::A Geek in Korea::

In my Freshman English classes today I had my first attempt at the “grade everyone’s homework in the middle of class” structure that I was attempting to do. I’ll need to revisit that idea, because it was a tad too hectic. No wasted time or anything, but my classes are simply too huge to make it work. Anyway, my activity was pretty fun, so I got that out of the way.

The first thing I did was distributed a page with 20 different pictures of different facial expressions. The students worked in small groups to describe the different expressions with as many adjectives for behavior and feelings as they knew. They worked on this for around fifteen minutes, then we got back together after I was done with checking the homework. The students then shouted out their answers, and I’d write them up on the board for everyone. I have some students that were giving an honest effort looking up everything in their pocket dictionaries possible. Their vocabulary was pretty good.

After that I followed it up by distributing all the white boards I could find in the office. I gave each group two markers and an eraser, and told them to use the expression on the paper in a scenario they invent, without any text, to tell a comic in four panels. I’ve done this exercise before with a much smaller class size. With groups, the students have to discuss the art, the story elements, and all the other things they need to finish the project. I gave them another fifteen minutes to finish that drawing, then picked up their white boards. My intention was to have each group try to guess each other’s comics and write down their answers, but we never had enough time. Instead, I just held up each of the white boards and had one of the other groups guess in front of everyone.

The students that sat for five minutes talking about what they were going to draw always did better. I might start requiring the students to plan out the comic first before I let them have a pen. The best comics were clear instantly. The most difficult comics took three or four guesses. The one I drew on the board took five tries to get exactly right. I would make them repeat each step until they got the next part right. The students would pick up the right things from the previous guess and then make their own attempt.

A few of the comics were absolutely hysterical and made everyone laugh. I think the vibe in my class so far is pretty top notch. I know last semester it was sometimes difficult to get people speaking in class. So far with my classes I haven’t had the same problems. The lure of participation points was always an option too, if I wanted to keep track of the best answers and artists. It wasn’t necessary, as everyone was working so hard.

It was an entertaining class, for sure, and people got to learn new words. It’s also hard to clean up and set up between classes. If I had classes in multiple rooms I wouldn’t have bothered with it. Carrying around all the materials requires to do this with white boards is too hard for one teacher. It was a successful experiment, but I can only do it one week per semester. What will I do next week when I need to grade something? I’ve got a week to figure that out, or decide how I’m going to be handling homework from now on. The students have the books, so I’m committed to doing something with them now.

Glow has grown tired of her mobile and her animal dolls, so my wife asked me to look at blocks. Glow went on a play date at a friends house and was very active picking up and destroying different bits of blocks, so my wife thought it would be a suitable purchase to keep her entertained.  There was no doubt. This was my chance to recommend getting her first set of Lego bricks as soon as possible. We found a nice starter set of Lego bricks for her to use with proper supervision. She and I will be making cute little houses and blocky cars by the end of the week.

Glow wasn’t the only one getting bored by her animal dolls. She’s had those things for eight months now, and besides making the occasional sound or being chewed on, they don’t do anything interesting. We’ll be able to make some new things to play with, and then Glow will be able to play Godzilla and destroy them. Later, she and I can sit around building things together. I’ve still got her giant Lego Dinosaur kit assembled, but if things get desperate we can always run across the street and pick up another few buckets to play with. That’s the great thing about being an adult with an income. You can just go out and buy more Lego bricks when you need some for whatever project demands it.

Lego bricks are my favorite toys, bar none, ever, and I don’t know if I will ever outgrow them*. My brother and I would play with them for hours on boring weekends building different things, but we never, ever ran out of things we wished we could build with a little more time or imagination. Before the Internet was invented, that’s what everyone did with their free time right? I’m sure my entire generation feels a strong nostalgia for the classic building toys, and I can’t wait to start sharing it with my own daughter.

*(I say this now, as a person that hasn’t stepped on one of those studded bricks while trying to walk to the bathroom at night and had it embed itself into my foot in a few decades. Painful foot injuries aside, I really love Lego stuff.)

I was sitting on the rock wall that is next to the bus stop waiting for the bus to arrive when an older lady approached me. She had weird teeth and a gleam in her eye that said, “I’m going to say something amusing and possibly crazy, listen to this!”

She approached me and repeated something to me, to which I did the universal, “I didn’t hear you I was listening to something with headphones” gesture. Undeterred, she waited for me to remove the headphones and said (all in Korean), “Oh, you couldn’t hear me. Let me tell you, you foreigners should be thankful to live here in Korea.”

“Uh, sure. Yes (Baffled look)? Uh….I know? (Freigning confidence). I…I am. (Confused) Why?”

“You foreigners are so lucky to live in Korea. In all your countries, you have earthquakes all the time. You could be crushed by your house in some other country!”  She makes this hand motion. A little person, then the palm of her other hand covers them. “Under their own house because of an earthquake!”

She sweeps her palm in front of her to indicate the city. “No earthquakes in Korea, are there? Look! That’s why we have such a nice country, and you should be thankful to live here.”

“Oh, okay. Uh…the bus is here…” I make the plan to get on the bus and sit far, far away from the strange lady.

She sets a pretty low bar if her only reason for wanting to live someplace is that you won’t be crushed to death by your own house in an earthquake. I had five wonderful classes today, but that was by FAR my favorite conversation.

Weird Flickr Pool dedicated to Traffic Girls in North Korea.

More Traffic Girls.

My wife and I have to change our daughter’s diapers from time to time. It’s just a fact of life with a baby. While in the bedroom when we’re getting ready for bed, or in the middle of the night, we occasionally don’t have the energy to dispose of them in the trash in the trash can over in our veranda. Sneaking through the house at night with dirty diapers could surprise Yoshi, and if he barks and wakes up Glow, say goodbye to the little sleep we do actually get. We just want to rest, so we clean up later.

As a result, at any one time in the bedroom in the morning there might be two or three diapers wrapped and ready to be disposed of somewhere in the bedroom. They usually end up on the floor, under a makeup stand, next to a night stand, or sitting on a shelf. No one has stepped on one by accident, or forgotten about them for an extended period of time, so there have been no disasters, but every morning it’s like a shitty diaper Easter Egg hunt. “Did I find them all? Will I find one later that I missed? What if one gets lost?”

On the parenting front, this is the last week I get to spend at home with my daughter and wife during the day before my four month long university schedule starts and I lose all track of time trying to keep up with tons of different classes for months. The cutest thing Glow has learned how to do is clap her hands in excitement. It is adorable. It’s fantastic to walk into the room and get applause from your daughter for anything you do. This is all from my wife trying to get her doing finger exercises with cute Korean songs.  Glow doesn’t have the fine motor control to do something like “Okay” or “Thumbs up!” yet though. I’ll be excited when she finally learns something like that from me.

What is seen cannot be unseen.

(From ZanyPickle)

The plan was that I was going to go to Costco for some items, then return home. Then I’d got to work for a bit and get some things done before I called it an evening. Some of those things did indeed happen.

I went to Costco alone because it had snowed heavily overnight and it was too cold to take the entire family along. Besides, if Glow comes along, we’re almost starting at a 50% carrying capacity once you add in her weight, her necessities, and all the care it takes to bring a baby some place in winter. We decided I’d just do the pack mule stuff myself and hope to be able to bring back everything we need in one trip.

I was also the person responsible for making the final call on the purchase of a new stroller. The one we had before wasn’t cutting it for a multitude of reasons, so I had to scout out the choices and pick one up there. I had been stroller scouting before, and now that I had my new phone I was going to be able to pull up any reviews to guide me if I needed any help along the way…or so I thought. When I got to the store, the first thing I tried (a search by product bar code) failed to turn up any results. The second search, the one I did online via my phone’s 3G internet connection, turned up a false positive hit for a children’s toy baby stroller for dolls.

Damn. Technology failed me. I could have kept looking online, but since my wife said it was up to me I decided to see if I could find a problem on my own that would stop the purchase. I had come there to shop.

Since their was a demo unit available in the store, I took it down from the shelf and rolled it around for a little while. It seemed to fit the criteria we needed, and Costco does have an awesome return policy, so I decided to take a chance and buy the enormous box. My wife and I tried to find out if someone could pick me up at the store, but no one was available. I needed to pick up a few more things in the basement to fill our cupboards, so I had to figure out a way to get everything home. I held off on some of the larger, heavier purchases because I wasn’t sure how I was going to get everything home if the stroller needed to be carried in parts before it could be assembled at home.

When I paid for everything, I took apart the box holding the stroller and hoped that it would be nearly assembled for the trip home. After a few Velco pieces and some button snaps, I was ready to load up the new stroller with the food that didn’t fit in my backpack and headed home. People on the subway gave me a weird look for having a new stroller without a baby inside, but I just shrugged it off. I had what I had come for, so I had accomplished something with my afternoon.

By the time I came home, I was too exhausted to go to work again. I needed a nap, and some aspirin to deal with a nasty headache. Tomorrow! Tomorrow is when I start doing work! Really!

Today because of an oddly timed nap, I woke up at 8:30 PM, hungry, but with no desire to eat anything available in the kitchen. We had eaten extremely well at lunch, so I didn’t feel a repeat of that meal was going to satisfy me. I’m somewhat picky in that I hate to have the same thing for lunch and dinner in the same day, and I usually try not to repeat those meals throughout a week. It’s my way of keeping my eating habits fresh and avoiding ruts. I started digging around in the back of the cupboard.

Sometime in the distant past I purchased a large box of Macaroni and Cheese from Costco. It was a Costco only bulk sort of brand, which I didn’t particularly take to and ended up transporting it from house to house as I moved around the city. After the majority of the box was eaten, it fell out of rotation. The effect of comfort food had warn off by that time, so I was left with a lot of boxes of noodles. I never had a reason to eat it, because we had plenty of other delicious things to eat in the house. I wasn’t a single guy any more by the time I had gotten down to the last two boxes. I had no excuse to put some nuclear orange powdered cheese substitute on my meal, so they stayed, for the last several years, gathering dust in the back of my cupboard. Until today, when I got the idea to try to cook them and make them something greater than just some single man’s treat. The scary thing is, Macaroni and Cheese has no expiration date, so the only thing holding me back was my willingness to try them again.

I set about making the meal while my wife gave our daughter a bath. I boiled the noodles as per their directions, only to find out they had gone stale and tasted like the cardboard in the package. I dumped them out and replaced them with the last of our actual pasta. I kept the sauce, and added in some left over chicken casserole my wife had made a few days ago. Chicken, potatoes, carrots, all cooked in an sauce we had bought in Costco. I put in some real cheese, mixed it to perfection, then sliced a tomato to garnish the plate.

It was freaking delicious. Really good food made from old food and left overs, all created out of desperation and taste bud boredom. I am not a gastronome. I don’t have the energy to get excited about cooking exotic new dishes, but damn if it was satisfying to eat well after digging through everything in the house to come up with something while my wife was busy with the baby. I finished off my plate, and set out some for my wife. She commented on how good it was while I finished off the dishes. I’ll pick up a box in the future and give this another try.

We got the plan for the trip to grandma’s place not long after my last post. We would go in the morning with my brother in law, then leave after lunch. This is what we packed for.

Of course when we got there people insisted we stay for the night. Thankfully we had a perfect reason to stick to the orginal plan. Glow is on some cold medicine. We had only packed enough for the day. They had to let us go.

We left before my wife got drafted to cook. I’m not happy Glow is a little sick, but it did help us out today.

My wife’s maternal grandmother was in a scooter accident earlier in the week. She broke two ribs and knocked out a few teeth when a car cut her off and she fell off her autobike. She’s in the hospital now recovering and won’t be at home for the holidays. My wife and daughter, as well as my mother in law drove down to visit her in the hospital today. I wasn’t able to attend due to some obligations around the house. Anyway, she’ll be in the hospital during the Lunar New Year holiday this weekend but will get out sometime later.

The choice the family has to make is to have the holiday or not. People who are serious about it want to do the ritual “chaesa” to honor the maternal grandfather who died a few years ago. It is their familial duty to honor their ancestors, and the anniversary of this relative’s death falls on the holiday. I’ve been present during this tradition once. It is a short ceremony that takes the women of the family many hours to prepare the needed food to set out for the offering. Men in the family read something, light some candles, pour some alcohol and then they close a door. They return a few minutes later, and they eat certain foods left on the table. It’s like a ritualized meal that honors the dead.

This is a separate meal from all the other home cooked food you eat all day. The men never do anything but watch television and shout at the children. This year the Olympics will be on television, so at least there will be some different sports to watch. (UGH!) I dislike the work load issues and style of Korean holidays, but the food is always excellent, so I’m torn on whether I want to go or not. We should bring Glow to the family outing to let everyone get a chance to fawn all over her and complete our visiting obligations for a while.

Since grandmother is in the hospital, there was a bit of a question as to the need of going to her house just for the ceremony. If we go, we’re there for a day or more. No one can escape the family’s obligations any sooner than anyone else because the work load doesn’t get distributed fairly along genders, or ages. My mother in law is going to be working, my wife will be either cooking or watching Glow, so we won’t be leaving any time before the last dish is washed. I’ll also have to watch my greedy aunt raid the backyard storehouse for all the food she can carry home.

I asked my wife, “Why not let someone else set up the table and honor their obligations without having to travel to an empty house in the countryside just to eat some food reserved for the dead? The maternal grandfather’s tomb is near the house, but other than that there is no reason why the ceremony needs to take place there in the rural countryside.The matriarch of the family isn’t even going to be present. Why not let one of the uncle’s host it this year? Wouldn’t that be easier for everyone?”

Nope. That idea got shot down because grandma’s house is neutral territory. It’s been done like this, so it will continue to be the same way. Trying to get the entire family to agree on anything is tough, so I guess it’s lucky it happens at all.

We’re probably going to have to go, and I’ll take pictures and watch videos while I hang out with the relatives all day. This year I can even edit my blog via phone, which is a new development. I can even upload pictures and whatnot. The only person that’s going to be left out is poor Yoshi. Grandma’s house is a dog eating, not dog petting zone.