the salient quality of teaching english at my hagwon is that it's sisyphean. students enroll and unenroll whenever they want to, determine their level according to how well they FEEL they speak, and often show up for 25% or fewer of the classes. so there's no way to approach things in a constructive, hierarchical way -- i can't teach anything ( Read more... )

has anybody tried not looking at a watch or clock for any extended period of time (like, i mean for days or weeks)? it would be impossible for me right now, but i'm fantasizing about a life of blissful unemployment. the thing is, i'm not sure i could live without knowing the time, even if i had no appointments to keep. how would i know when to ( Read more... )

this evening i came across an article on cnn, titled "mark cuban: youtube is for 'morons.'" mister cuban, it seems, is the billionaire co-founder of hdnet, a hi-def television network that would probably be generating all sorts of new-media hype (and ad revenue) but for the meteoric rise of the aforementioned website for dumb people. i'm not ( Read more... )

i'm 31 and i'm teaching english to office workers in korea.

this is not my beautiful house.

i've got my google homepage set up with a countdown timer that tells me exactly how much longer i have on this teaching contract (68 days, 9 hours, 38 minutes). i'm definitely running down the clock at this point. my head is so in the future that if my life were a videotape i'd just fast-forward through this part. i suppose that's sort of the ( Read more... )

holy god. i should never, ever reproduce.


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( auto-generated interests collage. cool. )

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the world has taken a turn for the bizarro of late, and i don't think i can get into much of it at the moment, for fear of jinxing myself in some way. i'll elaborate when it's safe to blab in public ( Read more... )

page eleven got some color. it's not really finished, but i'm going to ulleung-do for four days and i wanted to post something before i took off. ulleung-do, by the way, is an island about half-way between korea and japan. so if i stop posting, it means my boat sank.

( page 11 sample behind the cut. )