The Silence of Nothingness

Pretty fucking deep title, don't you think? I thought so too. I think I'm gonna use that for the title of my next book of poetry. You wanna hear some of my poetry? Do ya?....Sorry, got off track there. Another week is upon is us and I sit down at the PC to shart out the past week of my life for you folks. I'm writing this installment from school, as I really need something to pass the time, seeing as how my students are gone all week. Yup, the little buggers are off at the English Village all week. Unlucky bastards. Now I was hoping that my school would let me just stay home all week so I could jet off to some country for shits and giggles, but clearly that isn't the case. I must have been hallucinating from sleep deprivation or something, if I thought that was gonna happen. Instead I sit here at school and teach the parents after school, provided they show up, which is never guaranteed. But all things considered the week of desk warming should be quite useful, as I'll have the time to hopefully get my vacation days and my future job stuff ironed out.

As for the last week, nothing really happened, so lets just skip to the weekend. Yet again, mother nature intervened to keep me from the basketball courts. That makes 3 weekends out of 4 that have been rainy and generally shitty. The weekend that was nice? The one we spent inside watching the vampire movie. Clearly, if a higher power does exist, then he is an enormous prick. But you already knew that. The shitty weather also rained out any chance of seeing a baseball or soccer game. Thankfully, we were able to find amusement indoors. With my sanity at stake (see later paragraph), I headed to Seoul both Saturday and Sunday, despite the weather. Jamie and I, once in Seoul, decided to head to Insadong to while away the rainy afternoon with drinks and intellectual discussion of such topics as three-ways and three-ways with lesbians. Now I was naturally curious as to the possibility of the latter, seeing the inherent impossibility of such an act, but I guess everyone gets curious. After which, they probably go running back to women, but that's another story. With our intellectual discourses finished, we headed to the Sejong Concert Hall to watch a concert of various classical music pieces (one from Shostakovich, Dvorak, Beethoven, and Arensky, for those who are curious). Now the tickets ran for just under 10 dollars, but we still found ourselves woefully under dressed compared with the Koreans, but that is the standard operating procedure for foreigners here. Remember this is the place that had people rocking suits and high heels at the bloody ski slopes. I could talk about the performance and the pieces, but seeing as how I'm classical music challenged, I should just reserve my comments to saying that the concert was very good overall, especially given the price. Sunday wasn't anything crazy either, as I wandered around one of the nicest areas of Seoul and admired just how nice it was. You wanna know how I knew it was a rich/nice area? They actually had trees....anywhere. As much as I'd like to live in that area if I get a Seoul job, I have nightmares about just how self absorbed and narcissistic those rich kids would be. Shudder. I can't even get poor ass farm kids to do what I tell them, what chance do I have with Samsung's CEO's kids? Answer: no chance.

Now, normally I'm not so insistent on heading to Seoul over the weekend, but this past weekend was a special circumstance. In the hurry and scurry of leaving school Friday for the teacher's dinner, I forgot the power cords for my PC. And since my laptop is, in a word (or two)...not good, I had all of 2 hours (if I'm lucky with the PC's battery) for the weekend. I also had to try and conserve as much as possible for the chat with the parents on Sunday, so that left me with even less. Now, the loss of the Internet can be survived, but my PC's most crucial function is that of stereo. We now come back to the post's title. I have no way to access or listen to music outside of the PC, meaning that my choices are utter silence or Korean music on the TV. I chose silence. Eric, settle down, put down the gun, you can get through this. It's just one weekend. Seriously though, the absence of sound and music is enough to drive me crazy almost instantaneously. With the weather as lousy as it was, I was unable to even open the window to let in the litany of lovely Korean sounds (trains, yelling, honking car horns, explosions) from outside my apartment. The silence was complete. Couple that with loss of the Internet and the subsequent inability to access por.....ahhh, uhhhh....portable etiquette lesssons, yeah that's it. Portable etiquette lessons. With 18 or so hours of free time to now fill up, I got bored pretty quickly. Although the whole thing may have been a blessing in disguise, as it finally convinced me to get off my ass and get a guitar to help occupy my time. And since I still don't know if I will ever get that berimbau, I gotta do something in the meantime involving music. Good thing my neighbors are Korean and thus have very strong tolerance, perhaps even appreciation, for awful music, otherwise the bleating and mewling coming from my room would be a problem.

And for a small taste of what we here in Korea have to deal with, my link of the week. This week's is an "article" from a "real newspaper" The Korea Times. This is our source of supposedly legitimate English language news about Korea. Don't even get me started on the joke editorials written by foreigners that sneak past the editors. Seriously, you think an editorial written by someone with the email address of dokdoisours@gmail.com is real? C'mon.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/05/123_45051.html