zzzz

Making coffee entirely with your eyes closed may not be the kind of skill you can put on your resume, but it still comes in damn handy.

Inspiration

Cute Things Falling Asleep

Manly Role Models

A friend sent me a goofy email. I did the math and got the silly answer and then noted that there wasn't a single female name on the list of role models, except for my friend's. Disturbing.

WHO IS YOUR ROLE MODEL???


Try it without looking at answers

1) Pick your Favourite number between 1-9

2) Multiply by 3 then

3) Add 3, then again Multiply by 3

4) You'll get a 2 or 3 digit number….

5) Add those digits together.

Now Scroll down ..............

Now with that number see who your ROLE MODEL is from the list below :

1. Einstein


2. Nelson Mandela


3. Jacob Zuma


4. Tom Cruise


5. Bill Gates


6. Gandhi


7. Brad Pitt


8. Hitler


9. My female friend


10. Barack Obama

Seriously, Mr. Canned Salmon?

It occurred to me when I opened a tin of salmon yesterday that I have obviously only ever had canned tuna up until this point, because I was somewhat startled by what might have been a salmon spinal cord or something equally disturbing. I had no idea that my parents had been removing all those bones from my salmon sandwiches - and I'm pretty damn picky about weird crunch in sandwiches. I won't even buy egg salad sandwiches from shops because I once ate one that had a bit of shell in it.

The canned salmon was a gift from Samarra, for whom it was a gift from home. I secretly suspect that she didn't ever eat it because she didn't own a can opener - after all, that's why I didn't eat it for about 8 months after she gave it to me. I was pondering last night, as I obsessively removed bones, just why it is that some countries have cans with openers on the top of them and some don't. Is there a logic to that?

It was a boring evening at home - I made dinner (Liz's turkey soup was good, for all her protests to the contrary about it being bland) and did some laundry. Watched a bit of CSI (I'm just now half paying attention to the last episode of last season, so I'm pretty much caught up), Interneted a bit, and finished off a book. Now I've moved on to Twilight - for once, I'm jumping into a trend relatively early (it took me years on end to watch Buffy and I waited for quite awhile before embracing Harry Potter as well.)

My last class was obnoxious today. The kids bitched about not getting a totally discretionary break - somehow, they can't wrap their little minds around the connection between them acting like punks and me not being overly nice in return.

Our Trivia Locale of Choice - And I Made it In the Pics

Wolfhound.

Soon?

I was slung-lo and
So gung-ho
For anything to get me to start
I had my rock
I had my roll
But I couldn't find my spark

A flip of the hi-fi
A glimpse of the good life
And the clouds began to fade
I'm turning this B-side
Around to a de-light
Blue skies are here to stay

"She was so down, look at her now
She's never been so high!
Everyone knows, give it some time
The clouds'll clear the sky!"

Light the radio
Til it explodes
I'm dancin' til I drop
One small step
First right then left
I'm never gonna stop

"She was so down, look at her now
She's dancin' til she drops!
Everyone knows, give it some time
You'll find what you have lost!"

It is my style to take awhile
To put the feeling down to page
I get around to making sound
When the fancy meets the phrase!

"She was so down, look at her now
She's never been so high!
Everyone knows, give it some time
The clouds'll clear the sky!"

I'm gonna burst
Right out of this world
And I won't do it alone
A kick to the heart
A lift for the charts
One listen and we'll be gone
And then who cares?
We're debonair
And we're dancin' our way back home

"She was so down, look at her now
She's never been so high!
Everyone knows, give it some time
The clouds'll clear the sky!"

Organic

8. of or pertaining to the basic constitution or structure of a thing; constitutional; structural.

That is how I feel about my bouts of sadness. They are, unfortunately, part of my structure. The only bonus to this knowledge is that last time round I finally forced myself to examine drug options and they work. I don't like the idea of them as anything beyond a solution in a pinch, because they dull everything when they dull the sad parts. However, it's a reassuring thought.

In the meantime, it remains to do my best to pull myself out of this. It sucks to have some defective brain chemistry, but that is what it is. At least I'm presently living a life that I am generally happy and content with, which is a distinctly better place that I was in last time, when I basically hated everything about myself and my life - some of that was the depression talking, but some of it really was a series of choices that took me too far away from myself and who I wanted to be.

I'm setting my alarm for tomorrow now. I have plans that I really want myself to actually follow through on. I hope I go. However, now that I am home and in bed, with no mandatory tasks to be done tomorrow, I want to hide under my blankets and sleep. Except that I can't sleep, and that's one of my main problems right now - which is odd, as usually the sadder I am, the more I can sleep like it's an Olympic event I'm competing in and I'm going for the gold.

I should go, but on top of the incredible inertia that hits every time I walk through the door of my house, I feel incredibly unsocial. I can't imagine I'll be any fun. I know though that once I am there, it'll mostly be ok. I forced myself out on Wednesday and only felt like crying a couple of times - lately for me that is a good run of something approaching normal. I need to get some sleep, read the book club novel so as not to have a convenient excuse not to do that on Sunday, and then go out tomorrow.

I wonder how many times I have to tell myself to do it, before it feels like something I am actually going to do?

As Always, I Find Things Years Later

The Burqa Band (or the Blue Burqa Band) is an all-female indie rock band from Kabul, Afghanistan. They performed anonymously, all of the members wearing burqas in an apparent protest against the Taliban's rules regarding Islamic dress. They released a single, "Burqa Blue" and a self-titled album in 2002. The group gained some popularity in Europe in the 2000s, and toured in Germany, where a song of theirs was remixed by DJ Barbara Morgenstern. A YouTube video of a performance of theirs has circulated widely.

For fantastic photos and commentary on Afghanistan today, go read J.L. Krueger's blog.

For richer or poorer

When you work overseas, you become richer or poorer every time the exchange rate moves. In Scotland, I was making almost 2.5 times as much as I could have in Canada - though when I was a student and exchanging my student loans, I also had 2.5 times less. And it really was less or more by that amount, because things in Scotland often cost the same numerical amount as those in Canada, just with a pound sign in front, rather than a dollar.

Here in Korea, my first three contracts were golden. Because the American dollar was on par with the won, it was easy to just drop three zeros to make the exchange in your head - thus, if I was sending a million won back home it was like a thousand dollars. Except, of course, to the Canadian dollar it wasn't, leading to the lovely feeling of being given several hundred dollars of "free" money every time I sent money home. Brilliant, right?

Now, not so brilliant. I still love my job and I am still so much better off than many back home in the middle of the present recession or depression or whatever it is that we seem to be in. My job looks pretty stable - certainly there are starting to be rumours of lowering enrollment as belts tighten amongst workers, but there has also been increasing demand for teachers here. They've even started to lower the standards for teaching in public schools to allow people with only two years of university to teach. So, it looks ok, stability wise.

Also, for all that I'm making a couple of hundred less a month and prices have gone up here (as of last winter I was seeing things go up between fifty cents to a dollar for food in restaurants), I do live in a country that has an extremely low cost of living. If I had to, I could live here on $500 a month - maybe even less, actually, if I had to. I can't imagine another situation where I could live off less than a fourth of my income, allowing me to pay down debt and still do some travelling. At present, I send half home and spend half. It's not the most financially agressive strategy, but it is one that makes me happy.

I'm horrible with budgeting and in the past, the lack of ability to make payments on my student loans easily and cover my rent (which comes straight out of my pay before I get it, convienently) without stress led to a very unhappy time in my life. Here in Korea, none of those things are worries.

It may sort of be for poorer right now, but I'm very lucky. I need to remind myself of that more often.

I Am Sean Bell

I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.

I'm Going to Drink It Anyway

My milk is likely sour, but I wanted hot chocolate and so I had it. I'll be putting it in my coffee tomorrow too and I'm fairly confident I'll survive the experience. The best before date was December 30th, but I tend to just ignore those, as you can see.

So, it's perhaps become increasingly obvious that I'm sad. Quite sad, actually. I've certainly gone through similar periods in the past - the last one back when 2005 turned into 2006 - but in the past I have tended to stop blogging during them. After all, can't be much fun to read about me being less than perky. Way back when, my shtick was that I made my life into a series of humorous anecdotes, so when I was feeling sad there wasn't anything to say. Now I blog far more for myself than any audience that may be out there - it doesn't even need a purpose, I just blog because that has become something that I do.

So, I'm sad. It's been a rough holiday period on a number of counts and I have slowly found myself with little energy to deal with the sad. I keep trying to do the things I know are good for becoming less sad - I arrange social events and try and sit in the sun on lunch break and treat myself to good Indian food and all of those little things that are supposed to keep the sad at bay. It's working, though not as well as I'd like. All those social events are things I come to dread the moment I commit myself to them - already I am wondering if I could just skip out on both of the things I have planned for the weekend, for all that I was fairly instrumental in setting them up.

I've always been a person prone to sadness. Back in high school I used to sit around in my bedroom listening to the saddest music I could find, just so that I could sob while listening to it. As I have gotten older, I have found that the sad periods have decreased in length, intensity and recurrence, but they always seem to just be there, waiting for me. Oddly these days I feel the warring pulls of surrounding myself with tons of people (though I feel no less lonely) and hiding under my covers.

Reaching out when I am sad is something I find difficult to do. First off, I simultaneously don't want to talk about why I am sad and find myself unable to avoid doing so, because it's all I think about. I occasionally want to tell people I'm sad, but I don't really want my image as a tough person who makes a joke out of every difficult situation to suffer either.

Naturally, the lack of sleeping isn't helping. Again, this is something I can trace all the way back to my teen years. My father was partially right - it's a pattern and you can change it. However, I am quite a night owl by nature, so it's not an easy thing to change. Beyond which, the problem isn't that I don't get in my bed and turn off the lights, the problem is that sleep doesn't follow. Spending my days struggling to keep my eyes open isn't really helping anything.

Anyway, there it is. I'm sad and I'm off to try and fall asleep now.

Pick 12 books - one for each month of 2008

I am an idiot. How did I fail to notice that this challenge was for 2008 and was ending in a month? However, I'm also a stubborn idiot and I tried to complete it - though I tried to read the shortest books first! I got through 8 and a half, which isn't too bad, I guess, considering that I was fairly social over the holidays.

1. Practical Demonkeeping, Christopher Moore - Hilarious! I have no idea where he thinks this stuff up, but it is comic genius.
2. Borderlines, Peter Hoeg - I'm not sure what to say about it - it was an enjoyable read, but I didn't love it.
3. Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins - It took me at least 200 pages to get into it, though I did enjoy the end. Interesting, but not as enjoyable as I had hoped.
4. Tokyo Cancelled, Rana Dasgupta - It was interesting but somehow didn't draw me in.
5. The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
6. The Optimists, Andrew Miller - Finished after the deadline. I wouldn't say I loved the Optimists, but I found it interesting. It's an oddly visual novel, as the protagonist is a photographer and his sister writes about painters, many of the names I looked up. There are quite a few references to Greek mythology as well, which I must admit to liking in a novel. Many of the settings were incredibly familiar - I've taken that train ride between London and Edinburgh, through Berwick. I've been to Dundee and down the Arbroath Road. The descriptions of Toronto - Chinatown, Union Station, Yorkdale - call up lots of memories. Plus I googled to figure out what the hell a fish kettle is. It's worth a read.
7. Plainsong, Kent Haruf - The writing is simple and yet so beautiful. It was such an engrossing story that I finished it in well under a day. I loved it.
8. Naked, David Sedaris - I always think I'm not as big a Sedaris fan as I find myself to be once I dive into one of his books. There were just too many hilarious bits to mention, though the breast-feeding camels line has gotten permanently lodged in my brain.
9. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
10. What is the What, Dave Eggers
11. The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster
12. Fox Girl, Nora Okia Keller - While I was a little disappointed with Comfort Woman, I loved Fox Girl. It was a fascinating look at Korea and the GIs after the Korean War. It certainly sheds some light on the present situation.
Alt.The New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass-A few of the articles I had come across before, but they were all really enjoyable, even the description of a poker competition that I didn't even really understand. The one on Saddam Hussein was interesting considering events since. My favourite might have been the portrayal of the ten year old.
Alt.Life of Pi, Yann Martel - Fantastic book!
Alt.The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl
Alt.Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

"Chazu said that stuff [cola] rots your teeth. Be healthy, drink beer." ~ Fox Girl

"He liked the sense of momentum that he got from carrying out his purposes against so many different backgrounds." ~ Tokyo Cancelled

"Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of 'Yesterday' and 'Candle in the Wind' reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than 'Isn't it only two hours since breakfast?' High-alcohol wind, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anesthesia completed the gently high-altitude lullaby" ~ Tokyo Cancelled

"What is the function of the artist?" Amanda demanded of the talented trespasser. "The function of the artist," the Navajo answered, "is to provide what life does not." ~ Another Roadside Attraction

"There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others." ~ Another Roadside Attraction

"Jesus: Hey, Dad.
God: Yes, son?
Jesus: Western civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?
God: Certainly not, boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been." ~ Another Roadside Attraction

"The day was rumpled and dreary. It looked like Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas." ~ Another Roadside Attraction

"The old, Rooseveltian logic of the Doctrine had been that since the airwaves belonged to everyone, a license to profit from those airwaves conferred on the broadcast industry some special obligation to serve the public interest. Commercial radio broadcasting was not, in other words, originally conceived as just another for-profit industry; it was supposed to meet a higher standard of social responsibility." Host, David Foster Wallace, The New Kings of Nonfiction

"It's almost impossible to look away [from OJ's murder-anniversary interview], or not to feel that special kind of guilty excitement in the worst, most greedy and indecent parts of yourself... But that doesn't mean the fascination is good, or even feels good. Aren't there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?" Host, David Foster Wallace, The New Kings of Nonfiction

"He orchestrated a Draconian nationwide literacy project. Reading programs were set up in every city and village, and failure to attend was punishable by three years in jail. Men, women, and children attended these compulsory classes, and hundreds of thousands of illiterate Iraqis learned to read. UNESCO gave Saddam an award." Tales of the Tyrant, Mark Bowden, The New Kings of Nonfiction

"In any orthodox history you can find the standard autopsy of the causes... All of this is true enough, yet there's something faintly bogus and overly rationalized about it. The approaching war didn't seem like a political or economic event; it was more like a collective anxiety attack. Throughout the '30s people around the world came to share an unshakable dead about the future, a conviction that countless grave international crises were escalating out of control, a panicked sen that everything was coming unhinged and that they could do nothing to stop it." Losing the War, Lee Sandlin, The New Kings of Nonfiction

"Yes, I have experience in sales, but it is limited to marijuana, a product that sells itself." Naked, David Sedaris

New Normal

It was another four cups of coffee day.

My eyes were threatening to shut all through my last class.

Now that I'm off work, I could probably stay up all night rockin' it out.

My body needs a talking to!

2009 - The Year of Health?

Back around about Christmas, my friend Liz dubbed 2009 the Year of Health. She wants to quit smoking and get fit, as she feels at now that she is in her 30s, it's now or never. Considering my recent ill health, it seemed a good idea to jump on the health bandwagon.

Unfortunately, I can't jump high enough yet! I have some obvious health goals on the 101 in 1001 list - exercise, more attentive eating, sleep, and the like. So far, I can't pretend I've made any strides - though I have largely given up drinking. Only to replace it with a bit more social smoking that I used to do. Ooops.

Today I had to teach a discussion class around the topic of good health. I was eating leftover pie for breakfast because I don't have anything else that is portable and there is no time for breakfast in my morning schedule right now. Hilarious. Though I did bring lunch today and it's much better and I even bought a bunch of V8 yesterday. I also have plans to join Shawn's gym, just as soon I as I no longer have to be at work by 9 a.m., which I continue to find basically torture. I am a night owl and no matter how hard I try, I seem to get to bed around 2 a.m. and as such am just about the sleepiest person alive. Except in the evenings, naturally, when I feel like I could stay awake all night.

I was all grown up and responsible last night. Went grocery shopping, cooked an actual meal, did my dishes, washed my laundry and did a quick tidy.

Granted, then I watched three episodes of CSI while Facebooking.

You Know You've Made It When

You are in a trivia team name!

Can You Imagine...

... a complaints choir of ESL Teachers in Korea? The lyrics would be hysterical. Someone who can sing should make one!

The Internets Are Weird

The first girl I ever had a crush on, all the way back in high school, is celebrating her birthday today and due to the oddness of Facebook, I know this even though I haven't seen or even thought of her in ten years.

Weirdness.

Hrump

Only two of my students noticed I got my hair cut over the weekend.

Though, to be fair, it's just my old hair with actual style. But still.

I am totally exhausted, but also somewhat excited to make plans and try to be all dynamic and shit during the hell that is January.

Awesomeness

Draining

December is often spoken of as a draining month - the holidays, the stress, the pressure to have a perfect New Year's or an exceptional Christmas, the emotions if you are far away from home, the extra errands, the increased expense.

My December was draining. Not all of the emotions were bad, by far, but they were all very intense. In particular, it has been such an intense couple of weeks. Regardless of all the fun, I'm tired out.

January I find as draining. Each year, at least a part of me wants to hibernate from here on in until the weather gets warmer. I want to recoup my energy after the holidays and try and stay rested and happy during the dreaded Intensives. I know, it's so whiny to complain about having to work less than 8 hours a day, but I have to start my day at 9 a.m.! I have to commute during commuting hours! I don't like it at all.

In particular, there's been some high drama in my life lately - if you know me, that's no real surprise. I have for sure been as much a participant in the dramas as everyone else involved, but I really feel a need to dial it down for now, as much of it as I can. I'm a bit too tired to deal just now.

That said, I also find that January really does make me want to get out there and become a better me. I've made resolutions and I am all gung-ho to join a gym and do more cultural things and take more photos and be more creative and read more books and eat more vegetables and expand my social circle and, and, and!

So, basically this post is to say that either I want to be a slug in January or I want to do about 8 million things all at once.

Yep. That's January for ya.