Finally, A New Blog Post for a New Looking Blog

Inspired by my mother and my sister and my girlfriend, owners of tthree excellent blogs, I'm going to go ahead and try to start blogging more.
http://polkadotpalmtree.blogspot.com/

http://www.barefootbeadshawaii.blogspot.com/

http://countingdowntocrowpose.blogspot.com/2010/04/crow-pose-one-step-closer-to-world.html
Mostly my life is really boring, but if you clicked the links above you know it's not like anyone else in my family has a ton going on and they blog all the time. "Boring Thomas Blogs" could be a group name or a movie or something. A movie where you just watch Adam Sandler type and keep waiting for it to get funny but it doesn't and then you're like, "Oh, Adam Sandler, you fooled me again. I should have gone to see that Will Ferrell movie, which would have been equally un-funny, but likely a shorter wait for the un-funny."

The new picture is better than the old picture because Sara and I are both a lot thinner and we're not covered in gross South American river water. The biggest problem is that the new picture shows us in a bar about to get wrecked, or already wrecked in my case, but now I'm trying to avoid getting wrecked. I've stopped drinking during the week and I'm working on quitting altogether. Outside of a little Korean Mokkoli this weekend I'm doing pretty good.

                       A picture of me trying to quit drinking.  FAIL


Seriously, I've cut my drinking way back.  I've gone from 5 nights a week of black out drunk to 1 night every other week.  Success!  In February I woke up one too many times in either a pile of my own sick, face deep in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or with my shoes on in bed.  Since March I've joined a gym, worked out, eaten healthy, scaled back the drinking and lost almost 15 pounds.  All together since I've been in Korea, I've lost more like 30.  It's great.  With the cut back drinking and the  disappearance of the fat deposits previously located under my neck (4 Chins), on my back (Shrek back), on my sides (Love Handles), on my stomach (Baby bump - rarely attractive on a man), everything has been better.

My work life is better and my personal life is better.  So, my whole life is better.  Work is no longer a drag, no longer a headache inducing six hours of suck.  Now it's six hours of fun.  Last week I had my students convinced that my real job was at Pizza Hut and I just came to Chungdahm because I liked to teach Korean kids.  Oddly, I think I might be right.  I now see my job as six hours in the middle of a long day of good times.  The kids have tons of energy and like to tell me about their lives and I like to listen and tell them I'm a scientist sent from America to study the effects of eating human brains, the brains of small Korean children.  Teach-uh!

During the last couple of weeks all the middle-schoolers in Korea have been studying for and taking some ginormous test that decides whether or not they become President of the World or if they will work at Starbucks forever.  This has a lot of them fairly tightly wound and crying has become pretty common.  Also, many of the middle school students have been gone, studying at home.  For me this has been good and bad.  The good is that some of my classes have been cancelled.  The bad is that some of them haven't and instead of the normal 11 or 12 students, I've had 2.  3 hours with 2 middle school girls can be one of the true hellish times of life.  If they decide with their middle school girl ESP to hate you and completely shut down, three hours feels like 30.

However, if they decide to just talk the whole time to distract you from the lesson, then the 3 hours feels like 30 minutes.  These types of classes are really great because the kids just sit and talk in English the whole time, trying to keep you from doing classwork.  They think they're being so smart, but now I've got Grace and Judy and Bianca, three students I barely hear a word out of on normal nights, conversing in English for 3 full hours.
If you figure that private lessons similar to these can run almost $100 an hour, these girls get $300 worth of English classes in one night, which is usually what they pay for a whole month.  Sadly, when a class like this gets observed on CCTV by my boss, I get in a little bit of trouble.  I'm not sticking to the curriculum which is designed to get them to talk.  I'm skipping that whole curriculum and getting straight to the talking.  Stupid foreigner.

Other things I've done in the last couple of months:

-Korean baseball game.  College football crowd + Triple-A baseball = Fun.  Every player in America has his own song for when he's up to bat.  Every baseball player in Korea has his own crowd chant.  Strike 2 in Korea gets a bigger applause then most doubles in the US.  Plus, inside the stadium you've got 7-11's, Burger King's and KFC's.  With no price gauging.  Beers are 3 dollars.

-Movies.  Avatar, Kick-Ass, Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Iron Man 2.  In that order from best to worst.  Iron Man 2 was extremely bad.  Really boring.  Very shiny, lots of techno-crap, but garbage movie.  Let's talk about what's at stake:  Avatar - THE WORLD, Alice - THE WORLD, Clash of the Titans - THE WORLD.  Iron Man 2 - Not the world.  One of these movies sucks a lot harder than the others.  I really like to see summer popcorn movies, but so often they drive me so completely insane with their crappiness.  It just doesn't seem that hard.  Unlikely bad-ass, even more bad-ass villain, some reason for revenge against said villain, the fate of the world in the hands of unlikely bad-ass, dialogue that doesn't force liquid from my bowels in either direction:  Good movie.

I'm not alone in my opinion of Iron Man
http://theweek.com/article/index/202455/Is_Iron_Man_2_unwatchable
Although, "Unwatchable" is probably the wrong word.  Unenjoyable would be my choice.  Like literally, this movie should not be enjoyed by anyone.  You can watch it, but for the love of god, don't enjoy it.

   "Someone Peed my suit - Oh, it was me."  SPOILER:  Actual Plot Point
                      
-Gone Outside.  Part of the reason my life has been so boring has to do with the abysmal weather.  Yesterday we saw 70 for the first time.  I spent 20 hours outside walking this weekend.  Lots of trees, flowers, even some water in the dinky little river in this part of Seoul.  Also, crane game, Supershot basketball, Time Crisis, and other things that make Korean adults look and act like Korean 12 year olds.  Also, I scored 228 on the Supershot at Taito Station at AK Plaza.  I cannot be stopped.


-Bought clothes.  Losing thirty pounds is awesome.  Having a belt that has 8 inches of extra material and pants that fall down all the time, not awesome.  Luckily I'm down to a weight where I can fit in the clothes here.  Also, I can afford some clothes.  All excellent.

-Slept Less.  Anyone who's been around me when I'm sleeping knows I can sleep for 15 hours a day, easy.  I used to think I needed that much sleep to be effective.  Effective at what? you're all asking yourselves.  It turns out I don't need 15 hours.  Now I'm trying to sleep 7 hours a night and I'm feeling a lot better.  Plus, there's more hours in my day for things like the crane game and watching baseball.


I guess that's all.  Being challenged on the internet to blog more by your mother, and then allowing your mother, who could not check her voicemail on her cell phone until about a year ago, to beat you, is embarrassing.  I can't let it stand.

Bundang Teaching and Living. Mostly Boredom.

I haven't posted in a long time not because I hate my blog or the people that read it, but more because my life has settled down into a routine so boring I'm reminded of high school. Get up, shower, eat, go to work, come home, watch t.v., read books, sleep, do it again. Not only that, but my teaching job is so structured, generally to the minute, that every day is exactly the same, just with different students and slightly different information to teach.

Despite the boredom, I can't complain. I don't know that I've ever been happier. My job is so incredibly rewarding, what with the teaching and the kids speaking more and more English with fewer and fewer mistakes and those monster paychecks I get once a month, I'm just happy. Plus, most of the rest of my life is basically in order. I'm eating healthy, getting plenty of sleep, but not the 12 hours of day wasting I used to, and I can't help but think how different life would be if I'd gone to grad school last year. I mean, I know how that goes; the 15 extra pounds from the greasy fast food, the constant stress of papers to grade and papers to write, the drinking, good god the drinking, the hangovers, the swollen puffy eyes, the bloated face, the liver pains, the next day apologies. No, I'm thinking Korea was a good idea.

The teaching really is rewarding. Although the strange material keeps coming at me. Sex-selective abortion was a vocabulary term a couple of weeks ago, and there were a couple of 12 year olds who knew exactly what it was and didn't hesitate to tell me all kinds of stories about their cousins or aunts or mom's friends who'ed really wanted that boy. And then of course there was the eight year old who knew nothing about abortion or any of that and I started down a very strange path when I asked how long it takes for a woman to have a baby, "Teacher, eight months? Ten months? Nine?" And then asked the question how long does it take for a man to make a baby? "Teacher, a week?" And then I realize that I'm basically starting to teach sex ed, which I really don't want to do, what with my hyper-sensitive ingrained Americanism, as in "we don't talk about sex with children lest we be accused of teaching kindergarteners about using condoms." So it was at that point I just stopped and said "Ask your parents."

This is the type of thing I constantly tell my students: "Tell your parents that if you ever get into a situation where you have to eat them, it's called endo-cannibalism." And then I imagine the whole conversation between Suzie and her mother, Suzie who is cute in the way a baby panda and a baby tiger curled up in a ball are cute. Mother: "What did you learn today?" Suzie:"That if you eat me or I eat you, that's called Endocannibalism." Mother: "Well, let's hope it never comes to that." Suzie: "It's pretty rare, but it could happen, so we'd better be prepared." And then I imagine the mother's dazed look, and the thought bubble, "Last week sex-selective abortion, this week Cannibalism? Well they say Chungdam is the best, I guess she'll keep going."

Also I feel like my students really learn to speak English. In Korea you can safely assume that many of the people you come into contact with speak some English. They've invested billions of dollars to learn our language, and almost everyone who goes to college speaks English and every one who works in a service job speaks some English. But the problem is that the English teaching has been so poor that many Koreans can make the sounds and the words and all that, but they can't actually COMMUNICATE in English. It's a country that's learned scripts. As in, "May I take your order?" And the twenty or so reasonable responses to that question. But ask the people at the hotel when the church service starts at the chapel around the corner, or the guy at 7-11 if he saw and liked the movie Avatar, good luck. Go off the script, and you can forget about comprehension and communication.

A lot of this comes from the drilling and the memorization that are so prized. Sure, a lot of 12 year old kids have vocabularies that rival most American college graduates, but when they don't know how to put the words together, it's useless. It becomes sounds with no meaning. Combine that with the fact that many of the public school English teachers are Korean, and speak English with heavy, heavy accents, you get students who can pass any English test you put in front of them based on grammar and vocabulary, and can memorize huge paragraphs of English in no time, but when you ask them "What's your name?" they just stare at you and then maybe answer something like "Lal-pa" which you then ask them to repeat five hundred times until finally you look it up on the computer or have him write it down and it says "Ralph." This is both frustrating, and incredibly common.

But at Chungdahm, a school that has a strong emphasis on memorization and vocab building still, there's this small glimmer of hope. I can tell that these kids are learning to combine their English scripts. That after a couple of weeks in my class they stop looking at the book in front of them for the answer to "How was your weekend?" (Another odd phenomenon, I can ask them difficult questions about the reading which they can find the answers to in the book, but ask them "How's it going?" or to summarize what they've just read, and they act like your speaking a language their parents haven't invested thousands of dollars in.) It's a nice feeling, because I know that many of my students will go out into the world ACTUALLY speaking and communicating in English and not just working off of their script. And my hope is that soon all of Korea will get this message, that all of Korea will see a true return on their billion dollar investment. We'll see.

Other than that, my life is going by fast. Christmas was great, my parents were here for the week, it snowed a ton, life was good. And as you can see, I even had the time, money, and friends to Karaoke some.