6 weeks. 37 days. Freeeeedom. I can't wait to start living again. To have an endless number of days in front of me in which I can do as I please; get up late, stay up all night.
I've done my time. Served a year of a prison sentence that has been life in Korea. Slaved away for a group of horrible people who have now started wondering "Why wouldn't you want to stay another year?" "What are we going to do when you leave?" Treat someone like complete $&!# for a year and then begin to wonder such things... well, thats Korea for ya.
Although one things for sure "If I can make it here I can make it anywhere." And if my relationship has managed to survive this, how hard can everything after be? (Although immigration officers can be pretty tough sometimes!)
6 weeks. It means I'm getting close to the time when I can allow myself to dream again :)
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Melody
Dear Self~
Remember:
No matter what has ever come to me
I got my own brand of company
I got da da da inside my head
And i play songs back to back until i go to bed
Walking waking on a crowded street
With my headphones loud
So my hips can swing, so my head can nod
To the rock and roll to the boom boom beat
& i find that i'm never alone
& i find that my heart is my home
& the music within makes me whole
A world that i built on my own
& i know that i'm never alone
& i know that my heart is my home
Every missing piece of me
I can find in a melody
There's a river in my mind that's never still
Swirling, soothing all the time gives me a thrill
Swimming in the notes that go
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
Wandering, waking in an empty wood
It is quiet here, i am powerful
I look down below serenade the world
From inside my soul
When the walls begin to creep in
And the sky is fallin down
When i'm swallowed up in feelings
I get lost inside the sound...
~Kate Earl
Remember:
No matter what has ever come to me
I got my own brand of company
I got da da da inside my head
And i play songs back to back until i go to bed
Walking waking on a crowded street
With my headphones loud
So my hips can swing, so my head can nod
To the rock and roll to the boom boom beat
& i find that i'm never alone
& i find that my heart is my home
& the music within makes me whole
A world that i built on my own
& i know that i'm never alone
& i know that my heart is my home
Every missing piece of me
I can find in a melody
There's a river in my mind that's never still
Swirling, soothing all the time gives me a thrill
Swimming in the notes that go
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
Wandering, waking in an empty wood
It is quiet here, i am powerful
I look down below serenade the world
From inside my soul
When the walls begin to creep in
And the sky is fallin down
When i'm swallowed up in feelings
I get lost inside the sound...
~Kate Earl
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Building Up
Dear Construction workers of Korea,
Just a few observations and suggestions from a concerned alien... Please STOP working so hard!!! You are at the building site every morning at 6am. And I do mean every morning. Saturday? Sunday?! Holidays?! Why must you interrupt our sleep at the crack of dawn? And why must you do it so loudly? Using bizarre machines that seem to just make the process take even longer rather than speeding it up? Also you may want to work on clearing all your materials out of the street. I see kids playing on the long metal pipes as you stand above them working on the second floor flinging nails down & I have to say, its quite scary!
My poor neighbors haven't been able to sleep in for weeks now - and you've barely got going! (Not to mention your new job has abruptly removed their view.) Although I will not miss the fish heads and their aromas pouring out of bags in the empty lot on my walk home from school everyday, I do wish you'd give yourselves (and the rest of us) a break once in a while! Oh, and just so you know, they invented measuring tape so that you could achieve correct measurements of things... starting it from a solid point and measuring to a piece of tape blowing in the wind does not constitute an ideal measurement!
Carry on!... Quietly...
Just a few observations and suggestions from a concerned alien... Please STOP working so hard!!! You are at the building site every morning at 6am. And I do mean every morning. Saturday? Sunday?! Holidays?! Why must you interrupt our sleep at the crack of dawn? And why must you do it so loudly? Using bizarre machines that seem to just make the process take even longer rather than speeding it up? Also you may want to work on clearing all your materials out of the street. I see kids playing on the long metal pipes as you stand above them working on the second floor flinging nails down & I have to say, its quite scary!
My poor neighbors haven't been able to sleep in for weeks now - and you've barely got going! (Not to mention your new job has abruptly removed their view.) Although I will not miss the fish heads and their aromas pouring out of bags in the empty lot on my walk home from school everyday, I do wish you'd give yourselves (and the rest of us) a break once in a while! Oh, and just so you know, they invented measuring tape so that you could achieve correct measurements of things... starting it from a solid point and measuring to a piece of tape blowing in the wind does not constitute an ideal measurement!
Carry on!... Quietly...
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Note to Self
For months now in Korea (and a very brief week at home in the states) I have struggled with feelings of lost identity. Today I started to think of things a little bit differently. Perhaps what has actually happened is that I have just changed. I have carved away at my previous self.
Sometimes this was forced; I have had to alter my mannerisms and reactions to things for the sake of the culture I am living in. Asia and specifically Korea's concept of saving face has determined that I cannot behave as I would have previously. Anger and frustration are not seen as 'acceptable' responses to things. When I have reacted in this manner it was not received well. I have also had to deal repeatedly with a language barrier. Some of this is due to my own lack of Hangeul knowledge, and some has to do with the reception of a Westerner attempting to communicate with Koreans. (In the case of the latter, I have sworn I will make every possible attempt to try and understand someone speaking my native tongue with an accent!)
I have also chosen to make changes to myself. I am physically in better condition than I was when I came here. Between eating healthier - somewhat because I don't have the easiest access to my favorite, nonhealthy Western foods, but also just to help myself along in a quest for a better self-image - and exercising, I have met a challenge I gave myself. If you had told me when I came to Korea that I would spend so much time at the gym, and that the majority of that time would be spent running long distances at fast paces I would have laughed long and hard at the thought. In this respect I am proud of myself.
What I am not proud of was how long it took me to begin to appreciate my situation. No, my job has not turned out to be what I expected. But I made the choice to move to the other side of the world and experience a different culture with someone I love deeply. And I spent many months wanting to give up. I also spent months complaining. As I listened to people from home tell me over and over 'But look at what you've done! You've left everything you knew and started over!' I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. Because I wasn't going out and experiencing things like I knew I should have. I wasn't making the attempts to embrace the culture even when I didn't always like it. Perhaps if I had made more of an effort to understand it long ago, I might have found myself writing this at an earlier point.
Hindsight has a way of making us think these things through. And there isn't anything I can do about the time that has already passed, except to move forward positively. To let myself off the hook now and then and realize that I will continue to have bad days at school now and then (hopefully less of them though!), but to do everything I can to make the most of my time left here when not at school.
Either way I am left with the conclusion that although I've helped 'shape up' my physical self, my mental self is a little worse for the wear after the psychological undertakings of dealing with an incredibly vicious & nasty co-worker. I like to think that a good three months or so of traveling around Southeast Asia will help me to mentally regroup and I will leave Asia a better, more equipped person.
Sometimes this was forced; I have had to alter my mannerisms and reactions to things for the sake of the culture I am living in. Asia and specifically Korea's concept of saving face has determined that I cannot behave as I would have previously. Anger and frustration are not seen as 'acceptable' responses to things. When I have reacted in this manner it was not received well. I have also had to deal repeatedly with a language barrier. Some of this is due to my own lack of Hangeul knowledge, and some has to do with the reception of a Westerner attempting to communicate with Koreans. (In the case of the latter, I have sworn I will make every possible attempt to try and understand someone speaking my native tongue with an accent!)
I have also chosen to make changes to myself. I am physically in better condition than I was when I came here. Between eating healthier - somewhat because I don't have the easiest access to my favorite, nonhealthy Western foods, but also just to help myself along in a quest for a better self-image - and exercising, I have met a challenge I gave myself. If you had told me when I came to Korea that I would spend so much time at the gym, and that the majority of that time would be spent running long distances at fast paces I would have laughed long and hard at the thought. In this respect I am proud of myself.
What I am not proud of was how long it took me to begin to appreciate my situation. No, my job has not turned out to be what I expected. But I made the choice to move to the other side of the world and experience a different culture with someone I love deeply. And I spent many months wanting to give up. I also spent months complaining. As I listened to people from home tell me over and over 'But look at what you've done! You've left everything you knew and started over!' I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. Because I wasn't going out and experiencing things like I knew I should have. I wasn't making the attempts to embrace the culture even when I didn't always like it. Perhaps if I had made more of an effort to understand it long ago, I might have found myself writing this at an earlier point.
Hindsight has a way of making us think these things through. And there isn't anything I can do about the time that has already passed, except to move forward positively. To let myself off the hook now and then and realize that I will continue to have bad days at school now and then (hopefully less of them though!), but to do everything I can to make the most of my time left here when not at school.
Either way I am left with the conclusion that although I've helped 'shape up' my physical self, my mental self is a little worse for the wear after the psychological undertakings of dealing with an incredibly vicious & nasty co-worker. I like to think that a good three months or so of traveling around Southeast Asia will help me to mentally regroup and I will leave Asia a better, more equipped person.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
To the Management of PyeongDong English Forest
Dear Ms. Lee,
I am sorry to inform you that you hired a power-hungry dictator to be the 'head teacher' in your English center. Her goal for the past year has been to make everyone else's life miserable - most likely so we would know what it was like to be her.
She has used varying methods to achieve her goals. The first we encountered were a mix of deception and outright lies. We were told horrible things about you and made to feel as if you couldn't be trusted, thereby severing our ties to the only English-speaking person who was above her in the hierarchy. (If you want specifics... Did you actually tell her not to pay for our first dinner together - as is customary for the host of such a dinner to do - as we would come to expect it every time? And did you really ask her to work us like dogs during our first weeks in Korea so we wouldn't be lazy?)
Her next method was to 'divide and conquer' the three other people working in the center - pitting us against one another. You witnessed this yourself in an explosive argument one Friday afternoon. Fortunately after so much time in the center and a previous attempt by her at this particular method, we'd grown wise to her scheming. And now the three of us are all the more wary of anything she says. (When Fran asked her "How old are you?" he was referencing the fact that she very much resembles the girls I encountered in 6th grade. Twelve year olds who regularly changed their mind about whether or not someone 'deserved' to be their 'friend' based on the person's wardrobe and music choices. These girls were also commonly known to spread rumors of the 'Did you hear what so and so said about you?' And as this particular person has actually done these very things I think he had a legitimate right to ask the question.)
Her most recent persuit is to inflict as many rules as she can possibly come up with on us. This attempts to make us a collective miserable. Because if she cannot make us angry at each other, why not make us all miserable and therefore give her reason to complain about our performance as teachers. The worst part of this method is that one of the rules shes come up with is to make us all present during all classes - even though only one or two of us are actually teaching; the others must 'observe'. She got the shock of her life when she realized that during song time, which she teaches on her own, this left the three of us to do nothing at the back of the class.
I did not come all the way to Korea to engage in combat. I came to experience a culture and teach English. I fear now that the actions of one person have managed to poison my attempts at both. I am more than willing to do my job, but my job doesn't need to be this difficult and I am better at it when I can actually focus on the task at hand rather than constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering which direction the next attack is coming from.
I cannot pretend to know what is best for the center, as anytime I have tried to help in that regard my suggestions were thwarted. But I would suggest thinking long and hard about who you have chosen to run the center from the inside, and the impact that person has on all aspects of this center. Surely the personal agenda of that person should not be amusement at the expense of their co-workers and the children who come there to learn.
I am sorry to inform you that you hired a power-hungry dictator to be the 'head teacher' in your English center. Her goal for the past year has been to make everyone else's life miserable - most likely so we would know what it was like to be her.
She has used varying methods to achieve her goals. The first we encountered were a mix of deception and outright lies. We were told horrible things about you and made to feel as if you couldn't be trusted, thereby severing our ties to the only English-speaking person who was above her in the hierarchy. (If you want specifics... Did you actually tell her not to pay for our first dinner together - as is customary for the host of such a dinner to do - as we would come to expect it every time? And did you really ask her to work us like dogs during our first weeks in Korea so we wouldn't be lazy?)
Her next method was to 'divide and conquer' the three other people working in the center - pitting us against one another. You witnessed this yourself in an explosive argument one Friday afternoon. Fortunately after so much time in the center and a previous attempt by her at this particular method, we'd grown wise to her scheming. And now the three of us are all the more wary of anything she says. (When Fran asked her "How old are you?" he was referencing the fact that she very much resembles the girls I encountered in 6th grade. Twelve year olds who regularly changed their mind about whether or not someone 'deserved' to be their 'friend' based on the person's wardrobe and music choices. These girls were also commonly known to spread rumors of the 'Did you hear what so and so said about you?' And as this particular person has actually done these very things I think he had a legitimate right to ask the question.)
Her most recent persuit is to inflict as many rules as she can possibly come up with on us. This attempts to make us a collective miserable. Because if she cannot make us angry at each other, why not make us all miserable and therefore give her reason to complain about our performance as teachers. The worst part of this method is that one of the rules shes come up with is to make us all present during all classes - even though only one or two of us are actually teaching; the others must 'observe'. She got the shock of her life when she realized that during song time, which she teaches on her own, this left the three of us to do nothing at the back of the class.
I did not come all the way to Korea to engage in combat. I came to experience a culture and teach English. I fear now that the actions of one person have managed to poison my attempts at both. I am more than willing to do my job, but my job doesn't need to be this difficult and I am better at it when I can actually focus on the task at hand rather than constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering which direction the next attack is coming from.
I cannot pretend to know what is best for the center, as anytime I have tried to help in that regard my suggestions were thwarted. But I would suggest thinking long and hard about who you have chosen to run the center from the inside, and the impact that person has on all aspects of this center. Surely the personal agenda of that person should not be amusement at the expense of their co-workers and the children who come there to learn.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Gives You Hell
'Dear' Horrendous Korean Co-teacher,
It's Monday. I've been at school for 5 minutes & the muscles in my body are already tense, that bad burny feeling has returned to my stomach and my hands are once again shaking. So thank you for that fine introduction to the week.
I really don't want to be one of those people who complain all the time. For now I'm going to use the excuse that I have a lot to complain about. Mostly in regards to one person. You.
I wish I could say to you "When you see my face I hope it gives you hell" ~ instead it is what happens to me.
I just have to believe that I can make it through the next 74 days & then I will be on to better things. The thing that worries me the most is whether or not I will be able to hold on to my sanity for that long.
It's Monday. I've been at school for 5 minutes & the muscles in my body are already tense, that bad burny feeling has returned to my stomach and my hands are once again shaking. So thank you for that fine introduction to the week.
I really don't want to be one of those people who complain all the time. For now I'm going to use the excuse that I have a lot to complain about. Mostly in regards to one person. You.
I wish I could say to you "When you see my face I hope it gives you hell" ~ instead it is what happens to me.
I just have to believe that I can make it through the next 74 days & then I will be on to better things. The thing that worries me the most is whether or not I will be able to hold on to my sanity for that long.
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