Though I’m somewhat sick today (bleah, ugh), I managed to produce a new bit of writing on the long-neglected New Sophists’ Almanac. It’s mainly about the kind of “game-playing” I think we engage in when we watch scary movies, and how I think this may relate to what the hell is going on when we are experiencing “art”.

My sister just sent some more pics of my new nephew! Isn’t he adorable? But I was trying to figure out which side of the family he resembles, and got nowhere except that dark, dark hair seems a Pineault thing (ie, my mom’s side of the family, unless some branch of Troy’s family also has that). It’s hard to see from a couple of photos, though. He looks like a bright fellow, though, from this next pic: When Lime saw these pics, she declared that she thought he looked a little Asian, which once again made me wonder how much …

Oh, a hot night of… reading books together! Yes, my honey came over and we sprawled on the floor, reading books together. Not the same book: she’s reading some kind of mystical adventure in Korean (퇴마록, it’s called, which I’d roughly translate as “The Exorcism Story” if you use the word exorcism in a more general sense than it has taken on since the advent of the Christian us of that word…the banishment of evil). It sounds fascinating, some kind of pitched battle between people all over the world and ancient forces of evil that they’re fighting to banish and …

Today’s a rather long day. I started teaching at 8:30 am, and I will be teaching until 7pm. That’s because I took on an extra two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, teaching English at a high school. The kids there are good, so it’s not a chore, but it does mean preparing more exercises and so on. I’ll do that after my writing class finishes, I think. I wish I’d thought to bring dice with me today. Ah well… we can use coins for the board game I will give the kids. But I think I shall have to turn …

I’m not sure what’s going on, but just today, in the hour after I finished work, two women “tried to get along with me”, to use the wonderful euphemism I’ve only ever heard Lime use. One of them even saw me with my pants down! Wait, wait, it’s more innocent than it sounds. My pants were only down a little. She was a nurse in the clinic I went to, and she was jabbing a needle into my butt, delivering what’s probably the last injection of painkillers I’ll need for my tonsilitis (which seems mainly to have passed). The last …

Well, I went to the ENT today… the Ear Nose and Throat specialist (이비인후과) at the nearby True Love Hospital (it probably sounds less weird in Korean as 참사랑병원) but anyway, I was corrected on a few things. First, the condition afflicting me was not anything calling for antibiotics. It’s APT, which means Acute Pharyngeal (?) Tonsilitis. Which doesn’t, by the way, mean I need my tonsils out, not in this case anyway. The doc said this had been complicated by a case of Gingivitis; I asked him how that could happen, when I faithfully brush my teeth after meals …

Lunch today helped me understand one reason I am so incredibly sensitive about food. I noticed that the food I had—which was of the red and spicy Korean type—seemed a lot more spicy and it was even somewhat painful to eat. Ah, yes, it’s the infection. The one I complained about after camp, which I didn’t (for the longest time) realize was tonsilitis. The one which the dentist prescribed me 3 days of antibiotics for. Well, the 3 days of antibiotics did the only thing that they could do: they killed off the weakest of the bugs, leaving me with …

Yes, it does matter. It matters whether you’re in violation of a given law when you’re living abroad as a foreign national. I agreed to take on a part-time job that was offered through the University to me. It’s just a few hours a week teaching at some high school in the city. Well, the University took so long to get the paperwork done (and perhaps the two schools took so long to conclude their negotiations, as well), that by the time I was supposed to begin teaching, the paperwork was still not done. On the second day of the …

It’s been an age, but here are the results of the last poll: For the question, 30% of respondents favored him saying, “Excuse me, sir, but could you say that again in English?” while 20% of the twenty respondents (likely SF fans) favored him asking random Texans, “So do you know Bruce Sterling, like, personally?” If you would like to check the poll results, please feel free to do so. And please vote in the new poll in the right sidebar. We at eclexys I hope that this new poll is a little more amusing than the last one.