Today we learned that...

F is not for Apple.

Ms. Blake Planet

There people is eating a planet!

There's planet is the chocolate.

There is living many alien.

and air is jelly. 
so alien can eat.

there is the space jellyfish.

(Jason)

Today was ...

... not what I would call a successful day of teaching.

Starting with not being properly amused by the individual antics of my preschoolers.
Followed by a 5 year-old with a nosebleed.
Then a kid asking about my new necklace:  "So, if I pull too hard, it will break?"
"Yes, it will break."
And ... YANK.
And then, what exactly?  The grumpiness that resulted from all of this led eventually to treating my last class with utter disdain, in response to their volume level and general rowdiness, eventually ending the school day with a kid I've had for 10 months telling me, "I think bad teacher."
"I've had you every day for 10 months.  I'm a bad teacher every day or just today?"
"Just today."
"Well, I think maybe you were a bad student today, too."

Not really a day to be proud of.

But then I skipped the report cards, ate dinner, watched some mindless TV, and then saw a friend's band play in a venue so tiny most of the patrons stood on the sidewalk to watch.  Later, I went with two lovely friends and their dog to a favorite bar to eat dokbokki and we got sucked into watching "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" with the sound turned down, and suddenly life felt a lot more manageable. 

Thankfully, tomorrow is a new day.

changechangechange

Woah!

Watch out!

New layout!

I just couldn't resist this picture ... so, here we are.  The first major template/layout change since 2005.  I can tell the text will be a little bit more difficult to read, but several of the handful of you that read this are reading it via RSS feed anyway, so ... I'm going to give it a try.  At least for a little while.

b

p.s.  While I do have an awesome air-conditioner in my apartment, I also added a new fan that I bought yesterday, and it's blowing on me right now, and it's AWESOME.

p.p.s. Tomorrow I'm going to try to get report cards done, and after that, I'm going to see about writing to you, dearest Internet.  Are you ready?

strange beauty

This needs no ado, I believe.

a wide world

It's just after midnight on a Thursday night/Friday morning.  I'm wearing a face mask, drinking a glass of wine, paying bills, and trying to donate money to a few good causes in America while I sit in my apartment in Seoul, South Korea. 

Think about how all of that is possible.

I tried to call the Manhattan Arts Center to donate to MXTW, but the connection was bad, so I'm on hold with the Market to talk to my mom to see if she can do it for me... MAC, get online donation set up STAT.  And while you're at it, get somebody to redesign your website, because it's ugly and it's been ugly for about a decade.  I'm telling you the truth because I love you.

So, here's a list of things for tonight:

1.  I just paid off half of the remaining balance of my credit card.  Next month it will be done.  YEAH.
2.  I'm going to have my student loan paid off in a couple of months, at the outside.
3.  I've finally paid all of my official personal debt.  (Eric and Ben, thanks for waiting almost 2 years for that money.)
4.  I wish I'd have gone to bed 2 hours ago, at least.
5.  The parents of my pre-school class have decided that tomorrow they will buy all of the preschoolers and their teachers pizza for lunch.  PRESCHOOL PIZZA PARTY. 
6.  If you're able, help MXTW get to the Minnesota Fringe Festival.  Send them some money, even just a few bucks.  If you can, go SEE them, in Manhattan, and/or at the Minnesota Fringe Festival.  They full of so much discipline and energy and creativity. 
7.  I can hear someone dribbling a basketball 13 stories below.
8.  Saturday is Teacher's Day, and a kid gave me some EXTRA SPARKLY FUCHSIA LIPGLOSS as a gift.  Wicked.
9.  I finally took pictures of my tots.  So, watch out.
10.  Love from Putnam County:

The 25th Annual...

...Putnam County Spelling Bee.

1.  Where do these musicals keep coming from?  NOT something I would have foreseen.

2.  My song is too low for me.

Because it's written for a man.

But that doesn't mean I ain't gonna try.

3.  I keep falling down at rehearsal.  Daily.  In all sorts of situations.  It's extremely embarrassing.



It's finally SPRING!  There are flowers blooming EVERYWHERE!  The beginning of last week had me in the pit of despair, but I'm feeling a little bit better now, seeing poppies and bougainvillea and beautiful red and yellow bushes everywhere.  Going to rehearsal with highly entertaining folks doesn't hurt, either.  Gonna try to keep in on the upswing for awhile.

Love from the land of yellow dust,
b

Go Go Gadget...

...iPod!

I bought an iPod Touch.

And guess what?

IT IS AWESOME.

(Thanks again to Chris for convincing his mom to give me the iPod mini that came with his iBook in 2005. It lasted nearly 5 years, and only recently did it start to only work for about a half an hour at a time. I learned to truly appreciate having a soundtrack to my life.)

Movin' and Groovin,'
bebe

delay

I have been busy rearranging my life.

Here are some highlights:

1. A new school year has begun. New students! New schedule!

2. I have started to teach pre-school in addition to elementary kids. Tiring, challenging, ADORABLE.

3. I have moved into a new apartment. IT IS AWESOME. There's a shower. There's a private washing machine. There's a full-sized refrigerator. Storage space. Big windows. 5-minute walk to work. Key-less entry. Several lights that aren't gross florescents. One table for working, another for eating. Enough counter space that I can cut potatoes without an unbelievable balancing act. SCORE.

I just bought new bedding and a new small set of dishes. I've put some things up on the walls, and have begun searching for more. I bought two houseplants, one of which seems to be thriving.

Yesterday, after eating a homemade brunch of grapefruit, strawberries, eggs, potatoes, toast and coffee, I lounged on my bed for a moment, and just thought awhile about how happy I felt. How this abode feels more like home in 2 weeks than my last apartment ever did. How much happier I've gotten in the last few months.

Now that I'm settling into my new digs, and have the internet once more, I'll be back to writing. Please send me needling messages if I lag too far behind.

Love from Seoul,
b

with a bullet

I had a dream last night that I was shot in the chest. I spent the rest of the dream-evening trying to get myself to an emergency room, but first had to deal with, I believe, some very serious party planning. I woke up before reaching a hospital, seeing the party come to fruition, or bleeding out.

list of desirable attributes

great sense of humor

ability to make lists

delight in idiosyncrasy

likes to make breakfast in bed. coffee drinker. fiction reader.

understands the sexiness of the Golden Ratio

(making breakfast in bed is HARD! I think you ought to relent on that one. Maybe making it in the kitchen and eating it in bed...?)

(good call. thus amended.)

easy to finish, good pay, few complications

pro-repetition, pro-abstraction

goes to bed without fuss, puts the lid down

lanterns. shadows. dancing.

action, reaction, and full stillness, still fullness

yes make-believe, no pretending

plays well with others

smooth, soft, strong, resilient, easily repaired

stimulating, cost-effective

fascinated

cheap, well-worn

ace at cleaning up spilled milk and spilled marbles

(thank you to Lacey and Charles)

all the food, drink, and indie rock you could ask for

Hongdae is the Bedford of Seoul. (This will only make sense to about 0.05% of you.) Plus it smells like Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire on the street where my favorite bar is located.

On Writing, Part 1

I was having a discussion with some friends the other day about online presence. They were telling me that after a bit of a snafu involving a picture taken out of context and some public parental admonishing, they have begun to carefully monitor what they write and post, on Facebook and blogs, personally and for their mixed media Arts company.

I can understand having a professional face, especially when presenting oneself as a public figure. However, their cleaning up of the rough edges seems not to be for their professional lives so much as for the comfort of their parents. They told me that it has gone far enough that they feel like their online presence totally misrepresents them as people.

I think I just find it frustrating that people I know to be intelligent, creative, and extremely charitable should have to put up such a screen. They have no intention of running for office, they don't have jobs they're going to get fired from for writing about them online, nor do they have things to say that extremely inflammatory in any way.

On my end of the conversation, I talked with them about a chat I had with my parents about this. Over the years, I have learned to be more and more forthcoming with my parents, as they have been with me. Any secrets I may have ever kept were always due to embarrassment rather that they might be disappointed in me as a human being. I know that this makes me one of a lucky few.

So, when my dad first asked for my blog address, sometime when I was living in New York, I gladly gave it to him. He then asked if it made me uncomfortable for him to read it, if I thought it might change the way that I wrote or what I wrote about. I decided that if he didn't feel uncomfortable, then I would just go about my business and he could read all he wanted. (This, I believe, was around the time I wrote a post about throwing up on the subway. We all have moments to be proud of, and ones that we hope other people will learn from or at least laugh at. I think my father, knowing some of his stories, probably got a good laugh from that one.)

Now, this subject came up again recently, as I've moved to the far end of the world and more people have been invited to read. I'm not really dealing with a huge readership, nor do I feel professionally in jeopardy at any time; I don't have my real name connected to the blog in an obvious way, so you'd have to take at least 2 whole minutes to figure out who I was if you didn't already know ... also, while I may find reason to complain about this and that, I don't feel that I complain enough about my employment to get anyone in a twist.

(Being confident and cavalier in this respect may come back to bite me at any time. I am aware of this.)

Anyway, it came up again because of two new groups of readers: 1. A friend's parents, whom I adore and get on with very well, but who don't really know me as an artist or outside the context of their home, where I tend to be less irreverent than in other parts of my life or in my writing. They are reading, I think, mostly to find out about my adventures abroad. Also, as supplementary material to their own child's information. 2. My Grandma. Hi, Grandma!

I was talking with my parents when my mom told me that one of my cousins had showed Grandma how to get to my blog so that she could read it while I'm away. It's pretty cool that my Grandma is that technologically savvy - she's been using computers about a decade longer than my mom. However, when my mom told me that, I got a little nervous. Grandma is a cool lady (you are, Grandma!), but should I tone it down a notch to save her some sweat?

My parent's immediate reaction was to make me PROMISE that I wouldn't let this development effect the tone or style of my writing AT ALL. They basically insisted that I keep writing about whatever is on my mind. The song stuck in my head, my broken heart, my trip to Timbuktu, or a post about being naked with a bunch of Koreans followed directly by a post about my boobs. With whatever colorful language I feel is necessary. And more often, if possible.

I don't know that I have any real conclusion to this line of thought, but that I'm feeling thankful to be supported in that way by the people closest to me. Especially knowing that not everyone is so lucky. Occasionally I pick up a new reader, but I'm hardly in a place where I'm collecting a readership of people who don't already know me. For those who know me well, surely you can hear my voice in the way that I write here, surely you can see me grin or burst into tears. I feel like one of the skills I continue to cultivate as a writer is to balance eloquence with rhythm in a way that marries the way I think with the way that I speak with the way that I write. For those that don't know me well, I feel as though you really might begin to see the complexities in my character that you might miss if we only interact quietly, personally, reverently.

I am a respectful person, but I seek to combine the reverent and the irreverent, a classy elegance with a youthful abandon, loquaciousness with succinctness, for as long as I can put one foot in front of the other, one word after another. I don't ever want to be just one thing, and I don't ever just want to be who you think I am, who you think I should be. (This is important for me to state and restate, as it can sometimes be lost. I lost it for awhile recently, but luckily I'd just misplaced it.)

Thank you and thank you and thank you.

Your this! They wiggle!

Today I went to see several teachers teaching some wee little ones, in order to prepare for the possibility of a pre-school teaching gig at my campus come March. We got to know a little bit about the curriculum, which includes reading from GIANT books together and singing songs and coloring and a little bit of dancing and singing.

In Cherry class, a little boy wouldn't come inside because he thought I was there to replace his teacher. So much crying.

In Peach class, everyone could read!

In Mango class, they busted out some serious phonics, Thomas and Jade helped me make a picture that turned out to be a boat and a fire fish fighting a water fish. At first, the fire fish was totally winning, but at the last second, the water fish put the smack down.

My favorite part of the day, though, was Claire from Mango. She was pretty sassy, and whenever she blinked it was like she blinked with her whole face. It made her cheeks bob and her forehead scrunch, so she seemed constantly to be blinking, because it was so apparent. While we were coloring, she started laughing hysterically, and when I asked her what was funny, she couldn't breathe well enough to tell me.

Later, while everyone was dancing and singing to The Wiggles (terrifying but understandably awesome for ESL pre-schoolers), she made a point to tell me what had made her laugh.

"Teacher! When you color! Your this! They wiggle!"

My what?

Oooooooh.

My boobs.

"Well, Claire, I love to color."

She then proceeded to tell me the same thing verbatim between every song they sang (so about 19 times), sometimes grabbing my boobs, sometimes gesturing to where hers will be in about 14 years.

And thaaaaaat pretty much made the whole day worth it.

Update: The very next day I got asked the following question by a student:

"Teacher! Why you are not married and these are so big?"

If you can figure out the appropriate interpretation of that question, please let me know.

Naked

So, today we're back to regularly scheduled programming, beginning work at 12:45 and working until 8:30ish. So, I got up at 9 and went to the gym, came home, turned on the hot water, took off my clothes, entered the shower/toilet (shoilet) ...

And there is nothing but freezing water.

Apparently they chose the moment I got naked to turn off all the heat and water to do repairs.

Currently I'm cooking breakfast in a towel and hoping that it will come back on in time for a shower before work.

Speaking of being in the buff, yesterday I went to a jimjilbang (a sauna room) for the first time. I've been wanting to go for months, but finally, FINALLY I got up yesterday and new that there was no time like the present. Koreans go all the time. With their friends, with their moms and grandmas, sometimes by themselves. Basically, a public bath. They give your some loose clothes to wear in the main room if you feel like it, but mostly everyone is just naked. I've never been in proximity to so much bare skin in my life. Little kids and old ladies, relaxing and exfoliating, themselves and each other. Picking at blemishes, massaging their fat.

About $7 for a really hot bath, a medium hot bath, a mineral bath, a cold pool, a really cold pool, whirlpools, a high-pressure stream, a wet sauna, a dry sauna, personal washing stations, and regular showers. I enjoyed some time hopping back and forth between the cold and the hot baths, and scrubbed away my dried skin for about an hour ... It made me happy that it's just part of what you do with your friends and family in Korea. I've never felt more comfortable being naked in my life, regardless of being the one tall, pink lady in there. It was a delight to be somewhere where modesty wasn't a consideration.

I want to go at least once a week for the rest of my life.

Well, they're not done fixing the water, but I do have some fried potatoes to eat, so I wish you all a good day.

Hey, remember that time we went to thailand?

9 Things About My Trip to Thailand + A Smattering of Photos

1. I ate incredible food at the very least once a day for 10 days.

2. I stayed in a totally legit (and good) hostel, and then a place that called itself a hostel but really would have been a hotel if it hadn't been for 1. no refills on soap and 2. all of the bees I killed nightly. I slept like a log every night in a beautiful big bed, had a private balcony, a small fridge stocked with not-outrageously-priced beverages, and I ate green curry (and eggs shaped like stars and rice shaped like koalas and sausage shaped like octopus) and drank the best pina coladas of my life at their outdoor restaurant seating. The owner was beautiful and gracious and helpful and I would live there with her if she would hire me.

3. Medical conditions abounded amongst, well, two of us. Luckily, health services were helpful and affordable. Thanks, Thailand!

4. I got to spend time with my best friend since forever, reading books, drinking sake. If I could have more of that right now, sign me up.

5. I went skinny dipping. For the first time ever. In the ocean. On the full moon. It was, in fact, TOTALLY MAGICAL.

6. We let lanterns go, holding our hopes and dreams for the coming year. I am hopeful. I am full of dreams. I tried to keep things simple.

7. Lanta was so beautiful we stayed several extra days instead of heading to Bangkok, thanks to the skillful and gracious maneuvering of my travel agent.

8. I took a lot of pictures of drinks, because they were awesome.

9. Go to the Elephant to escape the sun and eat green curry. Go to Bambi's to listen to music and enjoy the most charming atmosphere on the beach.




Thank you, Ko Lanta, for being even more than we'd hoped for.

Monthly Test

Andy, Level K Grade 1

I wake 6 o'clock
I wash face
I wash hands
I clean the theethes
I wear clothes
and go to school
I learns to much
and I am
not happy

end

This about sums up the way I felt in college.
Also, Andy wrote more than one line on his essay! Hooray, Andy! Sorry about life sucking.

Happy New

So, I have some lovely pictures of my amazing vacation in Thailand. They are mostly of drinks and food, as you might guess. However, before I go about posting an assortment, I want to steal some photos from others on the adventure to add to the mix. Then I'll probably set 'em to some music and make it a total experience.

Deadline on that particular project is the end of the week, after I reread Hamlet and Macbeth, organize the mailing list for Savage Umbrella, send pictures to Jeremy, and hang up the clothes that are in a pile on the floor. End of the week, I should dare to hope.

Until then, please know that on Friday I got a haircut from a Korean guy named Kevin, who was awesome. At some point while cutting he made reference to the dye in my hair, and I told him I knew I should take care of it soon.

"Sad color," Kevin said, pointing to my roots. "This is ... sad color."

Yeah, I'm right there with ya, buddy.

So, I got him to dye my hair on Saturday morning when they opened the shop. I read Korean fashion magazines and drank coffee while he got this mane under control, and got the best head massage, complete with Kelp Treatment, that I've ever had in my whole life.

He told me to come back in 2 months, but I may be back there sooner for the sheer joy of the experience. Anyone else needing their hairs done in Korea, I'll give you Kevin's number. Completely worth the totally reasonable price.



Happy 2010. Things are shaping up.

(P.S. I thought Sherlock Holmes was going to be good, and then it was AWESOME. Best solo date I've been on in AGES. I think I saw Snatch for the first time on a solo date, back in 2000. Meant to be.)