Coming home this evening, I was crammed into a subway car so tightly that, seriously, I could not move without pushing someone over. It was horrible. This is life in Seoul. Sometimes, it makes me think back to the days of taking cabs and cycling back in Jeonju. Man, there were some interesting cabbies back then. Much better than the Lebanese cabbie I had the one and only time I remember taking a cab in Montreal… he was unstable, and his girlfriend was eating stinky food in the car — which was all but killing my drunk/food-poisoned friend beside me– …
Category: PERSONAL
아이 앰 모기 킬러
Are others in Korea noticing ridiculous numbers of mosquitoes zipping around their apartments for this time of year as well, or is it just me? I killed five of the bastards this evening alone, and there’s still one of them flying around right now, buzzing in the distance. And that’s with a mogi-tab in my 홈 매트 thingie, freshly put in a few hours ago. Seriously, what the hell?
Have I mentioned my old friend Jack?
While we’re only rarely in touch, I do look forward to the next time we connect, during some visit to Canada sometime. He’s turned out to be an excellent photographer, as the link will show you — his photostream on Flickr is enough to make anyone envious. Lately, it’s trip pics, but usually, it’s all kinds of beautiful pictures from the little islands of wildlife around Toronto and wherever else he wanders. That Jack… he’s a hell of a guy. Reminds me, I should upload some photos to my stream from Charlie’s wedding. It’s just, I keep on planning to …
Beowulf and Grendel
Yeah, Beowulf. So… this movie is one I wanted to see in Seattle, but didn’t. I should have trusted my instincts and gone alone… because this was better than three out of the four films I saw there (with the exception being A Scanner Darkly). It had a fascinating twist on the original, and maybe this owed something to John Gardner’s novel, Grendel — I don’t really remember the novel, though I know I read it once, long ago — that made all of the characters much more fascinating. For those who haven’t seen it yet, further blather will follow …
Today’s Observations
Just things noted from today: I think one of the things that gets libertarians into so much trouble, PR-wise, is that so many muddle-headed uses of the idea that people are free-to-whatever get used when they clearly don’t make sense. For example, yes, people are free to kill themselves, but anyone who’s talked to someone who was talked out of suicide knows that usually, the ostensible desire to die often evaporates and people are glad they were talked out of it. An analogy popped into my head this evening, marking a student’s defense of plastic surgery, which was about plastic …
하라테크
Well, I got a chair from these guys and it turned out to be a great investment. You can glomp around on their website and see the way it works, but basically, it adjusts to your pelvis, and lets your pelvic bones adjust so that there’s less pressure on the area. It’s not only turned out to be good for the lower body, but also for the back… my posture’s a little better, and my back is loosening up, despite my still spending somewhat too much time in the chair. Worth it, if you’re spending a lot of time writing. …
Currently Reading…
I forgot to mention, I’m taking a little break from Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee… great book, but sometimes I stop in the middle of such books to process. In the meantime, I’ve been tearing through Bruce Sterling’s Visionary In Residence (and catching up on the bits of Crystal Express I hadn’t read until now), and I also had a go at some of the early stories in Rudy Rucker’s collection Gnarl!. I have a couple of stories left unread in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, though I look forward to getting back to that book, and tonight, I …
Shirts Have Arrived!
Finally, only 3, no, wait, 4 months after I ordered them, the replacement shipment for my order from Cafe Press has arrived! I’m the proud new owner of… a bunch of cool t-shirts, including one of Kevin’s Dalma Daesa shirts, Adam’s Space Nazis in the Hollow Earth T-shirt, a Miskatonik University shirt (too bad nobody but me in my neighborhood gets the joke), an “I am a Rock Star in Korea” t-shirt (which, after all, was, in a very small-scale, cheesy, indie-rock way, true, though nobody will get the joke); a badly-printed Buddhabrot shirt, and a very cool Viridian T-shirt. …
More Writing Stuff
Oddly enough — or perhaps not surprisingly at all — the current political situation over here got me thinking about what exactly I was trying to say in my Northeast-Asian Superheroes story. While a lot of the plot-elements are actually remaining, there’s a slight bit of shuffling in terms of who occupies which place in relationship to the main character, a beleaguered private-sector-employed South Korean superhero. The resolution, which was eluding me for the longest time — since my return from Seattle to Korea roughly eight weeks ago — has finally, sort-of, fallen into place. I wish it were under …
Mr. Boechler
Thoughts have bubbled up in the wake of a post by Stephanie. So I had this gym teacher in middle school — I think from 7th to 8th grade — named Mr. Boechler. I heard when I was in 9th grade that he had been promoted to vice-principal at some small-town school, which seemed about right to me since in my experience, vice-principals are often mentally ill, violent assholes. Maybe the job makes them that way, but every one I’ve directly dealt with behaved like a petty Mussolini on the job. Anyway, this Boechler guy, he was this hulking thug …