(I wrote this the first night I arrived but haven't been able to post until now due to lack of internet at home, lack of time at work, and lack of USB sticks in general.)
1: Offend the person next to you on the plane. Check.
Sitting next to a Korean lady on the plane. We wind up talking a bit. She's been living in Virginia for a while, has 3 daughters, 2 of whom are twins doing missionary work in Brazil, and 1 who's going to William and Mary. She asks if I'm a missionary and I reply in the negative, managing to keep my mouth shut about how dumb I think missionaries are. I impress her by (unostentatiosly, of course) doing Korean and Chinese flash cards on my new used netbook. Then I shame myself and doutbless offend her missionary sensibilities by watching the movie "Borat..." How could I have possibly known in advance that the two dudes, one of them obscenely obese, would get into a naked wrestling match in their hotel room? The lady turned slightly away and pretended to be sleeping for the next 6 hours.
2: Lose 2/3 of your luggage, by mass. Check.
As we are about to get off the plane in Seoul, the PA comes on and calls my name, telling me to see a gate attendant. I immediately know what this is about, since my San Francisco-Seoul layover was only 1 hour long and was already boarding by the time I rushed over from my arrival gate. Somehow, one of my bags got left behind. It happens to be the one with deodorant and soap in it. It also happens to be the bag that I stuffed to 49 or 49.5 or 50 lbs (50 being the limit). The lost & found agent doesn't mentoin the weight or a potential fine. Supposedly, it will be delivered tomorrow night.
3: Meet a Walnut Lady. Check.
After getting my 1 lonely bag full of pants and dress shirts I don't need for the upcoming camp, I call the guy who hired me from a payphone (using my subway/bus card, pretty sweet), who directs me to take a bus ride then a subway ride and says he'll meet me at the station. I get to the place in question, and they don't have public phones. I have to explain to the lady selling snack cakes that even though I have a phone, I just got to Korea and haven't been able to activate it, but I really need to call this fellow so he can let me into my apartment. She calls on my behalf, introducing herself to my semi-boss as "the walnut lady." I thank her but don't buy any of her treats. I should probably go back and do that tomorrow.
4: Look awkward at convenient store. Check.
Setting up the house, I realize I don't have any TP. I walk down to the corner store but can't buy anything because I don't have plates, pots, or utensils at home. I come out carrying one roll of TP and a 2 liter bottle of corn husk tea. Or, to translate directly, Corn M(o)ustahce Tea.
5: See a feral toilet and receive expletives. Check.
In one of the alleys on the way "home," there are some toilets and sinks in the street. Not portopotties. Recentlyuninstalledpotties. Or maybe Soontobeinstalledpotties. Later, there's a little yellow triangular sign that in the USA would probably say "Wet Floor / Piso Mojado." Here, it says (in Korean), "Let's bathe!" I am pretty sure there must be a sauna in one of the buildings. I pass a Korean guy who looks to be a university student. Just like me, he's wearing a baseball cap and carrying an umbrella. I am pretty sure that just as soon as we leave each other's peripheral vision I hear him whispser under his breath (in Korean): Fucker.
6: Beat up a stranger: No check.
7: Perform at least one act of norm-subversion: Check.
Placed plums in the egg grooves in my mini-fridge.
8: Accidentally get self wet. Check. (Don't ask how it can be a goal to do something accidentally.)
Forgot that in Korean bathrooms, shower heads and sinks share a water line. Result: soaked left forearm.
9: Drink out of a cup with at least 5 dead mosquitoes in it. Check.
Note to future self: inspect new housing more thoroughly.
Day 1: 88ish% of goals accomplished. Not too bad.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
ETD: 4 Days
You may recall that about 4 months ago, I wrote a pretty schmaltzy post about leaving Korea "for good" after two years and then some.
But, as most of us more or less knew I would, I am going back. To be specific: I'm going to work a summer camp at Soongsil University, which happens to be ranked #24 in Korea, for what it's worth, which probably isn't much because my students will all be elementary schoolers. We'll see.
The camp starts on July 15th and goes until mid-August, but my visa lasts until late September. This is quite a boon, since it means I won't get deported after the camp even if I haven't yet found another school to sponsor my visa. I don't anticipate any troubles - I've got applications in dozens of universities and have done or planned interviews with several of them, and anyway if I don't get a university post in Korea there are hundreds of other places I could go - but it's nice to have the security.
I'm hoping to get out another post later this week about traveling and how much it cost (in case you are planning some future travels, [wink nudge]) and what it felt like and what (if anything) I learned, complete with another quotation from David Foster Wallace, who you're probably sick of by now. But, in my humble opinion, the dude was a genius, not to mention quite often hilarious. So deal with it.
Stay tuned~~
But, as most of us more or less knew I would, I am going back. To be specific: I'm going to work a summer camp at Soongsil University, which happens to be ranked #24 in Korea, for what it's worth, which probably isn't much because my students will all be elementary schoolers. We'll see.
The camp starts on July 15th and goes until mid-August, but my visa lasts until late September. This is quite a boon, since it means I won't get deported after the camp even if I haven't yet found another school to sponsor my visa. I don't anticipate any troubles - I've got applications in dozens of universities and have done or planned interviews with several of them, and anyway if I don't get a university post in Korea there are hundreds of other places I could go - but it's nice to have the security.
I'm hoping to get out another post later this week about traveling and how much it cost (in case you are planning some future travels, [wink nudge]) and what it felt like and what (if anything) I learned, complete with another quotation from David Foster Wallace, who you're probably sick of by now. But, in my humble opinion, the dude was a genius, not to mention quite often hilarious. So deal with it.
Stay tuned~~
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
SNOOT
is an acronym used (I was really tempted to say "popularized," but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be true) by David Foster Wallace in his essay "Authority and American Usage," in which he gives a book review of a guide to English usage, which is the sort of book meant to clarify where to put articles and commas and when to say "affect" or "effect." Though I think a fill-in-your-own-acronym challenge would probably produce some entertaining comments, I am going to go ahead and spoil the surprise: SNOOT stands for either "'Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance or 'Syntax Nudninks* Of Our Time;" which one it stands for depends on whether you yourself are or are not a SNOOT (Consider the Lobster, 69)
In case those defintions don't clear it up for you, a SNOOT is a person who enjoys and takes pride in searching out, ruminating on, and perhaps even correcting faults in others' use of language. I'm sure that many of you honorable readers recognize this quality in yourselves, and I'm even more sure that all of you recognize (and detest) it in me. DFW has many humorous and illumining (intentional SNOOT word) things to say about SNOOTs, but lest my preface wind up being longer than the rest of my article, I'll get to my point:
I bring up SNOOTiness because in a period of about an hour this afternoon I had no less than five distinct moments when I thought to myself "wow, that guy just did something funny with my language." (A quick way to gauge your level of SNOOThood: did you twinge when you noticed that I just [intentionally, for the express purpose of this addendum, yes, I do put lots of thought into some of these entries] wrote "less" instead of "fewer" in the previous sentence? The more disappointed you were with my writing, the SNOOTier you are.)
Now, perhaps to your surprise, I am not the SNOOT I once was. With each day that passes, each Korean/Chinese/Pidgin English/Piraha phrase that I learn, I feel myself drifting further away from the prescriptivists and more into pure bafflement and wonder at the fact that language works at all. Thus, I present the following utterances not in order to mock the utterers, but to try to figure out what's going on.
The first three came from, of all people, Wimbledon commentators. (Yes, I actually scrambled to find a piece of paper and write them down during the match. I am apparently more into linguistics than tennis.) Note that these are professional men and women who make their money because they are ostensibly good with words, not members of some lower-class group who were never taught to speak "proper/correct/real" English.
1) "This is the most amount of tennis he's played in a long time." I don't even know how to describe what's wrong with this. I'm tempted to say that because "tennis" is uncountable, you can't modify it with "amount," but it's easy to think of counterexamples that seem to invalidate that point. I'm also tempted to say that "the most," being a superlative, should be followed either by an adjective or a plural noun, and that "amount" is uncountable and so inelegible; but it's not too hard to imagine a sentence like "He has different amounts of x and y," so that can't be it either [ASIDE: This phrase is apparently commutative and could also be/have been written, "It can't be that, either."]. Maybe it's just an idiosyncracy or inconsistency of English that we can say "the greatest amount" or "the largest amount" but not "the most amount." Interesting how the commentator could have avoided the whole awkward fiasco by just making the sentence two words shorter in the first place.
2) "If Roddick was to break here, it's going to be a quick set." The problem here, aside from the use of "was" instead of "were," which is probably an archaic rule already, is that the speaker mixes his conditionals. Normally we English speakers have a pretty good way of dealing with this: we use different verb tenses and moods to indicate the probability of the event happening. i.e.:
present + present/future: a habit, or likely, or at least not unlikely, or maybe even a promise
present subjunctive (looks identical to the simple past) + conditional: unlikely but possible
past subjunctive (looks like past perfect) + past conditional: logically impossible
The commentator here mixes the 2nd and the third, which is why we (by which I mean "I") get that weird feeling of disjunction. Does the commentator think the event is likely or not? I can't tell.
For the record, from what I've heard, Chinese grammar doesn't make these distinctions and instead leaves it up to context. On Chinese TV, you'd probably hear the equivalent of "If Roddick break, be quick set." Italian, on the opposite end of the spectrum, avoids some of English's ambiguity by having a mood (the subjunctive) dedicated to counterfactuals. Because this mood rarely takes the same form as the simple present or past, people don't get confused about how to use it. NONETHELESS, Italians still avoid using the subjunctive and often use the plain imperfect/past progressive tense instead. Lazy.
3) "Even if he's tired, he could still serve big." I don't know exactly what's going on here either. Out of context, this phrase is probably entirely acceptable, since we often use "could" to make suggestions. But from the speaker's intonation here you could tell that wasn't the case. I think the speaker meant to convey the thought, "Even though he's tired, he can still serve big." So why change "though" to "if"? I suppose you can't be 100% sure whether or not the guy's tired, so you go with the hypothetical. But why use the conditional "could" when it's clear that the player currently is serving big? I don't even know how to elaborate any further on this one, which is probably just as well.
4) This one was said by an NPR reporter, again, someone who(m) I would expect to be a little better trained: "...Michael Jackson's death, which was probably inevitable...." I realize I'm just being picky, and what he most likely meant was that Michael Jackson, being Michael Jackson, was not likely to die a normal and straightforward death, and so all the less-than-interesting mysteries and shenangins we are now being affronted with were not wholly unforeseeable. Unless he meant to imply that he might just live on like, say, Elvis.
5) Finally, one from the guy working at the produce stand where my mother and I just purchased a few peaches. As we're checking out, I slide behind a wall and out of his field of vision. Bidding farewell to my mom in his southern accent, he says "You have a good day now." Then I pass in front of him and he stutters embarassedly and says: "Y'all have a good day now." To me, the "you" in his first sentence was plural, and so I thought what he had said was entirely natural and appropriate ; to him, though, the "you" was singular. He thought he'd failed to wish me well, so he redressed the slight by using the less ambiguous "y'all." Contrary to my SNOOTy understanding of "y'all" as a non-word, or at least a kind of brute, class-revealing term, in this case, it was actually used to be even more explicitly polite. How dumb is it that we don't have a pronoun for you (plural), anyway? What would you think if you were studying a foreign language and there were words for I, you (singular), he, she, it, you (plural), and they, but not for "we"? The word that comes to mind for me is "bogus."
Just one more fact, then I'll conclude. The Piraha language, spoken by less (SNOOT sense activated!) than 500 people in the Amazon, has the following pronouns (the superscipt numbers indicate tones):
I am impressed if you made it this far. Actually, there is another entire section of this post which I meant to include but decided to leave out. Fear not, I'll get to it in the coming days. Thank you for venturing into my mind. You deserve a break.
*Sorry for the bogus link. I thought it was funny. If you haven't yet tried following the link, sorry for ruining it for you.
In case those defintions don't clear it up for you, a SNOOT is a person who enjoys and takes pride in searching out, ruminating on, and perhaps even correcting faults in others' use of language. I'm sure that many of you honorable readers recognize this quality in yourselves, and I'm even more sure that all of you recognize (and detest) it in me. DFW has many humorous and illumining (intentional SNOOT word) things to say about SNOOTs, but lest my preface wind up being longer than the rest of my article, I'll get to my point:
I bring up SNOOTiness because in a period of about an hour this afternoon I had no less than five distinct moments when I thought to myself "wow, that guy just did something funny with my language." (A quick way to gauge your level of SNOOThood: did you twinge when you noticed that I just [intentionally, for the express purpose of this addendum, yes, I do put lots of thought into some of these entries] wrote "less" instead of "fewer" in the previous sentence? The more disappointed you were with my writing, the SNOOTier you are.)
Now, perhaps to your surprise, I am not the SNOOT I once was. With each day that passes, each Korean/Chinese/Pidgin English/Piraha phrase that I learn, I feel myself drifting further away from the prescriptivists and more into pure bafflement and wonder at the fact that language works at all. Thus, I present the following utterances not in order to mock the utterers, but to try to figure out what's going on.
The first three came from, of all people, Wimbledon commentators. (Yes, I actually scrambled to find a piece of paper and write them down during the match. I am apparently more into linguistics than tennis.) Note that these are professional men and women who make their money because they are ostensibly good with words, not members of some lower-class group who were never taught to speak "proper/correct/real" English.
1) "This is the most amount of tennis he's played in a long time." I don't even know how to describe what's wrong with this. I'm tempted to say that because "tennis" is uncountable, you can't modify it with "amount," but it's easy to think of counterexamples that seem to invalidate that point. I'm also tempted to say that "the most," being a superlative, should be followed either by an adjective or a plural noun, and that "amount" is uncountable and so inelegible; but it's not too hard to imagine a sentence like "He has different amounts of x and y," so that can't be it either [ASIDE: This phrase is apparently commutative and could also be/have been written, "It can't be that, either."]. Maybe it's just an idiosyncracy or inconsistency of English that we can say "the greatest amount" or "the largest amount" but not "the most amount." Interesting how the commentator could have avoided the whole awkward fiasco by just making the sentence two words shorter in the first place.
2) "If Roddick was to break here, it's going to be a quick set." The problem here, aside from the use of "was" instead of "were," which is probably an archaic rule already, is that the speaker mixes his conditionals. Normally we English speakers have a pretty good way of dealing with this: we use different verb tenses and moods to indicate the probability of the event happening. i.e.:
present + present/future: a habit, or likely, or at least not unlikely, or maybe even a promise
present subjunctive (looks identical to the simple past) + conditional: unlikely but possible
past subjunctive (looks like past perfect) + past conditional: logically impossible
The commentator here mixes the 2nd and the third, which is why we (by which I mean "I") get that weird feeling of disjunction. Does the commentator think the event is likely or not? I can't tell.
For the record, from what I've heard, Chinese grammar doesn't make these distinctions and instead leaves it up to context. On Chinese TV, you'd probably hear the equivalent of "If Roddick break, be quick set." Italian, on the opposite end of the spectrum, avoids some of English's ambiguity by having a mood (the subjunctive) dedicated to counterfactuals. Because this mood rarely takes the same form as the simple present or past, people don't get confused about how to use it. NONETHELESS, Italians still avoid using the subjunctive and often use the plain imperfect/past progressive tense instead. Lazy.
3) "Even if he's tired, he could still serve big." I don't know exactly what's going on here either. Out of context, this phrase is probably entirely acceptable, since we often use "could" to make suggestions. But from the speaker's intonation here you could tell that wasn't the case. I think the speaker meant to convey the thought, "Even though he's tired, he can still serve big." So why change "though" to "if"? I suppose you can't be 100% sure whether or not the guy's tired, so you go with the hypothetical. But why use the conditional "could" when it's clear that the player currently is serving big? I don't even know how to elaborate any further on this one, which is probably just as well.
4) This one was said by an NPR reporter, again, someone who(m) I would expect to be a little better trained: "...Michael Jackson's death, which was probably inevitable...." I realize I'm just being picky, and what he most likely meant was that Michael Jackson, being Michael Jackson, was not likely to die a normal and straightforward death, and so all the less-than-interesting mysteries and shenangins we are now being affronted with were not wholly unforeseeable. Unless he meant to imply that he might just live on like, say, Elvis.
5) Finally, one from the guy working at the produce stand where my mother and I just purchased a few peaches. As we're checking out, I slide behind a wall and out of his field of vision. Bidding farewell to my mom in his southern accent, he says "You have a good day now." Then I pass in front of him and he stutters embarassedly and says: "Y'all have a good day now." To me, the "you" in his first sentence was plural, and so I thought what he had said was entirely natural and appropriate ; to him, though, the "you" was singular. He thought he'd failed to wish me well, so he redressed the slight by using the less ambiguous "y'all." Contrary to my SNOOTy understanding of "y'all" as a non-word, or at least a kind of brute, class-revealing term, in this case, it was actually used to be even more explicitly polite. How dumb is it that we don't have a pronoun for you (plural), anyway? What would you think if you were studying a foreign language and there were words for I, you (singular), he, she, it, you (plural), and they, but not for "we"? The word that comes to mind for me is "bogus."
Just one more fact, then I'll conclude. The Piraha language, spoken by less (SNOOT sense activated!) than 500 people in the Amazon, has the following pronouns (the superscipt numbers indicate tones):
- ti³ "I"
- gi¹xai³ "you" (sing.)
- hi³ "he" (human)
- i³ "she" (human)
- i¹k "it", "they" (animated non-human non-aquatic)
- si³ "it", "they" (animated non-human aquatic)
- a³ "it", "they" (non-animated)
- ti³a¹ti³so³ "we"
- gi¹xa³i¹ti³so³ "you" (pl.)
- hi³ai¹ti³so³ "they" (human?)
I am impressed if you made it this far. Actually, there is another entire section of this post which I meant to include but decided to leave out. Fear not, I'll get to it in the coming days. Thank you for venturing into my mind. You deserve a break.
*Sorry for the bogus link. I thought it was funny. If you haven't yet tried following the link, sorry for ruining it for you.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
I'm broke as the Ten Commandments / Sometimes I'm harder to follow
Let it be said that after about 7 months of vagabondage, I am now about 85% of the way back to being employed again. This is because I went up to DC today to apply for a visa so that I can go return to Korea to work a summer camp. Thus, barring any horrific failure to obtain a visa, I should be back in Asia and playing tricks on little kids again by mid-July. Still no sweet high-paying, long-vacation-giving, little-work-requiring university gig, but sooner or later, that'll come.
On to my point: I must say that my few months back in the USA have been an unmitigated success. I saw most of the branches of my family kudzu and I may just have managed to spend time with all of my friends, with the exception of two living in Europe, whom I graced with my presence back in '07. (If you are a friend I didn't visit, feel free to insert an "almost" into the previous sentence in whatever place would make it least insulting.) The experience of checking up on and hanging out with everyone has occasioned in me some very serious thoughts about the nature of friendship and distance and love and life and cuddly puppies. Allow me to quote a certain Todd Snider:
You know,
If I ever do get my money together,
I'm gon' take care of all my friends
Gon' buy an island, run a phone line, call 'em
Tell 'em all to get fu**ed
Oh! That oughtta take care of them.
Just be me and my money.
It's hilarious when you hear it, I swear.
In case you were wondering, the humor here is an example of a paraprosdokian , or perhaps of syllepsis. But knowing this doesn't make it any funnier. In fact, it makes it less entertaining.
On to my point: I must say that my few months back in the USA have been an unmitigated success. I saw most of the branches of my family kudzu and I may just have managed to spend time with all of my friends, with the exception of two living in Europe, whom I graced with my presence back in '07. (If you are a friend I didn't visit, feel free to insert an "almost" into the previous sentence in whatever place would make it least insulting.) The experience of checking up on and hanging out with everyone has occasioned in me some very serious thoughts about the nature of friendship and distance and love and life and cuddly puppies. Allow me to quote a certain Todd Snider:
You know,
If I ever do get my money together,
I'm gon' take care of all my friends
Gon' buy an island, run a phone line, call 'em
Tell 'em all to get fu**ed
Oh! That oughtta take care of them.
Just be me and my money.
It's hilarious when you hear it, I swear.
In case you were wondering, the humor here is an example of a paraprosdokian , or perhaps of syllepsis. But knowing this doesn't make it any funnier. In fact, it makes it less entertaining.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Update
I've added some photos from the past 2 months. San Fran, Alturas, Boston, Philly, Madison.
Also, regarding the job offer mentioned in the previous post, it is pretty much going nowhere. The contract was funky and the lady, who was very nice during the interview, has stopped responding to my emails. Ah well.
I do have a summer camp position lined up in Seoul, which starts July 15th. So I guess I'll be going back to Korea by then. I also have numerous job applications pending and am waiting on the results of a few interviews for more long-term positions. But, I figure, if I don't get any, I can just go to Mongolia or something.
After 7 months of (much desired) unemployment, I may have forgotten what working is like.
Also, regarding the job offer mentioned in the previous post, it is pretty much going nowhere. The contract was funky and the lady, who was very nice during the interview, has stopped responding to my emails. Ah well.
I do have a summer camp position lined up in Seoul, which starts July 15th. So I guess I'll be going back to Korea by then. I also have numerous job applications pending and am waiting on the results of a few interviews for more long-term positions. But, I figure, if I don't get any, I can just go to Mongolia or something.
After 7 months of (much desired) unemployment, I may have forgotten what working is like.
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