It's Erection Time!

Well it's everyone's favorite time of year. Erection time, wait, election time. There's an election going on in Gwangju. And only the creme de la creme of the citizenry is asking for the populous' patent permission to govern our fair valley. I have no idea what their platforms are, but my only guess is that there is a More Kimchi Party and a More Samgyupsal Party. A cabbage on every plate or a piece of pig butt on every flatiron. I can only imagine the ferocity of the debate.
For the purposes of this article I'll be romanizing the Korean names in a way that actually makes sense. Newsflash, revised romanization committee, you're retarted. I came up with a system that accurately reflects Korean pronunciation in the English alphabet in ten minutes and I know 100 words in Korean on my best day.

First we have Mr. Im Joang Dae. He's my friendly neighborhood split-level house face man. When he talks his left eye moves because it's horizontally parallel to his mouth. I think he's running for some kind of city council seat from my district (there are 5 in Gwangju), because the poster says something about Buk-gu, the originally named North district. He's too old to be from the more progressive More Samgyupsal party, so he must be from the More Kimchi party. Good luck to you Mr. Im.



Here is Mr. Nam Pyong-oh. The great challenger of Mr. Im Joang-Dae. Maybe, he's running for something in Buk-Gu, but his office has a word after it that Mr. Im's doesn't. So maybe Mr. Im is running for a city council seat and Mr. Nam is running to be mayor of the district. I think that might be it, Mr Nam means Mr. South and he's running for office in the North district, ha ha. Either way, you can see he's an adherent of the More Samgyupsal ideology. Full of new ideas, with the new fashionable fake eye wear that all the kids are wearing, a casual oxford shirt without a tie and a smiley thumb pointed upward. He's the kind of guy you could have ten bottles of soju with at the norebang, a real Korean GWB.


Mr. Kim Who-Jin who's on first? I never knew that the kid who sat behind me in biology class and breathing through his mouth would end up being a Korean politician. I have no idea what he's running for but I'm pretty sure Kim Who-Jin is a card carrying member of the Kimchi party. He might be trying to act cool, but it's got a hollow ring to it, like a fat sophomore wearing Oakleys. The Samgyupsals would never have him. What I particularly like about this picture is the word "new" at the bottom after new it says "reedaw (leader)" in Hangul.


Kim Young-Moak will devour you all. Tall as a building, with a suit of the darkest black, woven of the night sky and the shattered dreams of young girls. You will submit to me, your new person who holds a position in municipal government. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.


Oh hai! I didn't see you there. I was just down here tying my athletic shoe strings. You know what I'm talking about, the shoes that allow you to perform most efficiently when tossing a ball around the park with your dog or executing vigorous calisthenics. Anyway, I'm Mr. Jaun Kap-Gil, and I'd like to talk to you about the Samgyupsal ideology. Pork fat is nutritious and cures cancer much more effectively than the kimchi that my competitor who is as tall as a five story building is peddling around. Here's a study where the conclusion has nothing to do with the experiment. That should prove my point.

There are more... but in the words of Amanda, "I'm tired."

It ain't all bad

So in light of my last post I thought it was high time to write my "Korea is not so bad" post. I've lived in the land of the morning clam... er... i mean calm, for almost 20 months now and I'd say I have a pretty good grasp on what makes this country and culture suck, AND what makes it cool. Here are some things I like about living and working in Korea:

1.) The money and job security. A#1 top reason fo sho. Free apartment (besides utilities), pension, severance pay, paid vacation and sick leave make this job pretty sweet.

2.) The food. Don't get me wrong I like Thai food more... but you can't go wrong with some delicious Korean BBQ. It's cheap to eat out, and everyone knows I love eating out! And come on, who can say they don't like kimchi? ;)

3.) I LOVE teaching! So much fun. Sure I gripe about it (it's a JOB after all), but especially now that I've finagled my way into teaching pretty much whatever I want, almost all my classes are successful. It's a beautiful thing. My students are hilarious and sometimes we spend the entire class just laughing about stuff. Don't get me wrong, I have some real asshole students, but since I know my students pretty well now, they know I mean business!

4.) Excellent transportation system. I hate driving and I'm happy to take a cab or the bus. In Portland, the bus drivers drive at least 10 miles under the speed limit. I hate that! Here they drive like they have somewhere to be. Love it, love it, love it (except when I am fearing for my life).

5.) Location. Conveniently located in central Asia, it is very easy to travel to other, cooler, places.

6.) Safety. Yousoek's blog aside, I feel safe here. I know I can walk any dark street at night and no one is going to put a gun to my head and rape me. Plus, I'm taller than half the men here, and my white ass scares the crap out of the other half, so I don't think they'll mess with me. I still lock my doors, I'm just not as worried about it.

7.) Good friends and cool people. Lots of the people coming to teach here are cool. Everyone has a college education, everyone is pretty liberal. My kinda crowd.

8.) Korea is not the USA. I don't like what the government does with our tax dollars and I don't want to live in a police state. Thanks but no thanks!

So as you can see, there are some perks of living among the Kim's and the Park's. I'll never be one of them, and hell, I won't even try to be like them, but it's not all bad. Maybe another six months won't hurt?

A

Why, why, why?

Since we skipped our morning running alarm two days in a row now, I must perform penance with a long promised blog post.

Since meeting three months ago, Amanda and I have moved into a new apartment together, went to Vietnam for a week, and quit drinking alcohol. The first two initiatives are the result of serendipity and the nature of a whirlwind courtship between two people with underdeveloped emotional walls. The third initiative was taken, not as much by us but by our relationship. Our relationship needed us to quit drinking because if we didn’t it wasn’t going to survive.
It’s a pretty big step when you forsake what has been the only social activity you’ve known for the last six years. If you had asked me three months ago, “How many nights a week would you like to drink three or more beers?”, I would have answered, “Four.” To be fair, my answer would still be four, I’m just not going to follow through. I was dependent on alcohol for any and all social activity. Playing guitar with friends? That’s five beers. Going out to eat? A pint and a bottle of soju. A night out? Depends on when it ends, but tomorrow it’s not going to be pretty. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. Youth absolves one from his responsibility to his body and reason for a time, but as we cross the quarter-life threshold that time appears on the horizon. Cultivating a healthy relationship with alcohol to combat abuse and foster reasonable usage habits is an intelligent endeavor at this point in life. I’m also treating living without alcohol as a social experiment; I must rediscover what people do without alcohol on a day to day basis, and a test of my own will-power. So far I haven’t broken my promise, but the force of the temptation has proven two things, how flimsy my will is and how strong the pull of alcohol is.

I consider my reasons for teetotaling somewhat superficial. I may have an unhealthy approach to drinking, but it hasn’t substantially negatively affected my life. I can drink without getting plastered, although I usually want to keep drinking if I can. I can go long periods without alcohol if I have to. Alcohol does not change my pattern of behavior; I don’t become another person when I drink, I become me but more fun and extroverted. I don’t consider myself addicted. Amanda’s reasons for forsaking the booze are somewhat more substantial. I won’t go into it, but Amanda’s life has been objectively more difficult than mine. Stability was not the name of the game in Oregon as it was in Pennsylvania. There’s family history, a personal past we won’t go into here, a complete inability to self-moderate, and a tendency to slip into an almost unrecognizable personality when inebriated that contribute to Amanda’s decision to do without alcohol. While I view our sobriety as a matter of curiosity and experimentalism, she views it as a matter of necessity. She took the lead in recognizing the pattern of behavior that needs to stop, and while I can see parallels in my own life, I don’t have the experiences and family history that would independently cause me to decide to quit alcohol. I am grateful, in that sense, to be spared what is inevitably to come, and I am also grateful to be able to help someone I deeply care about change her life in the way she knows she has to.

After our last drunken night, surviving another booze-fueled fight, we woke up suddenly only hours after our heads hit the pillow and walked like zombies up the main road to the KimBapNara where we recognized that in order for our relationship to survive, our dependence on alcohol needed to die. Teary, she told me over kimchi that she wanted to stop, and despite my misgivings (the irresistible pull of alcohol, and the fact that I hadn’t recognized my own problems fully), I said I would stop too. Even in its infancy we recognized that what we had between us was too important to lose to the same habits that had strained the strands of our previous relationships, it was time to change for ourselves, and for what we found in each other. I haven’t been sober for this long in 8 years; I’m not ecstatic about it, but I’m better for it.