::A Geek in Korea::

For the past few weeks, we’ve put Yoshi back out on the glass windowed veranda at night. He had been sleeping inside the living room in a small cage, but as the weeks got warmer, and he started spending the afternoons out on the veranda while we were at work, he tried to sleep there too. He would lay down on his pillow and refuse to get up when we told him to get in his cage.

At first it was too cold, and we’d put him in a sweater before letting stay out at night. Now he gets his t-shirt before we put him outside. If the weather continues to warm up, he’ll just sleep out on his pillow when his hair gets a little longer. Now he’s got a new game he plays with us.

In the morning, when I woke up, the first thing I used to do was feed him. I’d walk over to where his food is, grab a cup of food, and then open the door to the veranda, feed him, and then let him back in the apartment. He’d usually then spend the morning on my lap sleeping, whether I was on the couch or at the computer.

Eventually he associated me getting up with food. This is bad. The problem arises when Yoshi figured out that if he was noisy at around 8 am, he could wake me up. Once I am awake in the morning, it’s very rare that I can get back to bed at all. Thus, I’d wake up early, feed him, and Yoshi would get his first meal extra early.

Yoshi has been waking us up progressively earlier for each meal. What started as a leisurely 9:30 wake up call is now a 7:50 early morning bark or two. If we kept doing this we’d never get any sleep.

Today my wife got up early and let Yoshi in the house, but didn’t feed him. She wanted to break his habit of getting food earlier. Instead, he’ll get fed at the same time when we get up, but we’ll let him in the house if he is too cold. All he does is go to sleep on his spot on the couch when we let him in every morning. He’s as tired as we are in the mornings. She let him in, and when we got out of bed to face the day, he was still there napping. We fed him like normal after that.

For a dog that likes to sleep out of the veranda, he just doesn’t like mornings on the veranda alone.

Yoshi’s also begun to recognize when anyone is planning to go outside. The first time I grab my coat or mp3 player, he’ll get ready for his walk. When I put on my coat after my shower, he knows I’m going to work and will go outside to wait on his pillow for me to say goodbye. He also waits and watches the door when one of us leaves the house for a short time. I think he’s a remarkably smart dog.

My wife and I had the day off work today because of the local elections. A few days earlier we had made plans for today for a spring picnic in the park. We would bring out gas range, cook up some pork, and drink the day away. Then my wife tells me that it’s supposed to rain on Wednesday. We haven’t had significant amounts of precipitation in a month, yet it was going to rain on our day off? What crappy luck.

Before we had planned for the barbeque, she had promised to meet some friends at a coffee shop to chat. It was a Korean ladies thing, and I wasn’t interested in dropping by.Since it was raining today, she had no reason to cancel her promise with them, so I was left to entertain myself. She went off to vote and meet her friends.

After a long nap, I got around to the whole “doing something fun on my day off” plan. The only movies in the theaters were awful, and the Rifftrax guys latest was Spiderman 3, which I would never, ever pay any amount of money to ever see again. I had finished my 900 page book yesterday, and I wasn’t going to finish a second book I was half-way through in a hurry.

I played some Brawl and unlocked a few new levels. The Internet connection on the Wii was not being friendly today, so I didn’t get to play online for some reason. The Internet wasn’t going to entertain me long today anyway. I was feeling a little more passive than usual after my long nap, and really wanted to spend my rainy day as lazy as possible.

I decided to check out what was available on MegaTV, my IPTV service box. For some reason I had never noticed the “Singing Room” feature before. It turns out that I have access to Midi-quality music and lyrics to all the songs I like to sing in my very own apartment at any time I would like. Of course, there is no microphone, and the machine doesn’t output a score, so really you are just singing a song on a television. If you really tried hard, you could use the remote control to stand in for a mic, but really it isn’t the same without the atmosphere. For someone that only sings in singing rooms with disco lights and loud microphone feedback, sitting on a couch, sober, and trying to sing the lyrics of “Optimistic” seemed unbearably lame.

I ended up watching “Ripley’s Game“, a thriller movie I’d never heard of before. It had John Malkovich and Lena Headey (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles Mom!). It was an average movie, but hardly much of a thriller.

Once my wife got home, we ate dinner together, and she’s back to watching her dramas. I might finish up the book I had put off earlier, or try to sleep. It hasn’t stopped raining the entire day, and I didn’t get a chance to walk Yoshi or do anything else I had planned on. Sometimes the weather is so unhelpful, but at least I got a day to relax. They don’t come often during the week these days.

Kirk: Ah, come on Luanne, you know what this is.

Luanne: Kirk, I don’t know what it is.

Kirk: [sighs] It could not be more simple, Luanne. You want me to show this to the cat, and have the cat tell you what it is? ‘Cause the cat’s going to get it.

Luanne: I’m sorry, I’m not as smart as you, Kirk. We didn’t all go to Gudger College. [timer dings]

Kirk: It’s dignity! Gah! Don’t you even know dignity when you see it?

Luanne: Kirk, you’re spitting.

Kirk: Okay, genius, why don’t you draw dignity.

[she does so] [everyone gasps in recognition -- we can't see it, however]

Hibbert: Worthy of Webster’s.

From Simpsons [4F04]“A Milhouse Divided”

I’m taking over for a teacher for this month while she helps middle school students prepare for their big midterm evaluations. Right now I teach the highest level elementary school class instead of the middle school students until the tests are finished. Since I am teaching their book for the first time, I went a little bit faster that normal. We had five minutes left in class before the bell rang.

The other foreign teacher that also teaches the class will play a game of Pictionary when the class is close to finishing. I usually don’t play any games in my classes, but they asked me to choose words from their vocabulary book and volunteered to draw them on the board for the rest of the students to guess. My director had been circling around, peeking in classes to make sure they didn’t get out of class early or waste time, so I was in a bind.

The students said it was my choice for words. I decided that I was going the route of every pictonary game I’ve ever played, where you get those impossible words you can never draw. The first word I picked for a student was “Transparent.” How do you draw something you are supposed to see through? It’s an idea and a property more than a thing, which makes it extra difficult.

The student who was drawing was able to see the Korean word. She knew what it was, and had a great example with a glass of water versus a glass of milk, but it was too hard for anyone to ever guess. Once the students gave up, we worked on the opposite word “opaque”, as well as how to put it into a sentence. The students said they didn’t know the English word, so they wanted to limit my words to things they had to memorize in an upcoming test.

The students, undaunted by my mean word choice, handed me another vocabulary book and opened it to a random page. I had to pick something from THAT page this time. Hilariously, the word “naked” was on their list of choices. The person that went up to the board drew a person with no shirt on with a belly button, then got embarrassed. No one that knew the word would SAY it in English or Korean.

As the bell was ringing to be dismissed, they learned the expression “in your birthday suit.” They thought it was a very funny expression. I explained that on your first birthday, you arrived with no clothes on, so being naked is your “first birthday suit”. They understood it after that.

Is this cruel, possibly, however, it is amusing to see how the students tackle an interesting problem of language like words that aren’t suitable for drawing.

To get meta for a moment:

According to my stat logs, the words “nude Korean”, and “Korean nude” are the number one and two search results for this blog. Naturally, I expect this particular anecdote will only increase my page count. Oddly, my number three search result is “Cowon D2“, which doesn’t involve nudity whatsoever.

One of the most time consuming things I have to do on the job is grade the majority of my students essay writing once a week. The students are given a paper topic for each week of the month, dependent on their level and ability, and are responsible for one essay topic to be turned in. One beginning level topic might be “Family”, while an advanced topic could be “How can you be a good son or daughter?”

The grading is done by me, by hand, on the days where I come in early or have a break time. I usually grade forty of these in any given week. The revisions required vary from sticking a comma or pronoun in the right place, all the way to completely rewriting the essay after getting a rough Korean-English mess of a response. We slap a grade on it, the secretary records the grade, and we use that as the basis of our “writing” evaluation score at the end of the term. The students then take the corrected essay, then copy it in their notebooks a few times.

There has been a new addendum to this procedure. The scores I give the students now determine if the students have “passed” the essay requirement. Anything about 80% is deemed “passed”, and allows the student to go home at their normal time. Those students that failed will be kept after school in our study room to revise and reedit their essay to get a higher score.

I’m not sure how I like this new power of mine.

No one has told me if this means I’ll be required to remark the same essays repeatedly, but if it does, this idea is a complete and total nonstarter. There is already a backlog of students papers getting graded when some other paperwork requirements pop up, so if I’d have to spend more time doing something like test preparation, this wouldn’t be possible.

Several of my classes submit essays which frequently fail, and some that fail spectacularly. Some of this is because the are new to writing in general, and can’t do it well. Others don’t take the time on their assignments and simply write down something randomly.

Some of my newer students don’t write what I would call essays in a traditional “words in order providing meaning” sense. They are more Rorschach tests using characters in Korean and English. In these “essays”, these languages are applied to a paper that implies a pattern, but in actuality are meaningless blobs of ink or #2 pencil.

I must deal with essays in which introducing grammar, punctuation, or proper spelling disturbs the framework of their writing to a degree that it is actually easier for me to simply rewrite the entire essay from scratch than try to figure out what they are saying. These people are not capable of expressing a coherent thought in English yet, but I am empowered to hold them after school repeatedly until their writing improves.

I’m not sure if they’ll be installing cots, assigning numbers, and then providing meals, because the lower level students will need significant amounts of time to improve. The hardest part of all of this is that my median grade for a coherent, adequate but not outstanding essay is a solid 70% score. In the first class where this metric was used this week, only 30% of the class passed the essay, but several were only slightly under that threshold.

If the students rise to the occasion and spend more time on their essays instead of trying to write them before class starts to avoid this is great. Students try significantly harder on their vocabulary tests because they know failing sucks hours of their free time away being retested on words they don’t know all afternoon. If that’s all this rule does when applied to the essays they write, that will be worth holding some of my lazier students back after class a few times.

At least of the students get better I’ll have an easier time grading their works. I don’t usually ponder the scores I give very much. I like to grade based on the impression I get and on the rubric I’ve developed after MANY hours of checking their papers. Anything to keep me from reading bad essays all day is fine with me.

My arranged game of Brawl at my house finally came about today. I invited over a couple of guys for a chance to play Wii, and I had three takers. Since Brawl is a four player game, this worked out splendidly. We warmed up with a few games of Wii Sports so they got the feel of a split controller, then put in Brawl. There were several hours of Free for All Matches to be enjoyed by all

My encyclopedic, and somewhat embassingly thorough knowledge of Nintendo lore thanks to the trophies I earned playing the Smash Brothers series was in full effect. Since the rest of the players were coming in new, I had to explain WHY there was a 2-D LCD character fighting a giant penguin with a hammer. If one of the stage elements, or an item with a particular effect needed to be explained, I was telling them what game it came from, or how you could avoid it.

The madness of four players flying around the screen being blasted off by everything is something you just have to experience. We played for a few hours until eye strain caught up with us, then we put it on “Spectator” mode. We had this on in the background

A week back, I had ordered a deck of Magic the Gathering Cards from a Korean import company. I didn’t go out and order this on my own. I went in to save on shipping with a few others. They had bought specific cards for a deck they were making, while I ordered a theme deck that allowed me to play right away with my own cards. This way I didn’t always have to borrow cards when I went to meet them for a game. The person I ordered the cards came here, so I got my deck for the first time today.

We split three games between the three decks we had. One player won a game. My own new deck was very different than the decks the other players were using, and they liked a number of the cards they had never seen before. It had good synergy working off the cards included. I’m happy with my purchase.

Furthermore, there is some sort of Dungeons & Dragons meeting that I’m officially invited to now. I’m not sure when this goes down, but I’m supposed to “roll” a character and join the party sometime in the next month or so. Considering I haven’t touched Dungeons & Dragons stuff since 8th grade, all of this is will take time. I’m thinking of a “Warforged Fighter”, but since I don’t know anything its subject to change.

Honestly, I think I’m as far down the geek rabbit hole as this is going to go. I will never do LARP, and I won’t go to games conventions, would never cosplay. I’m branching out. I’ve solidly earned my cred as “video game geek” in the group, but now I get to see some of the other flavors of geekdom. I’m not against any of the stuff the group has introduced me into so far, so I might as well enjoy anything new I get out of the experiences anyway.

I got to go grocery shopping today while my wife cleaned the house. We had arrived at this assignment of duties after some skilled negotiation on my part. I had planned on going to the local Emart that is two blocks away, but we ended up calling my Brother-in-Law to see what he was up to. Since he has a new car, and wasn’t busy, he agreed to come over and take me to Costco. This was the first time I got to really ride around in his nice new car, so it was pretty cool.

He and I went around Costco doing the grocery shopping together. All he needed were some new black socks to satisfy his corporate dress code. I also bought some fruit for my Mother-in-Law. I made sure to keep to my grocery list, and had my wife consult on what we needed.

The only thing I splurged on was a bottle of wine. The only reason I bought that was because there were free samples, and it went down smooth. It was a sweet wine that didn’t make me cringe. If I didn’t buy it at that time, I’d have NEVER found the same brand and year again.

I’ve already had this experience. Last year, I had the best glass of wine at my favorite Italian restaurant in Korea. It was a sweet red wine, and it was just wonderful with the meal. It was the best wine I’ve ever had with a meal. Instead of picking up a bottle to bring home, I decided to just try to find the brand on my own. I apparently drank from the very last bottle of this particular wine in existence in Korea, and never was able to find another wine quite like it.

I’m not really a wine drinker, but that’s simply because I haven’t found any wine brand, or type, that I like, and it’s too expensive to just buy wine to find something. The wine I had at the Italian restaurant was the only wine I could get my wife to drink more than a sip, so I’d have loved to actually brought home something we could both enjoy.

If I buy something we don’t like, I’ll be drinking the entire thing. My wife only rarely drinks wine, and unless it’s very good, won’t drink without complaining. We had three bottles sitting in the refrigerator for this exact reason. They were given as gifts. We’d both have a glass, and she’d never want to drink it with another meal. Then it’s up to me to finish the bottle. Again.

Since I don’t drink much wine very often, usually once a month at most, we slowly accumulate half finished bottles. I’m sure we give the impression of being heavy drinkers working our way through three bottles of wine at the same time when people peek in our fridge, but we’ve been working on the same bottles for a year!

The last few times Costco had free wine samples, I’ve tasted them trying to find another wine that doesn’t make me wince. I told myself that if I found another that I liked, I’d pick it up. Admittedly, the wine sample I had was very small, but I liked what I had. I’ve worked through one of our other bottles of half finished wine, and have one MORE really strong wine to work through before I can get to the stuff I bought today however. It will likely be a long time before that gets open.

We brought home the goods, and by the time we had returned, the house was clean, Yoshi had a wash, and my Brother-in-Law had to go home to snag a parking spot at his comically overcrowded apartment complex parking lot.

A few weeks back, when the weather was nice, I was walking Yoshi outside. We always do a lap around our apartment, through a gate to a park, around the block, then return through the opposite gate and go into the apartment. As we were walking back into the apartment, there was some dog poo in the grass in front of the apartment.

My dog has never, ever gone to the bathroom in front of the apartment. He is well trained to go in less dense areas and always waits until we are in a park nearby. By chance, we happened to run into a security guard in front of our apartment. The security guard took a look at the old dog poo,  me returning with a dog, and did some mental calculus. “Is that your dog’s dung?” he asked me as I walked into the building.

“No, it’s not ours. We always clean up our mess.” I showed him a plastic glove. “It’s not ours.”

Yoshi and I continue to walk on our route without concern about what the security guard thinls. Yoshi has NOT had any accidents in front of our apartment.

However, when I run across this particular elderly security guard, he shouts at me, “Dog dung! DUNNNNG!” in a dramatic accusatory Scooby Doo ghost voice. It’s like his weird salutatory greeting to me. It’s hard to recover normal conversations with a very old man when all he ever does is accuse you of not cleaning up dog crap all the time.

There is a book mobile for the local library that drives around on a set schedule to each apartment. Once a week, for 30 minutes or so, the book mobile pulls up directly in front of our apartment. We have a schedule for when they are supposed to swing by, and my wife goes out and picks up a few books to read.

The only problem is that now her job requires her to miss the scheduled book mobile stop. She had some books she had borrowed, so I had to look out the window for the rolling library and return them. Either they didn’t come last week, or I missed them, so I was worried about returning the books this week because I thought I would have to pay a fine. The rental period is only a week.

I kept watch for the old retro-fitted bus, and when it pulled up, I grabbed my wife’s overdue books, my wallet, and headed for the door. I didn’t know the protocol, so I waited in line behind someone that got on the bus before me. The driver of the bus was sitting at a table, and there was a computer with a check out scanner entering in the books.

The woman in front of me handed him the books. The man scanned them, the results were green and cleared. She then went looking for something else to read.

I stepped up to the desk and handed over the books. The man looked at me in disbelief after a red flashing warning came up, and said, “Uh, are you [Wife's name]?”

I gave him a look like, you’ve got to me kidding right? “No, That’s my wife.” I pulled out my wallet. He got really confused then. I looked at the glowing red result and assumed I was being fined. I knew they were overdue, so I said, “How much do I owe?”

He misheard me, and thought I had said, “No, that’s my mother.”

My Korean isn’t terrible, and I know I can say this phrase correctly. No one has EVER thought that I was saying, “No, that’s my mother” before.

The man sort of waved me off, and I didn’t have to pay any money. (The library always loans out books for free. There are no fines.)

When I got off the bus, the man called back to me, “Tell your mom to return the books on time from now on, Okay?”

Sure thing.

I told my wife this story, and she thought it was hilarious. She even told it to her Mother-in-Law at dinner today, who ALSO thought it was hilarious. I’m still baffled by the entire exchange.

April Fools is the one holiday I can’t stand on the Internet. Every year, people do lame tricks or have some sort of elaborate surprise announced on that day. It’s particularly annoying with game sites.

For example, at WiiNintendo, a site on my RSS feed list, there were a series of pranks. Oh, and the first one started on March 31st! They can’t even keep it on the right day now, because all the other game sites up the ante and try to get people to fall for THEIR stuff. It’s not life or death stuff, but many is it annoying to sort through. Keep in contained to a single day, and hopefully a single post if you MUST do an April Fools prank.

I check news sites for NEWS. Don’t waste my time. If I think I’m being lied to, why would I want to go back to that place as a reliable source of news? The broadcast nightly news programs certainly doesn’t do “April Fools” jokes, because people trust them for information, and when they lie their credibility is (theoretically) damaged.

Even if there is ONE day were people say it is “OKAY” to lie, the more elaborate the lie, the more it convinces me you make up stuff on other days. Why else would you bother?

If April Fool’s was presented as a “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet, check your facts” sort of holiday, I’d be a lot better with it. Instead, it’s a bunch of stupid links and dumb lies. Just a heads up, RickRolling is the lamest thing on the Internet. Ever. Even lamer than this guy.

Sorry to rant, but it’s the same ever year.

There was a point where we started our new books and were expected to finish forty pages in four classes. Suddenly, that requirement was dropped, and we had fourty pages for eight classes. The problem being I had burned through a lot of pages trying to match the syllabus I was given, then had to slow down to stretch out classes because I had double the time. All this worked for a while, but now I’ve finished my books in all my upper level classes. I have to earn my title as a teacher until some workbooks arrive for some “filler” material.

Today I designed a “Writing Challenge.” The students had to pick from one of six topics, and then state their opinion, give reasons and defend their explanations in an essay. They only had to write a detailed outline, instead of a formal paper, but they had to give it to me to be graded before the end of class. Then I handed them a puzzle paper they could work on for the rest of class.

This doesn’t seem like that difficult a “challenge” for native speakers, but a few months ago none of my students could do this. When I came back from Europe, I started doing intensive work teaching outlining and essay organization skills. We’ve moved on to persuasive essays and opinion pieces. I think this is pretty impressive. Students can now support their opinions, and can give a reason why they think something is a good idea or a bad idea, and also give opposing opinions to a topic. That’s a skill that they will need to use more in the future, and it got it’s start in my class. I like that.