Ben and Elana's Wedding

          I have trouble thinking of my time in the US as travel blog-worthy because I have trouble thinking of it as travel. Which is silly.

          Anyway, After my second year in Korea, I returned for Ben and Elana's amazing wedding at Newt's Hollow, outside of Berkeley.

Photos by Stacia Torborg. See more of her photography (or hire her to photograph your event) here.

          While I was in Korea, Ben and I had a lovely Skype conversation brainstorming different projects that could help make the event more colorful and awesome. I ended up making a Rube Goldberg machine, painted in the same exact colors that their set designer friends were using for the table cloths and other decorations. I had a whole week while staying at Gabe's parents' house to go collect random objects, paint them, and draw out plans of how they could fit together to be a chain of causation. It took frantic work in the final hours before the wedding to get all the pieces to the park and hammer everything out into place around a tree and platform, but eventually a golf ball rolled down a tinker toy ramp to hit a block glued to a Lazy Susan, and a stegosaurus glued to the other side of the spinning platform hit its tail against a candlestick, causing it to roll down another tinker toy ramp and in the process hitting a tinker toy arm that spun out to hit Dan's posterior, signaling him to slam a video game controller guitar onto the button of an umbrella, which triggered it to open and knock down a mannequin torso so that it fell onto a safety net of crisscrossed blue yarn strung between two bright pink skis, and since the mannequin was tied to a racquet whose handle was stuck into a kick board flotation device on a pivot, the racquet and kick board spun to knock two bouncy balls off of colorful or animal shaped baskets. Then Dan, Judith, Ian, Caitlin, Eric, and I tossed the bouncy balls to each other with strange devices such as butterfly nets, tubular laundry hampers shaped like monkeys or flowers, and inflatable infants’ swimming pools shaped like a crab or a fish. The balls were dropped into baskets, which raised the veils of the small portable tents where Ben and Elana had been waiting. The couple then walked down separate paths into a labyrinth – also of my design and set up – that was made by having the guests stand on strings and hold hands to form the walls. The labyrinth was shaped as a crescent moon and had two entrances, one for the bride and one for the groom. The entrances were flanked by the people who knew them first, their parents and other family, and they continued down the maze through other people they had known before they met each other, and came together in the center among college friends who knew them as a couple and continued together down a wider aisle of their Berkeley theatre friends and others who had met them as a unit.

          That was most of my contribution, but the wedding continued to be awesome and whimsical. Four friends at the end of the labyrinth carried flags and flanked the couple as they walked to the minister. The four flag bearers and the minister had memorized a back and forth script in which the minister asked why they brought the couple forward, with super-specific and adorable responses, such as that in a house of twelve people they found themselves alone together, that they both considered rice and beans to be a complete meal, that in their fairy tales there are no knights or princesses — only each other, and because they asked to be brought. The minister then asked Ben and Elana who would support the new family they intended to create, since they were melding their last names into a new family name. They first called upon their parents. The five parents — including Ben’s step mother — had each brought a length of rope that was symbolic of their family history, ranging from a tie with shamrocks to represent Ben’s Dad’s Irish and academic background to Elana’s Dad’s simple but dependable silk rope and fishing line, to a strip of quilt being made for the new couple to Ben’s Mom’s string of traditional Mexican decorations. The parents tied the ropes together — and symbolically tied themselves to the McKelahan family — until the rope formed a ring around the couple and was laid at their feet. The parents vowed to accept both Ben and Elana and any offspring they may have as blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh. Ben and Elana then called upon their extended families, and the minister had them make a similar vow of acceptance and support, and place their hands on the couple or the parents. Next Ben and Elana called upon their friends, and the minister asked us to give our support and bring joy to the new couple. Once we placed our hands on the families, Ben and Elana called upon All that Is, Was, or Will Be — an excellent compromise on the god issue since Ben was becoming a minister and Elana is an athiest, yet they have similar beliefs with different terminology — and the minister asked for the blessing of all of existence for the couple. Ben and Elana then exchanged wonderfully specific vows, such as promising to use silly voices together, as well as some more serious but still specific vows about loving and supporting each other. It was adorable.

Photos by Stacia Torborg

Ben’s dad and other members of the families played some live Irish music as the guests went about to make art. Various stations had been set up around the park of Newt’s Hallow. In one, people smashed marital expectations by filling up ceramic houses or babies with confetti then rolled a bowling ball down to explode them onto sticky paper that captured some of the color. Lengths of tube were decorated and connected with colorful duct tape to make hula hoops. Picture frames hung between trees placed near a pile of costumes so that guests could dress up, take a Polaroid, then hang the picture on a clothesline to develop and display. A type-writer was set up for messages to the bride and groom. Guests glued cloth pictures onto a quilt to be sewn into place later. A book of memories asked guests to share a favorite memory of Ben and Elana and draw a picture.

Two plays were presented — one in which Dan and Jessamyn acted out a clever dialog written by some relative of Ben and Elana’s for the occasion between Socrates and his wife Xanthippe. The dialog was actually quite good from both a philosophical and humorous perspective on the merits of marriage in general and Ben and Elana’s in particular, and Dan and Jessamyn had the best reading of it due to their acting abilities and chemistry. The other play was also a staged reading, but this time by the children — presumably written by their parents — in which the newts of Newt Hallow complain about not being invited to their wedding and plan Midsummer’s Night Dream like plots of magic to repay the humans, but are reconciled with Ben and Elana who apologize and give a formal invitation.

The food served consisted of two dishes — one representing Ben and one Elana — and their combination, along with numerous other tasty treats. A band with at least one member that was friends with the couple played quirky and intelligently humorous songs, and then a cover of Still Alive, the song from the end of the video game Portal, which meant that Ben, Gabe, Aaron, and I were super enthusiastic about it. We began to clean up as the sun went down. Eventually everything was loaded up into the u-haul rental truck. Several of us had volunteered to unload the truck at Ben and Elana’s apartment and at the church before returning to the out of town locale to camp for the night. I asked Ben who was going to drive the truck, at which point he sheepishly said, “So, about that…” Earlier in the week I had agreed to be Ben’s concierge — in the Godfather sense of the word. I would help him with anything he needed to happen to make the wedding go off as planned and take care of any problems, from helping him shop for wedding attire to helping set up. Thus I agreed to drive the damned u-haul back to Berkeley, despite not having planned to do so, since the couple and their families were taking off for honeymoon or home. I hadn’t driven in more than a year since I didn’t have an international license in Korea, but I only got lost once. I was happy to do it, yet Ben and Elana surprised me with an amazing gift of a fairy tale they wrote about us -- entitled The Knight of Truth -- dedicated to me for my "chivalrous service in the creation of the McKelahan family." It is seriously one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. 

Teaching at Poly and a Flood

In the "I forgot to post this in the correct temporal order" file, here's some pictures from work.

In Korea, every major city has a river that runs through it, and those rivers flood fairly regularly. The areas around the rivers are built into parks and bike paths, which aren't as easily damaged by water and which can be more easily reconstructed. After a rainy week, it was fun to look out the window of the classrooms and watch the water rise. The pool across the river was particularly interesting, since we could see the brown torrent spill over into the pool's clear water and see the swirling progress of the sediment filled water.

I don't talk about the teaching enough on this blog because to me it was the backdrop to the awesome adventures I'd have on weekends and breaks. The work day was grueling, but rewarding. I taught ten or eleven classes every day, for a total of ten and half hours of work each weekday at minimum, plus planning for classes and doing grading, so often more like twelve hours. I was pretty fairly compensated for that work at Poly, and the excellent curriculum and brilliant students made the job meaningful. I remember being asked why I worked so hard, coming in early and staying late, and responding that doing the minimum amount of effort at that job required ten and half hours of work, and if I was only doing the minimum that meant I wasn't valuing it, so I was wasting ten and a half hours a day and would go home feeling drained, or at best relieved. On the other hand, if I decided that what I was doing was important and put in the extra effort then I was doing something valuable for twelve hours a day and went home feeling satisfied. I really miss teaching at that level, especially to my kindergarteners where I was teaching concepts outside of English, such as science, and to my most advanced students who I taught textual analysis as well as debate classes where they considered the pros and cons of issues as complex as whether or not South Korea should continue food aid to North Korea. 

Okay, enough introspection. Here are some kindergarten students being cute at birthday parties and art class:

Haeinsa Labyrinth

I forgot to write up one last trip I took in Korea: I returned to Haeinsa Temple, one of Korea's most important historical sites. It is most famous as the home of the The Tripitaka Koreana, a Buddhist cannon that Koreans claim to be the first book in the world to be printed with movable type. Since it is printed in Chinese characters, I can see why the technology didn't spread from there and only became popular once it was reinvented in a country that uses an alphabet. I discussed the Tripitaka Koreana more took lots of pictures on my first visit, back in 2009. 

This return trip was at the invitation of Kyungrae, the man who we met at Bongamsa Temple on Buddha's Birthday, and who became our unofficial guide as well as our generous ride. Barbara and I took him up on his offer to show us around Daegu and to go visit Haeinsa together. 

My first visit was by bus, so I unknowingly passed right by a pavilion that was famed as a monk philosopher's favorite meditation grounds. The river there really was quite peaceful.

I once again noticed the chimney made entirely of roof tiles. 

It seems that the labyrinth was set up year round and not just for the special event that I witnessed on my previous visit. 

I do always admire the ornate and effective joinery of Korean temples. 

Some of the imagery in the paintings on the outside of temple walls were fascinating, such as the tree growing from this giant fish:

Some was horrifically gruesome, such as the praying man wearing necklaces made of fingers. 

Kyungrae was able to provide a lot more background of Buddhist stories and iconography, but writing three years later I can't remember any of the specifics.

Metamorphosis

You may have noticed that in my Japan pictures I had a lot less hair than usual. 

Here's what I looked like the week before:

I spend a lot of time thinking about alternate possible cultures and beliefs as part of fantasy writing and game creation. One idea I had was a culture where people think their senses are sacred, and so shave lines into their hair along the lines of their sense organs, so as not to obscure those divine pathways. I was never going to have a better chance to see what that would actually look like, and the results were... 

pretty goofy looking.

This picture is like a glimpse into an alternate universe where someone with my genetics grew up deep in meth lab territory:

Curiosity sated, I went for the Ra's Al Ghul look:

Finally, I shaved my face and head to the skin for the first time. I'd been curious as to what it would be like for some time, but in the US or Europe I'd look like a neoNazi. In East Asia, at worst I'd be mistaken for a Buddhist monk. 

It's hard not to nick oneself when shaving where one can't see. Also, my head seems to be a bit lumpy. Oh well. It didn't hurt, and the sensation of shirts going across it as I put them on was interestingly strange. 

I lowered my voice an octave and told my students that my name was Mr. Jay. Some of my students were taken in completely, and others were creepily observant, noticing that I had the same watch or same laugh. Yes, I enjoy messing with my students. At heart I'm Calvin's dad.

The fuzz came back by the end of my week in Japan. I only had one more week in Korea before jetting off to the Bay Area for Ben and Elana's beautiful whimsical wedding. 

As long as I'm at it, here's the previous time I radically altered my appearance for fun, back in 2006:

Some of the stages of the process were hideous:

I fully expected to have to buzz my head after cutting my own hair for the first time, but it somehow turned out just fine. I've been cutting my own hair ever since. 

This was the first time I was clean-shaven or had short hair while I was at Reed. Even most of my own dorm mates didn't recognize me, and I was their House Adviser. What was even weirder was the people who did know who I was and I didn't know them. "Wow, Landon I almost didn't recognize you." Thanks person who didn't change your appearance and yet I have no idea who you are...

I think I annoyed some professors by not introducing myself in classes. I timed the haircut to fit with our discussion of identity over time in Metaphysics, and all of my professors were weirded out by the fact that this stranger clearly had done the reading and was familiar with earlier coursework. The best reaction I got was from a professor I intentionally messed with. I picked up a prospective student folder and sat in on his freshman Humanities 110 conference classes. He did an amazing double take when I walked into his three hour long senior level philosophy class the following evening. 

Professor: "You're... you're that prospie."

Me: "Yes."

Professor: "You're not really a prospie, are you?"

Me: "Nope."

Professor: "Are you auditing this class?"

Me: "No, Eddie, I'm in this class."

Professor: (after two minutes of befuddled staring) "HOLY SHIT, oh my god, holy shit!"

Japan Day 7, Part 6: The Stone Lanterns of Kasuga Taisha Shrine

I had a pleasant, though hot, walk across the Eastern side of Nara park.

In the Southeastern part stood a Shinto shrine. The area around it is filled with stone or cement lanterns, covered in moss and surrounded by large trees.

The hall of Kasuga Taisha was founded in the 700s replaced every twenty years in accordance with Shinto traditions, though the current building is about 100 years old. As I had come to expect with a Shinto shrine, it is very orange. 

It would be amazing to visit during one of the lantern festivals to see them all lit, but I enjoyed the lanterns even during the daylight. 

A fountain paid tribute to the deer residents. 

The bamboo base must be more modern than most of the lanterns, but I liked it nonetheless.

I then visited the Nara National Museum. My favorite part was the Buddha hall, filled with statues of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and guardian spirits carved from stone, wood, or clay.

I had a little time left before my bus to Osaka. I meant to spend my last 1370 Yen on a Japanese meal, but I ended up ordering ice cream with fruit instead. A cherry, orange slices, pineapple, and whipped cream sat above chocolate, vanilla, and berry ice cream (which I was pleasantly surprised to find to be actual ice cream instead of the soft serve that I'd come to expect in lactose intolerant East Asia), layered above peach, pineapple, mandarin orange slices mixed with cornflakes. I have no regrets.

I bumped into the poetry guy again in front of the pagoda on my way to the park. I was even less impressed this time as we went on about god and humility. Beyond the fact that he was obviously not humble himself, he had no response when I asked why being humble was at all valuable. 

In the park, I sat and wrote in my journal, which is good because otherwise there's no way I'd remember half of these details three years later. The deer kept me company as I wrote.

I was early to the airport bus and the airport. I wrote a little before boarding the plane. 

The airline was obviously operated by Koreans because the map of the route prominently labeled "Dokdo" island and "The East Sea". Japan would have labeled Dokdo their name for it since they (on flimsy pretext) claim the island themselves, and everyone in the world besides Korea calls the body of water separating the two countries "The Sea of Japan." The pilot spoke Korean, English, and Japanese with a distinct French accent. I returned for one final week in Korea before heading home.