Everytime I try throwing something to a coworker in my office he covers up his balls. Since we work with kids this makes sense. Kids throw underhand.
There that's it.
I haven't blogged for a while because I haven't really been having interesting thoughts. That said, this doesn't mean that I haven't been having a great time, also doesn't mean that I have been having a good time either. I more or less am having a pretty regular time.
I mean not to say Korea isn't exciting. It has lots of cool stuff. I just don't think it is the kind of stuff that most people give a shit about unless they are about to experience it themselves.
It's like clear and present danger. All speech is protected unless it offers a CLEAR and PRESENT danger to people. Then it becomes something that we need to look at more closely and is probably something that someone somewhere regrets was said. Likewise, I think this spectrum has another side: Clear and Present Give a Balls factor. All speech is uninteresting until the signified is near the describer and the listener. Or the 'you kinda had to be there' factor. Most the stuff I do is really cool to me, but unless you were there I think you are mostly just tolerating blogs and read them because the real news is depressing and there isn't a new season of Parks and Recreation on Hulu yet.
Unless you have nothing going on, for the most part I suspect that if I told you about most of the stuff I do here you wouldn't care. Especially in writing. Now if we're on skype using our speech voice things I have all manner of funny anecdotes and so such which are largely disposable but charming if you're, you know, my mom. But there is only one woman who fits this description (possibly 2) and even then I don't really talk to her that much because I live a life with stuff in it and she does too.
Anyway I plan on getting back to it at somepoint. This fucker aint dead just yet. Its warm outside so its just a bit cool here. For now.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Haylookitsa Food
I have a stack of Oreos on a shelf. They are my agency. My invisible hand.
Once again, as I write this, there are a handful of screaming 12 year old Korean girls screaming, "May I habb wan?" at my office window. This is because, a few days ago, a little girl with a name that sounds like a childish insult (Su-Mi) came to my office after hours and asked for a cup. While I was getting a paper cup from a stack on a shelf near my desk she spotted my precious cache of Oreos. With eyes lit up like a Christmas tree, she pointed at it and said something in Korean. Looking at her, I gestured for her to repeat after me, "May-AYE-HahV-Wuuun". She replied, "May-EYYYYII-HAABBB-WAAAAAANNNN". Looking at her, I said it again, this time more better, "May I have one?" She said. Meeee-eeeeee-hhhhhaabb-un. May I have one. Mai ab wan? May I have one. May I hab un? May I have one. May I hab wan? Figuring this was close enough, I gave her an oreo and sent her on her way. As it turns out, Su-Mi has connections. Leveraging her obviously extensive media contacts, she turned that tiny phrase into a mimetic which has permeated through the long haired teddy bear loving hordes of little girls in the school. Now, they think, if they ask teacher Curtains, "May I habb wan?" They are right. Oh yeah, they like to call me teacher Curtains. This is because my last name, Kersten, to them sounds like curtains. These little shits know how to make puns and beg for food. I work in an entire school of English illiterate overly entitled Dadist poets, Mia Elementary is like the village before Giuliani rolled through.
Speaking of which, I started reading a book on Park Chung-hee. He was the Giuliani of South Korea in the mid sixties. Except he was a dictator. Who was instated by a Military Coup. I guess he wasn't that much like Giuliani on many levels. However, on one level they were alike was that they were the law-and-order politicians of their respective parties. Just one was part of a political party whose platform was based off of interacting with a Democratic system constructed from hundreds of laws stemming from a tradition of political idealism and philosophy. Park had a coalition of like minded corporeal and middle tier officers who he had cultivated into semi-powerful positions such that they had influence without the contaminating effects of upper echelon politics. Their power stemmed from being the most organized game in country and from having lots of guns.
Park came into power by sparking a revolution when the democratic left was at its weakest, during the transition between Syngman Rhee and some other guy with a name like Chonen or something. Using the de-stability that had been caused by a South Korean government rife with corruption, Park built a manifesto which appealed to the order seeking. Likewise, it didn't help that Rhee and his heir had a tendency of pissing off and massacring a very prickly South Korean intelligentsia whose support was paramount for re-mobilizing a war stricken ROK. Park also made appeals to the rural economies and the military establishment with his martial background and well intentioned new-village policies, this allowed him to maintain support from the people that logistically mattered the most on the material peninsula: the ones who fed the populace and the ones who killed Sino-NK-Soviet communists.
This is interesting on a Giuliani front, who helped reestablish order in a borderline Baltimorian New York City by cracking down on all crimes large-and-small, Park operated a kind of a counter "Broken Glass" policy in the top of his structure. Using converse but similar social engineering, because unlike-but-similar-to-Giuliani, Park re-established the ROK industrial machine by creating a top down system that could have a strangle hold on interest rates, enact easy eminent domain, and cause broad social change from policy outwards. Giuliani, on the other hand, had to recognize that full top down policy and economic changes were either too ineffective to work or there was no political power that could combat street crime and had to enact low level policing strategies to change the rampant corruption and crime that was tearing the city apart. They were both Real Realpolitik as hell, just had different policy priorities and principles to reach the same goal: stability, geometric growth, and fast economic growth.
(of course on both sides there are arguments that the achievement of these goals by these men came from a complex and coincidental grouping of savvy social programs and de-regulations which helped to change the social fabric of these areas)
So it is in history, it is now. And I am no chronological snob. I see how it goes.
If these little girls all get snacks, I look like a pushover. They cannot all have snacks, giving away that last one so easily was not a good idea, it was a crack in the glass snack ceiling. The first stone through the abandoned factory window. It will only get worse from here unless I find a solution.
Of course, it's not just about the snacks.
It's more the power they imply. My ample reserve of snacks allows me leverage in the School wide snack index, allowing me to influence snack markets without actually exposing my assets to much risk. My strategic snack reserves are why the kids even pay attention to me, if these unwashed plebeians get near the reserve and realize just how artificial my valuations are, I lose soft political clout and will have to throw my economic weight around. Mind you, this is an reserve that has such an inertia that to mobilize it would require spending upwards of a quarter of the reserve's worth itself.
Snacks, my dear, are a game for the ambitious. One does not lose the game of Snacks. You either win it. Or you die.
Oh hell, the children's voices are organizing. They have switched to a chant of, "Snacks, Snacks, Snacks" and as we all now know, when chants are down to a single syllable; that's when shit gets real.
Once again, as I write this, there are a handful of screaming 12 year old Korean girls screaming, "May I habb wan?" at my office window. This is because, a few days ago, a little girl with a name that sounds like a childish insult (Su-Mi) came to my office after hours and asked for a cup. While I was getting a paper cup from a stack on a shelf near my desk she spotted my precious cache of Oreos. With eyes lit up like a Christmas tree, she pointed at it and said something in Korean. Looking at her, I gestured for her to repeat after me, "May-AYE-HahV-Wuuun". She replied, "May-EYYYYII-HAABBB-WAAAAAANNNN". Looking at her, I said it again, this time more better, "May I have one?" She said. Meeee-eeeeee-hhhhhaabb-un. May I have one. Mai ab wan? May I have one. May I hab un? May I have one. May I hab wan? Figuring this was close enough, I gave her an oreo and sent her on her way. As it turns out, Su-Mi has connections. Leveraging her obviously extensive media contacts, she turned that tiny phrase into a mimetic which has permeated through the long haired teddy bear loving hordes of little girls in the school. Now, they think, if they ask teacher Curtains, "May I habb wan?" They are right. Oh yeah, they like to call me teacher Curtains. This is because my last name, Kersten, to them sounds like curtains. These little shits know how to make puns and beg for food. I work in an entire school of English illiterate overly entitled Dadist poets, Mia Elementary is like the village before Giuliani rolled through.
Speaking of which, I started reading a book on Park Chung-hee. He was the Giuliani of South Korea in the mid sixties. Except he was a dictator. Who was instated by a Military Coup. I guess he wasn't that much like Giuliani on many levels. However, on one level they were alike was that they were the law-and-order politicians of their respective parties. Just one was part of a political party whose platform was based off of interacting with a Democratic system constructed from hundreds of laws stemming from a tradition of political idealism and philosophy. Park had a coalition of like minded corporeal and middle tier officers who he had cultivated into semi-powerful positions such that they had influence without the contaminating effects of upper echelon politics. Their power stemmed from being the most organized game in country and from having lots of guns.
Park came into power by sparking a revolution when the democratic left was at its weakest, during the transition between Syngman Rhee and some other guy with a name like Chonen or something. Using the de-stability that had been caused by a South Korean government rife with corruption, Park built a manifesto which appealed to the order seeking. Likewise, it didn't help that Rhee and his heir had a tendency of pissing off and massacring a very prickly South Korean intelligentsia whose support was paramount for re-mobilizing a war stricken ROK. Park also made appeals to the rural economies and the military establishment with his martial background and well intentioned new-village policies, this allowed him to maintain support from the people that logistically mattered the most on the material peninsula: the ones who fed the populace and the ones who killed Sino-NK-Soviet communists.
This is interesting on a Giuliani front, who helped reestablish order in a borderline Baltimorian New York City by cracking down on all crimes large-and-small, Park operated a kind of a counter "Broken Glass" policy in the top of his structure. Using converse but similar social engineering, because unlike-but-similar-to-Giuliani, Park re-established the ROK industrial machine by creating a top down system that could have a strangle hold on interest rates, enact easy eminent domain, and cause broad social change from policy outwards. Giuliani, on the other hand, had to recognize that full top down policy and economic changes were either too ineffective to work or there was no political power that could combat street crime and had to enact low level policing strategies to change the rampant corruption and crime that was tearing the city apart. They were both Real Realpolitik as hell, just had different policy priorities and principles to reach the same goal: stability, geometric growth, and fast economic growth.
(of course on both sides there are arguments that the achievement of these goals by these men came from a complex and coincidental grouping of savvy social programs and de-regulations which helped to change the social fabric of these areas)
So it is in history, it is now. And I am no chronological snob. I see how it goes.
If these little girls all get snacks, I look like a pushover. They cannot all have snacks, giving away that last one so easily was not a good idea, it was a crack in the glass snack ceiling. The first stone through the abandoned factory window. It will only get worse from here unless I find a solution.
Of course, it's not just about the snacks.
It's more the power they imply. My ample reserve of snacks allows me leverage in the School wide snack index, allowing me to influence snack markets without actually exposing my assets to much risk. My strategic snack reserves are why the kids even pay attention to me, if these unwashed plebeians get near the reserve and realize just how artificial my valuations are, I lose soft political clout and will have to throw my economic weight around. Mind you, this is an reserve that has such an inertia that to mobilize it would require spending upwards of a quarter of the reserve's worth itself.
Snacks, my dear, are a game for the ambitious. One does not lose the game of Snacks. You either win it. Or you die.
Oh hell, the children's voices are organizing. They have switched to a chant of, "Snacks, Snacks, Snacks" and as we all now know, when chants are down to a single syllable; that's when shit gets real.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Haylookitsa Where I come from
This one isn't going to be funny. Sorry about that.
I see my students frolicking in the halls, playing out their childhood dramas, trundling through the dawn of their years and I am jealous.
For me, all acts of remembrance hold a certain amount of melancholy. Wait no, I mean a certain TYPE of melancholy. A sort of sadness that is devoid of regret but at the same time stirs the heart to nestle in ones throat. I am not sure what this is.
It does not stem from a place of loneliness. Of this I am sure, I was raised by amazing people. At this moment, my mother is in Nepal hiking in the Himalayas while my Grandmother has just returned from a cruise which circled the continent of South America. My uncle is a professional musician while my Aunt is an artist of the highest caliber when she isn't hustling for the biggest and most prestigious humanitarian organization on the planet. I have a cousin living in Israel, one working in IT after going through all manner of medical hell and a broad family whose passions include architecture, education, medicine, and travel. I come from some good fucking stock. This is undeniable.
Likewise, I have any number of friends from diverse backgrounds who are spending their lives shaping the web, healing the sick, and/or becoming amazing in every aspect of the term. I am, without a doubt, incredibly fortunate in the personalities who have had the stupidity to be a part of my life. I hope they never wise up.
No, the melancholy comes from a different place. It is a part that, I suspect, is not a place of negativity, but one which stems from a much simpler impulse. I simply miss the moments that I shared with these people.
I have a distinct memory of a friend I had in pre-school named Brian. Brian and I were best friends for a few years when I was six, well best friends as one can have at that age. We spent hours together doing things that people our age did. I even remember the outlay of his house. It was a white house with the kitchen to the right of the entryway which opened forward to a living room with a couch and a street facing window. I remember playing with hot wheels and other pieces of molded plastic on the carpet of his house. I haven't talked to him since I was seven.
In elementary school, I had another friend also named Brian. He was a Christian skateboarder, the young breed of the hip protestant movement. His family were infinitely gracious to me. I remember having sleepovers at his house where we would sit in his bathtub and stare at the stars, having no conception of the things we were looking at. His family moved to Oklahoma in 7th grade and I haven't seen him since. The last time I spoke with him was when I called him to notify him that my father passed away. I heard he was on duty as a life guard when a young man died. I am sure we would have very little (or a lot) in common at this point.
In high school, a movie released called, Batman Begins. This is a film about a young man named Bruce Wayne going through the world's longest quarter-life crisis, kicking the shit out of ninjas to try and escape and contextualize the death of his parents while dressed as bat. It is one of the best pieces of pop entertainment in the last decade. It released on June 15th, 2005. I remember this because it was 10 days before my father passed away. He was in a hospital and I was, well, I was distraught. I was distraught, hadn't slept without tears for almost two weeks, and had a mild case of feeling awful about everything in the world. Sometime during that period, a friend of mine named John called me and told me that I needed to see the new batman film. I told him that I couldn't and he told me that he didn't care and that him and his brother, Steve, were going to come pick me up in 15 minutes. I protested. They picked me up and I saw the film. That one gesture on their part established an unrepayable debt in my mind to those two. I have not told either of this fact.
My family and friends are amazing, I am surrounded by people who have no business being the people they are. Someone who I have known since third grade is currently holding it down in China while another has just started with a company in Santa Monica. Anyway, that's all I have to say. Thanks people, I'll try to live up to these memories. Not like it will matter to any of you. This does not help with the pressure.
Also, Heidi is a badass. That is all.
I see my students frolicking in the halls, playing out their childhood dramas, trundling through the dawn of their years and I am jealous.
For me, all acts of remembrance hold a certain amount of melancholy. Wait no, I mean a certain TYPE of melancholy. A sort of sadness that is devoid of regret but at the same time stirs the heart to nestle in ones throat. I am not sure what this is.
It does not stem from a place of loneliness. Of this I am sure, I was raised by amazing people. At this moment, my mother is in Nepal hiking in the Himalayas while my Grandmother has just returned from a cruise which circled the continent of South America. My uncle is a professional musician while my Aunt is an artist of the highest caliber when she isn't hustling for the biggest and most prestigious humanitarian organization on the planet. I have a cousin living in Israel, one working in IT after going through all manner of medical hell and a broad family whose passions include architecture, education, medicine, and travel. I come from some good fucking stock. This is undeniable.
Likewise, I have any number of friends from diverse backgrounds who are spending their lives shaping the web, healing the sick, and/or becoming amazing in every aspect of the term. I am, without a doubt, incredibly fortunate in the personalities who have had the stupidity to be a part of my life. I hope they never wise up.
No, the melancholy comes from a different place. It is a part that, I suspect, is not a place of negativity, but one which stems from a much simpler impulse. I simply miss the moments that I shared with these people.
I have a distinct memory of a friend I had in pre-school named Brian. Brian and I were best friends for a few years when I was six, well best friends as one can have at that age. We spent hours together doing things that people our age did. I even remember the outlay of his house. It was a white house with the kitchen to the right of the entryway which opened forward to a living room with a couch and a street facing window. I remember playing with hot wheels and other pieces of molded plastic on the carpet of his house. I haven't talked to him since I was seven.
In elementary school, I had another friend also named Brian. He was a Christian skateboarder, the young breed of the hip protestant movement. His family were infinitely gracious to me. I remember having sleepovers at his house where we would sit in his bathtub and stare at the stars, having no conception of the things we were looking at. His family moved to Oklahoma in 7th grade and I haven't seen him since. The last time I spoke with him was when I called him to notify him that my father passed away. I heard he was on duty as a life guard when a young man died. I am sure we would have very little (or a lot) in common at this point.
In high school, a movie released called, Batman Begins. This is a film about a young man named Bruce Wayne going through the world's longest quarter-life crisis, kicking the shit out of ninjas to try and escape and contextualize the death of his parents while dressed as bat. It is one of the best pieces of pop entertainment in the last decade. It released on June 15th, 2005. I remember this because it was 10 days before my father passed away. He was in a hospital and I was, well, I was distraught. I was distraught, hadn't slept without tears for almost two weeks, and had a mild case of feeling awful about everything in the world. Sometime during that period, a friend of mine named John called me and told me that I needed to see the new batman film. I told him that I couldn't and he told me that he didn't care and that him and his brother, Steve, were going to come pick me up in 15 minutes. I protested. They picked me up and I saw the film. That one gesture on their part established an unrepayable debt in my mind to those two. I have not told either of this fact.
My family and friends are amazing, I am surrounded by people who have no business being the people they are. Someone who I have known since third grade is currently holding it down in China while another has just started with a company in Santa Monica. Anyway, that's all I have to say. Thanks people, I'll try to live up to these memories. Not like it will matter to any of you. This does not help with the pressure.
Also, Heidi is a badass. That is all.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Haylookitsa Parents
I know I am maturing because my life is becoming a litany of pointless stories.
My mom is in Nepal right now. This sucks for two reasons. One, she is a semi-old woman running around a second and sometimes third world country in hiking boots and a naive sense of adventure which is a fantastic way to worry a coddled Jewish son like myself. And second, she is further east than me. For a while I was the most eastward Kersten, and as we all know, if you are a white person from the western world your coolness is rated based on just how deep into the wild untamed orient you venture. My mom is basically a less racist version of a Kipling character. Also I'm pretty sure she has never shot a gun. This actually makes me worried more.
[This next part is for Mudnt, my economist friend...]
I keep getting asked if I am going to seek out my biological parents. I usually answer with a no and give an emotional answer about how much I love my current parents. I do love, to an extent, my current parents very much. However this goes much more elliptical than that.
What would I say?
What would her reaction be?
How would the other mother who taught me everything I know feel about this?
Here's the long reason,
I usually answer the question of my interest about my biological parents with a 'no', and emotional response, and leave it there. The REAL-ish reason I don't look for my biological mom or pop, is that I just don't care and I am a very lazy person. there are few things a lazy person wants to do less than stuff they don't want to do.
I mean there are at LEAST two million fuckers living on this peninsula and demographics dictate that half of them are women. This means there are AT LEAST a million women that I am supposed to comb through to find my mum. And, let's take this one step further, if there are AT LEAST two million people on this little priapic country, there are AT LEAST a million more men for me to have to go through in order to find my biological dad. That said, I am sure that with AT LEAST two million people on this geological tribute to Ron Jeremy AT LEAST a thousand people from each gender has died. This means that my sample size for finding my biological parents is AT LEAST about 2 out of 2002000. That leaves a very poor chance of finding my parents on this country that looks like a penis. I am also very bad at estimating.
Case in story.
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Gardiner, had a reward system for rewarding kids with rewards where we had to guess how many beans were in a jar. Each time you participated in class you received an opportunity to guess the number of beans and write it down on a board. The one most close to the actual number at the end of the week received two prizes: one, they were given a Costco sized box of candy, and two, they were allowed to bring in the next guessing thing.
Now, I (kind of) teach fifth graders right now and I thought about using this. And then I remembered how this scenario actually played out. In theory this game should work, it's based on a few simple ideas: people love gambling, kids can count up to certain numbers, people love collections of stuff, and candy is awesome. By all accounts this idea should work. Likewise, Stringer Bell should have gotten out of the 212 game cleanly with his undeniable ambition and intelligence, however, he gets got by a street rat wannabe Robin Hood via a granddad double barrel because of a call he made half a decade earlier.
My fifth grade experience with the estimating game was like a season of the Wire. Ms. Gardiner began the game by having the base rules stated above. Players were the only active participants, those who didn't play- the civilians were exempt, and although opportunity came a-knocking on the back of ambition, you would only be truly rewarded if lady luck deemed you worthy. It was an excellent metaphor for life(and selling heroin). If you were smart you were given an gambler's chance at winning a small bit of fleeting power and some hard sugar. The power, of course, is just a proliferation of the game itself so, in theory, it should never allow the game itself to get played and thus undermine the integrity of the guessing game's base conceit, to control and manipulate kids into sitting down and shutting up (that said, getting kids to sit down and shut up without hurting them physically is a fucking artform- more on this later).
The problems arise when someone figures out how to use the internal rules of the game itself to actually INCREASE the influence of the game. First case. A kid named Renee figures out that the most (and easiest) opportunities for participation are at the beginning of class, so Renee answers as many questions as he can at the beginning of each day, letting the rest of the sycophants in the class to squabble after the remaining bits of more prestigious but ultimately equal-valuable of the questions. Renee then waits for the smiling sycophants to write down their estimates at the end of the day. When he reaches the estimation paper he proceeds to use his handful of guesses to straddle the guesses other kids write down. So, in example, if Suzy Crackho writes down 560 he uses two of his day's estimations to do 561 and 559. This neutralizes Ms. Crackho's guess for the day. He also, being an engineer of both people and their systems, takes the time to figure out who is MOST likely to guess right. If given the choice, little Renee will spend his resources neutralizing kids with glasses or kids who seem to have the early signs of Asbergers/Autism (he ignores the obvious political incorrectness of this impulse, I mean the kid is in fucking fifth grade, give him some credit). Now, at the end of the month, when the number is called, Renee has covered a massive range of numbers. And of course, he wins more than his classmates. Now, he has a big box of treats and a little bit of power. But Ms. Gardiner is on to him.
Case 2. Ms. Gardiner is not an idiot, no, she is a Keynesian. seeing what Renee has done, she starts limiting the number of times a single kid can guess and forces each estimate to be a certain distance from the other she is introducing some artificial efficiency into her market. Now, Renee can no longer hustle his system. But of course, he is holding the power and the candy. Leveraging the candy, Renee begins approaching the aforementioned most likely candidates to win on the playground and starts lending them a milkyway here or a dipping dot there. Likewise, when it's his turn to run the guessing game, he uses materials that are almost impossible to properly guess, things like legos or peanut brittle where there are no real uniform sizes with which a rainman can run his voodoo(once again, kid is a fifth grader, cut him some slack on the PC side of things). This insures that he can have some semblance of control of the game. In fact now he controls both the street end (the play ground) and the business end (the guessing game) of things. Using his influence he begins leaking answers to his beneficiaries which are off enough such that Ms. Gardiner cannot see the manipulative distribution but close enough that outlying players who are not under Renee's influence can gain a foothold. Now, each time on of them wins, Renee takes a 35% candy cut and a promise to choose the next material. This 35% insures that bribes keep reaching the right hands while the choosing gives him the power to keep competition at bay. Influence and domination. That's how Escobar did it.
I always hated Renee. When I finally got to choose the things to be guessed, I tried to choose sand and Ms. Gardiner told me I wasn't allowed to do that and gave the choice to one of Renee's lackies. Renee also was later kicked out of school for biting a teacher, a nurse, and one of his colleagues in 6th grade. So there's always that.
Anyway, the game became the sole reason that we worked in the class.
In a sense, all fifth graders are sociopaths.
Renee's game worked for a simple reason. The simplest vision is usually the most easy to execute. This is because simple ideas tend to be linked into the more mechanical naturalistic processes of the world and society. It's why the Colosseum and Parthenon are still standing, why Jersey Shore is a cultural force, and why there are, and will be, so many illegitimate children.
I am an illegitimate child. And my biological parents want nothing to do with me. This isn't why I would not approach them though. They lost any say over my actions when they sent me to an orphanage, and I will ignore their autonomy from me because I don't care about their emotional states. That would be pretentious.
Being an illegitimate child is not that big of a deal because the whole concept is based off of relationships and relationships are becoming less of a big deal, and those are losing influence over how we navigate our lives for the same reason that Mrs. Gardiner's estimating game, and the DOJ's 'Operation Fast and Furious' failed.
Relationships are becoming more complex. And complex things fail. People have more things they want, more ambitions to see through, and more ways to not do either. Likewise, with the sexual revolution, there are more people to have sex with and more ways to pretend you are having sex. All these mores tend to lead to complication, and complication kills good ideas based in simplicity.
And I am not just talking about relationships that involve sex, in fact, in some ways I think the ones of the Philos and Agape are more complicated. Of course parental relationships involve both. This is a discussion for later though.
The point is that if I were to actually play the odds and hunt down my Bio-Mom, all my life and relationships with my adoptive parents, their parents, my cousins, my friends, and my life would come into play. I would be forced to feel and think about things I actively try not to care about but inform everything my identity informs in my day-to-day life which is indeed everything. This is a complex problem. I don't need to talk about this. In fact, I probably can't because I am not Amy Tan, I really don't know how to talk about identity issues in this kind of medium. Just imagine your own family and then multiply it by two families. Of course, I do know that this complexity would boil down into an unproductive act if I did find my biological parents.
I would probably just say passive aggressive shit to her. She would be getting groceries and I would say, "those tomatoes you got there sure do look like a SON of a gun..." or when she is waiting for a traffic crossing I would say, "Boy this sure takes a long time, someone could GIVE BIRTH waiting for a green light."
And here's the kicker. With all my trepidation and over-thinking this, I could say all the most twisted, bitter, things I wanted to her and you know what her reaction would be? She would just smile, nod, and cross the street. And I would be the silly young man out of fifteen million people in the greater Seoul area who mumbled something to her at the crosswalk.
And if she smiled and if this were her reaction, there would really be nothing else to say.
My mom is in Nepal right now. This sucks for two reasons. One, she is a semi-old woman running around a second and sometimes third world country in hiking boots and a naive sense of adventure which is a fantastic way to worry a coddled Jewish son like myself. And second, she is further east than me. For a while I was the most eastward Kersten, and as we all know, if you are a white person from the western world your coolness is rated based on just how deep into the wild untamed orient you venture. My mom is basically a less racist version of a Kipling character. Also I'm pretty sure she has never shot a gun. This actually makes me worried more.
[This next part is for Mudnt, my economist friend...]
I keep getting asked if I am going to seek out my biological parents. I usually answer with a no and give an emotional answer about how much I love my current parents. I do love, to an extent, my current parents very much. However this goes much more elliptical than that.
What would I say?
What would her reaction be?
How would the other mother who taught me everything I know feel about this?
Here's the long reason,
I usually answer the question of my interest about my biological parents with a 'no', and emotional response, and leave it there. The REAL-ish reason I don't look for my biological mom or pop, is that I just don't care and I am a very lazy person. there are few things a lazy person wants to do less than stuff they don't want to do.
I mean there are at LEAST two million fuckers living on this peninsula and demographics dictate that half of them are women. This means there are AT LEAST a million women that I am supposed to comb through to find my mum. And, let's take this one step further, if there are AT LEAST two million people on this little priapic country, there are AT LEAST a million more men for me to have to go through in order to find my biological dad. That said, I am sure that with AT LEAST two million people on this geological tribute to Ron Jeremy AT LEAST a thousand people from each gender has died. This means that my sample size for finding my biological parents is AT LEAST about 2 out of 2002000. That leaves a very poor chance of finding my parents on this country that looks like a penis. I am also very bad at estimating.
Case in story.
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Gardiner, had a reward system for rewarding kids with rewards where we had to guess how many beans were in a jar. Each time you participated in class you received an opportunity to guess the number of beans and write it down on a board. The one most close to the actual number at the end of the week received two prizes: one, they were given a Costco sized box of candy, and two, they were allowed to bring in the next guessing thing.
Now, I (kind of) teach fifth graders right now and I thought about using this. And then I remembered how this scenario actually played out. In theory this game should work, it's based on a few simple ideas: people love gambling, kids can count up to certain numbers, people love collections of stuff, and candy is awesome. By all accounts this idea should work. Likewise, Stringer Bell should have gotten out of the 212 game cleanly with his undeniable ambition and intelligence, however, he gets got by a street rat wannabe Robin Hood via a granddad double barrel because of a call he made half a decade earlier.
My fifth grade experience with the estimating game was like a season of the Wire. Ms. Gardiner began the game by having the base rules stated above. Players were the only active participants, those who didn't play- the civilians were exempt, and although opportunity came a-knocking on the back of ambition, you would only be truly rewarded if lady luck deemed you worthy. It was an excellent metaphor for life(and selling heroin). If you were smart you were given an gambler's chance at winning a small bit of fleeting power and some hard sugar. The power, of course, is just a proliferation of the game itself so, in theory, it should never allow the game itself to get played and thus undermine the integrity of the guessing game's base conceit, to control and manipulate kids into sitting down and shutting up (that said, getting kids to sit down and shut up without hurting them physically is a fucking artform- more on this later).
The problems arise when someone figures out how to use the internal rules of the game itself to actually INCREASE the influence of the game. First case. A kid named Renee figures out that the most (and easiest) opportunities for participation are at the beginning of class, so Renee answers as many questions as he can at the beginning of each day, letting the rest of the sycophants in the class to squabble after the remaining bits of more prestigious but ultimately equal-valuable of the questions. Renee then waits for the smiling sycophants to write down their estimates at the end of the day. When he reaches the estimation paper he proceeds to use his handful of guesses to straddle the guesses other kids write down. So, in example, if Suzy Crackho writes down 560 he uses two of his day's estimations to do 561 and 559. This neutralizes Ms. Crackho's guess for the day. He also, being an engineer of both people and their systems, takes the time to figure out who is MOST likely to guess right. If given the choice, little Renee will spend his resources neutralizing kids with glasses or kids who seem to have the early signs of Asbergers/Autism (he ignores the obvious political incorrectness of this impulse, I mean the kid is in fucking fifth grade, give him some credit). Now, at the end of the month, when the number is called, Renee has covered a massive range of numbers. And of course, he wins more than his classmates. Now, he has a big box of treats and a little bit of power. But Ms. Gardiner is on to him.
Case 2. Ms. Gardiner is not an idiot, no, she is a Keynesian. seeing what Renee has done, she starts limiting the number of times a single kid can guess and forces each estimate to be a certain distance from the other she is introducing some artificial efficiency into her market. Now, Renee can no longer hustle his system. But of course, he is holding the power and the candy. Leveraging the candy, Renee begins approaching the aforementioned most likely candidates to win on the playground and starts lending them a milkyway here or a dipping dot there. Likewise, when it's his turn to run the guessing game, he uses materials that are almost impossible to properly guess, things like legos or peanut brittle where there are no real uniform sizes with which a rainman can run his voodoo(once again, kid is a fifth grader, cut him some slack on the PC side of things). This insures that he can have some semblance of control of the game. In fact now he controls both the street end (the play ground) and the business end (the guessing game) of things. Using his influence he begins leaking answers to his beneficiaries which are off enough such that Ms. Gardiner cannot see the manipulative distribution but close enough that outlying players who are not under Renee's influence can gain a foothold. Now, each time on of them wins, Renee takes a 35% candy cut and a promise to choose the next material. This 35% insures that bribes keep reaching the right hands while the choosing gives him the power to keep competition at bay. Influence and domination. That's how Escobar did it.
I always hated Renee. When I finally got to choose the things to be guessed, I tried to choose sand and Ms. Gardiner told me I wasn't allowed to do that and gave the choice to one of Renee's lackies. Renee also was later kicked out of school for biting a teacher, a nurse, and one of his colleagues in 6th grade. So there's always that.
Anyway, the game became the sole reason that we worked in the class.
In a sense, all fifth graders are sociopaths.
Renee's game worked for a simple reason. The simplest vision is usually the most easy to execute. This is because simple ideas tend to be linked into the more mechanical naturalistic processes of the world and society. It's why the Colosseum and Parthenon are still standing, why Jersey Shore is a cultural force, and why there are, and will be, so many illegitimate children.
I am an illegitimate child. And my biological parents want nothing to do with me. This isn't why I would not approach them though. They lost any say over my actions when they sent me to an orphanage, and I will ignore their autonomy from me because I don't care about their emotional states. That would be pretentious.
Being an illegitimate child is not that big of a deal because the whole concept is based off of relationships and relationships are becoming less of a big deal, and those are losing influence over how we navigate our lives for the same reason that Mrs. Gardiner's estimating game, and the DOJ's 'Operation Fast and Furious' failed.
Relationships are becoming more complex. And complex things fail. People have more things they want, more ambitions to see through, and more ways to not do either. Likewise, with the sexual revolution, there are more people to have sex with and more ways to pretend you are having sex. All these mores tend to lead to complication, and complication kills good ideas based in simplicity.
And I am not just talking about relationships that involve sex, in fact, in some ways I think the ones of the Philos and Agape are more complicated. Of course parental relationships involve both. This is a discussion for later though.
The point is that if I were to actually play the odds and hunt down my Bio-Mom, all my life and relationships with my adoptive parents, their parents, my cousins, my friends, and my life would come into play. I would be forced to feel and think about things I actively try not to care about but inform everything my identity informs in my day-to-day life which is indeed everything. This is a complex problem. I don't need to talk about this. In fact, I probably can't because I am not Amy Tan, I really don't know how to talk about identity issues in this kind of medium. Just imagine your own family and then multiply it by two families. Of course, I do know that this complexity would boil down into an unproductive act if I did find my biological parents.
I would probably just say passive aggressive shit to her. She would be getting groceries and I would say, "those tomatoes you got there sure do look like a SON of a gun..." or when she is waiting for a traffic crossing I would say, "Boy this sure takes a long time, someone could GIVE BIRTH waiting for a green light."
And here's the kicker. With all my trepidation and over-thinking this, I could say all the most twisted, bitter, things I wanted to her and you know what her reaction would be? She would just smile, nod, and cross the street. And I would be the silly young man out of fifteen million people in the greater Seoul area who mumbled something to her at the crosswalk.
And if she smiled and if this were her reaction, there would really be nothing else to say.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Haylookitsa Charupa
It occurred to me while writing this that gordita is a word for “little fatty”. I am going to name one of my students Gordita.
Gordita Chalupa Aye Aye Aye
Gordita Freeman
Gordita Gecko
Gordita Enmaipanss
Teaching Korean children English is exactly like trying to get a puppy to shit on the floor. Well not exactly per say. It’s more akin to trying to convince a puppy to shit on a certain part of the floor. You keep trying to tell the little thing something and it just sits there and it just looks at you and then it pees. Looking back, I think it is more appropriate to say that Teaching Korean children English as a second language is exactly like trying to teach a Korean puppy English as a second language. They are indomitably cute and their first language is Korean.
That’s not to say that these kids are are dumb. In fact, I mean the opposite: for their age, they are smarter than I was at that point. On life’s curve, these kids will be proper adults by the time they hit my age. This is something only a few of my generation can brag about. Korean children are basically America’s most precocious children but tinier and more addicted to sugar and video games.
They keep asking me my age and weight. This is disconcerting.
Like any idiot who thinks they can shape a child’s future, I worry about the world these kids will grow up in. Korea has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. In Korea, per 100,000 people dudes kill themselves. And per 100,000 people 19 dudettes kill themselves. Seoul alone has upwards of 10 million people. So on average since this information was started to be collected in the 1960’s, over 200 people kill themselves in Korea in my city alone per year. This is the entire city of Roberts, MT dead in one year because they sucked at their jobs or school or whatnot.
There is tremendous pressure put on these kids each day. From 0830 -1500 they go to school and then after that some go to private ‘Hakwons’ (private schools) where they get to learn English from people more white (and thus more qualified) than me. Some kids go to sports clubs or other assorted activities where other more bigger people yell at them for doing things that are not the things that the more bigger people are being paid to yell at the kids to do. This is a Korean childhood. After this, they go to middle school where they are told that if they don’t do well they are going to have a shit life or go to a less shitty highschool so they can join the military later on and get yelled at by people who are afraid that other GED holders are going to stream down from the north and rape and pillage the land all the way to Jeju island. After this, they get jobs which they work at the same time they go to graduate school until they get married, pump out some kids and have their own little things to yell at. Well, as stated above, they can also kill themselves. But that’s more or less option C.
None of this really seems that alien to me.
Of course this ethos is not all bad. Seoul itself is a testament to this. This town is a mega-town where every nook and alley contains a restaurant, a domicile, or a place to put a nook or alley. It lights up every night like the Blade Runner set, this city is a science fiction story. People here can start their heaters from their cell phones. They have locks that they can unlock from their cell phones. The buildings regularly turn into giant walking robots that keep Japan at bay… literally… sorry. One time I saw a Korean man jump forward into the street and zoom off on a light cycle. Last night, a giant primordial being made from light attacked city center so the city turned itself inside out and some guy named Bin Won fought it with a spear made from pure respect for ones elders. Also, everyone here is amazingly dressed.
My next post is going to be about globalization because this place is basically you average American city but bigger, more stylish, more suicidy, more ambitious, and filled with Asian/pacific islanders.
Gordita Chalupa Aye Aye Aye
Gordita Freeman
Gordita Gecko
Gordita Enmaipanss
Teaching Korean children English is exactly like trying to get a puppy to shit on the floor. Well not exactly per say. It’s more akin to trying to convince a puppy to shit on a certain part of the floor. You keep trying to tell the little thing something and it just sits there and it just looks at you and then it pees. Looking back, I think it is more appropriate to say that Teaching Korean children English as a second language is exactly like trying to teach a Korean puppy English as a second language. They are indomitably cute and their first language is Korean.
That’s not to say that these kids are are dumb. In fact, I mean the opposite: for their age, they are smarter than I was at that point. On life’s curve, these kids will be proper adults by the time they hit my age. This is something only a few of my generation can brag about. Korean children are basically America’s most precocious children but tinier and more addicted to sugar and video games.
They keep asking me my age and weight. This is disconcerting.
Like any idiot who thinks they can shape a child’s future, I worry about the world these kids will grow up in. Korea has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. In Korea, per 100,000 people dudes kill themselves. And per 100,000 people 19 dudettes kill themselves. Seoul alone has upwards of 10 million people. So on average since this information was started to be collected in the 1960’s, over 200 people kill themselves in Korea in my city alone per year. This is the entire city of Roberts, MT dead in one year because they sucked at their jobs or school or whatnot.
There is tremendous pressure put on these kids each day. From 0830 -1500 they go to school and then after that some go to private ‘Hakwons’ (private schools) where they get to learn English from people more white (and thus more qualified) than me. Some kids go to sports clubs or other assorted activities where other more bigger people yell at them for doing things that are not the things that the more bigger people are being paid to yell at the kids to do. This is a Korean childhood. After this, they go to middle school where they are told that if they don’t do well they are going to have a shit life or go to a less shitty highschool so they can join the military later on and get yelled at by people who are afraid that other GED holders are going to stream down from the north and rape and pillage the land all the way to Jeju island. After this, they get jobs which they work at the same time they go to graduate school until they get married, pump out some kids and have their own little things to yell at. Well, as stated above, they can also kill themselves. But that’s more or less option C.
None of this really seems that alien to me.
Of course this ethos is not all bad. Seoul itself is a testament to this. This town is a mega-town where every nook and alley contains a restaurant, a domicile, or a place to put a nook or alley. It lights up every night like the Blade Runner set, this city is a science fiction story. People here can start their heaters from their cell phones. They have locks that they can unlock from their cell phones. The buildings regularly turn into giant walking robots that keep Japan at bay… literally… sorry. One time I saw a Korean man jump forward into the street and zoom off on a light cycle. Last night, a giant primordial being made from light attacked city center so the city turned itself inside out and some guy named Bin Won fought it with a spear made from pure respect for ones elders. Also, everyone here is amazingly dressed.
My next post is going to be about globalization because this place is basically you average American city but bigger, more stylish, more suicidy, more ambitious, and filled with Asian/pacific islanders.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Haylookitsa Socialnessity
It occurred to me while I was shoving candied seaweed in my face that Ryan Gosling's career route thus far is strangely reminiscent of Leonardo Di Caprio's. He gets his first leg up playing an attractive dude doing unattractive poor people things in an attractive way thus making an attractive rich person love him for the things. And then they bang and your girlfriend breaks up with you because you are not Ryan Gosling. This is the problem with romance. You are not Ryan Gosling. I bet Ryan Gosling could score a flight attendant.
I have realized that I have not been sticking to this blog very well. This is because I have been busy trying to figure out how to live in a foreign country who uses squiggly lines in place of letters and has a populace who enjoy putting things they find on beaches in their faces. I make fun because I want to learn. And Hangookerian is a fickle bitch.
Anyway, hopefully posts will be flowing in, however I need to warn, I am going to treat this thing as both a writing experiment and a notebook which means some things I write were started before I left and I finally figured out how I want them to go, and others are random scrawling because my hands were pissed off at me. Sometimes I just lock a stray cat in my wardrobe with a laser-pointer and a bag of water balloons and see what comes of it. So what I am saying is that some of these posts are going to be complete shit. This doesn't bother me because your enjoyment is enjoyable to me, your pointless elucidation on the specifics of my life rubs my ego in all sorts of wonderful ways, and your discomfort is hilarious.
Anyway, so far I got an apartment, met some awesome people, started a really good job with all sorts of interesting stories and experiences, and have been collecting wisdom on the secrets of the East. However, most importantly, I finally got to see the Steve Carrel film, "Crazy Stupid Love".
I saw it on an airplane. It was on a tiny screen in front of me on the back of the person in front of me's seat. My grandmother's boyfriend once told me that he thought the accommodation on Korean air was unmatched and that they had hot flight attendants. He was right on both accounts. Although I would wager my left thumb that the flight attendants on Continental would kick the shit out of the KA ladies physically, mentally, and cup size... although I bet the Korean Air attendants speak better Korean.
Even me, a humble coacher in the back of the deathtube received a warm towel. I fucking love warm towels. They are like the last lines of a Keats poem being read in a cold cabin as the dark cold of night puts out the last of your chimney smoke. The towel is warm and damp... and then a few moments later... it's not warm anymore and your face is wet. There are many films and great songs that end this way.
Anyway, So I saw "Crazy Stupid Love" which was really good for the first half and then there was a silly coincidence where one person is revealed to be someone you didnt know was someone else and then the whole thing becomes your standard Romantic Comedy fare. That said, there are some pretty funny parts in the whole thing.
There's this one part where Ryan Gosling punches a dude in the face, that was pretty cool. Then there's a part where Steve Carrell punches Ryan Gosling in the face, that was pretty cool. And then there's a part where Steve Carrell jumps out of a car, which was funny. Also there's a whole subplot about how people are different on the inside than the outside and stuff. Standard stuff.
Anyway, I am in Seoul, Seoungbak area and am living in a one room apartment. I have a sink, a stove, and a laundry machine in the same room as my bed and it is surprisingly comfortable. Met some of the coolest people I have met since I met some of the coolest people I have ever met.
Peace. More to come.
I have realized that I have not been sticking to this blog very well. This is because I have been busy trying to figure out how to live in a foreign country who uses squiggly lines in place of letters and has a populace who enjoy putting things they find on beaches in their faces. I make fun because I want to learn. And Hangookerian is a fickle bitch.
Anyway, hopefully posts will be flowing in, however I need to warn, I am going to treat this thing as both a writing experiment and a notebook which means some things I write were started before I left and I finally figured out how I want them to go, and others are random scrawling because my hands were pissed off at me. Sometimes I just lock a stray cat in my wardrobe with a laser-pointer and a bag of water balloons and see what comes of it. So what I am saying is that some of these posts are going to be complete shit. This doesn't bother me because your enjoyment is enjoyable to me, your pointless elucidation on the specifics of my life rubs my ego in all sorts of wonderful ways, and your discomfort is hilarious.
Anyway, so far I got an apartment, met some awesome people, started a really good job with all sorts of interesting stories and experiences, and have been collecting wisdom on the secrets of the East. However, most importantly, I finally got to see the Steve Carrel film, "Crazy Stupid Love".
I saw it on an airplane. It was on a tiny screen in front of me on the back of the person in front of me's seat. My grandmother's boyfriend once told me that he thought the accommodation on Korean air was unmatched and that they had hot flight attendants. He was right on both accounts. Although I would wager my left thumb that the flight attendants on Continental would kick the shit out of the KA ladies physically, mentally, and cup size... although I bet the Korean Air attendants speak better Korean.
Even me, a humble coacher in the back of the deathtube received a warm towel. I fucking love warm towels. They are like the last lines of a Keats poem being read in a cold cabin as the dark cold of night puts out the last of your chimney smoke. The towel is warm and damp... and then a few moments later... it's not warm anymore and your face is wet. There are many films and great songs that end this way.
Anyway, So I saw "Crazy Stupid Love" which was really good for the first half and then there was a silly coincidence where one person is revealed to be someone you didnt know was someone else and then the whole thing becomes your standard Romantic Comedy fare. That said, there are some pretty funny parts in the whole thing.
There's this one part where Ryan Gosling punches a dude in the face, that was pretty cool. Then there's a part where Steve Carrell punches Ryan Gosling in the face, that was pretty cool. And then there's a part where Steve Carrell jumps out of a car, which was funny. Also there's a whole subplot about how people are different on the inside than the outside and stuff. Standard stuff.
Anyway, I am in Seoul, Seoungbak area and am living in a one room apartment. I have a sink, a stove, and a laundry machine in the same room as my bed and it is surprisingly comfortable. Met some of the coolest people I have met since I met some of the coolest people I have ever met.
Peace. More to come.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Hatlookitsa Blarg
Check out the blog Hacking Asia by Eric M. He is a better writer than me and is actually doing something. Eventually (lulz, eventually) this blog is going to be a collection of whining and goofy sophomoric observations. So, people who I know who are reading this thing. Check it out. Follow him.
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