shameless self-congratulation

Well, today turned into a better day than I had hoped, and while much of it comes down to choosing the right sounds for each leg of the journey the bulk of the accolade goes to the act of simply getting out and doing something.
I had to pike on my squash game wih David due to some massive headache which I blame on the lack of painkillers given me by the dentist after the extraction on Friday. So, crawling into bed at 5pm with the intention of getting out at 10 to go downtown was the plan but it failed as I only felt worse. Sweated up a storm in the night and washed everything this morning, but felt a lot better by 1 so I decided to carry out thhe plan I laid out to YeonJi earlier in the week and dragged my carcass out to Daegok to check out the arboretum. Most of the journey I listened to 'Mingus Ah Um' (the best jazz album ever made in the goddam world) but switched to Rhian Sheehan halfway there cos that works quite well on the subway.
When I got there I sat back looking at the trees on the hills and enjoyed an icecream and some gatorade. The heat was just perfect. Warm enough to sweat if you exert yourself, but otherwise totally comfortable. I wandered around snapping mad photos of the cacti and bonsai for Todd, listening all the while to Trinity Roots, Portishead, Concord Dawn and DJ Shadow. On the subway home I got to enjoy Windowlicker (which is going into my "almost perfect" song collection) for the ride home, followed by Reckless, by Aussie Crawl. Totally mint.
Anyway, I feel better now.

i wouldn't call it interesting

... even if it was slightly out of the ordinary.
Got the call from YeonJi on Friday night about 7. She had won tickets to 'Grease' on the radio. Luckily I had to work, and arranged to meet at 8pm the next day.
After work I spent pretty much the whole day in the PC room downloading and watching episodes of 'Band of Brothers' and yj called me just as I was heading down to the substation. She was a little cut on account of she'd been with her co-workers all day on some kind of workshop up Mount Palgong and thhey'd been doing some drinking.
Following the usually kafuffle talking with a drunken girl in broken english, we found each other near the cinema and she took me to the restaurant all her people were at. I saw and marvelled.
Drunken korean office workers are not a pretty sight.
About 20 people of mostly 30+ sat around a long table covered with bowls of spicy salad and plates some kind of warm, soft ham. Evidence of beer spillage was apparent, and so was their joy at seeing me. There were shouted "hello"s made in that tone you come to recognise as indicating the bare minimum of English ability. No problem there, I'm just a passenger anyway. However, it was a little annoying when one drunken old dude stood me up for a linked arm one-shot. I drank half and pulled out my pills to show that I shouldn't be drinking, and that slowed down the desire of everyboody to have me catch up, thank goodness. Then the real fun began. There was a speech or two, and then it was time to stand on the table and sing and dance. Eggs were dropped, drinks were spilled. One nice gentleman tried to grab me for a dance as I returned from the counter with a glass of water which resulted in one poor lady getting a soaking and me needing a refill.
Then it was off to the singing room where the hilarity continued. Songs were sung, and someone cued up 'My Way' for me and I did a pretty good job, I think. While I was singing, the boss wrapped me in toilet paper and gave me a TP bandana. There was other equally stupid stuff going on, but i took off to go get some food. I guess these guys like to have a good time, but I really wasn't into it. It was nice to be there and see some uptight K-peeps getting loose on it, but it simply reaffirms my mantra: "Moderation is key"

a list of the dullness

Bit of a bookworm, me. Here is a list of the books I have read since I landed in this dull-ass city (in the order that I thought of them while my students were playing a game):

• The Lymond Chronicles (consisting of 6 densely literate novels about a Scottish rogue);
  
• In Conquest Born (a diabolical novel of war and hate);
  
• Guns, Germs & Steel (or "Why the white man rules the earth");
  
• The Red Queen (evolution in action; why people cheat);
  
• Siddhartha (Herman Hesse discusses Buddha-nature. I enjoyed it);
  
• Kittigrew and the Incorrigibles (a piece of swashbuckling airport shite)
  
• Catch-22 (for old time's sake);
  
• Momo (Gorgeous! By the guy that wrote the Neverending Story. Read this one!);
  
• The Little Prince (Cute!);
  
• Mother Night (Vonnegut is always good and easy);
  
• VALIS (Philip K Dick's religious experience);
  
• The Life of Pi( wothwhile and a piece of cake);
  
• Poker without Cards (disturbing dialogue a la Bucky Fuller);
  
• The Game - infiltrating the secret society of pickup artists;
  
• Finding God through Sex (Kooky, and difficult to accomplish on your own);
  
• The Way of the Superior Man (it's good!);
  
• The Fire from Within (essential Castaneda)
  
• Think and Grow Rich (annoying, but practical-ish);
  
• Dune (again, for old time's sake);
  
• Wuthering Heights (don't);
  
• Cyrano de Bergerac;
  
• Through the Looking Glass (both just so I'd know. Also, they were thin);
  
• Our Twisted Hero (by a Korean author Lee Munyol- pretty good!)
• not to mention the entire Asterix, including the ones Uderzo tried to write by himself; and a whole swathe of other comics (Batman; Sin City; Lucifer; Top Ten; Promethea; The Watchmen). Big ups to Rick for the hook-up.
• And From Hell, and almost every episode of Akira

.... and that's about all I can think of. Why get out more when stuff is more interesting in my head? (and other people's)

big siren

there is a big siren going outside. huge! it has been going for 3 minutes. oh.
it just stoppd
anyway, i went to see wayne (my boss) about it to find out if there was some kind of imminent disaster approaching. No-one else seemed to be paying too much attention to it, but you never know when it might be time to don the gas masks or take to the shelters. Not that Iknow where they are here. Maybe I'm just an over-cautious kind of guy, but I think that if .... oh, now i can hear jets! .... anyway, I think that if you hear a big loud stable siren, it's probably going for some kind of, i dunno, purpose, and sure it might not actually involve you personally but still, isn't it better to be safe than re-educated or shot as a spy or tool of ameican imperialism or drowned under some catastrophic tsunami?
Yes. Yes I think so.
OK, back to work

goddammit now i have a cold

Shit I am fed up with this damn illness keeps keeping me from my life. Still, it's a good cold, as colds go. Fuck the doctor this time. No shots or crappy pills (never see to make ANY difference and can't say I'm much surprised). This time it's just gonna be a 'rest' cure.Once again It's work 6:30-11am, lunch, sleep til 6, dinner, work 8-10pm, sleep again. What an existence! Can't go to dance class, can't go to the gym! Oh well, at least I don't have to eat bark to stay alive.

alll good

I am well again, hooray! It is nice to be able to eat solids. And poo them!

In other news, I have been mad crazy downloading Ken Wilber videos from www.integralnaked.com. If you want any sort of idea of what's in my head and where I want my life to go you should check that out. Unfortunately if you want to listen to their enormous archive of stuff you gots to pay $US10 monthly or something. Too bad. Ask me nicely and I'll send you a file or something. Or just read Ken's books. Or David Deida's. He's another guy I've been investigating lately he has a similarly siritual outlook but he deals motly with relationships and what exactly is the problem with men and women these days (mostly men are either all spine and no heart, or al heart and no guts. or something like that. mostly).
Also, I just got the Ideagasms chakra cleansing meditations mp3 download. Hooray. What a load of rubbish but you gotta try it out somtime. So yeah, I'm al hppy with my little 2GB zip drive going nuts every time I hit the PCroom just straight suckin that data down from the ether. God bless the internet!

springtime

...is quite pretty. Right now the trees lining the sides of the streets (at least the streets I frequent) are positively laden with blossoms. The cars kick the fallen petals up off the road as if they were dust. Blossoms not on trees is actually quite untidy. Here is a pic of a blossomy tree. They look a little better riht now, in the grey light of morning, and when you can see a whole bunch of them. I wonder if I should ge into fotography. Probably not. Heh.

Right now I have a kind of ache in my back so I'm gonna go home and consider eating something. I had a rather big lunch of chicken rice porridge soup. Nicer than I expected.

it is still not safe to fart

fuck it. you know what i mean :(

feeling better

Yesterday I bunked out (kinda) on one of my classes so I could go see my grumpy christian doctor who speaks barely any english. Fortunately he understood the word "Diarrhoea" and gave me a rather uncomfortable examination. This consisted of my lying on my back while he pressed down in various places on my stomach with his fingers and stethoscope. He asked me to relax but I was trying to hold back a dangerous pressure, so I felt a little awkward. Anyway, he gave me a jab and a scrip for some pills. I went home for a long nap. Got up at 4 to have some udon soup (liquid diet!) and went to work from 8-10. Felt like scabs the whole time. Sweaty night's sleep. Bizarre dreams. Something to do with constructing a giant 'magic number square' that was actually the design for a Babylonian tower. Trippy. Woke up feeling like arse - the discomfort had somehow moved into my head - heavy and sluggish. Fortunately I had only 3 classes this morning which I dragged myself through then shuffled off home for minestrone and another long nap.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you can see something out the corner of your left eye and you know it's going to kill you? It's not an evil thing -it just happens that killing you is in the nature of the beast. If you turn towards it, it kills you from the front; if you turn your head slightly away so it is behind you, it kills you from there.
So anyway, now I'm at work 'doing interviews'* and prepping for tomorrow.
Um. That's all. Thanks.

*waiting for new students, pretty much=nothing

i've got the damn runs

...and not in the hapy cricketing sense neither.

WARNING: Obviously this post will be fairly gross and graphic in detail as a way of my dealing with my own nausea and grumpiness. Those of weak constitutions (or simply possessing good taste) should perhaps look at these lovely pictures of Missouri.

Because MyeongIl had to go to Pusan at short notice on Saturday, I was left with a gap in my dinner schedule, so I invited Rick over for spaghetti. The spaghetti was quite delicious, if I say so myself, but the problem lay not therein, but in te treacherous dessert.
Rick invited me to his friend Murray's house for a little party, so I decided to mix up a cocktail using the strawberries I bought of the truck outside my house. Rick helped me to pick out the leafy bits at the top and i dropped them straight into the blender with some vodka, icecream and triple sec and thatwas my folly. If you buy fruit from street vendors you seriously gotta wash it.
So this morning at around 3 I was up damaging the Daelim, one squirt every 20 minutes or so. I say squirt because it was certainly the most watery expulsion to ever depart my body from that particular orifice. That, coupled with the damn mosquito kept from any semblance of sleep. You know how sometimes you wake up and think "Haha! Time for work," but instead of being your normal get-up time, it turns out to be 1am? Strangey. I guess my stomach was thinking along the lines of some Starcraft peon-unit "The toilet needs more shitty water!".
Having the runs is no fun. I hope Rick didn't get stung too. Oh well, it won't last.