October and November were busy for me — November insanely so — and I neglected to post about the few meetings I had, and events I participated in, at least since meeting Charles for beers in Kangnam. In order, and I think this is all of them, and, significantly, they’re both with bloggers in Korea: MEMESAK Conference, 2007 One Dr. Hodges, perhaps better known online as The Gypsy Scholar, long ago posted about the MEMESAK — the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea — conference last year, and I expressed my regret for not having known about …
Category: PERSONAL
Hin Jook, and More Proof of My Existence
I’ve been eating jook all day. If you don’t know what jook is, well, this might not be the best introduction. There is such a thing as delicious jook — after all, the stuff is just rice porridge. If you make it with a little pumpkin, or chicken, or other flavorful things, it can be delightful. But me, I’ve been eating it plain — hin jook, ie. white rice porridge. A little oil, a little salt, but basically plain. And drinking way too much water. This is how one prepares for the tests I’m having tomorrow. At the hospital. I’ll …
Villages Don’t Have Bad Neighborhoods, Do They?
An interesting link on Arts and Letters Daily recently was this one, discussing the following point: … those who travel and live abroad must be continually alert and never fall for the myth that we live in a “global village”. Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to religious observances, traditions, manners and gestures in other parts of the world. It is all too easy to be caught in cultural crossfire. The impetus for this discussion came from the incident involving Gillian Gibbons, a middle-aged British schoolteacher who did something very silly in Sudan. (She let her class name a teddy …
Ten Spikes, One Spike, Sado, Baejjangi, and More…
Yeah, another writing update. Well, I finally got “The Broken Pathway” (aka “The Broken Path” and “The Spike”) done. Some neat magical stuff and a (somewhat) dramatic (and dramatically magical) ending with a tiny, quiet coda at the very end… which expanded the story up to nearly the same length as the original draft, even though I removed several characters — one of them animal — and a subplot about a monk raping a woman sent by her infertile husband to the temple to pray for a son… and about his meeting the daughter he never knew he sired that …
Costochondritis
Apparently this is what was causing me to feel weird when taking a deep breath. The doctor I saw last week correctly noted that it was not a broken rib — which was my first suspicion — but he said he thought it was a muscular issue, especially with the muscles connecting the pelvis to the ribcage. Last night, I finally had had enough and went to the hospital, and the patient, friendly doctor checked me carefully (even offering to do an electrocardiogram, though I’ve had a few of those in the last few months and they’ve always been okay) …
Bathed in the Light at the End of the Tunnel
The editing gig I’ve been working for a month or so is now, finally, thank the stars and the heavens, over. While I’m thankful for the filthy lucre, working on two textbook projects at the same time and mostly close to the deadline, during an already-busy semester, while keeping up my writing (somewhat, because I had deadlines of my own to keep), pushed me very close to my limits as a human being. Last week was relatively free, but the couple of weeks before, and the last few days, have been so crammed that I felt as if I were …
Great Progress
I’ve made great progress on a few things: Textbook editing is almost at an end! A few more hours of hell and it’s all over! Whew! “Lester Young…” is now essentially rewritten. I need a good hour to proofread it and then I can send it off! (I’m reworking it for a major magazine. More news when I have something final to announce.) A great deal of “Eight Days” fell into place in the last couple of days. Chunks of it just sort of bubbled up out of my subconscious, and insisted on being written. I also made a couple …
On Ze Plate
… ‘zere is too much! I’m a little behind on grading, but not as much as I thought I would be a week ago. I have an unknown amount of textbook-editing left to go, but at least three full books I’ll need to proofread (possibly more than once for one of them) in the next few weeks. The proofing/editing requests are in the standard Korean mode: last minute, high-volume, jaw-droppingly short deadlines. I am unlikely to meet any more of those shockingly unrealistic deadlines: I’ve decided my health is more important than someone else’s panic. Chest pains are not a …
Athlete’s Foot, My Past Life, and I Look Chinese?
Somewhere along the way — probably in Japan — I picked this up, but it didn’t flare until a week ago. It’s been a busy week, so it took until yesterday to get to the doctor’s office. I suppose there might be a cream I could get over the counter, but I don’t know what to ask for and anyway, he is a good guy, and it doesn’t cost much to visit, so I dropped in to see my regular dermatologist. Dermatologist and urologist, actually. He does both, and this has indeed been handy. So anyway, I went to see …
Al Fry’s “Strange Beings”
Al Fry is the Strange Being, if you ask me. You can find some very odd videos by this man online — discussions of demihumans, dangerous chi power emitted from the eyes, and more insanity. It’s all a hodgepodge of random new age crap (qi and “psychic self-defense,” and the usual “vibrational levels” and “negative spirits”) and cryptozoology, duct-taped together and presented as if it was real. Except, almost as if with a bizarre sense of humor. You want to believe the guy narrating is joking when he says, “Now, listen up!” and goes on to explain how as late …