Although there was no video game in the office to calm me before the procedure, my tooth was just extracted. However, Lime was there and it did help calm my (admittedly minor) jitters. I feel fine, I didn’t even know the tooth was out till I saw the dentist go in with the curved needle to stitch up the gum. (And he wouldn’t have showed me the tooth if I hadn’t asked to see it. He’d already disposed of it and had to tweezer it out of the bio-waste cup on his tray for me to have a look.) No …

Hey everyone. If I go quiet for a few days or a week or something, don’t be surprised. While you are going about your daily life, working in offices or classrooms or clinics or whatever, dancing in nightclubs, sipping beer in front of the TV, and whatever else you do in your lives, I’ll probably be lying down on the floor, on my sleeping mat, curled up in pain and whimpering as the last hit of analgesics wears off and the next one slowly begins taking effect. That’s right, I’m going to see the dentist today about getting my wisdom …

Well, I’ve been looking at my transcripts a lot lately, as I’ve been preparing my submissions package for this promotion process that’s been going on at work. You know, my academic standing wasn’t as great as I thought it was—my music courses, especially my theory courses, dragged down my mark, as did the saxophone performance courses I took, and which I can’t understand having bothered taking, with all the hindsight I have now. But anyway, I’ve lately been thinking of studying more. I mean, I’m always kind of studying things, I know. But the more I live, the more I …

There’s a new English-language Korea portal up out there. It’s called connectKorea, and some of the media in the subpages is actually worth looking at. They’ve linked to me, and emailed to check it’s okay, which is always nice. The “texts” section has a few very interesting things, including a quick infosheet on the “Blood Types” myth so popular here in Korea, and a depressing graphic that suggests there are many more child prostitutes per capita in South Korea than anywhere else in the world, according to UNICEF estimates. And finally, a funny documentary about the Asian squat, something I …

Via Marvin’s Electric Smack Shack. Marvin asked for some recommendations of good stuff, so I’m obliging. He asked: Recommend to me: a movie a book a musical artist, song, or album a LiveJournal user not on my friends list (or a blogger not on my home page) what I should have for dinner a website a quote Then put this in your LiveJournal/blog and I’ll do the same for you (if I notice it and get around to it — let’s be honest — but I’ll try). Well, if anyone wants to make a similar set of recommendations to me, …

Often risqué, ever-thoughtful, Sarong Party Girl writes a very worthwhile entry about, well, all kinds of things, but especially “the race thing”, meaning her practice of dating men of another race (mainly foreigners, I would say from what I’ve read) in the highly-race-conscious society of Singapore. A quote that grabbed me: And someone actually made me think about this the other day, and I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why I like dating expats is the fact that they help me escape. I’m getting out of here soon, but in the meanwhile I have to make …

Well, there it is, folks. Last night, the camp party was hilarious—I was the “Official Photographer” and mainly just snapped shots of kids posing with one another, their teachers, and their class TAs. But the highlight of the evening was a dance competition. Now, getting kids to dance was hard, so Myoung Jae—the host of the dance-off—did his best to be really hyper on stage, and sell the idea of dancing as fun and cool. Most of the kids were reluctant, so Myoung decided to show them that dancing could be a good time. The TAs were called onto the …

Tonight’s the last night of camp. It’s a good thing, too, because I am exhausted. I was late marking the kids’ last journal entries from Wednesday, so arrived late at the cafeteria to discover crap on the menu, and so I ended up walking down to the front for food, missing out on coffee, and lifting a few chairs only to discover that my little bit of back pain has been expanding to a lot of back pain. It hurts when I stand. It hurts when I sit. I’m going to try lying down for a little while and see …

Yesterday, I groggily made my way to the toilet in the depths of night. I heard a strange noise upon entering the hallway, but I didn’t know what it was. When I passed the fire-alarm, though, I figure it out. The noise was the ringing of the fire-alarm bell. I had no idea what might have caused it, but assumed it couldn’t be a real fire-alarm triggered by a real fire because I couldn’t hear the sound of the alarm in my room—it was that faint. Call me crazy, but I supposed that a real fire would trigger a loud, …

My friend Ritu’s on the way to being a mommy a second time… and the time is getting close! Very exciting! Ritu: 힘내! 힘내! I was poking around on her Livejournal page and found this interesting question: Where do you anchor yourself? In a place, a country or a person? The question is kind of funny to me, because my first reaction was to think about whether I do actually anchor myself into people, places, or things. Now, of course I do that, but for some reason I felt that the assumption I do so was a little, I don’t …