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.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Haylookitsa Godzilla!
Leaving soon. Feeling anxious. Going to watch a movie.
(Sorry to John and Lorin about my sophomoric analysis of these films. I'm marginally better at talking about films where I choose the music, the characters have serif, and they are printed on paper or e-reader.)
Some of the best films I have seen in the past half decade came from South Korea. Chaser, Tae-Guk-Gi, Joint-Security-Area, The man from Nowhere, Old Boy, and I saw the Devil -to name a few- are fantastic films who showcase a love of story, the craft of cinema, and craftsmanship that rivals the golden towers mortared by America's Bay, Spielberg, and Cameron.
These films explore themes of isolation, camaraderie, nationalism, identity, dualism, and crime with equal parts drama and an observational eye that seems to merely capture the characters on screen but has inadvertently brought along the pathos. Also, they have subtitles which makes it really hard to think they don't do all these cool things because subtitles make films seem smart because reading is for people like Terry Gross.
Kim Jong-Il was not like Mrs. Gross. Although they both have/had lesbian hair. Also I bet both dug some South Korean films in their day.
In 1978, legendary South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok was kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il because the dictator wanted to create a Godzilla rip off.
Best Korea does not have best film industry.
This is foolish for one reason: according to Statute AS 11.41.300 of the Alaska state felony law, kidnapping is an unclassified felony (not class A since Sang-Ok had to escape on his own agency). This means that if Kim Jong-Il ever were to try and visit America via Alaska (or Seattle where, according to RCW 9A.40.020, Kidnapping is a class A offense), he could be incarcerated for a life sentence or pay a fine upwards from 50,000 USD which can feed a North Korean family for a very long time. I'm not sure what statutes NK has for this kind of thing.
Legal protocol is an expression of culture. And there are different cultures.
Also, let's face it, who wouldn't want to come to America, especially if you're a Juche dictator who has a collection of multiple thousands of films, many of which are American? Also we have six flags, the Kims love Six Flags over Texas. Everyone loves six flags. If you don't like six flags you are a communist, or I guess not. I don't know.
This is an odd kind of globalization. A dictator of the most closed off nation in the world was a total film geek and exposed himself to all manner of media from all manner of international sources. While his nation prided itself on its isolation- the kind that breeds an exceptionalistic attitude that keeps a starving disease ridden people patriotic- its despot was watching movies made by folk from Hindustan, Jewishland, Black-place, and New Jersey. This strikes my Plebeian brain as odd. There is no economic trade here for the culture to piggy-back in on like Jordan Airs to Nigeria, nor is there a colonial push that causes mutual cultural infection like jolly old Curry and Chips from Bombay with love. Likewise, there was no mass influx of foreign people into an area like Nigerians to Colonial Virginia.
Of course Jong-Il's watching of films isn't just him investigating cultures, nor is cultural mixing a purely laissez-faire kind of affair. In many ways, it seems that the societal mixing isn't just a cause or disaffected relative of the international mixing of media, it is an essential part of this mixing. The two processes are symbiotic. Although films imported into a country hold their own themes, narratives, and actors, they are all inadvertently also about this importation itself.
A foreign film is honest in that we watch it as both a medium for consumption but also for its packaging. I think most foreign film watchers are more aware of the meta-narratives, the emotions, and indeed the content of the film itself when that film is from another culture. In our age of liberalism and (assumably)(somewhat) post-colonial attitudes We all become unwitting film critics when faced with the art of the other.
This is what makes the late Kim Jong Il's fascination with film confuses me. What kind of enlightenment can be gained from watching a movie in a palace built from the ignorance of an entire nation? Do imported films mean anything if there wasn't really any importation involved? Doesn't an album or film just become a plastic disk if whats on it cannot amplify in a cultural resonance chamber?
On the vice guide to NK, the Northern cultural ombudsmen (in a culture this repressed, aren't they all ombudsmen?) sing karaoke to a Sex Pistols song. Karaoke is to singing as a copy machine is to Faulkner and the idea of Kim Jong Il watching Amistad makes me chortle and churn.
(Quick aside: I think this also applies to language. A language is a mechanism of culture. Teaching it is not just a mapping of syntax over Brocas/Wernicke, but the confluence of cultures and people and business and ideas and sex and hate and war and Angelina Jolie: an opportunity to expand on the linguistic resources of a youth beset by a dynamic new globe fueled by an expansive viral information economy. Not to mention my own personal development . Cultural roots here go too deep for homogenization; this is an augmentation, an infection, an integrati- aaaaand blah blah blah more on this later.)
Of course we have completely forgotten to mention the source of SK films. South Korea. But pursuing a psudo-intellectual diatribe about a medium I know little about on a country I'm about to live in is silly. More on this later, from the otherside.
Heading out in a month. Contract in hand. Getting excited and nervous. Fuck yeah. Let's do this. Let's get our exportation on.
(Sorry to John and Lorin about my sophomoric analysis of these films. I'm marginally better at talking about films where I choose the music, the characters have serif, and they are printed on paper or e-reader.)
Some of the best films I have seen in the past half decade came from South Korea. Chaser, Tae-Guk-Gi, Joint-Security-Area, The man from Nowhere, Old Boy, and I saw the Devil -to name a few- are fantastic films who showcase a love of story, the craft of cinema, and craftsmanship that rivals the golden towers mortared by America's Bay, Spielberg, and Cameron.
These films explore themes of isolation, camaraderie, nationalism, identity, dualism, and crime with equal parts drama and an observational eye that seems to merely capture the characters on screen but has inadvertently brought along the pathos. Also, they have subtitles which makes it really hard to think they don't do all these cool things because subtitles make films seem smart because reading is for people like Terry Gross.
Kim Jong-Il was not like Mrs. Gross. Although they both have/had lesbian hair. Also I bet both dug some South Korean films in their day.
In 1978, legendary South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok was kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il because the dictator wanted to create a Godzilla rip off.
Best Korea does not have best film industry.
This is foolish for one reason: according to Statute AS 11.41.300 of the Alaska state felony law, kidnapping is an unclassified felony (not class A since Sang-Ok had to escape on his own agency). This means that if Kim Jong-Il ever were to try and visit America via Alaska (or Seattle where, according to RCW 9A.40.020, Kidnapping is a class A offense), he could be incarcerated for a life sentence or pay a fine upwards from 50,000 USD which can feed a North Korean family for a very long time. I'm not sure what statutes NK has for this kind of thing.
Legal protocol is an expression of culture. And there are different cultures.
Also, let's face it, who wouldn't want to come to America, especially if you're a Juche dictator who has a collection of multiple thousands of films, many of which are American? Also we have six flags, the Kims love Six Flags over Texas. Everyone loves six flags. If you don't like six flags you are a communist, or I guess not. I don't know.
This is an odd kind of globalization. A dictator of the most closed off nation in the world was a total film geek and exposed himself to all manner of media from all manner of international sources. While his nation prided itself on its isolation- the kind that breeds an exceptionalistic attitude that keeps a starving disease ridden people patriotic- its despot was watching movies made by folk from Hindustan, Jewishland, Black-place, and New Jersey. This strikes my Plebeian brain as odd. There is no economic trade here for the culture to piggy-back in on like Jordan Airs to Nigeria, nor is there a colonial push that causes mutual cultural infection like jolly old Curry and Chips from Bombay with love. Likewise, there was no mass influx of foreign people into an area like Nigerians to Colonial Virginia.
Of course Jong-Il's watching of films isn't just him investigating cultures, nor is cultural mixing a purely laissez-faire kind of affair. In many ways, it seems that the societal mixing isn't just a cause or disaffected relative of the international mixing of media, it is an essential part of this mixing. The two processes are symbiotic. Although films imported into a country hold their own themes, narratives, and actors, they are all inadvertently also about this importation itself.
A foreign film is honest in that we watch it as both a medium for consumption but also for its packaging. I think most foreign film watchers are more aware of the meta-narratives, the emotions, and indeed the content of the film itself when that film is from another culture. In our age of liberalism and (assumably)(somewhat) post-colonial attitudes We all become unwitting film critics when faced with the art of the other.
This is what makes the late Kim Jong Il's fascination with film confuses me. What kind of enlightenment can be gained from watching a movie in a palace built from the ignorance of an entire nation? Do imported films mean anything if there wasn't really any importation involved? Doesn't an album or film just become a plastic disk if whats on it cannot amplify in a cultural resonance chamber?
On the vice guide to NK, the Northern cultural ombudsmen (in a culture this repressed, aren't they all ombudsmen?) sing karaoke to a Sex Pistols song. Karaoke is to singing as a copy machine is to Faulkner and the idea of Kim Jong Il watching Amistad makes me chortle and churn.
(Quick aside: I think this also applies to language. A language is a mechanism of culture. Teaching it is not just a mapping of syntax over Brocas/Wernicke, but the confluence of cultures and people and business and ideas and sex and hate and war and Angelina Jolie: an opportunity to expand on the linguistic resources of a youth beset by a dynamic new globe fueled by an expansive viral information economy. Not to mention my own personal development . Cultural roots here go too deep for homogenization; this is an augmentation, an infection, an integrati- aaaaand blah blah blah more on this later.)
Of course we have completely forgotten to mention the source of SK films. South Korea. But pursuing a psudo-intellectual diatribe about a medium I know little about on a country I'm about to live in is silly. More on this later, from the otherside.
Heading out in a month. Contract in hand. Getting excited and nervous. Fuck yeah. Let's do this. Let's get our exportation on.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Haylookitsa Truck Nuts
So my divorce-lawyer/accountant/aroma therapist asked me the other day if I could relate Truck nuts to Teaching English in a foreign country using mixed metaphors. I told her, probably not but I'll try to throw a hail three-pointer half-court header into the outfield.
Settlers of Catan is a good teaching tool.
--->
The opposite of truck nuts is the board game Settlers of Catan.
--->
Settlers of Catan is a game where you get to role-play a municipal development specialist. In the brave new twenty-first century, as a species which used to entertain ourselves by watching Gladiators smash each other's faces in with clubs, we now spend our evenings pretending to be Bureaucrats. In many ways this is an improvement. Watching living things kill each other for fun has certain negative connotations.
Settlers of Catan is the same thing as a blunt object against a neanderthal's head. Bear with me, here, this goes somewhere. This goes places.
I guess that means that Settlers of Catan is both a signifier and enacter of a kind of progress. The kind of progress that has yielded complex material processing, manufacturing webs that stretch the globe, and Hong Kong. Board games, video games, and racquetball seem to be aspects of a social facade which is a protector of this progress. This facade, on a personal level, this veneer, is an expression of that civil mask we wear everyday. When you catch your boss staring at your cleavage or your professor says something obnoxious and punches you in the face, this is the defense mechanism that kicks in to keep us in line to those invisible rules that make up the social contract.
These board games are a the expression of this veneer on a sociological level. I think we are ever so slightly oppressed and terrified by these invisible covenants so, in response we thirst to impose our own meta-rules over the bigger game. Rules where the stakes are lower than the social contract and, more importantly, rules which only apply to the on hand participants which end when the game is over.
So why do we desire to pretend to be a bureaucrat? Because people are boring. At least Risk let you pretend to be a megalomaniac fascist and Monopoly let me become Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie opened a museum that is filled with dinosaur bones and machines and guns just like that game Jurassic Park the board game. The dude went head on with the US government to screw over his workers and then chased the Britons out of England in 490 CE, just like that game Stratego. How many guns and fossils have the Settlers of Catan yielded like that game Operation? None, see? Stupid. Utterly without argument, complete idiocy that game. You know that part of the game where you're winning until John steals pieces off your side and when you try to stop him you drop your cards and then your pants rip and every laughs and then Thailand floods driving up the price of hard-drives and then the stock of Amazon takes a hit because now cloud computing infrastructure isn't as cheap as it once was? Screw that game and screw John. I hate John. Settlers of Catan. PFFT.
I suppose this isn't about what we want to pretend though, I suppose this is about 'the rules'.
<--->
This need to sit in a peaceful circle over some tea and perhaps a glass of wine (or if you're feeling especially rebellious, two glasses) comes from the same need to smash in another person's face with a club and then sell his children. It is the need to impose power over a gigantic system called the universe we can't control that is deadset on killing us at some point. Catan's rules are just another club used to impose a system upon the messy equation that is human action.
Settlers of Catan is a quickly becoming a cultural force. But remember, Catan is still a shitty game. It contains multitudes.
Like TS Eliot talked about in the Four Quartets, the way up is the way down. All cultural forces breed their opposites. In this case, the culture that would elevate Catan already spawned a counter-type to the board game: large horse-sized testicles which hang off the back of a truck.
Truck Nuts.
The pick-up truck is a testament (lol, testa-) (lol, balls) (grow up), to human resourcefulness, ingenuity, and resilience. Each modern truck is a mobile box filled with cutting-edge engineering, manufacturing, infrastructure, and computing wrapped in steel and various polymers. Each one is a tiny Ozymandius running around American roads in an endless circle of prayer to the god of commerce, Mitt Romney. I love Mitt Romney. That smile.
And then we hang fake balls off of them.
Because certain people are contrarian. Because some people want to offend you as a final resistance to the torrent of positive competition and cooperation emanating from Settlers of Catan and the UN. The other begs only to not be destroyed. This is the same resistance of Rosa Parks, John Rabe, and Ted Nugent. It's the dialectic of the weak that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison talk about. A lot like that, actually. Except, you know, different.
--->
Synthetic man-nuggets can be applied to Academia, ESL, and my life too. Here's how:
Having an English major is like owning a gas sucking Eastern European made SUV with truck nuts with 'deez nuts' written on the side. You feel really bad and useless and poorly engineered until you see someone with a business major driving something just as big and twice as Ukranian and you feel better because 'that guy is a bigger joke than me'. Except then you realize now you are just part of a confederacy of ass holes driving big vehicles contributing to the end of the world via ice, fire, and global warming. The comparison is just a coping mechanism. The truck nuts are some kind of metaphor.
The English department gives you a sense that you are part of an erudite Caucasian elite drawing knowledge from the memetic reservoir filled by Horace, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Faulkner.
Although this is partially true, an English Major is also a way to pay someone to judge your ability to read things the rest of the world deems entertainment.
I heard about Harry Potter for the first time when I was around 11 or 12 in Middle School as I was being prepped to have a Bar Mitzvah, become a man, and be able to attend batman movies in the theater. For the Hanukkah before that, I received a copy of The Chamber of Secrets from my extended family. I started reading it, didn't know what was going on, and then stopped. Turns out that was the second book so it made sense that I was lost in the narrative. Unlike Goosebumps and Boxcar Children, you have to read Harry Potter in serial order. Just like Charles Dickens.
Occasionally, I can convince myself that an English-Literature major is a giant awesome American made truck with a GPS, 4 cup holders, and a big ole grill to murder elk and jumping prairie dogs. Except, this truck has no wheels and no four wheel drive. It's awesome and I love it, and sometimes it gets me a date or two, but it isn't going anywhere. Especially when it snows.
There is no real reason to have a Lit major if you are thinking like a Utilitarian. There is also no reason to have a potpourri in your bathroom either. Anything you can do in a bathroom that you would want to cover up probably has a very pervasive smell. So when you are done doing that anything in the bathroom the room just smells like the combined scent of potpourri and pervasive smell. The potpourri just represents, when you first walk into the bathroom, the hope that it will actually do its job this time. It doesn't. But I would wager my left truck nut that Stewart-Mill had a little bowl of potpourri next to his toothbrush.
Now Febreeze, that shit could make the pope's woods smell like a summer breeze. But aerosols are best left to Engineering majors.
ESL are truck nuts for the disillusioned humanities undergraduate for their giant luxury truck without wheels. Sure, it's a salary job which pays me well and will eventually contribute to my future in a somewhat elliptical way- I just know, in the bottom of my gut somewhere, that it is also a concession to the fact that there is a big wedge between the pure pursuit of James Joyce and a career. It is my undergraduate Alamo.
Even if I do get an academic post somewhere in a community college which makes study and information my trade, I still know that I paid someone a few thousand dollars at one point in my life to talk about fiction, pretend stories, while my friend John is learning how to engineer a cheap bridge that can withstand extreme flooding for poor Taiwanese. And you know what? I'm not entirely fine with this.
But I also think, in many ways, we buy our trucks because of the ability to put truck nutz on them. John will spend his money on a nice TV and a bunch of trips to the bar. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is still an example of the balls wagging the truck. There is compensation here, somewhere, on all levels.
--->
Deez nutz (QED).
!=
(To anyone who is into philosophy, into psychology, in my family, a thinker, or not into mixing metaphors: I am vehemently sorry. It will happen again.)
Settlers of Catan is a good teaching tool.
--->
The opposite of truck nuts is the board game Settlers of Catan.
--->
Settlers of Catan is a game where you get to role-play a municipal development specialist. In the brave new twenty-first century, as a species which used to entertain ourselves by watching Gladiators smash each other's faces in with clubs, we now spend our evenings pretending to be Bureaucrats. In many ways this is an improvement. Watching living things kill each other for fun has certain negative connotations.
Settlers of Catan is the same thing as a blunt object against a neanderthal's head. Bear with me, here, this goes somewhere. This goes places.
I guess that means that Settlers of Catan is both a signifier and enacter of a kind of progress. The kind of progress that has yielded complex material processing, manufacturing webs that stretch the globe, and Hong Kong. Board games, video games, and racquetball seem to be aspects of a social facade which is a protector of this progress. This facade, on a personal level, this veneer, is an expression of that civil mask we wear everyday. When you catch your boss staring at your cleavage or your professor says something obnoxious and punches you in the face, this is the defense mechanism that kicks in to keep us in line to those invisible rules that make up the social contract.
These board games are a the expression of this veneer on a sociological level. I think we are ever so slightly oppressed and terrified by these invisible covenants so, in response we thirst to impose our own meta-rules over the bigger game. Rules where the stakes are lower than the social contract and, more importantly, rules which only apply to the on hand participants which end when the game is over.
So why do we desire to pretend to be a bureaucrat? Because people are boring. At least Risk let you pretend to be a megalomaniac fascist and Monopoly let me become Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie opened a museum that is filled with dinosaur bones and machines and guns just like that game Jurassic Park the board game. The dude went head on with the US government to screw over his workers and then chased the Britons out of England in 490 CE, just like that game Stratego. How many guns and fossils have the Settlers of Catan yielded like that game Operation? None, see? Stupid. Utterly without argument, complete idiocy that game. You know that part of the game where you're winning until John steals pieces off your side and when you try to stop him you drop your cards and then your pants rip and every laughs and then Thailand floods driving up the price of hard-drives and then the stock of Amazon takes a hit because now cloud computing infrastructure isn't as cheap as it once was? Screw that game and screw John. I hate John. Settlers of Catan. PFFT.
I suppose this isn't about what we want to pretend though, I suppose this is about 'the rules'.
<--->
This need to sit in a peaceful circle over some tea and perhaps a glass of wine (or if you're feeling especially rebellious, two glasses) comes from the same need to smash in another person's face with a club and then sell his children. It is the need to impose power over a gigantic system called the universe we can't control that is deadset on killing us at some point. Catan's rules are just another club used to impose a system upon the messy equation that is human action.
Settlers of Catan is a quickly becoming a cultural force. But remember, Catan is still a shitty game. It contains multitudes.
Like TS Eliot talked about in the Four Quartets, the way up is the way down. All cultural forces breed their opposites. In this case, the culture that would elevate Catan already spawned a counter-type to the board game: large horse-sized testicles which hang off the back of a truck.
Truck Nuts.
The pick-up truck is a testament (lol, testa-) (lol, balls) (grow up), to human resourcefulness, ingenuity, and resilience. Each modern truck is a mobile box filled with cutting-edge engineering, manufacturing, infrastructure, and computing wrapped in steel and various polymers. Each one is a tiny Ozymandius running around American roads in an endless circle of prayer to the god of commerce, Mitt Romney. I love Mitt Romney. That smile.
And then we hang fake balls off of them.
Because certain people are contrarian. Because some people want to offend you as a final resistance to the torrent of positive competition and cooperation emanating from Settlers of Catan and the UN. The other begs only to not be destroyed. This is the same resistance of Rosa Parks, John Rabe, and Ted Nugent. It's the dialectic of the weak that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison talk about. A lot like that, actually. Except, you know, different.
--->
Synthetic man-nuggets can be applied to Academia, ESL, and my life too. Here's how:
Having an English major is like owning a gas sucking Eastern European made SUV with truck nuts with 'deez nuts' written on the side. You feel really bad and useless and poorly engineered until you see someone with a business major driving something just as big and twice as Ukranian and you feel better because 'that guy is a bigger joke than me'. Except then you realize now you are just part of a confederacy of ass holes driving big vehicles contributing to the end of the world via ice, fire, and global warming. The comparison is just a coping mechanism. The truck nuts are some kind of metaphor.
The English department gives you a sense that you are part of an erudite Caucasian elite drawing knowledge from the memetic reservoir filled by Horace, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Faulkner.
Although this is partially true, an English Major is also a way to pay someone to judge your ability to read things the rest of the world deems entertainment.
I heard about Harry Potter for the first time when I was around 11 or 12 in Middle School as I was being prepped to have a Bar Mitzvah, become a man, and be able to attend batman movies in the theater. For the Hanukkah before that, I received a copy of The Chamber of Secrets from my extended family. I started reading it, didn't know what was going on, and then stopped. Turns out that was the second book so it made sense that I was lost in the narrative. Unlike Goosebumps and Boxcar Children, you have to read Harry Potter in serial order. Just like Charles Dickens.
Occasionally, I can convince myself that an English-Literature major is a giant awesome American made truck with a GPS, 4 cup holders, and a big ole grill to murder elk and jumping prairie dogs. Except, this truck has no wheels and no four wheel drive. It's awesome and I love it, and sometimes it gets me a date or two, but it isn't going anywhere. Especially when it snows.
There is no real reason to have a Lit major if you are thinking like a Utilitarian. There is also no reason to have a potpourri in your bathroom either. Anything you can do in a bathroom that you would want to cover up probably has a very pervasive smell. So when you are done doing that anything in the bathroom the room just smells like the combined scent of potpourri and pervasive smell. The potpourri just represents, when you first walk into the bathroom, the hope that it will actually do its job this time. It doesn't. But I would wager my left truck nut that Stewart-Mill had a little bowl of potpourri next to his toothbrush.
Now Febreeze, that shit could make the pope's woods smell like a summer breeze. But aerosols are best left to Engineering majors.
ESL are truck nuts for the disillusioned humanities undergraduate for their giant luxury truck without wheels. Sure, it's a salary job which pays me well and will eventually contribute to my future in a somewhat elliptical way- I just know, in the bottom of my gut somewhere, that it is also a concession to the fact that there is a big wedge between the pure pursuit of James Joyce and a career. It is my undergraduate Alamo.
Even if I do get an academic post somewhere in a community college which makes study and information my trade, I still know that I paid someone a few thousand dollars at one point in my life to talk about fiction, pretend stories, while my friend John is learning how to engineer a cheap bridge that can withstand extreme flooding for poor Taiwanese. And you know what? I'm not entirely fine with this.
But I also think, in many ways, we buy our trucks because of the ability to put truck nutz on them. John will spend his money on a nice TV and a bunch of trips to the bar. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is still an example of the balls wagging the truck. There is compensation here, somewhere, on all levels.
--->
Deez nutz (QED).
!=
(To anyone who is into philosophy, into psychology, in my family, a thinker, or not into mixing metaphors: I am vehemently sorry. It will happen again.)
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Heylookitsa Bob
My mom asked me the other day how I decided to teach ESL. I told her it was because of a fat guy in a hot tub and a dead rat.
Two summers ago, in 2010, I was working at The Yellowstone Club, a ski resort for wealthy people located a half hour northwest of Big Sky, Montana. I was a janitor. That August, my boss Ivonne told me that I was the new pool boy for an outdoor pool house. This pool house's main pool, being located in the middle of the Montana Wilderness, served as a giant chlorine filled mouse, fly, hornet, and any-animal-smaller-than-a-Fiat trap for the Gallatin mountains.
So every afternoon, I got to take a net on a stick and pull out dead things from a swimming pool. After that, I would go clean condoms and mice out of the hot tub filter. It was during cleaning the hot tub that I met an old fat Korean man smoking a cigarette named Robert.
There were signs posted around the pool saying that you weren't supposed to be able to smoke in the hot tub; this was a goofy rule. The Yellowstone club was a getaway for millionaires and the only real muscle around the staff was the custodial staff and facilities services. Did they really expect a bunch of janitors and electricians to tell a millionaire or their spouse not to smoke in a hot tub? That would be silly. In a sense, this meant the signs were for the children of millionaires and the staff or for health conscious millionaires to point at when they want to yell at a different millionaire for smoking.
Robert was not a millionaire to be messed with. The old man, still not a grey hair on his plugs, sat in a hot tub in the way that only a man who cared about nothing and yet also knew he was going to live a very long life could. He wore a gold chain around his neck and kept his silver Rolex on top of a leather wallet on top of his nautilus towel. He looked old school money, and he was Asian. Asian old men in movies, so as in life, look one of two ways: wan and breakable, or corpulent and charmingly sociopathic.
Robert was the latter.
I, being Asian looking, was a subject of interest to Robert. He asked me with a heavy azn-ish accent where I was from. Now, When an Asian person with an Asian sounding accent asks another Asian without an accent where they are from, they don't mean, "are you an adopted Korean who was brought up on Clint Eastwood and Mtv in a Semitic family?"
What they mean is, "You look like me. Why is this, and Which Asian country are you from?"
Growing up in the mid-west, most people I interacted with for my two decades on earth at this point had been of Irish, Polish, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Norwegian, or German descent and looked not at all like me. As with Robert, when a W.A.S.P. asks you "Where are you from?" they too are not looking for you to answer with "Billings, Montana." What they are asking is, "Why do you look different from me?"
To answer Robert, when he asked me, "Where are you from?" I answered, "From Billings, Montana." I was a very stupid twenty-something. Robert sat glaring at me for a while, a very uncomfortable while, and then he burst into laughter. We talked as I pulled a dead rat from the hot tub's filter chamber. Turns out he was actually the father of a millionaire and was a part time plumber and thought Montana was a stupid place. Too cold, too many bugs and the trees were dull. Fair enough.
He also told me that I should look into visiting Korea and when I told him I couldn't afford it, he told me about EPIK the placement association for Korean Public Schools. This was the first time I'd heard that Korea was a place that people went to teach English.
That night I would go look up EPIK. All because Robert the Plumber, father of a Millionaire, told me I should.
Two summers ago, in 2010, I was working at The Yellowstone Club, a ski resort for wealthy people located a half hour northwest of Big Sky, Montana. I was a janitor. That August, my boss Ivonne told me that I was the new pool boy for an outdoor pool house. This pool house's main pool, being located in the middle of the Montana Wilderness, served as a giant chlorine filled mouse, fly, hornet, and any-animal-smaller-than-a-Fiat trap for the Gallatin mountains.
So every afternoon, I got to take a net on a stick and pull out dead things from a swimming pool. After that, I would go clean condoms and mice out of the hot tub filter. It was during cleaning the hot tub that I met an old fat Korean man smoking a cigarette named Robert.
There were signs posted around the pool saying that you weren't supposed to be able to smoke in the hot tub; this was a goofy rule. The Yellowstone club was a getaway for millionaires and the only real muscle around the staff was the custodial staff and facilities services. Did they really expect a bunch of janitors and electricians to tell a millionaire or their spouse not to smoke in a hot tub? That would be silly. In a sense, this meant the signs were for the children of millionaires and the staff or for health conscious millionaires to point at when they want to yell at a different millionaire for smoking.
Robert was not a millionaire to be messed with. The old man, still not a grey hair on his plugs, sat in a hot tub in the way that only a man who cared about nothing and yet also knew he was going to live a very long life could. He wore a gold chain around his neck and kept his silver Rolex on top of a leather wallet on top of his nautilus towel. He looked old school money, and he was Asian. Asian old men in movies, so as in life, look one of two ways: wan and breakable, or corpulent and charmingly sociopathic.
Robert was the latter.
I, being Asian looking, was a subject of interest to Robert. He asked me with a heavy azn-ish accent where I was from. Now, When an Asian person with an Asian sounding accent asks another Asian without an accent where they are from, they don't mean, "are you an adopted Korean who was brought up on Clint Eastwood and Mtv in a Semitic family?"
What they mean is, "You look like me. Why is this, and Which Asian country are you from?"
Growing up in the mid-west, most people I interacted with for my two decades on earth at this point had been of Irish, Polish, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Norwegian, or German descent and looked not at all like me. As with Robert, when a W.A.S.P. asks you "Where are you from?" they too are not looking for you to answer with "Billings, Montana." What they are asking is, "Why do you look different from me?"
To answer Robert, when he asked me, "Where are you from?" I answered, "From Billings, Montana." I was a very stupid twenty-something. Robert sat glaring at me for a while, a very uncomfortable while, and then he burst into laughter. We talked as I pulled a dead rat from the hot tub's filter chamber. Turns out he was actually the father of a millionaire and was a part time plumber and thought Montana was a stupid place. Too cold, too many bugs and the trees were dull. Fair enough.
He also told me that I should look into visiting Korea and when I told him I couldn't afford it, he told me about EPIK the placement association for Korean Public Schools. This was the first time I'd heard that Korea was a place that people went to teach English.
That night I would go look up EPIK. All because Robert the Plumber, father of a Millionaire, told me I should.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)