For someone who’s inordinately proud of his ‘random footsore dogsh-t wanderings’ around the planet, I find it a little distressing in light of my advancing years and growing domesticity that of the 25 candidates here (almost 6 million people have voted on the choices, apparently) for the new 7 wonders of the world, I’ve only visited 8 so far:
You ever get that feeling when it’s like your brain is wrapped in wet towels? Dirty, warm, wet towels? Where you start a sentence, then trail off after a word or two because the expenditure of effort you predict will be necessary to actually complete it is way beyond what seems possible? Where ideas and plans, schemes and dreams, file in serried ranks through your mind, but it’s like watching a New Year’s Day parade while dozing on the sofa with a debilitating hangover and a sweaty scalp – the grandeur of it all is reduced to fuzzy snapshots, and you can’t seem to do much more than watch as they move slowly out of reach. You ever feel like what you have done isn’t all that sh-t hot, and what you’ve got planned will never come to fruition? Ever wish that some relatives would die, and leave you some goddamn money, so you could get off the treadmill, and then feel guilty about it? Have you ever gone a few days without bathing, ’cause sometimes you like the stank? Ever wish that you could actually focus your intellect on something worthwhile, but get pulled inevitably, irresistably, by the siren call of crap, and waste yet another day?
Ever piss and moan and whine in public, rather than get off your ass and actually do something?
Uhh, yeah. I have.
For BurningBird, in case she (or anyone else for that matter) decides to tour the Great White North this summer : some pictures from my folks’ fishing lodge at Tchentlo Lake – a fine place to enjoy a few delicious beverages.
Uh, and some fishing, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Edit : Borrowing very heavily indeed from thebluerobot, of course!
Time, at the end of the day, as a person’s most limited, unrenewable resource, is precious to me. Time to think, slowly, langorously, time to drink a bit when I feel like it and then enjoy the cushioned-by-clouds-of-cotton feeling the next day. Time to pay attention to what I do in my work, examine it, and find ways to do it better. Time to type self-absorbed crap like this into my blog, even.
Time that is not beholden to anyone, my own, privately-owned moments and hours and days and weeks, is one of the reasons I came back to Korea in August 2000. This week I’ve been presented with the opportunity to return to Australia again, to quadruple my salary back to what it was, get back into IT, work with some old friends, and lose all this glorious free time that I so enjoy. Wrestling with the decision is hurting my brain. Thanks I suppose to the (granted, reluctant) work-ethic of my stepfather, I do sometimes feel guilty about the months of paid holiday I enjoy in my current employment, and the four-day work-weeks. I can hear his ghostly voice saying in a loving but ungentle way – “You fink! Get off your ass and do something!”
I’m really not sure what to do, but this article (via rebeccablood) certainly helped me put my thoughts in order. It’s worth reading.
Update : Some interesting meta-commentary from Jonathon.
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…
I am sick. It’s terrifying being really sick, for someone who rarely is. Face of mortality and all that.
Just to keep my thousands of screaming fans (heh) happy, I’ll offer this update in the Korea Herald to a topic I wrote (badly) about in my WorldNewYork piece of a month or so ago.
I’m going back to bed.
Update :
Yesterday was a good day on the planet for me. I ate french fries for the first time in almost five months (found a fastfood joint only 4 subways stops away). I decided that I’m going to finally finish a book (it was the idea of finishing a novel that was blocking me. I’m going to write about Korea, non-fictionally, but in that inimitable smart-ass wonderchicken style – I can’t tell you more or I’d have to kill you – and the ideas are just pouring out of my head. I’m very excited about it.) I got some kind, positive feedback on my stuff here (thanks, Shelley). I woke up this morning to find an email from a publisher requesting use of some of my yammering at Metafilter for use in a book about online communities (take that, Basil Boy!)
A nice way to roll into the weekend. The keyboard will be smoking over the next few days, I hope.
Comments?
Feh. I’ve been thinking about why I’m doing this lately, and I’m not sure if it’s worth continuing. It’s all a wank at the end of the day, isn’t it?
Ah well. In the meantime, I’ll note that the signs in all the subway stations (at least out here in the boondocks) that said “Seoul Thorough” (which I mentioned in passing a while ago) have all been taken down and fixed or replaced. They now say “Seoul”. Score one for the anti-Konglish brigades! The world is slightly less amusing, perhaps, but also slightly less annoying. That’s not a bad thing.
Comments?
Lengthy hangover? Run down like the foreign dog that he is by a sleep-deprived taxidriver? Felled cedarlike by an especially nasty virus? Composing word by word the ultimate post that will drive women and wonderchicken-loving men to previously unreached heights of lexically-ecstatic mental fibrillations?
Nah. Fightin’ with the Mrs.
This is a post that’s explicitly about me, rather than my take on something, which I try to avoid here. Apologies. Ignore it if you wish.
So here it is. Another arbitrary milestone, but sucker that I am, I find it hard to ignore those little markers beside the road, arbitrary or not. For me, 2001 was one of those years of reinventing myself, ones that seem to come in more or less three-year cycles. I decided that, for the moment at least, the IT industry was not where I wanted to be, even if Australia was.
Throwing heart and soul into a project that I believed deeply in and having it sh-tcanned because of arbitrary, ego-driven political bullsh-t (I will never forget it, Mr. Bastard, and when you least expect it I will leap from the cover of darkness and rip your f–king black heart out and feed it to you, still pulsing) gave me pause, and triggered some re-evaluation of what I need as core in my livelihood, to keep my sanity. I’ve always needed friendships (if at arms length, perhaps, and on my terms, arrogant control-freak that I am) to sustain me, coupled with plenty of time to sit alone and think and drink. The first was possible in Sydney, the second, not.
Serendipitously, this university teaching job came to my attention at almost precisely the same time that I was re-evaluating how rewarding (in any but a monetary sense) the IT work and my role at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com was to me, and precisely how much sh-t I’d have to eat to fit in with the new corporate regime. I’ve been called naive, and foolish, and perhaps I am, but teaching has always seemed to me to be a noble calling. In the right situation, a teacher, a good one, can see how they have done some measurable good in the world. It’s a lot harder to see that result in the software biz, particularly when the results of a year’s labour is a piece of ‘groupware’ which ends up getting shelved, anyway.
Happily, since I’m nothing if not skilled in uprooting myself and flinging my sorry ass halfway across the planet at the drop of a hat (and happily, since SK is cool with that), the move back to Korea wasn’t the potentially shattering thing it could have been. I made (and renewed) some good friends in Australia, and I hope we’ll go back, sometime. I took a 60% cut in my gross salary, and that is a price that I gladly pay to be free from feeling coerced to lick corporate ass, to have the time to write, and read, and think, and drink, to teach again, and have my efforts appreciated, and to give the woman I love a chance to live in her own country again. I’ve made (and renewed) some friendships here, and as ever, all my friends that I can keep in touch with through this amazing InTArWeb thing sustain me, every day.
2001 was a stressful year, as my Years of Reinvention always are, but I think there is a chance that I’ll be a better man because of the hard decisions I made. And at the end of the day, at the close of another year, that’s all I can really strive for.
Peace, friends.
Call me a fool for love…
It’s New Year’s Eve, and we are off to the Opera. That sounds mind-wobblingly odd to me, but such is life. Cho Su Mi, who is apparently Korea’s most famous diva, will be singing. Joining her on stage will be a friend/student, Chung Ho Yoon, who is Korea’s most promising up-and-coming young male tenor. It will be interesting, and a novel experience for me.
Gives me an excuse to wear that ridiculously expensive suit I bought last summer, too.
Since this will be my last post of the year, before we head into the first palindromic year of the millenium, I wish all who have visited and all who will visit my meagre efforts here a most happy, fulfilling and peaceful New Year (even the guy who crapped all over the comment thread from yesterday) .
Wish me a Happy New Year, or curse me, as you wish…
Sometimes I surprise myself. Still capable of coherent argument it would appear.
Nurse!
This post at MeFi has resulted in a request from a fairly high-profile webmag for an extended piece on the same subject. Bosco’s back in the writing biz! Who’d have thunk it?
I mirror it here, if you’re too lazy to click through.
Well, the sh-t has hit the fan, familially. SK got a call from her mother last night – her mother had tracked her down through Korea telecom, and let fly with pure fury due to (in order of fury-inducement potential) a) she’d not told her mother that she was back in the country yet (waiting for the right moment, kind of) b) she’d been ‘bending the truth’ about her singleness over the past few years and c) her man (that’d be me) wasn’t a Korean. I’ve been asking her for a long time now to tell them about us, but she always maintained it was best to wait. Her call, I figured. But some very evil and unpleasant things have been said. Regardless, we are standing firm.
It would seem that apparently her parents, despite the fact that they have never met me, are irate enough to put a bullet through my head. If I should suddenly fall silent here, you can be reasonably sure that they’ve hired a hitman.
I’m serious.
I’ll keep ya’ll updated.
At Sydney airport now, saw this kiosk and couldn’t resist, addict that I am. Ain’t the modern world just a groo-oovy place sometimes? I suppose if the plane goes down in flames this will be my last communication to the world, so I ought to make it profound and touching, leavened with whimsy and just a touch of the Boscovian misanthropy. But the hell with that – I haven’t had any coffee yet!
Just bought a book entitled “How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People”, rather than a guidebook for Korea. If anything is a flag for the changing way I approach wandering around the world, that’s it, at least for the moment, until I think of something better. Gotta fly (literally), so….Just in case this does end up being a final communique (you never know!) – well, love to you all. I guess that’s all that needs to be said.
The phrase of the week : “Busier’n’a three-peckered billy goat in a French whorehouse.”. I dunno how and when that particular phrase colonized my brain, but I’ve been dropping it constantly, to the occasional amusement and slightly more frequent consternation of the ‘How ya goin?’ brigade.
The house is in a complete shambles and that feels really strange. After a couple of uninterrupted years of relatively quiet, predictable domestic bliss, the feelings evoked by the chaos of moving are decidedly odd . Strange people in and out of the house, meals thrown together out of whatever’s around (the mock-Irish stew I cooked up for dinner was pretty fine, actually), the zooming around in a fashion not unlike the above-mentioned domestic animal, the 3 million details, the downright surly people that answer the phones and provide ‘customer service’ on this Big Dry Island….it all makes me feel pleasantly enervated, full of anticipation, and recalls a little bit the time in Cancun with Craig and his tribe, when there were a couple major things to take care of (food, schooling, etc for the kids) and pretty much everything was a lip-of-the-screaming abyss maelstrom of giddy randomness and substance abuse. Not that it was that much fun, most of the time, at least when I was sober, but I look back on it as an education about how one’s life can be completely out of control but still feel right.
Anyway, I kinda feel that now. Coupled with the tendency to worry overmuch about minutiae that the last two years at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet have taught me, and the domestic life has bedded down.
Packing sucks. So this is why I avoided owning things as long as possible…T-minus 4 days and we’re off to Korealand again.
Small realization last night as I drank with a couple of friends and a gaggle of miscellaneous drones from OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet what a square peg I was in that field of round holes… made a comment, not a particularly funny or clever one mind you, about how I’d been trying (no, not really) to give my ex-boss cancer with the Power of My Mind.
*crickets*
Good thing I didn’t go on to say that I was hoping her children would be raped by methedrine-crazed outlaw bikers. Imagine how that woulda gone over…
Sydney still and pissed as a newt at 2 a.m. : Came across this old old thing on my (’97 stylee!) GEOCITIES INTARNET WEBSIGHT and am gonna mirror it just ’cause I can. The text of the Korean bit goes thus (but please note that it’s sophomoric crap, pretty much, and talks about events that were current at the time. In the intervening years both nothing and everything has changed…) :
Sydney : Learning the intricacies of moving one’s hardearned shekels around the world. Never really had to worry too much before – never had enough money to justify doing anything more complicated than buying traveller’s checks, or converting it to $US and stuffing in in my jeans (or secret money-belt-pouch-holster thing, back when I was actually nervous after reading so many tales of pickpockets. The black money holster thing that I wore during most of my last circumnavigation was a particularly clever one, except for the minor fact that it hung directly under my right armpit, an unenviable position in the best of climates. By the time the second year on the road was underway, what was left of my original stash of travellers’ checks smelled in a way that money ought not to smell). This time, I’m learning about some services offered by members of the Korean community developed over the years to get around the Draconian laws in Korea with regard to the movement of currency. It’s easier these days, but still not as easy as it should be. Odd, given that until a couple of years ago, little was said about the absence of any requirement in Korea for a bank account to be held under your real name, that the flow of money in and out of Korea would be so tightly controlled. Part of the Hermit Kingdom mentality still, the xenophobia? Maybe. I’m off to get drunk now, and not in a mood to think it through any more. (And how many times have I said that in the last 20 years?)