Flat Stanley in Korea

My little cousin's class read a book about a character named Flat Stanley who mailed himself all over the world. The students in her class participated by mailing their own copy of Flat Stanley to someone they knew, and she sent hers to me.

I took the paper doll to a few sights, and to my supervisor's Korean wedding.

Here's the short blog I wrote from Stanley's point of view: http://flatstanleyvisitskorea.blogspot.com (read from the bottom up).

Also, around the same time I mailed a box full of nonsense back to the US, which got great use at Renn Fayre and Burning Man. Some of my favorites were giant gloves shaped like bear paws that only had space for four fingers, a rectangular pillow with a cat face on it with a circular hole right in the middle, and this thing:

Site changes

I felt it was about time for a new picture montage on the top bar. Here's the old one for posterity:

Also, a reminder that if you can figure out at least five of the quotes from the Babel Fish quotation challenge and email them to me then I will send you weird socks/ties/t-shirts/whatever from Korea.

Update: Wow, that new photo set looks pretty damned narcissistic in retrospect. Oh well. I guess having a blog all about yourself is already narcissistic, I might as well be open about it.

Noncronological update

By request, here's a brief update on my life in the present before I dive into the my trip to Iceland and Britain. I'm now in Bundang, South Korea, which is South-Southeast of Seoul. It's on the subway system but pretty far out of town really. I've been absurdly busy with work; I usually spent twelve or thirteen hours there plus another hour's worth of grading that I take home. I doubt I'll have much time for extracurricular activities, which is a shame since continuing with Taekwondo was one of my motivations for coming back to Korea. I am enjoying the teaching for the most part, and I think I'm a much better teacher this time around, which is a good feeling. I've gone out on a few adventures and have a few more lined up, but I'll get to those when I catch up with my other travels. We now resume our regularly (ha) scheduled blogging.

Internets

I finally finally have internet in my apartment and so I should be catching up on telling you all about Canada, Iceland, Britain, and my return to Korea. Please hold me to this statement.

Babelfish Quotation Contest

As the first step in resurrecting this blog after my summer hiatus, I just spent some time removing a bunch of irrelevant comments written in Chinese. Most of them, according to the babelfish translations, were the sort of aphorisms that one finds in non-fortune fortune cookies, though I kept this one because of its sheer absurdity. In honor of such tortured translations I give you some quotations run through the babelfish grinder of disparate languages. Anyone who can identify a majority of the original passages will receive some weird Korean socks or t-shirt or something.

• Anger from Peleus' That they are seen; To sing; ? the son of Achilles? Corp

• ? , l' In the winter we are l' not quickly; York's this son completes brilliance summer; And tumbles our boezem house deep l' All clouds; Sea which buries. Will be that as it may our brow will be the compulsion with triumphal returns the type crown, our bruis? dwapens is the monument in the happy conference, our fearful above has hung, is severe we to change in the summit startled to the god measure. Grim-visaged war hath causes front which it corrugation smooth, with the present, but is not the bar corceles bed's restoration to the frightened fearful match soul, his they jump for joy nimbly in lady' ; Enchanting satisfied d' s room; la? d. But I that morning n' One forms for the acrobatics shows off also does not do seeks kijken-glas which is infatuated with; Difficult wish in the morning? I, with love' ; To support s grandly before the destructiveness takes a walk nimf; I makes a mistake reduces this honest part the characteristic to disguise the nature in the morning, in house torsional buckling, incomplete, delivers goods, in me in this world?? Breath, before the average summit it makes maigrement, and one? Lame and not fashionable that outer covering dog from j' It passed by they, as a result of I, in the little North America aborigine? Fights this? Time, vanishing, only if?? n' It has the delight, looks at the tree shade in? Under light and discant alone abnormal. And, because I am impossible? Maintains these honest day welsprekende France to minnaar, I must?? Clearly to determin? d and hatred larceny commodity these several day of genoegens is useless.

• J' Therefore you thought that there is I,

• All sciences in order to state the foundation for the future business of the philosopher now hardly the class structure of value must decide a problematic value, in order to create this forces.

• This was our paradoxes: Because each approach can approach constitute because it matches guide with guide, it was not possible to decide. Answering was as follows: If everything can constitute, in addition guide, as for matching that it is possible to constitute in order to deny. And with that kind of method as for that it does not give here and/or denies either agreement.

• This time as for me always war direction the mixed breed which wins is not that for thing country the fact that you remember is desired in order to die. That wins for the country that of extreme cube the relative direction which forms has another bad mixed breed. People, completely you dell' This substance which has the felt to; In order to speak; America to the war which remains because from war is not many letame here of the horse. The American loves traditionally in war. The American of all substances loves the fact that fight drives out. When being small at one, those entire [vosshkhiti those] l' The pointer of the marble highest at times many of player sulky master and the boxer of the range of the large alloy quickly. The conquest person dearly, there is no American, but the fact that it loses is not approved. The American plays in order always to win. As for them protest nell' It did not become; Give; l' Hell of for the sake of; There is a person who is gone. This, because in order the war which the American never is lost and to lose because never it has. Because the thought which many should lose in the American it is hated.

• That's why I say, I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax payers looking to bail out, but ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping tho— it's got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track, so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as— competitive— scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

• Because in way that is as this serious age?

• As love god punishes our feeling of the pride

Format change

In order to actually complete more entries and attempt to catch up a bit, I will be posting fewer pictures on this blog and instead linking to my flickr account. Loading pictures is a pain with blogger, and is my biggest obstacle to completing posts, so hopefully I'll be able to start updating more regularly.

Important Announcement

I decided to extend my contract to stay until Alanna finishes hers. We'll be done and heading back to North America at the end of May/beginning of June.

Update: This post is a lie.

Other blogs

Some of my friends here also blog, so in true Nietzschean spirit I will provide some additional perspectives. Jeff and Maddie, who work at the other ECC downtown, have been here since September and have a picture heavy blog (with real photography, not the half-assed pictures I put up). I actually found their blog before I came here and decided that my company was probably ok partly on the basis that they don't ever complain about it on their blog. Will writes a lot more about the teaching experience than I do, and he manages to make everything funny. He also has a great take on our coworkers. For example, he captures Lindsay's black humor with this quote:

While testing, I overhear this outburst from a fellow teacher, "I asked you guys to do one thing for me today! I said please please please don't make me hate my life for the next 40 minutes, and you are doing just that!"

Micrometablogging

This sums up my feelings about twitter.

(Hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

[Ironically, if not for the parentheticals, this blog post would be one of very few of my posts that would be short enough to fit on twitter. The title of this post would barely fit on flutter. I suppose it is some consolation for twitter users that twitter is not yet so far gone as to be beyond parody, the way youtube comments are (fun challenge: post a tongue in cheek comment on youtube that is obviously satirical, or even at all differentiable from posts made in earnest).]

He's typing in Korean

I finally figured out how to install a Korean font on my computer. Linux can be rather difficult for the uninitiated.

Now I can actually write my Korean name for you: 민준 (MinJun).

Actually, my keyboard is in English, so I can't really type in Korean effectively (much less sing in it).

We want Change!

Apologies for the format changes. The previous template was incredibly narrow, and I lack the skill and the patience to edit the html to make it all wider. I'm not totally happy with this one either, so I may end up changing it, but I promise to keep such nonsense to a minimum.

Update: I found a template I can tolerate, so I guess I'll stick with it. I hope none of you checked the site when I was trying out some of the worse options.

On politics

I've been making a lot of posts about politics recently, and I think I should offer some caveats. Mostly, I should say that if pressed I don't actually believe any of the political arguments I make. I don't believe in rights (I have no idea what the basis for rights would be), if I were to design a community it would be unspeakably intrusive and repressive by our standards, and I think democracy is a terrible idea because people are stupid. Yet I get upset by stolen elections and violations of 'human rights' and government intrusion and repression. Basically, I don't believe that there are any right or wrong answers to political questions (or any other questions, for that matter), just answers that are right or wrong in my community. Politically, I happen to be a part of the liberal community. I (grudgingly) attribute this to my upbringing in a moderately liberal household in an uber-conservative city rather than my superior reasoning skills. I like John Rawls not because his ideas are actually derived from pure reason but because my community values reason and so I like that he attempts such a reason-based justification (though of course that is impossible) and because his conclusions happen to largely coincide with the values that I was taught. When I am honest with myself (and I usually am to an unhealthy degree) I acknowledge that my political positions are based on emotion rather than reason, and are in fact at odds with my beliefs. However, I like politics and enjoy a good argument, even if I know the core premises of the entire debate are faulty (If it weren't for assumptions for the sake of argument I'd have no assumptions at all... and no beliefs). Therefore, I'm going to keep ranting about politics, but feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. Thankfully I didn't have this blog during the election...

Meta-meta-blogging

I'm amused but not surprised to see that I'm not the only Reedie who uses the label 'metablog' for posts pertaining to blogs. I'm a big fan of the prefix and concept meta-, at least when it is used in the epistemological sense of 'an X about X'. For example, the strongest section of my thesis was meta-ontology, i.e. an inventory of all the possible ways to inventory existence. Other fun metas are metalanguage (Tarski!), metafiction (David Foster Wallace!), metaphilosophy (Wittgenstein!), and metajoke:

A performative poet of Hibernia
Rhymed himself into a hernia
He became quite adept
At this practise, except
For the occasional non-sequitur.

~Tom Stoppard, Travesties

On the flip side of this, I hate it when people misuse the word ("that's so meta" which is probably intended to mean so postmodern; 'metaphysics' as 'beyond physics', a mistranslation that has soiled the word 'metaphysics' by making it synonymous with 'whatever mystical bullshit people make up'; etc). I am indifferent towards the prefix when it means simply 'after', as in the word 'metaphysics' as used in philosophy, which originated from a book by Aristotle which was so titled because it was the book that came after his book of physics, and has nothing to do with aliens or angels or auras or other laughable nonsense.

Computer

This is the first post from my shiny new computer (I would include a picture of said computer, but the only camera I have is built into its screen). It will take some getting used to to type on the tiny keyboard (the computer's largest dimension is 9"), but otherwise I'm happy with it.

In other news, I almost have my visa. I will spare you the rant on how much I hate bureaucracy and paperwork and the hoops I had to jump through in the application process.

Update: speaking of frustration, I can't get Korean characters to encode correctly on either my computer or my parents'. Grrr.

Plans

I just mailed my signed contract to a school in Daejeon,
South Korea. I will be teaching English to small children for at least a year. I will be leaving the States sometime in late December, and will start teaching on January 5th. Afterward, I will explore Asia until I run out of money. This latter portion of the trip will make this blog's title far more relevant, as I plan to travel in the manner that I did in Europe with my fellow European Hobos.

My trip strikes me as precisely the sort of situation where livejournals actually make sense, since a lot of people have asked me for frequent updates on my travels (and for confirmation that I am still alive despite my travels). However, I have rather negative associations and attitudes toward livejournal proper, so I will here--in addition to docuementing my journey--ramble on about US and international politics, philosophy, religion, science, and whatever random things that I think are awesome or otherwise worth talking about. I envision this blog as a mixture of essays and journal entries, though of course all of that is subject to what I end up doing once I actually leave.

I considered having this blog contain posts only be written by Reed College Philosophy Majors who graduated in 2007 and are teaching English in Korea (after all, there will hopefully be three of us). Upon further reflection, though, I want to be much more inclusive in who posts, largely because I am deeply homesick. During the last two months I have missed Portland and my Reedie friends far more than everything else I have ever missed at any point in my life combined. So please write to let me know what you are up to, what crazy thoughts you're having, what amazing art you are creating/experiencing, etc.