Testing today was more fun than before. I got a chance to test my best class, and some of what they had to say was hilarious. I wanted to type out some highlights, but it’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Which is just as well, as I have some work to do on my story tonight. But I will mention one standout line from today’s dialogues: Hey, your father is a swindler, my father is a crook: we have so much in common, my brother! Then the two guys hugged, and one shushed the other, warning that the FBI sometimes …

I just watched the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come, a film I watched a long time ago in another part of my life. At the time I read it fairly differently, but I enjoyed it when I first saw it. Seeing it again, I was struck not so much by the imaginativeness of the depiction of Heaven and Hell but more by the way it handled human nature, mercy and love and compassion and pain and respect. I like especially how it handled love: how many movies do you see which discuss love that is broken and mended, …

Last night, I went to the local market to buy some bread and other groceries. As I got to the checkout counter, the clerk—whom I’ve mentioned here before as having invited herself over to my house for dinner, as a way of hinting she would like to do so—invited me to cook dinner for her. She asked why I was buying 떡 (ddeok, which is a kind of rice cake), and when I explained it was because I was making 떡만두국 (ddeok mandu guk, which is rice-cake and dumpling soup), she asked if I am good at making that soup. …

Well, why don’t a bang a little dent in that list of things I wanted to post about? The other day, while Kathy was the only person in the office, the President of the University apparently came in, talked about the foreign instructors’ office needing a facelift with his crowd of assistants, and then walked out. The figure I heard was pretty surprising, as it was expressed in terms of each employee. The reaction to this news was mixed. Some people were very excited about getting new desks, furniture, computers, and whatnot. Others seemed to think it’d be silly to …

As a few people said lately, when it rains, it pours. I have so many things I’d like to blog about: a wonderful evening I spent with Lime over in Insadong (a couple of weeks ago, a post that will be complete with photos of some really cool things); the fact that it was recently my sister’s birthday and we had a good talk; the crazy novel ideas that have come to me in the last couple of days—I literally have enough creative ideas to be writing for two or more years solid, and that would be if I was …

Today was pretty uneventful. I tested two class groups on the first 7 weeks’ worth of study. For some of the students, this was a moment in which they could show how hard they’d worked. There were a few, especially one student named In-Soon (who bears a shocking resemblance to my friend Joleen in Canada) who did amazingly well. In-Soon’s responses to questions were not only grammatically perfect, but also very polite. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised, and I told her so; I also showed her the perfect score she got on the test. But of course, for every …

Yes, it’s test week. Students are scurrying like little frightened mice, conversational English professors have that, “Uh, I heard this conversation ten times today already!”, and the whole campus is abuzz with a strange energy. Speaking of strange energies: a nice young girl student asked me out twice today, and didn’t seem to take the hint right away when I talked about my girlfriend at length, and when I told her that no, I couldn’t go to the movies with her. However, a little later she said she might go and see the suggested movie with her friends instead. I’m …

If you comment here, it may not show up for a day or two. I’m not exactly sure why, but the comments function isn’t working all that well. I’ll ask the people at my hosting provider to look into it but I suspect I’ll have to reinstall and reimport everything and while I’m doing all that I may as well migrate to the new Movable Type, as it looks to me as if multi-author blogging isn’t something I’m about to start doing here and now. So for the next week or so, if your comments don’t show up for a …

Here’s a picture of my sister Annie with her our my nephew Nathaniel. Isn’t he adorable? Isn’t she lucky? Why is she lucky? Well, you know, I am lucky too. Living in Asia can be a headache sometimes but it can also be fascinating, fun, fantastic, in addition to the other F-words I use on other days. Health care is cheap (in Korea anyway) and if I were in better health my wisdom tooth would be out right now, for maybe the price of a few beers with friends. But the hard bit is being so far from so many …