Ugggggg.....

Not really any other way to describe how I'm feeling at present. It's been a frustrating day. Good news first though. I got accepted for SMOE!!! Only took 3 days when they had originally had said 10-15. Not sure if that means anything about how awesome I am, but I'll most certainly take it that way. With the confirmation out of the way, now the task falls to getting all the mess of paperwork sent in, which hasn't been going all that great. I received the Criminal Background Check from the States, notarized and shiny, but I was stupid and didn't realize that they also needed an apostille (just another notary stamp, but at the state level and more expensive, that's all) and I can't fucking get those here in Korea. I had forgotten how much Korea loves stamping shit. Can't get enough. So I went to the US Embassy last week to try and resolve the issue. Rumor had it that I could just go to the Embassy, get a signed affidavit and that would suffice. I'm still waiting to see if that is good enough. I sure hope so, as the whole trip was stressful enough. Despite leaving my school at 12:30, I was barely able to get to the Embassy before it closed at 3:30 and I probably was nearly detained/jailed/shit canned. Hell, if I was working at the metal detector/check in for the US Embassy and some dude wanders in sweating up a storm, mumbling nonsensical shit to you, shaking like a crack junkie, while he jerks himself off with his exposed penis, I'd be cautious too. Ohh and he smells like piss. I was kinda like that. They did let me inside and I freaked out again as this was the US Embassy and I only had won to pay in....good thing they take American credit cards. Although, they probably accepted won, but I was in such a frantic state that this escaped me.

So the Criminal Background check may or may not be done. Now comes the degree issue. They used to only accept the original thing (and their website stills says so), but now they only accept notarized and apostilled copies. Too bad I have the original copy sitting next to me with unnotarized copies. Fuck. I took my original degree to the interview to ask the lady and she said that it should be okay, since I can just take the original to the office myself and they can see its not a fake, though I don't really feel like I earned that thing, but that's a whole other matter.

Those were all issues that had surfaced before today. Today added some new ones. First, there was the complication with printing out my contract paperwork. What issue, you say? Just print it out and sign. Ohhh, you silly, silly people. You don't understand my relationship to technology, coupled with the extra degree of difficulty added to everything just because its Korea. Naturally, I should be able to just print and go, but our school's tech wiz was never able to hook up my pc to the printer. Don't know why, maybe the English barrier, maybe cuz Vista sucks that much. So for all my printing pleasures, I have to use another office PC, which incidentally doesn't have Adobe or any other pdf reader. Why? I have no idea. So many files are pdfs, that it seems asinine to not have one. But because of the schools security, I can't install Adobe. I explained this situation to the co-teacher and that got me nowhere, cuz talking to my co-teacher about computer issues is akin to talking to my mother or anyone's mother, if she didn't speak the same language. Eventually, I found some tiny off brand pdf reader that would install. Probably filled the pc and subsequently the rest of the network with massive spyware, so lets just call that my going away present for the rest of the school.

Next up, the proof of employment at my current job to get a higher pay grade, as I'm an experienced teacher. I explained this to the co-teacher, hoping she could just write up some manner of letter saying I worked at the school from said date to said date. Instead, she grabbed the contract paperwork and began reading it, cuz I clearly asked her to (wait, no I didn't...son of a...). Eventually she got to the page on when the Seoul contract starts, saw that it read August 24th (I'm still under contract at the current school then) and freaked out. "You know you are here then! You can't go! You have to come to school here!" Yes, I know. Trust me, I know exactly when this contract ends. I just told her it was wrong, which it is, technically. But now the whole school is probably fearful I'm gonna ditch them...a whole 5 days before my contract ends. Why the hell would I do that? Seriously? I do that and I lose out on the contract completion bonus (which is basically $2,000). Plus, I've survived 11 months with this woman and I haven't lost my mind yet, so I think I can handle another 5 days. End result of the freak out: school is paranoid and I didn't get the proof of employment paperwork. Brilliant.

Ahhhh, now we come to the Korean background check. Which I feel is redundant, as if I am currently and still employed in the Korean education system, then I clearly have committed no crimes, otherwise I would have been sent home. The problem being, how do I got about getting one? I have no idea. Does one just go into the local police station and ask for a background check? Do I have to go to some central bureaucratic police authority for it? I'm told to get one, but SMOE and my recruiter really couldn't tell me how to go about getting one.

Finally, we come to the transcript. I assumed this one was cut and dry, but I was being stupid, obviously. It arrived today in the birthday care package, which sadly ruined the happy feeling I should have gotten from new music, new books, and more candy from home. The transcript was super sealed goodness, but the registrar people didn't sign their name or stamp along the seal line, probably cuz they didn't think you needed that bullshit. So chances are that the transcript is no good. I can probably order another one with super speed delivery and get it before I leave for the Philippines (ohh that's right I'm leaving for two weeks on Saturday, so I won't be around to fix this shit that comes up.....crud), but I'm hoping I can just order one to be sent to SMOE or somebody else, so I don't have to wait around for it.

And just for good measure, when I tried to apply to one of the Korean universities to take classes in Korean, it totally cockblocked my application on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Technology really is conspiring to lead down the life path of the wandering homeless drifter. I'll be the modern day Johnny Appleseed. Now I just gotta find something to spread across the country. Maybe my "seed" rather than apple seeds.......ohhhh who am I kidding?

The weekend saw our badly depleted group (as most everyone is out of Korea at the moment) check out a Fernando Botero exhibit at on of the art museums. Botero is a Colombian painter who paints everyone and everything as fat, usually comically so. That's it. That's his thing. Fatties. Humorous for a while, "Haha, look at that fat dog", and sometimes gross (there were way too many obese nearly naked women), but it got old after a while, as he only had the one thing and most of his paintings depicted more or less the same scene. I was hoping the reasoning for everything being fat would be some harsh political statement about "fat cats" and "big wigs" in power, but it turned out to be just something about how he loves working with volume and wanted to truly depict the volume of things. Disappointing. Plus, all the pics were from the last twenty years, so we saw no evolution or growth as an artist. He's found his thing and doesn't appear to be moving from it, ever. Too bad. His coloring was amazing, but I just needed more depth for the painting, whether in meaning, the scene depicted, or the manner it was depicted. I like to stick around and think about paintings for a time, but I had absorbed his stuff in seconds. "Ahh, fat guy on a bike, reminds me of something I saw on America's Funniest Home Videos once....okay, now we have a fat chick sitting in front of her mirror....now we have a fat man on a fat horse, weird." We ended the evening with the exhibit documenting the Korean War in pictures along the stream. The Korean people are having the same issue with history as America, that nobody fucking knows anything about it, especially kids. Korean kids seem to be just as clueless about the Korean War as American kids are about who runs the government and such. The exhibit was interesting for me, as I obviously knew almost nothing about the Korean War other than it was that one thing we did between WW2 and Vietnam. More interesting was how it was portrayed, given that the sides haven't been reconciled, so "things" are left out in the official depiction of the events. Namely, the demonization of the North and the noticeable absence of negative events regarding the South, such as mass killings of POWs and the resulting mass graves. Makes you wonder just how distorted the history of the US is, now that I can see someone's elses history from the outside.

Now, for all you readers that are sad about hearing not hearing one of my bitchy rants in many months, I'm sorry and I hope today's post suffices. I lost myself for a time with all the fun times and lack of drama. My apologies. It won't happen again.

P.S. The title is even more applicable now, as I've suddenly been stricken with really bad, doubling over stomach pain that materialized out of nowhere. Can't explain it. Hope it goes as quickly as it came.