Progress Report 29.1
Anyong hasseyo, fucknut!
Before you start, I know it's been ages and I know I've been promising to update for ages too, but I've been really, really busy.
Doing what? Well, since we last communicated in this fashion, I've changed jobs, changed apartments, grown my hair slightly longer and been on holiday to New York, and those are the sort of things that will keep a chap's every spare minute accounted for. Not a single second has slipped by without it being designated to one of the four previous columns on the spreadsheet of my life. However, I'm currently on holiday from work and I have set aside this evening just for you. So enough of the fussing and bickering and the accusations of neglect - come and sit down here, and I'll fetch you a cuppa and tell you all about it.
Right, now where were we last? Oh yes - December. Well it was Christmas last December, if you remember, so we went out for Christmas dinner in Seoul, didn't we? Yes, that's right. We had Italian. It was really nice, but I had to work the next day, didn't I? Oh, we all did, so we couldn't get too drunk. Mind you, we still managed to put away a few.
AHEM. I've tired of the above conceit almost as soon as I've begun it, so I shall give you the details of the seven months that followed in a much more economical form:
Jan: Began lining up new job, negotiated new visa with the CUNTS at Immigration.
Feb: Continued negotiating with CUNTS at Immigration, finished old job, went to Japan to get new visa.
March: Started new job, as lecturer in visual communication theory at a university.
April: Continued new job.
May: And again.
June: Finished for summer, went to New York.
July: Went to London. Came back to Korea.
Aug: Began updating blog.
And that pretty much brings us up to the moment that I am typing these words. Okay?
Now, one thing that has given me pause when considering updating before now is that it has been so long that I don't really know what to tell you about. There's been so much happen that I don't really know where to begin. At the political level, we've got a new president and a new government, we've had massive protests over American beef, and we've had a tourist shot in the Kumgangsan resort in North Korea. At the personal level, I've become a university lecturer, put on a little weight and become part of the band that may very well save rock'n'roll. And at the cosmic level, the world has taken further irretractible steps towards its ultimate destruction. So there's a lot to report on.
If we were to look back over the past seven months and then morph that temporality into a fallacious phantasmatic landscape, we might perceive various hillocks and dells that we could, if we were given to cliche, call ups and downs. Yes, there have been ups and downs. And I would say that the ups have greatly outnumbered the downs. There were a few stressful weeks at the beginning of the year when those CUNTS at Immigration were causing me grief (and reinforcing my conviction that we are little more than serfs condemned forever to inescapable fealty toward the government of whichever state in which we were spilled from the womb), but that resolved itself with fortuitous timing, meaning that the closing of one door segued almost directly into the opening of another, but with sufficient interval to permit me a brief trip to Osaka.
Here I ate the best sushi I've ever had, ate the best (albeit only) octopus balls I've ever had, and tripped disasterously over a small chain link fence (an experience that comes flooding back with great immediacy whenever I find myself walking through a city and gazing up toward the sky). Brushing myself off, I returned to Korea and took up a position in higher education, and it has been pretty much all ups since then.
This trajectory of fortunes is somewhat the inverse of the new Korean president, Mr Lee Myung-bak. Despite starting the year on a high following a landslide victory in the elections, since his inauguration, he has managed to turn around such widespread approbation in quite a spectacular way. How did he achieve such a reversal? He agreed to import American beef.
When weighed against the misdemeanours of previous premiers of the republic (massacres, gulags, frauds of dizzying proportions), importing cheap meat for your barbecue-bothering citizenry would seem quite a grandiloquent gesture. However, President Lee was about to be handed a hard-earned lesson on the power of misinformation when used on a uniquely irrational people. News broadcasts prognosticated a Creutzfeld-Jakob armageddon to be visited on these shores as soon as the first container of filthy Yankee cowflesh touched the dock, citing pieces of specious evidence to back themselves up. Protests started small then quickly snowballed, led by underhanded teaching and labour unions. Soon there were half a million people on the streets, candles held aloft against the bastard in the Blue House, convinced that he had sold out their futures for the sake of the FTA.
The whole affair was a disgrace to all involved - the government, the media, the unions, and not least the utterly credulous populace that allowed themselves to be pawns in a leftist powerplay. But Mr Lee eventually came out contrite, set conditions on any imports, and no doubt wished he had freer use of the repressive apparatus of the state that had benefited so many of his forebears. The world would most likely not have begrudged it, and it can't have had a worse effect on his approval rating, which is now at an all-time low.
What else "a'gwan"? Well, Samsung spilled oil off the South coast, wrecking the prosperity of a number of small fishing towns, Korean scientists quintuple-cloned a beloved dog for an American woman with significantly more money than sense, and Hyundai Asan cancelled all tours to the Kumgang mountain resort after North Korean soldiers fatally shot a South Korean housewife who'd strayed out of a permitted area. So it's been business as usual, really.
Now, my holiday in New York was probably the highlight of the past half year, but I think I'll save the details of that for a separate report. Suffice to say this: If it's a New York cliche, then I lapped it up.
One change that has taken place since we last talked is one that is something of a negative regression: I have become hopelessly, pitifully addicted to caffeine once again.
This is somewhat beholden to my work ethic, which has of late become positively Calvinist, even during my extended summer break. At present, I go daily to a coffee shop (no, not Starbucks) and make further progress through the canon of what I teach, over the course of six or seven hours. (Okay, it is Starbucks. Sorry, but that's all there is round here and I can't stay at home and work because I just end up playing GTA San Andreas.) Needless to say, during this period of self-enrichment, I knock back a few mugs of the black stuff. Quite perfectly fair enough, I know, but these jolts of refreshing and vital invigoration come at a price - not only KRW2,800 a pop, but also that price adjured by Newton's Second Law, namely: You can't get up without getting down.
So every coffee that revs me up and has me tearing through dense works of theory like Heidegger's Dasein tears through the metaphysics of presence will necessarily leave me wretched and bamboozled a short period thereafter. And with this reverse-swing comes certain abrasive distemper, during which my sensitivity to the slightest of irritations becomes painfully engorged.
It is invariably during this period that my awareness of the more singular of Korean eccentricities nudges gently but insistently to the fore. The one that had me grating my teeth to smooth pebbles today was a habit peculiar to Korean females of a certain age, who, for reasons best known to themselves, feel the need to clap their hands loudly when laughing; not in a show of appreciative applause, but in a single, sudden gesture, issuing a surprising report that today had me reduced to a nervous wreck.
Just around the time that my concentration broke, each clap - normally tolerated as a simple fact of the auditory furniture - started to feel like a slap delivered directly to the surface of my brain. From all about the large customer seating area, housewives in the grips of pleasurable conviviality would break into fits of giggles, lean back slightly, and - BANG - clap their hands, at a volume sufficient to scare crows away from several acres of freshly-sown pasture. Every 20 to 30 seconds there was another - BANG - like incidences of domestic violence, sounding off from every direction. I tolerated it for around 30 minutes before firing off an angry text message to a Korean friend, demanding an explanation, an apology and request to cease and desist. Then I had to leave, as the air con was turned to levels powerful enough to reverse global warming and I was almost driven to kill.
So there you go. That's all the news that's fit to print.
Well, it's nothing of the sort, if we're honest about it, but I've had a long time off and I'm getting back into it slowly, so I don't want to do too much at once. But over the next few weeks and months, I promise I'll tell you about:
- the history of North and South Korea's petty border disputes
- my trip to New York City
- what a set of cunts Korea's previous seven or eight presidents were
- what my university is like
- my new apartment
- the size of my balls
- the 3rd annual Pentaport Rock Festival
- the band that is going to save rock'n'roll
- my recent incursions upon the dignity of the opposite gender
- my top ten favourite breakfast cereals.
It all sounds very exciting, doesn't it?
Well, until next time, I shall bid you good health, and good day, and
Anyongi kaseyo,
S
Before you start, I know it's been ages and I know I've been promising to update for ages too, but I've been really, really busy.
Doing what? Well, since we last communicated in this fashion, I've changed jobs, changed apartments, grown my hair slightly longer and been on holiday to New York, and those are the sort of things that will keep a chap's every spare minute accounted for. Not a single second has slipped by without it being designated to one of the four previous columns on the spreadsheet of my life. However, I'm currently on holiday from work and I have set aside this evening just for you. So enough of the fussing and bickering and the accusations of neglect - come and sit down here, and I'll fetch you a cuppa and tell you all about it.
Right, now where were we last? Oh yes - December. Well it was Christmas last December, if you remember, so we went out for Christmas dinner in Seoul, didn't we? Yes, that's right. We had Italian. It was really nice, but I had to work the next day, didn't I? Oh, we all did, so we couldn't get too drunk. Mind you, we still managed to put away a few.
AHEM. I've tired of the above conceit almost as soon as I've begun it, so I shall give you the details of the seven months that followed in a much more economical form:
Jan: Began lining up new job, negotiated new visa with the CUNTS at Immigration.
Feb: Continued negotiating with CUNTS at Immigration, finished old job, went to Japan to get new visa.
March: Started new job, as lecturer in visual communication theory at a university.
April: Continued new job.
May: And again.
June: Finished for summer, went to New York.
July: Went to London. Came back to Korea.
Aug: Began updating blog.
And that pretty much brings us up to the moment that I am typing these words. Okay?
Now, one thing that has given me pause when considering updating before now is that it has been so long that I don't really know what to tell you about. There's been so much happen that I don't really know where to begin. At the political level, we've got a new president and a new government, we've had massive protests over American beef, and we've had a tourist shot in the Kumgangsan resort in North Korea. At the personal level, I've become a university lecturer, put on a little weight and become part of the band that may very well save rock'n'roll. And at the cosmic level, the world has taken further irretractible steps towards its ultimate destruction. So there's a lot to report on.
If we were to look back over the past seven months and then morph that temporality into a fallacious phantasmatic landscape, we might perceive various hillocks and dells that we could, if we were given to cliche, call ups and downs. Yes, there have been ups and downs. And I would say that the ups have greatly outnumbered the downs. There were a few stressful weeks at the beginning of the year when those CUNTS at Immigration were causing me grief (and reinforcing my conviction that we are little more than serfs condemned forever to inescapable fealty toward the government of whichever state in which we were spilled from the womb), but that resolved itself with fortuitous timing, meaning that the closing of one door segued almost directly into the opening of another, but with sufficient interval to permit me a brief trip to Osaka.
Here I ate the best sushi I've ever had, ate the best (albeit only) octopus balls I've ever had, and tripped disasterously over a small chain link fence (an experience that comes flooding back with great immediacy whenever I find myself walking through a city and gazing up toward the sky). Brushing myself off, I returned to Korea and took up a position in higher education, and it has been pretty much all ups since then.
This trajectory of fortunes is somewhat the inverse of the new Korean president, Mr Lee Myung-bak. Despite starting the year on a high following a landslide victory in the elections, since his inauguration, he has managed to turn around such widespread approbation in quite a spectacular way. How did he achieve such a reversal? He agreed to import American beef.
When weighed against the misdemeanours of previous premiers of the republic (massacres, gulags, frauds of dizzying proportions), importing cheap meat for your barbecue-bothering citizenry would seem quite a grandiloquent gesture. However, President Lee was about to be handed a hard-earned lesson on the power of misinformation when used on a uniquely irrational people. News broadcasts prognosticated a Creutzfeld-Jakob armageddon to be visited on these shores as soon as the first container of filthy Yankee cowflesh touched the dock, citing pieces of specious evidence to back themselves up. Protests started small then quickly snowballed, led by underhanded teaching and labour unions. Soon there were half a million people on the streets, candles held aloft against the bastard in the Blue House, convinced that he had sold out their futures for the sake of the FTA.
The whole affair was a disgrace to all involved - the government, the media, the unions, and not least the utterly credulous populace that allowed themselves to be pawns in a leftist powerplay. But Mr Lee eventually came out contrite, set conditions on any imports, and no doubt wished he had freer use of the repressive apparatus of the state that had benefited so many of his forebears. The world would most likely not have begrudged it, and it can't have had a worse effect on his approval rating, which is now at an all-time low.
What else "a'gwan"? Well, Samsung spilled oil off the South coast, wrecking the prosperity of a number of small fishing towns, Korean scientists quintuple-cloned a beloved dog for an American woman with significantly more money than sense, and Hyundai Asan cancelled all tours to the Kumgang mountain resort after North Korean soldiers fatally shot a South Korean housewife who'd strayed out of a permitted area. So it's been business as usual, really.
Now, my holiday in New York was probably the highlight of the past half year, but I think I'll save the details of that for a separate report. Suffice to say this: If it's a New York cliche, then I lapped it up.
One change that has taken place since we last talked is one that is something of a negative regression: I have become hopelessly, pitifully addicted to caffeine once again.
This is somewhat beholden to my work ethic, which has of late become positively Calvinist, even during my extended summer break. At present, I go daily to a coffee shop (no, not Starbucks) and make further progress through the canon of what I teach, over the course of six or seven hours. (Okay, it is Starbucks. Sorry, but that's all there is round here and I can't stay at home and work because I just end up playing GTA San Andreas.) Needless to say, during this period of self-enrichment, I knock back a few mugs of the black stuff. Quite perfectly fair enough, I know, but these jolts of refreshing and vital invigoration come at a price - not only KRW2,800 a pop, but also that price adjured by Newton's Second Law, namely: You can't get up without getting down.
So every coffee that revs me up and has me tearing through dense works of theory like Heidegger's Dasein tears through the metaphysics of presence will necessarily leave me wretched and bamboozled a short period thereafter. And with this reverse-swing comes certain abrasive distemper, during which my sensitivity to the slightest of irritations becomes painfully engorged.
It is invariably during this period that my awareness of the more singular of Korean eccentricities nudges gently but insistently to the fore. The one that had me grating my teeth to smooth pebbles today was a habit peculiar to Korean females of a certain age, who, for reasons best known to themselves, feel the need to clap their hands loudly when laughing; not in a show of appreciative applause, but in a single, sudden gesture, issuing a surprising report that today had me reduced to a nervous wreck.
Just around the time that my concentration broke, each clap - normally tolerated as a simple fact of the auditory furniture - started to feel like a slap delivered directly to the surface of my brain. From all about the large customer seating area, housewives in the grips of pleasurable conviviality would break into fits of giggles, lean back slightly, and - BANG - clap their hands, at a volume sufficient to scare crows away from several acres of freshly-sown pasture. Every 20 to 30 seconds there was another - BANG - like incidences of domestic violence, sounding off from every direction. I tolerated it for around 30 minutes before firing off an angry text message to a Korean friend, demanding an explanation, an apology and request to cease and desist. Then I had to leave, as the air con was turned to levels powerful enough to reverse global warming and I was almost driven to kill.
So there you go. That's all the news that's fit to print.
Well, it's nothing of the sort, if we're honest about it, but I've had a long time off and I'm getting back into it slowly, so I don't want to do too much at once. But over the next few weeks and months, I promise I'll tell you about:
- the history of North and South Korea's petty border disputes
- my trip to New York City
- what a set of cunts Korea's previous seven or eight presidents were
- what my university is like
- my new apartment
- the size of my balls
- the 3rd annual Pentaport Rock Festival
- the band that is going to save rock'n'roll
- my recent incursions upon the dignity of the opposite gender
- my top ten favourite breakfast cereals.
It all sounds very exciting, doesn't it?
Well, until next time, I shall bid you good health, and good day, and
Anyongi kaseyo,
S
posted by Stephen Beckett at 8:00 PM
1 comments
