28 Years Young!

I know right? 28?! Woozer! Who’d a thunk?!

So I am officially 28 years old! No more mistaking me as an early-twenty-something anymore. I’m not even in my mid-twenties. I have undoubtedly rounded the corner into my late twenties. How do I feel about it? Pretty damn good actually.

This birthday is rather significant for a few reasons. First, it is my golden birthday. Ordinarily I wouldn’t know what that means, but you see, I have a godparent who is into all that new-age crap, and she once mentioned the term. Another reason of significance is, it’s my 10-year high school reunion. 10 years! It seems like my first 18 years couldn’t go fast enough and now... I’m not going to my class reunion though, I figure I have a Facebook account that can notify classmates of the alluring and glamorous life I live, which saves me the cost of an airline ticket. I am curious how many people are tied down with kids and a mortgage though. SUCKAS! And lastly, this birthday is rather significant because this is the oldest I’ve ever been! I can’t remember a time when I was ever older than I am now, which is reason enough to celebrate, don’t you agree?

Just now, I googled the number 28, and this is what I found. ‘28 is the natural number following 27 and preceding 29.’ Wow! Thanks Wikipedia, what would I do without you?

So onto the website, howstuffworks, which is one of my favs btw. In short:

Geminis born May 28 don’t wait for life to happen to them, they go out and wrestle with it. They are adventurous types who never lose interest in life of confidence in the ability to conquer it.

Enthusiastic and fun-loving, May 28 natives make great friends. They love people and enjoy getting involved in the personal lives of their friends. In romance, they are idealists, often unable to see the bad points of someone with whom they are involved, which occasionally leads to heartbreak, but more often than not, they are lucky in love.

The career path of May 28 individuals is often less than direct, but always interesting. They believe that variety is the spice of life. They care far more about what job they’re doing than how much money they can make doing it.

May 28 people believe that their life is a success if they are happy. Material goals mean very little to them. They count their successes according to the number of lives they touch and the people they inspire.

Hmmm? Little ol’ me?

Last weekend I went to Seoul to celebrate my birthday properly. I stayed with Val and her roommate Barb, and met a few of their friends. We went to Itaewon, which is the foreign district of Seoul. I bought the book, ‘The Alchemist,’ bootlegged DVD’s from the guy on the corner, and browsed through some foreign markets stocked with Macaroni and Cheese goodness.

One of the illicit movies purchased was none other than ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ which completely lived up to all the hype, (so much so that on my actual birthday I saw it in 3D with a new co-worker, Juliet. FANTASTIC!) The girls baked me a birthday cake, which was oh-so-good, and we lounged about laughing and giggling, reading tarot cards and sharing YouTube treasures.

The last day we went for massages and I received a hot stone treatment for the first time! It was so relaxing, I fell asleep and started snoring instantly. Barb also fell asleep, but she started drooling. What a pair we were! After massages and Thai food, we went to a Korean sauna and loafed about various temperatures of water. There’s more to the experience than that, but I’m gonna write an entire blog entry on it later, so you’ll just have to wait for the details.

Some of my kids knew my birthday was coming up and made me cute cards and letters. They are seriously so sweet, I have to share some with you:

Dear Alex

Hi Alax

I'm Brian

happy birthday!

Although I couldn't prepare a gift for you I realy want to say happy Birthday. I hope you having a happy birthday.

Again happy birthday.

from Brian

As you can see he drew a lovely sunflower, and on either side are people. I am on the left wearing a crown and holding a lollypop, but apparently Brian doesn't know who the boy was on the right is because next to the arrow is a question mark, which could be the best part of this letter. Either that or his decision to change the spelling of my name the second go around. Or how many times he says happy birthday. Regardless, I think we can all agree it is quite cute.

To Dear Alex (Alexander)

Hey! Im Tim

Tomorrow is your birthday.

Somtime I'm sorry because I made a noise sometimes. from now on, I will be a good student.

Although your birthday is tomorrow, I want to congratulate Your Birthday now Even though my gift is small, I hope you liking my gift for you!

I like you - I love you

So Tim made a paper airplane out of the letter and drew an airplane on the top, and then some faces and a flower in the bottom corner, but what makes this particularly special is, one of the faces is undoubtedly barfing. BARFING! Tim drew me a face of someone throwing up, which makes this the best birthday gift ever! I love my life!

To Alexis -

Hi, I'm Joel. I'm celebrate your birthday. Please play with my toy. And we're will more study hard. Thanks to teach we.

Bye!

I also got a really great card from Joon, one of my advanced students. She wrote a really nice message and then established an itinerary for my birthday, which included meeting the Korean president, and a quick flight to London to meet the cast of Harry Potter! WOW! What a birthday!

Joon is in favorite class, which brought me a birthday cake, some chicken and ramon (noodles represent a long and happy life) and sang a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ that nearly brought down the building! They are a sweet group of girls who always keep my laughing and amazed.

These are my advanced students Sarah, June and Jena, and they are oh-so smart!

And if 2 cakes weren’t enough, after my last class, some of the staff sang to me and we enjoyed yet another cake! This one was cream and even had some cherry tomatoes on top along with kiwi and orange slices. It was really good!

So yep, now I’m 28 years young and feel pretty good about it all. If I had a magic wand made of Holly and a Phoenix tail feather, I wouldn't change anything about my life, which is a distinctly wonderful space to be in. Thanks to everyone who messaged me or called, or even just thought of me on my special day. Don't doubt for a second that I couldn't feel your loving thoughts and well wishes! Love you all.

Book Review: 'Timequake'

For all the Vonnegut fans out there, 'Timequake' is a must read! Fresh, original and satiric! More Vonnegut than 'Breakfast of Champions.' It's his most autobiographical pieces of literature, infusing fiction with non-fiction.

The premise is simple enough: the universe has experienced a colossal loss of self esteem and can't see any reason to continually expand at an exponential rate. The result? A 10 year hiccup in the space-time continuum called a Timequake. Everybody must relive the last 10 years of their life knowing exactly how things will end, and never exercise free will.

So every character faces this dilemma, and as bizarre as their predicament is, it's not nearly as bizarre as the characters themselves. My favorite, Kilgore Trout. KILGORE TROUT! What a fantastical name! Trout is Vonnegut's alter-ego: he's a homeless writer who is often mistaken as a bag-lady because he shaves, and is never seen without the baby blanket he sports as a shawl. Then Vonnegut does what only Vonnegut can do, he infuses reality with fantasy, and meets Kilgore Trout at a clambake on the beach in 2001.

Much of the story is told through Trout's perspective and the tales he's written. Trout explains people have lived through timequakes before the universe halted.

'Trout called them "artificial timequakes." He said, "Before Earthlings knew there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them." And it's true. Actors know everything they are going to say and do, and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill, when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One. Yet they have no choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.'

Vonnegut writes about a family zapped into the timequake, who's forced to see their father come back to life, only to inevitably commit suicide once again, but he balances tragedy by reminding us of the small pleasures of life, the idiosyncrasies we easily overlook. For example, this passage about his uncle, Alex Vonnegut:

'He never had a kid, and never owned a gun. He owned a lot of books, though, and kept buying new ones, and giving me those he thought were particularly well done. It was an ordeal for him to find this book or that one, so he could read some particularly magical passage aloud to me. Here's why: His wife, Aunt Raye, who was said to be artistic, arranged his library according to the size and color of the volumes, and sairstep style.

So he might say of a colection of essays by his hero H. L. Mencken, "I think it was green, and about this high.'' '

This book is unlike any I've ever read. I can't say for sure if there's a villain in the story, perhaps it's the timequake itself, and the plot is difficult to spot, but there is the familiar character development and an arch of learning/understanding. Some of the tales are wrenching, some reaffirming, and throughout it all is Vonnegut's witty and inane observations. Like my review of 'The Brothers K,' I've decided to highlight some that don't give away much of the plot:

'Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.'

'In public lectures, I myself often say, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts." '

'About all I know for certain is that devout Muslims do not believe in Santa Claus.'

'To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, "indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex." '

'Some assertions by writers, however, are simply too preposterous to be believed... Who, for example, could believe Kilgore Trout when he wrote... "There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago! Only five hundred years ago! And yet they are now calling themselves Homo sapiens. Dumb? You want to talk about dumb? The people in one of the halves were so dumb, they didn't have an alphabet! They hadn't invented the wheel yet!" Give us a break, Mr. Trout.'

'All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.'

'Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done.

I'm a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers. Again: Somebody should look into this.

...Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What the heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?" '

'My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright... said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy. That's how I feel.

When the City of London wanted to give Shaw its Order of Merit, he thanked them for it, but said he had already given it to himself.'

'I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life... people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things...'

'I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.'

'I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believe tat a hurrican could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747.

No mater what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.'

'Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.'

'Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.'

'... Here are two more [amendments] little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the Bill of Rights:

Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities.

Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.

Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.'

'Timequake' was a terrific read! It reminds readers to look at life at all angles and pay extra special attention to the more ludicrous moments that ordinarily go by unremarked. This book has changed my life in one very real and quantifiable way, I will never again use a semi-colon as long as I live! And so, I tip my hat to you Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. With that, I'll leave with my favorite quote from this book:

'... we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.'

**If this book was rated, it would be rated R for strong language and adult content.

What's in a Name?

This is Simon and Daniel. I teach them 2x a week, and for the most part they're friends, but some days they squabble in Korean and refuse to share or sit by each other. Ah, little boys! It's funny, I was talking about Daniel with Lindsay and she couldn't picture him (she calls him by his Korean name) so I said, 'You know, the boy with a big head,' and immediately she knew who was speaking of. The size of his head is rather legendary in the academy, but it's nothing compared to my brother-in-laws. Wow! What a melon!

So back on point. I have decided to embrace some of the cultural slaughtering of the world by insisting on English names for my students. A new identity if you will. Some students use their baptismal names, though I only have a few Christians. Some kids come in with names his/her parents decided. Some choose themselves. And then there are those whose misfortune is to have me christen them.

At first I tried to be arbitrary about it. I’d ask what their Korean names are, and all the Juan someone-or-others became John’s, Tom’s and Shawn’s. But then I started to get annoyed with the students who didn’t express any kind of opinion, so their names quickly represented that. Now am quickly working through my list of good pet names.

From left to right: Superman, Ironman, Batman and Transformer. We're playing 'One Card,' also known as UNO in the states. These guys were particularly excited for new names, especially since I didn't care what names they chose, as long as it was appropriate, a stipulation that took some reminding. Transformer used to go by Tom, and sometimes sports the name Pig, depending on his mood. He's a boy of deep thought.

Transformer/Pig/Tom is pretty much the epitome of all little boys. He’s gross and loud and takes pleasure in unfortunate smells. He shoots imaginary guns at other boys, pants after he reads particularly long passages and he does this thing where he sucks on his teeth which drives me insane. If you look at him for any amount of time he will distort his face and/or snort. And it’s my job to make sure he learns some English and doesn’t distract his classmates more than permissible.

These are some of my older students, Jonah, Who.Am.I and Piccolo. They're normally a very peppy bunch, but apparently not for photos. Sometimes students choose names that aren’t exactly standard. They’re all at that age of civil disobedience, which is to say, they’re teenagers. Who.Am.I I assume was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Whenever I conjugate it to Who.Are.You I'm always corrected. One student was adamantly opposed to taking on an English name, so he opted for Hey You.

Also included in these distinctly defiant names is No Name. No Name doesn’t attend Sky anymore, and he wasn't particularly good at English. In fact, if it weren't for his name, he wouldn’t stand out from any other student. But his lack of a name now makes him as memorable as a real person. His parents would be proud.

Here is Jenny and Tim making faces at Brian who's fallen dead asleep. Poor kid, he was totally wiped out. Brian is a funny kid, I don't think I've ever seen him without his Hapkido outfit on, which is totally endearing. Hapkido is a form of martial arts, and Brian is a red belt, which is one belt away from black. He's quite proud of his ninja skills and often shows me the new move he's been working on.

I have a Lilly who’s really wonderful. She’s fifteen and rather clever and personable. We’ve had a couple of individual lessons together and has already tried to sell me health insurance. I’m not kidding, health insurance! That kid is going places with an attitude like that!

Once I had an entire class named after the Simpson characters: Homer, Bart, Lisa, Moe and Maggie. This was a classes that didn’t express an opinion, so I had some fun. The best part of this story is Maggie. He’s a pudgy littly guy with cute dimples, and chose Maggie over the more traditionally male names of Milhouse, Nelson, Monte etc., but what makes this story even better is, when we started the new semester he was bumped up 3 levels with new classmates who wouldn’t understand why he’s named Maggie, so I asked if he wanted a new name. 'No, I like Maggie.' That freakin' kid!

Maggie sporting the standard Asian photo pose.

I have a Matthew and his brother Tim, a few Jenny’s, a Katie and a Katherine, an Erika and Sarah, a couple Kim’s, Sophia, Ema, Julie and Julia. There's June and more than one Jena, and I can't forget Jo. There’s an Isabelle and a Jim, a Steve and Hailey, and a Piccolo, which is apparently an anime character’s name in addition to being a small flute.

You saw Simon, seven year old smarty-pants in a headlock, who is incidentally, the only kid I’ve made cry. I gave him 2 warnings with his phone and 3^rd time I took it for the rest of class. He was quite distraught over this, put his book over his head and sobbed. He's one of the most stubborn and brightest kids I have, I love it! A healthy dose of noncompliance is always promoted in my classroom, I just prefer when it’s not directed towards me. Eh, you can't have it all.

These girls would kill me if they knew I posted this, but it's a classic! They don't have English names and usually end up being referred to as, 'Number __ please.'

I wanted to write actual names instead of the faceless words, 'my students,' because these kids are every bit as real as the mental imagine I conjure at the mention of his/her name. And I’ll admit, it took me a while to distinguish the kids from each other, there is very little trace of individualism. Most students have pin-straight black or dark brown hair. The boys have the standard acceptable haircut with pointy sideburns, the girls sport straight bangs and cute little barrettes. All pretty much wear the same uniform. I’ve never seen black eyes before I moved here, and I’d wager nearly half of my students have ‘em, the other half have dark brown eyes. Some students may be a little darker than others, some students may be a bit taller, but on a whole, there aren’t the number of distinctive differences as there would be if I taught in the states. But I think that makes it easier to spot the shinning stars of the group, like the Army. Dress everyone the same, treat everyone the same, and you'll soon find those who stick out fast.

I called this kid Polham because he always wears Polham shirts, but recently he changed his name to something that sounds like Vegetable, it's some anime character. So now I call him Vegetable. He's a funny kid who always tells me I'm beautiful and flutters his eyelashes at me. It's quite cute actually. I don't think I've ever seen him serious other than this photo.

Since my kids have English names, I thought it only fair I have a Korean name. So I searched and searched until I found the perfect Korean name, the best one of all time! And name is... Han Solo! Most of the kids are younger than Star Wars, which makes me feel especially dated, so few recognize my name sake, but all make very impressed ohhhs and awwws when I write Han Solo in Korean on the white board.