print.pitas.com | happy lists :) Wow. A while back, I submitted a Happy List to the Happy Lists Site, over at print.pitas.com. Today it seems this list has finally gotten posted, for the Monday, August 11th posting. Maybe it’s a reminder to try be a little more epicurean, appreciate the little things a little more and find those unique joys that only dumplings or a a cup of coffee can give one.
This weekend’s been difficult, painful and harsh on me, for reasons so complicated I don’t know how to broach them here. So I’ll just post a good quote I found from Aristotle’s Poetics: Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions ?what we do ?that we are happy or the reverse. This is important to remember. …
In my second kids’ class – the younger class, incidentally – the kids found something unusual on the floor. On excruciatingly cute stationery was written a note from a girl named J– H– to a girl named H– K—. I understood some, but not enough to figure out what was being said about me. However, a friend read it and banished my misgivings with a rendering that went something like this: What’s up? This is J– H–. You heard? Gord, Thai, and John R. are going back to their hometowns [in their home countries]! They won’t be teaching here anymore! …
Charlie gave me this. (Link deleted since the site has changed radically. Try this instead. Probably not the same thing, but… it’s fun.) I should know by now that Charlie always gives me weird things, but they still always surprise me. We humans are such a weird species.
UPDATE (20 March 2013): For the curious, here’s the scarf image. Nice enough that I may make a banner from it… Original Post: The handkerchief that Sun Hee (one of my students, who also works in the office at my workplace) bought for me in Japan is very pretty. It’s a cute scene of little children playing in the fields of Japan, jumping rope and chasing butterflies. You may note that is the new background image of this webpage. I’ll be changing the layout so you can see it better, soon, but until then, have a look at the scarf …
Basically I am cutting and pasting from an email to a friend here. Let’s see. The folk village I went to on Saturday with my friend was fun. Pictures coming soon, probably tomorrow. Will be buying a digicam this week, probably. Today one of my old students — who is now someone else’s student, a little girl names Su Yeon — brought me a nice big bottle of bok bun ja sent by her mom! (Raspberry wine, purportedly with powerful effects on a man’s virility… which I can neither confirm nor deny.) She didn’t even bring one for her new …
I note that, yes, more and more of my posts of late have been in the gord’s life/life in korea categories. I have a bunch of draft posts about crossdressing African child soldiers, and about Bob Hope, and other things, but I’ve had no time to develop much about this stuff. Anyway, I will say a tiny bit about my short term plans: I will be working for two more weeks, and then during the third week I will be briefly going to Osaka to get my new work visa processing done. It’s a paid-for trip (necessary as it’s required …
Scare Tactics – Why are Liberian soldiers wearing fright wigs? By Mark Scheffler Why do Liberian boy soldiers cross-dress? What’s with the fright wigs? Mark Scheffler’s answers to this question are quite interesting, and indicate that the traditions involved go back farther than one might imagine.
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 an interesting enough blog by a (French? I’m guessing from the rare and few grammar mistakes and the name) foreigner living and teaching/studying in Seoul.