Your Score: The Monk

You scored 18% Cardinal, 61% Monk, 41% Lady, and 40% Knight!

You live a peaceful, quiet life. Very little danger comes your way and you live a long time. You are wise and modest, but also stagnant. You have little comfort, little food and have taken a vow of silence. But who needs chatter when just sitting in the cloister of your abbey with The Good Book makes you perfectly content.

Ganked from Wyafer.

Huh? Go read this story by my classmate Tina.  And while you’re at it, go read my classmate Ben’s sister Stephanie Burgis’s story, Crow.

Docs Change the Way They Think About Death

Via Fragment of the Day

(a) so many people seem to think that speechmaking is absolutely necessary for any function, gathering, or context, and

(b) so many people seem to be bad public speakers, not making any attempt to deliver speeches that interest, involve, or relate to the audience except as something to be endured.

Foreigners routinely comment on how rock bands will stop in the middle of a show and start talking… and talking… and talking… They’ll report on whole rooms of Koreans sitting in dazed, half-attentive states while some guy in a suit prattles on and on at them. I’ve seen local government officials give long speeches to rooms mostly full of yawning, bored children. I’ve seen yawning bored adults ignoring government dudes blathering on and on.

So anyway, this news piece I’m about to discuss didn’t much surprise me, but it was amusing, and a powerful example of the kind of silent resistance I am seeing all around me now in Korea, when I look for it. Lime told me about how a group of 400 people organized a soccer tournament, basically just for people to get together and play games and have fun. Picnic, soccer, fun. Sounds good, right?

Someone in the government heard about it — hey, 400-people in this tournament? Cool, that’s active, let’s sponsor it! They sent food and so on, which was cool, right?

Well, there’s always a price. On the day of the tournament, a bunch of government dudes in suits showed up and started giving speeches. You know, long, onerous, boring-as-hell speeches.

Everyone in attendance finally left, put off by the sheer boredrom and stupidity of it. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. That, my friends, is beautiful. If only there were more socially-acceptable ways for those people to tell the government dorks to shut their pie-holes, maybe they’d get the message.

I’m sure there are a few inaccuracies in my rendering, since I’m just going on what I remember from Lime’s explanation. Those of you who can read Korean can check out the original, here.

A slideshow of racist advertising Alexis linked to.

The article raises some really interesting questions about American culture, about art, about contexts for art. It brings to mind a question that’s been bugging me: is the blog a good context for writing to be presented? I’m beginning to think it isn’t.

What I saw was a middle-aged Korean woman in somewhat formal, classy attire talking to this guy as he let her into the room next door to look around. I had a brief conversation with these guys about something else, and then that was it.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, I saw that down the hall — way down the hall — the hallway was full of junk. By junk, I mean apartment stuff — some of the provided furniture, some cleaning supplies, and some boxes. The door to a different apartment was open, and this woman was in the hallway having loud conversations with several other women, I think were the same cleaning women brought in to clean up the empty apartments last week.

Now, it’s not like loud conversations in the hallway are unusual in the building I live in. I remember, during my first few months here, a lot of somewhat disturbingly manic, over-acted conversations between two of my neighbours who would always greet one another as if they hadn’t seen one another for years, and as if they wereboth astounded by their good fortune at crossing paths. Yeah, I know, I’m a bit antisocial, and I keep my cards close to my vest, but I wasn’t the only one who found their exclamations of, “Ohhhhhhhhh! Hiiiiii! How are you? It’s so nice to see you!” a little bizarre, considering they were saying it everyday, to their nextdoor neighbours, without even a hint of irony.

Anyway, those conversations would wake me on days when I slept in. And other people have conversations in the hallway, too. I don’t really complain about those, and sometimes — occasionally, mind — I have such conversations myself.

But when I heard this woman speaking very loudly in Korean, something inside me curled up and went tight, and I got that, “Oh, man, there goes the neighborhood” feeling bubbling up from who-knows-where. That involuntary reaction puzzled me to no end. I’m living in Korea, with a Korean, and she’s going to be a middle-aged woman speaking Korean one day, too. So what the hell kind of a reaction was that?

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Blogger Kathy Sierra at Creating Passinate Users has apparently been receiving death threats, and having her likeness posted in all kinds of sick, Photoshopped ways.

Which is so beyond not cool it makes me feel sick. To my stomach.

(via Min Jung Kim’s site)

(There was one approach that came to me later, which might have worked, but which didn’t occur to me at the time, and now it’s too late to try, though it might actually even be doable, alone).

But honestly, I think I’m just about ready to throw a little cash at the problem. I don’t really feel like hurting my back moving the fridge from my old place to our new one anyway, and I’m pretty sure moving guys could figure out a workable angle. Movers are cheap, too, around here, so it’s not such a big deal. That, and there’s the bonus that if necessary, I can always pay them to hump the thing up to the attic… If it’s even possible to get the thing in through the attic door, that is.

Damn, I think I need a tape measure.

In fact, I gotta say that I’m gonna post this, but mostly because I wanna complain about how people who write quizzes and such about Korea always have very negative attitudes. If someone insists that fan death is real, I smile, sometime I’ll ask them why Korea’s the only place in the world with the term fan death, how come I’m not dead though I’ve slept many night with a fan on in my room, and ask them how it works. I’ll point out that fean death is not a medical diagnosis.

But I’ll also note that when I sleep with a fan blowing directly on me, it does strain me and I wake with back pains, or a sore throat. I can see that the strain might induce something like a heart attack if someone’s ill, or weak, or old, or very drunk, or something.

As I commented where I found this quiz link:

That’s one thing about these online quizzes and gags I see about Korea. They’re usually so, I don’t know, persistently disdainful, and it’s a drag. It’s like grumpy expat 2.0 stopped holding boring bitchfest/bullshit-about-them parties and went online. Or maybe it’s the same bunch, and they’re just older, less connected, and lonely but still here and bitching by bandwidth instead? I dunno.

Anyway, after all that, here’s my result:

<div style=”width: 320px; border: 1px solid gray; padding: 6px; font: normal 12px arial, verdana, sans-serif; color: black; background-color: white;”><b style=”color: black; font: bold 20px ‘Times New Roman’, serif; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px;”>You are 84% ready to get out of Korea</b> <div style=”width: 200px; background: white; border: 1px solid black; text-align: left;”><div style=”width: 84%; background: red; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;”> </div></div><p style=”margin: 10px; border: none; background: white; color: black;”>
You have them figured out. You know it is a 5,000 year-old shell game and there is no pea. You are already over the hump and can probably remain in Korea indefinitely without any permanent damage. (don’t make fun of the ESL teachers too vociferously because they still buy in to it all)
<br><br><b><a href=”http://www.gotoquiz.com/the_is_it_time_to_get_out_of_korea_quiz_1″ style=”color: blue;”>The “Is It Time To Get Out of Korea?” Quiz</a><br><a href=”http://www.gotoquiz.com/” style=”color: blue;”>Create MySpace Quizzes</a></b></p></div>

I think the line “You have them figured out,” is pretty much the line that kills my sympathy for the quiz. I don’t even really have Westerners under 25 figured out, let alone Koreans. I’ve never felt farther from having “them figured out” than I do now. Generalizations, they come out of my mouth — especially in moments of annoyance — and then I retract them and think them over. Then again, generalizations about Korea come out of Lime’s mouth often too.

But actually, chatting with a Japanese professor (in Korean! And mostly comprehensibly!) on the way back from the immigration office today, we were discussing what we’ll do when we finish our stints at our current mutual employer. She explained that she’s almost got a doctorate in sociolinguistics (thesis was a comparison on slang and dialect in Korean and Japanese) and will be a professor in Japan. I explained that I’d be in Korea a few years more at least, and then most of my explanation had to do with Lime. So maybe 85% is right, I don’t know. The longer I live here, the more I realize how little I really know, and how wrong I was when I thought I knew so much. On the other hand, the longer I’m here, the more that things which bother me really bug me, more even sometimes than is warranted. Which is usually a signal that it’s time to move on, except that I also felt this way most of my life, in Canada, so maybe it’s just a signal that this place is home now?

(via kottke)

(Via one of the Pauls on the Culturelist.)