外國人doing 韓國

cheeseburgers and pancakes

The above reference is for one person.  Since coming to Korea I have thought a lot on relationships, human interaction, contact, et all.  Through my musings I have uncovered a lot, but I also felt I misunderstood a lot.  This all changed when I met a wonderful girl.  Her name is Dara McClary and her passion for life, ideas, art always gets me excited.  She is beautiful and far cooler than I’ll ever be.  I believe that she is an old soul, one that teaches through her wisdom, and next week will be the last time I will see her.

Of course, our paths may cross in the future.  But I am unsure as any on what the future may hold.  All I know is her life is destined for greatness.  She’s intelligent, compassionate, and awesome.  Plus, she has parents, parents that care for her and love her.  Looking at her mom I know she will do great things.  This in some ways is a send off.  It is also a remninicsence.

When I reflect on my memories of Korea I will think of her and many others.  She will stand out.  Her passion for life is great, and this makes me happy.  Strangely, she also taught me to love Korea.  When I was first here I didn’t enjoy it.   I was homesick.  I missed my bike, my skis, et. all.  But since hanging out with Dara I have found the intricacies of this culture inspiring.  When I’m greeted in a restauraunt I feel warmth.  When I see children playing in the streets I feel giddy.  Their zest, their exuberance inspires me.  Even in class, when I’m acting like a dunce, I feel complete.  Its strange and I know our relationship has been short, but I think through it all, we have learned a great deal about each other.  This may be sentimentality, but thinking on it I believe it not to be.  David Foster Wallace puts it better,

“It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

My general philosophy towards life is apathy.  I believe life to be a clusterfuck.  I take the good with the bad.  But as an over-analyzing, methaporical douchebag I often forget that life also involves beauty.  Awareness is something we always forget.  David Foster Wallace killed himself because of a long bout of depression.  I don’t want to go into it.  But listening to this quote above I get teary eyed.  Not because its devasting, but because it harkens us to stay aware, to see the beauty.  In meeting Dara I received some of the beauty.  She inspires me to be a better person.  And this is really all I can ask for.

I am going to miss Dara, I am going to miss her a lot, but through this experience I have learned a lot and for that my only words our thanks.  She is an amazing person and I hope all of you that read this blog get the chance to experience her awesomeness.

Committment

For the first time in my life I feel committment.  I feel committed to building my eco-resume, so I can get to into the graduate school of my choice.  Right now my top five go in this order:

1. Evans School at the University of Washington

2. University of Vermont

3.  University of Colorado at Boulder

4. NYU Environmental Development and Education Program

5. University of Michigan Interdisciplinary Environmental Program

All of these programs are extremely competative and I have been trying to figure out ways to raise my resume.  From some of my friends I have been inspired.  I am going to create an eco-travel blog that documents my own eco-narrative in Seoul.  In it I will highlight my personal experience and my political experience.  I will try to understand and I will try to inform all those about the environment in Seoul.  Thanks to those friends who have inspired me.  This includes Jim Babb, Tanner Ringerud, and a really true friend, Michael Dawson.

RAVEHIZZAWHATWHAT!!!!!!!

At moments in life there is a calling, a calling to participate in greatness.  On a Saturday morning, alone in my pajamas i.e. my boxers, a brown friend made that call.  He told me that we transport ourselves to a rave set on the illustrious shores of the Han.  At this moment I knew my night would scream of neon lights, haziness, and loads of awkward dancing.  All of this came true.  But through my night of drunkenness I also learned much.  I learned you don’t miss Jager with tequila.  I also learned you don’t mix Jager with coke.  In fact, you don’t drink Jager.  I also learned that promiscuity can be endearing, sexy, and downwright awesome.  I also learned that my friend, Risschie, has more game than I could ever hope to have.  Through the night I danced a lot, I drank a lot, and I kissed my girlfriend a lot.  It was fun.  It was good.  But, when I awoke the next morning, I also felt a somberness.  The onset of my somberness may have been caused by the fact that I lost my phone and my girlfriend’s bowel movements from the previous night.  But this somberness came from another place.

In a discussion with my brown skinned friend I think I found where some of this somberness came from.  As an American I have always felt that our country was great.  In my opinion this greatness stems from our revolution.  Our revolution was not the bloodiest, nor the most radical.  It did not rouse the masses and it did not change western history, as many of our teachers’ lead us to believe.  It did, on the one hand,establish an empire that committed many atrocities as it conquered the land that begins in the Atlantic and ends in the deep blue Pacific.  As Americans we have to answer for these atrocities, and I believe that, in some ways, we are, so I willl not discuss them further.  Instead, I would like to go back to another thing the American Revolution established, the Constitution.  The Constitution is a wonderous document, a great document, and it is a document that instills great pride in me and my fellow American citizens.  This leads me to my final point of this blog.  As a person that believes in the greatness of America I felt this greatness slip away when we elected George Bush for second term and I felt this greatness slide further away when the American people gave up on own revolutionary core as we failed to demand impeachment.  After this moment I believed that we were no longer great, that we were, in fact, mediocre.  A pile of shit awaiting to be shoveled up by the Chinese.

With the election of Barack Obama my belief in our mediocrity has subsided.  I now feel that we our a nation that is on the right track.  But we have some hurdles to overcome.  These hurdles began and end with the environment.  It is my personal belief that the next revolution is coming.  It is a green revolution and as Americans we have a decision to make: will we be on the sidelines or will we step up to the plate and tackle the problems that affect our beatiful land.  I don’t know, but reflecting on this I must say that for the first time I have hope that we will achieve greatness, that will be step to the plate like the big bambino and hit one out of the park.

I know this post started out ironic, but I want to end it on a sincere not.  I hope all of you are well.  And I hope that your enjoying the day.  Tomorrow is going to be a good one and I hope we can all find some way to enjoy it.

MANAGEMENT AND LONGING

Well my life has been a roller coaster ride.  My boss has been putting me through the ringer and the stress of all of it has taken a toll on my psyche.  Luckily I think I sorted it out and I am moving on through the next six months of my stay in Korea.  In the stress of the moment there was a lot of panic, but there was also some self realization.  I am ready for graduate school, really ready.  I am ready to work to change my world, and I am ready to go through the preparation necessary to make me an outstanding candidate for the programs I want to get into.  Of course there are some hurdles I need to overcome.  Since coming to Korea I come to the realization that I am struggling with a long bout of depression.  This struggle has lasted longer than my normal bouts and its time I seek some help.  In the past I did well with self treatment.  But now, without the access of friends and family, I realize that it is important for me to seek help.  I will let you know more about this as it progresses.

On to the things I am excited about.  I have come to the decision that I am going to pursue a degree in Environmental Policy as soon as I return from Korea.  Right now I am looking at four programs that get me really amped up.  One is New York, another is in Seattle, another is in Detroit, and one is in Wisconsin.  These locales don’t appeal to me, but the awesomeness of the school’s programs vastly outweigh my dislike for New York and Wisconsin.  On another note I wish the economy was better, but with Obama at the helm I am hoping that the economy will be much better in six months.  Of course, my hope occasionally stifled from reading Paul Krugman.  But he has some faith in Obama and that gets me a little jazzed.  Anyways, I return in six months and it feels good that I have a plan for the future.

I learned a pretty profound lesson from all this shit.  Circumstance and your own will occasionally put you into situations that can creat some chaos.  In the chaos, you can find order.  I know this sounds all taoist, but on some level I believe its true.  Things are good and a structure of a plan is beginning to form in my head.  Graduate school will provide great purpose and it will give me some satisfaction and merit to the problems I have been struggling with while I was abroad.

Before leaving you guys I would like to leave you with a final thought.  Going abroad doesn’t solve your problems it merely amplifies them.  Before traveling I knew that I was depressed.  I just did nothing to confront it.  Now, for the first time, I am actually confronting and fighting it, trying to find some answers to the problems that haunt my psyche.  I hope you are all doing well and I hope your finding answers in the tumult that we call life.

post #2 as an apology

Sorry for getting all philosophical in that last post.  In this post I mean to relate to all yeah all on a personal level.  Today, I went into Seoul for Buddha’s Birthday.  It was pretty rad.  The festivities included a big long parade, face painting, lantern making, and for you more daring folk, inappropriate touching.  Only kidding (about the face painting).  As a foreigner in Seoul I am adjusting well.  My cultural barometer is reading korean, even though I want to be reading, in the most George Bushian accent I can muster) Ahhmerican.  This probably has something to do with the fact that I am adjusting to Korean expatism.  Of course what does it mean to be an expat?

Ernest Hemmingway did it well, but he was a crossdresser, so we can all discount his experience.  Millions of foreigners live in Seoul and I always wonder about them.  Are our shared experiences the same?  Probably not but I believe they can be easily summed up in a pop questionaire.  This may be a little day dreamy, but as a citizen of the world I have been on a sort of whimsical quest.  This may also be an expression of my most recent makeout session with my girlfriend.  Not to harp on the fact, but girlfriends are great.  They give you purpose, happiness, exposure in a world that consistently beats you down.  This sounds a little depressed.  Perhaps, its sarcastic.  I don’t know.  But, as a new blogger, I thought I would try out different styles.  Throw caution to the wind one might say.  But that’s for another day.

Getting back to my original thought.  As an expat I wonder if we have this weird, preternatural hang up to obsessed with the existential.  Not to sound needy or fashionably emo, but as an expat I have consistently thought about my relation to the world and my purpose in it.  As citizens we lose ourselves often, but we get thrust back into it when our shit gets thrown up in our grill piece.  Like global warming.  Its a persistant problem that’s always there.  I consistently think about it even though there is little I can do about it.  As an expat I wonder where we can go after leaving our respected countries?  How are we different?  I know that this has gone on for a really long time, but in starting out this new blog I just kind of want to explore some of my inner thoughts.  Sorry for the length….

convergence

This is a topic I have given a lot of thought.  Convergence is one of those ideas that feels sticky, kind of like bubblegum, but with more tang and sweetness.  Perhaps, like molasses, but I leave that for you to decide.

Convergence is an idea discussed in the media frequently.  It is the notion that will be a moment where all facets of technology will interface into a seamless, cohesive whole.  This sounds neat, clean, and far too easy.  But I like the idea.  Convergence fascinates me because its so similar to a climax, in the narrative sense and the narrative sense.  With a climax were taken to the knife’s edge of desire where all our yearnings for resolution, cohesion, and outcome come smashing together into a nexus where everything explodes into chaos.  In the aftermath of this explosion we regain our composure, reorganize ourselves, and recognize our surroundings.  We begin, as builders like to say, to reconstruct.  In this reconstruction we recognize where the climax occurred, but this leads to an important question, can we actually determine where the climax occurs?

As a scholar of literature I believe that we cannot.  The climax is an illusion, a fabrication created by our want and our need for semblance, order, and understanding.  As a vestige of the modern literature tries to maintain this illusion.  But, as experimental authors demonstrated in the fifties, these structural illusion can easily be shattered through experimental fiction and contradiction.  Before I go off on too big of tangent, let me return back to my main point.  Convergence is very similar to climax in that it comes from a similar desire to maintain order.  We want technology to blend seamlessly into our lives with no hiccups or hangups from the full integration of our personas into the world of the digital.  This leads me to my final point.  Convergence is something that we want to recognize, but deep down we know we can’t, so as a member of the technological world why not embrace it and say who cares when convergence really occurs…

A moment in time

Through these past months I have gone through heavy shit.  I have experienced an onslaught of depression, anxiety, and fear.  Through this fear I have learned a lot about myself.  At one time I would have lost it.  I would have given up.  But now I am approaching life with a new clarity.  My life is strong.  I am going places and I feel ready.  I’m studying Chinese again, and I’m reading the tao te ching.  In the past I got caught up in semantics, logic, and academic pedagogy.  Now, I am interested in experience. Before I was interested in escape.  Escape is an interesting topic and its one I don’t really want to delve into at the current moment.  Experience fascinates me because its such a touchy subject to so many.  As a traveler I realize that my experiences are unique, that I am seeing the world from a unique perspective.  As a teacher I believe I am being challenged in a unique way.  This also stems into experience but it feels a little cloudy at the moment.  Right now I’m dating a really fun girl and its added a whole ebullience to my feelings on life.   I’m listening to a lot more jazz and less indie rock lately.  I’m also going back to the classic things I liked and delving away from the pretentions I hung upon in college.  Things are all clashing right now and I’m unsure of where they’ll go, but I do know that things are definitely looking up, way up towards something that gets me very excited.