::A Geek in Korea::

There have been a few more twists and turns in the pet ownership drama of the past few weeks. We still have kept Yoshi. While the pet rules are still posted on the elevator wall, we’ve been taking him for walks by putting him in a bag and carrying him down. Only one square headed security guard ever says anything to us when we walk him. The same security guard that harassed us moving in, and the same guy that was telling us to get rid of our dog due to some unknown Korean pet ownership law and or "group vote".

On walks with Yoshi, my wife has been other pet owners were they live and if they know anything about pet ownership rules in our apartment. Summarizing what people say, if there is a law, no one else in the country enforces it except this particular security guard. Our apartment has a bad reputation from pet owners as being particularly strange about it’s pet enforcement. No one seemed to care, or thought it would be a big deal.

By chance we caught a taxi driver that happened to live in our apartment as well. We asked if he had pets, and he went into a long tirade about how he proudly fought against pet ownership in his apartment building. He was a "leader" for his particular apartment building in the complex, and that he had "decided" that there would be no dogs. We asked if it had been put up for an apartment wide vote like we had been told it had by security guard, and he said that it had not. In fact, he seemed to think that a vote wasn’t needed to tell people what they were and weren’t allowed to do in their apartment. Basically, he said that it was up to him and whatever his group decided.

From what was explained to me, these apartment leaders are self-important people that basically pick a cause to champion so they can justify their salary as they decide things in the apartment complex. Trivial stuff like "Garbage recycling day" or "How much to spend on cleaning per month" wouldn’t occupy their time or be worth paying someone to decide, so they need something else to do. They tend to be strictly conservative and prohibitive. The guy seemed like a total dick.

Anyway, since the only security guy that harasses me has lied about every single justification for  not having pets, and the entire issue hasn’t been voted on according to this "leader" guy we met, I’m not really worried anything is going to happen. We’re being as polite as possible while still owning a pet. We’re not going to have our fun spoiled by a bunch of undemocratic guys that can’t deal with dogs. Even if it was put up to a vote, we still won’t give up our pup. Resistance!

I recently got a copy of Brain Age: Train your Brain in Minutes a Day! used at my local game shop. Right now, I wake up each morning, do my burn through my overnight Nexus War accrued AP, then eat some breakfast. Sometime either in the morning, or when I got to work, I make sure to bring my DS lite with me and fire up Brain Age. It’s not exactly a "game", but more a compilation of thinking exercises designed to quicken up your brain and prevent your mind from going all mushy in your old age.

There is a disembodied head of a Japanese doctor that guides you though the exercises. He tells you how these should activate different parts of the brain as you do what he tells you. The use of handwriting recognition works fairly well to keep the game friendly and easy to get into. Most of the exercises involve  rapif fire math questions and logic problems. Right now, by best "brain age" is something close to my actual age +5. I’ve also started working through the Sudoku puzzles included in the American release. I’m currently blasting through the "easy" puzzles and the interface is outstanding. It works just like a pen and paper Sudoku puzzle, except you don’t need to worry about ripping the paper trying to erase a mistake. Note taking, optional mistake notification, and statistic tracking. The only downside is the fact they didn’t allow for infinite puzzles. Only 100 puzzles, come on? Sudoku can be generated mathematically for infinite puzzles! Don’t think I’m going to buy another Sudoku only game.

This had been imported by some other foreigner gentleman that goes to the same game store I use. According to their save file, they hadn’t played it in a month. I’ve been playing it every day at the moment and still haven’t unlocked everything. Once I burn through the Sudoku puzzles and unlock the rest of the content, I’m not sure if I will keep the game around for its health effects. I will tell you that after an intense game session I do feel like I’ve taken a test that got my brain pumping.

I picked up Big Brain Academy myself in the United States. This game drops the educational angle brain and has a sort of mini-game feel. These games are broken down into different categories like "Think", "Identify" , "Compute", "Analyze", and "Memorize". You have three games in each category, with three different levels. These different levels are tracked for high scores, and you can do a "test" which is a minigame from each category at random. You are assigned a point score, or "brain weight", as well as a profession depending on how you score in each discipline. I tend to range from "Michelangelo" to "Hair Dresser" fairly often. I played Big Brain Academy for about three weeks off and on with other games. Since it is more of a mini-game collection with some high scores, it’s like an educational version of "Wario Ware" somewhat.

Both of these games are part of the "Touch Generations" line of Nintendo games. These are for casual non-gamers that want to give something unique a try on the Nintendo DS. I’ve also purchased Tetris DS, Electroplankton, and Nintendogs (Which I promptly got bored with in a week and later sold) which are also in the Touch Generations line. The whole "selling games to non-gamers" thing works for me because I don’t have time to play long involving games all that much anymore. If something isn’t quick playing and portable I’ll probably get bored playing it. The time where I can sit in front of a television for hours at a time to master a game has passed. My gaming choices as of late have started reflecting this.

Way back in the Internet days of old, when I wasn’t connected by a fat pipe of pure goodness, I used to use a service provider born from the depths of some evil nether region of the soul. Back then, the way I would spend my time would be to heckle movies online via chat rooms. This is how I ended up with my ‘Net moniker. I also became a huge Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan. I even chatted with the guy that maintained their official website. Now that’s some serious Geek cred.

Heckling movies "live" either by chat room or in the theater is a bit like an improv comedy, and also a performance art. Not everyone can do it well. I know I spoiled many, many a movie with friends talking during some important scene. I also remember a trip with a few friends to heckle a Godzilla movie in an empty theater that was way too much fun. Anyway, the idea was to heckle the new stuff that MST3k would never get the rights to show on air due to their expense.

When MST3k went off the air, I looked for alternatives. MSTing was acceptable for a cheap laugh, but most fan fiction is far too easy to make fun of anyway. I wrote a few, but didn’t nearly enjoy it as much as a live movie. It’s written but not "live", so all sense of timing is lost. Once I came to Korea I lost all ability to mock movies real time as I lacked the audience to appreciate it as well as a manner to watch what was being made fun of at the moment.

With the advent of podcasting, and Mike Nelson’s very own RiffTraxs, things are looking good. Download the RiffTrax for the $1.99 fee, which is essentially an alternate audio commentary, find the movie for rent or pull it from your collection, and sync it up. This avoids all those problematic "copyright laws" that prevented MST3k from heckling the best of the best. Now you can listen to commentaries from such cinematic classics as Roadhouse, The Fifth Element, or Plan 9 from Outer Space! During the movie, if things get out of sync they occasionally have a robot voice repeat lines from the movie to help you get everything back in time. Then there is Sharecrow, which seems to be made for this exact purpose, linking commentaries with DVD time codes to lock in sync. Future releases include Star Trek movies and guest appearances by former MST3k stars! It’s a steal for this price.

Little did I know there is an entire community of people offering up alternative comment tracks. It might be film nerds talking about movie trivia or someone trying to be funny. I don’t know who I’d listen to heckling a movie other than Mike Nelson, but it’s cool that the idea has caught on. Long ago I thought many a time of heckling a particularly bad movie in such a way, but without the means of organization, sync, and distribution, it wouldn’t have gotten very far.

I’m encouraging anyone to pick up a copy of Roadhouse and watching it with the RiffTrax. It’s got my MST3k fan seal of approval. Absolutely hysterical.

Every student I taught knew that today was the last day of intensive classes with me. My first class staged a mini-revolt during their five minute vocabulary regurgitation vocabulary test. Since half the class didn’t attend on the Saturday "make up day" for our holiday this week, they didn’t know which words to study for the test. As such, the highest level students in the school were failing their first vocabulary test of the summer intensive period. Panic attacks ensued.

Then, one student said, "Hey, if we all erase our names from the test, they won’t know who to fail!" Except this plan didn’t exactly work, since they all have distinct handwriting and half of them erased their names poorly. Also, one of the students had actually studied and wouldn’t remove her name from her paper. Sorting our who was who was relatively simple. The secretary and I figured out who they were, made them resign the tests. They all failed and needed to be retested. It’s never ending.

The lowest level class I taught was in a screaming, shouting mood. We finished our book relatively quickly, but I was well prepared. I played a game of "write down vocabulary" Bingo. The only word bank I could use in the book we had was of Disney Characters. We had more Disney characters to learn than phonics words in the back of the book. Pathetic. Anyway, they created their bingo sheets, but none of them could read the names without the pictures identifying who they were. I spend the first half of class reading Disney words and trying to keep their shrieks down to a low blood curdle.The drama was so intense that another teacher came in to tell me that one of my students had pounded the wall, probably in agony, as her team lost the lead.

I had just such the tool for preventing the class from getting too out of control. During the break between the two hours of class, I had grabbed the schools "Pointer" which is really a huge stick we carry to scare the shit out of students. I have my own pointer which I don’t use which is around the size of a ruler somewhere in my house, but this thing was three times as long, almost a miniature sword made out of wood. I carried into class and one of my slower students saw me, stopped, and just started "twitching" as if the thing brought back memories.

I also returned with a board game from Boggle’s World. The "Say Four Things" board game always saves me when I’m backed into a teaching "corner" so to speak. This class was extra large, with 11 low level students, so I printed off two copies of the board for each team of five or six students. Then I gave each team two different colored Post-It-notes. That way, they could keep track of the other team’s progress without all crowding around the same board and getting in each other’s way. Also, I used Post-It-notes because they could customize their little team name marker as they moved it around the board, but wouldn’t be tempted to take it or be able to lose it easily. They are also cheap and replaceable.

These students started getting wild as the game took its back and forth pace. Several times each team would pull ahead, then miss a question and be forced back.  Eventually one team won as the clock ran out. We had a good time, even if it was too loud and my throat was too rough.

Today, due to my rotation in the morning to fill in for classes left by the vacant foreigner position at the school, was the last day of intensive courses for two of my classes. I will not miss them. These were hellish classes I whipped along like a tyrant to complete the book.

My lowest level class of the day, was is actually designated "Upper-Low" on the attendance sheet. They aren’t the bottom of the barrel, but more like the frothy stuff floating on top. We got to business and worked through the last unit of the book. Half the students in the class are catatonic, while most of the others can’t respond to an English sentence without me translating their Korean answer for them first. Getting through the class was work in and of itself, as the students are so set on a routine formed by a book and study with other teachers that any deviation from the schedule causes crinkled noses and whines of complaint. For once, however, I was able to take advantage of their strict adherence to formality and got a little revenge.

We did our book work, and even got finished early. Now I needed something to do to fill up the time. I had found a related worksheet and printed it out for them to complete. After that was completed, there was about ten minutes left in the class. This is the time usually reserved for them to write down their homework in their "communications" notebook. It’s what the parents check to see what we did in class and what the students have to do at home. Since the students are given so  much work and only see foreigners twice a week, it’s impossible for them to remember all we assign. We take the time to write down the homework in each section of the book so that they can remember.

Usually I would stop the lesson and write down the homework, but this was the last day. I didn’t need to assign homework because I wouldn’t see these students again the check if they did it or not. Some of the students may not even attend the school on a day to day basis and may only be here for the intensive class. I wouldn’t see them ever again.

I’m not sure if it was the fact that they were unaware of this, or that they didn’t want to study for ten minutes, but they demanded homework from me. I’m not one to turn down a child that wants to work hard, so I wrote down the homework I would have assigned had I planned on seeing them again to check it. They wrote it down and complained like they always do. If they didn’t realize they didn’t have to do it, I’m not going to tell them. In fact, I should have given them a lot more. Then the next time they might learn something and wouldn’t fall for this again.

I’m sure that the elderly in Korea have faced tremendous hardships in their lives. They’ve grown up in a country that has gone from poor, isolated, and agrarian to hyper-modern, interconnected in the world at large, and fairly well off all things considered. Still, for all their wisdom and conservative values, the elderly in Korea get away with a lot sometimes.

Due to the Confucian roots of the family structure in Korea, not only can you not contradict the elders in your family, you can’t really say much to old people at all. So, when some old man or woman breaks some sort of protocol the rest of the younger people know about, people go about their ways trying not to make light of the situation for fear of upsetting someone older. This is how old people can get away with some of the stuff they say and do.

For example, I was with my wife in Costco. One of the places that has free samples is the butcher shop. They cook chopped steak with seasonings and serve it to the hungry masses. Korean people are absolutely incapable of learning how to queue, and some families starve their children for days it would seem, as they sit encamped around these various free food vendors devouring their samples. The steak "mob" is the worst, as the cooking time means that everyone in the area has the chance to smell the flavorful meat being prepared. The entire serving of meat is served up and finished in a matter of seconds by hungry families armed with biodegradable toothpicks.

I elbowed my way to the front of the mob, grabbed a toothpick, and scavenged what looked to be one of the last scraps from the feeding frenzy that had gone unnoticed. Dripping with sauce, perfectly flavored with onion and pepper, it was begging for me to pierce it with my toothpick. I launched my attack and speared the meat. My jaw dropped open in anticipation, and a faint trickle of drool could be seen at the corner of my mouth. In slow motion, I slowly brought the piece from the hot serving tray to  my mouth, tongue running over my lips and teeth ready to embrace the warm meat.

Then, the old lady next to me sneezed on not only my hand and meat, but all the remaining portions still left on the serving skillet. Everything was tainted. She said nothing, as she had already finished eating the last piece of non-diseased meat, and simply put her toothpick in the receptacle and moved on the defile the next piece of meat at the next stall.

I stood, mouth agape, unable to believe I was denied my tasty morsel of food. If I wanted to eat some steak I just had to wait around for the next batch and hope that Sneezy Dentures Kim didn’t show up to ruin my meal. The next serving wouldn’t be ready in time for me to sample it, and we never buy steaks because of the steep price tag. That’s why everyone crowds around the steak stall.

I was denied my free bite of steak by a woman so old she didn’t feel she needed to cover her mouth anymore when she sneezed, and she didn’t apologize to anyone for sneezing on them or their food. I couldn’t correct her, as she was way too old and people around me would give me dirty looks. How dare I say something to an elder! She wouldn’t understand a word I said and wouldn’t listen to me anyway, since if she didn’t apologize she must not have thought she did anything wrong. No amount of hygiene discussion was going to make the steak any more edible anyway, so it was a moot point.

I just marked it down in my little mental notebook under "Rude things I plan to get away with when I am way older that I’d never do now." Being old has it’s perks, and it seems one of t his is being completely inconsiderate about hygiene, food safety, and needing to apologize.  I now know this and plan to abuse it when I’m old and wrinkled.

It turns out that we really lucked out when we chose a shih tzu as a pet. We didn’t know a thing going into this whole "pet ownership" deal, but we’ve been mostly happy with the result.

For one, the breed’s temperament is excellent, so Yoshi very rarely barks. The only time he barks is when we are coming home after he’s been alone for a long period of time and gets excited when he hears our keys in the door. Otherwise he’s almost completely silent. Sadly, he spends a lot of time alone when we both work. We feed him before we go, give him some ice and cold water to help him cool down, and make sure he has a place in the shade to relax on the veranda. Other than that, there is little else we can do for his comfort. He’s weathered the heat of this summer very well. I come home to give him fresh water and to feed him on my lunch break, but otherwise he’s alone for a while. He doesn’t destroy anything anymore.

When we take him for walks, he is fairly well behaved compared to some of the other dogs we see. Whenever children approach Yoshi, he sits down and always lets the children pet him. He licks and plays, so thankfully no one has been bitten. It still  make is nervous, so we try to keep a good eye on him and let the children only touch his back, not his face or ears.

Also, since shih tzu have hair and not fur, they don’t shed! I just learned this today. We never have to worry about our dog’s hair being everywhere in the house as long as we give him the occasional shave. That’s awesome.

We’ve found an audible punishment for him that gets him to behave immediately. We have two powerful ellipsoid shaped magnets, confiscated from children at one of our schools. When we have these two magnets attract each other, then "whine" and "chirp" like cicadas. Yoshi hates this sound and will immediately stop whatever it is he is doing and most likely leave the room to the safety of his veranda. Finding something that has such a reaction out of him is great, because it means we don’t need to keep threatening him or leaving him outside if he is naughty.

We’ve begun taking Yoshi for walks by carrying him in the elevator in an over-sized shopping bag. He hated the pet carrier, and we can fold up the shopping bag and sit on it as he romps around the park devouring his daily count of worms. This is more than what the other pet owners in the apartment do. It seems that our particular apartment has always been a little weird about pets, but the letters and warnings are all for show  to give pet owners a hard time. No one is really going to bother us as long as our dog is under control.

Yoshi has recently grown a little stubborn on walks. He’s got a skin allergy related to protein, so we can’t feed him regular snacks. Usually when he was stubborn and refused to walk, we would feed him a treat to keep him walking. Now when he stops, he doesn’t get anything, so he’s being temperamental and just refusing to walk if we leave the grass of the park. All he wants to do is lay in the grass and eat worms all day. Too bad the worms are protein that further aggravates his skin condition. We’ll need to find bite sized non-protein snacks to supplement his no-protein bones and chews.

All around the apartment are stray dogs and barking dogs locked up in apartments that aren’t been treated well enough. We’ve done our part to be responsible for our dog, and we’ve been lucky to get a breed that works well with the confines of a highly dense apartment complex.

Tuesday being a public holiday, my management somehow convinced me to come in on my Saturday to teach the intensive classes that were canceled. Here’s a hint, it involved money. As much as I wasn’t thrilled about giving up a weekend morning to teach after teaching nearly double the hours stated in my contract, the students were even more annoyed. In my first class, the majority of my Advanced students didn’t show up. Those that did weren’t happy about being there.

One girl said that she was going to a water park tomorrow, so while she didn’t want to be there, she had no choice if she wanted to have fun on Sunday. The other boys seemed to indicate that this was the "path of least resistance" from their parents as well, but called the director a few nasty words for insisting that they couldn’t miss a single day. These children give up four hours every morning to study English, and I’ve been working them really hard to finish the book. We spent the first fifty minutes just talking, which we’ve never done. We covered a few pages in the entire two hours, but it was one of the easiest and most enjoyable classes I’ve had at the school. No "repeat after me" tedium.

The next class, full of devil spawn hell children of the damned from day to day, had nearly perfect attendance. This class serves a completely different purpose compared to the advanced class I taught. This is more of an "English baby sitting" class. Sending these students away for four hours every morning in the summer prevents filicide. These students use a Disney themed book which is so heavily branded it makes me feel dirty. I haven’t watched a traditional Disney film since Aladdin was popular, and trying to teach kids English when they expect the students to know the character names is sometimes frustrating.

Every time I tell them to open their books, I feel like this:

Troy: [On TV]  Now turn to the next problem. If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshedf are you?
                         You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Girl: Pepsi?
Troy: Partial credit!

Since these students aren’t here to improve English, only to spend time away from their parents in the largest possible chunk available, this class was full of crap I shouldn’t have to deal with. Bathroom breaks. Whining students. Eraser tossing battles. I grit my teeth, get through the lesson, then count down the minutes until I am free to do what I want.