One guy insists that his friend was interrogated and jailed for a week because his cell phone number was in the phone of a friend of a friend of someone who was selling marijuana in Seoul.

I called bullshit, and he went apeshit. “Dude, they don’t have a bill of rights here or any of that shit.”

The specific claim: In Korea, you can be interrogated and potentially jailed without charges for one week for third-degree association with someone arrested on drug charges. This was apparently claimed by a cop in an interrogation room.

Now that I have a calculator and some free time I plan to demonstrate just how fucking retarded this claim is.
This guy claimed that cops investigate drug arrests “to the third degree.”
That is, investigating every person who is in the phone record of every person who talked on the phone with a suspect, and everyone in their phone record, as well.
Let’s take the simplest example.
One person gets arrested. The cops start looking into his friends. This is assuming ONE person gets busted, mind you.

Let’s say I have 45 numbers in my phone record for the last couple months – that’s business, personal, medical, solicitation, ordering food, etc. That is 45 *phone numbers* they need to investigate, find out if it’s a business, a private party, their address, if it was to a business, who made/received the call, and so on.
Now, let’s say that each of those numbers has another 45 contacts.
45*45=2025
So, at 2 degrees, we have 2,025 *numbers* to investigate. That is 6 thousand phone calls to just identify who is who and where to find them, assuming (optimistically) that you find everything you need in 3 phone calls.
Now, let’s take that another degree.
2,025*45=91,125
So again, figure 3 phone calls per contact to identify and locate each party.
91,125*3=273,375 phone calls.
Figure those phone calls averages 5 minutes.

273,375*5=1,366,875 minutes

1366875/60= 22,781.25 hours investigating further leads after one arrest. Then, figure the price of those hours, plus benefits, for the staff doing the investigation. 200 hours a month if it’s a very dedicated cop, so that’s
22,781.25/200=113.91 cops very busy for one month investigating nothing except one drug arrest. Then, remember that none of those 91,125 people have even been interrogated in person, much less incarcerated, and you haven’t even done anything with that first guy you arrested.
Seriously people.

People who believe anything a cop says are stupid.

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

This post will be a discussion of slightly-to-very embarrassing bands I love. It’s come to my attention that I might have exceptional taste in popular media. If I don’t, well you can go get fucked. This is my blog &c.

Let’s talk music. I have some terribly embarrassing and terribly acceptable taste in music. Let’s start with the acceptable.

MC5, The Stooges, Velvets, Etc.

Okay, they’re great. It’s not all that much fun or all that revealing of me to say so. They stayed consistently hard as shit throughout their recording careers. My dad had a copy of “Kick Out the Jams” that was the 2nd most important record I got from him, immediately behind the second Led Zeppelin album. Well, third behind the copy of Foreigner’s “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)”.

Flipper.

I would like to thank my college friend, Jacob, for introducing me to this band. I can’t begin to do justice to how amazing this band really is. Me, Kurt Cobain, and someone who actually liked UK Two-step Garage for awhile, agree on a “post-punk” band. Their only real album is also out-of-print, which is frequently (though not always) a very good clue that a band rocks really hard.

Bad Brains.

I seriously think Rock For Light is what you hear by default when you get your ass kicked. It’s like Michael the Archangel cues up the tape or something. Plus they’re black, which makes them cooler. Surprise surprise, they were cooler before they got old and moved to New York where they made some particularly-famous-now Jewish assholes want to make hardcore.

Black Flag.

They rock pretty fucking hard. Not as hard as Bad Brains, but that’s sort of like “This guy I know is a badass, but I bet he couldn’t kick Charles Bronson’s ass.” “Damaged” is the only album post Dez Cadena singing that’s worth owning. Like, ever. Greg Ginn wrote all the words worth hearing. Please remember that before you all rush out to pay Hank Rollins for his friendship with Ian MacKaye.

Minor Threat.

More embarrassing than Black Flag just because they are affiliated with Straight Edge Hardcore. By “affiliated,” I mean “some stupid kids decided to take something way too literally.” Ian MacKaye is probably not as interesting a songwriter as Greg Ginn.

All that said, I don’t want to discourage stupid kids. Most pretty awesome things are the result of stupid kids taking something way too far. But seriously. The vegan assholes who worship at this altar conveniently missed the videos upon videos of MacKaye and company slugging 2 liters of everyone’s favorite cocoa derivative to get ampd up for shows, and so on and so forth. This music also sounds like beating people up.

Jawbreaker.

As far as I can tell, this is where that awful “Screamo,” “Post-hardcore” or whatever they’re calling bad punk with expensive haircuts and poorly pitch-corrected vocals now. Which is not to saw Jawbreaker sucks. They rock really fucking hard. Imagine if those awful “Rain . . . / . . . Pain” rhymes really did make you ache deep down thinking about the girl you took to your Junior prom, or the girl you dropped out and lost through the warping butt-end of a 40, and so on. They toured a lot, and inspired a lot of really bad music. Please don’t judge them for it. While we’re talking about bands that don’t deserve your loathing despite influencing awful music . . .

Nirvana.

This band is scary because they totally were the kids up the street who always smelled like either really cheap pot or burning garbage. They showed me Rambo II once when I was like 10. At any rate, the Nirvana home videos show us a frighteningly normal set of three guys who just happened to be in a really good band with a fucking hot lead singer. This is, again, embarrassing because they are associated with a lot of bad music. Sonic Youth, for example,  sucks in a big way. I always feel like I’m on the outside of an elaborate joke when people talk about liking them. They also paved the way for bands like Weezer and “The Grunge REO Speedwagon,” Smashing Pumpkins.

Led Zeppelin.

I would not listen to guitar-based rock without the second Led Zeppelin album, and I suspect many “grunge” kids/musicians feel the same. Before my father introduced me to them, I was listening to frighteningly embarrassing music. Really embarrassing. My dad listened to them a lot, but he always had awful taste in Zeppelin. I obviously didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I could hear what I now know was overproduction on what I now know is “Physical Graffiti” (“Kashmir,” in particular) when I was in sixth grade. I shit you not. There was something visceral in “Communications Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love” that just felt right, and faded as the tapes progressed chronologically. I know someone who paid a stripper with falsies to dance to “Whole Lotta Love,” mostly because he/his friends didn’t think she could.

Sebadoh.

It’s neutered early Sub Pop. I’ll be presumptuous and assume you’ve heard Mudhoney’s “Superfuzz Big Muff.” If you haven’t, go do that now. Again, out-of-print last I heard. Sorry.

Sebadoh is like that, except it’s crying because all the requests/demands to have sex with you because you’re in a rock band from the aforementioned Mudhoney album didn’t work. This band makes you grow a vulva.

Beat Happening.

More Sub Pop-type stuff, although technically affiliated with the infinitely-cooler K Records. It’s all semi-incompetent crap that periodically turns out a gem, largely as a result of keeping a Tascam Portastudio running while a bunch of burnouts smoke pot and play guitar/bang on things. Somehow, this turns out a fair bit of listenable, and even good, music. I can’t figure it out, either.

Every Band Steve Albini Has Ever Been in.

Steve Albini, by definition, plays and records the kind of music my mom wouldn’t let me listen to. It’s everything gorgeous about punk rock combined with everything awesome about metal. I’ll confess to borderline fanboy status, although I’m trying to develop digital snobbery in response to his, among others’, analog snobbery.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.

It’s pussy-ass music over slow, slow breaks. Frequently, the said breaks are the preset beats from old Casio keyboards. It is occasionally gorgeous, but frequently mediocre.

The Mountain Goats.

It’s a guy with a guitar who used to record into the mic in on a boombox, and shouldn’t have stopped doing that. Now, he makes quirky, comfortable pop music with real production values, sort of like what happened when Pavement stopped making “indie” albums. He started really recording and working with other musicians, and the immediacy, or perhaps the lack of pretension, or something, vanished. It feels premeditated, belabored, and nowhere near as ephemeral. I’m probably talking about overproduction again. But when I hear “overproduced,” I hear Jimmy Page ca. The Song Remains The Same or Axl Rose ca. Chinese Democracy’s excesses. By contrast, The Mountain Goats aren’t so bad, or are even tasteful. Then I remember that George Jones doesn’t make your grandfather less a drunk.

Italo-Disco, as a genre.

There was no “disco sucks” backlash in Western Europe, and the US dollar was trading particularly well against several Western European currencies in the early eighties. So, what is the correct response to a surge in interest (and price) in Disco in Western Europe? You make your own, of course. Italo-Disco is the result. How does it sound? While it’s terribly predictable, that’s exactly the point. It sounds like something a gay Italian man would want to get all coked up and dance with another all coked up gay Italian man while listening to. It is also entirely synthesized, which is probably what it will be remembered for. No bass guitars, no pianos, all synthesizers, cheesy drum machines, and Gay As All Hell. This is the direct precursor to what people call House Music nowadays.

To paraphrase The KLF’s Manual, there are no emotions you can’t experience on a dancefloor. The words are complete gibberish, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the dull “thud” of the analog drum and the “snap” of the synthesized handclap with the squishy, squirmy sounds that were just a few years from being called “acid house” and providing a soundtrack to, uh, gay black men getting all coked up and dancing together in Chicago.

I know this stuff is cool to like now what with “electroclash” going out and people desperately needing a new ‘retro’ fad to latch onto, but this stuff seriously makes me want to dance and drink 6 dollar cocktails.

In The Navy! 

Joy Division.

Yeah, I said it. “Unknown Pleasures” is all that’s worth your time. They suck, and this album was made by the production, which makes it even further hilarious than it already is. New Order is in here, too.

Honorable Mentions.

Defiance, Ohio, The Ghost Mice, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, etc. The anarchist-leftist vagaries of this crap hit too close to home for me to completely ignore it, so I need to listen to it from time to time. Then, I listen a little closer, realize it sucks, then realize I sort of like it.

I would like to remind you; This is a list of embarrassing music I LIKE. Bad music, or music other people like en masse that I hate, would take a really long time to list.

Greg Teacher: George, do you mean “May I use the bathroom?”

George: Yes.

(Exeunt George, visibly flustered, stage left)

(CLASS laughs uproariously.)

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.

However, I had an amazing, artist-chasing-muse moment teaching my adult class on Wednesday night, and I wanted to share.

The buildup was the kind of thing that just happens with me sometimes. One of my adult students, Rachel, mentioned she’d like to work on her reading comprehension, and discuss articles in class. She apparently wanted celebrity gossip, I found out later, and Eddie, the other student, really wanted no part of it. He seems to think that studying vocabulary lists is the best way to learn a language.

Anyway, after trying several different sources, I finally find that scholastic.com’s articles are about the only news that these two adults are going to understand at all. So, I sent them this, without the dressing that gives away the intended audience: US Embassy Attacked. I hoped against all hope that I could get two uncomfortably-like-my-parents people to follow my lead in a discussion that was bound to end up in nationalism.

Eddie and Rachel came in, both slightly late, but class could begin in earnest earlier because Eddie is usually very late, and this time he was not. At any rate, they began griping about vocabulary. I had gone over a fair bit of the vocabulary at the beginning of the previous class, repeating that I wanted them to ask every last question they could find re: vocabulary right now, and giving them a light primer on 20th century Eastern European history. In their second language.

So what happened? On the whole, I was disappointed. “Nationalism” translates to Korean with a very positively-connotated word, and Eddie loudly declared that Kosovo should be its own country if they are their own ethnic group. I explained to him that this was literally nationalist, and then explained to him that the word nationalism had some negative baggage in English. (For example, the contraction of “Nationalist Socialist”) Rachel mostly listened, and asked for clarifications on the details of the article.

We talked for awhile, and Eddie expounded on people needing their own homelands. It was clear that Kosovo needed to be its own country, because there were people who were not Serbs living in Serbia.

I inquired about his knowledge of America’s ethnic makeup. With some light prodding, he conceded that there was a mix of ethnic groups in the United States, getting along relatively well, and that he’d rather live in United States than an independent Kosovo. I asked if he had any ideas about why this might be. He said he didn’t know, and then looked expectantly to me for an answer.

I don’t have one.

I then re-iterated 2 statistics from the article. 60% of Serbians are unemployed. The average monthly income is roughly $250. A region of this country that is legendarily worse off than those statistics, and cites that as a reason for withdrawing from the country, has just declared independence. I asked Rachel and Eddie what generally happens to a country during a civil war. This drew blank stares. I then took a minor risk, asking if their parents ever spoke with them about what it was like to live in Korea in the thirties and forties . (For those of you unaware, Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to the end of World War II, with your standard “You would have gotten thousands of coffee table books if this happened to white or sort of white people” atrocities, and then there was this war.)

They didn’t seem to catch on that civil wars are bad for people. I finally went for broke. “Eddie, let’s say you live in Korea, and you make 250,000 Won (korean currency = $250) a month, and your extended family is generally unemployed, so you need to help them out with that as well. You have an option to live in Tokyo, and make around 3,000,000 Won (about 3,000 bucks) a month. You will be away from your people, but you will be able to feed your family. Is that more important than being under Korean rule?”

He finally acknowledged that yes, maybe feeding his family was more important than living under Korean rule.

I asked why Russia and China don’t like the idea of a new country, and America does like it. This, frighteningly, led to blaming communist solidarity. I explained that Russia is no longer a Communist country.

I gave in, and went briefly through the discussion of why China and Russia don’t want Kosovo to be recognized as its own country. I wrote the words “Taiwan” and “Tibet” next to China, and “Chechnya” next to Russia. Eddie gave me the gorgeous “Ah-ha,” which baffled me, considering his apparent unfamiliarity with the fall of Soviet Communism.

This isn’t even the good part.

10 minutes left in class, Eddie says “Hey Greg? I have a question.”

“What’s that, Eddie?”
In perfect English, the best I’d heard all night:

“What is the difference between a mob, a rioter, and a protester?”

Ecstasy, orgiastic joy, my face reddens. After 45 minutes of bluster, Eddie has asked, in perfect English, a question I would be thrilled to hear an adult ask me in his native language.

I would like to kiss him. I elect to shake his hand, which leads to some confusion.

“Uh, What?”

“You just asked an excellent question, Eddie.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I quietly loathe myself for axiomatically equating high household income with a healthy country, but I am not comfortable taking my real positions with them just yet. Or my broader ones, anyway. I am not looking to convert people. I’m simply really fucking tired of reading out of a textbook with people who I know must care about something besides advancing their career and watching Sex and the City without subtitles, respectively. That is all.

I would like to apologize in advance to my girlfriend for her friend/roommate’s image making it into my blog before her image. Take a cute picture of us together. Get it to me.

If you were wondering, yes I am starting to listen to twee pop, and the bad cardigan grows in 4 weeks after you decide that Beat Happening doesn’t suck.

Okay, the lesson was on describing abilities.

The sentences structures in the book were “Are you able to . . .,” “Can you . . .,” and “Do you know how to . . .” I pushed “Can you . . .” hard, and they were curious why. They thought that being so direct in English was rude.

I told them it was not.

This then led me into a conversation that I thought someone with a relatively high level of fluency and reading comprehension would know about English by now.

First, Korean is a very intensely hierarchical language. This hierarchy is based largely on age, partially on profession, and very largely on gender. Person (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) is implied by context. Your social status relative to that of your listener is not. This is what you need to know about Korean for this discussion.

Second, English is not technically a hierarchical language. However, there are subtle hints that a native speaker uses to indicate relative standing. For example, using Latinate rather than Germanic words, other completely abstract vocabulary choices, sentence structure choices (less direct, more use of “to be” = more formal, etc.), and so on.

So in a high school English course, one of my students had it put into his head that asking a simple present tense question to an older person is rude. And maybe it is. Some casual investigation showed that this is a somewhat common belief in adult ESL students. The application “May I ask your age?” was the first sentence that came into his head when discussing the difference between “Can” and “May.” Now, think about how much time you spent, when you were developing your English-speaking capacity, to the difference between direct and indirect questions. This led into the discussion I want to have now.

I (and virtually everyone else) was taught using a model of language that assumes “direct translation” is the goal.

Direct translation assumes that somewhere, there is a word in every language that has a very simple, direct 1:1 ratio with a word in every other language. This is demonstrably false, as anyone who has ever studied a classical language in a literary sense will tell you. I spent a whopping 3 years translating Greek and French literature as a poor student of the classics, and I’d guess half of the class time was spent arguing over which of about 3-4 words in one language was the best fit with little to no worthwhile justification for them.

What is the answer? Language is not translatable. The notion of translating as anything rather than a delicate art is utterly fucking stupid. This is why the King James Bible outsells The New American Bible year after year, this is why Thomas Hobbes’ translation, complete with “He was wrong here” footnotes, of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War is still in print and selling. Granted, The King James Bible and similar works are in the public domain, which surely contributes to their popularity (i.e. “They’re cheap”) but there is no doubt that it is an amazing piece of literature in itself.

So where does this leave me with education in foreign language? There needs to be some new model. I am vaguely aware through a professor from the university that the mainstream of language education is aware these problems exist, but beyond encouraging a “hands-on approach to teaching” with very little in terms of ideology. Maybe someone has presented all this and I’ve yet to be exposed to it.

The approach we took, especially with the younger children, at my first hagwon certainly smacked of a non-translation model. No dictionaries, only repetition, flashcards never had any Korean on them, hell, nothing had any Korean on it, and most importantly, the Korean teachers spoke English most of the time. However, the trouble in that school (as in my current school) is what to do once a student has a basic grasp of grammar and a fair-sized vocabulary. You can’t keep playing memory games and singing songs indefinitely. Intermediate language courses are my weakness, and I’d like to think there is something about them that makes it not “just me.”

Little kids are easy. They will do *ANYTHING* repetitive if you convince them it is a game. They sing stupid songs indefinitely. They dance. They touch body parts that you tell them to. (shut up) They imitate you, unprompted. There is no self-awareness whatsoever.

Besides all that, they’re fucking adorable.

Adults are also relatively easy. Treat them like adults, encourage questions, take them out for drinks/snacks/whatever occasionally, and be their friend. They’ll be forced to learn more because they will have the human need to talk with you more, because you seem like an alright person.

Intermediate level students present a number of challenges, and I have only found one strategy to address it. That one strategy has failed with exactly one class, and here’s a discussion of all that’s wrong with intermediate ESL.

When kids can sort of speak English, their strengths and weaknesses are the result of their previous education. Adults generally know how to tell time, months, days, years, basic verb tenses, Subject-Verb-Object order, and so on.

Intermediate students lack these in completely unpredictable ways, and are frequently adolescents. That’s my problem with intermediate students in a nutshell. Lack of control.

However, much like adults in general, adolescent males tend to deal well when I’m just their friend, slow down and simplify my standard speech slightly, etc.

Adolescent girls, in my experience, are a much tougher nut to crack. The ones who are motivated work regardless. The other ones don’t talk. Or whisper. And claim they don’t understand questions they simply do understand. That is my weakness as an educator. Early middle school girls.

Okay, I stayed up way too late writing this. I wrote about what I wanted to write about, and I have some left to ruminate about.

The first step was waking up and getting out of the house in time to get across town before 2:00 pm or so, when the restaurants close. We had to search for it, buried in open air markets and warehouses. Kimi, my host, had eaten there before, but was not 100% on directions. After we asked 3-4 people, we found the place, and it was full, with a a short line outside. You line up outside and wait in the cold, sipping barley tea out of paper cups.
The restaurants apparently begin preparing at 3 or 4 am, when they need to go to the markets to buy the fresh fish. The restaurants close in the early afternoon. Which is probably an artifact of some faded element of japanese culture.

These restaurants’ dining and preparation areas are about the size of a college dorm room.
There are about 10 seats at a bar across from where the men make the sushi. The fish itself is kept in a refrigerated glass case, sort of like the deli display freezer, in front of the patrons. This blocks the view of the men preparing the sushi somewhat, which is probably good. From working with his hands literally constantly, all the joints of the sushi masters’ fingers were deep red with huge bands of dead, white skin built up around them. It was gross. Somehow, I didn’t let this stop me. I was the only person in the room who could see over the counter by 6 inches.

The sushi place was run by two sushi masters. These men will apparently work together at this same restaurant for their entire lives. One man, who did all the actual rolling and serving, was a squat, quiet man who only spoke when spoken to, and whose hands danced quickly across the hardwood rolling area, deftly manipulating wads of rice and bits of tuna, eel, sea urchin, and wasabi drops.

The other was a tall, skinny guy that Kimi thought was cute.

The overall feeling I got from them was sort of like an old-time butcher. Just two quiet, hard-working men who know what they’re doing, and quietly and relativley modestly go about it.

So what happens once you are done waiting outside?

Diners go in shifts, with eah new group completely filling the just-vacated room. You sit down, a very unattractive woman gives you a hot white towel, which you are to put on a ledge under the counter once you’ve wiped your hands, and then said woman serves you a large, ceramic cup of scalding hot green tea.

Periodically, the squat man reached over the counter to give us our rolls. There are a set of waxy-looking leaves on a slanted counter forward of our eating area where he places the sushi, one piece at a time.

The restaurant is 170 some years old. I presume it changes locations, but maybe it has been consistently open and had that name at some point or another for that long. I was too entranced to pursue the line of questioning past that point. There were pictures on the wall of the sushi masters with elderly “famous” Japanese baseball players on the wall. Apparently it’s okay if they take the pictures.

I had cooked shrimp, sea urchin, tuna, fatty tuna, a bunch of other things I don’t remember, and something that looked like kimbap to finish.

The way sushi chefs are trained is a throwback in a good way, even if it makes no sense.

When one decides to become a sushi chef, one drops out of school and starts washing dishes at a sushi restaurant. Sushi “apprentices” receive shit pay, work the same shit hours that everyone else works, and get no formal training. You learn how to make sushi by watching the chefs at your restaurant make it. You work your way up the ranks by watching people a step ahead of you, and gradually your responsibilities stop sucking so dramatically. Then the day comes when you are a sushi master, and you go out on your own. I can’t think of any other profession that remains this steeped in tradition.

So that’s my uneven, hacked-to-bits-and-reassembled telling of going out for sushi. Enjoy.

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.

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.