Obviously there's not a damn thing going on here...

...because I'm re-posting a link to one of my pictures up for consideration at JPG Magazine. So click on the picture and vote, if you're so inclined. And be feel free to check out the rest of my photos over there if you're so inclined.

(Image taken during my trip to the Khrapovitsky Estate, Muromtsevo, Russia)

SEGAPAWS

As you may already know, my mom has a LOT of cats. She's currently taking care of over twenty (seven of which live in my house in the Waycross ghetto), and she's working to get the strays in my neighborhood fixed so that they stop procreating. (It's not like my neighbors are going to do this, as they're apparently too busy dealing drugs and shooting at each other. Hooray for my ghetto fabulous neighborhood.) Anyway, I've created a website which provides information on the various things my mom has been up to. Please click here to check it out. Thanks! And if any of you in South Georgia or North Florida happen to be interested in adopting a cat, well, let me know!

Random Saturday Stuff

Today I went downtown for the sole purpose of purchasing a glittery green belt I talked myself out of buying last weekend. Between my house and the Yulha subway station is a fire hydrant to which an adorable and sweet (albeit quite stinky) little puppy is frequently chained. It is so friendly and just loves it when I pay attention to it. The dog belongs to the owner of the dry cleaner located behind the fire hydrant. I would seriously consider stealing this little guy if it weren't for Mia. And for the fact that as the only whitey in the neighborhood, it would be obvious who took it!

Isn't it adorable? At least it has food and water.


An underwear store downtown called Yes. The sign reads:Hey June!! Didn't you see my panty and brassiere?
Well... Is that yours? NO!
How about this one?
It's mine!! My underwear!!
Why don't go to yes? Yes? Yes!! Yes
Let's go to yes!!!!


Glittery green belty goodness.

In the ghetto....

An email from my mom this morning:

Another police report from [your street]. Someone on the 800 block heard someone outside, and demanded to know who was there. "the person outside then opened fire with a small caliber handgun."

I live on the 900 block.

Apparently this is what Canadians and Americans look like.

Another textbook image.

Where are the mythical makeup wearing men?

From the same text book that brought you pot plants,
I give you the makeup for men chapter.

"Mike likes to wear make-up. He is not trying to be a woman.
He just wants to look good"


Meanwhile, this article from the English language newspaper for kids,
the Junior Herald, is currently on display in the lobby of our school.

So seriously, where are these make-up wearing dudes? 'Cause I think that's rather hot, and I most certainly haven't seen any around these parts.

In other - completely unrelated - news, there's a middle-aged fellow who runs a fish-bread stand along my way to work. Fish bread sounds totally disgusting, I know, but I love this stuff. Trust me, there is NO FISH in it whatsoever. It's this yummy fried bread stuffed with a sweet black bean filling. So good. Anyway, the man who sells them is really nice, and always says hello to me on my way to work, and on my way home (on the days when he's still open that late). Anyway, today he gave me four of these yummy fishies for free. (You can't tell from the picture but they're pretty big.) This is why Korea is awesome.

Two songs I just can't get enough of right now.

I turned off the auto-start.
Just hit play if you want to listen.
Seriously. Hit play NOW.

McCain: Not Moderate Like You Were Led To Believe

(If you're having trouble viewing the video, click here.)

Additionally, check out Nick's post on Obama, Edwards, Hillary and McCain.

Happy New Year (redux)

Happy New Year everybody! No, I haven't slipped into some time warp; Happy LUNAR New Year. This holiday is called Seollal in Korean, and you can learn more about it here, if you're interested. Today marks the start of the Year of the Golden Pig. It's supposed to be a lucky year for marriage and procreation, if you're into that sort of thing. (More info here.) Anyhow, there's not much is going on here at all. Today has been warm(ish) and sunny, but I've done little more outdoors than take the dog for her walks. Pretty much everything is closed for the holiday, and nobody is around. Luckily I have the never ending antics of Mia and Songi to entertain me. I may do some hiking tomorrow if the decent weather holds.

Mia puts Songi in her place!

Test results and some pointless pet blogging

Results are in! Apparently there is NO ONE out there like me. Not that I needed a test in order to prove that or anything, but this has rather confirmed what I suspected. (What am I talking about? Scroll down and read the previous post!) Anyway, of the people who have taken the test so far, the highest scores belong to two people whom I don't actually know in real life: Amanda (website) who works where I worked last year and even sleeps in the same bed in Nina M's house where I slept in last year (and she didn't even get extra points for that!) and Catherine (website) who teaches English in Japan. Both Amanda and Catherine scored 82%. Of the people I know in real life, Misha and Caitlin have tied with the top score of 80%. My mom scored 79%. My best friends all scored in the 70s. Think you can score better? Go take the test!!

In other news, I have a three day weekend in honor of Seollal, the Lunar New Year. I'm not sure that I'm going to do much, as the weather is cold and wet - not exactly conducive to adventuring. I like my adventures dry, thank you. Or at least warm and wet. Gwen and Samson have gone up to Seoul to spend the holiday with Samson's mother and various small children who love to torment small dogs... and as such I'm pet-sitting Songi once again. (The idea being that torment by cat is preferable to torment by toddler.) Mia is definitely enjoying this:

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

How similar are we, really?

Don't laugh, please, but my most recent internet addiction is OkCupid. There are some absolutely insane people on there. As in people who make ME look normal. Anyway, one of the features of OkCupid is that you can make your own quizzes. I've made one to determine how similar others are to me. See, I'm not one of those opposite's attract types; whether for friendship or dating, I prefer people who are similar to me. So everybody, go take my test and let me know how similar you are to me. (I'm quite curious as to how my real life friends will score, actually.) Answer truthfully, based on what you think or feel, NOT by how you think I would answer. CLICK HERE (Don't forget to come back and tell me your score!) Don't take this too seriously - my best friends are all scoring in the 70s! :-)

This textbook was published in Korea.

One assumes they were going for potted plants.

Paradise Losing

In 1995, my best friend Melissa and I met up with her older sister Brenda for a month long jaunt around Costa Rica. (We were 15, 16 and 21, respectively.) It was an incredible trip, and it awakened in me an unquenchable lust for travel.

We visited the small port town of Quepos, from which we took a bus down a narrow, winding, dirt road to the nearby national park, Manuel Antonio. There was hardly a tourist in sight.

We visited the tiny village of La Fortuna, located at the base of the Arenal Volcano. We paid a local a small fee to guide us into the jungle where we could bask in the natural volcanic hot springs.

We rented a room in a family’s home in the even tinier village of Santa Elena. From Santa Elena, we walked up a long, deserted, dirt track to the Monte Verde Rainforest national park. Again, few tourists were to be seen.

In 2002, Melissa, Brenda and I returned to Costa Rica to find that things had changed drastically in seven years.

Quepos had become a booming tourist town, full of hostels and hotels, hip cafes, pricey restaurants and souvenir shops. The road connecting Quepos to Manuel Antonio had been paved, and its entire distance lined with resorts, hotels, condos and restaurants.

Likewise, La Fortuna had become a bustling tourist community. The volcanic hot springs of Arenal were no longer isolated swimming holes in the wilderness; instead, the naturally heated waters were pumped onto the grounds of impressively manicured hot spring resorts.

Santa Elena, too, was booming, full of a wide assortment of places to stay, eat, and entertain. The paved road leading up to the rainforest was lined with condos and resorts, going all the way up to the park’s gate.

While the interiors of the parks were indeed pristine reservoirs of nature (and while I must say that the hot spring resorts of Arenal were FABULOUS), I found the encroachment of the modern world distressing. Then, in one of the last legs of our trip, we journeyed south into the all-but-untouched Osa Peninsula. We arrived by bus at the nondescript village of Palmar Norte, from which we took a makeshift taxi (er, pickup driven by a local) to the tiny rural village of Sierpe. From there, we took a boat down th wild and undeveloped Rio Sierpe and out into the pristine Drake Bay.

Drake Bay was the ideal tropical paradise. Isolated. Untouched nature. Few locals and even fewer tourists. I only had my old 35mm Canon Powershot at the time, and as my originals are an ocean and a continent away, these small images I scanned in ages ago are all I have to share. But take a peek, and perhaps you’ll see why I consider Drake Bay to be one of my favorite places on the planet.

Drake Bay

Drake Bay as a storm approaches.
Shortly after taking this shot I was thoroughly drenched.


Left: Drake Bay at sunset
Center: Rio Sierpe
Right: Small waterfall and swimming hole in the wilderness

So why do I bring this up? Well, this morning I received a rather depressing email from Brenda and Melissa. A company called Arenas de Oro has purchased a huge chunk of the Drake Bay area wilderness (86 acres to be exact), and is carving it up into a planned beachfront community. Arenas de Oro is a branch of a real estate group called the Costa Rica Land Trust, which is supposedly “dedicated to environmentally conscious development of Costa Rica Real Estate that preserves wildlife and the scenic beauty of the landscape while helping people to enjoy their dream ocean view land investment.” It might be environmentally conscious development, but it’s still rampant development. Especially as CRLT seems to also own the greater portion of the land ranging from Dominical to Playa Uvita to the Sierpe basin to Drake.

Melissa, Brenda and I have been toying with the idea of a return to Drake Bay this fall. While I’m not entirely certain that spending a month in Costa Rica while unemployed is the best of plans, it now seems imperative that I go before it’s too late.

Barack Obama for President!

Ever since his speech during the 2004 Democratic Convention (when I found myself wishing that he, not Kerry, were the Democratic nominee) I have been hoping that Obama would run in 2008. I know who I'm voting for!

Not a damn thing going on here.

I went on a walk today,
and all I got was a shot of a sidewalk and a headache.

Purchase Prints!

These prints and more are now available for purchase!
Either click here or on the image above to see the photographs available.

Another JPG Magazine submission - Please Help!

I hope you guys aren't getting tired of this by now... but this is my latest submission to the JPG Magazine contest. The theme is Breakthrough: discovery, invention, progress, and revolution. Obviously, I'm going for the discovery aspect with this photo. If you think it fits the theme, please click on the image to vote. Remember, you must register with JPG Magazine for your vote to count, but it's free and easy. Thank you for your support!

New Glasses!!

I bought new glasses today, complete with a new prescription - and fabulously cheap. Why are glasses so freakin' expensive back home? My last pair (frames, lenses and consultation with an optometrist for new prescription) cost nearly $600. These cost $80 - framses, lenses, prescription and all. I am seriously going to buy a new pair of glasses every month for the rest of my stay here. Check them out!

What do you think?

The eyesockets of the glasses curve at the sides, and the lenses end before the curves begin. This is apparently some kind of new style - they had a wide selection of this kind of frames. I think they're pretty awesome, although they are a little weird!

I changed things up just a bit over at the main pad...

Click on the picture to check it out!

Four Substantially Less Controversial Book Reviews

My last book review was of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This post is going to be substantially less controversial. For Christmas, my Aunt Mary gave me a gift certificate to Amazon.com (thank you, thank you!) and I was able to purchase a nice little stack of books to keep me occupied for a while. Four of the books I purchased were mysteries from two different series which I enjoy.

The first two books are The Game and Locked Rooms by Laurie King. These books are the final two (at this point anyway) in King’s series featuring Mary Russell, the young wife of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve been a fan of everything Sherlock Holmes for as long as I can remember, and I absolutely adore successful adaptations of the tale. King’s Holmes is as similar to Doyle’s original creation as if he were penned by Doyle himself… and if Doyle’s Holmes were to marry a Jewish feminist less than half his age, he would surely have married none less than Mary Russell. The books are intelligent, well written, captivating, and quite addictive. I thoroughly enjoyed the final two as much as I enjoyed the previous six, and I very much hope that King will continue to produce this series. I highly recommend this series to anyone who loves a good mystery. I would also recommend starting at the beginning with the first book in the series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (which I actually read on my second trip to Korea back in 2004), and reading the series in order. While each book stands alone and does not require knowledge of the previous books to be enjoyed, I recommend reading them in order, if simply to witness the evolution of the relationship between Holmes and Russell.

Sometimes I stumble across literary characters whom I feel would become great friends, if only they could leave the confines of their books to mingle with one another. Two such characters, whom I feel would become the best of friends are Mary Russell and Fremont Jones from Dianne Day’s Fremont Jones series. The latter two books which I just finished, Emperor Norton’s Ghost and Death Train to Boston both feature the ever-awesome Fremont Jones. I first discovered Fremont last winter when I was home for the winter holidays and found a copy of The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, the first book in this series, in my mom’s house. I have now read five of the six books in this series. Fremont Jones resides in early twentieth century San Francisco (the great quake of 1906 occurs in the second book of the series). The final Mary Russell book brings Russell and Holmes to San Francisco, albeit approximately twenty years later than the setting of the Fremont Jones stories. However, having Russell in the domain of Fremont (so to speak), vastly increased my feeling that if only they were to meet, a great friendship would transpire. But alas, that’s not what happened. Instead, I was somewhat disappointed. While King’s books were solid, both of Day’s were quite the opposite.

Emperor Norton’s Ghost was actually well written and quite entertaining… all the way up to the final chapter, which wrapped everything up quite rapidly and rather weakly, and with what appeared to be a giant leap of intuition on the part of Fremont. To me, a good mystery story is littered with clues which can help a savvy reader to solve said mystery. The skill of a mystery writer lies in the peppering of the story with these clues without allowing the reader to determine whodunit before the denouement. (As a totally unrelated aside, my spell-check just automatically replaced whodunnit with whodunit. Hmmm. Spell-check now replaces nonexistent words with other nonexistent words.) The one clue discovered by Fremont which connects the victims to the killer is tenuous at best, and the denouement is, well, rather vague and hasty, quite a disappointment, given how great the rest of the book was.

Death Train to Boston was a disappointment for a variety of reasons. Let’s start with the name. Death Train to Boston? That’s just a horrible title. But in the interest of not judging a book by its cover (or its name) let’s delve a little deeper. The previous four Fremont Jones stories were mysteries, Death Train to Boston is also marketed as a mystery, but the thing is, it’s not. Granted, there is a mystery involved, but the mystery takes a minor second-stage to the main tale, which is more of an action/drama than anything else. The thing is, I quite enjoyed the little misadventure that Fremont got herself into, as well as the adventures that her partner (the Watson to her Holmes) Michael Kossoff and her friend Meiling Li have while searching for her… but those things would have made an awesome backdrop to a mystery. Instead, they all but supplant the weak little mystery which somewhat lurks in the background of the tale until the very end… when it rears its weak little head in order to be rapidly squashed by Fremont, Michael and Meiling. And to make matters worse, the villain turns out to be one of the bad guys from The Bohemian Murders, not even someone original. (This also meant that I had to dig out my copy of The Bohemian Murders in order to remind myself who this guy was...) I definitely felt let down. There’s still one more book in this series which I have not yet read, and I will read it at some point. I’ve grown quite attached to Fremont and Michael, and am quite interested in what happens next in their lives, although after reading these two, I’m not as excited about reading the final installment as I once was. I highly recommend the first two books in this series, The Strange Files of Fremont Jones and Fire and Fog. As to the rest, they’re enjoyable, but after the quality of the initial books in the series, you’re bound to be disappointed.

PS - Thank you again to my Aunt Mary, who made all of this possible. I still have one more book from my Christmas purchases to go - Buddhism for Beginners by Thubten Chodron. I'll let you guys know what I think once I've finished it. For now let's just say that reading a text on Buddhism hard on the heels of Atlas Shrugged is tough on the brain cells.

Pink/Green/etc

I decided to wear my new shirt today, which then inspired me to take some absurd photos in my living room.



Koreans have long torsos.
I'm wearing low-rise jeans,
the top of which is located roughly at that pink arrow...
and the shirt keeps going and going...

My new pajama pants :-)

We were discussing family trees in one of my classes the other day.
I asked the students to draw their family trees -
one took the word "draw" literally and made
chariacatures of all her family members. I love this one!

The Korean middle-school take on racism

In one of my middle school classes, we are currently working our way through a conversation book. We read a short (2-3 page, fairly large print) article on a topic and then discuss. We've only had the book a short time, but so far we've discussed habits, world population, the future and most recently, racism. The article we read essentially defined racism and then talked a good bit about why racism is bad. After reading the article, I began to ask my students some questions.

I started off with this one: What is racism? I was looking for an answer along the lines of what was presented in the article, which was that racism is when someone thinks his/her race is superior to other races. Well, the answer I got was a little different. My students were unanimous: Racism is when white and black people don't get along. But only white and black people. What about Asians? Can Asian people ever be racist? No. Racism is something that happens when white and black people don't get along. Period. Um, okay.

What about Hispanic people - can they be racist or experience racism? I was told that Hispanic people don't count; they're not important.

Is racism good or bad? Bad. Why? Because black people are sad and poor.

Are Korean people ever racist? No! Never!

Is there racism in Korea? Not now. There was racism back during the early part of the 20th century when the Japanese invaded Korea. The Japanese thought that they were superior to the Koreans, and beat them and made them work for the Japanese. Also, all Japanese are monkeys. All Japanese are monkeys? Isn't that racist? No. [As an aside, the sheer hatred my kids display towards the Japanese is unnerving. The other day we were learning adjectives for nationality in one of my classes of sixth graders. There was a picture of a Japanese woman. I caught one of my students drawing very graphic images of blood coming from various parts of her body. But only the Japanese woman - the people of other nationalities on the page were untouched. I asked him why and was told, "I don't like Japan"]

So, there are many white people in Korea. Why are there so few black people? (I know that this is because one must submit a photo with one's job application... this is so non-white/Asian people can be weeded out. Even Asians have a hard time getting jobs here.) Well, according to my kids, black people are too poor, that's why they're not here. I decided not to get into the photo thing.

Are you racist? No.

Do you think that Koreans are better than people from other countries? Yes.

One can't blame the kids for having these opinions; it's their parents and teachers who are propagating such views who are at fault.

TGIF: Thank Goodness It's February

I am quite relieved that January, and the hellish schedule that came along with it, is now over. Yesterday, January 31st, I awoke following six hours of sleep, threw on some clothes, tied a scarf around my unwashed hair, popped an excedrin (mainly for the headache I woke up to, but also because I was out of coffee and excedrin contains caffeine), and ran to work.

In contrast, I woke up today, February first, after twelve glorious hours of sleep. I puttered around on the internet for about an hour, waiting for my hot water to heat up. Then I took a shower, got dressed and had breakfast. Now I'm blogging. I plan to play with the cat and clean up my apartment in the remaining hour before I begin my leisurely amble to work. Hooray for the return to normalcy.