::A Geek in Korea::

I had to say, for the few days after I found out my school was closing and I was having interviews with schools all over the neighborhood, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I couldn’t go a day without someone offering me a job. Nevermind that most of the jobs would be longer hours, or worse schedules. People were falling over themselves to offer me something. This would build up anyone’s confidence.

I applied at a National University earlier in the week. There was a stated deadline, so I was waiting to hear back from them about if I had made the cut. I gave them a call today and found out I wouldn’t even be given an interview for a position, and they hadn’t bothered to even call me back to tell me I wasn’t even in the running for a job. Not only did I get shot down, no one even told me. While I find this a bit unprofessional, it looks as though I had accidentally swam out of the "kiddy pool" of my local hiring bubble and found out that I was swimming with sharks at a much more competitive environment. The job I had been hoping to land must have gone to someone earlier that was qualified or had better connections. Damn.

Anyway, I’ve been moping around the house all day depressed that I wouldn’t get the job. I’ve still got standing offers, which supresses my panic a bit, but the prospect of ending up at another job where burnout and turnover is high sucks. There is a chance I might end up working with my wife again, which wouldn’t be so bad, but we bought our house on the assumption we’d be working in different neighborhoods. Now it looks like we’ll both have to put up with the long commute across town. At least I know that the school is run legally. It’s not my first choice, but it is a choice. At least I still have a few other options. I even have some time when I get back from the States to decide if I absolutely can’t decide where I want to end up.

It could be worse, I know. I could have no one offering me a job, or have to find a job before I run out of money. Neither of these is the case. I have time to take a vacation and get away for a few weeks. I don’t think the timing of my vacation could be any better. I have enough money saved that our travel will not be affected by this sudden surprise.

Tonight will be my last chance to hang out with the teachers from my old school. One of them is leaving for South Africa in a few days, and another will go back to Canada briefly and return in a month’s time to Korea looking for work. They were wonderful people to work with and made my last job one of my best experiences in Korea. I’ve learned a lot about professionalism and gained a lot of confidence from them. I’ll be sorry to see them go.

I just got back from my second superhero movie that I’ve seen at the theater this week. Earlier I went to see X-Men 3: The Last Stand, and today I watched Superman Returns. I liked both of the movies, but I think Superman Returns was a much better film. The timeless modern yet still retro look of Metropolis was really well done. Without ruining the storyline, I liked the changes they made to the Lois/Clark/Superman relationship. Also, Kevin Spacy was a really good villian, and Parker Posey played a great hench woman.

I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in months, and now I go to two in the same genre in the same week. This might be because these are the first movies I’ve been interested in for a long time. I didn’t even want to see X-men until I was bored a few days ago and didn’t have anything better to do. When I found out that Superman was playing I was excited to see it even though I hadn’t been following anything about it. These days I don’t have the time to worry about movies anymore. This is a big change for me, as one of my hobbies in college was watching almost everything good and bad that was released in the theater. Now I simply don’t have the time or energy to follow movies. Plus, unless it’s around award season, nearly everything has been awful these past few years.

Part of the reason I’ve been going to see so many superhero movies, at least subconsciously, is that these days I’m not feeling too super myself. I had so much stress I went to the hospital for it. I sit around packing up my belongings all day, cleaning up after the dog, and spending too much time online. I spent nearly everything I’ve earned in the past few years renting a new apartment, and I don’t have a job now to start earning back all I’ve spent. The place I applied for, and really want to work at, has yet to call me back. My trip to the United States is in a week and I still don’t know what I’ll be doing for the majority of the time. The stress of all my responsibilities is starting to take its toll on all aspects of my life. I’m short tempered, often alone, and irritable to others.

I hope some time away from Korea to recover will set me on the right track. I’m not sure it’s unemployment that’s got me down or just a convergence of many other things that were all ill timed.

It’s not secret that I play Nexus Wars despite my hatred of the MMORPG genre. This is a bit of a problem as I absolutely can not stand 3D fantasy role playing games set in generic settings of perpetual turmoil, but have become fairly addicted to action points based roll playing games with massive player vs. player fighting. This is the second game in the same genre that I’ve basically fallen head over heels for. The problem is that while the community and the creator of Urban Dead destroyed any urge for me to continue playing after I had maxed out a character, everything that Urban Dead got wrong, Nexus Wars seems to be getting right.

In fact, the game is so good, that even though I get to play with three characters for free, I’m even considering donating money to get more characters to play. I’ve already got three characters going at the same time. I’ve got two Neutral characters, a Myrmidon and a Sorcerer, as well as an evil character about to get to his second tier skill sets. Each of these characters has diverging skill sets, different abilities, and will play differently from each other. That’s what makes the game so much better than Urban Dead. The longer people play, the more unique a character can get. No character can learn all the skills, which always defeats the point of investing time in a character. If everyone ends up the same, why try to be special?

The strange thing is, the game boils down the MMORPG mechanic to it’s basics. There is crafting. There is combat. There is movement. Instead of the movement of a 3D avatar in a game world populated by fellow players, all of this is limited by a certain number of action points and is communicated by text. These action points are limited by the time not spent playing the game, as they accumulate over time. No in game action will allow you to acquire them faster, so it’s about spending them wisely. While most MMORPGs are about wasting as much time as possible, where time played is the most determining factor of a character’s power, Nexus Wars pushes the effective use of time. You can level the hard way, or you can grab skills that compliment each other and are useful later on that keep you leveling smoothly.

Excuse me while I get all geeky about good this game is:
Right now, I’m in a faction with all of my character. These allow me bonus points for attacks and defense, meaning they are a benefit to me. I also can keep my character at their stronghold, which keeps my character relatively safer than on the street. This saves me action points, because death has a penalty. The longer I keep my characters alive, the stronger I become, thus helping me level faster. There are also raids, which lets me get experience by exploiting the actions of others as they fight with other groups. I benefit the group by using one of my characters skills of "infusion" which allows me to use magic points to augment our groups strength by claiming parts of the territory surrounding our stronghold. This causes tension and battles with other groups. We also protect our faction standard, which gives us honor. By holding other factional standards, your faction’s honor grows, also giving greater strength and also allowing you to level faster.

It’s still a grind. It’s still a huge time sink. However, it’s free. It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s new. It’s interesting. The game mechanics are really well thought out. It gives me something to do for twenty minutes a day without worrying about monthly fees. Also, there is a limiting mechanic of action points. Once I use up my points, I can’t play until they recharge again. That means it’s self-limiting. You can only play it so much each day, so the most dangerous part of the MMORPG genre, the addiction, isn’t nearly as dangerous. While the game does keep me occupied through the day for short periods of time, it’s not the all consuming time sink that has me in front of the computer all day. I think this is the reason I don’t feel as bad playing this style of games.

Last November, I got a game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (Go! Fight Cheer Squad). It features a group of tough male cheerleaders helping people around their city by dancing to music inspire people in their time of need. You control their cheers by tapping points on the screen. It’s as awesome as it sounds, or perhaps moreso. Words simply do not describe this great game concept.

The game is a good test of accurate tapping of the Nintendo DS touch screen in time with music. I was able to get to the last stage, where you have to save the world by dancing to the song Ready Steady Go! This song is known to be the hardest in the game, because it’s long and very fast. Compared to the levels that proceed it, it’s much more difficult. Beating this stage opens up the next difficult level of the game by unlocking a new cheerleader to use. I was stuck trying to beat the "Normal" difficulty for the past seven months. SEVEN MONTHS.

Here is the stage in question, Ready, Steady, Go! :

This isn’t me beating the stage, but I’ve been playing this exact same level for the past seven months.

When I first got to this stage a few months ago, I couldn’t even make it more than a minute before dying. This discouraged me, but I kept trying to improve. Later, I was able to get to the "spinners" of the stage, but not much farther. I simply didn’t have enough of the "cheer life bar" left to continue. I was told that if you hit the last set of numbers in a color group exactly correct you get twice the energy refilled in  your "cheer life bar". Armed with this knowledge, I was able to progress to later parts of the song, but I still was just a little short of completing the song since I hadn’t memorized the new sections yet.

Today, I got the fartherest I ever had without beating a level. I actually got to the last "spinner" I needed to complete to finish the song only to fail. Determined, and unwilling to go crazy after being so close to victory, I finally beat the song. Seven months of on again off again work rewarded. It was very satisfying. I’ve unlocked the third male cheerleader and can look forward to the "hard" difficulty.

So far the songs in the new difficulty are much harder, but actually follow the beat of the song more closely and are easier to learn to a degree. They do require very accurate tapping and a lot of memorization. I’m currently stuck on one song, but at least it’s a new song. I’m not sure I can ever listen to Ready Steady Go without my blood pressure rising in frustration thinking about at all the times I failed to complete that song.

That being said, Ouendan is one of my absolute favorite games on the Nintendo DS. Only a very good game could keep me playing after seven months of failure. I’ve sold off some games, bought some new ones, but I always come back to Ouendan from time to time to try to unlock a new song or try to do better.

Korean Weddings here are not new to me, but once you get married yourself, you get another perspective on everything. You begin to compare your experience with the people currently getting married. It’s not entirely fair to be competitive, because taste is subjective. While you might think that someone’s wedding dress isn’t nearly as nice as the one you ended up choosing, they might love it.

For example, We liked the food at our wedding better, even if there wasn’t any left when we got finished with the ceremony due to our cheap Aunt bringing the Ziploc bags to steal our food. On the other hand, the wedding hall today didn’t feature a pink and green heart behind the altar like ours. They had an awesome brass band, we had an excellent Opera singer. They had way, way, too much dry ice fog, but we had more light effects. We’ll call that a draw.

The wedding I attended today was fine. No major problems other than some overly noisy children before the wedding, and overly noisy adults during the wedding. Who talks, messages, chats, or just downright ignores what is happening during a wedding ceremony? People might only be in attendance out of a financial or family obligation, but you could at least pretend you are interested. If the children stopped running up and down the aisle during the ceremony, the parents should at least turn off their phones for the twenty minutes it takes for the ceremony to finish.

There was a wonderful scene at the end of the ceremony. The bride and groom were walking down the aisle, and four men with fake snow lined the exit. They were flanked by several people with party popping fireworks. The "dress handler" did something courageous and put her between the fake snow, fireworks, and the brides very flammable hair. She was protecting the very expensive rented dress as much as the bride’s fake eyelashes. I wonder how many people’s lives together began with someone needing to put out the bride’s hair?

Not only was I the only foreigner present for the wedding, I was the only foreigner in the entire wedding hall. People kept giving me a double take as I would sit down. I also was told that I was a "very handsome boyfriend" by someone that used to work with my wife. This is the third wedding I’ve been to with people that have attended my own wedding.

One of the requirements of a teaching visa to enter Korea is that you have a sponsor that allows you to stay in the country. As such, to stay in the country for a significant amount of time, you need to be employed. In my experience people without jobs usually have about a week or so to find work before they need to worry about immigration. I’m not sure if this is a legal grace period, or just the result of the slow processing at the immigration offices. I’ve never been in the situation for an extended period of time to know.

Anyway, I am now the sole unemployed person in my Korean family. My father in law, a seasonal manual laborer that goes through draughts of unemployment is currently working, and my brother in law has passed his driver’s exam, meaning he has all the requirements for employment set out before him by his last interview. He’ll be moving soon to make phones in Gumi, another city known for industrial jobs. This poses a problem, as we are going on vacation for two weeks and need to find someone to take care of our dog Yoshi.

Now I’m the only person that doesn’t have a job.

My first day of unemployment was actually fairly good, as days go. The wife and I got up at 4AM, took a taxi to the edge of town, and watched Korea lose to Switerland (He was OFF SIDES! Really bad referees!) Anyway, after catching a bus back to our part of town, we took two extended naps and did some laundry. It’s probably one of the most relaxed Saturdays I’ve spent in the longest of times. After our second nap we got invited over to eat Sam-gae-tang (Chicken with Rice and Ginseng) at my In law’s house.

Currently my plans are to get my employment documents organized and find out all I can about another university hiring for a similiar position to the one I just left. I have two weeks to look for work before we move the house and go to the States on vacation. After that, I have up to a month or more to look for work when I return. If things aren’t looking up by then, I might feel the sting of unemployment instead of it’s endearing qualities of excessive freetime and a chance to sleep in all day.

Today was my last day at a school I’ve been working at for the past year and a half. It was a rather anti-climatic day.

I started off by going to the hospital. Since I still have school insurance, and the many tentacles of this school happens to include a medical center, I stopped by for some discount health care. I had a previous health check come back with a very Magic 8 Ball answer of "Answer Unclear. Try again later." Seems there were some things they wanted to recheck involving urine. I have been suffering from some pulsing pains in my kidney/abdominal area for the past week, and wondered of my inconclusive test results might need to be further refined.

We did the tests, with some additional X-rays to see if there was anything potentially hiding from the other tests. The doctor that interviewed me about they symptoms proceeded to ask me to lift my shirt for an examination. He made a claw with his two fingers and started hooking my stomach and asking me if I was in pain. Now, having someone claw at  your stomach isn’t exactly pleasant, but it wasn’t as if I was in serious pain from anything other than his fingers. He concluded by looking by my X-rays that I had no kidney stones.

He suggested I was suffering from a lack of exercise, infrequently timed meals, and an abundance of stress. That basically nailed what had defined my life for the past few weeks. I can’t go out to exercise with my dog Yoshi yet (two more weeks for shots!), and I’ve been so busy with looking for work and for apartments I haven’t been eating at the same time everyday. The stress levels are absolutely through the roof at the moment. I can’t remember a time when I’ve had so much stuff going on that’s costing me this much money at every turn. Just today we made airplane reservations back to the United States (July 7th to July 22, confirmed). Along with my apartment purchase, I’ve dropped a serious amount of cash in the last two days. All this while officially being temporarily unemployed for the first time in Korea. (Deep Breath.)

However, my students were great today. One group of kindergarten mothers actually begged me to stay at the school. The entire group of mothers came in and asked me my plans and really tried to make me decide to stay with their kids. If only things had worked out differently, I would have loved to keep things as they were. While I really like teaching their kids, I wasn’t going to be able to stay at the school despite their pleads. It’s time to go. The majority of the teaching staff is going, and the school won’t be the same. I wouldn’t want to be around when all the drastic changes started to occur.

I had four "cookie parties" today. The kids supplied their own snacks, and I brought the cola and cider for them to drink. The kids ingested massive amounts of sugar, then bounced around the classroom between rounds of Uno. They also made sure I ate dangerous amounts of salted and sugary snacks. By my last party I stayed far away from the snack table. I took some pictures for my Flickr account to share. I have to say that I never had any significant problems in any of my classes this year.

My largest class was actually my favorite, and I didn’t lose a single student the entire time I taught them this year. All my other classes were very good too. They each had their own character and senses of humor. Some of my students this year have been at the school longer than I have, so they were shocked to see such dramatic change occuring. They genuinely would miss the teachers they learned from for the past few years. The transformations in some of the student’s characters and abilities has been remarkable.

That being said, each time I leave a school it gets a little easier. It’s not that the connections between student and teacher aren’t as strong, but that I know where to place a limit on my attachment. I can have good relationships with students without violating my privacy now, which lets me step away from everything much more easily. Right now it still hasn’t sunk in that I won’t be going to work next week, or the week after that most likely. The whole "I’ve got to move into another apartment" idea hasn’t even begun to register yet either. The "I’ll be visiting the United States with my wife for the first time to meet the extended family" seems so far away that it’s like a dream.

Tonight will be indulgence of another kind. Korea plays Switzerland for a place in the knock out rounds of the World Cup. The game starts at 4 AM local time, so we’ll be traveling to the World Cup Stadium in the middle of the night to watch the game with the rest of the city of Daejeon. It will be my first World Cup party of the tournament, and I hope not the last. Now that I don’t need to worry about work, I can enjoy myself and try to get rid of some of this stress that has accumulated for the past few weeks.

One of the biggest uncertainties with work happened to be where I was going to be living in a month’s time when my contract was finished and I had to move out of my current company provided apartment. I’m no longer "owned" by my school in any degree. I’m a complete free agent now that I’ve got a marriage visa and a release letter being drafted. I can work where ever I want, provided I have my own housing. Getting that housing wasn’t exactly easy, or cheap, but my wife and I are now no longer going to be homeless in a month’s time.

We have always been planning ahead for the moment where I was going to leave my current school and look for work on my own. You can demand a much higher salary and better hours when the school can see you are well established with your own apartment. It’s one less thing they have to provide, and you can ask for a higher salary to offset some of the cost of living in an expensive place.

Land here is at a premium, and as a result, real estate is incredibly expensive. Our combined salaries for the past year or more was able to only get us a moderately larger apartment than we have now, and that’s just to rent for the next two years. We still have to pay a monthly fee. We didn’t have enough money to forgo the monthly rent because we didn’t have a large enough deposit. We didn’t have a large enough down payment because my school started acting crazy and unreliable about six months before I was planning on leaving. Had I been able to keep working them and not worrying about my legal status or employment, we would have been in a much better position when we looked for houses.

The timing sucked, but we tried to make the best of it. We have a cousin in the real estate business, and we went looking for places around town this morning before work. We looked at three places in smaller buildings, then also went to an actual apartment complex to look at bargain end apartments in a price range we could afford.

Three of the five apartments we looked at were very nice, and for our standards, very livable. The first two were written off because the owners of the apartments had borrowed heavily to own them, and if they had financial problems they would very likely be put on auction where we would lose our deposit key money. Our deposit money was the entire savings we have in Korea at the moment, so this was an unacceptable risk.

We went to a less central location to look for apartments more in our price range with less risk. These places were a bit older, but with the subway expanding into the area in the next year, soon to be in a prime location. They’ll be fine for getting to work as long as I can ride a bike, good for shopping, great for exercise, and playing with the dog when we go out. Riverside parks circle the entire apartment complex, so it will be perfect for getting outside from time to time for a picnic as well.

The first place at this location was a total dump. No one repaired the walls where people hung about twenty pictures, the windows were covered with goo, and I basically broke down, depressed that this was the best we could afford after several years of work. The agent in charge of showing the building mentioned there was a remodelled apartment in the same building going for nearly twice as much, but suggested we went for a look. This apartment, while the same size and design, was 100% better. New finish, new sinks, new floors, walls, everything. Absolutely livable despite the higher price. We had found our home for the next two years.

We signed the papers and move in two weeks later. While I might be a free agent looking for work now, I’ve got a place to call home while I look for work. All I need to do is find the right school in the mean time.

Special culture note: There are "Lucky days" marked on realtors calendars in Korea. Buddhists believe if you move into apartments on these days you will have good luck and make more money. These days are also the most expensive days to hire moving companies because they adjust their pay to reflect the increased demand. Usually the busiest days to move are weekends, but these "Lucky Days" fall according to the lunar calendar and change.

I went to my morning adult class to say "goodbye". There was a paper we were given to explain the situation today, finally. Their "solution" on the paper was to open up the location I used to work at before I moved to this school full time. The problem is that it’s in an entirely different neighborhood, and they would provide no bus service to get students there. The vast majority of my students come to the school because it was within walking distance, and it was substantially cheaper than all the surrounding schools. The reason it was cheap was there was no bus service to add to the fees. Several of my students were asking me how they were supposed to get to class if it was going to be so far away.

It surprised me to hear they were reopening my last location to elementary school students, because I know their lease of the building had a non-competition clause in it. They rent out the building at my last location, and the floor below also contains an English school. I had an interview there yesterday. They still seem to be in business and were interested in hiring me. They aren’t going anywhere.

When I signed my contract at my current school, for the old location in question, I was told I would never be allowed to teach elementary school children at that location because they agreed not to have classes in competition with the school below. Now, it seems, this no longer applies. Seems my school has a habit of ignoring contractual obligations that goes beyond my location.

Now here comes the most outrageous part.

After we handed out all those fliers and told all the students we were leaving the school, after one teacher bought a plane ticket back to South Africa, after I interviewed or was approached by half a dozen schools, after I told all my students we were closing the school and we were having a party for the next two days…after all of this, literally while my school was still operating, one of the teachers got a call.

The man who interviewed me at the main campus of our school called and said, "It was decided an hour ago, your school is NO LONGER CLOSING."

I talked someone this afternoon about staying in my apartment after I leave the school. When I spoke to him at lunch, he made no mention of this happening. This is literally a decision that was made no more than a few HOURS ago. A complete reversal on everything we’ve been told for the past two weeks happened on the whim of some elite upper management person that can’t be reached by anyone else. No explanations. No information. Whenever we ask, we get, "I’m not sure. Maybe. Let me check."

What the hell is going on?!

It seems that there is some sort of reason why the school won’t move classes to the other location which our manager isn’t allowed to tell us about. He claimed that because so many people complained about the classes for the new location, they decided to not close the school I work at. The school was got caught for tax evasion and illegal immigration practices. Unless they had a change of heart and decided to follow the law, pay whatever fines they were given, and rearrange the legal status of the school, I don’t know how they were given the choice.

It’s infuriating that they decide we weren’t important enough to be told the school was closing until the week where we needed to decide if we were staying or not while everyone at the main branch knew our fate. It’s even worse that they decided to keep the school open now, but not even tell us the reason. I’ve spent the last two weeks looking for work, apartments, and getting really, really stressed out. Who knows what would happen the next time someone decides to change their mind.

I can’t tell what will happen next with the school, but I’ve already told them I want out.

I demanded a release letter on my desk by the end of the week. The school has broken their contract and I am owed a release letter stating as such. Even though it will cause me financial hardship, be a huge pain in the ass, and really give me a hard time trying to get everything accomplished, I’ve decided I’m leaving the school. All trust I once had for the school is gone. I’ve been treated like something not worth any consideration whatsoever. Less than Korean, less than even human. They had the audacity to ask me if I wanted to resign a contract with them?

Are you fucking kidding me?