Intrepid Girl Reporter

Despite my obvious affection for the New York Times, it’s articles like this one that make me want to knee it in its elitist groin.

It must be difficult, of course, to choose between a lucrative job in the private sector and an honorable job that allows one to “give back” in the public sphere. I’m certainly glad I’m not faced with that decision. One of the many perks of not being able to obtain ANY JOB AT ALL.

I’m not going to lie: I want to go to an Ivy grad school or, if not, at least one of the best in my field. That is, however, for graduate school in a specialized discipline. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t resent the way major news outlets (such as the Times) only focus on these most prestigious colleges, the ones that cut out the middle class by refusing to offer merit-based aid, and assume that they must be home to the best and the brightest. I once sat across from a Harvard student who didn’t know where the state of Kansas was. Note to Harvard: I do. Believe it or not, there are a lot of other schools out there that are not Ivies that turn out perfectly functional individuals. i’m also more than a little turned off by the way the article makes it sound like these public sector jobs should just be totally honored that these fancy fancy students might deign to give their expertise.*

That having been said, I do want to throttle My Own School pretty often. We were recently featured by Consumers Digest as the #1 liberal-arts value in America. We were also featured in Delta Sky magazine. Both stories made the front page of our website. Note to My School: Until you stop acting like it’s a big honor to be featured in DELTA SKY, we’re never going to leave the 40s in the rankings.

Nonetheless, I think I might try to apply to some of these companies too. I’ve been trying to work in the public sector, and no one wants to give me a low-paying job doing difficult and emotionally draining work, so I might as well start looking at jobs that would actually allow me to pay my own rent.

Tried to teach a pop-song lesson today, three different ways, and none of them worked, because my students are ungrateful little hoodlums. This state of affairs wasn’t helped by the young co-teacher, who switched from her customary usage of “maybe it would be a better idea if” to “I want you to,” which semantically means pretty much the same thing but totally makes it sound like it’s my duty to bend to my co-teachers’ whims. I realize that this is probably just a translation issue, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I played different classes Kanye, Sufjan Stevens, Enrique Iglesias and Stevie Wonder, and I was so frustrated at my classes’ refusal to even engage - and these are students I like! - that by the end of the last one, which may actually have been the worst, I was barely speaking to anyone. They shouted “I love you” out the window, but it was too late. Tomorrow’s classes get a lesson on the future tense instead.

We did have our final goodbye party at the 공부방 (after-school program) today, though, and they gave us each a beautiful tea set. I don’t even know how to describe how badly I want these kids to succeed.

*I have a real problem with the low pay offered by most jobs in the public sector, including (and especially) those sponsored by the government. The wrong messages this sends are almost too numerous to mention: that these jobs lack the same prestige as better-paying ones in the private sphere, that working with and for others should be some kind of sacrifice, that there’s something inherently noble about working with others to better the world. Volunteering isn’t about “helping”; it’s about working to make a better life for all of us, and it comes with as many benefits (if not more) than private jobs. Everyone should be able to find something they like, in my view, that also happens to benefit someone besides themselves, but continuing to perpetuate this idea that working with others must require a little bit of unpleasantness that we have to suck up is totally detrimental to any efforts to get others involved. It also makes it way more difficult for people without independent means to take up jobs such as these. I realize that most public-sector jobs don’t have a lot of money, so I’m mostly referring to government-subsidized jobs (likte teaching and AmeriCorps) here, but it also seems to me that there is an inherent assumed correlation in American society with social-sector jobs and low pay.

And, I mean, if I were poor and learned that these AmeriCorps volunteers were being put on food stamps so they could “empathize” with me, I would be incensed. No one WANTS to be on food stamps, and I find it a little bit insulting to people who actually have to be on them that, should I join AmeriCorps, I’ll be expected to do it too, like poverty is some sort of game.

Class notes had to come back eventually. Unfortunately, I stopped taking them for a while, which is why you were deprived. No fear.

THURSDAY, 12 JUNE 2008

2A - Infinite Classroom Challenge

• not perfect but did want to perform
• a ton of girls with pinkeye…ew
• can’t remember who won
• unusually good perormance from…that girl in the front
• Twin A is in this class, Twin B is in 2E (don’t forget)
• don’t mix up Baek Mi Young and Baek Ji Young (dammit Korea)

1K - Konglish Jeopardy

• had to do jeopardy instead of Muhan Dojeon because computer doesn’t play sound
• noisy as all hell
• got really into Jeopardy
• keep insisting that poor IGR 1 is my boyfriend…if they only knew

After stupid teacher conversation thing I have to go to the opposite side of town to see HD’s stone exhibition. To be fair, I don’t really have anything else to do, since the stupid AmeriCorps application still won’t work - it is now telling me that my account is locked after too many invalid attempts (zero) to log on. I obviously cannot just give up on finding a job, but this (lack of) response is incredibly discouraging.

EDIT: I never made it to the rocks. I went out for ice cream, galbitang, and an avocado-cheddar BLT (all within three hours) and played Scrabble with Africa. But while I have your attention, let me provide you with a few old student haiku.

First, we have a few meditations on seasons, with the way they reflect on our own (and our friends’) lives.

There is the cool wind
There is the beautiful scene
So I like fall best

I like spring so much
Spring is warm enough to play
But, I do not play.

I like winter best
We can play snowball fight too!
Oh Ji Seok likes too

Spring is very warm
At spring are enjoy PC room control board
We are crazy

Reflections on love and its vagaries:

I love MC Mong
His face is very lovely and cute
But he have a girlfriend

I am handsome boy
I had girlfriend yesterday
Now I don’t have her

Love return give me
But we are loving with our
Love is beautiful

Paeans to favorite foods.

I like egg fry best
Because that is delicious
I very like egg

Envy for coteachers:

(Co-Teacher F) has much money
His salary is getting bigger and bigger
Now his salary is .6 billion

Descriptions of students’ selves and others:

I am smart and cute
Also I am wonderful
But this tall a lie

I am bad boy
I don’t have any money
But, respect me ha!

I am a good boy
Many people respect me
I am a cool boy

He likes a crain
He wants be crain driver
He loves a crain [ed. note: accompanied by illustrations of construction equipment]

Within this category, there is a very special subset devoted entirely to my student Monkey. Monkey’s name, I may as well tell you now (realistically, in Korea, this is not going to help you identify me at all), is Man Ki. Now you understand. I actually have a few more of these at school, so I’ll try to find and post them tomorrow.

Man Ki is psycho
Man Ki always see (?) bad things
So Man Ki is short

Man Ki is short
But Man Ki is cut(e)
Man Ki is crazy
and Man Ki always show the sexual video.

And, of course, the metahaiku.

It’s so difficult
I don’t do it either (?)
It’s a haiku [ed. note: the author of this poem is named Yoo Seok]

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already,…and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.

- Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”

I have this feeling that when I open my suitcase in Johnson City, all the things that I bought in Korea will turn into dust. Never mind that I did this once before. This time I’m coming home for good, at least for a little while, and I can’t imagine that the colors will stay, that I’ll be able to pick up my clothes without watching them disintegrate in my hands.

I have a little less than a month left here, depending on when I finally decide to leave. I’ve been putting it off. I can leave as early as July 5th, after which I’ll take classes at the state university in my town, and…then what? I know I can’t stay here, but I haven’t heard back from a single job (except for the one that told me that they would interview me if I were only in the States). I know that if it weren’t for my friends and my family here, my time in Korea would seem like a dream, so far removed is it from the region its promoters so optimistically name The Mountain South. I’m pretty distant from the Eastman Kodak plant here.

I have no problem going home as long as I have something new to which I can move on. I’m not ready for this to be the pinnacle of my life. I’m a little scared of how fast I’m afraid this experience is going to disappear from my life, but I might be more worried that once those shirts and dresses that were so beautiful here disappear, I’ll have nothing to hold in their place.

Student haiku:

I like spring so much

There are lots of flowers

It is warm, dear.

Are you a student?

I think I am a student.

So, I must study.

See, I bet you didn’t even know that your heart was made of ice until you felt it melt. (Also, aren’t accurate syllable counts overrated?)

I was talking to Scooter today for the first time in a while and describing my current jobless plight, and he reminded me that I live on a gorgeous island where the weather is really nice right now, which is true. I just need to get this stuff out so I can stop worrying about it. Of course, if I just relax and don’t send off any cover letters, I will never get a job, because no one will know I want one.

It is a nice time to live here. I just need to remember that. The Green Eggs and Ham lesson went surprisingly badly, but because my Tuesday kids are so far ahead, I don’t really have to worry about it for a while. Meanwhile, Oregon is coming to watch my kids haiku it up tomorrow, and I’m quite excited.

The first thing I should establish here is that I’m not going to grad school next year.

To be fair, Columbia’s rejection letter was really nice - they think my academic credentials are stellar, they encourage less than 5% of their applicants to reapply but they really want to see me again, I just need to get some more work experience, blah blah blah. And as Miguk Oma says, they certainly didn’t have to write all of that.

I found all this out yesterday morning, before I had my laptop back, i.e. sitting in the freezing living room squinting at the stupid host family computer. I was not initially fazed. I found out on Tuesday that I got an interview for the AIF fellowship, which is promising. And I’m reasonably sure that if I apply again, I not only have a good chance of getting in, but I might actually get some money to fund my poor educational dreams.

Subconsciously, however, this information started to stress me out. Basically, yesterday just sort of spun out into this sort of nunchi nightmare. Nunchi, for those of you who are not schooled in Korean culture, is the ability to sort of suss out a situation, to avoid making the sort of social miscues that Korean society abhors. I guess the news that my future is a lot less certain than I was hoping sort of dulled my nunchi, because I kept upsetting the kibun everywhere I went, including but not limited to: overextending myself at the inconvenience of other people, accidentally making Omma take me and some other teacher she knew to a really expensive eel restaurant near the Jeju Student Culture Center, accidentally sitting in the wrong seat on the bus, etc. I think the low point of my day was when I went to both E AND Lotte Marts to find some trail mix and I just couldn’t find any and I almost started crying in the store. I knew perfectly well that Korean stores do sell trail mix, but apparently none of those stores are in SinJeju, so I ended up having to buy separate trail mix components, which, for the record, are really expensive.

Despite my own discomfort, however, I want to take note of a recent source of pride: Host Sister has refused to go to hagwon anymore. Not even joking. I can’t even come up with an analogy that will make the significance of this apparent to my American readers - all I can say is that Korean students go to hagwon. They just do. To give you an idea of why, here is the Korean life plan:

1. To be happy, you need to have lived a good life.
2. To live a good life, you must be successful.
3. To be successful, you should probably have gone to a good university, preferably a SKY (Seoul, Korea, or Yonsei) school.
4. To get into a good university, you have to have done well on the admissions tests.
5. To do well on admissions tests, you should have gone to a good high school.
6. To get into a good high school, you have to have done well on the high school admissions tests.
7. To do well on the high school admissions tests, you need to study all the time.
8. To study all the time, you need to go to hagwon.

I partially credit this decision to her time in America and the fact that she saw that her life as a ninth grader does not have to be perpetually miserable. She told Host Mom that she can study just fine on her own, which is true, since she has been known to skip major family holidays in favor of studying. “Every day,” she told me, “I think about hagwon, do I go or not go. Every day.” Also in America: she got really good at SkipBo. But I played her yesterday and I still won.

Anyway, moments like this sweet SkipBo victory remind me not to feel too sorry for myself, even though maybe I will spend another whole year abroad and if I don’t who knows if I’ll get a good enough job to get me into grad school? Maybe I should see if they have hagwons in America.

HB is acting out in the way that only a sixth-grader can, standing in my room and declaring that he will “never not talk to me,” then staring in my mirror and refusing to leave. His ire is understandable in a sense; he’s mad because I’m spending time with HS that HS never had before. On the other hand, I offered earlier to play with him and he said he wanted to wait until after I was done with HS, and now we’re out of time. What he’s also been doing is waiting until it is obviously inconvenient to play (ex. HS says she’ll be ready in five minutes, HB wants to take that time) and then getting angry when I can’t do it. I suspect that Oma and Apa have already talked to him about not being jealous, so he’s drawing attention to his concerns in the only way he knows how - making it look like I’m not paying attention to him. Also, by making fun of my Korean, which he has never done before. Understanding is exhausting sometimes.

In the meantime, I’m writing my CV, and at this point I’m starting to wonder if I can include things like “crochet” under my skills category.

Can we start with a few lists, please?

INAPPROPRIATE VIDEO/SONG JUXTAPOSITIONS (Nix&Nox Noraebang, City Hall)

• “Jingle Bells”: domestic violence
• “Summer Nights”: dying soldier

SOME THINGS MY STUDENTS DIDN’T LIKE ABOUT “THE SNOWMAN”

• “No speak” 
• “Father, he is fat”
• “Snowman. I don’t like face”
• “I hate cat”
• “Santa, Santa isn’t fun”

My students mostly earn brownie points for liking “The Snowman,” however - regardless of some of their opinions of it, they all - and I mean all - watched it quietly, which is not something I thought I could achieve with an elephant tranquilizer gun. SDY wrote that it reminded her of the days “when I was young.” The fact that SDY looks like a third grader notwithstanding. She’s an old soul, I guess you could say.

The students who have the most brownie points in my book, however, are my PopSong kids, with whom I am celebrating Christmas right now in the most Korean way possible - at a nasty smoky PC방. Today is the boys’ party. Yesterday was the girls’ party, and with the three girls who showed up, I went to Baskin Robbins and the aforementioned Nix&Nox (for Jeju residents, I cannot recommend this karaoke venue highly enough). One of my students, it turns out, is a fan of both Eric Clapton and Jack Johnson, which means that someday she will be able to successfully rush a fraternity at My College. The boys, however, wanted to party by staring at a computer screen and killing things, so here we are. One of them tried to show me how to play StarCraft and, in perhaps my most badass moment ever, I got nauseous from the screen, so I had to quit. My handle was T3ACH3R.

Sitting at someone else’s computer gives me as much time to think as anywhere else, and I think a lot about transience now that I’m so close to coming home, even for a little bit. Oregon said that at the Christmas party last night she was about to say something about the party we could have next year, before she realized that next year we will be in an Ivy law school (Arkansas) or an Ivy med school (The Singer) or bumming around on people’s couches (yours truly). 

It’s all going to end. Just like the time when I listened to Barenaked Ladies ended around the time I started tenth grade. Someday I’ll hear the song again, just like I did yesterday at Hollys (in the first recorded instance of good music being played at Hollys ever), and remember that part of me, but I won’t be there anymore, and I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

At least these kids playing StarCraft are so much more adorable than I ever thought nerds could be.

So I downloaded The Snowman, which is only THE BEST CHRISTMAS MOVIE OF ALL TIME*, for use in my classroom, during these last two useless weeks after exams. Playing it, I noticed that this version featured a live action introduction with a narrator who looked oddly familiar. Google reveals that this mysterious fellow is, in fact, DAVID FUCKING BOWIE. Perhaps more importantly, his presence does not improve the movie at all, aside from the fact that you get to see David Bowie.

Moral of the story: The Snowman > David Bowie > the rest of us

I’ve had the past three days off, effectively creating a five-day weekend, which was nice to say the least. “Nice” might not even be the best word for Saturday, where Aewol’s co-teacher’s boyfriend proceeded, at noraebang, to rap along with popular artist G-Dragon, as well as 2Pac. Also, his name was Steve Son. As in, “My name is Steve, son.”

Of course, five free days without drama is an impossibility for the Jeju Crew and for my host family too, I think. We can’t help it, really; being thrown into this immediate closeness, spending so much time together, it’s almost inevitable that we’re going to make mistakes sometimes. When you finally start to know people, it’s so much easier for you to hurt each other. I got in a massive fight with HB; I got into another fight, not as large but just as difficult, with Scooter. I didn’t want either of them to happen. But these things, they feel like fires: you can avoid them, yes, but the brush collects and blazes later. And I’d much rather burn them out now.

But later HB told me that he likes me, although he doesn’t love me, which someone told me means that he does, really. And Scooter and I went suit shopping on Tuesday and had just a good friend day - we ate pizza, and Christmas shopped, and made fun of the guy at Zini’s (who is now - if you are interested - featured on the poster outside the cafe. He is reading earnestly), and split a chestnut 빙수 (sundae). Then today I had lunch with Oregon and Transy, and went to the five day market with HM, and she told me to sleep in the car as the Weepies played in the background. Then we went out for 갈비 and 냉면 to celebrate HS’s finish with finals, and I know it’s such a tired theme, how lucky I am. What should I compare this to, my favorite pair of shoes?

Speaking of shoes: I went into Athlete’s Foot this morning to try to get a pair - I currently have NO shoes that protect me from the rain - and I asked the guy if he had my size in these shoes, and he was like, “Yes.” Silence. After an uncomfortable pause, one that went on far too long, I was like, “…Can I try them on?” Then he seemed to take it as a personal affront when they were too big. As it turns out, they’re for men. Who knew? (Not Korea. Take that, gender stereotypes!)

Now I have a personal statement to finish - I have, rather suddenly, decided to apply to what the Koreans call 대학윈 now that TFANY is out of the picture. I’m applying to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which is quite a long shot, but it’s also the only program I’m pretty sure I’d attend sight unseen. I don’t know if I’ll get in this year or not - if I don’t, I’ll just apply next year, although getting in this year would be pretty much unbelievable. It’s so terrifying to think that This Is What You’re Going To Do With Your Life, but as Miguk Oma (in her infinite wisdom) pointed out, one has to make some sort of choice at some point. And as the life of Miguk Apa has proven, you don’t have to stick with it.

In two weeks I’ll be home. But the days here feel so bright sometimes.

Finally, someone found my blog by searching for “burnt toast poem,” and I feel obliged to provide.

Eating burnt toast or kimchi -

The decision seems easy to me.

Beautiful it is not,

But toast don’t smell like rot.

I sure hope that this breakfast is free.

I’ll be here all week, kids.

Today IGR Recommends: The Snowman, and concurrently, bittorrenting. I cannot actually share a copy due to filesize, but I can direct you to Azureus, and from there recommend that you Google “the snowman” + torrent. And realize just what has been missing in your life all these years.

*I do not make such statements lightly.

“You are beautiful girl! I am luxury guy!”

- a third-grader (read: ninth-grader) tries to seduce me in the hallway

1M (boys) - movie reviews, part 1

• WotD: cinema/quiz: fun/funny
• didn’t get to clip (mostly due to poor time org on my part)
• were they worse than average or do I just feel bad today?
• The Cutest Student Ever’s boyfriend sits in the front row, is also great

2E (girls) - movie reviews, part 1

• not particularly high-level but we got through the lesson in good time
• how can I revise this to cover all the material, make it less of me talking, and get it done in 45 minutes?
• realization: I have been wearing my skirt backwards for the past three hours

One would think that, being suddenly forced to find a new future, going back to bed would not be the ideal course. And it’s not. But aside from the fact that TFANY is gone, I do have a small but nasty cold, and I did have three hours this afternoon that I was supposed to use to go suit shopping with Scooter. I bailed, feeling congested and exhausted, although the truth is that I felt worse for myself than I did skipping out on him.

So this afternoon, instead of doing something productive, I dreamed that I was working at Starbucks. It was exactly like working at Hollister. One of the girls I used to work with was even there, and, in a side plot, was also volunteering with the Fresh Air Fund. I got made some sort of manager within, I don’t know, three days, but no one would tell me how to do anything, so I just hung out in the back all day. I was a manager and I didn’t even know how to work the machines. I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor for the fact that I’m afraid of being a fraud, of taking on responsibility that I’ve convinced people I’m equipped to handle without actually being qualified. Or it might be a commentary on how many times a week I go to Hollys and Tom and Toms. Tossup, really.

But – in the spirit of celebrating small victories – I slept this afternoon because I was sick, not because I was sad. Unlike the marathon, escapist sleeping sessions of days of yore, I slept today not because I didn’t want to deal with the stress of being awake, but because my head felt like a balloon filled with aerated mucus. Which is unpleasant, but the lesser of two evils, for sure.

I’ve been browsing jobs on idealist.org but, dishearteningly, have no experience with dairy cows or Swahili, which means that a lot of opportunities are out. Hallim’s coming in to town tonight and host fam is taking us out to dinner and to the jjimjilbang, where we can talk about this situation and help me find some method of living productively as we sit in the scented tubs and get pointed at. Congested or not, it’s still a good life.

The time between meeting and finally leaving is sometimes called falling in love

- Lisa Loeb

Yeah, I quoted Lisa Loeb. You want to make something of it?

2L (boys) movie reviews, part 1

• okay for the most part but loud
• got through everything

2M (boys) movie reviews, part 1

• usually lower-level kids seemed interested
• except for that kid in the back who kept asking why he had to do it
  • I thought I made real progress with him but maybe not?
    • although he is obv smart because when he wrote “fuck” on his paper and I yelled at him he told me that it was just a joke, and that maybe it was bad in America, but “I am Korean”

1J (boys) - personal ads, part 2

• TOTALLY redeemed themselves today
• v. participatory
• titles: “‘Who Likes ‘Muhan Dojeon’?”
• Malcolm X is my favorite kid ever
  • ad title: “I Am Seeking My Future Wife”

1K (boys) - personal ads, part 2

• as usual, not as adorable as the class before them, but reasonably well behaved
• made The Smartass hold his hands above his head
  • should have been a desk, but he claimed to have some sort of rib injury (?)

Malcolm X is fat - not obese, but unquestionably fat - and he has Malcolm X-style glasses, hence the name, and he has the sort of permanently disgruntled look that only the fat kid can possess. I wish I could put his roster mugshot on here; he’s looking at the camera as though he’s asking it, Are you serious? But his English is amazing and he, himself, is pretty great. Today I let him rent a pen - the pen costs a shoe, which they get at the end of class when they return my pen to me - and he managed to finagle another one shortly afterwards and kept demanding his shoe back. When I forgot, he yelled, “Teacher! MY FOOT IS LONELY!”

The Smartass, on the other hand, is whom I suspect to be the ringleader of this whole groping Thing. For his level and his age, he speaks English pretty well as well - and I have so few of those students, maybe fifty of my thousand, that I’m loath to alienate any of them - but he’s become the leader of this gang of maybe four boys in the class, all of whom need him in some way; he’s already hit puberty, obviously, and he’s reasonably tall and good-looking, and the other boys who circulate around him are, in order, incredibly short, a little chubby, and…obviously forgettable, because I can’t remember exactly what his thing was. At any rate, they tend to talk about sex a lot and ask really inappropriate questions, which I ignore, because I don’t want to encourage them, but what I thought might have been a groping incident happened with one of those boys a few weeks ago. I’ve seen him around my classroom when I’m not generally there, e.g. at lunch, and I’ve seen him try to get in through the window too, so I suspect him - or someone associated with him - with the vandalism I’ve dealt with, too, but I can’t prove anything. The major thing I hate about him is that he’s a terrible influence on kids who might otherwise be decent human beings. Plus, you know, he could be one of my best students if he weren’t one of my worst.

So. Progress on a few things my loyal-est readers will have followed: TFANY is almost surely out. I talked to The Program today about what would happen if I terminated early, aside from the fact that I’d have to buy my own ticket home, and the answer was that I would no longer be able to claim any association with The Program at all. Ever. Which is problematic in that I’m depending on The Program to help me get into grad school, and also psychologically demoralizing in that my entire year would be annulled. If that was what I wanted, I would just have done TFA in the first place. I’m trying to see it as liberating, but really, honestly, right now I’m just depressed. Because even after the fact that I have to lock my classroom, that a few of my students see me less as a teacher and more as the object of some sick game, I still wanted to be part of TFA. And I know there are other things I can do, and that I should probably cultivate my interest in things besides education so I get a wide range of experience before I figure out on which area of development I want to focus. This is, however, a dream I’ve had since the age of sixteen - and, honestly, much longer. I’ve only wanted to do TFA since the age of sixteen; I’ve wanted to teach kids who needed teachers since (and this is rather embarrassing) I read the condensed version of My Posse Don’t Do Homework in my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest. See, my life is almost unbelievable, but not in the entertaining way, more in the are-you-SERIOUS-that’s-really-dumb kind of way.

So there’s that, and the aftermath of yesterday’s incident - ACT is horrified, as I believe I mentioned, and held a powwow with the other teachers today about teaching the other kids about respecting women and the fact that, if you’ll pardon me, I AM THEIR FUCKING TEACHER. The student in question continues to insist that he did nothing, that it was a “mistake,” which I am absolutely positive is not true. This was not a misunderstanding. I am still so angry, so appalled, and more so that he can sit there and say that it didn’t happen, that he can lie with such sincerity. Miguk Oma suggests taking that kid out of my class, and I’m starting to think that it’s not a bad idea, but I am also about 98% sure that it is not just him. Honestly, I don’t entirely know what to do.

But then there are moments of such unbelievable delight - I LOVE Malcolm X. I love being bowed to by one of my most disrespectful students. I love how my students scream my name in the halls. Today I gave Canada a copy of one of my favorite YA novels, The Westing Game, to read instead of doing classwork, and she was so excited. And one of my students from PopSong - who also, of course, happens to be in 1J - turned in a personal ad describing himself as a “just student.” I love him so much; he is the kind of boy whom you just know loves his mother, and she him. He will be teased by his friends for being “the sweet one” long into his twenties. AND I received this personal ad from another student, which I sort of promise is the last one I’ll ever offer:

I am a 1. dark and bright, 2. don’t need glasses and 3. kind person. I like 8. warm 9. sleep and 10. friend. I have 6. brown eyes and 7. short hair. I am as attractive as water. I am 155~ cm tall. If so, please send me an email at 15. you look like happy.

This has nothing to do with mistranslation and everything to do with the fact that a magical alien has apparently landed on my doorstep.

I met with Soccer at Zini Book tonight to finish writing our grant for the after-school program. We talked, as always, about how it is with emptiness and changing love, and the unchanging (thanks, Coleman Barks). Also about Jeremy Piven. With all the stress I’m dealing with right now, there are other shifts in my relationships here that make me afraid I’m going to lose the state of affairs with which I am very happy - but surfaces change, and I can’t do anything about that. And I know that no matter how ruffled the water on the surface becomes, the floor of it remains the same. But it’s hard not to flail out in fear, and also hard not to get more specific, so I’ll leave it at that.

We also talked about the island and the year, and how we’re all here together for a short period of time before we get thrown apart again. But that’s how it is with everything, right.

I would recommend something, but my congestion is making me lightheaded, so maybe not tonight.