Sing, O Muse, of the Rage of Thomas’ son, Gregory . . .

Korea has yet again made me feel very unwelcome. A correspondent on-loan to ABC from a Korean news program managed to get this pile of clever, vile, journalistically-irresponsible selective and creative half-truths printed:

English Teachers Bring Drugs To Korea

I would go through all the near-lies, distortions, and damned lies in it, but fortunately, the comments following the article do an excellent job for me. My personal favorite is the quoted “$2,200 dollars a month.” That was true for roughly one month in recent memory – November 2007. She is using a figure (One thousand Won equals One dollar) that is off by around 33%.

A foreign teacher making 2.2 Million Won a month (a very common salary, but more than any public school pays teachers without a master’s degree) is earning $1,583 a month – that’s $18,000 a year. Would you be clawing for an 18k a year babysitting job where you need to leave the country once a year just to start another job, or if your boss fires you, and the government is almost definitely going to take his side unless you shell out 400 bucks and 30% of the winnings for a lawyer?

I am going to stop before I get going on Korean mafia involvement in the drug trade and human trafficking, particularly on the US west coast, much less their complete monopoly on all but a statistically insignificant portion of it in Korea (if we’re making so much money, why the hell would we risk selling drugs?), nevermind the comically predatory practices in my profession (ESL), and besides all that, the flat-out eugenics that college-educated Koreans accept as fact to support their superiority, and look, I didn’t stop, and I’ve about talked myself into moving.

The further disgusting part is when you look at her profile on KBS Global’s website.

Westerners have as strong a prejudice against Asia as their aspirations for the region. Worse yet, the provocative nature of foreign media tends to further inflate existing prejudice against Asia. Korea has many characteristics which draw keen media attention, because what most people recall about the country is that it is still a Cold War frontier and remains divided, with an unstable security situation. Having knowledge of only the Korean War and intense political confrontation, the Western audience doesn’t try to see and analyze the overall situation in the nation.

Yes, the West wants to overthrow your miniscule peninsula, thinks you are inferior, and is completely unaware of you, besides that you make electronics that are better than China and Taiwan’s, but not better than Japan. You’re on to us. (Dear Korean readers: THAT WAS SARCASM)

So please, next time you hear a Western English teacher bitch about Korea, try to show a little bit of sympathy. And for my Korean readers, I can only ask that you try to understand my bitterness and frustration. I’d love to have a beer or two with you, but Jesus Christ, could you just admit that somebody who isn’t Korean even could do something right sometimes?

Reading Salon.com – shut up.

*Note – This article deals with a very limited set of people. I am not discussing those below the poverty line, or even really outside of Western Europe and North America. I am not interested in convincing anyone’s Limbaugh/O’Reilly-obsessed dad that women have it rough, and I regard the workplace as an unpleasant place, by design, for all humans. *

I have started reading contemporary articles on romance, dating, sexuality, and so on, and it’s humbling how average I appear to be. Salon.com is an entertaining read. It is the antithesis to my preferred news sources – The Christian Science Monitor, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and (just because they are representative of the shit Americans get fed as news) CNN. The timeliness of some salon.com’s editorial writing leads me to frightening realizations about where I fit in the population of North Americans. I’m young, bright, gainfully employed, well-educated, and so on. There’s money to be had writing news to people like me, but I’m too young and not quite wealthy enough to feel like the New York Times is written to me. So, I have Salon instead. Worst of all, the money to be made writing news to people like me, or people like the New York Times’ readership is what keeps everybody else from getting the kind of news they should be getting.

I have relatively recently stumbled over two articles that address ideas that I’m being forced to think about, given my current relationship with a 3rd wave feminist and my lingering classical notions of “purpose.” These ideas and the articles overlap in their treatment of these topics.

Attack of the Listless Lads

In Defense of Casual Sex

These articles discuss (sometimes indirectly) increasing female empowerment (especially in dating and sexual contexts), its role in male identity, and the increasingly common view of men as exceptionally flawed by contrast with our female counterparts. For me, the latter is the major issue here. As a male, I’m noticing that my quirks seem less-permissible than presumably similar flaws were for my father, uncles, (figurative) older brothers, and so on. The former article declares this a controversial opinion, apparently by the traditional view of the man as the breadwinner, decision-maker – the images you get in black and white short-form videos produced in the fifties. (“Hi, honey. Here’s your pipe and a whiskey with two ice cubes just like you like. Dinner will be ready in 30 minutes, and the kids are upstairs studying. Can I make you a little more comfortable?”) That’s been dead since at least the late seventies, and probably was always a myth. This is not where I want to spend most of my time. This ideal was bound to get destroyed by capitalism. I mean, seriously, someone sitting around the house all day serving another person with no money involved directly? Feminism cannot take credit for the widespread acceptance of women outside of the home, if it even wants it. The empowerment that women are now seeing is largely the result of it being profitable to make women “empowered.”

I don’t find this particularly interesting. It’s socialism, and relatively mainstream socialist thought, as I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

But the above writers (one a woman, one an older man interviewed by a woman) view contemporary young men as “unworthy” of their female counterparts in the first case, and “scared shitless” of commitment in the second.

This interests me, because I can imagine someone perceiving my behavior as me experiencing the feelings ascribed to men in these articles.

(According to this mindset) Women are overqualified for men in general and awestruck, in the good way, by the wealth of opportunity they now enjoy. Men, by contrast, are now assigned an incapacity to make decisions in general, from what to have for dinner, to what sort of jobs to apply for, to which girls we date are worth taking past those first couple nights out.

I can’t say a lot about female empowerment. I’m a man, I’ve dated women (almost exclusively) from the generation currently under the microscope, and I only have indirect experience of the inner workings of American men who I believe were transitional from “the old way” to the current batch of twentysomethings – the baby boomers – for a comparison. In my world, Baby boomer women were essentially sexless housewives or bed-tanned second wives with expensive tastes. Neither talked a whole lot about sex. Catholic education also provided a lot of adults who didn’t talk about sex outside of abstinence.

The baby boomer men I know don’t sound like they had much more of a clue, really. I’m more emotionally healthy and have a better job at twenty-six than any of them I know well enough to talk about had at 30. I think most of them were married (or close to it) by my age. They aspired to financial security and pursued it in pretty conventional ways. My dad was my age in 1975. I think he was on his first marriage by then. I was six years away from being born. There was apparently an expectation to get married that I don’t feel.

The expectation of marriage by your mid-to-late thirties might be the difference, and might be what’s making men like me all fucked up. Let me explain.

Women get told to have all these experiences now that they are (theoretically) liberated. Go out and have fun before you settle down and start making babies, or (gasp!) don’t make babies at all. That’s great. I’m seriously happy that this is happening. Women at 35 are still enjoying dating. Great.

But what about the guys? What are we supposed to do while women are having all that fun? We have that fun, but it isn’t endorsed by the public the way it is being endorsed for women. There’s something attractive and positive about a 35 year old woman seeing a few guys at the same time that I don’t immediately feel about a man the same age. He’s past his prime and ought to be settling down a bit, right?

At least in mixed company, women get winks and giggles for being size queens with sugar daddies, but guys who openly attest to preferring girls dramatically younger than them with disproportionate breasts aren’t even worth commenting on.

I do it, too. I am not blaming anyone.

I am still formulating this. Either men are continuing to act the way they were in the past, or are having even more fun in general before getting married, while women are increasing their premarital jollies. At any rate, there is still a sense that what men in general are doing is not permissible while what women in general are doing is either commendable or out of their hands. There’s a lot to be had here, and I’ve been writing this off and on all day. I give up.

Do you know what sucks worse than biting your tongue?

Absolutely, positively nothing . . .

Except biting your tongue very, very hard, and then being an English teacher, so you need to speak for 6+ hours a day just to teach, nevermind administrative odds and ends, personal life, sorting out taxation and pension hijinks, and then living in a country where there is at least a little bit of red pepper in every remotely common food.

I would share more, but sorting laundry was intellectually taxing.

I can’t even eat the delicious, wonderful candy that just arrived from the US, care of Ma and Pa Schroeder because of this shit.

Short anecdotes seem to work best lately.

This past weekend I had a moment.

I bitch about Korea all the time. There’s plenty to bitch about. The culture is infuriatingly and blatantly hierarchical, repressive, sexist, xenophobic,  and arguably just plain-old backward.

Imagine a place so repressive toward women that one smiles a little on the inside seeing a lady smoking a cigarette on the street, just because to do so is a remarkably bold, rebellious step. A Korean woman who smokes in public may, depending on the neighborhood, draw stares, whispers about promiscuity, and in some circumstances, a loud, abusive dressing-down from elderly strangers.

But then, there was a moment Saturday night that reminded me that this place isn’t all bad.

I was hanging out in front of the convenience store, on one of the chairs provided for just this purpose, drinking the metric equivalent of a double-deuce, with a skateboard at my feet. I see flashing red and blue lights.

The car with the flashing lights comes closer, and then turns left in front of me. I flinch for a minute. I don’t even have a brown paper bag. Regardless, I take another gulp, and put the can down on the table in front of me, also provided for this specific activity.

The cop in the passenger seat smiles, waves, and pulls away

Further evidence of my increasing maturity.

Today my adult class acquired a new student. Eddie wasn’t there, so I had one new student and Rachel. The new student seems like a pretty standard square Korean guy. He has 2 kids, and apparently owns a semiconductor business.

We were supposed to talk about an article about The New York Philharmonic visiting Pyongyang, but this got derailed by introductions and finding out about American life. Which further derailed into why I wanted to write this blog entry.

I miss eating beef all the time. A lot. I’ve been in Korea for over a year now. When I go out with friends or my girlfriend, and they ask me what I want to eat, I only ask that it be Western, and filling. I told my class this, and this turned to the safety of North American beef.

I explained how rare Mad Cow really is -10 animals have been detected in Canada, total. This baffled them.

Next, I asked them why they were worried about it. Here comes the shocker.

Apparently Korean news reports that American beef has ground up bones ADDED TO IT DIRECTLY. Imagine trying to explain the concept of “bone meal” to someone, in their second language, in contradiction to something they heard on the news. I did it, and apparently didn’t step on any toes.

Next, I managed to successfully determine that 2 people in my class, as adults, believe that you can die from sleeping in a room with a fan on. This is a relatively common belief in Korea. One of these people is a retired nurse, just to remind you.

I elected to teach them the term “Agree to disagree,” and moved on.

Now, those of you who knew me around age 12 or 13. Think about that. I am okay with lots of someones believing a fan can kill you in your sleep.

Life After God.

I just had my browser erase approximately 1000 words of development in my political thought, as well as about 8 links, and I still have a relatively lengthy draft of an experience I had in Japan on tap. However, in the course of writing the political discussion, I felt it was necessary to talk about something perhaps too personal for a blog. We’ll see.

I no longer believe in any extraordinary/supernatural/spiritual/what-have-you powers. I felt this way as an adolescent and young teenager, then became a somewhat boring deist, and then returned to atheism. My reasons for the final step might be worth hearing, and the background allows it to make any sense anyway.

I was a gloomy kid. Maybe not in kindergarten and such, but in grade school I was pretty damn pessimistic. I had reasons. The fascist attitudes of both the social environment and majority of teachers in the Catholic elementary school system of my youth were not a good place for me. There are people who do well there and are nurtured and find what they need and so on. I wasn’t one of them. I became increasingly bitter and nasty through elementary school, which included junior high for me. The most tangible case of my gloomy bitterness was, as someone who literally never had to study to get decent grades, failing one quarter of Religion class at my school because I conscientiously refused to memorize The Beatitudes, or even write anything in the space provided on the test. I now recognize the amazing literary and intellectual significance of The Sermon on The Mount. However, I was in 6th grade, loudly self-identifying as an atheist, and certainly did not get a fair chance at The Gospel of Matthew by the comically bad instruction I was receiving in religious studies.

Moving on, the Jesuit High School and eventually my weirdo college slowly drew me further into the fold of halfhearted Deism, and would have continued in that direction, no doubt, had I not made a very unusual acquaintance my senior year of college.

Jack Angstreich located me due to his interest in my undergraduate program. He was surfing through lists of “Johnnies” on Friendster.com, and I stood out due to my interest in Sergio Leone’s films and well as aforementioned Deism, which by that time had turned to some variant of Dualism. Jack talked me through the flaws in some of my thinking (over the course of 8 or 9 months). This focused mostly on dissecting and discrediting Plato’s Theory of Forms. At this point, I was increasingly unhappy because I didn’t know how to find out if I was doing what was morally right, if what I wanted to do was what God wanted me to do. One’s will needs to be in accordance with God’s will to be truly happy in life, by mainstream christian theology.

Y’know what made me happy? I am not making this story up.

One night, lounging around my parents house, a failed enterpreneur at age 25 and an hourly part-time employee of an overpriced chain of sandwich shops, I almost bawled my eyes out to a friend I had met on okcupid.com because I was having an intense emotional experience in the process of rejecting God. Previously, I thought there was a possibility that what was best for the world might not be what made me happy. With the Old Testament’s God, The Gospels’ God, and especially God according to Paul of Tarsus, and especially especially Augustine of Hippo, and no doubt with Thomas Aquinas, it is perfectly realistic that God wants you to be unhappy, if temporarily. This leaves the question “when should I be happy?” I shit you not, I was at an impasse with my counselor with this question for at least 2 years.

By giving up God, I could unreservedly work towards what I thought would make me happy, always. I had nobody to answer for except my own conscience. I didn’t have any obligations besides those I put on myself. Morality became what somebody else thought was best for me, i.e. “usually bullshit.” Everyone talks about these incredible journeys of salvation, moments when they “knew God was there” and how awesome that felt.

The absolute most wonderful night of my life I declared that there is nobody at the universe’s helm, there is no necessary beginning or end, and nobody is in charge. I have never been happier in my life than I have been since that day in fall/winter of 2006, sitting at the counter in my parents’ kitchen, and accidentally stumbling across a theological discussion. I now believe myself completely incapable of art in any true sense, as I have no gods besides, well, human happiness. This is about my only regret, and experience tells me that I make pretty shitty art anyway.

In which Greg juggles several priorities, then does the inevitable.

Once again, I find myself debating exactly what I want to share with whoever happens to find my blog.

I went to Japan this seolnal (“Chinese/Lunar New Year”) and stayed with someone I met over the internet.

Okay, fuck it.

I went to Japan to visit a friend and her daughter. I met this friend through the online dating site okcupid.com while I was still seeing my ex-girlfriend. I suspect said ex-girlfriend still periodically reads this blog. This will be taken as a scathing self-indictment. It isn’t.

Moving on.

Tokyo is a compulsively tidy place, with lots of very narrow streets. The ramen is expensive – 12 bucks for a bowl and a can of beer. I will grant that the ramen is very, very good, but still. It’s (varyingly) thin broth with noodles, onions and (occasionally) a slice of pork.

Y’know what? I still can’t write worth a damn about anything that I feel like sharing with the internet. So I’m done. I apologize to the roughly 3-5 people I know of who were waiting anxiously to hear all about the trip. Call me. I just don’t know how to write meaningfully about my life while maintaining the kind of distance I feel is necessary in a very public forum. Please try to understand, gentle reader. I am recognizing that this blog will never be even a very good source of information about anything except me. That recognition comes with choices I’m not ready to make. Seriously. I don’t even know how comfortable I am posting a picture of my friend and her daughter here. Would you continue to read if this turned into a discussion of my political thought? Seriously.

That’s what I’ll talk about. The only time I got any response to anything was when I said that Mark Steyn was Full of Shit. I still agree with that, but I found the assumptions made about my views the most frustrating.

Political thought is probably the only thing I know I give a shit about. Therefore, it would make sense that my blog deal primarily with it. The ideas I’m interested seem to come up in the heading of “sociology” in most places I’ve seen them, but my distastes for some elements of academia (particularly its organization) arise upon saying that.

This is going somewhere. Over the course of the evening, reflecting on my undergraduate education led me to a work I was (pathetically) unfamiliar with that relates to this crossroads.

This will be good for me. It got me to read a “real book,” albeit online, about politics. That’s a step. I mean, I’m trudging through Moby Dick at present, and good ‘ole Vladimir Ilyich has managed to capture my imagination.
So yes. Apologies to those who were mostly reading this for updates on my life. This blog may shortly turn into a series of reflections on my political thought and reading, which will likely include some discussion of my day-to-day life as it relates to the aforementioned.

I find that much more interesting. And my opinion is more important than yours.

Cold Showers.

Well, no more of them, anyway.

Since moving into my new apartment almost 3 (!) months ago, I have had a very poor relationship with my on-demand water heater/central heating. These are generally the same thing in a Korean bachelor apartment.

How’s this work? There are pipes under the floor in apartments. Your apartment gets hot by heating, and then pumping through the floor, the apparently-not-safe-to-drink Korean tap water. This is all fine and dandy, except you also control when your apartment sends real hot water to the whopping 2 taps in the apartment.

This is also fine and dandy . . . until the labeling on how to send significantly hot water to, say, your shower, is not only in Korean, but in Korean jargonese that isn’t in dictionaries.
I finally found one way to make my water kind of hot for a couple seconds. This was enough to get myself wet, turn off the water, lather up while freezing in the unheated glory of my bathroom/laundry room, then turn on the water again and wait for it to get hot again. This is obviously not very satisfactory. And it took a widely-varying amount of time for the water to get hot enough to take a real shower. So now, patient reader, I am going to teach you how to take a hot shower in Korea.

WTF.

I just looked at my stats.

Who the hell googled “Greg Schroeder needs”? Seriously. Fess up.

In Which Greg is distracted to hell.

Honestly, everything I can think about to blog about is far too personal/directly related to work.

I will blog when I feel I have content appropriate for this blog-of-a-not-15-year-old.

The New Years Resolutions have been largely ignored.

Number 2, 4, and 7 are doing okay, but otherwise there is no progress whatsoever. I have yet to set foot in a *real* grocery store in 2008. My fridge was pretty disgusting going into this weekend, but I finally cleaned it. That said, here are the current contents. I’d tell you what it was before, but you would almost certainly vomit.

Red Pepper Paste: ~ 450g

Gatorade (or “Kei duh lay”): ~ .5 L

Orange “Juice”: ~1 L

Hot Dogs: 7

Beef Shoulder: 1, frozen

Onions: 2

Beer: 1 L

Grape Jelly: ~300 g

LotteHam (private label Spam)(The remnants of a Chuseok gift from a student at my previous employer): 400 g (200 low salt, 200 regular)

Strawberries: 35

Yes, you just read a complete list of goods in my house that require refrigeration. Yes, I’m digging that deep.

I’d give those strawberries about 30 more minutes. No, I’m not pregnant.