May 9, 2006 - It's getting hot over here!

Things are heating up over here, in both the literal and figurative senses. Today was somewhere around 25C (77F), a bit toasty for my usual longsleeve getup. Worse, at my university class, we're faced with a choice of a stuffy classroom or an inaudible one, at the behest of the traffic-plagued main drag through the university district in Sinchon, which conveniently runs right past our window. There's also some major highway being erected across the street, but making note of "construction in Seoul" is as relevant as pointing out that the Han River is wet. I've gotten in the habit of sleeping with earplugs in the afternoons or if I plan to sleep in past 7am. About three months back, I reveled in the sight of a building next to my apartment being torn to shreds with a mini-demolition team (see photo). What I hadn't considered at the time was that anything that comes down, must go back up - one creaky girder at a time. This building is, without exaggeration, directly outside my window, and I reap the benefits of its construction seven days a week, starting when the sun does, without exception. No doubt other neighbors are as vexed, but does this justify a low-key guerilla war? The easiest solution: move.

I did mention that life is heating up figuratively. In the sense that my workload is tilting closer towards the level of, say, "hell", I suppose it's a legitimate claim. Last weekend practically all of my writing students came back from their mid-term exam hiatus and bombarded me with essays to mark. I'm not insinuating that they voluntarily handed in such a heavy load.. it's simply the result of teaching 4 TOEFL writing classes (NB: don't try this at home), each with 6-13 students and two essays a head. That makes me the happiest bloke in the writing department one day each month (payday) and the sorriest chump for the other 30 days.

Also at Seogang Univ. (Korean language classes), this is our final week of class. It's been just under two and half months of an intense 9am-1pm, Mon to Fri, curriculum, where during this time I've no doubt quadrupled my vocabulary and overcome my weak spots: listening and speaking. At this point I'm confident enough to get past what I observed last summer as First Date Syndrome: having only enough lingual ability to impress one's date for one evening, where thereafter, conversing about the weather gets old real quick. Rather, after having completed level 2 at Seogang University, I can tell you not only the weather, but what my friend thinks about the weather too! ^^ Actually I saw the fruits of all this effort a couple weeks back when I hung out with one of my professors for an evening, covering quite a range of topics (in Korean) from family issues to human rights in China (that one didn't last long, but...). Also today in class we held a mock job fair with students from other classrooms, which was rather successful. Job interviews are nasty because one has to resort to the rarely-used impersonal, honorific form (there's actually a conjugation used only for news broadcasts, military subordinates, and... job interviews). Throughout the class I played a representative for GS25 (a 7-11 equivalent) and hired a French girl who offered to start work that day for a humble salary. Later on as we switched roles, I got the post as a foreign language teacher at Seogang! (considering the amount of paid vacation time that university instructors get here, this is something well worth considering if I'm to stick around any longer than 6 more months).

As disappointed as I am to see my time at Seogang come to an end, it'll be a necessary change, where in the future I'll have more time to pursue grad school plans, pay off the more bacchanalian moments of my Winter vacation in Thailand, and get back to poisoning my liver in the company of friends I've snubbed for the last few months. This is neither a shift towards over nor underachieving. Call it what it is: a horizontal thing.