Feed the kitty

After his plumbing repairs (and lung repairs, and eye repairs), Tug seems to be all better. I credit his stress-free lifestyle. (If he only knew about the numberless cats just on the other side of that wall trying to stay alive somehow through this icebox of a Korean winter...)

But he needs special urinary-tract-aid food that can only be bought at vets' offices, and we ran out. So after school today I walked to the new subway stop, took the train to nearby Yangjae Station and walked to a nearby vet's where I had bought his scratching post-- only to find the office wasn't there anymore. So I turned and walked straight into the awful north wind for the mile or so to Gangnam Station. (In this country, nothing good blows in from the north.) I figured to find at least one vet on the way.

And, my friends, it was cold. Holy toeloopin' Moses in the Ice Capades, it was cold. You know when you get a horrible pain-- brain freeze from a lime margarita, labor pains if you're a woman, a basketball in the castanets if you're a guy, somebody pulling your lower lip over your head-- and there just are no words that will convey how it feels? Yeah? That's how cold it was, walking straight into the wind and slip-slidin' away on the ice and snow underfoot.

When I finally got to Gangnam Station and hadn't found a vet, I gave in and decided to take the subway over to Tug's actual vet, even though that would mean another nearly-a-mile walk into the wind when I got there. But thankfully, there was another vet within a block of Seollung Station, and they had a puppy the size of my fist that went crazy for a touch and a kind word, and they had the right cat food.

So it just took two of my six waking post-school hours, four bucks for the fares, 20 bucks for three pounds of cat food, and nearly losing my nose and several cheeks to frostbite, but Tug's got his don't-clog-the-pipes food. He didn't show any signs of appreciating my effort.

If the little booger's not careful, I'm going to hollow him out and make a muff.

Front to the Future

When I was a kid, I thought about living to the year 2000, which seemed impossibly far away. It never occurred to me that 2000 would once be considered the good old days. The actuarial tables of the time said the odds were I'd die in the year 2020, which was impossiblier farther away. Don't seem impossiblier anymore, but at this point I think that by 2020 I'll finally get my act together and start accomplishing stuff.

Me, 2012.

I've been thinking this morning about what my Android smart phone represents. Not many years ago, if you'd told me I could use a device smaller than Tom Cruise to do a thousand things, I'd have told you that you were crazier than Michele Bachmann... if, at that point, I'd ever had the bad luck to have heard of Michele Bachmann. I can Facebook or Twitter (while rationalizing Facebook and Twitter as verbs); take photos and send them around the world; catch up on email; listen to music; read whole books; translate from English to Korean or vice-versa (although I happen to know that"식 당" means "restaurant", not "per equation", as Google thinks); record my deathless thoughts (usually along the lines of "soy milk, bread, bananas"); zoom in on a map of Seoul; plot my subway route; and, most importantly, evaporate little green pigs with exploding irate, though naturally flightless, birds.

I've been told I could even make a phone call if I ever wanted to.

All this on a phone that was free and service that costs me a dollar a day. And I live in what many people say is the most wired city in the world. Here, everybody on the subway is mesmerized by their electronic devices and I'd worry whether the driver is paying attention to his job... but there isn't a driver. On the new subway line, you can look out the front of the computer-driven train and feel like Mr. Sulu as you zip through the tunnel. (I think I'd prefer a human driver, but at least the train is going to be tough to hijack.)

I know what we were all thinking back in the day: flying cars! But I've seen a lot of Koreans drive in two dimensions; I'd say the last thing we need is to add a third.

So, despite the melting polar ice caps and the career of Ke$ha, I've decided to spend the rest of my life in the future.

Engage.

"...and, doggone it, people like me."

You know that stuff I wrote two entries ago, "I'm not alone"? Yeah, well, never mind. I was only kiddin'.

Seems I'm a ramblin' guy again; Kyung and I are off. I won't pretend I'm not disappointed, but I'm fine. Maybe I am alone, but 2011 was still a success because I learned I don't have to be alone.

Anyway, we're three weeks into our four-and-a-half-week winter break (necessitated by Korea's biggest holiday, Seollal-- Lunar New Year-- coming so soon after our usual two-week break). My colleagues are beginning to trickle back from their excursions to such strange, exotic locations as Vietnam and California, but most won't be back for another week.

I've been keeping busy writing, hiking, milling on the tread at the gym (shut up, I'm an English teacher), going to a movie, soaking in hot tubs, and hashing. During the school year, the Saturday morning Yongsan Kimchi hash is about all I can commit the time to each weekend. Now that I'm on vacation, though, I'm hitting both YK and Southside HHH on Sundays. It's a delicate balance, trying to keep the January cold out without being so bundled up I sweat through all those layers while running. Usually I fail.

Yesterday's YK hash, going all the way up and over three mountains while covering six miles in two hours, was epic, but it was last week's Southside that I'll really remember. We clambered over and between and around boulders all the way to the top of a mountain so high that even the traffic sounds of this metro area of 22 million completely faded away.

Halfway up: Headshot, Burt Reynolds, Mr. Blister, some guy, 

Dead Porno Society, Corndog Millionaire.

Top of the World, Ma! (The escalator was out of order.)

The long, long way down was enchanting, with a beautiful little stream frozen solid all the way down through the silent woods. Maybe the best thing about Seoul is that spotted all through this huge city there are the hills and mountains, so natural, so peaceful, so quiet.

But in case one is ever tempted to forget that this is still Korea, near the top of the mountain is a bunker, built after the war, that's used by the army to train their men how to watch out for invaders from the north.

Still, it was a lovely day, and the hash means so much to me in terms of conditioning, friendship, and self-esteem.

And you know, though it seems improper to say it... friends and acquaintances tell me it's impressive that someone my age (58, if you're keeping score at home) has run over 80 hashes, and completed two marathons, in 15 months. And I always go, aw shucks, tweren't nothin'. But you know... it is impressive. I rock. In some ways.

And now for something completely different.

When I was new in Korea, every day brought something funny, or sad, or odd enough to want to blog about. After a couple of years, though, I stopped noticing as much, or caring as much to post it. And there is a lot of funky stuff here. For example: 

-The underground shopping malls have so many rotundas and stairs and corridors branching off in all directions that they were apparently built by gophers with architectural degrees.And then there's inexplicable stuff like this:

-One of the moms in the English club I emcee at school gave me a Christmas present: a shocking-pink bow tie with gold filigree. (She knows me so well.)

-There are always so many salespeople standing around in stores that you can't twitch without having someone suggesting stuff you should buy, but for Seollal they're mostly decked out in lovely, traditional hanbok outfits. And you can't find half the stuff in its usual place because of all the gift packs on display, including Korea's favorite holiday delicacy:

-Close your eyes, delicate readers: as written in Korean characters, hope and hof (beer hall) are spelled identically; so are rub and love; so are park and fuck. (It's important to remember the difference in a no-parking zone.)

-There is actually in Korea a "free" cat who cost $1200 at the vet's due to nasty plumbing problems, an eye infection, and fluid in the lungs. Unfortunately, he lives with me.

If he wants legs, too, they're coming out of his allowance.

...and so, as Nick Carraway said, I beat on against the current, and survive the winter, and occasionally remind myself that, though I may be thoroughly single again, doggone it, people like me.

Don't mess with techses?

Everyone's Gone to the Moon, The Only Living Boy in New York-- choose your favorite old song about being left while everybody else is away-- heck, choose I'm So Ronery, the Kim Jong Il puppet's song from Team America, I don't care. Point is, everybody's away. People from school are all either in the States or lying on some Southeast Asian beach during our 4 1/2-week winter break. I've gone to hashes, but between people's vacations and bone-chilling weather, they've been sparsely attended. Kyung's had house guests and spent the New Year with her daughter, so it's been ten days since I've seen her and it'll be four more before I do again.

Even Tug was back in the shop for observation for a bit. Selfish little creep.

So I've had lots of time to reflect. (However, I have not been refractory.) What I've been reflecting about today is tech, what we've lost and what we've gained.

What happens when we're left to our own devices? So to speak.

A packed Seoul subway car is quite a sight: 40 or so people, none talking to anyone else, 35 of them absorbed in their iPads and iPods and iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S's and Android phones. I'm not making fun; when I'm on the subway, I'm probably listening to a podcast or checking my Facebook or Angry Birding, too. (Did it ever occur to you that maybe the Birds are so Angry because they need a giant slingshot to fly?)

The locals' absorption in their tech dovetails with the facts that-- how should I put it politely?-- Koreans have a much narrower conception of personal space than Americans do and many have no sense whatsoever of who's near them. The result? Many near-hits and the occasional near-miss (that is, collision) as they stroll through subway stations and down streets sending texts, playing games, and watching Korean soap operas. (Costco has a sign prohibiting cell phones on the moving sidewalk.) For that matter, a lot of the cab drivers have GPS's that double as TV sets; you're as likely to ride with a TV watcher as a GPSer.

One example of personal tech making us more separate: I remember when I first started coaching cross country in 1999. We'd rent vans once a year, or twice if we advanced to the regional championships, and head over to Gainesville or Tallahassee, seven kids with me driving and seven with my friend and co-coach Brian. We'd talk and joke and laugh and rag about each other's musical taste as we swapped CD's in and out of the player, and we'd build a real team (it might not be too much to say a real family) atmosphere. But within a couple of years, everybody in the van but me, the driver, would be lost in his or her own earbudded world, and from five minutes out of St. Augustine to five minutes before Gainesville, I would in effect be driving alone.

And of course we could all name lots of other examples of how tech separates us from the people we're near, even as it links us to people far away (...he said, sitting a Pacific away from most of his audience.)

The proximate cause of this perhaps-not-entirely-original musing is the fact that I've finally given in to the e-reading wave. I've been resisting out of loyalty to the idea of The Bookstore-- I love a place where you can go and pick up any book, read the blurbs, open a page at random and skim a paragraph or two, and buy a book (even though said book often doesn't look as appealing sitting on the nightstand as it did the moment I decided to pay for it). I love being around people who love books.

Heck, I've owned a bookstore. And worked in a newsstand shop. And at the public library. And, back in Florida, run my school's textbook sale. And I hate to see the bookstore wither away. But it is, just as the newspaper is. And the record store and the abacus and buggy-whip industries did.

Still, I need to read more books, especially as I'm working on my own fiction, and it's a heck of a hassle to have to travel an hour each way to buy one. Also, I've been reading a blog about self-publishing e-books; the author (admittedly one who is experienced and prolific) earns six figures a year without ever paying a publisher or an agent. And on an e-reader, you can download entire out-of-copyright books and sample virtually any book for free, as well as checking out books from libraries. (Yeah, not sure yet how that works.)

The Mom's English Club, which I emcee on Thursday evenings at school, was reading Because of Winn-Dixie when I took the club over with four hours' notice. There wasn't a spare copy to be had in the Republic of Korea; I downloaded it onto my Android phone for three bucks. A hashing friend, who came back to Seoul to cover Kim Jong Il's death, showed me her Kindle and I was impressed, but she told me it was her second device and she liked her Nook better. On my phone, I read Tom Sawyer and I'm in the middle of Connecticut Yankee and sampling the first chapter of Stephen King's 11/22/63. All for free.

The prices have come way down on the infernal contraptions, and I've finally given in; frankly, reading a novel on a phone is less than ideal-- you have to hold it close to your face and turn the page every five seconds. So I asked my friend and colleague Bob to pick me up the low-end Nook at Barnes and Noble while he's in the States this month. (The import fees and shipping on American goods are prohibitive.)

Why a Nook and not a Kindle? Well, the reviews are slightly better for the Nook; I'd have to have Amazon ship a Kindle to somebody in the States from whom Bob could pick it up; Amazon is evil (it's a terrible employer and is engaging in Walmartian levels of undercutting brick-and-mortar stores); and I'd rather support a real bookstore chain, even one that's driven googols of little stores out of business, than a place whose entire physical presence is the warehouse we last saw at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apparently the Nook is keeping Barnes and Noble from Bordering on bankruptcy.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my little darling in two weeks or so. It already has a pet name... I was considering calling it Da Nook of the North, but that's too much of a stretch even for me. So I'm calling it Nookie.

Don't you judge me.

Day 362

I've always liked the week between Christmas and New Year's. Aside from the thrills of Boxing Day, when we put away the Christmas boxes, or box up our unwanted presents for return, or watch a Rocky marathon on TV, or buy colorful underwear, or browse pictures of brachycephalic dogs with underbites, or some damn thing (I've never quite been sure), it's a quiet time of reflection, catching one's breath, and tranquilly contracting hypothermia. And for more than half of my years on earth, it's meant time off from school.

Looking back at this blog, I see I've posted an ungrand total of six entries in the last 22 weeks. (For comparison, I made 35 posts in my first month in Korea and 14 in my first month in Seoul.) I guess this is because I post about things I find novel or interesting and, after three-plus years here, not much is novel anymore. Maybe I'm a little tired of my own glibness, too. I've thought of dropping this blog entirely, to tell the truth. (I haven't, evidently.)

There was a time not long ago when I would have found so many things ripe for blogging:

• Tug went into the shop for plumbing repairs (to the tune of $1000) and is back there now for treatment of a cold and an eye infection, both of which he picked up when he boarded there the first time.
• I fell on my head (and chest and wrist), running downhill on hash and tripping on a drunk bump in the street; at our hash Thanksgiving dinner afterward, I bled like a new red hoodie from Wal-Mart and, four weeks later, my wrist is still sore. (In my post about the marathon in November, I wrote that if there had been a string in the street, I would have tripped. At the time, I thought I was joking.) It's the third time in my life I've gashed myself just above my left eye by falling on my head... one is supposed to learn something from experience, and what I've learned is that I turn my head to the right just before I fall on it.
• The gang I started working two years ago at school continues to disperse, one by one, around the world: Nick, our counselor, has moved back to the States and Lauren has moved from San Diego to Copenhagen.
• My hashing friends leave, too... GI Ho, Spartakicks, and Spread Eagle Scout Master (among many others) are gone, TKO is leaving, and it's only a couple of months until we lose Shitonya and Bootylicious.
• Korea continues to impress with its tech. For example, this is one of a dozen panels at a particular subway platform:

 ...while you're waiting for the next train, you scan the items you want with your handepone (cellphone) and send it to HomePlus. Your groceries are delivered when you get home.

• I MC the Moms' English Club at school every Thursday evening, bringing the joys of Fried Green Tomatoes to the land of pickled cabbage.
• Kim Jong II died, making way for Kim Jong III, and I'm told nerves are frayed on our side of the border, though I can't see it anywhere.
• The stores go crazy for Christmas and, gee, Gangnam is pretty, all lit up with LED trees and gift-wrapped building facades. But the day itself is pretty much like any other; everything's open for business. And what I really miss are Christmas cookies and trees with lights.

 In Itaewon: possibly the biggest light display in Korea.

• Penguins in parkas are patrolling the park. (It's c-c-cold.)
• And so it goes.

The biggest thing worth blogging about is my relationship with Kyung ah, and that's almost too personal to write about. We've been seeing each other once or twice a week, and it has done me-- and I hope, her-- a world of good. We go to dinner or a movie, sing together at a noraebang, play a little pool... one day she drove me out past Incheon Airport to a dock, where we took a ten-minute ferry ride to a little island on the West (that is, Yellow) Sea. I loved every second of it: the salt air, the sea breeze, the hungry gulls, the company.

 ...you can get a lucky shot, even with a cellphone camera.

Beyond that, we just enjoy each other's company, and it has been a long time since I've had someone in my life.

And, years from now, if I remember one thing about 2011, it will be this: it's when I met Kyung.

That means it's been a good, good year: I'm not alone.

Occupy Earth

I don't usually write very explicitly about politics here; if you know me, you know where my sympathies lie. But now I'm just sickened. The police at Cal Davis (where, incidentally, I lived for a few months, exactly 50 years ago) have sprayed protesters (who were doing nothing more threatening than sitting on the ground with arms linked) directly in the face with pepper spray. A woman protesting in Portland was sprayed point-blank in the mouth. An 84-year-old woman was sprayed in Seattle.

It's nice to see how far our civilization has advanced since the Civil Rights days; in less than fifty years, we've gone from assaulting peaceful protesters with firehoses, billy clubs, and German shepherds to simply attacking them with something that a US Army study concluded can cause "mutagenic effects, carcinogenic effects, sensitization, cardiovascular and pulmonary toxicity, neurotoxicity, as well as possible human fatalities".

I'm so proud: unlike at Kent State and Jackson State when I was a senior in high school, nobody's been killed. Yet.

Personally, I'm completely behind the Occupy movements around the country and the world. We are systematically being ravaged by corporations, banks, and the politicians-- of both parties-- they own. The right-wing cries of "class warfare" are totally true... except it's not the middle class or the poor who have been waging it for all these years.

Call me a socialist if you like. I can take it. Hell, 75 years ago John Steinbeck was called a communist for standing up for migrant workers and working people against the banks and corporations that profited from their misery.

But suppose I'm totally wrong. Suppose corporations (as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney have said) are people. Suppose the Occupy protesters really are lazy, dirty, communist hippies. Even so, do governments-- do the police-- have the right to assault and hospitalize peaceful protesters? Arrest them for trespassing, put them in jail. They did it to Dr. King. They did it to Nelson Mandela. They did it to Gandhi.

Here in South Korea, which was a draconian police state until the 1980s, every time there's a whiff of protest we see bus after bus after bus of police officers deployed. But in three-plus years, I've never seen anything like what I've seen recently in Davis and Portland and Seattle,,,

in the Land of the Free.

Eighteen thousand fifty-eight seconds

All the omens were bad for my Joongang Marathon on Sunday, November 6. I hesitated to enter, to begin with. I overtrained (often running six days a week, including regular training runs, hashes, and the school cross-country club) and hurt my knee, so that I had to take two weeks off from training, including the two longest runs. I made a radical change, from traditional running shoes to "barefoot" shoes, in the middle of the training period. And I lost two of the 17 pounds I'd planned to take off. And put them back on as I carbo-loaded in the last few days before the race.

And on Sunday, Marathon Day, it rained. A lot. Not Monday. Not Tuesday. Not Wednesday or Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Not Monday, Part II, not... well, you know. I didn't want to go and didn't know if I could finish: my best projected time might keep me from being picked up for blocking traffic.

And yet it all worked out. I give myself an "A". Not an "A+", because my goal was to break five hours and it took me five hours and 58 seconds. But my other goal, after having run three minutes/walked one minute for the entirety of the Chuncheon Marathon a year ago, was to run pretty much the whole way. And I did that. And took 39-plus minutes off my PR. So I feel pretty damn good.

I did almost everything right during the race; I fueled well, BodyGlided liberally to prevent chafing of the Personals, carried water till it was obvious I wouldn't need it (and dropped my hydration belt off), had a devoted pit crew on the course, timed myself very carefully... I had my pace down exactly, and kept with it, to finish in 4:58. Except that that didn't account for the fact that a marathon course is measured by the shortest possible distance around curves, which one can't always run with 21,000 other people in the way. And then there were those trips behind the bushes... you've heard of answering the call of nature? Yeah, well, Nature doesn't call me; she stalks me. According to my GPS watch, I ran exactly a quarter-mile farther than the official distance.

I could have foregone the food bar I ate while walking, four miles from the end. I could have skipped that one last trip to the little boys' bush. Either one would have saved me a minute... ah, well.

It started to rain as soon as I left home before the race, and kept it up most of the morning, intensifying a half-hour or so into the run, and very soon I just couldn't get any wetter. And being wet, I was absolutely chilled by the cool, breezy day. For five hours. And even once it stopped raining, there was just no way to avoid stepping in cold puddles. When I finally got home, my toes looked like white raisins.

Toward the end, my knees weren't bending real good. If there had been a string in the street, I'd've tripped on it. (I did, however, win the wet t-shirt contest.)

I got really lucky, though... a few miles in, I met a fellow American named Kyle, who was running his first marathon. I coached him a little, we shared energy gels and ibuprofen, and we encouraged each other for the next 20 miles or so, until finally he pulled ahead, finishing ahead of me by a minute. But having company made all the difference in the world to both of us, as neither of us wanted to quit and let the other person down. And then, though the Marathon "scoop up the slowpokes" Bus driver suggested we get on board, we didn't-- we were just too close to the end to even consider stopping.

I owe a debt of thanks to my hashing friends LesBalls (thanks for the photos), Countess, and Choopa for coming into the city to cheer me at the finish, and an enormous debt to our school principal Ron and his wife Jill, for being there, both going out (in the rain) and coming back, with my ditty bag of shoes, socks, shirt, water, energy gels, and food bars. And to Mr. Park, our boss, who kept popping up during the route to take pictures and cheer me on. (And give me a warm, dry ride home afterward.) Practically the best take-away from the whole experience is the knowledge that all these people sacrificed a large chunk of their weekends because they care about me.

My dear friend Shawn (Countess) was proud of me. Me, too.

By the way, I've mentioned it before, but now I'm a total drink-the-Kool-Aid convert to barefoot shoes. Running in my conventional shoes, I got worse knee pain than I've ever had, but after taking a little time off and switching to the Merrell Trail Gloves (which are basically like going barefoot, but with a little protection for the feet), the pain completely disappeared. We evolved to run on the balls of our feet and let our bent legs absorb the shock. It makes all the difference in the world. (I owe more thanks to Debby, my ex, who long ago said that thick running shoes can't be good for people, and my friend Lauren, for introducing me to Born to Run, the bible of the barefoot crowd.)

When I got on the stadium track at the end, it was vastly inspirational-- Carl Lewis and FloJo ran on this track at the Olympics-- and a tremendous letdown, because when Lauren and I ran a 10K here, we came into the stadium 50 yards from the finish line, and I expected the same here, which would have let me break the five-hour mark. Instead, we came in almost a full lap, a quarter mile, from the finish. And all I would have to do to beat my goal was to match the world-record 1500-meter pace. Inexplicably, I did not do so.

Kyle and me, a few minutes after the finish.

If you aren't a slow person who's run a marathon, I can't describe to you the sheer incomprehensible length of the damn thing, I'd say roughly approximately 46,147 steps; the sheer creakiness and achiness of everything below the waist I can mention in public; and the deadly monotony of the training, especially the long, long Sunday runs. All the way through, I kept thinking, "There's no way I'm ever doing this again."

And then, when I crossed the finish line, the relief and the release and the pride... well, maybe there was brief, manly tear, and you know, it wasn't so bad, and... heck, I know I can cut 58 seconds off my time...