gift sets i have seen.

With Seollal just around the corner, it seems a good time to comment on Korea's unusual knack for gift sets.


It's funny to me not so much because they're popular here, but because for some reason they're not popular back home. I mean, a well wrapped set of toiletries or coffees is actually a pretty nice gift.



Of course, this being a blog about differences, i'm going to focus on the ones that might not go over so well back home...

A whole case of generic brand Spam!


Nothing says "happy new year" quite like 12 cans of tuna!


Dried sardines are always a safe bet.

meh dong!

Korea gets 5 points this week because sticking your tongue out is a vocalized onomatopoeia.
And they do it a lot.

enerzen, you harlot.

I know its out there. I just can't find it. yet.

interneting, computing, and the permanence of memory

"The dangers of facebook is that it is a natural archivist. Before the internet, i could have been a king for saving every scrap of paper, but now you actually have to go out of your way to delete a message. Forgetting becomes the challenge, remembering the routine."

Digital ephemera is impossible. Every note, every draft, every email and text and message is saved without me knowing it, waiting to be recalled at the darkest hour.

Even itunes records the last time i listened to a song. One year ago today i was listening to (smog). How is it helpful to know this? How can it do anything but root me in a past that should only be meaningful as a prefixed segment of a narrative called MY LIFE NOW?

What will it mean in 25 years when i can still recall, at the slightest touch, every single word of contact i ever made via the internet? And because this is the norm - because it is erasure instead of saving that requires action - what would it say about me if i 'chose' to forget? The internet has in every way flipped the natural meaning and value of saving.
And i am scared.



Near the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa oasis. (because every post deserves a picture.)

A year of meta-living (not really.)

As long as we're on the subjects of New Years, I should mention that my biggest (and lamest) resolution was to only read books that could be construed as meta-fiction. (non-fiction is exempt, as are short stories. Memoirs are to be decided by committee on a case-by-case basis.)

Although to be fair, my definition of Meta is more aligned with the concept of Matroyoshka doll's than anything else.

And so, without further adieu, i present the worlds first meta-vending machine:



Wait for it...





Hell yes. It's a vending machine that dispenses little toy vending machines. Life is good.

There is a lettuce on the plate.

It's frustrating to have to teach children incorrect English...



But everyone makes mistakes.

What drives me crazy are things like this...

The yellow star to the above left of "bird" says "Watch Out!" Every vocabulary box has one world singled out as a "watch out" word. But its always a random word, not something difficult or watch-out-worthy.

Also, the Atlantic Ocean apparently does not exist.

a very belated new years post (of sorts)

On new years i was supposed to join the supposed 600,000 citizens who crowded Haeundae Beach in Pusan to watch the sunrise. But it was freezing, so i stayed in bed. Apparently, i was not alone.
Because this is a Korean tradition, I wasn't surprised that when i asked my kids on Tuesday how many of them had seen the sunrise, most raised their hand. What did surprise me was that most of them had "seen" the sunrise in a rather insincere manner; by watching it on TV or looking at slide shows on their computer.

huh?

There is a language barrier, and so the most pressing question was to decide whether

A) the kids were watching the sunrise later in the day to avoid waking up at 6am.

B) The kids were watching it on TV because they were too cold/lazy to go outside.

(Un)surprisingly, the answer was evenly split.

I understand people watching the Times Square ball dropping live via television. That is a site-specific event. But the sunrise? Furthermore, i can't really image someone watching a taped 'ball-dropping' the next day because they were too tuckered out the night before.

I have a very hopeful image of my children watching the sunrise on their Samsungs while the actual sun rises, um, like directly outside their house. For added irony, one of the children gets up and pulls down the blinds to keep the glare off the TV.

A boy can dream, can't he?

A susan Sontag kind of week (part 1)

I finished reading "Regarding the Pain of Others" yesterday, and it was gooood. And while i agreed with most of it, something strange happens in the last chapter that made me feel uneasy:

Part 1

Towards the end of the book, Sontag gives the strong admonishment that...

"Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia." (p 114)

Is this true? Does being an 'adult' imply an obligation to not only accept, but accept with such detachment, the wickedness of humans? Does holding onto a hope that the worst that humankind has shown is an aberration really imply an 'unacceptable' naivety?
It would seem to me that this position creates a number of moral problems. If one is morally required to not only accept, but accept without flinching, the potential for gruesome depravity, then it complicates our expected response to a situation where such violence is even possible. If we cannot be 'illusioned' that anyone would refrain from the worst, how can we justify preparing for anything less? It would seem obvious that any relationship with another human is founded on a tacit agreement that such depraved acts remain 'off the table.' And if these acts are understood as beyond boundaries, then it would also follow that the necessary reaction to witnessing them is precisely that of disbelief; of disillusionment with the contract of human decency.
But this disillusionment cannot be permanent. The renewal of faith required to go on after the invariable aberration from a Contract of Decency - not just as a functioning society, but as a psychologically sane individual - is predicated not on forgiveness of the individual who errs, but on labeling the act itself as Exceptionalist.

Sontag does go on to acknowledge the incongruence between the value of remembering and the importance of forgetting. "Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together... [but] to make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited." (p 115)

And in a general sense, this also presents a catch-22 of sorts. Because while Sontag admits that remembering in particulars can be counterproductive towards the cause of reconciliation, it is also necessary towards any sort of 'meaningful' remembering. If we only know that genocide is possible in the abstract, it becomes intangible, unreal. But if we remember it in the specifics, it not only prevents forgiving, it also becomes an act tied to the memory. Depravity existed here and here - and we can locate and maybe begin to explain it in 'this' historical context. So we are at an impasse.

So yeah. This is - i am well aware - a completely inappropriate comparison in terms of scale and weight, but it is my life this week:
I quit my job here in Korea on Monday. I knew that even though my contract clearly states that i can give 30 days notice at any point without penalties, my boss would probably screw me. At least, i was aware that in the history of people quiting there jobs in Korea, there are very few cases of happy endings, and quite a few cases of disaster. As a result, most people who choose to leave early turn the tables and preemptively screw their bosses by 'pulling a runner' and simply leaving in the middle of the night right after payday.
This is undoubtedly a vicious cycle. The more people 'pull runners,' the more bosses won't trust foreign teachers, and will try and abuse them, which just makes it more likely that someone will run in the first place.
I knew this before Monday, but i still didn't believe it would happen to me. Or rather, I had to be naive enough to see if it would happen to me. I was curious to see if my boss, who i respect as decent and honest, would try and take advantage of me. And of course she has.

Also, Korean kids love peanut butter sandwiches, but the thought of adding jelly makes them cringe. fyi.

A Susan Sontag kind of week (part 2)

part 2

Sontag talks about viewing suffering in two very different ways;
First - and more importantly - as a way to remember and honor war's dead, to (maybe) avoid future wars, or at least to understand their horrifying implications.

Second as a narcissistic and base desire to witness the morbid.

Since leaving Egypt i have thought a lot about this second part. About our natural 'attraction' to viewing suffering and the grotesque. Sontag locates the first recorded acknowledgment of this attraction in Plato's Republic, where in Book IV Socrates relates a story about Leonitus, son of Aglaion:

On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, "There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight."

Last night in a taxi on the way back from Pusan, we saw flashing lights up ahead on the highway. Scott said it was going to be a checkpoint, but i was pretty sure i knew what was coming.
In America we're so fast to hide the bodies. Part of the implicit pact of rubbernecking back home is an all-but-guaranteed PG-13 rating. We crane to look, but we anticipate only the signs and symbols of carnage - shattered glass and crumpled metal. I've noticed that this is rarely the case outside of the West.
Last night no one had bothered to cover up the body. It just lay there, face up, on the side of the road. I saw him first, and pointed out that "that guy's dead," whereas Scott and Cyndi decided that he definitely was not. The cab driver, for his part, said "oh my god" dramatically/breathlessly a few times, clearly for our benefit. ("Oh my god" is a genuine Korean expression, used in all corresponding situations to the English version.)
Afterwards, i couldn't stop thinking about the gulf between our different reactions.
Cyndi asked, "how can you be so cavalier?" But I wonder how i couldn't be.
I saw so many car crashes in Egypt that the cringe-component of the shock faded. All that was left was the visual, and the visual remains fascinating.
Sontag points out that "suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not at all - as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure." (p. 40) This is probably because suffering removed from pathos becomes narratively meaningless. (unless of course it serves an anti-narrative of universal pointlessness.) And because most of Sontag's book is devoted precisely to the 'meaning' associated with viewing suffering, she doesn't dwell any further on the accidental misery of others.

But if Sontag is correct in arguing (and i think she is) that viewing the misery inherent in war photography cannot be separated from the narrative of the war in question, then photographs - or first person viewings - of narrative-less accidental death is indeed a very different bag. It is all the depravity with none of the 'benefits.' Except that even here Sontag sees potential for personal growth:

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. (p 98)

And if this truly is a goal (i'm skeptical), then I would think that accident photography offers the best way to approach this, free from the distractions of the narratively contextualized. And the lack of any mainstream interest in narrative-less accident-photography (whether documentary or artistic) becomes a strange omission.
Or maybe we really just need this contextualizing as a shield. Both from appearing morbid and grotesque ourselves, and from feeling that the world itself is morbid and grotesque without consequence.

Or maybe i've written a stupidly long post.

i woke up this morning thinking about this Levi's commercial...


Those must have taken him a very long time to make.

so...
Does reproduction really disqualify meaning?

How important is sacrifice to a gesture like this? How important is authenticity? or Honesty?

And finally, why do i wake up thinking about this stuff anyway?
i think i need a hobby.

this is unfortunate in so many ways. but its 2 am, so i'll leave it at that.

this has got to stop.

wondergirl hysteria has reached the point where it has literally eclipsed the existence of anything else. Like the alloted musical space in korean culture has been filled with "tell me," to the exclusion of all other music past or present.


flight attendants...


child exploitation


best of...


and a tutorial for the curious...