Drive-By Update

Life is so utterly hectic that I’ve barely had time to relax, let alone write any of the posts I was planning to this week. However, I’ve now really gotten into the swing of this office hours thing. (Of course, so are my students — I had two visitors last week and appointments with two more this week — so we’ll see how far I get with getting anything else done here.) I was joking with the secretaries this afternoon that having office hours like this is a bit like prison: gotta do the time, after all, and all that’s …

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I’m in a Meeting

I didn’t write that last post at 9:00am today, but rather last night. Scheduling posts to be published at a later date is cool. Neat, and it’s new to me — I couldn’t do cron jobs before in WordPress on my webhost’s space. I love it! And yes, by the time this gets published, I’ll really be in some kind of orientation meeting. I don’t know whether any of it is going to be in English, or how much point there is to me being there. (Most of the other new profs are bound to be Korean, and those who …

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Miss Yum and Mr. Bum Suck

Okay, okay, I know, it’s a cheap joke, and one all too common on cynical expat blogs. But please, wait, wait, hear me out! Sometimes you really do end up with students in your class, or friends you meet in other ways, who have these names that are just, well… they’re things you can’t help but grin at, because you’re an Anglophone and because people should just not be named that sort of thing. Like Miss Yum. Okay, really, it was Miss Yeom, but it was pronounced yum, as in, what people say when they see food they want to …

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No Tokyo For You! (Er, Meaning Me…)

A couple of factors combined to make the potential trip to Tokyo that I mentioned here unworkable. (Not the least, a great deal of uncertainty until, well, this morning about whether I’d need this or that or the other thing to get the code number I’m supposed to get in order to do my visa run.) Now I have stuff going on this week, stuff to get done, people to see and places to be — heh, even an orientation tomorrow, which will probably be several hours of incomprehensibility to whatever foreign profs actually make it there — so the …

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Back to the Nose to the Grindstone

I’m finally back on the wagon in terms of writing: I put in 1000 words on “Moe Yuki Ona,” my J-fetishizing-expat-in-Japan horror story, and I spend an couple of hours slowly working my way through “A Killing in Burma,” a project I left by the wayside a while back to focus on other things, but which I want to get out of the way before I start anything new. If you search the latter title in my blog, you’ll see babblings about it going quite far back, and since I like the vaguely cartoon-like quality of the characters and story, …

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