Just Another Manic Monday

Phew. . .finally finished with work today a half an hour early (hence my ability to post early morning. . .your time). By 'finished' I in fact mean 'released from' as this week is again preparation time for students as they ready themselves for their upcoming midterms. Being primarily the duty of the Korean teachers to help them prepare, my job has been reduced to no more than sitting at the front of the classroom, occasionally listening to students practice their oral exam which they have been memorizing for the past week.

While it's not the most interesting job in the world, I sure have gotten a lot of reading done and would love any suggestions that anyone is willing to share (that means I'm almost out of books, feel free to send old periodicals too, thanks)! Just last week I started, and finished two books, "Messenger" and "Gathering Blue," both compliments to Lois Lowry's fantastic tale, "The Giver." Both books were set in eerily similar yet drastically different worlds from that which we know. The final book of the 'series,' "Messenger," actually brought together the two previous, unrelated books in an incredibly thought provoking manner. Although certainly readable, and most likely aimed at young adults, these books are certain to become timeless classics as they stark warnings of the atrocities that we, as a species, are capable of! The books are both a simple read that you can either breeze through in a day if need be or drag out for vacation pleasure reading. As far as I know they only come in paperback too which means they're both cheap, easy, and worth investing the couple hours in. . .just my opinion!

I also managed to muscle through "Satchmo: My life in New Orleans," an autobiographical account of Louis Armstrong's early life, lived out primarily in the Crescent City. While far from a literary masterpiece, the personal, and very recognizably Naw'lins voice that Louis writes in is absolutely captivating. What perhaps surprised me most about the book is how Louis describes loving New Orleans, almost a hundred years ago, for all the same reasons that I, and many others, still love it today: the smells of Cajun cooking and honeysuckle in bloom, a steaming meal of no more than red beans and rice, the sounds of hot jazz tearing through the Vieux Carre, the blind eye to public vagrancy so long as it is mostly harmless, and of course, waiting to catch a glimpse of the Zulu King on Mardi Gras day!

Reading about the Naw from the perspective of one of Her most well recognized children certainly make me yearn to be back on the banks of the Mighty Miss! It seems almost redundant at times to ask "Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans?" For if anyone has ever been and is not there now, I couldn't imagine them not knowing what its like to miss that wonderfully quirky city. If you haven't yet been. . .well you just don't know what your missing. To those that either fail to, or are unwilling to recognize the abundance of culture, perspective, music, food and down right Life emanated from that city. . .well I pity you, for when you ask, "What would the world really lose if New Orleans was to wash away?" then perhaps the answer is simply something that you could never recognize!

Enough about books. . .I already give you enough to read without demanding you take on other side ventures (as this is clearly your primary literary undertaking for the next 330 some odd days). Why I'm writing, other than the fact that I'm stuck in the Native Room at work waiting for that clock to strike 10:30pm (sounds like a real job right, I mean in terms of waiting for it to be over, not that we finish after our kids should probably already be in bed), is that we were recently informed of an adventure we are to go on this evening!

Apparently, Mr. Lee, second-ish in command at DYB and the man who hired us, has requested the presence of all FT's (foreign teachers) for a meeting tonight, meeting at the Main Branch in Daechidong. Now if you remember, this is where Nate and I had to commute from for our first week in Seoul, an hour away. Soooo, after finishing work tonight we'll go home and change then (hopefully, provided that we are supplied with cab fare) hop in a taxi and take the hour journey in to the city center. From there we will meet up with Mr. Lee and the other FT's. What else the night has in store, I couldn't possibly guess. The only thing I know is that there's no way we're getting started anytime before midnight and there's only a slight chance that I'll get to go to sleep tomorrow before the sun comes up.

Oh yeah. . .but remember, don't let your private life interfere with your work. Wait. . .what if work takes over your private life. . .isn't that interference by default!? Am I absolved of the responsibility of reciprocal interference? Does that mean I don't have to come to work tomorrow? I mean, I could just as easily read books for six hours from the comfort (HA, I use that word liberally) of my own home (HA, that one too)! Oh well. . .I'll let ya know how it goes. . .Hopefully I'll have Internet in my apartment by then. . .just let me go ask Joseph!