The First Glow; Father-in-Law

So... I promised to control myself, and only post the absolute best 416 pictures I've taken of babyseyo so far...

Nah, just kidding. Babies are beautiful, but many/most don't photograph well, because the cuteness isn't in a freeze frame, it's in the little squeaks, squirms, and mewlings, in the same way my friend from Busan, who is willowy, and graceful, and a stunner to meet in person, seems awkward in photos, because pictures don't show how graceful she is. He's usually wrapped up tight, but if you unwrap him, Babyseyo sprawls in every direction, and throws his arms as far up as they go. And it's not cute to take a picture of it or to tell it, but if it's your own kid, that little stuff is great.

Meanwhile, my in-laws came to town for a while. I've spent a few spells with my in-laws this year: first down in the south coast of Korea, Namhae and Yeosu, during parents' day weekend, where we traveled Korean-style, and tried to hit every well-known spot in the region in three days.

Here are perhaps the three best pictures:

We also went to Niagara Falls and Toronto with them for a week in July, and had a wonderful time. Here are perhaps the three best pictures from that trip.

(as you can see, I'm not wild about putting over-many pictures of my family members up on the blog... it's my blog, not theirs, so...)

 That gorgeous lady in the background there is my cousin, though. She's awesome.

Well, the Roboseyo and his In-Laws saga continues as Babyseyo polishes off his first week   (with a burp and a surprisingly rumble-y fart for his size, as usual).

An interesting feature of this week has been Roboseyo's occasion to hang out around the house with only Roboseyo's mom and dad-in-law around (read: nobody who speaks Englis to throw Roboseyo a rope). This has been a stretching but satisfying experience: there are times I bluff, or shrug and make the "blank face..." but I'm getting more and more, and finding myself able to say more and more, as time goes by. This is immensely satisfying: the light of understanding in my father-in-law's eyes is WAY better than sentence forms in a textbook, as study incentives/goals go.

Well, one thing we did in Canada was try out some Canadian beer, which my father-in-law liked a lot: his favorite was the Sleeman's Honey Brown Poposeyo had in his basement fridge, but we also tried a few brews near the distillery district in Toronto.  Hyangju has been encouraging me to take Popinlawseyo to my favorite neighborhood watering hole - a little place within walking distance of my house, that has a modest but extremely well-chosen selection of beers, including imports from Japan, Germany, America, Belgium, Canada, England and more. It's a great place, and the owners know me there, and sometimes stop by the table and chat. Most of my friends and connections who have met up with me in my neighborhood have been invited to meet me there. I'd put it on google maps, but instead I'll force you to invite me out to buy me a beer, to find out where it is.

So we went there and had some London Pride, some Samuel Adams, some Alley Kat, and some Anderson Valley microbrew.

Now, for old Roboseyo, the question is not how much can you drink, but how fast can you drink. Even back before my body made me pay more on Saturday than it was worth to get right sloshed on Friday night, I could drink a ton... as long as I got to choose my pace... and if I couldn't choose my pace, I'd probably end up barfing somewhere (and then getting back on the horse for more) or making a bad decision (and piling my sobbing self into a taxi).

With my friends, generally we get our chat on, and because I only invite very interesting people to drink with me, we usually have no problem filling up the spaces between sips with enough engaging conversation that the question of pace is pretty much moot. Not so with Popinlawoseyo, because my Korean chops, while improving, are not up to snuff yet, and Popinlawoseyo's English consists of about seven phrases (while Mominlawoseyo's English consists of saying "Why can't we just get popinlawoseyo to say it?" in Korean).

Meaning we were drinking at about triple our normal pace of consumption, simply because there wasn't a whole lot else to do. The liquid courage effect helped me to speak a little more as the tipple made me tipsy, but not enough to offset fifteen minutes a bottle, when my normal pace is forty or forty-five.

(proud grandpa)


I got home, and had a very funny conversation on the phone (in Korean, so that the in-laws could laugh along at my storytelling) with Wifeoseyo, and a playful broken chat with the inlaws, while teasing our two dogs (who have been quite lonely while Wifeoseyo is in the 조리원).

My in-laws are great people, and I love them. They do their best, they are learning to simplify for me (though the Daegu dialect still throws me sometimes), and even though they can't understand what I'm saying, I think they get me, and they see that Wifeoseyo and I pretty much love the hell out of each other.

Final side note: I love the simplicity of many Korean sayings and phrases: instead of some weird idiom like "He's good with babies" or something, the comment people were making, upon seeing me holding Babyseyo, was simply "애기 잘해" which might literally translate as "he babies well"

So... I'll be off babying. Everybody enjoy the fall colors, and see you again, soon.

Babyseyo! Babyseyo! Babyseyo!

Suddenly, Everything Has Changed - by The Flaming Lips. Press play. 

 Because suddenly everything has changed.




 







(lyrics to the song "Suddenly Everything Has Changed"):

Putting all the vegetables away
That you bought at the grocery store today
And it goes fast
You think of the past
Suddenly everything has changed

Driving home, the sky accelerates
And the clouds all form a geometric shape
And it goes fast
You think of the past
Suddenly everything has changed

Putting all the clothes you’ve washed away
And as you’re folding up the shirts you hesitate
Then it goes fast
You think of the past
And suddenly everything has changed

Random Weird Pictures

Been meaning to publish these for a long time... I took these pictures of a big poster in a subway station a long time ago, and still can't get over how suggestive they are. heh heh heh. problem is, with a photo like this, the jokes are way too easy, so I've got nothing to say. So... do you think APM did it on purpose? Rather... do you think they'd admit to doing it on purpose? and a couple of random "sand" konglish pictures for good measure.

World Mental Health Day: October 10

It's a few days late, but October 10, according to someone I love very much, was World Mental Health day. I'm not linking, because my friend wrote an intensely personal, private account of her own journey with mental health issues, that doesn't need a bunch of strangers reading it, but here's a quote she posted on her website that is germane to mental health issues anywhere, especially in Korea, where the stigma against mental illness is really strong:

The very reason these illnesses are so stigmatized is because no one shares their battle. No one who is "normal" (which I actually, even through all of this, think I am!) ever tells people, "Hey, I've battled that problem, and I'm okay! I have a kid, and a job, and a marriage, and guess what!? I am not going to lose ANY OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS by sharing the fact that the GABA, Norepinepherine, and Serotonin neurotransmitters in my brain are not properly hitting the synapses of my Cerebral Cortex.

Some people go through life with a limp, because of a sports injury. And nobody thinks anything less of them. It's a shame that those who go through life with a gimpy brain-chemical-regulator, rather than a gimpy ankle, are subject to so many fears, prejudices, and other general crappinesses in life. That's all for now. Rob

Making the Most of Korea's Festivals

It's festival season here in Korea, and while Korea's festivals are awesome, and one of my favorite things about the country, I have, at times, had a terrible time at a festival, because I didn't follow these simple rules. These rules are generally not unique to Korean festivals, but useful nonetheless.

You can find out which festivals are going on here.

Interspersed in this article are pictures from the "rape and cosmos festival" in Guri, near Seoul. That's rape and cosmos the flowers, not rape and cosmos as in Kobe Bryant and Carl Sagan.

1. Scout, Research, Plan, Reserve


These festivals don't always happen in one place, and if you zig, instead of zag, you might miss the best parts, and come away from a festival thinking "weak sauce" instead of "wowza."

The best thing is to go with someone who's been before - even better if it's someone who knows enough Korean to get around, read the schedule or (glory of glories) research it online in Korean (there's always more info in Korean than in English).

However, most festivals these days have websites... and even websites with (some manner of) English on them. Don't count on that -- the English part might not have been updated since 2008, but it can't hurt to try. Use Internet Explorer, and turn off your popup blocker.

Before you show up, have an idea of what you want to do, or at least the most important bases to touch. If you just show up and wander around, you're going to catch the butt end of the fun.

If you don't have a car, know the transportation available. Know the phone number for the local taxi company, and/or the tourist help number for that region. If you do have a car, know where parking is, and how far it is from the venues. Whenever you can, get a bead on the nearest bike rental place, and use bikes to get around. Bike rentals are available in many towns around Korea, and they're an awesome way to get around.

Make hotel reservations. Well ahead of time, if at all possible, or you might find yourself up a creek, knocking on lodging establishment doors at 2am, sleeping in an elevator in a jimjilbang (a friend even got turned away from the local jimjilbang, because it was all full up, once), or having to stay out all night. The smaller the town where the festival is located, the less likely they'll actually have enough hotel space to accommodate the entire festival crowd during peak times.

(in Guri, people were digging holes in the flowers to get those cute "face in the middle of flowers" pictures.)

2. Have your gear ready
The best way to have a terrible time at a Korean (or any) festival, is to show up empty-handed, only to discover everyone but you knew that the toilets wouldn't have tissues, or that water wouldn't be available on the premises, or that the nearest non-cotton-candy food was a 30 minute walk away, or that there was no. shade. anywhere., or that the cash machine you passed on the way out of the train station was the last chance for a 30 minute bus-ride in every direction, and they don't take cards here. Some festival locales are nearly barren the rest of the year - the cosmos festival is just a park for most of the year, with public park amenities, not major festival amenities, so some of these festival grounds won't be equipped for a whole lot.

To be prepared: bring these items:
-Enough cash to taxi around, and not need to visit an ATM.
-An extra layer (best of all if it is wind/waterproof, especially if it's a spring/autumn festival: the temperature really drops at night).
-Enough liquids to survive a sunny afternoon.
-A package of napkins that can double as toilet paper in a pinch.
-Trail mix, health bars, or something in case there's no food other than cotton candy and stale churros on site.
-Sun protection (I always bring a hat when I'm at a festival).
-A fold-out mat to sit on the ground

At the train or bus terminal, find a tourist information center, and get the map/brochure they're handing out. The person at the tourist information center might be the last person with (somewhat) competent English you come across, if your festival is in the countryside, and if the festival brochure has the word "Traditional" somewhere on the front page.

(I love taking pictures of people taking pictures. Don't know why. Silly photographer poses have got to be one of the reasons, though.)


3. Be Ready for Crowds, And Ready to Wait

One of my more recent "least favorite things about Korea" is that, while there's lots of cool stuff to see and do in Korea, anything that you can see or do that is even remotely seasonal (festivals with a time frame, natural phenomena that have a time limit, like spring blossoms or fall colors) is subject to an absolute rush of people wanting to enjoy that same ephemera, at the same time, as you.

So... there are tons of cool things to see and do... but you'll share most of them with a million other people also wishing to see or do the same things. This is especially acute for famous festivals, festivals near urban centers, and festivals celebrating seasonal things, (flowers blossoming, leaves changing, butterflies mating). So be ready to wait in line, to get jostled, to wade through crowds, and to nearly lose your travel buddies a few times. Be mentally prepared for it, too, because if you're expecting to get away from it all, but discover the "it all" you wanted to get away from is waiting for you at the festival site, the unexpected stress of crowds is a lot tougher to manage than the expected stress of crowds.

(A double rainbow pose! What does it mean?)


4. Have the Right Travel Partner


My mother-in-law likes to travel old-school Korean style: with a checklist and four destinations before lunch. I like to throw the plans out the window and spontaneously take a nap under a nice tree, because it's there. Be sure you're traveling with someone who has the same travel style.

(The classic "proposal" photographer's pose.)


5. Know Where to Be... and Know that Everybody Else will want to be there at the same time


Here's where a little research is handy. The highlights of the festival will be at certain times and certain places - the Andong Mask Festival's fireworks are something you'll remember for your whole life... if you know when and where they are.

The thing is, those other million people who came to the festival? They also want to be there for that, so be ready to show up at or near your vital locations enough ahead of time that you don't miss them while waiting for a bus that isn't packed like sardines. As I said: some of these places don't have the transit infrastructure to conveniently transport the full number of visitors, because the festival crowd is double the busiest day they ever have during the rest of the year. So be ready to move early, or by a different route than others take (if you know the area), or to fight and claw for a taxi.

My wife always teases me because she knows all the different types of flowers, and my flower vocabulary goes like this: "The pink one. The pale blue one."

I've had great times at festivals; I've also had horrible times at festivals in Korea, because wifeoseyo (girlfriendoseyo) and I were unprepared, or had faulty expectations, or under/overestimated distances, crowds, or prices. If you're cool with flying by the seat of your pants, do it, but at least know where you're sleeping, and where and when the bus leaves, or you might spend most of your trip wandering around aimlessly, trying to find a way out of a neighborhood where there's not much to do.

 and one sunset photo from a birthday party I went to on Friday.

Ha ha. Here's a fun one: I'm so Korean...

You know "yo mama jokes" that start with "Yo mama's so [adjective]"? Well at my buddy Yujin's blog, somebody left a comment, "I'm so Korean, my genealogy's all in Hangul, even before Hangul was invented." and then a few more you can see here: "I’m so Korean, our family kimchi recipe includes the line “bury and age for 500 years” "I’m so Korean, when somebody breaks into my house, I sigh and think 'Whatever. It’s happened 5000 times before'.'" and so forth. So, readers, what's your best "I'm so Korean..." boast? Put them in the comments. Winner gets a toaster! I'll start things out... "I'm so Korean, my side dishes have side dishes." "I'm so Korean, if I see a tiger in the wild, I offer it a pipe." "I'm so Korean, my mother-in-law asks ME for my dwenjang-jigae recipe."

Kpop Can't Take Over America. Neither Can Anybody

SeoulBeats has an interesting article that got facebook-posted and twitter'd at me all day today:

It discusses the way Kpop has been facing an increased demand in different countries of the world... a topic sure to get the we'll-repost-every-Korea-article-from-any-foreign-news-source Korea Promotion-type people all hot and bothered.

As you can see from these four videos, K-pop has swept the entire world and every human on the planet now loves Dongbangshinki and Shinee and 2NE1 and Girls' Generation.
Sydney


France


Peru


and Geneva


and the crowds are no longer just overseas Koreans. See that white girl in the corner of the Geneva video? The one who doesn't really know the dance?

But sarcasm aside, the article brings up some of the usual complaints about the way often the management companies themselves are bunging up the delivery of a great product ...

and K-pop is a great product. It's not art (though there are Korean musical artists to be found if you know where to look) but as performance goes, it's a highly polished act that they've nearly got down to a science. Actually, down to a business model is probably the more apt phrase.

The article also suggests that these days, thanks to YouTube and stuff like that, K-pop has found enough overseas fans that they don't need to try to "convert the masses" the way JYP tried to do, booking The Wonder Girls with the Jonas Brothers: Kpop already has fans in all kinds of places, and they'll do a great job of selling out all kinds of venues... so long as their bookings are in keeping with the size of the fan community in their target cities (but who are we kidding? Ambition will win out. Wembley Stadium cancellation, here we come).

Some people might be a little disappointed if Kpop chooses to cater to that smaller niche, rather than aiming to hit the mainstream...

I'm not. And you know why?

Barenaked Ladies. That's why. And no, that's not a reference to the new look I hope SNSD takes on.

Barenaked Ladies (or BNL) is famous for that one song that gets stuck in your head. The chickity china one. You know it. They've had a handful of hit singles in America. That one catchy song was in 1999. What many people don't know is that in Canada, they first broke out in 1993, with this song:



They got some measure of success in Canada, but to get big in the USA, they toured, hard for a long time. Basically, from 1993 until 1999 when "One Week" broke through, they were releasing albums and achieving slowly increasing levels of fame around the USA, so that by the time the did have a radio hit, they also had a polished act, a solid back catalogue to fill out a full length show, great stage banter,  a pre-existing fan base who could act as their missionaries to those who thought they were one-hit-wonders, and live favorites that new fans could get into, while old fans could sing along.

And if a Korean band really wants to make it in the USA, they're probably going to have to do the same. This whole "hitch our wagon to the Jonas Brothers" thing won't quite do it, and here's why:



He tries to crack up the audience, but his delivery is twelve kinds of "off." It's kind of cute to see him fall on his face, but it's not a speech that will set another million tweens' hearts aflutter, the way the Beatles were charming and cheeky and funny in their moptop era interviews. 

In Robotics, they talk about the "Uncanny Valley" - when robots begin to resemble humans, humans feel more empathy towards them. We empathise with R2D2 more than Robbie The Robot because R2D2 looks and acts a little more human than Robbie does.

We connect more with Mr. Incredible than with Rodney Copperbottom, because he's more human-looking... but then something strange happens.

Call it the Polar Express effect. There's a point where the imitation gets close enough that it becomes weird instead of more and more charming. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was so lifelike... that it freaked everybody out. It was so similar to human that the small differences became the focus, instead of the big similarities.

And Korean stars trying to act the way American popstars act will fall into the uncanny valley - that "almost there, but not quite" zone, that will win over those niche audiences, and people who are willing to take Kpop, its awkward English its aegyoish stylings, and its boys wearing eye makeup on its own terms. It won't win over "the mainstream" in the way that would make the Kimcheerleaders feel validated. (Then again... jimmying music chart results for a meaningless number one single (see here) validates them, so maybe it would).

See, Rain's video up there-- he tries to make a joke - a simple pun - and bombs completely. Because rehearsing softball interview questions is not the same as actually appearing cool enough during a live appearance/interview/whatever, that a teenybopper (they're the audience for Kpop) would go "I want to make THAT person my idol." Making a joke that's culturally acceptable, and delivering it in a way that's funny to a widespread audience, is a very, very culturally specific performance, and you can't traipse across an ocean and expect to be the coolest kid in the class when you don't even speak the language. And that's the level of cultural acclimatization that would be necessary to reach "the mainstream." Lady Gaga knows the culture well enough that she can turn it inside out and play off defying its conventions, but you have to know it to subvert it.

(that uncanny valley goes the other way, too: the two mixed-race girls in Chocolat freak me out because their not-quite-Korean faces look really really weird to me in Korean kpop makeup, Korean kpop fashion, doing Korean kpop dances and aegyo. Big noses and aegyo are like apricot jam and pizza to me: both alright, but not together. Don't ask me why specifically - the whole thing about the uncanny valley is that you can't quite put your finger on it - but it's weird to me.)

Oh yeah: Unless you can do this (Shakira), or something like it.
In which case the rest is kinda moot. (Thanks, Youtube)

That may still not be entirely true: Shakira backs up her talent to back it up, with a really strong stage show, and she was a proven performer in Spanish (and had support from that fan base) before she tackled the VMA's.


But the other rub is this:

There's just no such thing as a mainstream anymore. When the Beatles came across the pond in 1964, the average TV owner had something like three or six channels to choose from, period. It's a lot easier to get astounding tv ratings when you're twenty five percent of all that's available! Even in the days of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," there were few enough methods of media distribution, that probably every person in America had heard "Billy Jean" on the radio, and could hum along. These days, thanks to Youtube, Amazon's long tail and iTunes and online personalized specialty radio stations, you can have an album or song hit number one in the charts, with vast swaths of America's population still saying "Justin Whober?" or "Whoby Keith?" or "Isn't M&M a candy?" Arcade Fire had some good chart results, and they still got the Who the Hell is Arcade Fire? backlash when they won Album of the Year. Modest freaking Mouse had a number one album...because in 2007, that's possible. Wouldn't have happened to the Pixies in the '80s.

That's good for music, because it means anybody can find their niche, and it's good for me, because I don't have to wait through radio crap to find songs I like and buy their albums.

Stornoway. Courtesy of a facebook status update. Song: Fuel Up.


But that same diversity in music means that you can't sweep America, or take America, or the world, or Europe, by storm. At very best, you can take one country, or one demographic by storm - like Justin Bieber did, setting youtube and twitter records while people older than me have NO idea who he is, and couldn't be bothered (at the same time as those tweeners really can't be bothered about Arcade Fire and The National). You could be an indie sensation, or a country sensation, or a teeny-bop sensation, or a CCM supadupastar. If you've got the chops.

And that'd be a pretty impressive accomplishment. But you can't take over America anymore. There's just too much ground, and too diverse, with too many pockets of people looking for something too specific, to be taken. What was the last album that took North America by storm? Has anything since Jagged Little Pill had the same impact across demographics?

The group that has the best chance at it will have every member good enough at English that they can do unscripted stuff, and come off cool. They will be legitimately talented, and also very hard-working, and they'll pay their dues: they won't whisk into L.A. from Seoul, book Staples Center, and sell it out because "The Whole World is Being Swept By the Korean Wave." They'll make it the way BNL made it in America. 200 cities a year, for five years. And then suddenly they'll appear out of nowhere.

The way Bobby Kim did in Korea: by being really poor for a while.

So that's what I think. Now go read the article at SeoulBeats.

So... I'm Dumb. You should go to the KOTESOL Conference

I accidentally linked the wrong Kotesol conference in my last post.

So here's the correct link: you should go to the KOTESOL conference next weekend.

Here's the facebook page.

I was there for one of the days last year, and they had good sandwiches.

EVERYTHING is Happening

I've received a whole bunch of notices I'd like to tell you all about...

1. The Kotesol Conference...
I strongly encourage English teachers in Korea to do something with their year or two in Korea (other than the usual having fun/see the world things), because otherwise it can be a bit of a black hole on your resume. KOTESOL is a great organization to get involved with, to sharpen your tools as a teacher, and to demonstrate a commitment to your profession that will help you with employers, and in the classroom.

60 presentations. Go visit the KOTESOL site for more information.

2. As seen on Popular Gusts:

 On the evening of Tuesday October 11, 19:00, Mr. Devolin and Senator Martin will host a dinner reception for Canadian English teachers in Seoul at Maple Tree House, Jongno-gu, Samchung-dong 31-1 (02-730-7461) for a casual exchange of ideas and open discussion on a range of issues over (free) Korean BBQ. What we would ask of you is to spread the word (quickly) among your friends/colleagues/acquaintances who are Canadian English teachers interested in the idea of having a meaningful discussion on Korea-related topics or issues of concern to English teachers in Korea. Of course, all of you may attend this event as well. As solid attendence would help their event to be a success (first 50 to RSVP), your cooperation in inviting contacts is much appreciated.

RSVP: eslreception@gmail.com
Attendees: First 50 to reply
Cost: Free
Time: Oct. 11, 19:00-21:00
Location: Maple Tree House (Samchung-dong)

Guest-Posted! Jonoseyo, Peter Nimble, and Welcome, readers of The Scop

Welcome, readers of The Scop, who may have come here after reading my guest-post on Jonathan Auxier's blog. If you're a fan of Jonathan Auxier, because you're a fan of Peter Nimble, and you're younger than age fifteen or so, I have to warn you that sometimes this blog uses big words, and sometimes it uses bad words like the "h" word or the "d" word (and I don't mean "happy" and "dinosaur")... but I'll make sure this post is squeaky-clean, or warn you.

And hello, my regular readers. I'm excited to tell you about this...

Jonathan Auxier was my very best male friend in university: we participated in comedy improv together, we got all pretentious together (both English lit majors) and generated a huge network of interrelated and absurdist inside jokes with surprising speed. Jonathan is the best yo-yo-er I've ever (knowingly) met, the second best player of "Zip-Bong" (a game I still play when I'm teaching kids) and I'm not sure why, but when I'm talking to him, I'm somehow better with words than I am at any other time. Being around him just helps me turn a phrase.

After graduating, Jon went to Carnegie-Mellon University for a masters' in Fine Arts in writing, and I came to Korea. We kinda drifted apart. But thankfully we re-connected recently.

Jonathan invited me to write a guest-post at his blog after we had a discussion there (also check my long comment) about Harry Potter, and why I felt let down by Harry Potter's performance as a hero: I love the Harry Potter books - really love them - but found that Harry's final victory left me cold. In the meantime, I've discovered my new favorite hero journey: Aang's journey, in Nickelodeon's "Avatar: The Last Airbender" So go read my post at The Scop about why. Aang might be the most likable protagonist I've ever seen (he matches Harry Potter in the first three books in likability - before Harry gets all sullen and resentful of...everything), but Aang has a resolution that's way more satisfying to me than Harry's.


Jonathan and I both dreamed of writing books back in our glorious, handsome, long-armed days of youth, and part of the reason he's started his website, "The Scop" (Scop is an old word for storyteller) is because Abrams just published his debut novel, "Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes."

(book trailer - did you know books had trailers?)

Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is a great debut novel. Peter is a blind thief - the world's greatest thief - and a ten-year-old boy, who breaks into a mysterious haberdasher's wagon, and steals a box which he discovers to contain three pairs of magical eyes. When he puts the first pair of eyes in his empty sockets, he is magically swept off to a mysterious place, and has high, swashbuckling adventures that are full of revelations, surprises, sly references to other children's classics (Peter Pan's Lost Boys, meet The Missing Ones). For your token Korea reference of the day (because this is a Korea blog), there is an evil king whom Peter eventually must confront, and he uses a surprisingly similar method of controlling his enslaved population as North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and his propaganda machine: force-feeding his people lies about how happy they are under his rule until they believe them. 

The book includes Jonathan Auxier's own drawings (as does his blog: if you do something really awesome, sometimes he draws a picture for/of you) and the whole story is presented by a winking narrator who is never funnier than when (he?) directly addresses his audience... one of my very few gripes about the book, which I think is an absolute winner, is that I wish I could have heard more of the narrator's hilarious/witty/unexpected thoughts on topics. The action was exciting, but other books also have action... I kept waiting for the totally unique narrator's voice to throw that one extra layer of self-referential fun on top of the action, like the rug that ties the room together. (Warning: this video clip includes a Very Bad Word that your parents don't want you to say... so don't click on the link if you don't want to hear it.) Sometimes I got the gently-tossed narrator's bulls-eyes I hoped for, and sometimes I didn't. Part of the reason I wanted the book to go on longer, was so that I could hang out more with that narrator.

(image source)

Take that single gripe with a grain of salt in the exact shape of this fact: Jon is a friend of mine from of old, so perhaps I simply miss his voice because he's my friend, and I'm reading this book partly as a friend of Mr. Auxier's, and not purely as a reader of books. Maybe his editor disagrees with me. Or twelve-year-old readers. Maybe most readers wouldn't go "More of Jonathan Auxier! Less of that Peter Nimble fellow" in a book about Peter Nimble... but I did, strange as that is.

(image from Jonathan's own website: looks like the friend I remember)

However, I'll say unequivocally that Jonathan Auxier has grown to become quite an excellent writer, and it is clear that he has worked extremely hard on crafting a book that is quite nearly perfect, and that doesn't show off how hard he must have worked on it (because that's the greatest trick good writers can do: a good writer can spend hours getting a sentence just perfect, but when you read it, it seems like it just popped into their head. The hardest working writers make their effort invisible.)

Now that I have his readers and friends attention for this one post, I'm going to dish up one juicy story from his past: at one point, Jonathan decided to start reading the dictionary, from cover to cover, in order to find all those lovely, delicious words that are fun to say, or that perfectly describe something that's difficult to describe, but aren't very common. Well, he'd started on that task when he handed me a manuscript he wanted me to critique. The story was good... but it was loaded, loaded with very obscure words that, while they perfectly described their various situations, needed to be looked up in a dictionary. The funny thing is, because Jonathan had just started his quest to read the dictionary from cover to cover, the obscure and wonderful words in the story all started with "A," "B," or "C"!

(clearly we influenced each other at some point)

Jonathan Auxier's book, "Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes" is an abomasal book, and if you visit the website for the book: http://www.peternimble.com/, you can see that Peter Nimble will answer your questions, but you will also see (events) that if you decide to study "Peter Nimble" with your class before next February, you can have a free skype visit with the author, Jonathan Auxier. Some of my regular readers may teach young students who are middle-school-level readers, who might just LOVE this book (Jonathan describes it as the book he wished somebody'd handed him when he was in middle school)... and it'd be fun making Jon stay up late to skype-visit a class of students in Korea.

One last thing: another benefit of re-connecting with Jonathan is that his writing on The Scop (which often discusses being a teller and lover of stories) led me to discover Cockeyed Caravan, which is a blog by a writer named Matt Bird, that should be read by anybody who dreams of telling stories for a living, whether that's books, televeision, or screen. I know Korea's expat scene is loaded with people working on their novel or screenplay, so go subscribe to him, too.

Disclosure: I received no compensation of any kind for the guest-post I wrote, or for writing this glowingly positive post, for Mr. Auxier. Other than the short thank-you e-mail he sent me.

One reason it's nice to be a boy...

One tiny little reason...

If you do one Festival This Year...

If you do one festival this year, do the Andong Mask Dance Festival.

Here's more information about the festival.

The Official Website

And some (pretty rough) videos from my 2008 and 2009 trips:

The Must-See Fireworks: (read about them at my original andong blog write-up)


Mask-dancey things.


The (UNESCO World Heritage site) folk village where some of the festival happens:


Hopefully the music is better than in 2008...


My boy Evan:

Appeared in Newsweek Korea: On Ajummas and Knee-jerks

So... back in June (i'm terrible at writing these kinds of posts on time) I was translated into Korean and featured for the second time in Korean Newsweek Magazine, in the section titled "Seoul Serenade." The article was a riff on this post I wrote a few years ago. So... enjoy it.


Too quick to judge?

Even when expats don’t speak any Korean, some Korean words creep into our vocabularies, especially words that can indicate something specifically Korean.

One example of this is the words “ajumma” and “ajosshi.” The dictionary says “ajumma” and “ajosshi” mean older woman and man, but everybody knows that in different kinds of conversations, those words have extra, added meanings. When my university-age (Korean) female student had a bad experience with an ajumma one day, she came into class looking upset. When I asked, “what’s wrong?” she said the word “ajumma” with a face, and a voice, that told a whole story in one word. We could all imagine the kind of situation that had happened.

These kinds of stereotypes can come to mind for foreigners, too: we also have stories about ajummas and ajeosshis waiting in line, or at the department store, in a drinking neighborhood. Everybody has a story or a joke about those kinds of situations.

I also have an “ajumma story.” I was on the Seoul subway, at a stop. When the doors closed, I heard a commotion: somebody had fallen through the sliding doors as they closed.

An ungenerous thought came into my mind: “It was probably some rude ajumma throwing her purse to catch the train before it goes” -- Koreans and foreigners all know about that stereotype. I thought, “well, if she got caught in the door and fell, and if she got embarrassed, she deserves it for being so pushy and impatient.”

With that righteous attitude, I turned to look more closely, and maybe to feel some ugly satisfaction at seeing the rude ajumma’s embarrassment...

but it wasn’t the scene I imagined. Three people lifted somebody to her feet, but it was a tiny, thin, white-haired grandmother, with her spine curved like a question mark, so old her feet were unsteady, even with three people holding her. Limping on one leg, there’s no chance she could have sprinted, as I imagined, to catch the subway: she had probably been unable to move her slow, uncertain feet quickly and carefully onto the subway car, and tripped and fell as the doors closed.

Immediately I felt ashamed for judging a stranger without even thinking about her situation, without even bothering to see who she was, before deciding, in my mind, that she deserved to fall on the subway. The old lady apologized to the people around her in a low voice, and the strangers helped her sit in one of the end seats of the subway, reserved for seniors.

I thought about my own attitude: it is easy to dehumanize strangers: I don’t know the name or history of the driver who cuts me off in traffic, I don’t know the family situation of the bureaucrat who gives me more paperwork at the city office, and I don’t know the life experiences that led the shouting drunk in the street to make his life choices. Because I don’t know them, it’s easy to have no compassion, and assume the worst about them.

Because of the language barrier, many expats cannot even speak to the Koreans around them as humans, so the tool that can lead to human connection is not always available. Without connection, it’s harder to develop compassion, and it becomes easy to turn someone into a bad guy, or a scapegoat, and forget they are human beings, just like I am.

As I thought about it, I realized that kind of judgement goes in both directions:

Expats in Korea know that not all ajummas act like the ugly stereotype, and most of us also have lovely stories about friendly, warm, hospitable, sweet, and funny older Koreans we have met. In fact, my mother and father in law are a perfect example of a wonderful ajumma and ajeosshi who show all the great virtues of Korea’s older generation.

And if you ask around, many people met a foreigner during a trip, or in a class, or at an event, who was sweet and kind, who made a human connection. But because of language barriers and cultural differences, those connections can be difficult. Some find it easier to build up an image based on a few ugly stories in the newspaper.

 However, it’s unfair for me to take the worst ajumma story I can remember, and use it to judge every ajumma I see (as I did on the subway that day), and it’s unfair to judge the individual expats living on your street, and teaching your children, according to the most shocking story you saw on TV.

I can’t say if one side judges the other side more often, or more harshly: I’m sad to say I’ve seen judgement go in both directions, but that’s not the point, anyway... I CAN try to change myself, and remember to think about the humanity in people who are different than me. I try to do that every day, so that my Seoul is a city of humans, not strangers.

Kurry: The Media Mashup Project

Kurry: the Media Mashup Project.

A number of Thursdays ago, I was invited by the fearless and mighty Cynthia Yoo, the nigh-superhuman juggernaut behind Nanoomi.net, and Tatter and Media’s connections with English language blogs, to attend an introduction of a new “media mashup project” between Yonhap News and Tatter & Media. Personally, I think this is a really cool project.

(what's a mash-up? Originally, it was two songs that seem dissimilar, combined by a clever DJ, in a way that just really, really works, despite the dissimilarity.. that's a mash-up. Mash-up is starting to stretch its meanings to include things other than songs, it seems.)

Outkast vs. Queen

Tatter & Media is a huge network of blogs and bloggers in Korea, and Yonhap News is a news wire that sends Korean news around the world: Korea's Reuters, if you will. Now, these days, both of those groups face challenges in meaningfully introducing issues and events to the world: bloggers, because blogging is a new media which doesn’t carry a lot of clout or credibility in many circles: phone an embassy for a comment and tell them you’re a famous blogger, and then phone them again and tell them you’re from the Washington Post, Reuters, or Yonhap News... you’ll see what I mean.

Yonhap news, and many traditional news media also have a problem: while they have the name recognition to get that interview or comment, reporters at such places often have to complete several article write-ups per day, which means that even if they’d like to, often they don’t have the time to go into depth, and call all those sources that would deepen their reports, or write in a way that includes perspective or background knowledge of the underlying issues, even if they do know about them. And issues drive news stories, not events - news stories that tap into important issues spread, and ones that don’t drop like a tree in the forest.

To worsen that inability to go deep, traditional media also find themselves wildly outnumbered and unable to compete with the immediacy of bloggers, twitter users and the like. By the sheer law of averages, a few twitterers will be right where the news is happening, as it happens: beat reporters still have that dispatch time-lag. Thanks to things like twitter and tumblr, some kinds of breaking news have been pulled, unceremoniously, right out of the hands of those trying to report it. For example: I learned of Michael Jackson’s death and the Japan tsunami through twitter, and the suicide of ex-president Roh Moo-hyun through blogs, and the pictures of the Seoul floods that knocked my socks off weren’t the ones from any news source, but the ones people retweeted from instagram, tumblr, ACME tweet-a-photo, and Facebook status update links.

(the borg/Naver ship: you will be assimilated)

Another problem lies in the nature of the Korean Internet climate: if you follow Korea tech news even a little, you’ll know how Naver and Daum, the two biggest portals in Korea, utterly dominate the Korean Internet experience. They have recently been blasted for this - one Korean blogger took the portals to task for some of their manipulation of search results, and actually encouraged Koreans switch to Google, and try to break the Korean internet monoculture. Korean portals have been taken to task by others - one example.

One of the accusations against these portals is that they direct people to news articles that have been cut and pasted (perhaps without accreditation) onto pages hosted by the portals, rather than directing readers to the original articles hosted outside the portal’s network. By doing this, the portals keep readers inside their network, and get more eyeballs looking at ads in their own ad network. (By dishonestly (illegally?) copying content.) Previous efforts to get blogs and news gathered into one place has usually involved either bloggers copying content from news sources, or news sources copying content from blogs...often without permission from the other. Neither is an ideal situation.

Enter news Kurry (거리)

(one kind of kurry/geori-this is the picture on the top banner of my blog)

A 거리 is (see the note at the end of the post), if I’ve got this right, the streets or the marketplace, in the sense of English idioms like “He knows the streets” or “Word on the streets...” It can also indicate a street that has a concentration of some one product - the office furniture street (Euljiro 4-ga) or the ddeokbokki street (Shindang) - so the title of the project-- Kurry (I’m not wild about the transliteration, but...) evokes a marketplace for media, news, and insights. The Kurry Project is a collaboration between the many bloggers on TNM, and the journalists at Yonhap News, which will ideally bring the best of both sides into one project:

Bloggers will be able to grab a Yonhap story (legally) and highlight the issues or background that make the story compelling, and Yonhap will be able to (legally) pick up that more in-depth report from the blogger and circulate it (legally) along the Yonhap news wire as a follow-up. Meanwhile, Yonhap gains from the immediacy and depth bloggers and social network news can provide, while bloggers involved in the project have a chance of being picked up by an international news wire, and will be able to introduce themselves, when digging for a story, as “from Yonhap news” instead of “from JennyTheKittyLover on TiStory”... big credibility jump there. Some bloggers will be the “curators” drawing out stories that could be improved with some knowledge or expertise from the combined knowledge of the bloggers involved.

Sounds good, right?

So keep this one on your radar... I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

(read about it in Korean here!)

[UPDATE]
One of my buddies who's closer to the Kurry Media project just contacted me with a little more to say about the name, to clear up some confusion we've had in the comments, and a bit more about the goal of the project:

Turns out the Kurry is meant to be a kind of a triple-play on words: Kurry can refer to the 거리 - the marketplace of ideas etc., as I described it above; it can also refer to 카래 - Curry, the Indian food, which is a mix of different flavors coming together in harmony, OR the main meaning, as a transliteration of 꺼리, a verb-modifying tag which is used in Korean like this: 읽을꺼리 means something to read, 볼꺼리 means something to see, 말꺼리, something to talk about, etc.. -- the Kurry project is meant to give people something to see, to read, to talk about, or to think about, that is keyed to their interests, rather than just the stuff newswires tell them to be interested in.

So, I hope that clears things up.

Korean Propaganda: North and South

Adeel, from "And With Your Help I'll Get That Chicken" has an interesting post comparing North and South Korean propaganda posters.

So go read it.

The comparison between the heavy-handed way the government talks to its people in the north, and in the south, serves to remind us both that South and North Korea aren't really that far removed, timewise, from being the same country (sixty or seventy years isn't a whole lot in geopolitical terms), and the real point of divergence might have only been as recent as 1987 or 1993, with South Korea's first democratic election, or South Korea's first election of a civilian president.

Though it's definitely different now... listen how similar the song is in this (admittedly old) North Korean tourism ad, to the music your taxi driver listens to, or to the music tracks playing in the background at a noraebang (karaoke room).


Some south Korea Trot music.


Yes, South Korean tourism advertising is better than that...


But the fact South Korea's tourism promotions have all been upstaged by some random tourist who happens to be a good video editor? Not good news.

Seriously, they should just hire this guy.

In general, I've observed that sentiment towards North Korea is mostly generational -- as South and North Korea have become less similar over time, those with less memory of times when North and South were similar feel less reason to hold onto the connections that remain. People under thirty seem to spend more time talking about the staggering economic burden North Korea would be as a province of South Korea, absorbed and needing support, while people over forty have bought into the "one people" thing comparatively more.

One of my students once dropped the interesting thesis that Western technology companies dread Korean unification, because North Korea's cheap labor combined with South Korea's technology know-how would enable South Korea's technology companies to dominate the world markets by undercutting the prices through reduced manufacturing costs.

Meanwhile, a left-leaning, Nork-friendly student I once had argued that if South and North Korea reunited, South Korea would become a nuclear capable nation, which it isn't right now, thanks to North Korea's nuke program, and that would raise Korea's status in the world. Although I suspect this might have been a prepared argument used to justify being North-friendly, as I've since heard that exact same argument, to the letter (or at least to the talking point) from a few other north-friendly people who were smart enough to know their "one blood, one people" stuff had run out of gas with anybody under forty, and perhaps they needed a different line.

Ain't No Party Like a Pyongyang Party' Cause a Pyongyang Party is Absolutely Mandatory!

This remix of North Korean promotional footage, set to a party track, is pure genius.

Wish I'd thought of it.

Mark Zuckerberg is My Crack Dealer

I'm tired of the bimonthly Zuckerberg Hatedown that occurs whenever anything about Facebook changes.  That's all.

It takes 48 hours for everyone to get used to the new layout, and then we all whine again when it changes again.

If my drug dealer decides to stand in front of the Baskin Robbins instead of in front of the Subway, I'M still the one addicted to the product, aren't I? Why waste time whining "Hey dude. I had to wait thirty seconds for that crosswalk. Didn't used to have to do that. So... can I have a dime?"

That is all.

OK one more: Google plus never quite made it. I don't think it will.

And here's why:
Because with google behind it, it never got a chance to make its mistakes in obscurity.

Google didn't do a huge buildup to google docs, but just made it available, and waited for people to discover it was an awesome service. By the time a lot of people were discovering it, it had already worked out many of its initial glitches. With Google's last few social forays, it created a big buzz that a not-completely-finished product simply couldn't live up to.

Plus, Google will never again have that "outsider" cool that helped it in the beginning, that helped Facebook and Twitter get going.


Not to mention:
the SNS market's saturated. Supersaturated.
I don't want to sign up to another linkedin hi5 facebook myspace twitter WHATEVER the heck, have another place to log in, have another login and password to remember, and another place that might get hacked, and wade through overlapping services anyway.

So... until somebody invents the combinator that lets me click on ONE button, and be updated on my facebook, twitter, kakao, linkedin etc. services without having to visit five different places, I'm in. Call it FacebLinKakaoWitteReddit



Until then, I'm happy with what I have.

And no, I'm not signing up for reddit.

Abortion in Korea

My mom was a hard-core anti-abortion activist: she worked, and volunteered, for my town's "Right To Life" and unplanned pregnancy organizations, and a few times, we even took a few young, pregnant ladies who needed a place to stay into our home a few times. She even brought my little brother to the picket lines a few times. I can't think of an issue where I more clearly see, and sympathise with, both sides of the issue, than this one. Frankly, writing this post, this way, might upset some people who are very dear to me, who remain strongly opposed to abortion.

James Turnbull, of The Grand Narrative has a fascinating account of a Korean university student's attempt to procure an abortion in Korea. It includes being lectured about her loose lifestyle by a doctor (I've been told women buying birth control pills at a pharmacy sometimes also get "don't be such a floozy" lectures from pharmacists). It also discusses how the price has gotten way higher in Korea, because government officials think fighting to bring down Korea's high abortion rate (by persecuting doctors who perform abortions) is a good way to bring up the birthrate.

Which is about as wrong-minded as thinking that we can solve the traffic jam problem in Kangnam every day by raising the speed limits on the main roads, instead of by widening roads, improving bus lanes, discouraging the use of cars, encouraging development of telecommuting options, introducing congestion taxes in downtown areas, and building more subway lines. -- Abortions in Korea are a symptom of a larger problem, and fighting the symptoms doesn't solve the problem.

It's a complex topic, but here, in my opinion, is the choice:

Either:
1. Make pregnancy prevention education easily available, and make it easy (and non-humiliating) to obtain pregnancy prevention devices (birth control pills, prophylactics, etc.). This training should be for young men and women. Make birth control and morning-after pills over-the-counter. And fine pharmacists who receive a complaint for lecturing a woman on her lifestyle. Make the fine double for every repeat offense. He's a pharmacist, not a priest.

OR
2. Make abortion affordable and accessible -- if you're not going to teach people how to avoid pregnancy, give them a way out of it.

OR
3. Create/improve working social programs, daycare centers, and maternity protection laws, etc, that make sure that parents, and especially single mothers, no longer feel like having a baby will be the death of all her future career/education prospects.

Or maybe all three. Or at least one and three, so that if the religious right really does insist on banning adoption abortion, fewer women end up on that road by accident, and those who do end up on that road, have options.

... or we could go back to exporting unwanted babies, like back in the '80s when Korea was one of the world's largest sources of overseas adoptees. Did you know back in 1998 Kim Dae Jung actually apologized to Korean overseas adoptees. (more about Korean overseas adoption here)

Somebody I love a lot is currently in the process of getting a masters' degree in Canada as a single mother. And I LOVE that in Canada, it's possible for a single mother to aim at a masters' degree, rather than inevitably resigning herself to a career waiting tables. Until single (and married) women in Korea feel like they will still have options even after a baby is born, the abortion rate will continue to be high, and the birth rate will continue to be low.

But go read the story of getting an abortion in Korea. It's a little bit heartbreaking.


Update:
In the comments, somebody asked me to link this blog, which is an account of a "foreigner" getting an abortion in Korea.

It's a single-post blog, and it includes the line "I will only list one abortion provider in the Seoul area, because I believe he is worth the travel time" ...I'm sure there are other clinics where one could find similarly compassionate, and English-capable help, to say nothing of those who do not live around Seoul. Condoms break in Busan, too.

If anyone has a link or reference for doctors in other parts of the country, or others in Seoul, or wishes to put some kind of contact information into the comments on this post, so that people can contact them for a recommendation, feel free.

Jesa Pizza

You should all go read Ms. Lee To Be's thoughtful blog post about tradition, in light of the picture of a pizza on a jesa table, that made the rounds on Korea's internet recently:

the main gist: we preserve dead things. To make preservation (rather than practice) a goal is also, in part, to surrender the belief that tradition remains relevant to our lives.

The Korean from Ask a Korean! wrote about how to do a Jesa a while ago, and has a (short) response to the pizza jesa here.

I wrote about Jesa once, a long time ago, too, upon reflecting on my mother's death of cancer.

Chuseok Weekend, Gae-eun Park, Meetups and A Scare

Music soundtrack: EMA - Anteroom. If Elliot Smith were reincarnated as an emo girl, here's what it would sound like:  Hit play, and then start reading.


Did a few things over the weekend.



Among them:

Ate at Table 34 in the Grand Intercontinental Hotel at Coex with wifeoseyo... and that food was obscenely good.

Met some lovely lovely people on Tuesday, and had a few drinks and a nice walk and talk, near my home. Included in that crew were some of my favorite former coworkers, a few bloggers who shall go unnamed, and one irascible scoundrel who shall not be named, but whose face shall be shown here for the internet to see his shame.



Now that the baby's coming soon, I have a feeling a lot of my hangout events will likely be somewhere near home, like this one was. Fortunately, I live somewhere AWESOME.

Met some OTHER lovely lovely people on Sunday night and had a picnic on an overpass. And some OTHER other lovely people on Friday night.

Ever meet a person who's just a cool-person magnet? Some people, somehow, always have lots of very smart, or interesting, or funny people around them. My best friend Matt, who left Korea, was like that, too -- you could count on people recommended by him, to be worth the time to get to know them. I'm happy to say I know another person like that.

But I won't tell you who, or you'll all want to hang out with him/her too, and then s/he won't have time to hang out with ME.

Another weekend highlight, though, was visiting 개운산공원 - Gae-eun Mountain Park - on the smallish mountain behind Korea University. It's a park that's not that easy to reach, shows evidence of being fairly recently built, or at least improved, and has a lot of open spaces where you can see some great views of the city, or let your kid run, without losing sight of them.


Spacious. Nice view. Not crowded. Noice.

Because it's not that easy to reach, it isn't crowded, either, the way Han River park, or the Cheonggyecheon always are when the weather's nice, and because there are trees on the mountainsides all around the park (as well as some trails through woods), despite being in the middle of the city, the air's fresher than you find in most places.



There's not quite enough there for an entire date, but it'd be a decent place to take the kids, or bring your camera, or just to chill with your buds. Maybe bring some bottles of wine and get talky. It's big and sprawling enough that a decent game of capture the flag could probably be played. Or, bring picnic materials, a frisbee, a soccer ball/football and badminton rackets and a very, very nice time could be had.

By foot: Go to Korea University subway station, exit 2. Go straight until you pass the GS 칼텍스 gas station, and take your first right. Head down that road until you see a a fork in the road, with one fork going up the hill. Follow road up hill around a bunch of curves until you reach a three way intersection. Go right, and you can't miss the park area. It'll about 35-30 minutes by foot, unless you're slow.

Or (if Daum Maps isn't lying), once you pass the gas station, across the street from the corner where you should turn right, take the small green bus "성북 20" and get off at "개운중학교" stop, and backtrack a little to find the three-way intersection that leads to the park.



The park has most of the trappings of other parks where seniors are fond of hanging out - and the demographic there definitely skewed older - so there are exercise machines (including some fairly new, and quite nice equipment in one corner - I tried it), but because it's up a hill, again, it's not as crowded with the seniors as Jongmyo Park is.

Instead, it looked like this: even on the Saturday of a Chuseok holiday.


There was also a health center, but I didn't really explore that.

Wifeoseyo was very impressed with big rocks that had beautiful Korean poetry carved into them: they're some of her favorite poems, she says.


One little corner of the park even had a little book booth.


The books are multipurpose.


Either this sign indicates there are speed bumps ahead, or there's a suntanning area nearby, too.



This was not the view from Gaeeun Park. It's the view from Bukak Skyway's little lookout point.

But I went there, too, and it was nice.

I also climbed a mountain with a group of people, and had a bit of a scare. I had a crappy breakfast, didn't do warmup stretches, and went too fast at the beginning, leading to a lightheaded spell the likes of which I haven't had before. The other hikers were kind enough to wait for me, and once I took it a little easier, I was OK for the rest of the hike... but that's never happened to me before, and it put a mini-scare into me. After all, when the zombies come, I want to be sure I have the endurance to protect my family, and keep going until they've all been beheaded, you know? A sharp machete is important, but so is a good cardio regimen.



As I pushed, and then passed 30 years old, I discovered that I can maintain the level of health/body type that I had in the 20s (which was pretty low-effort when I was in my 20s)... but it just takes me a little more work each year than it did the year before, and a hardcore dizzy spell on the entry slopes of Bukhan Mountain was a pretty clear sign it's time for me to put a little cardio into my regular routine. And that I'm not 22 anymore.

Dammit!

But other than that little scare, I had a great weekend. How about you?