Wow, the lunch plan I had fell through. It’s shocking to have a day with nothing happening between 10am and 3pm. Maybe I’ll actually have a nap tomorrow… I’ve been adding a lot to the ESL section of this site, which may or may not escape the notice of regular readers since the entries usually don’t make it onto the main page. (I backdate them in order to prevent it from happening, though tonight I’m gonna try change the code so the ESL stuff can be properly dated and just not show up on the main page. Anyway… between that …

(Here’s a joke that’s all about ESL, but also makes a point about the “listen and repeat” passive learning that happens where students just learn common conversational phrases and don’t learn how to express themselves. I typed it out for a friend’s email and then thought I might as well post it here…It’s a great joke to tell when teaching Koreans and they say,”I’m fine thank you, and you?” everytime you ask them “How are you?” even when they look tired, sick as hell, or whatever… Even if it depends on a little awkward use of English, it’s still amusing. …

Sometimes, you can find something useful in an advertisement. For example, a kind of Asian Amazon.com-like company… If I hadn’t clicked on an innocent little link, I might never have found this site, where one can order books by all kinds of authors (like the new works by Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Egan, as well as classics by Philip K. Dick and Olaf Stapledon… things that are, I can testify, practically impossible to find in Korea. Oooh, I am gonna begging some friend with a credit card to give me a hand with an order… Wheee. …

Today I was walking home from the Teacher Training luncheon and I ran into a couple of kids, one of whom I sort of know. She’s a student of my co-worker and friend Kimberley’s. So anyway, she knows me by name, and I know her face, because she’s the daughter of the woman who runs our apartment’s local little corner shop (“the super”). Anyway, the girl quickly greeted me, “Hi Gord!” It was odd enough because I’m used to people calling me Go-duh, the Korean pronunciation of my name. But anyway, I said to the girl, since she’s an English …

… and some of them are funny. But, since I’m still working in analog that needs to get digitized via scanning, I am screwed as far as my desire to show you the pics at top speed. I also just worked a long freaking day. This overtime business… I taught 7 hours today, and then there was listening to the introductory speeches at teacher training. Most of the teachers had enough understanding to realize that the speaker was, for a good 15 minutes or more, explaining to students where they can eat in the neighborhood. I swear talking about food …

Coming soon is a tenuous title for this time of the year… after all, I’m about to embark on a protracted period of overtime work, and my time will be short for a while. Still, there are a few posts I want to make.

Okay, I was spelunking the stats application for my website, and I have to say, some of you people are quite odd. Someone actually found my site by searching the keywords “bob marley belly button rings” over at msn. And I also discovered hits from places like California (a massive number of hits in fact), Taiwan, Israel, and other places. Now, I know the hits misattributed as coming from “North Korea” are accounted for by my own visits to the site, and by those of some friends and students in Korea. I know of a few people in Virginia, Saskatchewan, …

Trackback should be working now… now on to getting my Awasu news aggregator all set up, and testing my own RSS feed (and making it available on my site). No rest for the wicked…

So here’s what I have learned in the last few days… 1. It’s amazing how radically your view of a situation can change. Sometimes pain is self-inflicted, and very often I think the effects of emotional pain of this type can be overcome far more easily than one imagines. 2. It’s amazing how quickly back pain can result from improperly executing the head motions in the butterfly stroke. We’ve just begun learning to do it. I made a joke in Korean about how our classs used to look like a bunch of retarded frogs, but now we look like retarded …