Things have been quiet at the hagwon lately. Except, of course, the director going on his periodic rages with vague reasons. He was happy for awhile because we had gotten an explosive increase in enrollment. Something pissed him off, though. He doesn’t like talking with the mere songsangnims (“teachers”), so I don’t have a clue what it is.
In other news, I’m cutting back on expenses because I need to finally start sending home money on my lovely school loans. Dandy. I did the math, and my current pace puts me at done in around seven years. Not bad, I guess.
I dance around this a lot, but I do have a girlfriend. Why am I dancing around it? I told myself I wasn’t going to have a girlfriend here. It happened anyway. She’s great. I would have a significantly more difficult go of it in Korea without her. And she’s cuddly.
The Korean government keeps tabs on foreign teachers because there was some fraud awhile back. There have been violent felons and people with fake degrees teaching kindergarten. So, I had to get information on my graduation from college. Namely, the exact date I matriculated.
This shouldn’t be too hard. However, the only place this is written is on my diploma. However, THAT’S IN FUCKING LATIN, the classical language MOST people learn, but not me, OOOH no, Latin scholarship is too derivative for my undergraduate degree. So now I am likely to get audited by immigration because I don’t know if “quarto decimo” means “the fourtheenth” or “falling on the fourth.” And don’t tell me. At this point, it’s best I don’t know.
Anyway, what finally got me to write here (and the conclusion to the buildup above) was looking on my college’s website for my graduation date. The diversity program caught me in a very direct way immediately beginning my search. Yes, all colleges have them. Yes, I think they’re stupid unless they are at an institution that makes educating group x a stated goal (i.e. “not a really fucking old college and expensive college, whose theoretical underpinning predates female enrollment, much less belief that non-whites are fully human”), and frequently contrary to the goals of the institution, and usually those who defend them have no real reason to do so outside of social justice claims that ultimately declare that, for example, black people are always poor, and even when they’re not, they don’t read books. But they love sports. They even hired one of those rich uncle tom weenies with a CV full of “urban outreach” bullshit to push this. She sat in her office talking with people who self-identified as a minority in registration, and otherwise had nothing to do with the school. Otherwise, she went out to college fairs, handed out her card, and told black kids who stopped near the booth that St. Johns, a school she knows jack shit about, is an awesome place for black people. Which it isn’t.
Anyway, the front page is an obvious-to-anyone-who-attended-the-school-in-the-last-two-years fake. Minorities were obviously placed in a rather elaborate faked class, and photographed. The two students are 2 years apart. Two links away, on the page with a message from the president, we get a quote from someone that is a regular source of disagreement on the program. I don’t doubt the value of Booker T. Washington’s writing. However, his works are very rarely a favorite, much less more than an afterthought on the program. Fine, it made a difference to someone. This quote is placed below the previously-mentioned “minorities who read” picture, next to the President’s message. I would hope that quotations on the website are not just pretty things, but something intended to be representative of the school.
Booker T. Washington is one of the 4 or 5 authors regularly up for debate to be stricken from “the program.” I’ve read him. He really just isn’t that good. Well, compared to Aristotle or Marx, anyway.
Now, speaking as someone who saw a very attractive romantic interest lionized because, well, she is an Oprah special waiting to happen, this annoys the fuck out of me. Partly because I still have animosity toward her (there, I said it) and I’m tired of being black being cooler than being lower-middle-class-and-falling white. I was at least as unequipped to deal with a frou-frou East Coast Liberal Arts College as your average poor black, and didn’t even have the novelty of <i>that</i> to help me. I was just another white borderline sociopath who couldn’t dress himself, but also didn’t go to my summer home in Ambergis Caye or visit my father in Japan over the summer, and as a result I decided to Al Jolson it up with my lack of refined tastes, with predictably sad results. Rather than continue the quiet nerdiness I fell into quietly in high school, I discovered that I really wasn’t bright enough to be that kid at St. Johns. So, I decided to be mostly bacchanalian and rude.
Just go read Jim Goad. He’s better at this than I am.
I need to go buy yarn so I can make rabbit headband/masks tomorrow afternoon. Seriously.
My apartment is a mess, I love rice, I love spam (a delicacy in Korea. I shit you not. Gift sets are widely available.), and I am really tired of extra vowels. Seriously. Who the fuck goes to Muck-dawn-nuhlds-uh? And yes, that is a phonetic spelling of what it says on the sign outside my window.
What to do from here continues to smack me in the face, as I reach the 6 months in Korea mark. Considering I still have no idea what I enjoy (there is no way in holy hell I could teach kindergarten for the rest of my life), I’d likely have the same trouble I had before Korea. Namely, being so removed from goals that I could not even start finding them. I mean, it’s only about 8 months since I convinced myself that being happy is necessarily a good thing. And at the time, I really despised my life – hence Korea. My only consistent goal now is getting out of debt. I’d like to not have a job. I’d live most places to do that. That’s a recent enough discovery that I have to doubt it’s permanence.
So there. As promised, standard bad blogging.
