Academic Freedom

All the real world examples of English for my ESL classroom are either clips from MSNBC or articles from the New York Times. Occasionally I let my students watch the Daily Show, but only if half of them remembered to wear their Che shirt that day. For my intermediate students I assign readings from Trotsky, Marx, Chomsky, and...I don't know, Al Franken? Earlier this week we were discussing health care reform in the second greatest country on the universe's best planet (Cuba is the first) when one student arrogantly raised his hand and asked about limiting principles in commerce clauses and whether they allowed for the existence of individual mandates. Foolish child, I said while slapping him, North Korea is a workers' paradise! He should have gone home after school and suppressed his talents for the good of our fellow comrades' self-esteem, but instead he enrolled in college just to join the Young Republicans.



Apparently the first thing he learned at orientation was where Obama was born, in Antarctica. They don't even issue birth certificates there. Tomorrow we are going to paint a mural of workers working so my students are too busy to listen to this apostate!

Runned in Place

Sometimes I think about the $1.50 + 60ish minutes it takes for me to get from one end of Seoul to the other and how that compares to the time and outright commitment required of someone living here 500 years ago to make the same journey. Then I think of the whole Amurkan thing and how much scurvy I would have had to endure just to get here in the first place, not to mention how irrelevant Amurka is to this whole scenario since this blog is full on whitey, so I suppose my voyage would have originated in Europe instead. But still, the scurvy.

Same same with ideas. Take for granted just how easy it is today to get on YouTube and demonstrate for the world exactly where your particular brand of ignorance is distributed along a bell curve, but not that long ago it would have required an absolutely fantastic imperative for you to undertake the task it truly is to distribute your ideas to the wider public.

Genuine appreciation isn't as tactile as it once was.

DMZ

Toured the DMZ with Obama today.



Was my first visit there. Is generally the first stop on the Soko tourist circuit but I just haven't seen the point in spending $100 and an entire Saturday watching people point guns at each other. Then again, the DMZ has a profound effect on the collective Korean psyche - How else do you explain ajummas? - so I've always thought I should make the pilgrimage in an attempt to better understand my hosts. Still, $100 and a dress code so took nearly three years and a friend to find some rando bike tour for only $10 to finally go.



Was kind of ridiculous riding past soldiers, trenches, and active lookout posts on a rented bike, but then again, 60 years of conscripting your tallest men to stand along the border because there's no better propaganda than nutrition and physical fitness is an entire brand of ridiculousness unto itself, so I guess the neon green singlets we had to wear made made the whole thing moot, not to mention how much easier we made it for any North Korean snipers to score a kill.

Since no one on the tour died we celebrated by going to the loneliest amusement park in the world.



Fun for the whole family, and only 14 meters from the heaviest fortified stretch of land in the universe!

#NAMFREE2012

Flew the colors for Namibia's 22nd Give Us Free Day.




Then went back to jamming my new favorite song from zee ol' adopted country.



Happy free to you and you. You too.

Divas

Released my new video just this morning and already 30,000,000 views on YouTube. The reason you can't find it is because you don't speak Korean. My girls have already started wearing sunglasses to school and will only return my calls through their publicists.

Teaser

Unleashing my video production skills on the world later this week. Hurrr's a taste:

kRony

Well, that or some whitey promising a small African boy he's going to save him AKA standard-issue prompt to feel bad about something else instead.

Won't assume you watched KONY2012 but if you did I'd say the most poignant moment - aside from the "if you can spare a couple bucks here and there oh haaaiiii we made $10 mil last year!!!" - comes as some poor kid begins to cry while talking about the brother he saw murdered not so long ago. Homeboy responds with:



Because of course, some rando vagrant filmmaker just passing through has the capacity to dictate what is and isn't okay to a young boy traumatized from his very recent experience as a child soldier. Whole lot of assumptions and biases to unpack in that little exchange.

Margarita Tour

Was that time of the year when I wander around aimlessly the same time my job deposits money directly into my account. Jammed Africa two years ago and SE Asia last year so obvs went looking this year for flights to India, or Columbia, or Turkey, or somewhere nice. Settled on...Detroit?

Took all of three days home before wishing I could work 16 hour days inside a sweatshop, but rather than looking for jobs at a deli I took some side trips instead. Ended up in New York, Vancouver, Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, all of which I'll tell you about since you've never been to any of those places, especially NYC since fully 33% of this blog readership is whom I was there visiting. Travel narrative begin!

NYC

I'd never been to NYC before and still wouldn't have had my best homegirl EVAR not moved there two months beforehand to be a financial mogul. We did all sorts of touristy stuff like go to Times Square:




Stroll through Central Park:




Watch a taping of the Daily Show:



And...fuck it, let's drink margaritas instead until one week later when I finally pulled myself out of the gutter to fly back to Detroit, on an airplane.

All in all a great time in the big city, at least until people Michigan side asked me about it. "Uh...I DID SO MANY THINGS!!!" For the realz, you know how hard it is to sit through yet another happy hour and resist the urge to tell the bartender, "No really, I have a job 14 time zones away. And yes you can too have a mustache and be considered a professional just pour me another drink I'm on holiday." Guess that last sentence began as a question, so: ?????


Vancouver

Was about here I decided to cast my travels as a margarita tour since that's all I really wanted to eat. Giules made a fabulous first round the Monday I was there but the second was a bit er since we ran out of limes and had to use limeade instead. Tuesday's margs were a bit off as well since Canada and all, so it's not like you can just pop over to the corner grocery when you run out of triple sec. Travel narrative, continued:

Went snowshoeing on some mountain whose name I know only because of Google Maps: Mt. Seymour. My professional wilderness opinion is that the hike was so pristine and silent that it felt more like a movie set than the great outdoors. I'd have written a poem about it all but I'm illiterate, nor do I own a pen. Well, that and time well spent with new friends I met in 2006...



...as well as catching up with old ones I met just that day.




Portland

Ordinary string of winter days in Pdx:



Rain, rain, rain, OMG SUNSHINE IT'S LIKE SPRING FOREVER LET'S HAVE A PICNIC MAKE SWEET UNICORN LOVE, rain, rain, etc.

Spent more time in the Pearl in just four days than I ever had in both my and all three of my grandfathers' entire lives, though okay because I was sleeping on my friend and his lady's couch. If I were that concerned about my faux-SE street cred then I would have slept under a bridge instead. Also okay because my Margarita Tour dovetailed nicely with friend and lady's own First Shot Fridays™, a ritual initiated to mark the start of the weekend after Lisa (the aforementioned lady) would fly to New Hampshire from Chicago but now a way to summon the courage needed to face down the niggling details of a fairy tale wedding. Basically, Friday night dinner at Cory's parents', who had a pitcher of margaritas at the ready without me ever having to have bothered them with: Yo brahhhhhs, I'm on this fake margarita tourrrrrrrrr!!!!

Some sad news: finally sold off Sasha. Felt all sad and the biz while watching her loaded into the back of a pickup, hog tied, and driven off into the dark horizon, but then I remembered the stack of hundies in my pocket and went back to a margaritin'. Zee ol' easy come, easy go, I suppose.


Los Angeles

People in LA are tall. I was at some rando concert in some rando venue with lots and lots of Portland-brand hipster folk, only California so somehow my full go hater vibe was jammed and I wanted to be everyone's friend instead, which meant I had to listen to the actual music rather than daydream about everyone there dying in head-on fixie collisions with other hipster cyclists, as I'm wont to do anywhere else but LA, apparently. Also, people in LA are even taller than the first time I said so. I noticed this as I was scanning the crowd while struggling to recalibrate my inner hate-age. I'm 175 cm (a nicer way of saying 5'9"), which is exactly average, meaning I should have been at the center of the height distribution scale. But of 300ish people there I only counted 11 shorter than me. Only four of those were midgets because the other six midges I counted were 5'10" or taller. Couldn't wait to go back to Seoul and play power forward on my basketball team.

Jammed with Homegirl de la Kindred Spirit while there. I landed on a Sunday evening, and since she had errands to run Monday we figured late brunch before she set fire to her to do list. But kindred spirit AKA an afternoon on Olvera Street pretending to be unemployed while drinking margaritas instead.



I actually ended joining her errand mission, at least the "go to the record store" and "jam the aforementioned concert" half of them. Since my 389,948 terabyte collection of music is more click-and-drag than any trawling through record stores, something I hadn't done since 1989, I had to navigate those first few moments in the store outside of my comfort zone. But while looking for somewhere safe to hide I accidentally tripped over the country music vinyl section and started digging. Tried flipping past this gem but...



...that hair, those eyes, that look. And don't even get me started on the shirt. I don't have any plans to actually listen to this album, but I do have plans to think about the time in 1979 when a photographer asked Bill Anderson for a come hither look and now my homegirl has to resist his advances every day because I bought it to display on her kitchen counter. I didn't quite have the dollar to cover the clearance price but I did have my credit card. And I don't mean to give away the ending but the reverse cover includes moments when the photographer told dooder to both look playful and to pretend he understands every women's lady fears.

The next day I collected sunburns on the beach and ate 13 burritos.


Chicago

Last stop on the Margarita Tour, but it wasn't until sitting here...



...that I remembered just how much I hated Chicago and changed my ticket back to Detroit from "eh, a couple days from now" to "OMG GET ME OUT OF THIS SHIT SHOW NOWWWWWWW!" Too bady the new itinerary meant a 7.30 am train departure after landing that time of life when State Street looks like this:



But still, Margarita Tour, so went looking for a friend to jam the 4 am closing time with me. Found one from back in the day, but I was coming from California so didn't have the two-hour Central Internal Time head start on too tired to live that she had. Got all the way to pancakes and...



...splat!

That marked the end of my Margarita Tour, though not necessarily the end of margaritas as long as I was in Detroit and could buy El Toro at the grocery for $12. Would have loved to continue this series in Koko but margaritas here cost $500 to just daydream about, so adieu until I'm in South America raving about my awesome tan.

K-atch Up

Not sure how fast K-pop moves but figured I was out of country long enough that I should go looking for a new jam. Was going to claim this as a summer anthem since it's so nice out today but have decided to relegate it to spring instead.