Once, when I was seven or so, I caught my grandmother trying to escape. She was living with us for the time being, maybe just visiting, and I came into the living room one day to find her sitting on the floor, surrounded by my sister’s toys, speaking entirely and rapidly in French on the phone. Afterwards she told me she was going to the airport. When I told my father he started grilling me: what did she say? Who was she meeting? What transpired over the course of that conversation? She said something about a friend, I told him. I don’t remember what happened after that, but she didn’t leave, at least not then.
Once upon a time there was a nice bourgeois Vietnamese girl who would grow up to run her own businesses and become a compulsive gambler and eventually conscript my younger brother into bringing her Newman-Os every day at three o’clock, at least during her visit. My father met my mother because he moved to Pensacola a year before she did, because his mother wanted to take advantage of the influx of boat people and start a shrimping outfit based on cheap labor. Now my grandmother is old, not as old as she looks and acts but old nonetheless, and she speaks in a strange and unique patois of English and French and Vietnamese and she can’t move around without a walker. My father and his siblings cleaned out the last apartment she lived in and found, among other things, two mandolins. She lived with my father’s youngest brother for a while after that before she decided to move out again. Now she has a boyfriend.
All of this happened when I was gone. I learned about it because Mr. Bing - it’s a nickname, his last name is Crosby - called our house tonight. The happy couple wants to visit, which is unfortunate, because no one is here but my brother and I. All sorts of things happen when you disappear for a year. Now I am learning my way around America again, and having everyone around me allude to the things that I missed. Apparently Feist’s “1234″ was also used in an iPod commercial. Apparently my dog has learned how to use the back stairs now and my friends created a fictional morning show called “Good Morning, Topeka!”
The band Rachel’s comes from Louisville. I had no idea. I didn’t know about Will Oldham, either. This news brings me both pride and nostalgia for what is more or less my hometown. (Although it is not where I live now. That’s somewhere else.)
The speed with which pinkeye is spreading through My School is both staggering and disgusting. While the most significant outbreak occurred last week, and I thought we had maybe eradicated it, two second graders came up to me yesterday and pointed to their eyes with an expression that can only be described as delight. I haven’t worn contacts for a month because I can think of about fifteen things I would rather do with my time than get an eye disease. Ew. (I am also avoiding touching my students, which is difficult, as they seem to want to constantly high-five me.)
This week I taught a lesson borrowed from a Program kid in Gyeongju that was based off Korea’s own national treasure, Muhan Dojeon, a show which translates to “Infinite Challenge” and bears the unique honor of being Soccer’s second favorite television show, after Mary Tyler Moore. I was anticipating the lesson being - well, if not infinitely challenging, then challenging enough - but much to my surprise, some of my worst classes have taken to acting it out quite well. Some of the others prefer screaming. Whatever floats your boat.
I’m still trying to get all my job applications done, specifically the AmeriCorps application, which I have filled out, in whole or in part, no less than seven times, only to have their computers keep eating it. Do you think they’re trying to tell me something? I alternate between feeling like I’m surviving and like I’m thriving. Some days the mosquito trap in my room works, and other days I come home to find that not only has HM unplugged it, but she has also let bananas rot to the point that small fruit flies have taken over the kitchen.
*I would like to state for the record that I do not think hanbok are flattering. I just don’t. They’re neat-looking, and they can be pretty in and of themselves, but the fact that this modernist take on it still doesn’t work is a testimony to the garment’s innate inability to flatter. Not that I’m biased or anything, but I feel pretty strongly that the garment of my people is both more attractive and less baggy.
In which we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming of constant complaining about all the stress in my life and examine a few things that I really, really love. It’s a special Super Size version of IGR Recommends.
When we were in Japan, I discovered a heretofore unknown fact about Soccer: given any iteration of the game “Would You Rather,” wherein one option is anything in the world and the other option involves Billy Crystal, she will always choose the one featuring Billy Crystal. This is a rule I like to think of as “Soccer’s Law.” At first I thought she was crazy. I’m not going to say that I suddenly had some sort of epiphany about my feelings towards Billy Crystal - they still remain in the indifferent-to-occasionally-annoying range - but I do, now, understand where she’s coming from.
I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull* with some of the Jeju crew and Co-Teacher D, and I was trying to explain to CTD how adorable I find Shia LaBeouf and why. As it happens, I had also been discussing my love of the show “Cupid” with Oregon and Arkansas earlier, which is another relatively obscure thing about which I am passionate. I’ve also been listening to more Korean psychedelia lately. These three seemingly unrelated occurrences helped me to realize that I, too, have a lot of things I don’t necessarily think are the best in the world, but, given the option, will always choose for whatever reason. These strange little obsessions are itemized for the first time here.
Note: the following list doesn’t include obvious concepts like “favorite artist,” and it’s not comprehensive. Also, most of these do not reflect very well on me.
Note 2: if you have known me for longer than six months, you have probably heard me talk about at least one of these.
Note 3: My sister shares a lot of these. I’m not sure why.
1. “Sesame Street”
I love “Sesame Street.” I have always loved “Sesame Street,” and I probably always will. It still makes me laugh, and not in the “oh that’s so cute way,” more in the “Grover why did you bring out a grapefruit on a hot dog bun” kind of way. I love that it doesn’t talk down to kids, that it features characters who aren’t always sugary sweet to each other, that it takes on Hemingway and Hitchcock. If I create something with as wide an impact - if I even created something nearly as entertaining - I will be very, very proud.
Arrivederci, frog.
2. Shia LaBeouf
When I was in high school, I used to watch “Even Stevens” with my sister specifically for the purpose of seeing Shia LaBeouf. If “Even Stevens” was interrupted by “Lizzie McGuire,” I would complain loudly until that Hilary Duff monstrosity had ended and “Even Stevens” was back on again.
I totally want to hang out with him. I think he is absolutely adorable. I thought so when I thought he was like six years younger than me and he seemed to be the kind of kid I would have loved if he were my age, and I think so now that I realize that he is, in fact, my age. I like the fact that he broke into the movie business in an unconventional way and that he chooses a wide variety of movies. Also, he seems to have trouble with women, which if you know me at ALL you will realize that this, to me, makes him even more endearing. I would date him as well as hang out with him. Just saying.
3. Korean psychedelia/folk
I bought an album by Shin Jung Hyeon yesterday and it’s really good. I also want to listen to more Kim Jung Mi. I can’t believe I didn’t know about this stuff before. Don’t get me wrong, I still like Big Bang okay, but this is a total scene that apparently disappeared and was replaced by NOTHING.
4. My Co-Teacher, ACT
ACT is the most awesome woman on the planet. She hugs me and listens to me rant about things she can’t do anything about. Right now she is in Seoul protesting the Lee Myung Bak administration. I asked her what they were going to do in the demonstration and she said, “Shouting.”
No one ever knows who Jeremy Piven is. Which is too bad, because I love Jeremy Piven. I have loved him ever since I watched “Ellen” with my mother when I was in elementary school. I loved him in “Cupid” (see below), and I love him in “Entourage.” (Note: this is a key distinction between the items on this list and actual normal things I find attractive. Adrian Grenier is much, much more attractive than Jeremy Piven. I realize this. I find Adrian Grenier incredibly beautiful. But I would not necessarily go see a terrible movie featuring Adrian Grenier. I would do this for Jeremy Piven.) I think that I associate him in part with this sort of nostalgia for the mid-90s, when I was first starting to imagine myself as something more than what I was then, and the media I consumed featured adults living these lives that were possibilities for me. Also, I watched these things with my parents, and that was fun.
7. “Cupid”
“Cupid” was canceled prematurely. “Cupid” is one of the cutest shows ever, and I mean that in the most positive possible way. Jeremy Piven played this guy who was convinced he was Cupid, and Paula Marshall played this psychiatrist who was convinced he wasn’t and that love was all about science, and they wrestled with it as he tried to hook up every single person in the city, and I was twelve and really wanted to fall in love. Theme song by the Pretenders, which added to the awesome, as I also wanted to be tough like Chrissie Hynde.
8. My father’s boss and his wife
They ply us with delicious baked goods and have really adorable Nova Scotian accents. They are older and, we are sure, make wonderful grandparents. Cute dogs round out the package.
Highly recommended. Totally different from the movie, as previously discussed.
11. Blessid Union of Souls
Again from the mid-90s. Lyrically terrible and incredibly catchy.
12. Men’s style magazines
Esquire and Details feature authors I actually like reading outside of magazines (ex. Chuck Klosterman, Nick Hornby). They also write as though they are speaking to an audience older than tenth grade. While I’m not a fan of the way the dating articles occasionally veer into misogyny, they are far more entertaining than their female counterparts. The only comparable women’s mag would probably be Jane, but Jane was a) a little full of itself, b) targeted towards women who wanted to make it known that they read Jane, and c) halted sometime last year, which means I can no longer subscribe.
13. Reusing and making stuff
My father is a pack rat. So am I. He and my mother are also both bargain hunters, a trait I have inherited. Also, I have always liked making things, as my mother can attest, when she used to take me to the craft store as a treat. As a result, my rooms wherever I live are always cluttered with projects in process.
14. Social marketing
I did my thesis on this. I love good marketing. I’d rather be convinced than preached at.
15. Thomas Haden Church
There was a summer when I was moving and everything I owned was in a box, which meant that the only thing I had available as entertainment was USAm, the USA network’s feeble attempt to recycle old programming for the unemployed. I got really into “Ned and Stacey.”
Look at those crazy antics!
I actually think that “Ned and Stacey” was a good show for what it was - the writing may not have been top-notch, but Debra Messing is kind of endearing. More importantly, Thomas Haden Church is both full of himself and completely unashamed of being crazy, which seems to be the role he fits in the best. (Also, I’m a fan of mid-90s sitcoms that weren’t very good. Don’t even ask me about Caroline in the City.)
My sister understands this, as she watched a lot of Nick at Nite during this time and went through a similar phase with “Wings.” We also both enjoyed “Sideways.” Thomas Haden Church seems to be crazy in the same way we are, which is to say that I suspect that if we played “Would You Rather” with him long enough, we would find his Billy Crystal, so to speak. And isn’t someone we can play such games with what we all want, in the end?
*SPOILER: I briefly entertained the notion that the UFO was there, and looked incredibly cliche, as a sort of tribute to these sci-fi movies of the time period when IJ is set, but Oregon disagrees with me here, and I think she might be right. It’s difficult for me to say, anyway, because I’ve never seen the rest of the movies (don’t start on me). Also, CTE is lots of fun.
Because they are delicious and very expensive in Korea. Americans, appreciate your bounty. Meanwhile, I will keep eating my secret stash, hidden in my room.
February 1, 2008, 1:16 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
(Sorry.)Having finished with my exploitation of developing economies for now (who knew prostitutes and heroin could be so cheap?), I’m writing from someone else’s computer on a US military base, a weird slice of suburbia in the middle of Itaewon GROSS GROSS. I went to the grocery store/commissary down the street today and was pretty embarrassed at how excited I was. Interestingly: also realized that I now talk as though no one around me can understand, which is a habit I need to break very, very quickly.Internship starts Monday - jumped through bureaucratic hoops today and that was pretty much it. Now I’m sitting with Soccer, who is half asleep on the couch and sick and miserable. I don’t even know what to make of my surroundings. But I do know that internet access is limited, so I will be a lot more productive. I hope. One of my new roommates is writing a book. What am I doing? GOALS, FEBRUARY
write at least one essay for Program literary magazine
read at least five new books (and review them on goodreads)
finally make decision re: presidential candidates (side note: an Obama/McCain race? Can we make it happen?)
make bread in oven of lovely large house where I now live HA HA HA KOREA
find more jobs to apply to in likely possibility grad school thing does not work
January 30, 2008, 3:13 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
The computer in the airport only accepts 10 baht coins, and will only allow Internet usage in ten minute increments, and (most irritatingly) does NOT have a displayed USB port, which means I cannot charge my poor, ailing iPod. But I still have forty-five minutes before my flight leaves, thanks to a delay that I’m starting to learn is a pattern for AirAsia. That, and people shoving each other to get onto the plane.
I spent a ridiculous amount on myself in Thailand. And other people, too, but a lot on me - not really by the standards of the people with whom I live, but certainly by the standards of the people with whom I was living. Being here has caused me to seriously consider my choice of career field; I had a long talk with Hallim last night in which she posited the exact argument that I’ve always given - i.e. that development issues aren’t unique to the developing world, that “help” often equals “ideological imposition,” that no one necessarily knows what the consequences of our actions will be, and I found myself in the unique position of having to explain my chosen field of study and work in a way that wouldn’t contradict that framework. Because I agree with her. And yet this is still what I want to do, especially after being here, realizing that I spend more on myself in six months than most of the people I’ve met in the past five days spend on themselves in a year.
This is what I tell myself: There is problem after problem, everywhere in the world. I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, and I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do. But I do want to be offered as many options as possible, and I think everyone has the right to know about all of the choices available to them. I want to create options: maybe in education, maybe in economic development, maybe in public health, maybe for press freedom, maybe in all of them. I know that there are issues in my own country, and I want those to be fixed too, but personally, I want to work with the so-called “developing world,” not because I feel pity, not because I think that we’re all necessarily so much better off, but simply because that is what I want to do and I’ll do something better if I want to do it.
We met elephants who were fed only soda and sweets until they were sent to the two charity elephant hospitals in Chiang Mai. We also met people from the hospitals who explained how the two hospitals are feuding, and how each one believes that it’s better than the other. Since I was little, I’ve always been made so easily sad. I want to stop being sad. So here we are. Thank you, Thailand.
January 26, 2008, 1:33 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
Questions/comments about me in Singapore and Thailand, to date:
“Malay face, see, she have Malay face”
“Indian girl?”
“Parlez-vous chinoise?”
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Yo, our guide, learned all of her English from Da Ali G Show. Also, her actual name bears no resemblance to the word Yo. She did, however, guide us to Sukhothai through a combination of train and songthaew, or “truck with some benches in the back.”
HALLIM What’s a songthaew?
IGR You sit in the back of a pickup truck. Like Kentucky.
HALLIM Oh, that’s not even special.
Then she took us to a place where some masseuses on off duty from hospital gave us hour and a half long Thai massages for approx. $6 USD. Dinner - apparently pad thai is a Sukhothai specialty - was 25 baht, which is less than a dollar. Tomorrow: bike riding around temples, more deciphering of guide speak.
January 25, 2008, 1:39 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
My pen-and-paper journal is in the hotel down the street, which makes recalling everything we did a little difficult, simply because we happened to do so much.
TUESDAY
Saw the Merlion, Singapore’s own mythical creature (half lion, half fish, invented in the 1960s), in person; Merlion appeared to be spitting. Got Hallim lost trying to find Lau Pa Sat hawker stand, but am/was not repentant, because I had the best char kway teow and fried carrot cake. (Neither carrot nor cake. Discuss?) Then her friend took us over to Little India, where they happened to be celebrating Thaipusam, a southern Hindu festival that involves piercing of the skin with hooks and rods. Like, lots of them. The men who did this supposedly were doing it to obtain the fulfillment of some sort of wish or desire, and they had to parade down the street with these three-foot-tall headdresses bedecked with feathers and, in at least one case, flashing lights. We got mehndi on our hands (8 SGD) and ate papri chaat and pani puri and gulab jamun and Slurpees and got shoved into this crowd of people so dense it seemed that we should all introduce ourselves, since we were sharing sweat, etc. After we made it back we got locked out of her friend’s apartment, so we ended up sitting in the living room of his neighbors, who were adorable and young and who want to visit Jeju. Then he came back and we bought bottles of Tiger and drank them on the playground outside the building.
WEDNESDAY
Lunch at the Queenstown MRT station: prata (Indian fried bread), duck rice, rojak (fruit salad with some sort of peanut-chili-fish sauce dressing and fried crullers - it tasted much better than it sounds). Then we went to Haw Par Villa, which compares favorably with the weirdest things I’ve seen in Jeju - I can hear Soccer now saying, “That’s not possible,” but oh, friends, it is. The backstory behind Haw Par, for those of you who didn’t grow up reading your family’s travel magazines, is that the Burmese brothers who made Tiger Balm decided to use their wealth to create a theme park that would educate the public about Chinese mythology. To that end, there are sections like “The Ten Stages of Hell,” which details in vivid diorama form the various punishments for specific crimes, and various outdoor sculptures showing things like marauding monkeys and a man being rescued by a giant turtle. Total price: free, except for the Hell exhibit, which cost 1 SGD, maybe 80 cents American. Then we went to Chinatown for the night market and ate dim sum, came back, went out to some swank hotel bar with Hallim’s friend and some of his friends, came back, and drunk ate more roti prata.
THURSDAY
Phuket is phenomenal. Enough to merit such alliteration, anyway. Thanks to the good graces of Hallim’s momma, who had accrued a number of Marriott points, we managed to stay in a hotel that was probably the nicest on the island, and, judging from the rest of the clientele, one I won’t be able to afford until I somehow become half of a middle-aged Australian couple. We swam in the warm, clear water. We slept on the sand. We ate Italian food - and yes, I know we are in Thailand, but I plan on eating nothing but Thai for the next week, and anyway we can’t get good Italian in Jeju. This morning we went out to the beach early and then ate banana pancakes.
FRIDAY
So here we are in Bangkok - we met our Intrepid tour guide, who goes by Yo (?), a couple of hours ago, and she took us to a Thai restaurant that was the best Thai food I have ever had, so I guess that bodes well. We spent most of the day in transit. AirAsia is cheap, but it is not efficient. Where we are now is a slightly dingy hotel in what Hallim describes as the Itaewon of Bangkok - but we leave for Sukhothai tomorrow, which should be a good deal nicer.
So that, loyal chingu, is all for now. More from the road.
Ways in which my performance over the past 48 hours was suboptimal:
Left phone charger in Louisville
Totally pooped out last night, was not particularly energetic party guest thanks to end of visit fatigue
Took shower for first time all trip
actually good in that I was clean, bad in that I hadn’t taken a shower in three days
drove home in snow due to late departure from Rooms and Rooms’ apartment
failed to email HS’ teacher to set up a time for school tour tomorrow, which is why I’m sort of hoping that the snow picks up
old laptop made me look really bad by coming home in suitcase, WORKING PERFECTLY
abysmal showing in Scrabble
At the turn of this new year, however, my hair has reached its ideal length for this cut, and I made some peanut butter cookies.
It doesn’t take a degree to observe that this year went a lot better than any other I’ve had. (Although I now have one. Which is part of what took this year up a notch.) I do not, however, see this as a mathematical limit, where my life approaches a finite amount of awesome. So I want to set some goals for 2008. I’m not sure how well I’ll follow them, but if they’re not there then I definitely won’t accomplish them. Or maybe anything.
update GoodReads more
I like GoodReads and I read a lot, there’s no reason not to do this
revive old projects
internet based and otherwise
blog more consistently
I thought about participating in NaNoBloYear, but aside from the fact that my stab at NaBloPoMo was a dismal failure, aside from the fact that posting every day might foster an unhealthy narcissism and assumes that I live a really interesting life, I might not be near a computer every day
listen to more music
read one poem every day
try to email someone at least once a week
generally be better correspondent, but this is feasible and definite
take better care of money, give it the sort of love that will make it want to stay with me
spend it on stuff like traveling and not stuff like clothes at AZ Plus
