Lime’s words a few minutes ago, after checking her grades on the Medical Licensing Exam, were, “Oh my God!” or something close to that. For the record, she was bouncing around with a smile on her face, so I guess she meant it in a good way. Dr. Lee. She did it. :) (For those wishing to congratulate her, you could do it on her site or, well, she’ll see whatever people write here, too.)
Month: January 2006
Hellohellohellohellooooooooooooo.
Yeah, camp is wearing on me. Wait, I think it’s the accumulated effect of four full camps, with this one being the least-well-organized, that is wearing on me. Things like someone booking buses to the basketball game tonight for 6:00pm but not thinking to move dinnertime earlier than the usual 5:30pm. Things like nobody knowing where this or that thing is. Things like continual revision of exercises and activities ten minutes before they begin, after nobody showed any interest in revising them a month ahead of time. And yeah, though I’ve spent fewer nights in the dorm than last time …
Carnivàle
On a whim at the local Carrefour department store, I picked up a heavily discounted copy of the first season of the HBO series Carnivàle. I hadn’t heard of it, but it looked like something that would be up my alley, especially with the tagline, “1934. The Dustbowl. The Last Great Age of Magic.” Turns out that, at least after the first episode, I definitely do not regret picking it up. Carnivàle is the kind of show that, while it seems to be plodding along slowly, is actually bristling with information, full of all kinds of entrancing politlines and threads, …
Taxi Blues and Other Dabang News
Here’s some surprising news! Myoung Jae, with whom I used to play in the Dabang Band, informed me that a film that played at the Busan film festival, titled Taxi Blues, is being prepared for general release in Korea. The film features a snippet of the band’s performance of the original song “Taxi Blues” (one of Myoung’s babies) as well as having the whole song play over the closing credits. So anyone in Korea, if you want to see my OST debut — meaning the first and probably last time anything I’m involved in gets onto an OST — make …
In Honor of Watching Donnie Darko for the Nth Time: A Quiz
Here’s a neat quiz. I post my result on the evening on which I watched the brilliant movie Donnie Darko for the Nth time in my life. You are Karen. You are just trying to help kidsfind themeselves. “A linguist once saidthat out of all the combinations of words inthe English language, “Cellar Door”was the most beautiful.” Which Donnie Darko Character Are You? brought to you by Quizilla
Carla Bley and the Korean Prison Chef
As I live in Korea, this may amuse me more than those in North America. Or not. On what I think is the Carla Bley Band site, which is built on the theme of a musical prison — don’t ask what the heck that is all about — there’s a piece about how a deal was worked out, with Carla Bley scoring a musical residency in in Germany, and the WXW prison in America getting — you got it — a Korean prison chef. I told you it was weird. The rest of the site is bizarre, too. One more …
Though it’s probably the basis of pragmatic socialism, really, and therefore nothing new…
… it just struck me in a fundamental, pragmatic way that the idea of “surplus labour” kind of depends on the people who are “surplus” allowing such a fundamentally oppressive system to exist. And while the utopian vision of a society in which a concerted uprising puts a stop to such a system was (supposedly) trampled in 1989, there’s another version of the uprising–one that depends on an unconcerted attack on the system, a continuous, distributed, disorganized form of resistance that, instead of collapsing the oppressor system, transforms the system into something more universally oppressive. The name of this distributed, …
Cab Thieves
NOTE: I posted this a while back, but it wasn’t published until a few days ago. The “today” mentioned is at least several weeks back. Lime and I were waiting for a cab today, and this twerp came after us, looked at us, and then positioned himself to catch anything that would be coming our way. When a cab pulled up, Lime hollered “Yaaa!” (Hey!) to him, to remind him we’d been waiting first. The word’s not the most polite thing, but on the scale of impoliteness it’s not anywhere near as bad as nabbing someone else’s cab. The bastard …
Too Harsh?
Is this too harsh to email to this guy? I was forced to pass him today, and he had the gall to send a thank-you email to me. Not that the twit would read it, but maybe I could get it translated. He deserves some kind of harsh response, considering the crap he pulled to get a pass in the class — rather disgusting as I’m sure you’ll agree — but I’m not sure whether what I’ve written below crosses the line. NAME, Don’t thank me. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve the grade you got. NOBODY thinks …
Subterranean Doctrine? Part 1
Jodi over at The Asia Pages recently (a few months ago) wrote about the complexities of dating someone from another culture while living in that other person’s culture. Actually, she writes about it fairly often, and I can see why, because it’s a really big thing in your life, in a relationship. Occasionally my criticisms of things Korean — cultural, governmental, traditional, or what have you — have led to some pretty hard arguments with my (Korean) girlfriend. It wasn’t because I wasn’t sensitive enough, it wasn’t because I wasn’t funny enough or even because of any basic disagreement; some …