Here’s the new stuff in my life… 1. After a few botches at the local hair shop I sometimes go to, I told the hair shop girl to just go ahead and shave off my hair, including my precious sideburns. (No worries, they’ll grow back.) So I’m now at 12mm of scalp hair. I like it. The kids in my classes told me I look like a crazy man, but the adults’ reviews have been a little more mixed, from “Oh, I liked it better the other way,” to “You look like very healthy man now!” So… anyway, it’s cooler …

Well, the thing about getting a job as a professor is that everyone is pickier about records. So, today, I sent over a lot of my paperwork. My MA diploma is already over at Jeonju University, but my BA diploma (in fact, certification letter as a diploma took too long to have printed off) and transcripts, and the letter releasing me from my current contract were sent to Jeonju as a registered post today. (They’ll arrive tomorrow.)

You know, with all the different meanings of words, it’s a little wonder that people have trouble learning a different language. Or is this so? For example, over the last few days, the word “power” has come up in a lot of different contexts. The first was yesterday afternoon, when the campus suffered a power outage. All the lights, all the air conditioning, all of it went kaput for the space of a few hours. The bank was nonfunctional, the classrooms were stuffy, the cash registers were crippled.

I’m only finished about half of the update I wanted to do. Mainly I just changed some of the link displays and added a scrolling image over in the photos link section. Oh, and a new color scheme to fit the way I feel these days… not black, but somewhat grey. Which is pretty good considering… and there is a little green, here and there. New shoots, new life, new way of thinking. Hopeful, yes. So much to update here… I am going to collect this site into a smaller set of categories, and make it look somewhat less like …

Yesterday was a very painful, difficult day. I learned a lot yesterday about myself, and about life. I learned that sometimes the things you believe really matter, simply don’t change anything. That the truth is good, but it can hurt like hell. I learned that maybe the things I thought were essential and fundamental, aren’t. I learned that the most powerful thing maybe isn’t the most important thing, just as my friend Charlie told me so many times, and even told me yesterday. (And what other people have told me, in their way.)

Lately has been a complicated time for me. One of the things I have learned is that life is absolutely complicated, no matter how much we simplify it. It is complicated not just because of the other people in life, which is what is usually suggested by people. But life is also complicated because of what we are.

Well, I went ahead and, in an act less of narcicissm than curiosity and a desire to tabulate all the links containing any info about me online, I googled myself. Come on, like you’ve never done it? I found the stuff I already know about, plus some odd hits containing references to my dad. He had been working in quality assurance and also some R&D, I think, in the food treatment industry. Here’s a link where he is mentioned in connection to pea micronization, hemp sterilization, and on standards in Canadian grain regulations. Nice bit of oddness, that. :)