Watching Mad Men, wishing I was back in the 60s, then realizing that I was there, but in my version everyone spoke Korean.
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I just checked the temperature: -9 celcius. And now I have to go and wait for a bus. Isn’t that nice?
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It’s interesting to spend Christmas with snow around. I’m just not used to it. In Australia, Christmas usually comes in the middle of a heat wave. All you really want to do after stuffing yourself full with Christmas pudding is go to the beach and bake yourself browner than a roast chicken. However as strange as it is for me, there is a definite feeling of rightness, now that all the Christmas songs actually fit with what I’m seeing around me.
I do lament the lack of mince pies and pudding, however I just learned that Americans don’t have those delicious treats as part of Christmas, nor do they have Boxing Day, so I don’t feel so bad. I am full of Christmas cheer, which really set in when I exchanged gifts with my students and heard them squeal with delight at the pink stuff I bought them (they’re a pair of nine year old girls). I remembered that feeling of getting presents and wondering what on Earth was in the giving of presents from old to young. At the time I thought that getting presents was the end of the equation. Now I understand.
In addition, as I sipped my coffee and updated my website a beautiful ballerina came up to me and gave me her number. She wasn’t doing ballet at the time you’ll understand, I just took her word for it. Presents come in many forms it seems.
But, and you knew this story had to have a but, it sucks to be away from family. With summer Christmas in Australia, a warm house to celebrate in was a given. But it was the smell of home-cooked food and the faces of those you love right next to you which made Christmas. And that right there is the biggest drawback of life overseas. Especially so at this time of year.
But I’ve got new socks and cologne and candy, plus the number of a ballerina, so really I’m not doing too bad.
Merry Christmas everyone, stay safe and if you are near any mince pies have one for me!
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I learned recently that in Japan’s history it has only been invaded sucessfully once. That was after the end of the second world war, and then it was largely due to a huge bomb or two. It was tried earlier, quite some time earlier, during the 11th century or so by Ghengis Khan’s mob, but they didn’t have any huge bombs and were rather unsuccessful.
Korea, on the other hand, has been invaded over 4,000 times throughout its history, by a whole lot of countries from a whole lot of different directions. Just before the Russians came in from the North and did great things there, and before the South was occupied by the Allied forces, the peninsula was ruled by the Japanese. They rather impolitely decided to make it an annex of Japan and change the language and culture to Japanese. This, less than a century ago.
After the Korean war, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Their GDP was the equivalent of just a few US dollars. There was no work, no real industry. People resorted to eating bark from trees in the country. In the towns, men could be seen roaming around looking for work of any sort. Old folks today can still remember those days, and their appreciation for the allied forces is still clearly evident. Had it not been for their success in holding Seoul, they might still be eating bark like their Northern cousins still do.
Instead what you see around Seoul is designer bags and clothes, wealth and luxury, coupled with a hard-working spirit and a sense of responsibility to make up for a troubled past. In just a few decades Korea has put itself on the map and come up to be one of the world’s richest nations. Parents tell their kids to eat everything on the plate because to leave food is still something terribly wasteful. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to do so, but now it’s just something to be nagged about. The industrious spirit is still there, but how much will cross over from one generation to the next?
If it’s more common to find uneaten food on a plate now, will a relaxed approach be also more common. Will the work-all-day-and-night, scrimp-and-save mentality be a thing of the past. There is a saying “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” which can be applied to families or countries. Poor works hard to become rich, the child grows up in wealth and eats away at the profits by not having the same work ethic. The third generation is back at the start, poor, and so the cycle continues. We in the west tend to take our wealth for granted. Quite possibly, the cycle isn’t so fast, as in the three generations analogy. But if the Koreans keep their hard-working mentality intact across the generations, we may be in for a shock.
If I were Korean, I would certainly not be doing what I’m doing. I’d have a job and I’d be working 12 hour days and saving up my money. Instead I work about 20 hours a week and spend the other time trying to write something which one day may turn into something big. All of it is a maybe, but it’s a maybe that I’m interested in exploring. It’s kind of like a gamble really. You feel like your are in a race with the people you went to school with. Developing a craft feels essentially like changing your shoes and putting on roller blades when the starting gun has already been fired. Everyone else has raced off and is running toward their futures, but you are getting your blades on, wondering all the time if you’ll be able to skate at all. Will I fall, will I be slow? Will I have to take them off again and then start running from scratch, destined to be behind the rest of my life? Then I see a 23 year old on the Apprentice and I get really down.
But then I write something that I really like and someone else tells me that they really like it and I think of the amazing future that is waiting for me whatever I do. I may not have the impetus to work my ass off every day until retirement in order to build a life for my future family, but I have a sense of purpose. And that’s enough.
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The World Turned Upside Down
Help is Round the Corner
No More Keeping My Feet On the Ground
1.36
High Speed
Such A Rush
Careful Where You Stand
Easy To Please
Only Superstition
This is my shopping list of sorts. See, I’m a huge Coldplay fan and I’ve been scouring their singles for their B-sides. Actually a lot of my favorite songs by Coldplay are the ones unreleased as singles and a few not even on their albums. They’re a great band for a number of reasons, but it must be the combination of sympathy in the lyrics and the timbre of Chris Martin’s voice which makes them my number one band.
Speaking of songs, there is a song which I like by Chaka Khan called ‘Through the Fire’. Many people may recognize it by it’s (sped-up) inclusion on Kanye West’s ‘Through the Wire’. It goes “Though the fire, to the limit, to the wall/For a chance to be with you I’d gladly risk it all…Right down to the wire, even through the fire.” I can’t get over songs like this, where the woman is singing about reaching a breaking point to be with a guy. More than that, she is (and here it comes) submitting herself to the man she loves. It’s a touching submission and it makes me remember the girls I have seen or known who lose all reference to reality for the sake of their heart. It sounds silly, but I’m actually a little jealous of it.
I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes because I don’t really believe we’re equal. I believe that we are fundamentally imbalanced in various ways, strength, emotion, intuition, aggression, and more. This is the natural order of things. I can’t fight or deny that men are stronger than women. In the thousands of years that humans have roamed the Earth I think somehow this imbalance of power must have been counterbalanced in a skill or virtue posessed by women. Men have known for a long time that women were smarter than them. They had their suspicious at least. Why else would they always blame them for doing the devil’s work and punish them as such? Why would they subjugate them and refuse them education if not because they feared the result? We aren’t even near to being equal, but we counter each other’s imbalance in the strangest of ways – like puzzle pieces coming together. Anyway, I just like the reminder that sure women do submit to the man they love. Society today is so full of manly women who are trying to be one of the boys or posess the masculine traits of aggression and crudeness. When I see a girl in an outward display of strength I really cringe. It’s just not attractive (to me anyway). When I see a couple together with the woman playing the aggressive man’s role, I have to turn my head.
Luckily I happen to be in a country which hasn’t really caught on to the western idea of equal rights. I have great confidence that they won’t either. Eastern philosophy underpins the structure of society here. If you can think of a yin-yang circle, you may understand it a little. It’s a cirle made up of two teardrops, one black one white. Inside the black there is a circle of white and vice versa. The black represents the male and the white the female, and already it is clear that we each have a part of the other in us. We are joined together to form a circle, but we should keep a distinct line between what is female and what is male. As long as we keep this distinction and form, the circle is balanced and harmonious.
One may point out the fact that women here seem submissive to everyone and this is prevents them expressing themselves. I used to think this myself when I first came here. Then I was advised that women are actually in control in Korea. The man works hard for the money, but the mother takes all the money and distributes it. The men may always get to speak first and the woman may have to be polite, but within that framework there is more power than you may think by looking.
It’s a complicated subject and altogether too complicated for this blog. I just came here to write down the names of some songs I was after.
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There was a massive snowfall the whole day Saturday which left my motorbike under about four inches of it as a result. I had been staying over at my friend’s house due to me being sick and miserable. Even though we didn’t talk much it was good company. I saw on my Firefox browser add on that snow showers were due for Seoul and on Saturday afternoon I headed outside to see if it had started.
I hadn’t eaten all day, let me say. I had a cold, a sore throat but thankfully no sneezing, oh and a headache. I wasn’t feeling too sharp by any means. Usually my weekends are a great time to hang out with friends and spend my money, but today I couldn’t think about anything. Including food. I made it outside and it was snowing slightly, just enough to melt when it hit the ground, but enough so that you could walk and get some specks of white on your jacket. I walked up the street to buy an icecream. It was the only thing I could bear eating. I headed back and watched a movie.
Then, after the first icecream was so good I decided I needed another one, so I headed out again. This time, it was snowing heavily, if snow could actually be heavy. It’s simply amazing, we’re just a few days into Winter and already the weather here has thrown a little party for the new season. You can bet that when it comes around to the first of March the little flowers will be popping up and making people fall in love. It really happens on schedule here.
After my second icecream (I guess you might call that one lunch) I stayed inside for the rest of the night, until about 8am when we decided to go and eat some dinner. Is it strange to you that I might eat dinner at such a time? It does seem to invoke that response from people I confide this to. I wonder what does one call the third meal of the day. It consisted of delicious barbequed pork, dipped into a salty bean sauce, wrapped in a lettuce leaf along with rice and a couple of onions. In other words, a real meal. I was almost going to say a real man’s meal, but we can’t start talking about sauces other than tomato and lettuce leaves? Forget it. But it was a real meal and I’m calling it dinner.
The point of the matter is when we went outside to drive to the restaurant, the snow had melted on the ground enough to create a lovely layer of ice in odd little patches, fatal to the unwary. Also our car was buried under a mountain of snow. It took cautious steps around the outside of the car and a few buckets of warm water to convince the snow to take a hike. To make matters worse, the whole day today was bright and sunny, melting the snow enough to turn it to liquid which froze on the ground, creating more ice.
After dinner I went home to get some rest at my house. At the moment I am living in a hilly part of town. I know Seoul is pretty much made of hills, but my apartment in particular is, as it were, on the side of one. I was most cautious at 9am coming home and equally cautious at 10pm when I ventured out to get a coffee. I lost count of the almost-slipped-on-my-ass moments I had, but thankfully didn’t in fact end up horizontal. I was being careful, but every so often I’d see something interesting, like a cute girl for example, and not pay attention to where I was walking and then “whoa” my hands would go up, I’d do an impression of a drunk man falling backward through space and then I’d regain my composure. Then I would immediately pretend like I hadn’t just looked like a fool for half a second.
I have great respect for girls in heels who brave these conditions. Yes, I stare at nicely shaped legs out of respect. Really.
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I just checked the actual temperature after riding on my motorbike through the freezing cold night. It’s down to -4 degrees and there’s a potential for snow tomorrow afternoon. So yeah, it’s cold.
I’m so so so frozen. I need time to thaw.
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