Thanksgiving in a foreign land is an all or nothing proposition. You either have access to turkey, cranberries, and communication with family, or you make do with fried chicken, strawberry jam, and a Disney movie. It actually hasn't been since the first Thanksgiving of my mission that I've had to resort to the latter.

In a recent care package, my family sent to me (I feel a song coming on) four boxes of Jell-O, two cans of pumpkin, and a lone can of cranberry sauce. I whipped together the whole berry cranberry sauce with two boxes of Jell-O, some celery and walnuts for a reasonable facsimile of star salad. I couldn't make anything pumpkin pie-like, since nutmeg and condensed milk do not exist in this country unless you can break into th airbase and raid the PX, and I kind of wasn't in the mood, what with my back and all, so I just heated up the pumpkin with salt, pepper, and butter like mashed squash. Meh. And for turkey I did go with fried chicken, which is still pretty awesome with cranberry.

I guess I'm too caught up in the trappings of things, too obsessed with traditions and memories that in and of themselves are not that significant. Thanksgiving would still be Thanksiving without mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. I guess part of it, too, is the challenge of improvising, adapting, and scrounging up a traditional American feast without an oven or a Wal-Mart.

[Pictures to follow]

Oh, and if nobody gets online, I'm marathoning Avatar.

So, they have these school uniforms, right? Kind of lame, especially for the girls, but not that big a deal.

But if a student comes to school with a bightly-colored jacket (i.e., anything other than black, brown,or navy) over their uniform, they confiscate it. And about half of the windows in school are stil open, so if you're in a classroom you're nice and toasty, but if you're in a hall or stairwell it remains below freezing well into the morning.

And if you're not wearing your uniform blazer on under your winter coat, or don't have your necktie on before stepping onto school grounds, they make you get on your hands and knees on the sidewalk. Beatings may be out, but stress positions and public humiliation are definitely still in.

If you're a teacher, you can't do anything about it. Not just me, of course I can't do anything about it, a few Korean teachers are concerned about it. But if you have a problem with it, you don't get promoted, so the only people in a position to do something about it are sure to be devoted to the status quo. And if you actually dare to speak out against it publicly, or even just comisserate with the your students about the unfairness of it all, you can get fired.

Because that would be subversive. We can't have people who disagree in our perfect little society, especially not with people in authority.

I'm a hard teacher, I'm strict and I probably have anger issues. I crack down on mp3 players and cell phones, talking and sleeping in class, and even combs, mirrors, and makeup, and I brook no insubordination. But I'm draconian because I care. It's no skin off my nose if these kids don't learn English, I seriously believe they shouldn't all have to (more on that in a second), but I get paid either way. I'm a jerk about things that distract my students from the job at hand, that prevent them from learning and growing as individuals. I'd be interested to find out how the people in charge justify their policies, but not interested enough to get sacked over it when I'm out of here in four months.

In the past week, a lot of seniors have come to me to have me proofread their university application essays. They're not studying abroad, they're not studying English, but they still have to write in English on the application. So it doesn't matter if you're top drawer in science, if you can't write in English like a pro, you can't get into a Korean university to study science. So everyone has to learn English as a foreign language, whether they have interest or aptitude or not, and very few people are going to use it after they turn 18, so everyone learns it poorly and that pretty much prevents us from teaching the motivated/interested students well, so the whole system is pretty much set up for failure, and then the government gets all upset because of low average test scores in this 'essential skill' that no one needs or uses or is encouraged to develop past high school. It's like getting upset over standardized test scores in history. Not that I'm anti-history, but having absolutely everyone master it is not really tied to a nation's prosperity.

They have pretty much ended anonymous Internet use. Every major site requires real name verification linked to your national ID in order to log in. I can't upload videos or make comments on YouTube, even though I set my location back to the US, because YouTube is a big pushover and lets countries like China, Iran, and Korea tell it what to do. Yes, I went there. If you post mean comments on the Internet, you can go to jail. It doesn't matter if what you have to say is true - it's not about libel, it doesn't matter if what you have to say is subversive, if someone in the administration doesn't like your tone, they can put you away. I consider it a minor miracle that I can get away with rants like this, but it's probably only because they don't know about it.

They say that they don't tolerate racism, but they require all applicants to provide a headshot with their resume and then pretend that has nothing to do with why qualified foreign teachers of African or south Asian descent can't get teaching jobs, and then they complain that they can't get enough native speakers as teachers. The Anti-English Spectrum, an organization devoted to portraying all foreigners as drug-addled, AIDS-spreading pedophiles are about as rabidly bigoted as the KKK, and it most countries it would receive the same level of credibility, but in Korea, where they would theoretically be illegal, it's a powerful lobby that influences the news media and immigration policy by promoting a lot of skewed statistics and outright fabrications about crime and disease rates among foreigners that do not stand up under scrutiny (like, say, comparing their estimated number of foreigner teachers to the actual number of teaching visas granted each year), but go unquestioned and get quoted by journalists and government leaders because the Korean education system programs people to accept anything in print as fact without evaluation, and their agenda is consistent with the powers that be.

They say they want Korea to become a leader in a global, multicultural society, but they exploit the language barrier to create a closed-off intranet out of one of the highest Internet penetrations in the world. Women who marry or date non-Koreans have been shunned for the past fifty years - there's a whole set of slurs specifically for the women who show even social interest in foreigners - and even denied social services, but now that a lot of Korean men are getting mail-order brides from southeast Asia, suddenly there's a need for a lot of studies and programs to address the special needs of multi-racial, multicultural, and international families. They say they want to cut down on foreign adoptions of Korean babies (gotta maintain that racial purity), but they make life absolutely suck for single mothers.

But at least they have street vendors that sell these amazing roasted sweet potatoes.

The Original:


The Adaptation:


M. Night! I trusted you!!!

For a couple of weeks now it's been a little chilly. Which means the Koreans are all freaking out, wearing sweaters and jackets and coming to class wrapped in blankets (I do feel sorry for the girls who have to wear those stupid uniforms with above-the-knee skirts year-round) and I'm still going around in short sleeves. I've been thankful that it's finally cold enough to kill the mosquitoes so that I can leave my windows open at night, and I'm still sleeping without so much as a sheet. Everyone at work's screaming at me, "Aren't you cold?! Why aren't you cold?!" and if I had a pair of shorts I would wear them just to freak people out more; it's not that cold, maybe a little brisk, but that's all. Nothing that either simply being indoors or walking quickly for a minute won't remedy.

Yesterday I confessed it was almost cold, very, very cool, but not quite cold yet.

Then this morning I get up and it's cold, the good, old, northeast Asian, scalp-shrinking, face-tearing, chest-piercing, hamstring-locking cold that says, "I don't care what your Viking ancestry and Boy Scout-induced masochism have prepared for, you will bundle up."

So I go into work wearing a long-sleeved shirt and the heaters are cranked up so high I'm sweating to death.

For as long as they've been around, pencil and paper role-playing games have been seen in contrast and often in conflict with computer and video games. Debate has raged over whether CRPGs can really be considered role-playing games, and whether role-players can really be called 'gamers.' There has been a persistent perception that pencil and paper role-players are more 'traditional' or 'old school' than computer gamers, even though the two media have been around almost the same amount of time and both have evolved significantly over the past three decades.

It is true that pencil and paper games are more resistant to change, both in good and bad ways. On the one hand, a 0th edition D&D player would not feel out of place at a 4th ed. table - the rules have changed, but the tools have not. Some see this as dinosaurian, clinging to antiquated, analog resolution mechanics:

So we both have a bunch of little plastic men, right? And we move them. Manually. Then, when we fight, we roll dice and then do math to figure out who hits who. But there are no actual battles or explosions. We use our imaginations, like a couple of savages.

On the other hand, compare the number of people still playing vintage D&D to the number of people still playing vintage Pong. Vintage Pong has some sentimental value, but vintage D&D kicks as much ass today as it ever did because pencil and paper role-playing is not technology-dependent.

So where will the future take us? Some see pencil and paper role-playing as a fad, destined to walk the way of ragtime and the hula hoop. Some see it as an art form, like live theater, that will continue to have a small but dedicated (and, admittedly, elitist) fan base, despite the existence of a much more popular, economically successful, and technological medium competing for the same audience. Some see a marriage or merging of tabletop and computerized role-playing games as inevitable or desirable. But there is one element of tabletop role-playing that I think could lead a divergent trend, allowing pencil and paper games to flourish in environments where computer games cannot yet survive.

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Everyone keeps saying there are lots of jobs you can get with just a Bachelor's degree, doesn't matter in what. I can't count the number of times I've been told, no matter what your background, they're going to have to train you anyway, and a B.A. proves that you can learn and stick with it. But I don't know what many of these jobs are. I can (and therefore shall) list a lot of jobs in every other category of education, but the list of what I know of in the category I actually fit into is much smaller:

Category: High school diploma or less
Jobs: food preparation, custodial/housekeeping, factory work, customer service, retail, security
Analysis: low job satisfaction, low pay, probably few good positions open because everyone laid off 'settled' for whatever they could get, wouldn't get hired anyway because I'm 'overqualified'

Category: Extraordinary talent, connections, and determination
Jobs: professional athlete, professional entertainer, novelist, artist
Analysis: unless my game design really takes off (which would be awesome, but I'm not kidding myself) pretty much out of the question

Category: Bachelor's degree, any
Jobs: teaching English abroad, I guess technical writer, um...?
Analysis: these are the jobs I could get if I only knew where to find them, and they're the jobs I need to get, even if I'm just using them to go back to school for something else

Category: Bachelor's degree or equivalent certification, specific
Jobs: teaching, computer programming, meteorology, pharmacist, chef, translator
Analysis: with a little wiggling, I might be able to squirm into one of these with a little retraining, but I need a day job first to keep me in diapers while I do that

Category: Advanced degree
Jobs: doctor, lawyer, university professor, librarian
Analysis: I'll let you know when I find an extra $10,000 lying around

Did Hell just freeze over? Or am I in tune with a growing societal trend and a spokesman for my generation?

It's like I'm part of a movement or a party or something - an amorphous, leaderless sect of people, not yet united, not yet organized, not yet even really in contact, but it's there and it's growing. I don't know who we are or where we're going, but we are, and we're taking the rest of the world with us.

Or maybe it just seems that way because I tend to read like-minded people.

Last night I looked into ABCTE and today I realized that there are about five weeks to the end of the semester, one of which will be speaking tests and another of which will be finals, so I only have to plan three more lessons before Christmas.

While I was down, I watched the Connections (1978) and The Day the Universe Changed (1985) documentary series, both written by James Burke. I also burned through the Connections² (1994) and Connections³ (1997) series, which are barely worth mentioning, since by that time Burke had obviously sold out and was phoning in trivia only tenuously connected. All of the series had more travelogue than information, with pregnant pauses for each 'earthshattering' revelation, and prolonged shots of ducks, cats, and pedestrians in foreign locales. I watched them all at 150% speed and didn't miss anything.

Burke is described as a science historian, but as near as I can figure from his biography he is neither scientist nor historian; he's a journalist. A lot about him rubbed me the wrong way. He uses a lot of horrible puns, though no worse than your average science teacher, I suppose. He has this smug anti-religion sneer, especially when talking about Buddhism and Catholicism, as if the idea that people could actually believe in anything other than science is a cute inside joke. However, he's also vociferously anti-intellectual, regularly uses very unflattering terms when talking about scientists and scholars, and takes the stance that technology and progress are definitely going to kill us all. He's unashamedly EuroAnglo-centric, and uses a lot of slurs and stereotypes when talking about Scots, French, Germans, Italians, and Greeks. He only grudgingly acknowledges Chinese, Arabian, and American contributions to science and technology, and never goes in to explain the process of how those things were invented, just how Europeans refined and developed them after they got their hands on them. He seems to think that 40% of all technological, philosophical, and social developments in the past 500 years led directly to Naziism. Not just to WWII and the machines the Germans used during it, it all led specifically and inevitably to Adolph Hitler's political party and their rise to power. But most bothersome to me was his view of history.

It's funny how you don't think of history changing. Of course science is changing all the time, always in motion is the future, and a thirty-year-old description of the 2000's looks ridiculous now (see Back to the Future II). The past is set in stone. But history - our perception of the past - is not. Burke ascribed to the then-common view of history as The Dung Ages. From 500-1100 A.D. Europe was an undifferentiated mass of barbarian hovels and secluded monasteries, with everyone up to their ankles in fecal matter and no intellectual activity of any sort going on. Everyone was small-minded and life sucked in every way imaginable. And it's a load of tripe. Hearing that taught as history, or that agriculture developed only after early civilizations settled river valleys, is as schockingly ludicrous and antiquated to me today as would be walking into an astronomy class and being told that all the stars and planets circle around the Earth.

The Dark Ages are only "dark" because of a lack of literary sources. And it would probably seem ironic to Burke how pushing technology into the future has improved our understanding of the past. Most monasteries kept a chronicle of local events, which Burke found horribly small-minded and useless. The same could be said of an individual weather station. On its own, it tells us little, but linked together into a network, they give us a much bigger picture. Modern computer imaging and databases recovering and collating medieval documents, together with recent archaeology and developments in other historo-scientific fields, have given us an image of a vibrant and flourishing medieval period with an academically active literati studying, discussing, and exploring both local and imported advancements in every field of knowledge.

Burke set out in Connections to show that history is not linear, and technology was rarely imbroved by the breakthroughs of a singular genius, but lots of seemingly unrelated events shape circumstances in which inventions, almost imperceptibly, nudge technology forward. He illustrates how the modern world's increasing complexity makes responsible and informed policy decisions nearly impossible for non-specialists. These things he did, and reasonably well. He set out in The Day the Universe Changed to show that people in the past or in foreign countries are not idiots, but that knowledge is determined by worldview, and everyone thinks their own worldview is the best. This he failed to do, largely because of his unrelenting derision for foreigners and historical peoples.

Based in the Cold War, Burke often frequently refers to an impending apocalypse, runs the audience through the possibility of having to start civilization from scratch after an inevitable and total collapse of the modern way of life that his generation foresaw happening nine years ago. And yet, it's kind of cute, the way he predicted with wonder and awe what has been practically mundane for almost half of my lifetime:

You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge. Because the computer would do the day-to-day work — for which we once qualified the select few — in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught. You might end the regimentation of people, living and working in vast unmanageable cities. Uniting them instead in an electronic community, where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart.

Sound familiar?

That's why my generation will probably be more cynical and skeptical than any before us. We were raised on the certainty of a nuclear WWIII between Cold War superpowers, and watched the Iron Curtain crumble. We were told time and again of a technological singularity, exponentially expanding capabilities of science that will either solve all of our problems or doom us to extinction, and most of us still work, play, and travel using technologies more than eighty years old. We were promised flying cars and jet packs, and we grew up to find that things were for the most part just shinier versions of what our parents used. It's a good thing people are taking climate change seriously now, because by the time most of us Millenials get older and more conservative, it's going to be a rare doom and gloom prophecy to impress us.

All of the predictions - China will own everything, European, Japanese, and Jewish populations will vanish, supercomputers will fit into your bloodcells - all come with the easily-fogotten caveat: if current trends continue. That's a big if, and usually impossible. All systems are ultimately self-regulating, all systems are bounded by the laws of physics.

It has been on my mind for some time, how many of our most sacred cultural institutions are relatively young. You might say that I have been questioning The Formula for most of my life, and that's part of the reason I'm teaching in Asia instead of having a 'normal' job and a 'normal' life in a 'normal' country, but it's been in the past few months, with the economic situation and the prospect of returning to America, that I've been thinking about it some more, and a couple of things in Burke and researching the Victorian/steampunk highlighted some things that were already on my mind. Not just, why the 9 to 5 at one company for forty years, I'm asking why do we have master bathrooms, and do we really need them?

I look, and I see a world that is as one nation, though we cling to the idea of nation states, things are so intereconnected that it is no longer a helpful illusion. I see this world-nation, and it is a class society. The First World or the G8 or whatever they're calling themselves now are the aristocracy and collude to remain so, with an entrenched ruling elite. We have the toys and occasionally we share them to prove to ourselves and others how magnanimous we are. We control the organs of communication, the means of production, and the halls of learning. This is the world Wells foresaw of Eloi and Morlocks. We live in our gardens, making Edens from deserts and damn the cost of pumping in water, wholly dependent on technology we no longer control. We've forced the poor to labor in our sweatshops - and I do mean our sweatshops, though we tell ourselves that it doesn't count because the sweatshop is far away while we tacitly condone them every time we shop for bargains. We are caught in a trap of our own making, seduced into the endless cycle of upgrades and planned obsolescence and a constantly rising standard of living which we are just beginning to discover is a house of cards. It is not our environmental practices which are unsustainable, it is our lifestlye of wanting and getting and having that is unsustainable, and the environment, the economy, and everything else follows.

I for one don't need more anymore. I'm done trading up every two years for solutions to problems I didn't know I had, for satisfaction to appetites I didn't have until I heard they could be filled. I don't care about the Next Big Thing, because my experience shows that it's really not that much better than what I have now. I'm willing to have less, use less, and want less, especially if it means my brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka can have more. I'm not going to chuck it all and go live in the woods, but I'm not going to aspire to the suburban middle-class morality of conspicuous consumption. I'm not sure what this makes me other than anti-consumerist. I'm still a fan of capitalism, especially after reading The Wealth of Nations, but it has to be moderated and restrained, and the system won't do it for us - we have to wean ourselves of our addictions, and I'm starting with me.

Well, I'm moving about again. After being mostly horizontal for a week, I'm back to teaching. Another week of medication and physical therapy and generally taking it easy to go, and I'm already probably 60% mobile. I was using a broomstick for most of last week when I did have to be about - the baseball bat was a bit short for my needs, and I found a pair of crutches that had been left behind by the previous tennant. It was mostly just to keep me from falling if I had a spasm and for leveraging myself back up if I did. Just being up and walking about is quite a workout, since I'm using different muscles than usual, and most of them are not the best of friends. Standing for more than half an hour gets me sore, but I'm standing up straighter and picking up my feet higher. The walk to school seems a lot longer than it used to.