#100...What the...

*&^% is happening to me? I have been in Korea for eight months, and the amount of mental rupture and rebuilding that has happened in that short amount of time strikes me as somewhat unbelievable.
The things that I have held to be gospel seem to shift almost as rapidly as the weather. To be perfectly honest, perhaps nothing would make me happier than to know that I have managed to so attenuate myself to nature that my mind and body go through seasons that directly coincide with the seasons of the earth, but I know that’s not the case.
While I am no doctor (I might have to ask my doctor friend about it though), I think that what I am experiencing is a psychological un-rest the likes of which I have heretofore not been acquainted, and it’s all because I am trying to deal simultaneously with the past, the present, and the future—which, for me, is a lot to juggle. Generally, I live my life from day to day (on a budget of $35 a day) and deal with things when they come up; however, because my present situation is becoming tenuous due to the fact that my work contract is nearer to being finished than it is to its beginning, my mind naturally turns toward that almost impossible question: what next?
For me, tomorrow is today, and today is yesterday, and yesterday is tomorrow. Floating seems like an appropriate metaphor. I’m up above the clouds, floating through the atmosphere as a cloud and thinking about what’s underneath the cloud cover.
What is most peculiar is that I am comfortable here. It might be upheaval, but what I know from experience, and the reason I feel so calm during what I know is change, is that these are the fundamental moments of any particular life. These are the times that define who you are going to be. These are the transitional moments from who you were to who you are becoming.
Focus is changing, and I just noticed that there are so many –ing verbs here, and that makes me extremely happy, because any time you are –inging, it means that you are, right now, in motion.
You know what?
That’s it for now.
That’s all I wanted to say.
Well… that was all I wanted to say.
But, just as I was about to post this, I realized (saw) that this is my one-hundreth post, and that means something.
Okay, I’m not sure exactly what it means, but “something” seems reasonable.
I started this blog because I was unhappy and needed a place to vent. Then, it became a venue for me to work through all of things that don’t quite fit together in my head—one of the beauties of writing is that when you are engaged in it you are engaging one of the most fundamental aspects of humanity: the ability to create meaning. And what happens when you do this? Jigsaw puzzle pieces suddenly start fitting together.
Generally, I have no idea what I’m going to write about when I sit down, but I have found that when you just let the fingers do their thing and turn off the consciousness, the sub-conscious seems to spill itself all over the page, such that when I return to it I understand myself more fully.
At my current teaching position here in South Korea, I teach an essay class, and the most difficult part about the entire class is getting the kids to actually forget about content and simply do the writing. I have for a long time maintained that the only important thing about writing is that it’s done. It is done to a higher or lower degree of accuracy in some cases, but that only barely matters. The ability to use complex symbols on a field an almost distinctly human attribute, and the more involved we are with our humanity, the more we understand ourselves. Korea is a funny place because people here don’t really want to understand themselves. Rather, to be more specific, they are taught that it doesn’t really matter to understand their selves because everybody is essentially the same. Now, Korea is one of the most homogenous cultures on the planet, and it is certainly interesting to see a society functioning based on the fact that everybody is pretty much the same and it is only our age and our title that distinguishes us, but it doesn’t jive very well with my western conception of the individual.
Apparently, there was no Enlightenment in Korea.
I can’t decide if there is a better. Koreans don’t care, AND it doesn’t matter to them because they have been raised to not care. So, Koreans walk around being super-Korean, and it’s easy to predict what everybody’s going to do.
(In an interesting side note, this has an adverse affect on their ability to learn English because when you are attempting to learn English, you necessarily have to get involved in the culture—language is not a tool, it’s something that we exist, something that we are, something that defines us. They can learn vocabulary and use the vocabulary, but it isn’t until they begin to understand the culture of individualism that they can truly grasp the language.)
On the other hand, western people are so unpredictable, that you have millions of people walking around doing whatever the hell they want, and it sometimes goes way too far. All one has to do is look around the public school systems in America right now to see what too much individualism will cost you, and in my humble opinion the price is dear.
So here I am, writing blog number 100 about God-Knows-What and I’m staring at my books that will have to find their way back to the USA soon and I’m drinking coffee that hasn’t been prepared from an instant coffee-creamer-sugar mix and I’m wondering whether or not I will be able to learn the skill of hunting when I get back to the states and I’m dreaming of the home that my friends and I plan on having together with the crops we plan to grow and I’m thinking about whether or not justice is a natural or artificial virtue then coming to the conclusion that it seems more artificial than natural to me and I’m thinking that it’s no wonder Ernesto Guevara turned out the way he did after seeing the things he saw and meeting the people he met and I’m trying to figure out what kind of songs I should put together for the show next week—new songs, old songs, some kind of mixture…--and I’m thinking about the worthless, cheating girlfriend I had when I first came to Korea and I’m thinking about the incredible, worthwhile girlfriend I have now who will have to be given up—not something either of us are looking forward to—and I’m thinking about a double digit number that seems kind of incredible given that it was three or four for so long and I’m thinking about the fact that one of my classes is finishing their book today which means I will buy them pizza and I’m thinking about how to make the future tense in Han-gul and I’m thinking that earlier this morning I conducted an entire banking transaction entirely in Korean and I’m thinking that becoming a writer is probably the best idea I have every had and I’m thinking about the weekend and I’m thinking about the sound of my air conditioner and I’m thinking about thinking and I’m thinking about you.