Certs

Please remember, your Korean is friendly but sensitive.  The first time he or she invites you for a ride in their thin, speedy van, do not buckle up.  The use of a safety device only says, "I don't trust you."  Instead, enjoy the t.v. mounted on the dashboard.  Your Korean chauffer is.

***

In class today I was assigned a serious task: while the child-automitons recited and transposed, I was to note those who worked hard. How does one judge fourty voices droning without any attempt to pronounce a hard consonant? 

By their hair of course.  

Low marks on standard bobs cut out about 85% of the class. +1 on anything that wasn't a bob and +2 for short chunky lesbian.  Fly high young ones, fly high above the crowd.  The world, or your bored English teachers, will reward you.

Cause and Effects on the Effeminate

But lord I tell you the Koreans are wild.

I'm invited out to tennis and they're battering me.  Guard they net, they motion, and it's a ball in the knee, a ball in the shoulder.  I take one in the hand trying to protect my face and I can feel the new space between my knuckles.  I don't know the word for "separated" but one of them notices the light flutter of my swelling ring finger as I try for a corn-snack after the game and he pops it back into place while pretending to beat me into the bag.  Then he ties on a red fraying bandana and play twos while I pretend not to cradle my hand by the space heater.  And they all scream when the smash it, they scream!
 
These Korean cats are tigers.

I skip past the boy at the urinal, nice suit, and place one between us as is the custom of my country.  He turns, as is customary for the Principle of a school in this country, looks me full in the eyes as I stand exposed releasing my green tea and says "hi".  The man's hard.  Harder still because I'm probably bigger than he is when he's hard.  Just like nails this man. Just like little hard steel nails.


At lunch they're all eating the stuff that's still boiling.  The boiling stuff will be swallowed immediately, the cold things will be left to get colder, the foreigner will be taunted for his slow eating.  "This will burn me," I say while they pour soup in their grins.  And it does, even five minutes later it burns me so badly.  I struggle to get it down and the ubiquitous culturally important hot sauce splashes into my throat undiminished by the calming influence of saliva and there are two aweful distinct fires now.  I wake up late for classes with a cooling seaweed paste slathered throughout my mouth and a tiny dick drawn on my cheek.  The balls though, are huge.

They had a war here.  They eat the bruised bananas.  

A short list of failures

Total time spent planning one full lesson and outlining a series of lessons to create a cohesive ten day curriculum: a little over two hours. 

Worrying if I'm on the right track: on and off over the weekend.

Having seven out of fifteen students show up and proceed to refuse to talk or participate in the aformentioned planned activities: painful.

Accidentally dismissing the class early: an evening to spend eating knock-off oreos until sick.

Too much of a terrible thing

How dishes of squid is a squid?  I eat them all the time now.  They must catch them in nets by the ton, just a net of tentacles hiding beaks and eyes like ours.  Tentacles in the soup, pointy heads covered in sauce.  They boil their brains to thicken everything.  In South Korea we eat everything but those haunted-man's eyes.

I've seen them still alive.  They have ten tentacles; eight of similar length and two longer lined with suckers or barbed hooks.  The first set stand for the seven deadly that both species share, the eighth is for the squid-specific sin: lacking a skeleton.  The two longer tentacles stand for humanities redemptions, Love and Unity and they use them to tear us apart.  Also, squids squirt ink.

I've tried to eat them with satisfaction, to shred their arms in an act of defiance of their sub-marine tyranny.  But they're so durable and revolting.  And each bite I take gives another piece to the thing that must be assembling in my stomach.  Tentacles and pointy heads and brains assembling themselves back into the monster that wasn't dragged from the deep, but gleefully met the knife for this very purpose.  Whole save for the eyes, it will blindly squeeze and pop everything until it can clamber up, sucker over sucker through my chest and into my throat and then tips of tentacles poking through my nose for leverage it will slop out my broken jaw and...

They're made from sold souls you know.  That's why their eyes are like that.  Every mother who left their baby in a dumpster, every man who didn't honour his daughter, anyone who wanted to play really good harmonica in the 40's.  They're all squid.  And they'll kill you.

But my stomach is rumbling.  I must go feed it.

Coupon: A two for one, lucky you!

I'm not sure what the girl did exactly.  The students talk all the time when we do - we the teachers - and the solution that seems to be more popular at my school is to overpower them.  Small speaker boxes slung on the hip are very popular.  A wire runs up and around the ear to the mouth and you're your own P.A. system.  Right then though, me and the kids, we were talking about introductions. [If Suzy hires Paul in a dark alley to kill her lover Adam's fiancé, who will perform the introduction when Suzy and Adam meet Paul in the Chuck E Cheese to pay him?]  Earlier that day Mrs. Khang had lost her stick, all teachers carry what-are-usually-bamboo-sticks-but-not-always, and she'd jury rigged a new one out of about five long wooden chopsticks held together with an elastic band.  I think it was because of the composite nature of her new instrument that it made such a fantastic rapping sound on the girl's forhead.  Students, please, I've never met corporal punishment in the classroom before, you must introduce us.  But in the interest of transparency, they did tell us this would happen.  And on the subject of disipline...

As I walked to lunch a dozen boys rushed past me, or nearly anyway. "There's a fight," they said, excited in exactly the same way that the boys back in Canada would get excited about a fight in grade nine.  "Some grade sevens are fighting!"  And they were off again, a machine gun of sandals slapping the stairs.  I surpressed the middle school boy in me and walked down. 

My school is two buildings joined by a bridge running from second floor to second floor.  Looking down, there were about a hundred students milling in the courtyard.  No fight though.  I'd missed it.  I didn't missed the fact that I was the only teacher present.  From the windows all the way up both buildings spectators heads poked out.  Then, in the absence of a show, they decided to lend a hand to the spectacle.  Each room's supply of chalk was shuttled to the window and bombed onto the mob, which quickly broke up under the onslaught.  I considered cutting myself a switch and restoring order.  I also considered smearing the damp chalk lying on stones across my face and leading the children to capture several burger restaurants I've had my eye on and at least one PC cafe (to keep the soldiers happy).  Instead I compromised and went to lunch. 

But this was all on Friday.  Ages ago. 

I was late for that basketball game I mentioned before.  Meet in front of the Outback Steak House at one.  Is that so hard?  A bus, a subway and a poor estimation of my own travel time later, I arrived at about quarter after.  Maybe even later.  I didn't have a watch, I only knew that there was no one waiting in front of the OSH.  It took fourty-five minutes and a very generous guided walk to the wrong middle school before I was sitting in a dark PC cafe wishing I smoked because if you looked at some of these guys you'd think they were running intell for a Mission Impossible-style operation instead of power leveling their friend's Tauren Shaman.  Trying to find every school in a three mile radius I instead came upon the message cancelling basketball all together that day.  And so it was that instead of breaking in my new silver shoes that day, my friend Adam and I connected long distance via internet, caught up a bit, and got very mean spirited in our handling of punk ass bitches South Korean-style.  Which is to say that we won the competative online video games we played, but please, I prefere to call it saving the world.  I will say that we were forceful only in our actions and avoided engaging in the juvenile name calling that is unfortunately prolific in the genre.

I decided to find a different way home than the way I'd found myself there.  Walking to the bus there was a small crowd gathered around a man in a very fine suit.  Curled into the fetal position, he was so small, like a child in a deep blue tie with wrinkles on his face.  He fought the police when the woke him up, and when the handcuffed him and when they picked up him and lifted him to and then into the back of the car.  Drunk, alone and on the street by five in the afternoon, I wondered what he was so sad about.  What could someone have to be sad about with a suit that was so nice?

I found my target bus stop and went foraging.  For one thousand won I enjoyed three things on a stick.  They were hot and soft and like a soft bread that sat in a soup for flavour.  The vendor pulled one out for himself as well, and we ate them in solidarity under his plastic tent.  We nodded a lot, and sometimes I would say "jwoi-yo" which is Korean for "good."  We drank the same soup that the bread had come in, and I think had a moment.  I was feeling pretty good about humanity when I got on the bus, which turned out to be the wrong bus.  There were a few desperate minutes between being kicked off that bus at the end of its line and finding the proper route, but I kept my head and made sure nobody saw me cry. 

South Korea, I've got you all figured out.

Hard done by

Today I was repeatedly and viciously complimented by women from the ages of 35 to 55 and by girls the age of 14 (15 in Korea Noah).  I was told several times I was an asset to the school and that I was handsome.  So of course I deserved a 'me day'.  In this case a me day consisted of:
-going to the music shop and pretending I was going to buy a very nice guitar so that I could play it for a half an hour.
-Having a personable, dedicated small business owner apologize to me for putting pickles in my sandwhich when she saw me take them out even though I didn't ask for no pickles.
-Riding the escalators up and down the department store thinking about how all the advertisements featured white people and wondering when someone was going to ask me to model for them.
-Buying, (Korean-made I have been assured), silver and black shoes for the game of basketball I plan on participating in on Saturday.
-Coming home, eating my girlfriend's home made chowder (a feat to make in S. K-ree-ha), limiting my compliments to "it really does have a lot of corn in it" and playing two+ hours of Heroes of Newerth (dork) while drinking 1.6 litres of beer.

I just hope I can shake off today and start tomorrow with a sunny disposition.

Murder words

Calling names can kill people.  Page 13 in the official grade 9 English text book.  The message is delivered in a reading comprehension unit and is accompanied by a small colour comic.  A boy hunches his shoulders and sobs while two more look on laughing.  What responsibility I have, teaching these children the language that kills.  I should ask for a shield, and a stipend for my horse to and from school.  I guess we don't notice it back home, it's just so common.  English is for wizards.

What's in an address?

I don't know mine.  I've circled the building and there are numbers all over.  Which one's the address?  No matter what I try the google mapers won't give me a fixed location.  And untill I figure this out I can't range too far.  Where will I tell the taxi cab driver to take my drunk ass home to?  And so it was, neccessarily, a tame weekend.

My bathroom goes, from left to right: mobile shower head, sink, toilet, towel rack.  There are no partitions, in fact the whole room is probably six feet across.  You can shower and poop comfortably, but you'll get the toilet paper wet.  The drain in the center of the appropriately slanted floor wasn't cleaned before I moved in and I often stare and the tangle of straight black hair that's amassed their.  I guess things about the previous tenant, but you can only read so much from someone's hair.  I wish they'd left me a note.

Tomorrow is the first day of school.  I came here on the pretenses of a job, and now I'm actually going to be asked to perform.  I suddenly feel that somewhere along the line I should have told them; I've always been less of a teacher and more of a clown.