowered to a tennis net level. The game is imported to Korea from the Vietnam war (Koreans fought alongside the Americans against the Viet Cong) and the soldiers brought it home. As it's considered a lowly 'soldier's pastime' one can have great difficulty finding Korean teachers who'll indulge in the sport - they tend to lean to mamby-pamby sporting activities like badminton. I find the game a *great* workout because it gets all of the big muscles (namely, one's ass and legs and the whole ab area) moving more often, yet does not wear out joints like with jogging or running. The perfect balance of flexibility and mobility for those of us who are 'mostly' in shape, and who just need a slight push, it offers a lot of fun to keep motivated. Oh, and I fully intend to bring it back to Canada one day.)

Anyway, as regards the foreigners who took to this marvelous game, everyone who was there knows what happened - at first a Korean group of jokku (Korean-style foot volleyball) players played on the same court and we tried to make sure our game was after their time. However, eventually they were gearing up for some tournament they were probably going to lose anyway, and they didn't want to share either of two courts so they started a campaign of Korean-style passive-aggressive grief to the foreigners one night, they tried to bully us off the courts which resulted in a brief confrontation. In typical Korean passive-aggressive style, the police were called and sided with the Koreans presumably because we were playing too late. A sign was put up in the community park later that week that clearly stated no playing after 10pm. Then after that, the original Korean group got back to playing, until well after 10pm. Of course no police were called any of the times that they played.

It was more than a bit of a souring experience that never really got resolved for us, the foreigners. But I always suspected someone in city hall would care and do something had we the opportunity to explain. I also presumed the issue may have been about the space having been paid for and/or reserved, much like with our city parks recreation services back home in Canadian cities.

Well to my friends Neal, Crystal, Richard, Shannon, Abby, Jason, and anyone else who may've been initially interested in jokku but gotten turned off by that experience... this one's for you:

Finally I mentioned to my wife today that I had been interested in contacting the correct city recreation department so I could go about learning how to book and reserve the appropriate park for future jokku games, so as to thwart the future efforts of any foreigner-hating Koreans. What I found out was this: my wife located and spoke to the right city hall officer and he got so angry about the stories I'd told her.

First he clarified

1) that the parks are already paid for and

2) it is absolutely the right of every foreigner paying taxes here to lawfully use the parks as they wish, to the same extent as the Koreans do.He then went on to give his personal phone number to us and asked us that if anything like this ever happens again, we were to please call him directly and he would clarify this matter immediately. He also offered to explain our position to the police should we need to call the police, and

3)he furthermore (I love this part) offered to plant ANOTHER sign on the very same parksite where the first sign was placed, with a warning from the city to all citizens to allow the foreigners to play in the park at the same courts and times as all the other Koreans. He said he'd do the latter if we called again in the moment of another similar problem.

My brethren and sistern, we now have the muscle of city hall on our side. He really said that. I especially liked the story about offering to put up a warning sign not to harass foreigners anymore. Too bad you're almost all gone.

But with that news, and the new incoming group of foreigners, I'd like to raise anew the foreigners' interest in the great game of foot-volleyball Korean style, a.k.a. jokku, and recommend that we *all* come out, or even just ten of us, and play any sweet old time we damn well please (when the courts are not already in use of course.)

Amen.

2008-07-30T08:04:00.013+09:00

ENGLISH AUSCHWITZ - MY EXPERIENCE AT A KOREAN KID'S ENGLISH CAMP

Most of my blog's articles muse over existential questions by an expatriate contemplating an eventual return home. I like to tell stories of beauty experienced while living in Korea, prefering to shy away from the negative internet testimonials that seem to besiege this place (sometimes unfairly) from expats maladapted for one reason or another to their new locale. There are legitimate, problematic local notions of nationalism and race, but as they are for the most part easily circumnavigable, I set those realities aside to contend as well that too many expats who have undiagnosed emotional or mental illnesses come over and blast everything about Korea - consider it another frequent source of this unfairness. In the end, the social isolation here can be daunting and the positive outlook can be a real exercise for a foreigner, but it is a necessary and fruitful task, ultimately worth embarking on. So I'm happy to share positive anecdotes. I think we need more of 'em.

But the bad press Korea gets is not just all smoke. Sometimes it's good to remember how lucky one is, having avoided bad experiences people have with schools here. I guess I was due for a reminder as I recently had an unfortunate but mercifully brief stay as a teacher at what must surely be Korea's English concentration camp for children, a.k.a. CDI's Rookie Club English camp, tucked away among the farms of South Korea's southernmost rural countryside. Having been asked to write a TOEFL-style opinion essay on genetic engineering as part of the application process, I got blinded by slick image and an exceptionally ambitious program, and imagined I'd hit something special. By the fifth day, my kids were bewildered and lost, utterly unprepared for what CDI had prepared for them to study. I may as well have been teaching string theory to kindergarteners.

The company itself comes from the Hollywood of Seoul, a ritzy neighborhood called Kangnam - the highest fees, highest overhead, high-octane students and programs, and loads of prestige. Although by no means the only language school shingle hung on Kangnam's glitzy streets, it distinguishes itself from other private academies in Seoul in that it has shares on the stock market, providing quarterly reports to shareholders just like any other company on the stock exchange. In Korean academy terms, that's confidence. It also boasts an international chain, and appears at first glance to be something truly different from Korea's often-flawed market-as-school-principal phenomenon. They offer, if nothing else, an interesting alternative to correcting the national problem of Koreans' English language acquisition (internationally speaking, an embarassingly low rate) not matching the staggering amount of money Koreans invest in that acquisition yearly. They do this even while thumbing their collective noses at conventions widely accepted by classic teacher-training institutions, conventions such as the ineffective practice of having students memorize long lists of vocabulary, to take but one example. Perhaps I should have gotten my first red flag there.

One one end, there are those classic, corrupt fly-by-night academies everyone knows about. But on the other end of the industry, you've got headstrong academies like the one in question, with principled visions of what supplemental education could be. Some of their expectations faintly smelling of delusions of racial superiority (40 new words a day! Korean kids can do this!) they dump curricula of superhuman proportions on their children, unfettered by inconvenient contradicting data coming out of the most recent theories in education or language acquisition showing the uselessness of such activities, instead choosing to place their faith in their customers being children of 'the great Han race.' Though highly problematic - not to mention offensive - these places (admirably enough to me anyway) truly believe with a kind of religious fervour that Korea could pull itself up by its bootstraps and reverse the national language acquisition problem overnight if only this or that.

Now to be fair, there are language academy chains with other patented approaches - Berlitz, International House and Global Village are examples of chains that come to mind. Their approaches, not defined by performance expectations based on racial myths (as they depend on student diversity guaranteed as a selling point) can be great for the student who's stepped up to the program's starting point. To be fair, many Korean students desperately try to step up to such programs. Some of them even succeed. Unfortunately when the rubber of such high octane programs hits the proverbial road of this country's reality down on the street level, as so much of the industry already underserves the Korean public so profoundly, the customer base is always lower and smaller than it should be.

That is a real market problem in the case of the sexy Kangnam academy that built my camp. When the training fanfare died down, children (whose entrance test scores appeared to have been overlooked or ignored entirely) had been allowed to pass screening, judging from the great gap between where the students were and where the program started. Yet exorbitant fees were collected anyway from parents working twelve to sixteen-hour days. Unready children got ushered into my classroom, clueless they were about to be clobbered with an English program too high for them. Oh and if you didn't deliver CDI's rigidly outlined program, guess what? You don't get paid. Mom and dad are working so hard for little Lee Junior, so the pressure to succeed is enormous and in some cases severely damaging.

Our kids cried every single day - some at school, some in their dorm rooms, some at lunch, some at lineup. In the bigger picture, the pressures on unprepared children to perform enormous mnemonic feats were so great that tears, shakes, lashing out and mentions of suicide were common when finally the crash came from learning that being Korean still equals being human. Oh and it came. At our camp, suicidal utterances were overheard by another teacher as early as the second day. There's only one other educational area where Korean children experience similar pressure to perform - the last year of high school, when they try - and fail - to memorize reams and reams of English lists in order to get into the top university. It's referred to as 'Ko sam-pyeong' (the 'high-school sickness') (the frequent mention of wanting to kill oneself, preceded by physical breakdowns, including premature loss of hair, diarrhoea, stomach problems, debilitating headaches, and so on.) But that experience is readily available at hakwons years before high school.

Enter CDI Rookie English Club, and twelve other teachers-in-training, some very experienced, all eager to learn and deliver the CDI method. The camp director and a guest principal from a Canadian CDI branch introduced a seemingly fabulous program, designed by the hakwon's own "research and development" team (a group of Ph.D. possessing company curriculum developers.) A four-week program of highly aggressive English acquisition in an English-immersion environment meant no Korean allowed, even for discipline, and English taught through various subjects, such as movie English study, storybook English study, and staged performances of English scripts, and various memorization workshop structures. I began to think I could even learn from some of the approaches of the curriculum.

I saw the extensive camp program and the strict guidelines and concluded (and was promised) that somebody must know what they're doing because the financial stakes are so high and it can't be as inappropriate as it seems. Campers could not possibly have been admitted were they not ready for the English program we were to teach, right? That would just be a new level of inhuman. The expectations and size of the program were so vast that it would just be impossible to imagine children might have been allowed to enter without having first passed a very rigorous test and thereby demonstrated they could handle it, right? After all, what other children, except for only the most advanced could have a hope in hell of swimming in a program where they had to
-memorize 150 new English words every single day for twenty days (yes, 3000 new words memorized in a month),
-take twenty memorization tests to monitor their progress on such tests,
- post their grades for such tests on websites, failing or otherwise, for all to see
- take twenty more tests to similarly measure and publicize the rates at which they could at the same time memorize the contents of two to three new storybooks every week
-this in addition to their other English courses like screen (i.e. movie) English and the like?

I mean these would at least have to have been guaranteed as highly motivated, high-achieving kids with razor-sharp study habits, right?Would it not be totally criminally negligent to look the other way, and blindly admit an unprepared child into such a program, at the price of $4000.00 per child? Surely they wouldn't dare.

Incredibly, a class of unprepared, totally mismatched children is exactly what I received on my first day. It took me several days of trying it the CDI way to believe it at first. Now I'm all for working with kids at any level. Believe me if all they have is the alphabet and a few phrases, I'll work with it. But don't ask me to get them memorizing 150 words a day and don't tell me I won't be paid in full if they don't do it.As the days rolled by, and the memorization test results floated along zero day after day, ringing home the powerful, silent message that they knew *no* English at all and weren't gonna anytime soon, it became clearer to me that I was participating in something I did not believe in. I became philosophically opposed to where my kids had been placed. Not only had they no idea what were the contents of my increasingly slowed speech, but they also had no idea they were expected to memorize such large amounts of text daily, they showed everyday they couldn't do it, and they'd no idea how to accomplish such a task (indeed I myself was lost as to how I might prepare them to cover such vast terrain) and they had no intention of following the no-Korean rule in the classroom. And I was going to be docked pay if they didn't get it all done. My kids, my program and I were three parties which had no business being in the same room together.

In the first few days before I considered quitting, I must have handed out enough red cards (rules violations) to make a small book. Four of my students had visited the principal twice and came back bawling each time. Somehow I knew re-seating was not going to solve this, but I tried it anyway. No, somehow this problem was deeper.The problem at its source was that I was lied to. I mean totally. The second problem was my fault - I'd abdicated all my previous wisdom about Korean children and the culture of education here, and for the belief that things were somehow different in this much more expensive, much more researched camp program. But it wasn't. It was the same crap you find at McEnglish franchises in this country, but in my experience it was just piled higher and deeper.

The CDI program that had such rock-solid faith in its methods, that it invited shareholders to invest in the company, was an emperor that had no clothes on. Had I stuck to my guns and fought to uphold what I already knew, I might have left the program earlier, as did two of the other older teachers in the first week of training. I should have had their insight. At least I should say, I know deep in my bones my kids would have been happier had I just gone and done things the way I knew they should be done, right from the start. But that would've gotten me fired or my pay partly withheld. But my kids would have learned less, albeit more completely.

Interestingly enough, as I was putting down my thoughts about this camp experience I escaped, the divine powers of the universe steered me today to an online mini-lecture on the difference between intelligence and intuition, by Deepak Chopra. Intelligence or rationality, Chopra explains, comes from the mind. Intuition comes from deeper within, which is your soul, a form of intelligence that contextualizes, that is, that takes everything into account. Intuition is the ability to eavesdrop in on the universe, or on the mind of God. You can cultivate your inner dialogue by meditating, learning to ask that difficult question, and then just let it go. Eventually, the answer will come back, in a flash as it were, the result of a number of factors blended together to produce the answer you seek.

I must have been in symbiosis with Deepak Chopra on Saturday and Sunday because when I reflected on what I'd become helping my class see near-perfect failure test after test without redemption (how can you cover all the errors in a test when 20 minutes of each class is spent managing kids and sending them out to the principal, and another 150 words have to be covered for tomorrow?) and trying so hard to deliver CDI's product the CDI way to kids who were clearly not CDI material, the answer came to me too in a flash.

I listened.

The Mrs. and I are enjoying our new vacation now.

2008-06-10T10:41:00.006+09:00

Happy 39th Birthday

Indiana Jones has hit the screens again with all the swashbuckling, boot-kicking fervor I remember from my tweens when I first saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark. But boy, he's got a lot more white whiskers. And the theatres have become all gestappo. A really campy scene caused me to groan aloud in the audience 'oh God, yeah, thank you little ants for giving me my hat back' If looks could kill, I'd have been multiply stabbed. Sleighting Indy's campy movie schtick is as taboo these days as whispering 'The DaVinci Code bootlegs history.' Were the earlier movies populated with this kind of goofiness too? God did I really eat up that schlocky movie gimmick stuff? Oh wait, the Temple of Doom. Never mind.

Well it's on my 39th birthday that my old friend Rick and I headed out to see the show. I'm looking up at white-whiskered still-tough-as-nails Indy, and trying not to think about getting ready for my 40s, or turning the page on a chapter of my life, or reflecting how much has changed since I first saw Indy run out of the cave tunnel in Peru, dodging Hovitos Indian poison blowdarts so long ago. I can't help but wonder, though, when each swashbuckler hangs up his pistol and hat? Does the adventure just change location like with Indy? This is the chestnut this old waegukin in Korea is grabbing onto.

I'm in Nova Scotia on vacation. The following weekend I took a trip out to Economy, Nova Scotia (a place that had me giggling every time a road sign went by.) My buddy Yuri has come home after eleven years in Korea and a year in Oregon and India. He's planning out his next phase while he resides for the moment in his cottage out in the 'sticks' as we say (it just means far away from the city.) It's good to spend a day with a devoted returnee, compare and contrast, and speculate on my slow homecoming. A few days earlier Yuri, Scott (another Halifax returnee) and I toasted my birthday and our reunion at the Old Triangle pub, where I had a ridiculously over-priced Irish stew and Strongbow Apple Cider. Arr! It was an auspicious reunion evoking memories of secluded garden decks in the cafes of Seoul, Sunday mornings after the proverbial Saturday night before - these were the last places the three of us had hung out together. In the interim we'd covered three years and thousands of kilometres each. Also two marriages and a divorce had occured in that time. How very different we seemed, looking back at our lives then compared to now. And yet in spite of our globetrotting it seemed like a little miracle that we could still share a meal together and still have good times in each other's company in our hometown of Halifax, after all the ground covered, in terms of both geography and personal change.

Yuri and I stomped around the backwoods of Thomas' Cove. I was grateful to see wildlife again (hardly ever seen in Korea, even the countryside) - how amazing it was that the rising tides and sea currents could corral all the nearby deadwood into one grassy inlet making it look like a kind of tree's graveyard. I came across the most ambitious beaver dam ever, and we finished on the red beaches of the Bay of Fundy, locale of the world's highest tides. The sand has a pigment so red, you'll never get it off of your feet if you walk around barefoot for a while.

Our day in Economy was mostly smooth sailing, having had a lunch on the deck overlooking the Bay and a light supper between breaks of 'The Assassination Of Jesse James..'. Our talk moved from adventuring through far-off lands to traveling through the undiscovered countries of the soul. I pondered the deeper question of what's changed and what's remained, looking at the next phase of life. We'd sneak in the occasional Korean phrase here and there. I wonder if pirates talk like this over whiskey, in their twilight years.

Twilight years? Next phase of life? Holy crap! Am I here? I'm so far off from retirement. But 'next phase of life' is seeping into my speech these days - family, career, this summer orchestration project... This getaway was a very much-needed corridor for ideas, concerns and pressures to bounce around the walls and dissipate in the open temporal space of a do-nothing weekend. But it's just an illusion. Preparations really need to be made for the approaching end to the summer of my life. Autumn will be setting in soon. I have to be ready. That's how being 39 makes me feel.

In this way, I ease myself into my new year like slipping into a crisp, warm pair of cotton pyjamas on a cool autumn evening.

Looking back now and seeing the places I've been, I've come to accept that although the adventure hasn't ended, the path will be turning inward. The adventure has taken a new twist, but from here on out it will be with Maria. And finally I see on the horizon, the road home. I think my expat days may be numbered after all. Praise God.

Some of the more memorable places:

Koh Chang, Thailand

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Seoul, South Korea

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Praia da Vitoria, Portugal

Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Burns Lake, British Columbia, Canada

Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Taipei, Taiwan

Busan, South Korea

Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada

New Orleans, LA, USA

Provincetown, MA, USA

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2008-04-14T09:10:00.005+09:00

You know, most of us walk around in our lives most of the time having to get used to accepting circumstances which may, at times, evoke in us a certain degree of ambiguity, or doubt. There's a point when opening a door must close another. The compromises we make at times to accept the good things we want, resulting in this degree of doubt about what we've gotten ourselves into, and how we should 'read' it, constitute a kind of art of living. That technique of awareness, that sort of stock broker's ability to trade cosmic currencies is ultimately looking out for our total health. The better we get at practising it, it seems, the better we get at living with ourselves, and the circumstances we've helped create for our lives. Moments can be expressions of this equation too.

But every once in a while, just e-every so often, a moment comes along that has such perfect cosmic orchestration, is just so Hollywood epic film-like in its cosmic synchronicity, that it invites speculation on divine presence. It's almost beyond the imagination of those who fake such stories. It's just got the fingerprints of God all over it somehow.

This Saturday past, my life in Korea was just such a day.

Went to my wife's cousin's wedding in Busan. Outdoor garden-party-type wedding at the beach hotel, very ritzy, very foofy, quite lovely, money everywhere. All of a sudden --Hold everything! What's that noise? Oh my God, there's a City Of Busan-sponsored karaoke beach contest happening just thirty feet from the hotel backyard-garden, just beyond the bushes and trees marking off the property! 15-foot speakers pumping out house music and drowning out the ceremony, oh no!

(Why is this a problem you ask? Because my wedding gift to my new family member was actually a string quintet arrangement of Sarang-eui Seoyak (Vows of Love) a quite popular Korea-meets Bon Jovi kinda torch rock ballad extremely popular for wedding dances and such here. I re-wrote it for strings - which foofy wedding had waiting in the wings - and having been a singer before, I'd sing it for them in the ceremony. This squatting elephant-sized next-door-neighbor problem seemed to be the punchline in a weekend-comedy of errors, first having to explain to my wife that her cousin's request of this art and my writing/performing it was a valid gift in itself, and more value (were I hired for these services) than the money we might have given otherwise, and then arriving at the hotel and seeing four - not five - chairs laid out for the musicians gave me a minor heart attack as I'd considered that maybe it was a string quartet miscommunicated and not in fact a string quintet, the result then being my arrangement would be full of holes due to the one instrument missing, and me looking like a musical retard distant relative who should be tolerated, instead of coming off as someone providing the transcendent art that could bring focus and absolutely set the tone for the wedding.)

Seeing those four-not-five-dammit chairs I nervously drank my tea, informed the wedding set-up crew that a fifth musician was coming (I hoped) and kept reassuring myself by repeatedly murmuring 'two violins' and 'three violins' then 'four musicians' and 'five musicians' over and over again in Korean, wiping my brow and consoling myself that they could not possibly be confused with each other among Koreans speaking over the phone and that I was not, in fact, going to make a fool of myself and that in fact a quintet and not a quartet was on its way.

I'd just relaxed my face muscles from holding that shit-eating grin and just started to get in the groove of the pre-wedding rehearsal with the musicians when the karaoke speakers boomed on. Oops. It seemed my wedding gift went out the window.

Or did it?

My wife and I left the hotel park and went over to talk to the event organizer next door. No go, couldn't be more indifferent. We begged and pleaded and just lots of 'sorry's and 'x'es with the hands. Then I asked for just five minutes and I explained the gift I was giving and I even said let me join this damn contest of yours, I bet I'll win and we just kept at her and somehow, someway she caved. Thank God. We traded cellphone numbers and she consented to turning down the music "just a little bit down! Not off!" for five minutes when we would call her later. We struck a deal. Headed back to the wedding M.C, he understood when to cue us to call. Things seemed to be lining up.

The wind started blowing hard. The musicians' papers started blowing right off their music stands and all over the neatly groomed gardens. The M.C. understood he should compete with the booming music next door and it was a shout-off. The string quintet (Yes! It was a quintet!) started playing their little wedding march and even though the circumstances didn't change, we could hear the wedding march somehow anyway. The little mics from the outdoor wedding sound system appeared to have the strings holding their own in the midst of all this.

Above our heads the sky start turning quite grey and it looked like a storm or rainshower might be rolling in. The good news was that the beach-enthusiasts all up and down the boardwalk seemed to notice, too. Slowly the karaoke event seemed to lose steam. Was God actually intervening? Do I dare allow myself the arrogance to imagine such a thing?

And then the time came. My wife called the next door event organizer. She did not turn the music down, but off, in fact. It seemed that our request and the weather turning kind of dark had taken its toll on her resistance. And finally *our* event started to feel like a wedding. It began to have the chance to feel like one. Just the little sprout from a little seed in our hearts was planted. We could collect our thoughts and focus on this moment and not the event next door.

And then the song came. The quintet played well. The wind stopped. I swear to God, no word of a lie. Even the damned wind stopped blowing. I was properly hydrated, hit all the right notes with the right intensity. And I think in that moment, we could all zero in, hearts and minds, on these lyrics:

LOVE'S VOWS (approximate translation)
With great anticipation,
the moment we've awaited has come
To the sound of everyone's blessings and congratulations
Vows of love (we) are exchanging

As new times come,
sicknesses also will come.
As like now, with you here at my side,
Will we (then, as now) be able to console each other?

(chorus - soaring lines, wide orchestral palette, big climaxes)
That we should walk together down this road ahead,
That the two of us here now-
That these promises (we make) will always be constant,
Do you believe?

And hard days, too, will come,
But (there will be) no regrets!
That until that day the heavens call
That only full of love we will be?
Do you believe?
I believe...

The first chorus ended, I held that last note as the music rose over me, and relatives from both sides, grannies and grampas sitting in their pretty little hanboks like neatly arranged little crabapple dolls, the yunguns behind them, burst into applause.

They granted me the second verse. It often seems in matters of art and culture that Koreans don't have the patience for a second verse, but it was clear in this magical, frozen moment that these people didn't plan to go anywhere. So the musicians and I rolled into the second verse and I ended the song on the soft notes "mid-eo-yeo" (I believe) and as the ensemble sighed its last two chords, I felt like a blessing had finally come to this wedding. The invisible wedding fairy had finally arrived and was sitting right on my head.

No rain. And the wind stopped. And the karaoke event next door? Dead silent. I looked around and passersby from the beach had since congregated around the little garden opening and along the balcony.

And I knew it then at that moment,- the gift was real, it felt real, and everyone knew what it was I'd given.

Maria's family spent the first few minutes pointing out at the reception that I was a cousin on 'their' side of the family, that this gift had come from 'their' side! I laughed. I heard later the bride's father cried. (He's kind of known as a romantic.) The sunshine of that moment lasted clear into Monday.

2008-03-01T10:03:00.005+09:00

Well I'm definitely not the wide-eyed newbie Emanuel who first arrived in chilly northern Ilsan in 2004 - that sidewalk-javex-scrubbed, socially sterile polymer-smelling "new family-friendly" manufactured city outpost north of Seoul, with its scads of ill-mannered, snotty Koreans, each more fixated on looking like they were someone than actually being someone, Ilsan with its freakadelic parallel universe brand of Korean Jehovah's Witnesses pimping the corners, traveling in packs of plaid on sunny weekend afternoons. In state-enforced family-friendly Ilsan, if you were Korean and not an evangelist, you didn't smile. A recent trip back showed me that's pretty much Ilsan for foreigners today.

I believe I brushed up against the ghost of my own 'this can't be all there is to Korea' bewildered past Emanuel. And I said to my tortured ghost, quietly in my mind, 'don't worry Emanuel of Ilsan past. It isn't. Rest in peace.' And that younger Emanuel gathered up his chains, and dissipated into peace - a kind of peace that goes with knowing that a corner of hell hasn't changed and it really wasn't me. Why would anyone go and revisit a place of their imprisonment? That was what I had to know. I had to know that it wasn't me. And it wasn't. I even went to my old one bachelor room apartment building, since it was just a stone's throw away. Looked like a dusty brick three-storey BFI bin for disposing of people and their dreams. Just where the window should be was a board, covered by a broken pane. A place of desolation.

Fast forward to 2008. Emanuel's relocated in the beautiful seaside city of Mokpo, and has ordered a treadmill in an apartment in which there's plenty of room for it, a piano and other big stuff. The treadmill's walled up with the tv in front of it. Action movies and track time - *that* is the winning combo that will get you in that bathing suit come summer. I've only had it a week and I already feel so much better. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in feeling consistently great while in Korea. Get your co-teacher to help you figure out a location to ring up. Ours came from a company in the nearby major city of Gwangju.

I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner! No crowds, no channel compromises, you can go to the bathroom whenever you want... I hope there are enough action movies at the DVD shop to last out the contract. A freakin' good formula for a great time getting fit.

However, Maria and I are thinking we may have hit on the maximum space capacity for our little officetel. In the common area, we've now got a large upright piano, a treadmill, bookshelves, sofa, coffee table and tv table area. Maria frantically scratches away upstairs at long mathematical string theory formulas trying to find ways to open up even more extra-dimensional space, madly muttering things like 'no wait - I'm sure we can fit in a freezer somehow' but my professor-spouse may have to concede even she has hit the peak utilization of our officetel, at least according to the limitations of the laws of physics, bendable space-time factored in.

My friend Jason is encouraging me to push the envelope further and see about getting a hot tub.

2008-02-05T18:51:00.000+09:00

My baby showed me her genius again tonight. I'm so excited about this ridiculously simple dish - pizza without the bread. I've had a mind to try this for years, but never had the determination to sit down and figure out a replacement for the bread. But I should as I can't really eat much bread anymore, it makes my gut swell out and is generally unpleasant. So Maria did this for me.

Microwave-boil the broccoli for 3-4 minutes, then drain and cut up on a plate with onion and red pepper. Dashes of salt, pepper and black sesame seed all over and grated mozarella cheese generously spread. Microwave again for another 2-3 minutes. Ridiculously simple, wonderful to eat, very much like pizza. I never thought I'd be this in love with broccoli. I think I'll have this every second night. Serve with red wine.

Christ I'm lucky. Try it and see for yourself if you miss the bread.

2007-12-19T16:35:00.000+09:00

It's Election Day in Korea and as a foreigner that means I get the jump on all my online Christmas shopping and home decorating and baking.

This year our church choir is doing the Mass of the Angels for Christmas Eve and Day services. I'm really excited as we prepare the singing of this very happy chant. I've always felt that night sky angels hovering over the flocks tended by shepherds would sing in Renaissance or Baroque long florid choral lines, but when I think of it, Gregorian chant, especially the sequences of very happy modes in the Missa di Angeli, would do just fine for that pastoral scene's soundtrack. So I spend time at the piano, awash in great swirling lines of music, preparing, polishing, honing, refining.

I talked with another cool foreigner couple here in Mokpo about a special Christmas party, and I thought I had the beginnings of something really special and very Christmassy in all the right ways - my piano, his electric guitar, Maria's magic home touch to the charms of Christmas, Randi taking a stab at some genuine English wassail (wow I get so excited talking about that one aspect, that I feel like a little sprig of Christmas holly shoots out of my ears, toes and arse everytime I mention it - thinking about how Anglo-Canadian it would be to simply *have* gen-yoo-wahn wassail in the house - I wonder if it's minty? Can you fly once you drink it?) and plus one more charm - a little praesepio. A miniature city scene of Bethlehem just atop the piano, with little additions submitted by guests if they want. I think candles, too. There should be lots of candles. Sounds like a formula for a very dreamy Christmas tv special circa 1979, right?

Wrong. We're hosting this caroling and wassail and praesepio party, and we've already had 6 whities turn us down! (blogger laughs out loud, jutting forearm out in mock victory) mm-yeahh!! Well the thing is no foreigner wants to be caught dead in Korea without a thing to do on Christmas, so we book ourselves up to the nines around this time of year or implode and let the holiday find us, if it can. I thought I'd get the French club participating a couple of little songs, but no dice. But I understand. But still, it's not exactly a Maritime Christmas, is it? Ouch. I guess some things you really can't take with you from home. But that doesn't mean we can't start our own fire right here. I think it'll take a few Christmasses for Maria and I to get the formula just right.

So for the moment it's going to be a very Korean Christmas. On the upswing, the foreign couple who are confirmed are in fact so nice, they'll make up for a good 6 or 7 others. But if there are many more declines, I may have to cough up some money and pay for coffeegirls LOL (a kind of Korean hooker) to come and pretend they're our friends! Do they have coffeeboys at these places too? I should call a few for Maria.

Well, I'm making a racket but we may get a few others, and we're inviting the neighbors on our floor. It may wind up being just the right crowd for this sort of thing in the end. The universe does have a way of shaping these things sometimes. I guess that's the kind of thinking that could never let me become an anarchist. I suppose in the end I'm just a big meta-structuralist. And I'm curious what the noisy amourous couple down the hall look like. (What is so sexy about 7pm every Saturday anyway? Maybe we'll find out, as our party will be at that very time. )

Haven't found the Korean word for wassail yet. The Chinese always work this sort of thing out so cleverly with their symbols. Coca-cola to them is 'bang in the mouth' Enough crisscrossing threads of irony there to knit a sweater..

Okay I digress. I better get cracking on these gingerbread men.

Christmas cheers

2007-12-12T20:01:00.001+09:00

I got this sick feeling in my heart tonight, when I walked past another new norae bang (karaoke facility). The norae bang was sleek and lit up with highlights like you might find on a Star Trek bridge console, but it was located on a dark, untraveled street. It might as well have been a seedy massage parlor. I tried to peek in the window to get a glimpse of the little glamour disco worlds in which grown men were happily drowning, hollering into microphones, but all I could see was the face of a faux-wood panel. How fitting. And how Korean in a way.

Some of the most beautiful expressions of living in the West are treated here like mental illnesses that need to be 'managed' and herded into padded cells, away from daylight. Singing is one of them. There are an alarmingly small number of voice studios for all the singing that goes on in all these norae bangs, which are just rooms where one's glory is supposed to be aroused as a singer 'might-have-been', an almost-contender, that they can revel in for the space of an hour about how close they might have come to a different life, before they were been beaten into submission and fed to the machine that results in the eventual production of a son.

There's another parallel to this that gets an equally dirty treatment - sex, at least in the context of love. For a small town like Mokpo, there is a really high number (a *really* high number) of dirty little grimy motels where people (married adults usually) can get their adulterous urges clinically served, tucked away in clandestine little rooms in buildings wrapped in red neon and faux Western architectural detail. They've even got hanging flaps over the parking lot archways so faces can't be seen from the street. But comparatively speaking, there are just a handful of interesting places to take someone on a date. And should you go out on a date, everything you do in the West is wrong here - holding hands, cuddling- you're always against the grain.

How are you supposed to feel about a place where two of life's most glorious acts - singing and loving - are scurried into dark corners and what's paraded out in public are horrible, hair-sprayed fashion ghosts of the pop 1980s West?

2007-11-08T15:52:00.000+09:00

Get Them Bugs Outta My Face!!

Well I had a most disturbing trip to a spa last week. First, because it was a spa and I'm a guy. Second because of what nastiness happened.

Anyone who knows me knows I don't believe in the hype about the Chinese rising tiger economic bandwagon that everyone's jumping on. Haiqi, my ex-girlfriend who was a banker, cleared me about that in her explanations about what business is trying to do, and what the government is trying to do, and why the two will never meet. So when all this 'Made In China' hububble came about I just grinned and gave a little arm-tug 'yeah'. Also I'm pretty pissed at the Chinese for a lot of the silly notions that come out of Chinese medicine, like rhinoceros horns curing erectile dysfunction and so they're shooting up all the rhinoceroses to extinction, and so on. Every day on a Chinese website unearths more atrocities done by their own people, on their own people out of sheer stupidity. (Check out the lady who swallowed 26 needles in her life because her parents wanted a boy and heard that swallowing a needle would help her to produce a penis. Anyway..)

So I was surprised to see something recent and modern that Chinese medicine produced that was not utterly retarded, and was actually, um, innovative.

Blackheads. As I was getting my one and only facial done (at my wife's suggestion) I noticed the attendant reached for a small metal hollow spoon with a lance in the middle of it. Freakin' painful, she bore into one of my nose pores and pulled out a tiny little alien. I freaked of course, and she put it on the microscope and then magnified it on the big screen tv. I could not freakin' believe my eyes.

For the love of Christ, do you know what a blackhead is? When you're looking at a blackhead on your face, you're looking at the very back end of a long poopy trail left by a little eight-legged microscopic bug that's decided to move into one of your pores and has started eating your skin cells for nourishment, only to poop them back out later as it burrows deeper into your face. She pulled out not one, but two!! Two, I say!

Needless to say, I lay on the flowery stretcher-bed mortified as I stared at the big-screen tv and watched these little black creatures' legs (with padded round Mickey Mouse-like white feet) writhing about under the hot microscope light, still stuck to (and hanging on) the front end of the nasty long poop pipeline that came from their ginormous asses while they were busy feasting on you! That's what a blackhead is and how it is made!!

Waughh!!

And who discovered these little bugs and how to remove them?

A Chinese doctor.

Well I'll be damned. I guess I'll have to shut my mouth now.

2007-10-21T09:07:00.000+09:00

NEW WORLDS UNFOLDING

My dear blog I'm sorry I haven't written to you in ages. It's been so long. Please bear with me as we make our way back into normalcy.

Our one-week excursion to Canada to get married on Thanksgiving Day turned out to be quite the upheaval. Yank your body into a 12-hours different time zone, then after you're just starting to find your way, yank it back to the original time zone. Ouch. The first week we were back we couldn't even stay up past 4pm and we were awake at 1am wondering what to do with ourselves. We just gradually made it back to 9pm bedtime and I just fought off one flu and I managed somehow to get another one. I think I got some scalp/skin disease off the airplane chair too, because I'm all broken out. So I've got a lot of travel healing to do.

I wanted to send everybody cool pics too... I have just seen friends' photos and they are alrightish but I am awaiting the photographer's photos and hope to really show you something then.

Two nights before the wedding I hosted a dinner for our two families at O'Carroll's restaurant (lobster dinners - never did a lobster make me so drunk before)(the Korean family thought I'd spent a fortune considering how difficult it is to get lobster in Korea) and I had a rehearsal dinner the next night (the night before the wedding) at Vinnie's pasta restaurant on Inglis St. On both occasions, and at the reception, I made toasts in Korean, English and Portuguese. One of my best friends Scott called me the lynchpin of the party (because of my international toast maybe.) I laughed half-drunk in the middle of my speech and said something stupid like, ' holy shit this feels like the United Nations' or some such. Anyway, you get the gist of the tone. And everybody was cool with it.

My toast, which I originally learned from Maria in Korean, was translated into Portuguese and English, and made for me a kind of unifying motto for a momentous weekend of two very different families coming together:

Para os ideas mais altas/

For highest ideals/

Isangeun nop-geh

Para o amor sempre mais profondo/

For deepest love/

Sarangeun gip-geh

Y os copas sempre no mesmo altura/

Glasses always at equal level/

Janeun pyongdeung ha-geh!

I also had lots of opportunities to crack international jokes with my inlaws, which was nice. We watched the Olympics together, cheering the admittedly impressive Korean athlete, chanted 'fall down' Korean jinxes for the Chinese athlete, and when he tilted his leg to the side accidentally during a pommel horse handstand I pointed and said, 'oh look, made in China' which they laughed about for a few days afterward. We carried on like that a lot. I took them to Peggy's Cove and Oakfield Park out by Fall River. My mother-in-law, quite upset the previous morning about a delay in the mall, was now clapping her knees in the van and singing some happy Korean chant, which her son and daughter-in-law joined in on. Happy sounds. But I honestly think they liked Oakfield Park more. They commented it was like being in Teletubby Land and couldn't stop taking pictures.

A few days earlier, my mother-in-law kept wandering around Point Pleasant Park looking at the forest floor and identifying tonnes of edible stuff. That was when I first started to see her as a senior citizen needing stimulation. Back home she is something very different. She's like an old, inefficient but very ceremonial and very necessary administrator of a tiny kingdom (her deceased husband's estate) but in the park she was something else entirely.. kind of free and happy. My brother-in-law was so thankful to me for having taken her there and to see Scott's wife, who charmed them all when they hosted us in their new home in a wonderfully old, very leafy area of residential Halifax.

At times in the ceremony I felt like some kind of nobility with a foreign princess getting married in 18th century Portugal (pre-earthquake) and not in 21st century Canada. That's because the choir sang the parts of the Mass in Latin, and I'm not used to hearing that in weddings. Plus all the ornate beauty of St. Patrick's helps one forget they're standing in downtown Halifax. An hour in there and it's easy to think you're somewhere in Europe.

I think of Maria as the most amazing, beautiful, exotic and golden-hearted creature on this Earth of course. But in addition to these general sentiments I also felt she was especially beautiful on our wedding day. She wore a white hanbok that was a major departure from the western wedding dress but extremely elegant. She had a silk crown-like headpiece strung with pearls, and both it and her dress were adorned along the fringes with small lavender flowers, flanked by green leaves and pink buds. I wore a white tux with a lavender vest+tie, because the flowers along her fringes were lavender.

The reception was at the Portuguese Club and Maria and I changed into our hanboks and had a wonderful time and the dinner was amazing. My Korean in-laws had no idea they could so easily adapt to Portuguese food but the spices are all the same (the Portuguese brought the red pepper to Korea, so pimenta-flavored foods have an odd but distinct familiarity to Koreans.) Some of my other relatives (the younger ones) said,' thems some fancy pyjamas you got on' and I kept singing the 'Everybody Was KungFu Fighting' song in return. Thank God Maria's family didn't understand or they'd totally kick my ass. Not really. Actually we really bonded together over this trip.

One of the nicest surprises on this trip actually happened while most of the family slept. It was a Friday late morning, and with the jetlag it was clear everyone was still a little tired. We got back to the bed and breakfast and the air was a little heavy as some of us were pecking away at each other earlier in the van. I could feel the collective homesickness, which didn't dissipate as we moved from the van to the house. We needed to come together again somehow. At that moment, I noticed a piano in the parlor, so I sat down and played the Korean national anthem, because it was in our daily routine back in Mokpo and we hadn't heard it for two or three days. Then instantly followed the national memorial song they play to remember the soldiers who died fighting in the Korean War. As this meditation took over the somber quiet, mother-in-law and the family stopped and listened, and then she emerged smiling, and hence, the rest smiled too. We were okay after all.

The family went to rest and I took Maria out to buy some nostalgia food at the little green Korean store on the corner of Chebucto Road and Roosevelt or thereabouts, down by the Rotary. But on the way we swung in because I wanted to say hi to my long lost good ol' pal and best friend, Rick, who hadn't yet seen me since I'd arrived (but he was going to be my groomsman.) I pitched little pebbles at his attic loft flat window, and his downstairs neighbor was working on a bike. I recalled my growing environmental awareness when I'd lived in this very flat, before I'd rented it out to Rick. His new neighbor was working on an all-electric motorbike and another electric bicycle. Rick came out and I saw too much time had gone by. White hair had started to show and I felt like an exile from my own home. But in a matter of minutes, we were talking, riding his neighbor's bike around like kids, and laughing and carrying on again like good old days and the years seemed to have disappeared.

When we headed up to the store, that was when I think it sunk in for Rick that change had occured. The ajumoni asked about Maria and I and it turned out that like us, she was a Catholic too and she was overjoyed about our upcoming wedding. We were chatting up a storm in Korean, and I slowly made it back to English to include Rick, who was by now asking me how to say annyong haseyo. But I was so surprised to learn from ajumoni that in the Halifax area alone, there were as many as 26 other Canadian male-Korean female *Catholic* couples living and making a go of it in my old hometown. I was flabbergasted. I hadn't any idea how much had changed since I'd been away. And I knew 2 such Halifax couples who were not Catholic, and to boot, one of them had been to a Can-Kor intermarriage social night with 15 couples, that had no religious affiliation at all. That was when I realized a whole new other world had opened in my hometown and maybe coming home would be different but familiar but in a whole new way.

But it's been a week since we've been back and it seems like a dream. So many new worlds opened to us, to Maria and I. I feel a bit like the last week was Einsteinian extra-dimensional space tourist. Well that wouldn't be totally off. You travel 12 hours into the future to reach Korea, and 12 hours into the past to get back to Halifax.

My new sister-in-law sent me two wooden ornamental ducks, a Korean adjustable omen, according to how you arrange them. If you make them face each other, it is an omen of harmony. She said it was to thank me for such a fine job hosting them in Canada. So thus they sit facing together on the tv, with the two smaller ducks given to us by another family, following behind each parent. Hopefully the little ones are a good omen too.

So here I was transferring my cds last night on the computer and Maria surprised me with her attraction to the sort of piece I don't expect anyone to enjoy but me. I always knew we shared similar tastes about the choral sacred stuff, but last night I was playing John Adams' Violin Concerto and she told me that when this music plays, 'time stops'. I quite enjoyed that remark. John Adams' Violin Concerto is the only other one of two works of his I know of, using serial technique in a distantly romantic air. Actually for brief moments it sounds like 1980's pop chord progressions, giving a slightly West Coast Californian taste to this new music. Maria was quite surprised when I told her that Europeans were already using serial technique this way in the 1920's.

We sat in the Saturday evening amber light, I, sipping spoonfuls from my bowl of sweet, boiled-pear Asian cough remedy, and Maria supping her stew, and there in our own little makeshift concert hall we enjoyed the luxurious sounds provided by Adams, interpreted by violinist Gidon Kremer and Kent Nagano with the London Symphony, as we quietly meditated on another rich new world opened to the two of us for about the space of 40 minutes.

2007-09-12T17:35:00.000+09:00

SEEING THE WIND
Have you ever watched the beautifully changing, amorphous leaf that a flock of birds makes when they're hovering in a gust of wind? It's like watching a school of fish in a net, but different, there's more activity and noise involved. I love the opportunity it gives us to see that which is invisible, in this case a wind gale's beautiful shape.

I was down on the Mokpo docks one evening before sunset, enjoying this as a metaphor for invisible forces in need of an enabler or enactor (or avatar) to give shape. I sometimes guess the Old Testament Jews might've seen God this way, explaining their heroism for rogues like King David. It got me reflecting on old music-coaching ideas about theory and practice, the difference between working out an idea in one's head and trying it out in action, and from there, reflection on moral imperatives to act, to build, fix, erect, move through, like a dancer trying steps, a vocalist trying scales, a Gom-do swordsman trying to slice the air in perfect silence, the difference between talking about exercise and actually doing it. Then I got on a new resolution to an old conflict:

Two young boys live in a harbor town - one, a larger bully full of venom, who captures and torture small birds, and a smaller, gentle soul who loves nature, birds, animals, insects. Never hurts a living thing.

Out on one harbor pier the older boy loves to go flycasting. There he plays a cruel game: he catches a fish, leaves it on the dock with the hook and line still in the fish's mouth, extends enough line to hide around the corner of the pier warehouse. There he waits for a seagull to come down and swallow the fish and fly away, and then he reels in wildly, yanking the shocked bird out of the air, with the fish still in its stomach, until the bird crashes down into the water.

The younger boy, upon hearing of this horrible game, is filled with compassion and rage and wants to kill the older boy but he's too small to do it, at least right now. Frustrated with this knowledge, he decides human beings can't be trusted and sets out on his own campaign to train birds not to trust humans. He starts furiously stamping at every bird near him, hoping they will learn to fly away and avoid humans altogether and not go near the cruel older boy. This exhausting practice ultimately distances him from that which he loves most.

So here was my old stopping point. How would you counsel this boy?

I asked my Buddhist friend what would Buddha say to this boy?

Buddha would say that you must understand your part in the universe and that the bully may be playing out a minor scene in the larger act of his own kharmic destruction.. The major Protestant Christians - Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Calvin and others - would say you can do nothing you must simply pray for the divine enlightenment of (or administering of justice to) the bully. But Catholicism says different. And I only really understood it today down on the docks as I looked on Mokpo harbour's orange sunset.

Those who study the universe and our place in it, who beckon to us to remember that we are just a small wrinkle in a great unfolding that is ever before us, tend to downplay the fact that although students of the universe, we never cease being a part of it. The ability to stand outside and ponder why does not excuse us from the imperative to participate within. Maria interprets this as the power of one. I think of it sometimes in terms of morally conscious consumer choices, which I share with others, in the hope for change. Ultimately I think I hope that real environmental change will come about this way, as subservience to the almighty dollar is such an obvious weakness of the otherwise impenetrable institutions and corporations that are bringing us to environmental ruin.

So I thought of it like this: the boy is spending great amounts of energy directed toward himself. It's directed to himself out of fear. Why doesn't he realize the mandate he is hearing (to do something) and instead of spending greater energy finding mechanisms to avoid the wrath of the tormentor, turn that energy outward to become larger than himself, and bring down the tormentor? The ability to ask questions has not removed him from his role in the universe in which this tragic play is acting out.

If a dragon flies out from the mountain and carries away one cow from the village every week, eventually, herding the people and cows away and rebuilding burnt homes will cost more energy than actually climbing up the mountain in one campaign and slaying that dragon.

So the new ending I wrote today was," the boy found a number of friends who were equally appalled at the actions of the bully, and they ganged up on him the next time they saw him and beat the sh*t out of him." Hmm, maybe that was more of an Islamic answer. Catholicism merely says for your faith to be alive, you must perform works, whereas Islam more directly exhorts bringing the struggle to the infidel. But I think the kids involved were Irish.

So I decided today I would be less like myself sitting on the dock and trying to divine the changing shape of the wind, and be more like the birds showing me what the wind looks like in their wonderful hovering flocks of black and grey - by engaging it in flight.

God damn it, I learned all this when I was a voice student changing from baritone to tenor. Well after a while it all becomes review, doesn't it?

2007-09-09T15:34:00.000+09:00

THE SABRA IN KOREA

My first composition professor, a loveable, brilliantly talented, but hopelessly forgetful, previously heavy potsmoking Indiaphile with new music groups named The Salvation Dharma Band, warned me that this would happen. He said it was the way of all composers as they age. As all the great Romantics seasoned their chops as symphonists, their most experimental and exploratory phases gradually lost ground to the cause of more powerfully refined articulation of ideas. Yet again, art provides a metaphor for other areas of life. I think I'm becoming more conservative with age.

I got this letter from home. Halifax's new amalgamated super high-school just got smacked down for trying to outlaw hoodies. You know, those hooded sweatshirts that make a hooded criminal's face harder to see from hallway ceiling vidcams. Here in Korea, kids wear school uniforms and would be properly smacked down for subversive fashion variations. But in my hometown, the issue was safety. But in a typical display of left-wing institutionally corrosive Canadiana, my hometown's biggest education investment - the super highschool - couldn't even withstand this minor libertarian uproar for five minutes. And the Nova Scotia Teachers Union says there is a problem with violence in the schools and anything that can be done should be done.

Fume.

There's a rising resentment against Halifax Police from such unchecked libertarianism, and it's backlashed in a growing lack of vigilance in the law and order of the town I once loved. Swarmings, gang beatings, major rumbles. Not so long ago we used to laugh at weaponless kids trying to act tough by hiding in bushes and jumping out at people but being reduced to begging for money. Don't get me wrong, these were kids with parents and homes to go to for three meals a day, mind you. Boy, you can't laugh at that anymore. Four swarmings of 12 year-olds on isolated adults, just last year alone. Junior's got teeth and he's packing.

I think about these returning deterrents whenever I get a new wave of come-home pressure, and I got a new one after rewatching the movie Munich. The Israeli secret service chief at the end tells his exiled operative, 'you're a sabra. Come home. Your mother is old and your father is sick. ' Holy crap, that's me. I had no idea how Jewish I could feel until I heard that.

This is the push and pull tug that I and some other expatriates have with their Maritime hometowns. A liberation still in denial of itself. It seems I've been constantly leaping out of that neighborhood just for the ground to start sinking back - first daily, to survive to high school in another neighborhood, then semi-permanently with studies abroad, and coming back home and yet not, and now the final exorcism, ideologically, dealing with the last moral imperatives to return. The world's a big place. I don't *really* have to return to enter a job market of 'Johnny where's your homework? Gee I dunno teacher did you look up your ass?' if I don't want to.

Do I want to for the family though? Am I a sabra who really should come back home? Damn it, my father really is sick and my mother really is old.

Shoulda rented another movie.

2007-08-26T18:22:00.000+09:00

End Of Summer In South Korea

It's late summer in Korea. Early morning clouds blow up into defiant little billows, defying over night the warm air mass that expands in the morning and washes over them, drawing their cumulous forms out into long white threads. You can feel the summer wind's days are numbered, even while you're applying sunscreen because of the hot day ahead. Soon these warm skies will retreat southward, and we'll be overtaken by blustery days, skies the colors of granite and silver, by falling leaves, by the long black fingers of bare trees snaking up into the skyline of early sunsets, and the first snows. You can already see it starting, right now. Maybe that's why the Korean lunar calendar already says the first day of fall has been here since last week.

But it also wakes up my mind to the most productive time of year for me. God you can't be Canadian and not feel that special stirring whenever the air starts to get a little sharp around this time of year.

This year's provincial summer camp was a great success! My team (ten kids among 150) won 3rd place for best poster and best cheer, and 1st place for best skit and best song/dance, and won best overall camp team. So I was feeling pretty frikkin' great. I made lots of new friends.

I've been feeling extra industrious today as I've been preparing some reading translation exercises for my school's 3-day English camp. So I thought I'd post this interesting study exercise for all my friends who complain about how good my Korean is. Now you can know all that I know. Just study these sentences, and you will be at my level in Korean.

Just in case anyone thought that Koreans don't really have it harder than anyone else when jumping into English grammar, I thought I'd show the translations - direct (yuck) and below that, the correct English - here in my blog today.

I'm sure this or Japanese grammar is where George Lucas got the idea for the way Yoda talks.

10 present - Easy

1.우리는 그들을 사랑합니다.
We-are them love-do.
We love them.

2.그들은 우리를 싫어합니다.
They-are us hate-do.
They hate us.

3.죽이자!
Kill-let's! (informal tail, no honorific at all just a truncation of the peer honorific)
Let's kill them!

Moderate
4. 매일, 그녀는 8시에 학교에 갑니다.
Everyday, she-is 8o'clock-at school-to go.
Everyday at 8o'clock she goes to school.

5. 매주말에, 우리는 피자를 삽니다.
Every weekend-at, we pizza buy.
Every weekend, we buy pizza.

6. 매달, 한번씩 외식합니다.
Every month, one-time outside food do.
Once a month, we have restaurant food.
*idiom* Once a month, we eat out (outside)

7. 매년, 우리가족은 새로운 나라를 방문합니다.
Each year, our family-is new country visit-do.
Each year, our family goes to visit a new country.

Difficult
8. 내일 나를 못보면, 앞문으로 오세요.
Tomorrow me not see-if, front door at come.
Tomorrow if you don't see me, come to the front door.

9. 점심시간 후에, 저는 작은 커피를 마시기 좋아해요.
Lunchtime-after, I small coffee drink-to like-do
After lunch, I like to drink a small coffee.

10. 우리는 너무 긴 공부시간을 정말 싫어해요.
We are too long studytime really hate.
We really hate studytime that is too long.
*idiom* We really hate lengthy studytimes.

10 Past
1. 먹었다.
(somebody) eat-did
(somebody) ate (something)
usually implied: I (or you) ate. / I (or you) ate it.

2. 않먹었다.
(somebody) not-eat-did
(somebody) didn't eat (something)
usually implied: I(or you) didn't eat. / I (or you) didn't eat it.

3. 내가 말했어
I say-did
I said (something)
usually implied: I said it! / I said it before!/ I already said it!
*idiom* I told you!

4. 했다
did (very informal, and to elder, considered rude)
(somebody) did (something)
usually implied: I did it. / You did it. /I did. / You did. / Yes, you did.

5. 안했다.
(somebody) not did (something).
usually implied: I didn't do it. / You didn't do it. / I didn't. /You didn't.

6. 왜했어?
why did?
usually implied: Why did you do that? /Why did you do it? /Why'd you do it? /Why'd you do that?

7. 왜안했어요?
why not did?
Why didn't (someone) do (something)?
usually implied: Why didn't you do it? /Why didn't they do it? /Why didn't he/she do it?

8. 그녀는 노레하기 좋아 했습니다.
she-is singing like-did(sir)
She liked to sing.
*idiom* She loved to sing.

9. 그는 듣기 싫어 했습니다.
He-is listening hate-did(sir)
He hated to listen.

10. 그는 나갔어요.
He-is get-out-of-here-did.
He left.

10 Continuous (present participle)
1.나는 가고 있습니다.
I-am go-and am(high honorific).
I'm going.

2. 기차가 오고 있습니다.
Train-is come-and is(high honorific).
The train is arriving.

3. 우리는 노래하고 있습니다.
We-are sing-and are(high honorific).
We are singing

4.나는 가게에 가고 있습니다.
I-am store to go-and am(high honorific).
I'm going to the store

5.스파이더맨이 기차를 멈추고 있습니다.
Spiderman the train stop-and is(high honorific).
Spiderman is stopping the train

6.지금 우리는 애국가 노래하고 있습니다. 전화하지 마세요!
Now we are Aegukka sing-and are(high honorific). Call do-not!(peer honorific)
Now we are singing Aegukka. Don't call me!

7.가게에 가고 있는데, 그리고나서 영화관에 갈거야.
Store-to go-and am-and, and then movie-house-to go-will. (informal)
I'm going to the store, and then I'll go to the movie.

8.스파이더맨이 기차를 멈추고 있었는데, 닥터 옥토푸스가 갑자기 왔어요.
Spiderman train stop-and is-was-when, Dr. Octopus suddenly come-did.
Spiderman was stopping the train, when Dr. Octopus suddenly came.

9.그는 놀기를 시작했는데, 차가 갑자기 왔어요.
He-is to-play start-did when, car suddenly come-did.
He started to play, when the car suddenly came.

10.그들은 케잌을 만들었는데, 고양이가 식탁위에 갑자기 올라왔어요.
They-are a cake make-did when, cat table over (onto) suddenly jumped.
They were making a cake, when a cat suddenly jumped on the table.

There it is! That you a fun-time reading-had, I hope. Next time-at, one eye-shut sudoku trying will, and string theory equations tackle-will.

2007-08-05T21:04:00.000+09:00

Korean Summer Roadtrip

Well it's the 9th day of my roadtrip through inner Korea. We kicked off our vacation roadtrip with the Busan World Carnival, and over seven days travelled up the east coast of South Korea, hitting Gyeongju, Pohang, Tebek, Uljin, then turning westward to YeongWeol, Wonju then to the dirty dusty grime of Yongin and the great Rome that is Seoul, which oddly enough nearly had us at each other's throats, before returning to the inner sanctum of the nestled green misty mountains of Jireh, near Kimcheon (kim-chawn) wherein we are now safely retreated.After nine days of laughter, tears, anger, ecstasy and indigestion, I type this summary squatting on a straw floor mat in what may quite possibly be Korea's last remaining authentic ancient style country home, complete with old style accompanying farm and a neighboring herd of cows who beat the corrugated metal walls with their tails all night long. This place has hatches for doors, you crouch everywhere, and the walls and floors are made of special paper. Ah but it is lovely, the stuff of songs and old portraits. No shit my friend, this is the real Asian deal. It's what all of us foreigners imagined Korea might be like before we saw pictures of Seoul and didn't realize Starbucks had long since planted a flag and we were really thinking of Vietnam or Thailand. I'm looking out on a deck with hanging bamboo mats for walls, corrugated tin roof ledges, and I'm gazing through a morning rain into a garden of jasmine and goucho peppers. There isn't a travel agent on Earth that could've put me here. You just have to know someone to get this far away from it all. In fact, this laptop is the room's only sign that I'm in the 21st century, and not in the 19th. I'm wondering if it's possible to ever get tired of this? It's so simple and beautiful and things are so delicate and elegant here in this rural paradise.

As it turns out, Maria owns a share in this Korean style cottage-estate, deep in the high mountains of Jireh. So she thought this would be a good pick up point from Seoul on our trip. Indeed she was right. For seven days, we trekked through lots of deep interior forest, bussed, beached and camped all over the east coast of Korea, waded or swam through rapids and wandered aimlessly through lots of quaint backwater places where I'm sure we had no clue where the hospital was. But God's providence arranged it so that we didn't get sick until we got into the comfy cosmo surroundings of Seoul, where a hospital was readily available. And boy did we get sick. But before we were pulverized by the collective sin of all that is Seoul falling upon us, we were cleansed and purified by the hospitality of the countryside. And so many funny things happened to us along the way. But it wasn't until tonight's bus ride that we started remembering them.

A Kimcheon bus took us up deep into the mountains last night. We were laughing our heads off on the bus because while in town, the bus stopped on one route and a woman entered and handed the bus driver a large bag of fresh vegetables - either his wife or a previously arranged trade or purchase. But quite against the rules as we'd later discover. Very country. A few stops later, a gnarly old farm granny attempts to stuff on the bus no less than five crates of watermelons. Holds up the route for a good five minutes. The bus driver is shouting at her and she is sliding and squishing the boxes into the aisle, acknowledging her imposition even while she continues to impose. And finally I help her load the five boxes onto the passenger side first two seats, and for about fifteen minutes the bus driver is tearing a strip off of her how this is against regulations and she should have called a taek-bae (delivery truck) and how she's damned lucky there's not a camera on this bus or the owner would fine her, and how rude she is to the other customers. All the meanwhile of his lecturing, he's herding the bag of vegetables on the side of his left foot to keep from rolling and making noise to show him as the hypocrite that he is.

Ye-eee--e-e---e-e-e-p. We're in the country, now!

Then when the bus finally gets into Jireh (a village famous for black-skinned pork, reputedly delicious) the same ajummoni (old auntie) leans in front of the bus driver and shouts out his window for her husband to come out of the store and bring a drink for the bus driver for his trouble. Hilariously enough, the bus driver then springs to life to earn his drink and begins diligently helping her unload the boxes off the bus, while the husband inside is shaking the bottles in the fridge (for one that hasn't been opened already?) The ajummoni barks, "wait" and the bus driver protests, but then rubs his nose, looks from side to side, and opens his side window casually. The husband decides on a bottle of the sports drink, Pocari Sweat. The bus driver shouts, 'POH-KA-RI A-NYA!' (not Pocari!) like he has a menu of choices. Then the bus driver tries to shoo away the drink, but the old husband and wife, who've passed off the drink to him, shoo away the bus driver. They have a mutual shooing contest and I think the bus driver lost. He cusses and starts off with his unwanted drink (I think he wanted alcohol) muttering ungratefully which makes Maria laugh more. Then as if to deflect our attention away from him, he criticizes the driving of a passing car.

After Maria and I calmed down, we recalled our first day trip, our taxi ride into Busan, which started off a good series of days and we hoped this would prove a similar omen. On that ride in, some Korean, infuriated with the tax laws, stood on the roof of a building overlooking a highway, and yelled things like 'f&*#king Korean government!' and started throwing money down. Before we arrived, it looked like it was raining 1000 Won bills (one dollars bills). That would explain why I saw a distinguished older Asian princess-matriarch fly like an animal from her car parked at the light, and scrounging on the ground furiously. It was so quickly done, too. I thought to myself, 'there's only one thing that can strip the layers off an elegant Korean woman that quickly - money' and I looked and lo and behold, on the pavement were bills stuck to the ground. Other people starting bolting from their cars as well. The light changed, but people were dashing out from their car doors for the great cash-grab that ensued. Then our taxi driver got the fever. Then I did. I bolted out of the rear passenger-side door and circled the car. No money. And the taxi took off, leaving me in the middle of a busy Asian city highway. I freaked. Luckily the passenger door was still open and Maria shouted, 'you fool, you forgot your customer!' and the people in the truck behind me laughed as I chased 10 feet this car with its side door swinging wide open. I returned unsuccessful from the hunt, glad just to have made it back into the car.

It seems that my Korean has improved a lot on this trip. We met up with a young Korean who lived in Brazil, so I could practice my Portuguese with him and my Korean with both he and Maria. It was a delicious dilemma to not be able to speak anything but Korean or Portuguese (self-imposed dilemma, I could turn to English with Maria if I wanted to.) With him we went to see the imperial tombs where some of Korea's more distinguished kings or emperors were buried. One was excavated and I just drooled at the prospect of taking pictures of some of his artifacts. A great insight into the soul of a people is to be able to observe how they loved (adorned) their kings. To me it's an expression of their art.

Anyway we get in there and there's a big sign saying 'no photos' so I'm bummed. Then we get around the whole fascinating glass-case lit display (authentic gold-trimmed chain mail plate armor, gold belt, diadems, scepters, banners, and finally the imperial crown itself - I was no more than 5 feet from it, divided by a glass case) when this bastard starts pulling out a zoom lens and photographing everything. So there was no way I was letting this guy go so in Korean I started complaining that there is a sign clearly stating no photos, and that I wasn't joking or lying and he should stop before somebody calls the police and hauls him off to jail. The guy gives me a dirty look while Maria and Inyop are laughing and I walk away with them continuing on in Korean about how it's his own damn ancestors' king, not mine, and he should show more respect at which point they lose it and break into guffaws. I proceeded out to the info counter just outside the excavation site and complained about the illegal and highly unrespectable activity going on inside the site, and they reply that the sign just means no flash photography. So with that release, I just set my flash to 'off' and returned inside, a man freed to do his mission and capture everything on digital images, the perfect hypocrite of my previous rant.

Perhaps one of our best friends on this trip has been the novel little Korean 'air-camp' tent I bought on Korean home shopping for less than 50 bucks. The size of a bicycle tire, you throw this nifty disc up into the air and it totally unfolds into a 3-man sleeper pup tent, ala anything you ever saw come out of Batman or James Bond technology. We set it up on a rocky perch above some rapids outside Paeron village (near YeongWeol) just as a convenient place to change swimming clothes, but then a flash rainstorm hit the whole area and we scrambled to the safety of our dry little tent as Korean princesses all up and down the river shore screamed bloody murder as their makeup slowly melted, and their macho boyfriends just laughed at the helplessness of it all. It was the only dry place in sight in either direction, so we sat inside, zipped down the top and watched the river beneath us slowly rose. It provided a kind of sanctuary for us there, as well as on the beach a few days earlier in Pohang during a surprise rock concert and fireworks show.

I learned a new expression this vacation - if you are the recipient of uncommonly fortunate providence, of an extraordinary serendipitous nature, Koreans say you are 'son of God'. So Maria has been calling me that a lot these days because of the fortuitous events that have befallen us on this vacation. But I am grateful for it all, the bad parts too, as they offered chances to learn.

Tomorrow we head to Jinju and then back to the sleep harbortown of Mokpo. But this place I'm in now leaves the deepest impression on me of all that is Korea thus far.

2007-07-11T12:05:00.000+09:00

Are You My Top Friend?

Facebook - that online social utility to keep in touch with old friends - is great, but have you ever noticed that it's got some pretty not-well-thought-out applications, like the top friend application? You can list who among your friends are your top friends.

Why would you ppst a public record of your friendship hierarchy? What happened to equality in diversity?

"Hey buddy! Thanks for listing me as a top friend!

I tried to do the same thing with that application but then I struggled with excluding people. Pretty soon I started imagining pissing off a bunch of people who were my marginal friends, people who otherwise wouldn't have known they didn't like me until they saw they weren't my top friend! Pretty soon I had to go to psychological counseling for bedwetting and I took three days off of school! So I removed the application.

But you're still a top friend, even if I'm too mentally unstable to say so in Facebook! Okay? Why are you yelling at me!? Top friends don't yell!!Okay you're my top top friend! My toppest toppedliest toppiter top friend. Honest.

-sigh- this is exhausting. Is it too late to be a hermit?"

2007-07-10T09:31:00.000+09:00

Best work-out session ever!

So I'm in my 20th K1 Muay Thai Kickboxing class, basically I'd been sucking pretty badly at anything related to punching, when the sabomnim shows us self-defense moves one Friday night. This is a totally groovy departure from the tedium of pivot and punch I'd been working on. In one class my month's fee earned its worth.

Then my fourth Friday in(last Friday) he gets the students trying their new moves on each other. I freak! I'm just an old fart and these young people (bones thin and brittle as twigs, but still) are full of beans. More over my sparring partner is a tall, lanky (mercifully mild-mannered) Korean fellow about 6'3" or so. As I look up at him I'm wondering what the hell kind of rice he's been eating and where do I get some.

"What am I doing here" I ask as we assume the starting wrestling hold. Well our sizes were so different we couldn't even reach each others' limbs to topple each other at first. It was pretty funny. So I gripped him and I tried throwing him around a bit, and finally we each try for a headlock and I get him down, then he flips around and I'm down, but I surprise him by shooting my legs up in the air and grabbing his head in an attempt at a scissors, (as I'd had done to me at a bar recently) but we're too near the wall so the instructor calls time and moves us over to the center. When that happens and we resume our position, it's all over for me. I don't get the same leg grip, and soon he's got me in the sleeper stranglehold and I pat the mat. But the exhiliaration of adrenaline afterward and the knowledge of relative safety to fine-tune the techniques makes it as addictive as crack. So I'm actually congratulating the guy and I'm all good-mannered sportsmanship about it.

I instantly decide I must return for more. (Why do guys do that?) This is quite the change for me from pacifist to highly motivated martial arts student. I met the same tall dude and asked him if he would be my sparring partner again so I can study how to tackle larger opponents. He is so good-natured about the whole thing and agrees to let me use him to practice tackling and disabling him.

And now I'm reminded how so many Koreans are really so generous. This fellow is okay with getting thrown around by a fellow half his size to help me unlock the secrets of how to take down oversized opponents.

Now look: there are plenty of bad Koreans around like any other people who walk this Earth, but most Koreans I find are as generous and good as this guy. Anybody making any of those negative blanket whining statements about 'all Koreans' can eat my gym shorts as far as I'm concerned.

Dae-han-min-gook!

2007-07-02T20:37:00.000+09:00

There is a country where people go to learn kindness again...

It's not a place with a flag or a national anthem, but rather, it's more like an undiscovered country that unfolds into miles of valleys and meadows deep within one's heart. The conundrum though is that sometimes we have to travel far in order to find it. Behold, the proof of the Divine's sense of humour.

When you get there, you may be surprised to find you already know some of the inhabitants. They may be familiar faces but in new settings, different homes than the ones you placed them in, in your mind. And some landmarks appear familiar, too. But they've been migrated, like boulders carried over aeons on expanding ice, finally melting and settling in the country of your new understanding. It is there, it is always there, and all the time we're travelling in the physical world, trying to make distance with that which we seek to understand, we're carrying it, like a great unborn divinity waiting to be born after blood and water and tears, emerging to change history - that is to say, our personal history - forever.

A woman stepped into the elevator tonight, with Maria and I. She was a beautiful but very clearly angry Westerner, a miserable kind of creature. I'd not have given her a second thought, but I'd met her twice before and she was the same both times. That may be okay for Manhattan, but it's not normal in Mokpo, the city hovering on the deep-space-nine outpost of civilization, for strange foreigners not to at least look and acknowledge each other, even if they don't say hi. This chick was on a mission to prove two Westerners caught in the same elevator in rural South Korea can totally not notice another Westerner is there. The resulting scene reminded me of that Newfoundland tongue-twister song,

Oh McTavish is dead and his brother don't know it,

His brother is dead and McTavish don't know it,

They're both of them dead and they're in the same bed,

And neither one knows that the other is dead!

That was us.

The first time my hellos were blown off, I wondered if my vibe was wrong (as sensitive, happy people might do.) Now look, I know everyone doesn't want to be pals, but it's also just so damn easy to be pleasant. And I tend to be happier when I run the 'be good to everyone' auto-pilot program than when I run other previous auto-pilot programs (such as the 'what the f*$# do you want' or other similar auto-pilot programs) so I got my reasons. Anyway as Maria and I exited, I mentioned it to her in Hangookmal, and she commented that the woman looked like she was in so much pain, at least on her face. Korea can be a rough adjustment, especially for those used to Western customs. (Internet forums spilleth over with whiners of this very nature.) But hell, so can the West. And being in Korea can also shave the chip off of a lot of peoples' shoulders and sometimes, particularly in the beginning, it can hurt. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that some of the folks I've met have definitely come here looking for some escape, prefering to study their home culture or circumstances from afar.

This phenomenon is not entirely unlike interplanetary exploration. Much like ESLers getting flack from families for taking this gig in Asia, a lot of short-sighted westerners blame their governments for spending any money at all on satellites to Mars, Venus, the Moon and elsewhere, and yet those outer-space explorations empower us with new insights on our own environment.

Expatriates come over here to do the same thing (in addition to paying off the student loans. After all, they could just as easily go to the oil rigs in Alberta if they had to, so it can't be all about the money.)

I've got this friend named Michael, a Toronto publicist. Just an angel of a man, he gently cautioned me through his story about certain expats in Asia who never make the adjustment to Canada again and become 'lost' somehow in the trans-Pacific flight. Well, it is so easy to get accustomed to the gentle way here. In what other job on earth do adorable little children run up to you every week and kiss your hands and tell you they love you just because you did your job? Now compare that with the Western experience of, 'Johnny where's your homework?' 'Gee, I dunno teacher, did you look in your ass?' Yah. No contest.

But there is an antithesis to this Westerner who finds Paradise in Asia, and that would be the Westerner who finds Purgatory in Asia. They come here, prickly as a porcupine in a thornbush pageant, battlescarred from all things that are the West, and the first thing they do is look for opportunities to say, 'ouch'. Yet somehow being here sands off their edges, introduces them to the new paradigm of relative calm. In fact, the two kinds of Westerners may be the same person at different stages. I've certainly met both. I wonder which of these two types I met in the elevator.

People who find the way back to that inner countryside often report the surprising resemblance it bears to life when they were very young. More over, these same people tend to be able to find it irrespective of which side of the Earth they're on (NB: that's a peacetime observation. Please don't write to me about the Iraq war. I already know.) Conversely, and in another stroke of divinely comedic humour, people who tend to leave places like Korea thinking they are returning to just such a country in physical reality (e.g. the 'real world') tend to find it's not there when they arrive, as has proven again to be the case with a fresh batch of Mokpo bashers now pining for in their Facebook status updates.

In other news, scientists confirmed today that people who felt grateful for all types of weather tended to live longer than people who complained about the heat in summer the wet in spring, or the cold in the winter weather.

2007-06-05T22:38:00.001+09:00

The other night, I thought I saw a Westerner who'd been in Korea too long.

A helmeted ESL teacher mountain-biking home from the toy store in shorts and sandals,
That's one thing.
But processing across a ten-lane crosswalk of waiting car headlights,
brandishing his new Nerf swords, raised to the wind,
the ESL cavalryman singing Star Wars at the top of his lungs,
With a belly full of kimchi & BBQ pork lettuce wraps, and soju vodka.

I put it to you: time for him to head home,
Or fully assimilated Westerner?

And we wonder why do they make such bad documentaries about us here?

2007-05-31T10:49:00.000+09:00

There's nothing like a mountain sunrise birthday summit to help clarify how much one has to be grateful for, and this morning the Spirit is particularly great indeed.

Maria and I flew out of the building parking lot this morning on our bikes, frantically pedaling through corridors of bright morning sunlight as we crossed street after sleepy street, hell-bent for the mountain. But the sun had beaten us to the punch. It hung low over our heads, in the eastern sky, gloating over our tardiness, from between apartment buildings and tree branches. (You know I've taught Maria to ride a bike now? I gave her a folding dirtbike.) I felt lighter and more possessed by energy as I rode, perhaps because I had so few clothes on - just shorts and a golf shirt and sneakers. But from the base of the mountain I bounded up the long stairs, stopping only twice briefly before imitating Rocky Balboa at the top of the trail. As we tore through the morning trail my mind started a retrospective to ten years ago, when I was 28. When we collapsed together at the summit, I looked out over the harbour and the sun had changed from a teasing companion to a congratulating one..

38 is already so much better than 28 was. In that year, I was in Memphis, TN, and an entire year-long effort to assemble a first fairytale opera commission fell through because of a small presentation error. With no other gainful employment to fall back on, I left my Master's studies bitter and unable to spiritually or financially manage one more day of composition study. I did return to Canada and I did continue over the next years to do important musical things in Nova Scotia of which I'll always be proud. But I don't think I even celebrated my birthday that year. I was trying to think if I did.

But on the mountain this morning, saying prayers with Maria, I meditated on the past year thus far. It seems like a never-ending journey into more and more bright light. In these past two years I'd now completed the best (and most fulfilling) music I'd ever written - my first two Masses (for Ascension and Christmas), sketches for a Requiem have been started, and I'd just acquired my first-ever piano, a real one. I'd met the love of my life and I was ready to meet her. I was teaching and composing and performing now all the time. What was different? What's changed between the me of ten years ago and now? I think it's because the formula was different . I wasn't bending myself to joy, as the poem goes...

He who bends himself to joy
Doth the winged life destroy
He who kisses a joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

I was now kissing a joy as it flies, so-to-speak. And when we arrived back at the apartment, I reflected on how the new piano we bought two days ago has shaken cobwebs and dust off of a very big corner room of my brain. It's a used piano but it looks lovely, sounds good and feels even better.

So I opened my shelf archives this morning and pulled out Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony (to me, a symphony whose crashing melodies I like to run out to with my raft and let the tall, rolling waves carry me out into an endless, romantic sea) and Aaron Copland's Rodeo Ballet Music and I'm going to start reading from orchestral scores again.

I decided it is time for musical expressivity to return to me. I had a hankering for Handel's Messiah this morning and played 'The Trumpet Shall Sound' for my birthday morning triumph after our breakfast, while Maria was showering. I thought about my friend Scott's extremely cheesy 'Let Their Love Be Blessed' (Handel's 'The Trumpet Shall Sound', with lyrics altered to be relevant to a Korean wedding a couple years back)(ouch) and I laughed out loud.

I think the difference is that worry no longer casts a shadow over my hope for things. That and my life grows organically, positive experience bears the seed of the next positive experience. I'm starting to see the divine design that sculpted me for this moment in time.
I've crawled out of a big hole at 28, but I saw this morning on the summit that I've done more than merely crawled out and shaken the dust off of me... I have more than regained lost ground...

Somehow I've learned how to fly.

2007-04-28T14:57:00.000+09:00

Requiem for evil movie character henchman #2

(This requiem is for starlight on the path after that bright, blinding life-moment... It's an ode to the long silence after the film-music stops, the dignified, tranquil morning that follows the amazing night before, when time stood still. And it's for those who only fully live in such moments, that the humble process of getting up and continuing the next day may reveal its quiet beauty.)

(ahem.)

What the hell is wrong with people?

I'm watching James Bond 'Die Another Day'. There's an unimportant evil guy who's really got a crappy deal, and he's caught my interest. It's Bond's archvillain's right-hand man, we'll call him henchman #2. He's a geeky blonde-bowlcut, young "Sven"-type evilguy, complete with black turtleneck and ability to giggle hideously when his new diabolical contraptions show their evil power. The evil complement to Bond's 'Q', this guy totally enables his rather prissy boss's global expansionist plans... and yet he can't get any respect. He designs evil lightning gloves and instruments of exquisite pain in his own fully-funded lab in an ice fjord castle somewhere I'm sure there's no ferry to or from. He's obviously good at what he does, and it's obviously an exciting career for him. But what does a guy like this do at 5p.m. when his shift is done? It's not like there are any bars to go to, any softball matches to play, any women to pick up or anything for that matter but hang out on an ice floe drinking with the penguins until tomorrow. What gets such a fellow up in the morning? Oh, wait. He's just been sucked out of the collapsed wall of an airplane - a harsh end to his career of distinguished service.

In light of his sorry death, I reflect on this question - is there any creature so miserable on this Earth, so defined, enslaved by what he does that he foresakes all of life for its sake, to find that he hates himself for loving his work so much? Henchman #2, who's loving you!? You better listen to some Janis Joplin, I think.

It's gotta be that Korean television has played this movie 10 times this year. The arch-villain (a spoiled brat red-haired Brit) just sneers at him when his evil lightning glove works. Not a simple 'thanks' or 'well done'. I'd have taken that glove back and fried the boss's nuts off, I'm sure, if I'd received that kind of response for a job well done. And so would you, I think! Long before #2's demise, you could also smell that somehow his employer was just going to off him over some minor annoyance, like color-coding the destruction buttons wrong, or making an inappropriate evil guy joke. You know, Jesse James did once shoot dead one of his own posse for snoring too loud.

Perhaps evil megalomaniacs see something about such slaves to passion that the rest of us don't - persons who become subhuman to their more balanced peers. It's important to love what you do, and to do what you love, but it's more important to learn how to love more than just the citizens of your own tiny little world of work. Journalists, who often spend days cramped together in the same van, chasing stories, living the thrills and disappointments together only to come home to spouses who can't relate, know well about this.

I guess I'm fixating because I'm thinking these days about how happy I am teaching ESL here in the Korean countryside, replacing my previous music job, and yet composing and getting performances as a hobby. In fact, with more time to polish, I think I may actually be composing better than before (when it was my 9 to 5.) I worry if I may have allowed the press or arts organizations to use me in the past to mislead some young Halifax musicians into thinking a self-employed musician in Nova Scotia was a viable career choice. It bothers me that I might have let myself be a pawn in someone's story-writing hobby as part of a greater distraction from the frustration of their own daily grind of pushing papers. God, I hope no young impressionable mind sacrificed his or her best years pushing the music-as-business wagon because of something they read about me making a living at writing and performing in their province.

Well, at least I know I could never be a journalist. I could never get stories out on time asking such existential questions about my own work?

Anyway, I have a point to make. The next time you feel some performance pressure by some geek who is totally (or mostly) defined by his or her job, take a moment and step back and remember evil henchman #2. Imagine his painfully quiet coffeebreaks, his untouched social calendar of bare, clean, empty white squares, his communication difficulties with the quacking penguins hanging out on ice floes. And for God's sake, remember his end. I hope you're working for a better boss than #2 had.

2007-04-22T08:18:00.000+09:00

Patron Saint Of Murphy's Law

Why is it that the coat hanger that hangs off your coat rack everyday as you whisk out of the door, the same coat hanger you've been meaning for weeks to put back in the closet just on the other side of the corridor, only chooses to find you the Saturday that you're rushing out the door to catch a taxi to catch the train leaving in 30 minutes downtown to meet your loved one? Why does it only then develop a talent for finding as many hooks, ropes, and pockets to hang off of your person as you rush back in to turn off the heater?

Could it be the same reason that you pulled a muscle in your neck stretching in bed on the morning you're supposed to later bring those three heavy bags of school demo materials to school?

It behooves us to pause at this point and reflect on a dire need to fill a gap in the great litany of saints and their spheres of control. Clearly, we have needed in the church for some time now, a patron saint to protect us from Murphy's Law. We have a patron saint of hopeless cases, St. Jude, who has long been confused with Judas the traitor. He's not quite the same and I don't think he could expand his docket portfolio to any more than what he gets on his desk nowadays, especially with the general increased population. We have sensational tabloid-type patron saints like St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians who miraculously survived being dipped into boiling oil (was that part of her mediaeval stage act?) We even have fictional joke saints like St. Flahoola, the patron saint of raining on Protestant outings (I can't take credit for that, that goes back to some cheeky choristers back in Halifax.)

The time has come to raise to public awareness a figure such as who has found that all his housewares suddenly descend on him, in the moment he needed things to sail on uninterrupted (for just five damn minutes! Lord, please!) and yet conquered his circumstances in the hour of truth with the divine gift of escaping all barbs and traps, moving with fluid elegance through a gammut of hostile objects, utterly unaffected, Matrix-style. He whose ketchup flowed back up onto the hotdog, and not down onto his nice white shirt. He whose foot was grasped by a blowing newspaper just before it descended on doggie doo. He who's guitar string broke only after the final chord was played. Such a karmic champion should come to us in those moments when all cosmic harmony becomes atonal and the Wagnerian-windswept beauty of one's life rhythm is morphing into a Schoenbergian Variations For Orchestra. At these moments, we need a karmic superhero. A champion of the people who will say, "nay! No more! Return to thy hooks, foul utensils. Pipes delivering liquids or gasses, thou shalt not burst now. Stay thy hand, cruel lady of fate, for thou art verily a witch in thy unholy wrath of knickknack mischief."

Who shall stand at the Lords' right hand, your celestial lobbyist while God & Son are distracted fixing wrongs in parallel universes?

He should relate to our complaints, like Woody Allen or Daffy Duck but more level-headed. Also, I've never seen either of them pray. And with the former, it would probably turn into a whiner's contest. That's not good in a patron saint. Superman is too controversial a figure for the church, with his shiny red underwear. But he did just die recently. But not affiliated with adversity necessarily. Although X-ray vision is always cool to have.

How about St. Shenanigan? First off, St. Shenanigan is Irish so there's the whole luck thing going on. And I think he knows Murphy (yes, of Murphy's Law) Educated in the 19th century in Spain. Rumoured son of leprechauns, graduated with his classmates Lady Luck and the Spanish 'Duende'. Killed by a pot of gold falling on him, buried at the end of the rainbow. This patron saint offers a great psychological twist to an adverse situation. You could say, 'okay, St. Shenanigan, I know you're here. And yes it's very funny. Ha ha. Now please help me out of this mess.' and like that, St. Shenanigan would turn the situation around for those of the anointed who demonstrate good humor.

A Prayer To St. Shenanigan

Okay St. Shenanigan, I know it's you!
And yes, it's moderately funny.
Okay, very funny.
Now my dear celestial patron,
For the love of the Lord,

In the name of Lord thundering Mary Murphy,

And all the angels and saints eh wha',
Would you kindly please frig off and help me out of this mess?

I love you, but I need you.
I know that if I put my trust in you, oh well-meaning butler of the Lord,
Who is of Irish descent and probably related to leprechauns,
That you will turn this situation around.
I know you can hear me too.
So please, OH, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!
Help me get it together and ____ (state your cause here)

Thank you. Amen
(take a deep breath, and untangle yourself. And just see if St. Shenanigan hasn't helped make it better.)

2007-04-19T21:06:00.000+09:00

The Power In A Monster's True Name
(Dedicated to the hope for an end to further pain inflicted by mental illness suffered anywhere, and especially this week by families of Virginia Tech victims.)

Among wizards with some decent length to their beards, it is common knowledge that if you can know a demon's true name (a very difficult thing to pronounce, let alone to find) you can cast a spiritwrack spell on it, which summons and captures it in a charcoal circle (scrawled on your stone laboratory floor of course) wherefrom you then proceed over the next several hours to torture, twist, torment and otherwise maim the flailing hellspawn until it is magically compelled to do your bidding in some horrible task you assign. The spell is very precise in its requirements. You can have no cracks in your circle lines from which it may escape. You should have no windows open to blow away the circle, and for your own safety, you should nail down everything that can be moved before you start this process, for the diabolical fiend whipping and spinning and spiritwracked before you will use all means to wriggle out of your hold on it. And if that happens it means certain death for you. But if you have done your homework, if you have taken the precautions not in anyway to be distracted from the procedure once started, you can and will control the monster. In other words, in the world of necromancy, once you know a demon's true name, it becomes your personal bitch.

Understanding mental illness can feel not entirely unlike this process. Any similarities, one may find, apply not only for oneself but for understanding others also. In terms of mental illness (incidental or chronic) the process is a lot safer as well, for you don't end up afterward with a sworn enemy who breathes fire and never dies.

It's finally become apparent to me as the result of events this week, that a lot of problems I faced in the past and bad decisions I've made have stemmed from anxiety attacks followed by mild depressions after they either get addressed or let down. But this time it was different. Because I'm older now, this latest one was weak enough to observe objectively, from outside myself, allowing me to cut through the confusion of having had too much young energy in the past to bounce around the apparent issues. It's like a big dangerous balloon filling with air but when it doesn't get tied or popped, there's a big "giving up of the ghost" that happens. Unfortunately I don't always get to pick what my mind grabs onto as something to worry about. But at least now I know this is a problem, and I can therefore surround it, give it parameters, and begin the process of closing in on it, hopefully to rob it of the power it enjoyed via its past anonymity.

But along the roadside to identifying anxiety, I have also learned a lot about various other mental illnesses that I wrongly thought might have been the problem. In doing so, I learned why a sensitive, big-hearted person should not get hooked by the tempests of others, and that in the most sensational cases of disturbed people I've met, that the issue they're citing is not in fact the material issue at all.

Really liberating.

In a seemingly unrelated (but really directly linked) note, I recently had an insight shared by a theology student about the art of spiritual warfare. She told me that when you are praying, if there are demons around, she learned in a workshop that they don't have the ability to hear your prayers if you pray to yourself quietly as people often do. So when you are in the act of spiritual warfare with diabolical forces, you should always pray aloud so the demons can hear your prayers. Definitely filing that away for my next exorcism. Hey, don't laugh, you never know when you might need it.

But it would seem fitting that people beset with emotional problems, who are thusly behaving like assholes in front of you, get somewhat disassembled if you've skewered them with a cutting, accurate pinpointing of their brand of mental illness. In such an instance, their faces look a lot like you just put a live hand grenade in their hands and asked them to deal with it somehow. It probably feels like finding out too late you have no pants on. If you really know their annoying behavior looks a lot like a specific problem and you can point it out to them, it's potent, it's powerful to know, especially if they think you now know something about them they don't know about themselves. For that moment, the issue they're citing is not the issue on the table anymore. In some cases in the past, it has been the fastest defuser of an escalating argument. But you do have to know what you're doing. Not just anyone can pick up a spellbook and holler incantations and expect it to all go one's way.

Nonetheless, thusly armed with this information, I have, in the past, set out to strip power from various popular forms of meanness and cruelty of one form or another, among young locals with a mean streak. My first blow was struck when I taught a beautiful, slightly plump Western woman here how to retort to childish Korean princessisms by illustrating to them their bony unattractive unhealth in perfect Hangookmal.

But namecalling, even as a just retort, is not always called for. And in the case of people you love, you should know there're ways to do this with love. I don't mean coddling someone from the true image of what they look like. I mean laying something on the line for someone you care about, without affectation or any hint of attitude or masking, which you can bet your ass they'll be searching for in your wording and facial expression.

In any case, a greater acceptance and engagement of the reality of emotional and mental illness is desperately needed in our world. Fanatics who use religion to maim aren't bred, they're harvested. We can see this in a personality profile of Muhamed Ali Agca (the 1984 failed assassin of Pope John Paul II) which shows a person who was many times living on the edge of insanity and desperation, before he joined Turkey's radical sect The Grey Wolves, and it continued after his training in North Africa and the Middle East. It begs the question if others could have access to good treatment, would we even see an Al Qaeda? Who would they recruit? Who would pick up their Arabic-scrawled tapes they leave everywhere and find something in their Islam-perverting rants to relate to?

Did you know that in Chinese culture, it is still prevalent among match-makers to dump a family which has even a distant relative with a history of mental illness? Apparently all the other factors weighing your young adult's candidacy as a mate - status, wealth, looks, talents- all go out the window if such a fact should come out, and from the match-maker's point of view, you just have to be grateful for whatever she manages to get for you, all negotiations closed. So of course it gets swept under the rug throughout the culture, costing trillions of person-hours of pain, and billions of dollars in lost productivity at work as incapable individuals rise to corporate positions they can't handle without treatment. And the worst part is, it doesn't have to be this way. So many forms of illness could be so easily managed, and some are weak enough, brief enough that they can be cured without the introduction of synthetic drugs at all. For such as these, a little love, a walk in the park, some time in a favorite activity, these can be enough to send those brain chemistry levels back in the right direction - again, for those of us who are occasionally emotionally ill or mentally ill (which is almost all of us at one time or another) as opposed to the chronically ill.

Cho Seung Hui had some people reach out to him in his time, and I'm sure that mitigated or delayed this tragedy, but if there was anything that could have stopped him, I'd wager the following: 1) he needed to have broken or interrupted the vicious looping of his negative emotions with the incestuous self referential insular thinking that fed those emotions, and 2) he needed external aid (prescribed medication) to help him do what he could not do through therapy alone.
There are thousands of partially assembled Cho Seung Huis and Marc Lepines walking among us. Not all of them are born contaminated in their perception of the world. Some of them have legitimately painful stories that leave them twisted and bent, like metal telephone poles after a vicious hurricane. For these people, daily living is like walking in and out of a series of thunderstorms. And the occasional weather clearing comes from people like you and me, from a simple laugh or a pleasant exchange. So remember that the next time you're thinking of being cruel to someone, and more importantly, remember that when someone is trying to hook you with their own meanness or cruelty too. Let that realization liberate you. Get the bird's eye view. I'm pretty sure the Pope reached Agca in prison because he knew such hatred doesn't come from sanity.

Remember, exorcists serve the Lord when they serve the needs of the victim, but they know the possessing demon is the one speaking to them. And still they persist, winds and objects swirling around them, but never hitting them. Unless they pause to look.

2007-04-15T21:57:00.000+09:00

I feel like I just made out with a succubus. Finishing mission impossible has left me a lot sicker at the end than I imagined at the outset. I just turned my school's song lyrics from poetic Korean to poetic English and all I've got to show for it is a quivery stomach and a splitting headache. But I pray the job will pay off in the coming weeks in the form of grammatically correct and aesthetically pleasing English sentiments ringing in the school hallways, sung from the mouths of schoolchoir girls.

Throughout this week's meditation exercises on Korean school song melodies, it's become apparent that Koreans seem to to approach music composition the same way many of them do business: it doesn't seem to be important what's going on melodically, as long as all the cadences function Western style at the end. Not exactly brimming with flattery, but true in the case of our school song. (Wagon be damned as lon as the wheels work!) As long as they get their re-so-do completion in the bassline, the melody can hobble along or skitter a la johnny-one-note or crash and tumble and split its knee open on the curb of wrongly stressed English syllables. But God save the Queen, it better sound like Handel on the last two chords of every phrase!

This little microcosm has proven useful in understanding much larger Korean phenomenae, like gaggles of corporate employees trudging along, impeccably dressed paper airplane makers, while a precious handful will actually be doing something productive. But by golly when the quarterly report comes down, there'd better be a profit showing, and suddenly it's the apocalypse of all-nighters for the whole staff, right down to the bitter end of the tune! (That would be the quarterly report.)

I've also found out this week that surly, reluctant grade six girls are truly international, and like their comrades in far-off lands, here too, they can make anything, even the singing of a song, turn into a painful laborious exercise.

Let their boyband dreams be damned to Gehenna, though, for at the end of time, after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, they did

surely,

and truly

sing:

On Mount Binyeo the pine trees grow
Strong, straight and tall!
Like us they grow, mighty they grow,
So too like us here, below!
Grant us today that we become
Strong, swift and wise!
For the future of Korea
Will be shaped by us!
May we remain ever beautiful!
Let us remain good and true!
For we are now all the students of
Mokpo Buseol - grade school!

2007-04-02T14:24:00.001+09:00

Harry Potter and the Frightening Similarity

WARNING: This blog is pure pulp fantasy fiction, and it goes on a fair bit, just so you know. So if you're not into wizards, orcs and the like, move on.

...those enchanting games lit our imaginations for years. We still talk about them today sometimes. Harry Potter's great but he doesn't hold a wand to Mystro. They share a couple of similar physical features (a boy, really powerful, magic) but I don't think kids would relate to him. He's actually an 87 year-old man magically possessing a small boy's body (his own body, transformed into a child-like temporal stasis, the result of narrowly escaping the diabolical trap of an evil deity.) However, I realize I can't write a book about him now as it will be called a cheap imitation. Still, I'd like to tell you about Mystro's slightly darker world which created him, and his last great adventure, which spun its course in the early 1990s, when I met with a regular group of friends over several summer Sunday nights at 7pm in a quiet midtown home on tree-lined Summit Avenue, behind St. Theresa's church in Halifax.

On those Sunday nights, we used to become adventurers of other worlds where we'd trek across vast plains and deserts to hunt a witch-king, astrally travel to exotic places like the Elemental Plane of Wind, and negotiate elaborate plans with cunning immortal heroes like Bahamut (the platinum prince of all good dragons, whose castle on the Elemental Plane of Wind changed location every day) about how best to corrupt the plans of diabolical, unnameable evil forces, bent on the destruction of lands of innocent people living on the Prime Material Plane (the mortal world.)

One such time, in the valley of Bloodstone in a far-off land, an urgent request was sent out to six immortal heroes to meet in Bloodstone castle, to be presented with an important task. Answering the call came Amber, high priest of the God of light; Olaf, a ranger of immortal fame who fashioned magical slaying arrows for almost any type of being, and reputed for his assassinations of various tyrants; Zazzer, Olaf's black-leather-clad female accomplice and cunning thief of great skill; Skye, a reclusive but powerful old wizard; St. Bernard, a holy knight of unmatched strength whose very appearance inspired fanatical loyalty in mortal men; and my character, Mystro, the 102 year-old Arch-mage, diabolically imprisoned in the body of a twelve-year-old boy.

Son of a peace-loving merchant family, Mystro's parents were unable to accept his decision to enter magic school, and disowned him when he enrolled. But he first decided on this career after a childhood trip he took with his father to an important merchant city. When their wagon made its way over the crest of the hill on that fateful day, the familiar city they expected to see in the valley below was a flattened wasteland of smouldering ashes. It turned out that some great evil magical battle had taken place recently. The impression on the boy was a deep one. From that day, at that young age, that set in his mind the decision to study magic... to have control over his fate. He learned that if you know a magic-user's truename, you can use it in a spell to command him, hence he adopted the nickname, Mystro.

Up until the time of this Bloodstone adventure, Mystro had had an interesting life as a wizard adventurer. Late in his career, in his 87th year, during a battle in another campaign his comrades were caught in melee combat with some Bones (lesser devils) which tried to pick up the fallen bodies of his comrade combattants and make off with them through an Astral gateway. He and his ill-fated cleric companion pursued to retrieve their captive friends. But the whole thing was a diabolical trap. The gateway was magicked to turn all the heroes into infants, and their infant bodies would be picked up and sacrificed. But the mastermind of this trap, the archdevil Asmodeus, foibled the attempt to transform Mystro into an infant. When he and his cleric friend came out on the other side of the Astral gate trapdoor, the cleric lay at Mystro's feet, a squawling infant, covered in his adult robes, but Mystro himself had been turned from a venerable white-bearded wizard into a twelve-year old boy, his mage robe hanging from his now-shorter arms and legs. After surviving the initial system shock, Mystro furiously lobbed all manner of violent spells at his encircling would-be undoers before grabbing the infant body of his cleric-friend and narrowly escaping via his last Teleportation spell he had memorized. He escaped a horrible death, but he was forced to start over, with an abnormal body that wouldn't heal again without magic. Although Mystro did grow in power as an Archmage, His body remained trapped in a demonic curse too powerful for him to entirely remove despite countless hours toiling in his laboratory by candlelight, poring over his tomes and spellbooks, trying to unravel the powerful necromancy that would forever cling to him. He still felt the age of his old body but remained to the eyes of human leaders a small boy. Mystro would forever remain totally dependent on magic for healing, and he knew he would eventually die in that pre-pubescent body.

But his child-like appearance was almost irrelevant now at the time of this summons to Bloodstone castle. For in the time since then, the boy-wizard had also become the emperor of the land of Tarq. This was an empire he gained after slaying its namesake emperor-monster. Now Mystro entered the hallowed halls of Bloodstone as the famed ruled of this vast continent in another dimension. His throne there was housed in the palace of the Imperial city of Jade, Tarq's capital.

And he entered followed by a train of twelve black-armoured men with golden eyes and silver hair. Who were these men of his company? Soon after having escaped Asmodeus' trap so long ago, he rescued twelve very young gold dragons from a litter captured by an evil cleric for a sacrificial rite. With the help of the King of the Gold Dragons, Mystro agreed to adopt and raise them and protect them in the absence of proper parents. He only had to swear to the King of Gold Dragons that he would teach them in the ways of the lawful good morality that all gold dragons were known for. These twelve gold dragons were now young adults and fiercely loyal to him, and accompanied him on high-profile state visits such as this, shapechanged into humanoids. They would accompany him appearing as human guards, unless trouble came.

Mystro initially came upon the land of Tarq because he found that raising these gold dragons attracted too much unwanted attention. His bungalow overlooked a great gemstone canyon wherein the dragons would feed and sleep, and grow. He had taken a neighboring village under his protection in exchange for autonomy, but after new enemies kept appearing, most notably priestesses of Tiamat (the five-headed Queen of Evil Dragons) failed to kidnap some of his adoptees, he eventually built a sky-ark and took all the villagers who wanted to go with him, into another dimension, to a peaceful island he scried via crystal ball. Unbeknownst to him, that island neighbored a vast continent ruled by Tarq, who invited Mystro to a meeting of the crowned heads of all the lands, where Mystro would be assassinated. However, Mystro instead killed Tarq, inherited the empire, ordered all evil temples to be destroyed and replaced with temples to Apollo (Mystro's deity) and he lowered the tax from 12 silver pieces to 7 silver pieces a month. The people gave their fanatical loyalty to the new emperor, and the result was Apollo gained two million followers overnight, and Mystro gained great new favor with his deity and installed a new magocracy in the land of Tarq. The boy wizard, once titled the exalted protector of the twelve gold dragons, was now also an emperor ruling from the Imperial city of Jade. And this legend had descended onto Bloodstone castle to join this call of immortal heroes.

Bloodstone's problem: in order to stop the advance of endless undead armies against the valiant but outnumbered human soldiers who protected the valley, six immortal heroes were summoned to Bloodstone castle, and were presented with the quest to end finally this campaign at the source. We conspired about a daring but foolhardy plan - one which would likely guarantee for us torment and need for life-long vigilance. In order to stop the continuous rise of skeletal armies, raised by the Witch-King, we would have to descend into the 666th plane of the Abyss and commit a daring act of theft against the Witch-King's supernatural patron - Orcus, the Prince of the Undead - by stealing into Orcus' obsidian castle in the vampiric city floating on lava at the bottom of the Abyss, and attempt to steal (and later destroy) the deadly Wand of Orcus. Distracting the unholy prince of the undead with the task of making a new wand would force him to abandon his earthly protege (the Witch King) allowing our champions to finally kill the Witch King, scatter his armies and force Orcus to abandon his supernatural sponsorship of this campaign. But after Orcus remade his deadly wand, our adventurers would be robbed of peace for the rest of their mortal lives.

2007-04-02T14:20:00.000+09:00

THE BIONIC SEMESTER

The new semester is really blooming with ambitious colors. My school's supposed to be distinct (on paper) from other local schools but it still helps that our classrooms are populated by many principled newbie teachers full of piss and vinegar anyway. This semester they've stormed us, bucking the wall of tradition with new ideas and energy, smoothing the edges of that which has been erected before.

A funny thing sometimes, that wall of tradition. Sometimes it upholds and protects, and other times it blocks light and fresh air. In the recent movie, 'The Queen'. HRH Elizabeth II's mother talks in the garden about (the preceding line of kings) not bowing to the whims of rabble-rousers (i.e. the press stirring the pot during the week of Diana's death) But why mightn't her mother have instead said that there are times tradition is followed, and times that tradition is created (as in the issue of the funeral) ?

But what Tony Blair recommends gently but persistently to HRH throughout the movie, our new teachers have similarly laid at the feet of our principal and his train (that would be the regal dynastic teaching establishment at our school) - tradition should not be so much like Roman or Greek architecture, subjects and objects of worship of their own symmetry and former splendor, religiously preserved into such contrast against the evolving surroundings as to make monuments of themselves, stiff, impressive, but irrelevant to the new streams of traffic. That's not the purpose of tradition. Tradition, new teachers are gently but firmly asserting, exists to serve, not just to be adhered to, and like Jewish architecture in the streets of ancient Lisbon, tradition is alive and changes with the changing landscape. It takes pieces of itself and re-shapes the sides of new roadsides and mountain faces encountered. It is an organism that not only imposes shape but also reshapes itself around new challenges.

The new teachers might have as well arrived in boats, donning brown wooly robes. Fresh with the words of the new pedagogical gospels ringing in their ears, they pursue new ways of utilizing the visiting native-speaker teacher, sending flocks of elementary school English journals, splayed open, wing-spread, floating into my office by the armload, in weekly migrations. (A major opportunity lost on the last semester's teachers.) Well, anyway it makes me feel more needed, to be correcting them in those tedious off-time office hours I must keep, instead of muddying myself amongst the great disgruntled masses of ESL teachers on Dave's ESL cafe. And although I have less class hours this semester, as they are all 'immersion ESL' conversation classes (using ESL to teach other subjects) I put more research into collecting supplementary materials for those classes. The new teachers have totally got my back. It's becoming a kind of passion.

One young, new, keener Korean teacher made my smoke demo better. It was week 2 of my weather series. I was struggling with a Busan school lesson plan involving ice, warm sand, and incense smoke in a box. It was hell. Well along comes young upstart smoking-a-pack-a-day ajosshi (a Korean mister) who put my incense stick near the door and showed the smoke go out on the top and go in at the bottom - just like he might have seen countless times standing or squatting with his buddies half-tanked, smoking outside the late night fresh squid Korean restaurant. Thank God I could chuck the damn ice and the damn sand! Drunken Korean ajosshi culture kicked in and helped my lesson plan! Awesome! The result was a better lesson demo all around.

(But it's not all roses for them - the newbies have to move all the furniture, I learned, regardless of physical ability. It's a kind of initiation tradition at our school apparently. Meanwhile, a quite physically capable teacher of more seniority continues to sit at the back of my ESL classes, cruising the internet, and making the occasional student either wash out his coffee cup or copy his documents during my class.)

(I could go ooff about this form of dues-paying being like an inferior form of skin-toughening that kids do by hitting each other, and that convents and monasteries occasionally observe in practiced rituals like fasting, or farming or communal maintenance, but that gets me started on how many schools and universities are in the closet about their desire to be like a place of worship while publicly declaring their indifference to superior existing forms of monastic life. So best don't get me started on that.)

That three-week weather series started with hot/cold air masses, moved through Tornado Alley and ended with weather map forecast conversation practice. I'll start a gravity series soon, beginning with Christopher Columbus and the fabled waterbucket demo, move through Newton and his embarassing secret and end with Einstein's answer, his resulting new picture of the universe, and wormholes. I'm loving pairing up history and science, and occasionally, discussing culture in there as well.

For my nerdy older boys English club I made a Dungeons and Dragons storytelling club with dice. Gets them out of the PC cafes and off of World of Warcraft, and in front of each other, talking and imagining. For the girls English club I started coaching choir-singing with the Canadian folksong, 'She's Like The Swallow That Flies So High.' Next week, the Broadway song, 'Hey Look Me Over' in English and in Korean. And I can't help but continue singing Handel's Hallelujah chorus in Korean!

2007-03-30T23:54:00.000+09:00

A New Picture of Mokpo

I terrorize Korean pedestrians zipping past them with my new 21-speed mountain bike which oozes testosterone with its G.I.Joe death squad cool-guy hot-wheels colours, and its unseemly gay-Paris bike bell and front white basket. The accessories fit the rugged mountain bike about as well as finding out Chuck Norris wears silk panties. Still I can't deny the bell and basket's functionality. They're just so damn useful. And I can't complain too much, I did get it for free from a departing foreigner. I wait until I'm really close then I thumb the bell quickly. It's not to be cruel - humans have two reactions, one following the other. The first instinct is to freeze. This is the one I act on, and pass by them, before there's time for the second instinct - to turn and arbitrarily pick a side to move to. Out of concern for the second, I am required to ring the bell much closer to the person, but I avert disaster. I suspect if my bike had a personality, it would be in gender re-assignment therapy.

Such are the sights and sounds of Mokpo as spring infiltrates us. It comes quietly, insidiously but certainly like the yellow dust blowing across the sea from Shanghai and Canton.

Blossoms are bursting, the sun sidles up closer to us, trying to make us its friend again, and as I ride or walk about town, I'm humming Handel's 'Hallelujah' chorus, in Korean, which has become my new fave song these days as I prep for Easter:

Al-leluia! Al-leluia!
Alleluia!Alleluia! Alle-lu-ia!
Jawn neung-eh juda ga-seu-ri shin-da!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

It's very spring-y.

Getting back in the Korean choir feels like putting on my favoite old summer shirt. It just feels **right**. I'd forgotten for a month or so what a joy it is to be in a good ol' four-part church choir. There is a kind of mystic beauty that happens when a choir's first strains eventually press into finely tuned chords between the choir sections, probably a kinestetic reaction to pure, uncomplicated sinewaves resonating between so many bodies. But that's the head talking.

The heart is photographing these precious Sunday mornings. But my fiancee is a big part of that. I stroll with her to church, arm-in-arm, down quiet streets of clean, tree-lined brick sidewalks - I in my trenchcoat, tie and straightened blonde hair that defies me by curling anyway, she in her adorable black French beret and defiant black curly locks, leather jacket, and black lace scarf and slacks - a heady, rich, exotic blend of Busan and Paris. We each desire this delicious little Sunday morning ritual and pay no mind to the cool, wet, spring morning wind. Inside, the warm sounds of the choir and the golden lights of candles will exorcise the cold wild damp winds of the outside spring morning air.

She came yesterday via train to bring me Korean mudfish stew when she found out I had a sore throat and cold. I had no idea how powerful that stew is! She had no idea how well I'd eat it! She thinks I'm Korean, I think she's an angel. When we meet, we bring strawberries, or wine, or flowers, and speak in English, or Korean, or Italian, or French or Ecclesiastical Latin. Even our prayers move seamlessly between my English and Portuguese, and her Italian and Korean. We pray together when lying side-by-side. We spend rainy weekends indoors and order in. In the day she deceives me into napping together, then sneaks downstairs to wash the dishes. I fight my way into the kitchen to do them together, and she complains and fights back. We wrestle to the floor and that's the end of dishes. After church, we prepare stew and plates of fruit and hot drinks, and I offer her African choral songs at the piano. She approves with an embrace, and lunch has to be put off to dinner. In fifty years I want to touch her white hair and wrinkly face and kiss just as passionately as we do today.

But I can still see her this morning as she stands in the hallway's grey morning light holding my choir music as I lock the door. Her kisses taste like strawberries and sweetened coffee. We cling tightly, arm-in-arm, defying the cold spring wind. The sun even seems to shine a bit during that walk. As long as I live, I shall never forget these Sundays, especially these Sunday mornings.

I've recently become a big believer again in intangible forces ultimately working out of love for my benefit. Einstein was right. Time really is a fourth dimension which knits with space to make space-time. As 38 approaches, I look back and find it hard to recognize myself at 28. I can see myself now against my shadow of ten years ago and I'm grateful - for the distance, for the universe ever so slightly twisting the violin pegs, brightening the upper harmonics of my soul over time, bringing out the overtones to enrich what is good in me, rebuilding, lessening the dull, dark tones, and subtly changing my life in quiet, subterranean shifts. At 28, I was on a collision course with anxiety for loving and fighting for the wrong (although noble) things. But even so, knowing enough to keep joyful things close (like choral singing) preserved an inviolable center around which other monuments were demolished, re-landscaped and new ideas erected.

But living in love now, I'm moved to career changes which sustain and augment love - real love, not worn-out young romantic irrelevant notions of revolution and artistic space-races. Unlike ten years ago, when I wrote for composer-professors, now I write to bring me joy. I could mourn the longer incubation periods, but really, I'd rather be a bi-annual amaryllis than a perennial daffodil. Most people don't know that an amaryllis, if well-cared for, can bloom repeatedly, not just once. Here's to amaryllis bulbs, and their spectacular livid blooms, which make them worth the wait!

2007-03-11T22:56:00.000+09:00

I believe in love again.

I believe.

The other night at Yongsan train station, we couldn't find a place to be alone and say goodbye. We had just reunited over a weekend of explanation, tears, laughter, and so much love. I had to return home, but in my heart I was already carrying a mission to reunite us in the same city, soon, permanently. But... Aa-ish! (as the Koreans would say) - those final minutes were passing too quickly, like water slipping away. It really was ending too soon. I knew we shared a kind of unspoken, growing anxiety... there still was so much to express. We stood on the marble floor of a grand station hall, surrounded by passing commuters, and yet completely alone. It wasn't suitable somehow. It wasn't right.

I took her hand and we scurried upstairs to the second-level balcony outside, to Seoul's skyline of evening lights mingled with God's stars. But there, too, in the dark, it was crowded with people, hiding under the awning, from the light rain. It appeared we'd have no place to be alone and say our goodbye. At that moment, I believed for the first time that God might change the weather for a mere two people. He sent a small miracle, a torrential downpour of hard rain. The people stepped back further from the edge. But in that moment, I saw an opportunity and I opened my big golf-sized rainbow umbrella, tucked my love underneath it with me and together we walked out from under the awning, into the raining, black, wet darkness of the promenade, far from the crowd, toward the balcony's garden edge overlooking the station entrance below, and there, walled off from the faraway crowd by night and a wall of hard rain, I lowered the umbrella's edge to hide our faces, and in that tiny sanctuary we kissed for twenty or thirty minutes in the rain. The whole world disappeared. Only a beautiful rainbow covered us (my umbrella was dimly lit by the garden potlights.) The crowd was only about sixty feet away, but they might as well have been on another planet. There, God gave us a way to be alone in such a public place, and say goodbye properly to each other, my beloved Maria in her cute, black beret, luscious curls of raven-black hair, and her strawberry lips.

Mighty and wondrous are the works of the Lord. Hallelujah...

2007-02-21T15:07:00.000+09:00

Animal Stories With Happy Endings

I had to turn down an offer for a dog rescued and rehabilitated by some ESL foreign teachers. Several hundreds of dollars later, the fruit of their labor was a new, loving and loveable dog. Don't you just love stories like that? Only I was too anxious about the guilt that the slightest neglect would make me feel. After all, I do hear the little whining puppies of our officetel apartments all day crying for their masters to come home.

One of my best friends is a guardian angel who provides a loving home to cats he takes in from bad homes, and then cries a lot when they die a happy old age, years later. I have to remind him that maybe God's put him on this earth to right the wrongs other humans did to these cats. So in his vulnerable moment, he accepted my suggestion that he's a kind of 'human angel' cat goodwill ambassador from God. We need more people like this in the world I think.

So I'm thinking about my first real dog, a jumpy, yappy Sheltie-cross who first appeared on the site of our log cabin up in the Rockies where I stayed in 1993, fresh out of university.

Yes, well I'd wanted a dog all of my life and I could never have one. So when I was 23, I went to take care of an old woman in a log cabin way-y-y-y up in the the Canadian Rockies. And there we eventually met Georgina. It ran away from its previous master, and it had signs of having been abused before. So I gave it lots of gentleness, lots of love and slow gestures, and eventually she trusted us so much that she made a nest on our porch and gave us puppies. For a mother to do that, it says something about her opinion of us, I think. I was really proud of her trust in us. She became a happy dog.

It did take a lot of patience, because when the dog first decided it had friends at this cabin, she decided she'd earn her keep by chasing away all the wonderful wildlife which used to come around the cabin, which meant furious racing and barking around the cabin, all night long. One night Olive had had enough and hobbled out in her nightie grumbling in her gravelly over-smoked voice, " I'm gonna shoot that damn dog!" (But her shotgun was in the room, thank God.) She flung open the big oak door, and called out to the night, and Georgina appeared, happy as could be. She pointed down and shouted, "shut up!" And Georgina looked up and responded to what she thought was a game, with "Arf!" Then Olive wagged her finger again, angrily, "Shut up! *SHUT*... *UP*". Georgina repeated perfectly, "Arf Arf! Woof! .... Woof!" and thus ensued a lively exchange of one-upmanship... shutupwoofshutupwoofshutupshutupwoofwoofshutupwoof... a battle for comprehension for the next five minutes on the porch, the two of them passionately engaged, yet on completely different wavelengths. Olive finally slammed the door in frustration and hobbled back to bed, grumbling her threat again. I stayed up just to keep an eye on her, but she didn't get her gun. Georgina was happy as could be that her hard work was being recognized and immediately resumed barking duties around the house. The old woman hated the dog, but she accepted it because of me. And the puppies changed everything for Olive. Watching all six of them desperately jumping into and out of snowprints, trying and follow mommy for morning walks, it was the cutest thing. They all went to good homes but I never got to see Georgina again as I'd moved away. But I'm happy to have been part of her transition from cruelty to normalcy.

Earlier when I was 19, I went to a friend's house and they had rescued a female dog (some kind of hound) from a terrible home. The previous owner burned his cigarettes on her belly when she peed on the floor, so the dog thought it was bad to pee any time, so she became so sick and angry. When I met her, she was just learning to trust humans again because of her new family (my friends) but she still threatened every new person who came in the door. When I came in the house, she did her threatening thing but I bent down slowly. She just barked and looked at her master for guidance. I decided I'd get up and just make slow 'you-could-outmanoever-me-if-you-had-to' movements to the chair, and I put out my hand slowly for her to smell, and she came near me. She continued to bark and growl, but she sat near my feet in the living room, and continued to look around for her master's face, maybe to gauge from him what the hell was going on with me. But I spoke softly to my friends, and then after a few minutes of her feeling in control, I patted my lap and the dog jumped up into my lap. She never did that before with anybody, they kept saying to me. So I felt lucky then also to have been at the right place and time for an animal learning to trust humans. I think it was the (lethargic)movement and the (gentle) voice and lots of patience and understanding. But I think they can smell our pheromones and when we're comfortable and when we're not. So we have to make the emotional decision internally as well, that we're very much in love with the animal, in spite of what our instincts may be saying. I think they can smell that.

Babies certainly can. It's a big part of my technique to holding babies. No matter what kind of hellish, flaying brat may be in your arms, if you breathe deeply in and personally decide, "I really love this wonderful baby" and then after the warm fuzzies come over you, gently exhale through your nostrils into the babies face, I'm pretty sure they're smelling that you're comfortable with them because they usually stop crying after this. You can even be holding them incorrectly, but if you do this, they'll forgive it, I find. But if they don't smell your warm fuzzy acceptance of them on your breath, no degree of correct holding will make them feel better. At least that's my experience.

But back to animals. I think that previously abused animals on the mend like to feel that they could beat you if they had to do it. So I help them think that (well, the female ones anyway.) They can run around me fast, it's okay, then afterward, they are calm and we can be friends. But I don't know how to take good home care of a dog. I just know how to have good relations with them. There's a section in the Little Prince about taming a friend. Do you know it?

But these are two happy ending stories about animals. Do you have any happy memorable stories with animals? Please share in the comments space below.

2007-02-16T23:11:00.000+09:00

Who are your favorite singers, and what were they singing when they first "grabbed" you?

My favorite female singers of all time have to be (in no particular order) :
1. Birgitt Nilsson singing the part of Brunnhilde in Acts II & III the 1962 London Philharmonic recording of Die Walkure
2. Whitney Houston in her debut album (1986?) especially 'Saving All My Love For You'
3. Amalia Rodrigues, in almost anything but especially the early fado recordings like 'No Ceu Da Minha Rua'
4. Mahalia Jackson in almost anything but especially later recordings like 'Come Sunday', 'Monday Morning' and 'Way Up In Jerusalem'
5. Mariza, the much-hailed natural successor to Amalia Rodrigues' crown. Her percussion-and-voice rendition of "Barco Negro" is a gorgeous testament to what the former colonies can bring to Portuguese culture.
6. In-Sun-I, the lovely Korean-Afro-American singer in any R&B, but especially Gasseum Ari, the first Korean song I knew when I had a first love here.
7. Rene Fleming in almost anything but especially the Cherry Duet of L'Amico Fritz with Pavarotti.
8. Maria Callas singing 'Vissi d'arte' or any other Puccini or Donizetti
9. Sarah Vaughn, especially singing Gershwin in her last recording with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For me her dreamy deep alto cooing is the female gender's reply to Barry White, and her scat-singing just sparkles.
Digging into my roots a bit, I found this gem, Ceu Da Minha Rua (The Sky On My Street)
My friend put it up on her site, you can thank her.
http://blog.naver.com/jxbride/34613836

It's a landmark recording of Amalia Rodrigues, Portugal's celebrated queen of fado (fado is a sort of Portuguese blues, originating in the 19th century, coming to full flower with Amalia's famous recordings. Some argue fado's roots go back a thousand years or more.) Before Amalia, I thought ghosts were only spooky. But through these old recordings, Amalia's haunting voice is like a ghost of love from ages preceding her. Her recording seems to come from the very walls of Lisbon's ancient streets, mingling with the city sounds.

No Ceu Da Minha Rua is a song about "home" and the special sentiments it invokes - hometown, old neighborhood, the place where you belong. Think 'Cheers' tv show, but in Portugal. It certainly romanticizes the Alfama, Lisbon's oldest neighborhood district. (The Alfama comes from the Arabic, Al-Hamma, for the fountains, or baths, which would place the neighborhood's name origin back at least 1000 years, to the arrival of the first knights from the court of Lyon.)

A gorgeous, florid vocal ornamentation sprouts from the melody's nooks and crannies everywhere, like flowers through stone, with a joyful skill that makes all the right allusions to glorious old Europe. Old ghosts of Islamic remnants wind their way out of the mandolins and vocal lines. They try to grow like a musical vine on the lattice of an ancient Christian song form. And the whole ride is so intoxicating. As soon as I find a way to link to the mp3, I'll post it on the web. (I hope my translation can deliver just some of the art in the lyrics.)

No céu da minha rua da Alfama não chama,
The sky on my street from Alfama doesn't beckon,
nem prende as intenções.
Neither does it hold the intentions (stop one's business.)

Às vezes nem a lua lá mora, embora
Sometimes not even the moon there resides,

lá chegue em seus clarões
But arrives there in its rays of light
mutilados a telhados
broken, amongst the rooftops,
que se abraçam fraternais.
That give a warm, familiar embrace.

E no céu da minha rua
And on the sky of my street,
a Lua, recua, limita-se aos beirais
The moon recedes, back to the sky's very edges.

Com Alfama céu não rima
Against (the grandeur of) Alfama (below), the sky (above) doesn't rhyme
Porque sempre o céu é pouco quando olhamos lá pra cima.
Because the sky we glimpse above is never enough.

Mas o céu não nega o troco cá embaixo a quem se estima
But that same sky/Heaven doesn't withhold its rewards from those below who esteem it.

Vai, daí ser voz corrente
Go, and spread the word,
que na Alfama toda a gente
because in Alfama, all the people
Traz o céu no coração
carry that sky in their hearts

É feliz por natureza
(Heaven) is happy by nature
Ninguém puede mais riqueza
(and from that sky) no one could ask for more
Que saúde, amor e pão!
Than health, love and bread!

2007-02-14T10:13:00.000+09:00

Oh! Yesterday I was visited by an applie pie angel!

Her name is Crystal (very fitting name, implies shining) and after I brought her my sacrificial offering of a crate of Korea's finest Kimcheon redsoil farm apples, she laid them on the altar and performed a powerful prayer and they transformed into three pies - apple crisp pie, medium applie pie, and a godzilla monster kick-you-in-the-arse-where's-the-ice-cream apple pie.

Like Jesus and the five loaves/two fish, there were apples left over after sharing this bounty. Returning a good gesture, she put so much cinnamon and sugar and it was so gooey from the juicy apples it gave me tingles. A treasure to be sure, in this lost land of kimchi! But long after, they continued to keep me warm. I simply could not get an apple pie in Korea before this moment. And don't even talk to me about McDonald's apple biscuits. That's like talking apples and oranges. Forbidden fruit of Korea... forbidden apple pie. But no snakes. And Eden baked right in.

I'm all for adapting but sometimes finding another westerner out here is almost as pleasant as a cinnamony apple pie, when that part of your brain that itches to articulate in higher language vocabulary gets a long-needed scratch.

Crystal's a foreigner, like me. But it's amazing how many Canadians are finding each other over here. Although Mokpo is far from Seoul, there's something special about being here with this foreign community. And everyday there are more stories of folks finding old schoolmates and other friends here in this other Canadian colony. It seems at such moments that Korea is a kind of Canada's other Florida. I wonder what impact this will have on Canada a generation from now. Do you think we'll all be off the Timmie's and hooked onto kimchi and gimbab?! Well we certainly could a lot worse than that! The diet here in general has been very good to me.

But every so often, you gotta have a slice of home.

2007-02-10T10:07:00.000+09:00

I don't really believe in ghosts...

But if I did, I'd swear someone is pushing me to write a song for a Requiem. And for whatever reason, I'm feeling a particular motivation to dedicate it to the souls of those who've departed suddenly.

The motivation comes at least partly from the melody. This song that's becoming born in me carries a plaintive, dramatic plea that feels like a boat sailing against hope to a distant shore, like to a place that faith alone says will eventually appear. Singing it invokes an image in my mind, of people crashing through to the other side, the way fish might say humans look underwater when they're breaking the water's surface and then reaching, maladapted, disoriented, toward light.

Is this my spirit resolving itself against the daily news? I suppose we each have to come to terms with it in our own way, this one aspect of the world. It shocks, but most of us are busy to digest it, and we put it away for later consumption. But I think it can build up like an acid if you don't unearth it and let it die under the daylight of scrutiny.

The residents of Halifax, Nova Scotia have a peculiar superstition of believing themselves to be out of harm's way, and it creates the false sense that they're somehow insulated from the rest of the world. But this superstition is not unfounded. The conflict between the northbound Gulf of Mexico airstream and the southbound blasting Arctic airstream, which wage war on each other all over the continent, for the most part create trajectories for hurricanes to go around Nova Scotia, or to get so weak that they peter out to rain by the time they get there. Factor in the relatively quieter life of a lower population, and you've got a recipe for a powerful myth.

But change is in the air... a travel agent friend back home stresses out when the Israeli invasion of Lebanon causes the local Lebanese community to flood travel agents with emergency flight requests out of Damascus. And during last month's winter vacation, I felt any last vestiges of my old Halifax were gone for good, as my brother relayed to me a new picture of the city by reading the online police reports. They tell a story of a once-friendly city now besieged by swarmings. Working citizens walk home from work and get stabbed to death by kids, and retarded rap video trends inspire so many to want to be a retarded 'gangsta'. Sauron, it would seem, has reached 'the Shire.'

I've come home many times, and I've long-since known you can't ever really return 'home' in that sense, but this time it was... unrecognizable.

In the one year I tried living in Toronto, it occured to me that much of the coldness I felt from the city was an unfair process of using the subway as a social barometer (an endeavour doomed from the start - I'd be more successful asking the church for advice on better sex technique) and otherwise seeking confirmations in daily living for a prejudice that was taught to me about TO. Under this cloud, I saw other warm individuals as fellow refugees, unearthed or discovered-in-hiding. Anyway, I know the crumb of a chance I was giving Toronto in my mind was just so much bullshit and it deserved better. And so I embarked to see it in a new way, and walking across the city was part of my reconciliation, and giving the city a chance to be loved on its own terms. You might even say I gave Toronto my blessing... as I made a huge benediction over it (in the fall I walked from Finch station in the North, down Yonge to Union station in the south, and in the spring I walked Kennedy station in the east, across town to Kipling station in the west.)(okay east to west would be the Greek orthodox blessing. Don't tell my folks, we're Catholic and they'd kick my ass for doing right to left, instead of left to right.)

But what may seem to some in TO to be a false accusation against the city, does appear quite legit in other areas on the continent, like LA. Lots of migrants, crowded, no time to care about anyone... although usually this sort of country mouse accusation is pointed at financial centers and the people who work them, as opposed to entire cities. And I've certainly met enough genuine career-refugees from the corporate sector to confirm that.

But at this time I'm reminded of my African-American, Mississippi friend's mamma's advice she gave to him, and he bequeated to me, "son, don't let the world make you cold."

Okay, mamma. I'll make this my mantra, too. But should I just shut off CNN altogether? And if I don't, who could be blamed for one day finding a cold and bitter face staring back from the mirror? Who can bear the mental weight of so much ongoing world conflict?

But that mamma was right. And I don't imagine she'd say stop reading the paper. Maybe she'd even champion recharging the spiritual batteries, of making the reconciliations you need to in your heart in order to restore balance, finding that yoga that stretches your spiritual muscles in the way they need to be stretched. I think we each have to find our way of doing that, our optimal spiritual yoga position, for our unique spirits. So maybe she'd understand writing a Requiem.

So there's this obsessive melody that's constantly popping up. I can't stop hearing it. Also these past two days I feel a deep sadness. Could be just S.A.D. but the deaths of innocents are close to my mind a lot.

So I dug around and found these prayers... (or the parts Durufle used from Missa pro defunctis) Here are the ones I'm meditating on. Some of them are cold, stormy grey like the stone of a sarcophagus, and others are scintillating like summer sun reflecting off a lakewater's surface and onto your face and neck.

Requiem - Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,et lux perpetua luceat eis.Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion,et tibi redentur votum in Jerusalem.Exaudi orationem meam,ad te omnis caro veniet.Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,et lux perpetua luceat eis. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. A hymn becometh thee, O God, in Zion, and unto thee a vow shall be repaid in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer; unto thee all flesh shall come. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them
Sanctus - Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth.Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.Hosanna in excelsis.Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini.Hosanna in excelsis. Holy Lord God of Hosts; Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.
Pie Jesu - Pie Jesu Domine,dona eis requiem sempiternam. Sweet Lord Jesus, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest.
Agnus Dei - Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,dona eis requiem sempiternam. Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, grant them eternal rest.
Lux aeterna - Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es.Requiem aeternam, dona eis Domine,et lux perpetua luceat eis. May everlasting light shine upon them, O Lord, with thy saints in eternity, for thou art merciful. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them.
In Paradisum - In Paradisum deducant Angeli,in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres,et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat,et cum Lazaro quondam paupereaeternam habeas requiem. May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May a choir of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.

Been a busy year for sacred music.

2007-02-09T08:14:00.000+09:00

Robert DeNiro recently asked Yahoo! Answers for names of noteworthy secret societies. As I had been feeling irrelevant lately as an English teacher, I couldn't help but feel a kinship with the Esperantists, who, God love 'em, have probably wanted their society to be anything but a secret. The founder of these enthusiasts of world unity practice Esperanto, the Euro-mongrel language designed to take a bit of every language, in the admirable dream of creating -ahem- creating a new common (if totally arbitrary) language everyone can understand (you know, pretty much what English has become with its powerful lexical engines after British and American imperial expansion.) The problem has always been that they are only understood by other Esperantists of course, each of which possess the annoying quality of superficially sounding like they're speaking *your* language... that is until you step in and listen closely. (But if they ever got a nuke and a radical list of demands, INTERPOL would be screwed I'm sure.) They were in recent Yahoo News, something about an anniversary. I had thought they'd all but disappeared with the last world unification effort - disco. (Wasn't that supposed to bring us all together too? Like, what happened to the dream, man?)

Well in a fitting contrivance of coincidence, I had been experiencing my own kind of global united world vision recently when my co-teacher had been set up on a date and the matchmaker asked to take things slow. Cool. But the explanation was that this was a Korean girl (girls of other nations go faster? How does that explain naked norae bangs (private karaoke rooms) and love motels and coffee girls who deliver more than coffee on little motor scooters?) Saying 'conservative' would have worked, but because she distinguished the girl's slow pace as a Korean quality, we couldn't help but wonder about all that other stuff we hear about. Well-intended, but the irony was too much and we couldn't stop giggling.

However, while my co-teacher, being a gentleman, was of course in complete agreement with his friend, he did strike the right chord when he concluded, 'women all over the world are the same in that regard. In every country there are shy ones, bold ones, fast ones and slow ones. It's the personality, not the nationality.'

Indeed. Whatever would possess someone to think of their entire country's female population in this way? Why, a kind of subconscious transference, of course. Self imposed on other. The same kind of subconscious knee-jerk transference I made a week before at the Mokpo Museum of Natural History.

There I was on a field trip with my darling ESL students and one of the moms. We were looking at a display of stones curiously sculpted by natural forces, which artists lifted from their environments and gave them backdrops, or enhancements, or in some cases simply names to evoke the image the artist saw.

So we approached this one stone sculpture which looked like a shallow lake with a humanoid shape at one end of it. It's title, in Chinese, had just two characters. Two. Very concise, probably some familiar well-polished cultural term. The English title directly beneath it, however, and in contrast, was nearly twenty words long. It read, 'a wife waiting faithfully for her husband, eventually perishes and petrifies' (paraphrase) I asked the Mrs. what the Korean word for that was and she plainly replied 'we have no Korean word for that' And BANG - cultural transference- I just found that fact really funny. I started laughing. Then she looked at me and then her eyes widened and she started pointing at me and laughing too. Of course I had to say it. "Is there no Korean word because in Korea the wife would never wait..?" She answered, "maybe you're right!"

Now before you Westerners get all complacent and smug, remember there was also no snappy English term, either. So she could just as easily have used my terrible joke to backhand Western women's reputations too.

-if you didn't find that funny, don't worry. My principal didn't either. But he'll get over it. I hope.

But if I was feeling bad for not reaching students with English, I was also feeling just as much relieved that my Korean language skills hadn't been better the week previous. This is a story of the potential dangers of hearing what you want to hear - another kind of transference.

Lost In Translation
( or, Why You Should Never Use An Online Translator.)

At 4:30am the week previous my cellphone buzz-vibrated the coffeetable (silent mode) jarring me awake. I stumbled downstairs in the dark, 'who could be calling me now and what could they possibly want?' I'm in Korea, so maybe it's overseas. A call from home?

It was a textmessage, in Korean. It came from the phone number of a cute local woman I had asked out twice. She accepted twice, and canceled twice. I had given up on her. This was Charlie Brown's proverbial cute red-haired girl, with me playing Charlie Brown. Only the proverbial red-haired girl was waking me at 4:30am with a cell text message. So, of course, like any decent single man, I wanted to investigate. When I went through the translation of her text message, it sounded like gibberish. It talked about peeling the English poetry teacher (I don't teach poetry but I do teach English! Could it be?) But if it had come from anyone else, I wouldn't have gotten my coat on and walked down the street (okay I'm lying I ran) to the 24-7PC internet cafe to type it into a Korean text translator online to help me.

What I got from Babelfish:
About sea it is a husband family
The housewife it is late at night
In order not to come and go, what minutes
Help it entrusts
The husband it raises

? Quite mysterious.
Maybe this girl, being a Korean second-language learner (she's a S.E. Asian, not Korean) is not a good Korean speller, I thought. Some of those double consonants are hard to hear. So I retyped it, changing some doubles to singles, vice versa.

The new translation:
In order it is this
English poetry husband to peel and affection housewife night nuc to not to come and go,
also the surroundings minutes raise the genital organs chin the husband whom it does

Damn!

I went back home and skyped my Korean friend in Halifax, asking for emergency translation assistance. It was now 4:50am. Time was ticking. This could be important. So I waited for my friend's reaction. She was shocked at the Korean I typed, and promptly sent it back in English.

The real translation?

This is ____'s husband.
I want people's help, who are related to her
(like friends or co-workers)
for a housekeeper not to hang around outside too late at night.
from her husband.

What an exotic mix of deflated disappointment, and yet relief all at once in an adrenaline cocktail in my head. Holy crap she has a husband? Oh my God I didn't even need my coffee anymore. And excuse me but, his 'housekeeper'? Ouch.
I hope I'm never referred to by some future woman as her 'bank machine'.

That transference, it'll getcha everytime. And to think I almost responded...
Aish. and Whew.
All at once.

2007-01-12T19:49:00.000+09:00

Did I ever tell you when I was a kid, I used to imagine I could solve the riddle of one of the Divine mysteries, like how God could be omnipresent and yet in one place, simultaneously?

My theory was that everyone - my parents, the bus driver, people on t.v, everyone - was a disguised angel, executing a carefully rehearsed script designed to test my reactions... everyone of course, except for me, the object of these tests. God spends eternity running individual people through His earthly life-theatre gammut, one at a time, carefully studying and recording their every action like a scientist watching a hamster run through a very long labyrinth that takes 80 years to get through. Since God never ages, He's got all the time in the world to run billions of people through this morality obstacle course, one at a time, and judge whether they live in Heaven at the ends of their lives.

That's pretty messed up, even by my loose standards. I don't understand how I could have concluded this as I never experimented with drugs. But it didn't end there. Oh no, I decided I'd try and cheat the system. I thought if I could turn on the t.v. earlier than intended, I just might catch an angel (impostering as a journalist of course) still fixing her hair or putting on her human mask or whatever, caught by surprise that I turned on the t.v. earlier than I was supposed to. Then I tried seeing what would happen if I answered people with answers other than what I should have said.

Mom: son, are you ready for lunch?
Me: Yes! - I mean... (musically)No-o-o! (then I come down for lunch)
Mom: ?!?

I tried walking backwards, anything that would upset the system, or what was expected of me, to try and catch the system off-guard. I became a little experimental surrealist. At the height of this absurdity, once at supper, I picked up a spoonful of potato,tuna and onion with olive oil and vinegar and looked at my sister and said, 'this tastes like an e-minor chord' She told me I was retarded and she was right.

Soon after this I gave up trying to mess up or peel the backing off of God's elaborate illusion, accepting that these silly attempts of mine, too, must be part of the grand plan - which made me feel even sillier to think about (oh, so it's written in the book of Life that at this point in my life, I'm totally supposed to be a spaz. Gotcha. Okay I give up God.)

I was reminded of this funny but bizarre period of my childhood when I saw the movie Harry Truman two weeks ago. Like Jim Carrey's character, I thought everything was unreal (but I was a kid. What the hell was Jim's excuse for thinking this?)

But in 180 degrees the opposite direction, last week when I was back home in Halifax on vacation, I felt a rather ghostlike sensation, like everything around me was evolving and developing but I was in a temporal stasis of some sort, not quite as real as everything else. It was a horrible feeling. Some of my Korea-inhabiting Halifax friends had gotten married and settled down into new careers here, while others were awaiting babies or renovating homes. I could share their happiness fully, but all the developments seemed to cast a shadow of a question mark on me. I'm sure some of them felt that question too. Even the Halifax skyline I knew had changed so much. Eventually I felt less at home in Halifax than in my host country, where I continue even now to get a real sense of purpose, a feeling that I'm making a difference with the work I do. I always knew that as an ESL teacher in a foreign country, I would come to a moment like this. What to do?

Before vacation, a Korean friend gave me a book called, 'The Purpose-Driven Life' and I started into the book with great gusto, eager to glean any pearls of wisdom that could alleviate me from the aimlessness that accompanied my occasional loneliness out here on the Asian-English frontier (enter blowing tumbleweeds.)

But the book was extremely Protestant, and far too childish to keep me interested, with its insistence on God having pre-written every action that will happen to us. (If God has wants for us, like He wants us to live, and God has pre-written every action even the numbers of days we will live, how does that explain God's responsibility as the architect for the short lives of the aborted unborn?) Anyhow, you can see how this view can get rather messy, rather quickly. Still, I've been around enough senior citiizens to know if you let someone foolishly blather on long enough without getting too involved, eventually they may have something really wise to share with you. It is possible. So I trudge through impossible chasms & blizzards of reason, waiting for a shining light to vindicate my efforts for walking through this snowstorm of Calvinism and fundamentalism. It even makes my back hurt to read it, just like sitting in an unergonomic, angular, hard, wooden pew somewhere in the 16th century anti-Catholic German north. (I prefer the fever-chills of the Italian seasons myself. Even their churches' kneelers have cushions. Lemme tellya, those people know about church!)

I was writing a friend about someone who had just returned to Toronto from her 'Asian immersion experience' and wondered if she had gotten out in one piece (i.e. with her sense of humour intact) I remarked that I consider myself to have had a Torontonian immersion experience, and lucky to have gotten out of *that*. I talked about how nice it was not to be near bankrupcy anymore, and that I was now shopping for the lowest bid on performers and producers to record a CD for next year. Young composers starting out have to really haul ass to put out a first CD. Mine's for choir and orchestra so you can imagine the investment involved. Makes me wish I were a solo flautist with a reverb machine and a sunset pic. (Just a little New Age music humor there for ya.)

But when I think about this CD project, I can't help but feel that somehow this Purpose-Driven Life book has either reached me or prophesied something that was to happen in me, and that the ghostly feeling I had in Halifax is (mercifully) about to incinerate like a vampire facing the coming sunrise of a new potential being realized, a shining self-actualization. Well I'll be damned. Is this coming from the book or from me?

I've discussed with friends the fact that my muse (my metaphor for my desire and drive to self-actualize in music) has been an unbelievably good lover and an unbelievably bad life partner. So I kicked her to the curb, Oprah style. I thought I'd thrown in the towel long ago but my musical past appears to be throwing the towel back at me. Is it possible she refuses to die? What kind of R&B record should I play for her return? Should I put on 'Reunited' and get roses and candles for her, or should I dust off 'I Will Survive' and change that stupid lock?

2006-12-23T18:49:00.000+09:00

Do you enthusiastically celebrate Christmas in a secularized world?

This is a pic of my mom's praesepio (Bethlehem city scene) under our family Christmas tree. As you can see, it's a passion - as much a family tradition as is the illusion that the whole family helps build Bethlehem, a nice idea that never pans out and we eventually surrender our democracy to mom in exchange for absolution for our inferior "urban planning" sins. Penance usually involves hot chocolate, shortbread cookies, and sideways sooky-eyes from the safety of the kitchen table, out of range from swinging distance.

But some of us all too quickly lay similar holiday passions on the sacrificial altar of deconstructionism at the behest of a seemingly persuasive argument. And Christmas lately has received a lot of those kinds of attacks, where people my age discover the pagan customs some Christian traditions adapted during the religion's conquest of Europe, and then get tripped up on what is the function of history.

You've got your Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorists. Then there are the anti-historians. Then there are individuals who don't appropriate facts - for example, that Christmas Day isn't Christ's birthday. It was never meant to pinpoint Christ's birthday, only to celebrate it and rather arbitrarily an occasion at that. But they declare calamity, meditate on the end of their Christmas (not why the founders of Christmas, equally aware of the arbitrary date, mightn't have agreed) etc, and how the world has been duped or asleep until this moment when, thank God, they have come along to save us from ourselves.

I paused to think about this last night after I met an undergrad of European medieval history at a Christmas party, who suggested I should read a copy of The Pagan Christ (which I had read parts of) whose author uses Egyptian theology to propose alternative views on how the Christ of faith came to be.

A quick google revealed that among his book's many critics are included at least 20 leading Egyptologists who criticised his work and bibliography, pointing out glaring errors in the author's references to pre-Christian Egyptian religion (e.g. some far off dates, in some cases by several millennia) or lacking understanding of pre-Christian Egyptian religion. They declared his assertions bogus, his references to Egyptian culture unresearched, and ask why he doesn't answer questions put to him by a number of scholars in his alleged areas of expertise. In linking the name 'Jesus' with 'Iusa' he apparently even managed to get the linguistic syntax wrong, incorrectly linking it to two Egyptian words when, as another historian-critic of his book pointed out, it is drawn from a Greek translation of Yeshua, or Joshua, which was a very common Jewish name to have at the time of Christ's birth. Contrary to the claims of the Pagan Christ, ancient Egyptians never imagined that their Pharoahs' incarnations as deities afforded the common Egyptian to possess 'even a little bit' of divinity. And thus the book's effect of diluting the distinctions of Christianity, appear to reverse when the reader does a little digging into the bases for his facts.

I probaby read like an admonition not to jump too quickly into historical conspiracies. Fair enough, but I'm after another point - one I learned in grad. school (along with proper bibliographical and research methods.)

I once wrote a grad. music history paper titled, ' The Art Of Middle-Eastern Vocal Embellishment And Its Crystallization In Christian Chant'. It showed the first written Gregorian melodies as coinciding with the appearance of the first gypsies on the doorsteps of European cities, around 850AD. I pointed out the arrival of gypsies and the identical classification of some vocal ornaments found in both the front of the Liber Usualis as well as in an ancient text on how to educate a Hindu singer, and the paper had a few minor interesting points, like how merely rhythmic condensation exposes a more eastern vocal embellishment crystallized in Christian chant.

I hoped it would be a step toward a new way to perform chant (hopefully open up some possibilities to how some of those regionalized performances of chant may have sounded with Moroccan drums, etc. before the church clamped down with a single performance standard.) Anyway, my paper was driven at showing young composers the nature of fecundity in creating new music, but it inspired a quite unintended secondary proposition from some fellow students and musical friends: some began suggesting that this proves there is nothing original about Gregorian chant, that the European mind contributes nothing new to the music tradition from which it borrows, as this is all traceable back to a previous, and perhaps even more pure source of music for inspiration.

Wait a minute.

Europe's Gregorian chant was no longer original or distinct just because monks may have been hearing gypsy melodies rising up to their monasteries and perhaps appropriated the influence for their use? This was a bizarre proposition for the nature of originality, especially in cultural studies (and years later, at this party, its relevance in theosophy.) Was the Western orchestra then, too, a misappropriated child of India because we took the violin from the battlefields of the Crusades? The Indian violin may also be traced back to the Chinese arxu, which in turn was derived from still earlier instruments. Are the Indians then unoriginal imposters too?

With this standard, the concept of originality breaks down, but long before it is applied, it is pretty apparent that the cultural relevance is thin at best, since at each evolutionary stage, the people at the time obviously apply what they know to create new solutions to their needs.
This can certainly be said about the influence of pagans and Christians on one another during their cultural encounter, and assimilation.

My paper got a 'B' but the outlandish (and unintended) propositions people were prepared to make - based on my paper - was a phenomenon that has always stuck in my mind.

So I sit by my little recreated manger scene again this Christmas. I know full well it looks a little bit like the tiny god representations of Jupiter or Juno that pagan Roman soldiers might have used or like the tiny voodoo-like representations of loved ones that traveling Romans used to worship to bring their prayers to faraway families. But I choose instead to enjoy something much greater than what Jupiter, Juno, and others were offering at the time, and that my own mother in Halifax is making the same city under her tree right now. I know it's not Christ's actual birthday, but why would that affect the greatness of this arbitrarily selected day? Christmas Day is a day to focus on and celebrate so much. And considering the crushing, utter and complete conquest of the Roman Apollonian feast that Christmas achieved with its message of a higher love through intrinsic individual human value, it is an especially great occasion to celebrate - celebrate that Christians provided a feast day that became more popular than the Apollonian feast day of Dec 21st, celebrate the Christian's message of their feast day, how it changed the Roman view of human value, what it teaches us still today about our own worth, and even how successful so many have become at matching family reunions with this time.

Goddamn it, more tinsel!

2006-11-28T09:33:00.000+09:00

Karmic bubbles

Yesterday I spent the whole day in a protective karmic bubble.

The weekend was spent in bed with the flu, but my antibiotics kicked in and I got up 5:30 am Monday really rested, and headed out 6-ish into the Mokpo pre-dawn rain in a good suit and tie with my big golfer-sized rainbow umbrella. It must have started with the brollie. You have a huge rainbow brollie protecting you, it must be like a radar dish for attracting positive karmic radio waves or something. Of course, Mokpo was dark, serene and glistening, but I was happy to find ajumma store owners still rubbing their eyes when I entered the little dimly lit shanty shops to buy pastries and fresh fruit. (There's this one place that has day-old baguettes diced up, dipped in lemon and glaze and placed on a tray for free samples. But I can usually get a big bag full of them for a buck, and I hand them out to some teachers and admin. staff on Monday morning. )

That shielded feeling continued through the day. A lot of people were fighting throughout the day for one reason or another. I think it was the rainy day. But I somehow managed to avert being targetted all day. Not one fast car splashed me on my walk to school. Only my shoes were wet when I arrived. Some kindergarteners I tutored brightened up - I wanted to start our songs, they wanted to play with balloons, so I used balloon-bouncing to prompt our ESL songs. We made sentences and drew the actions of our sentences on a big canvas-portrait, wrote poems to their mothers and fathers and then played games.

I'm odd about bad weather. I smile and warm up when it rains. I was told once the good feeling from rain (being in it but unaffected by it) is an unconscious pre-natal memory of the feeling of safety or security. I could go with that. But it doesn't explain why I giggle or laugh when I'm walking in a snowstorm.

On Sunday night, I was flipping channels and hit on a televangelist talk about memorial stones the Hebrews used to make to recall the good things God had done for them. He mentioned that one of the reasons people like Moses kept a staff was to carve on them the important events of their lives, e.g. this day my son was born, this day I escaped a wild animal, etc. When Moses held up his staff over the Red Sea, he would have been also holding up a crude kind of diary of all that God had brought him through before, and draw strength from that portable journal that good things would happen again.

The young fellow preaching interested me because he pointed out that the only time God got angry with the Hebrews was not in any of the times they asked for help but when they complained that God had abandoned them, after all they had survived. It was in their negativity and despair that God found fault, not in their cries for help. He talked about mental imaging and seeing yourself succeeding at doing the thing you dream of. (He was a kind of motivational speaker and ministry combination person.)

Then the minister asked about memorial stones in our lives. It brought to mind my good friend's counseling project called 'The Wall' where he dedicates a wall to his house as a post-it board for good things that are happening to him through the year. He simply makes a note of it that day, attaches a picture if relevant, and posts it on that wall at the end of the day. After a year, my friend will have a wall of evidence defying his negative predisposition that only bad things ever seem to happen.

Well just to play devil's advocate, I sat there entertaining the question and found I had almost no easily accessible memory of positive past events, and that was mostly because of recent conditioning. BUT when I started to apply myself to the task, a long litany of positive events lined up in my mind, well into the past.

It was a very powerful kind of week's end/week's beginning form of meditation, and perfect for Sunday night, really.

I went to bed that night immensely satisfied and grateful for my life, much more than I'd been in weeks. That's why I felt so good on Monday morning, why I had so much inner light all through the dark metal-blue and black and grey damp day. Maybe that's why I wasn't getting snared in all these other people's Monday morning personal storms as I wandered through school and about town. A little Sunday night nudge in the right direction, and now I'm addicted to early Monday mornings. It's extra back-step space for Olympic gymnastics... it gives me more room to tumble through my week.

2006-11-06T20:48:00.000+09:00

Remembering Remembrance Day

I must be getting older. I enjoy bright Monday mornings full of life and promise, even cold fall mornings as this one was, and can no longer relate to stories of Monday morning hangovers hungover from Saturday previous.

But this morning as I made my way up the gnarly little hill road to my school, I felt I was being haunted by something. My eyes rose with the hillgrade and up to behold a vast, deep sky of layered clouds - a backdrop of white, and over it hovered darker clouds of pewter, silver, and granite, with great, open expanses between some layers of grey revealing others within, slightly biased toward a dark, dusty, deep-sea blue - one of those last late-autumn aerial battles between receding warm air fronts and the advance of oncoming Arctic winds. It was as rich and as tiered as the curtains of a French Baroque opera, a great heavenly portrait for anyone who cared to look up.

I felt a bit of Halifax in the tiny misshapen houses nearby straining to hang onto hilly roads along which they stood. This ghost, and the cool winds above and glimpses of sun, had me instantly checking my left side, almost unconsciously, for a red poppy pin which I hadn't bought this year. I was in Korea. I would miss that minute of silence in Grand Parade Square in Halifax, where so many citizens would quietly gather on November 11 as they did every year. Far away back home, for a minute, veterans would return in their minds back to terrible, unseen worlds we should never see, local marching bands would stand alongside them, defiant against harsh, cold rain, red noses puffing and sniffing, and red cheeks would coax out of brass instruments their sweetest, dignified melodies. There, under a greyer sky than this one, thousands of solemn onlookers would once again descend to the the center of the Square and cast or lay their poppies on the war monument, and through that morning's meditation, honor again the departed soldiers, so many of whom marched through that very same Square long ago, down to the warships and on to Europe to fight a distant tyrant. I would miss this 9a.m. ceremony again, for a third year.

I wondered briefly if the sky above might have looked very different from the cool North Atlantic June sky that young soldiers might have seen years ago, before they stepped onto the shores of Europe.

A line of birds, I think they were larks, cut their black silhouettes upward through the sky.

I have always been aware that it is something to be grateful for, never to have experienced war. But on this Monday morning, when I came in early to rehearse our little opera with our elementary students, as the sunshine gradually entered our cold little classroom, the sound of little Korean children rehearsing melodies from Western opera choruses seemed especially sweet.

It was worth a brief meditation on the gift of peace I'd been given for another day.

2006-11-04T12:27:00.000+09:00

Christmas is coming...

Wow I haven't written anything in a while here.

I've been busy with the opera-based ESL musical I mentioned making for our school (using famous opera arias with original English lyrics for an ESL project-play) but this week I've been busy writing a Christmas Mass, my first, in Korean. Hearing and singing Gloria in excelsis Deo again is like a pure shot of concentrated Christmas juice right in the system!

I'm setting four prayers to music, Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. The Gloria has presented me with a dilemma - doesn't it seem like since Bach and Handel, that Christmas Seraphim angels of discriminating taste distinctly prefer to sing in Baroque style cadenzas and play timpani? I haven't asked any lately, but it seems this is their standard modus operandi nowadays. So do all melodies alluding to angels' Christmas song now and forever more funnel into the valley of Bach? Well, I'm not worried about unconsciously quoting him, he'd never do what I did (and he'd do it better anyway.) This Gloria chorale turned into a real Baroque bear at one point, bristling with holly and mistletoe, but too thorny to be kissable, however the choir has tamed the song, smoothed its fur and made it quite lively and elegant, so I'm happy.

The Christmas Mass will be performed here and possibly at a church in Seoul, on Christmas morning. I hope to get it recorded and maybe broadcast it on the internet afterward.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Haneul nopeun deseo neun Haneunimge yeong gwang
(Heavens highest heights-from-is God-to glory )

Korean:
eo= 'aw' sound
eu= like French 'peut'
o = 'hope'
a = 'apartment'

2006-10-29T19:19:00.000+09:00

Rainbow Story
An opera intro for intermediate young ESL learners

The Rainbow Story
Long ago there were seven brothers and sisters, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, who painted the world¡¯s colours every day. They loved each other very much and really enjoyed their work. Each morning their friend, Sun, would meet them and they would begin their work painting all the colours of everything in the world. Their work was beautiful.
Song #1: Oh Mr. Sun
Well, almost everybody. Grey cloud didn¡¯t like them very much. She wanted the world to be one colour, grey, just like her. She thought grey was the only good colour and she really hated the work of the seven painters. One time she tried to block the sun from shining, but the sun was too strong and he sent her away.
So she tried a different way to break up the brothers. One morning while Green was painting the leaves of the trees, Grey cloud whispered in his ear, ¡°why does your brother, Blue, get the privilege of painting the sky and the sea, but you must paint only the plants? Nobody looks at the leaves, they are not important. But everybody looks at the sky. Why can¡¯t it be green? Are you not important? Is he so much greater than you?¡±
Green became sad and angry and started to think, ¡°yeah, why can¡¯t I paint the sky?¡± and soon he became so sour that he couldn¡¯t paint anymore. He was very angry with his brother Blue.
Song #2: Not beautiful
Grey cloud continued her bad work by whispering into the ear of Yellow, ¡°the other colours don¡¯t like you. They think your colour is not important. Why do you paint the sand on the beach? Nobody looks at the sand. Everybody looks at the sea, and the trees. They laugh at you. You are just a sister, but you should have an important colour. Your colour is not important. Look everywhere. Yellow is not important to them. Do you like that?¡±
Yellow tried to ignore it at first but she started to cry.
In this way, Grey cloud turned all the brothers and sisters against each other. Soon they started to hate each other and be jealous. Then they stopped colouring the world and soon the whole world was grey, just like Cloud.
The people in the world started to complain, ¡°what happened to the beautiful colours? The sun is gone and everything is grey now!¡±
The seven brothers and sisters noticed too. They were so unhappy They sat together on the beach and started to talk.
Song 3: Where did the sun go?
¡°The world has become so ugly since we started fighting¡± said Green. ¡°I was happy when I was painting leaves.¡±
Then Blue spoke up. ¡°Why did we start fighting?¡±
Then Yellow spoke up. ¡°I don¡¯t know, but I think a yellow sky would look very silly.¡±
Then all the brothers and sisters started laughing. Soon they started comparing stories, and they appreciated each other¡¯s work even more than they did before. Their love grew so much in that moment, that they said to each other, ¡°let us never fight again about this.¡±
After giving each other a big hug, the seven brothers and sisters picked up their paintbrushes and showed their new understanding by first painting a big rainbow in the sky, so everyone knew they stopped fighting. Then they went back to their jobs, painting the world in all its beautiful colours, and the Sun came out again, and Grey cloud had no more power over them anymore.
Song 4: Say A Little Prayer (Westlife)
----------------------------------
Song 1 (Sung to the chorus of Toreador, from Carmen)
Oh Mister Sun, please mister golden sun!
Come out to play! We'll play with you!
These children are asking you,
Please come out so we can play with you!
Oh Mister Golden Sun,
Come out to play!
Come out to play with me!
Oh Sun Mister Sun
Oh Sun Mister Sun...
We'll play with you!!
Song 2 (Sung to L'Amour est un oiseau, from Carmen)
Tell me why do you work so hard?
Oh tell me why do you work so long?
Your other brothers paint more than you
Because your colour is not beautiful!
NOT BEAUTIFUL!
Not beautiful, you paint the leaves, but don't paint the sky,
Your brother blue he paints the sea,
But you can not but do you know why?
NOT BEAUTIFUL!
They think you're bad.
And if they did not you would not feel sad.
Because their colours are beautiful,
Why should they paint more things than you?
Song 3 (Sung to O Mio Babbino Caro, from Gianni Schicchi)
Where, where did the sun go?
Beautiful things are gone now.
When we all loved each other
We used to paint the rainbow.
When, when will the blue sky and
beautiful things return?
I want to see the sun again,
I want to see the rainbow.
Song 4 My Love
An empty street, an empty house,
A whole inside my heart.
I'm all alone. The rooms are getting smaller.
I wonder how, I wonder why, I wonder where they are.
The days we had, the songs we sang together. Oh, yeah.
And oh, my love. I'm holding on forever.
Reaching for a love that seems so far.
Chorus[ALL]
So, I say a little prayer.
And hope my dreams will take me there.
Where the skies are blue.
To see you once again, my love.
Over seas and coast to coast.
Find the place I love the most.
Where the fields are green.
To see you once again,
[SHANE]
To hold you in my arms,
To promise you my love,
I tell you from my heart
You're what I'm dreaming of.
~
Reaching for a love that seems so far!
[chorus]

2006-10-25T00:09:00.000+09:00

Hi,

Well I finally joined a choir that I love, and they all love and live music and art. After practice, they go drinking at a little hole-in-the-wall chicken and beer place, and their voices ring through the restaurant in this wonderful romantic toasting song which is both robust and invigorating, in four-part harmony. A great bunch, they've captured my heart. One of the basses is a former #1 Korean pop chart hit songwriter. I heard his hit song, Mo Mo, it's very upbeat. It sounds like a Korean in California during the Beach Boys' heyday.

I was asked to write a Christmas Mass for this new church choir and I couldn't be more thrilled. I showed them the Ascension Mass which will be performed in Portugal next year (and possibly Denmark) and I said it had been premiered in Canada, and one song in Korea in 2004.

I pulled out the old Christmas music sketches. They'd been tucked away since Peter Togni left the Basilica for Russia, and I'd thrown in the towel on Toronto, and maybe Canada for the last time. Getting to test-drive the new work with a capable and willing local choir has brought back a lot of happiness! Hangeul (Korean language) will be the challenge but everybody's helping me five minutes here five minutes there with syllabic stresses and unstresses and such.

As soon as I started playing the sketches again, it was like a reunion with someone I loved and hadn't seen in a long time. Now it feels like I'm in a portrait of a great big sea, but painted with voices... with great choral lines.

The first day I showed up to meet them, they handed me a solo - Panis Angelicus - and asked me to have it ready for this morning's service. It went quite well, actually. How did they know I could sing it, and how did they know I could prepare it so quickly? Really, they'd just met me. But somehow, they knew. Anyway, it was providence. Feels like putting on your favorite old jacket though.

Last night we went to the conductor's restaurant (she owns a restaurant together with the songwriter, who is also her husband) and they had a karaoke machine in this big delightful bungalow-style restaurant and they got me up to sing Elton John's Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word (among other songs.)

Funny I was asked to sing that song this week. Some people in expat communities are running away from something. One hopes not to get tangled with one, as I did recently, but it's unavoidable. I never thought I'd be dating one though. I guess you just never know.
But somehow, God or the universe knew and He or It decided to counterpoint this experience by sending me beautiful new people in this family of musicians.

This week I finished writing a musical for my school. They asked me to use my English class to introduce my kids to opera and I didn't know quite how to do that, So I took a very short story and inserted three famous arias with new story-relevant (and easy-English) lyrics. It was a hit with both of my co-teachers and the principal so I think it will go over well. This opera-based story for ESL students is in the next blog entry. I'm posting it so other teachers can use it for camps and such (if I'm credited as the arranger).

Lots of love from chilly Mokpo
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:
to visit orphans and widows in their affliction,
and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:27)

2006-10-24T22:38:00.000+09:00

Article referral: On The Da Vinci Code

Sometimes a good conversation, like a good blog, ought to be less about capturing your thoughts and more about accurately recalling similar thoughts articulated better by someone else. Recently I got into it with an old friend over the Da Vinci Code, a focal point for some unchallenged newly popular ideas about the church.

(original post found at http://davincicode-opusdei.com/?p=110)

2006-10-22T18:00:00.000+09:00

English education, pianos, faith

Today watching/listening to an exquisite performance by pianist Baeck Gon Oo on KBS TV, I was smitten with the gorgeous sound he (and the sound engineer I guess) was getting out of the piano, how well he handled the instrument's subtler expressive power, and I recalled the sad fact of how most pianos are maintained in this country. It reminded of a discussion I had earlier this week on comparing Western education systems to that of Korea and the recent talk of reform and whether the culture here can facilitate that reform. (The Korean Minister of Education released a new report on the state of the nation's education, the current methods, results, and a way forward. They had a lot to say about English education in this country, too, so it's the subject of forums and chat rooms.)

My school has a gorgeous 6' grand piano for their gym/rehearsal hall and they keep it in dreadful climates with windows ajar on rainy days, wildly swinging temperatures through the seasons, and so on. Yet something in this country makes the distinction between 1) people who buy pianos because they know music education is important, yet leave the instrument in neglect, ensuring it will never be the instrument of a moving performance, and 2) people who buy pianos and in spite of popular local practices, know exactly what is required for the piano to maintain its crisp, fine-tuned, robust sound. What is that difference?

I think it's Western cultural values about how to spend money, on what, and when and why. But it's not popular these days to let in too many Western ideas. It's like a popular recoil against multiculturalism, which, if we can gauge by appearances in the recording industry and other heavily promoted arts, has given rise to a splintering ultra-regionalism. A love affair with globalism is clearly over and local, traditional values are the moral apex, by mere virtue of their traditionalism. It's like when we opened our doors to the world, a lot of bad old ideas came in. Is the internet and its inherent insular bent capable of all this? Where world-music used to flourish as an aesthetic, now a concentrated-orange juice regionalism, an exclusive type, seems to grow. I wonder if Enya will continue to record in English or if she'll exclusively sing in old Gaelic from now on.

In this country I used to just laugh this off as quaint Korean country bumpkin mentality (all food in Korea is great if it is traditional Korean food - so too follows the attitude about all things Korean) but through the news it seems to be only a local symptom of a much larger trend, bucking the old cultural pluralism that may have initially stirred eastern interests in things like Western pianos, or English. It's a step backwards, not entirely without reason but certainly unsustainable in a world of institutions buying European pianos, lest they be left to rot in gymnasiums.

Today I read that this past week in Seoul, the Federation of Korean Institutions addressed the Minister of Education and proposed the need for sweeping reforms in order to improve their rate of English language acquisition for students in Korea (many young adult Koreans participate in overseas English immersion programs. )

I wonder if they can make the necessary switch to accomplish this. The switch would require two major shifts - 1) changing the pre-requisite skills to teach English here, and 2) a change in the Korean mind, specifically, an appetite for genuine success, and not the appearance of success. This would require a new relationship between the purpose of student evaluations, and the image problem here that brings no end of grades-fudging, test scores tweaking, and thus problems for administrations plotting courses for their educational institutions.

So many teachers here get frustrated when the business side of English seeps into the classrooms. It doesn't get any better when English teachers are barred from grading their own students or being consulted on test criteria, or being required to develop the curriculum for tests that don't reflect class curricula. They have a hunger for change, but do they want the required change?

Or are they content to buy pianos because they should, and then let them decay from neglect?

2006-10-20T15:26:00.000+09:00

I passed a large roadside garden on a hill this evening.

I saw sitting there among the foliage an old ajoshi and ajumma. The couple were facing the sunset, and they seemed to be really contented or exhausted. I started to wonder what it might have been like to have been on that patch of land when they were much younger, and what invisible past worlds they were looking at, to contrast with the city that lay before them now, in such a completely different country from the Korea of 50 years ago.

It made me think back to another time and place when I lay on a grassy bluff just off the highway in Nova Scotia, on farmland somewhere between Truro and Halifax. My girlfriend and I lay there with a big wool blanket wrapped around us, the car not too far away down below, and we watched the struggle between the warm southern winds and the oncoming cooler Arctic clouds above us in the autumn evening sky.

Well this is probably the corniest thing I'll ever write but I was trying to describe that feeling in a letter I was going to write home, but then the phrase took a life of its own and didn't want to be a letter, it wanted to be this little poem instead. So I let it.

I lay down with you in green autumn fields of soft evening.
We lay together - elated, our bodies aching from the work of the day-
Among great spinach leaves, under a bronze sky sinking into deep persimmon,
And the smell of the oil of your hair, a scent like no perfumer's skill has ever made.

You took my hand, and drew me close with your familiar smile
Your dark, warm eyes caused autumn's cool darkness to recede back to the edges.
And lying there with you, my heart full of light,
The soft, rich earth beneath us,
I asked myself if I could ever commit such an infidelity
As to ever wish for more than the simplicity of this moment.

2006-10-17T17:59:00.000+09:00

Whenever this weather comes around in the fall, I'm taken back to a place...

...with big wool sweaters and large steaming mugs of hot Red Rose tea. Maybe some eggs and toast. And a dark wood-framed window with dusty dry warm dark wooden slats, around a damp cool window pane spotted with raindrops and mist, barely masking lush green grasses and purple thistles outside, refusing to surrender to the intrusion of winter. Grey luminous fog breaking the darkness of the kitchen with its white-silver daylight that spills onto the table and flowers, as we pass the afternoon laughing and talking about everything and nothing. The aging trees outside wave at us and cast their old leaves about the yard like confetti. Although we are insulated from the blustery wet day, somehow we can still smell the rich goodness of the earth outside. It reaches us somehow, even in our warm, bundled up kitchen table sanctuary near the stove.

It's a memory of tea-time in Nova Scotia. Thanks for joining me.

2006-10-03T19:29:00.000+09:00

Things are alright in Mokpo. I accidentally deleted my cool mapleandbrownsugar blog last week, and I was upset about it, but I started with a new one.

I am crazy-getting fit. Every morning I've been getting up ridiculously early and climbing the mountain at the end of my street in order to get a few pictures of the sunrise. It's been really rewarding, you can check out the pics here: http://emanuelinkorea.myphotoalbum.com/slideshow.php?set_albumName=album21.

I don't know if it's related to good health, better circulation, or some early symptom of diabetes, but as a result of all my heightened activity, my skin tingles often and I feel really good. But I crave naps in the afternoons. This makes me feel older than I am, like I should have plaid pajama bottoms and cartigans and shuffle the school halls in slippers looking for my glasses that are on my head. But in the evenings, I'm at the gym all the time now. I love it. I bought ten passes and I intersperse with outings to mix up the routine.

Well just the other day I did a workout on abs and then for a cool down fat-burning push finale, I decided to do my first aerobics class. Now, nobody will ever accuse me of having stereotypes about a group of people. Certainly I know Koreans are as diverse in their tastes as anybody. But I never thought that my liberal mind would be out-liberalled and shown to be prudish by anyone on *this* continent. Yet on this day when my instructor arrived with her really-too-tight outfit in front of me, I was really out-pruded. What's this? There's something I'm uncomfortable with? Me? That Korean really made me feel like a prude, which is saying something.But I tried to be cool about it.

I was directed to stand right behind the instructor by the other classmates. She wore a shiny-gold-shorts-covered butt that looked like it was painted on. I wondered for a second how any blood could flow there and if strip poles were going to come down from the ceiling. The dance moves were aggressive and fast but I could keep up. It was disco-based aerobics so it was very arm-y leg-gy, but her shorts were too tight, too close and really too shiny. So much so that when we all bent down, she strained against her shorts and it looked like she had two abducted little people hidden in a knapsack. Somehow, I was trapped in somebody's comedy show. Don't people wear jogging pants anymore? At least yoga pants? We did triangles, and she'd just smile at me around the corner from her hip and count one two three four. Next time I think I'll go for the PG-13 class (the family rated class.)

Of course as soon as the stretches started, the Korean guys in the group left. The benefits of stretches are, of course, a huge part of the reason we get fit in the first place. They transfer flexibility and suppleness to gradually calcefying limbs and keep us feeling young and nimble and, well... sensations associated with youth.

Regardless, I liked going back to that high-school dance feeling, the time of Wham, Madonna, Dire Straits, big shirts, big hair with big messages from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Those were dance moves my body hadn't done since the days of Soul Train. I thanked the three instructors and they replied that they didn't think I could do it but I did really well. I mentioned I hadn't done dancing like that since I was 16 and they whispered and giggled at my indication of my age. But I was looking at three women who were looking at 30 in the rear-view mirror, so I guess little-sistering themselves to me was their way of feeling better about that.

I'm feeling very much in concord with nature and life these days, but it's 10 o'clock and 10 o'clock is now officially kicking my ass. I thought fitness was supposed to make you desire sleep less, not more. Maybe it's the sharper fall air.

2006-09-25T22:52:00.000+09:00

He who bends himself to joy, doth the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses a joy as it flies, lives in Eternity's sunrise. - W. Blake

Well... it's been a great weekend and an even better Monday.
These days are the last desperate hangers-on of a Korean autumn refusing to accept that summer has packed up and left. Illusions of summer make me wish for weather that allows summer clothes, but reality hits at night and for once I'm glad I have some hair on my arms and legs (despite the aesthetics of the natives!)

In the morning, though, it seems like you can fool Mother Nature, like even she is asleep before sunrise and is neglecting her job of freezing the hell out of early trekkers. So I snuck up behind her this morning in the dark and climbed up Iban mountain, the hiker's path to which starts down the end of my street. I reached the top to steal some photos of the sun getting up,, feeling a bit like a paparazzi catching a celebrity by surprise. Naked sun pics!

Look how beautiful it was, too! From the peak, Mokpo and her harbour are totally captivating at dawn with some little lights from the connected fishing boats glistening off the water, bright as Christmas trees, their little lamps trying to coax the fish into nets (I think), and the sun peeking up over the end of the harbour like an old guest entering the room with a quiet, familiar, warm hello. Kinda looks like Halifax somehow, especially the long land-bridge, which I could almost imagine is the McDonald bridge.

This beautiful start to my week also represented a glorious ending to a very tough week before, the sort of week that can be a real downer for an ESL teacher far from home.

We're all so isolated out here in Mokpo, and when you're part of an even more isolated expat community, it takes almost nothing - one or two backbiting, fractious members - for one to feel like an island, if one doesn't know that there's no consensus within the community. This is the general curse of living in small towns, I think, and has been the basis for some famous stories and movies. Who can't recognize the archetypal simmering malcontents at ladies' auxiliary clubs with big flowery hats who glare from behind their fine bone china teacups, sneering sideways at the heroes or heroines of so many movies? Isn't that insidious, insufferable passive-aggression the reason we all cheered when Laura Ingles deliciously punched the storekeeper's villainous daughter in the nose, back on Little House On The Prairie?

How weak and ephemeral the triviality of words that would cause one to laugh back home, and yet how much stronger a tea those bitter words can make when removed from the larger kettle of a city to the small cup of a foreign community outpost on the edge of nowhere.

This must be why I don't watch Survivor.

Well last week when I heard some awful gossip allegedly circulating about me, or so I thought, I saw red, ("who would say such things about me without knowing me?") but after a few inquiries to some trusted friends I found out that actually quite a few individuals had been similarly victimized without warrant. Soon after comparing stories, I started to get beautiful supportive emails from friends I didn't even know I had, people admitting their struggles with ugly gossip that seemed like it could compromise their ability to meet new people on their own terms. All it takes is a couple of simmering malcontents and enough passive, complicit, non-confrontational-type listeners to make a mountain out of a molehill, out here on the ESL frontier.

It reminded me of a lesson I learned about people and how they tend to project their own personal fears onto others in vulnerable negotiations. If you don't pick up your shield and sword and go into that cave to confront the dragon you think you might have heard, you can wind up assuming a lot of things that aren't true, like that the dragon is ten times its real size, or that it knows about your bad ankle or what-not. When I've seen this sometimes in new negotiations, I've found that not offering any unnecessary information helps keep everything cordial and more closely centred to what's fair. But in social situations like the one I encountered last week, more often it seems the dragon is just a gecko, and a wounded one at that. But you can't find that out if you quietly absorb the smacktalk and crawl away into a shell. Why do we do that? Why do we assume the worst, instead of going into that cave and finding out what somebody's problem is with us?

The Koreans say if you want to catch a tiger, you have to go to the tiger cave... but I didn't know the tiger's cave was in fact a patio bar, where my detractors unwittingly revealed themselves and where I had my vengeance. As it turned out, they were three pretty obviously unhappy and profoundly unattractive women, and it didn't take much to faze them or put them in their place. Hadn't had that much satisfaction in a retort since the time I left a stickie-noted futon sale brochure under the door of my upstairs neighbors, who - God love them - kept me awake with their metal-cot-squeaking amorous antics at night. (The stickie read, "with love, from your neighbors.")

Well the trial, it seemed, was over. I won. And anyway, the "islands" were getting connected. It would have been so easy to be all wounded, stay in and be pessimistic, but I didn't. I reached out and found out I wasn't alone. The universe played a fiercely bright fanfare, presenting me on Monday morning with a great golden award, a Mokpo autumn sunrise.(Mokpo sunrise, 6:24a.m. September 25, 2006, from Ibansan summit, the landbridge connecting Mokpo to the mainland.)

You can see a slideshow of my other sunrise photos at http://emanuelinkorea.myphotoalbum.com/slideshow.php?set_albumName=album21