This week’s F5 comes from the diabolical, karate-warped mind of Acolyte Of the Way of the Open Hand, aka Marvin of Austin: What does it really mean to be a citizen of the world? How do you understand the concept, and who are the five people who best exemplify your understanding(s)? They can be living or dead, fictional or non-fictional. Oh my. Marvin’s really outdone himself this time: even he himself had trouble answering this question. Of course, the whole challenge to this is that first little question, which I would rephrase simply as, “What is a world citizen?” That …

The Friday Five for this week comes from the fingertips of the illustrious Adrienne: If time and money were infinite, what are the five things you’d love to learn how to do? Which of these do you think you’ll do anyway, no matter what the economic and temporal restraints are? It’s a tough question, because of course there are zillions of things I would like to learn. I hope I’m not cheating by the way I answer this. I’m going to assume a couple of things: that sets of things are acceptable, like languages categorized in one set, since I …

Laura‘s question this week was a good’un: If you could change five events—historical or personal—from the past, which ones and how? What outcome would you hope for? You know, I’ve posed this question to two very different groups of students during my years teaching here in Korea. The first group was an assortment of adult students whose English was of the highest level in our school, meaning that at least half the students had been abroad. Some of these students were considerably older than me. The second group was a pack of middle schoolers. Now, their answers may have been …

This week’s Friday Five is mine: The other day I had a talk I had with a co-worker, Shawn, at my workplace. I was talking about an experience at the swimming pool and how I realized, through that experience, that I was actually an adult; I mean, I felt it clearly at that time. It wasn’t the first time that I felt clearly the reality of my adulthood, though. Those kinds of moments come at funny moments, don’t they? My baby sister, who is engaged to be married this summer, commented that she wonders when she will feel grown-up. I …

This week’s Friday Five question was posed by Gina: So, going back to the original source material responsible for “The Friday Five,” Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, (and its source material, Desert Island Discs the show): What are your top 5 “desert island” discs? Wow, that’s such a tough question. It’s a funny one, because you know, this weekend I was listening to the soundtrack of High Fidelity. I’d just had a kind of experience that could have been in that movie/book, actually, well, sort of. A kind of weird, degrading, or at least sorta perplexing, experience with a woman, and …