fox, fox, grant me my wish... (Wishing Stairs)

Man, again I’m totally exhausted. I’m only going to write for about thirty minutes, because then I definitely need to go to sleep. My lessons aren’t totally prepared for tomorrow, so I’m going to wake up a little early and finish them up.

I don’t have too much interesting stuff to report for today. Spent two hours this morning studying Korean and learned about twenty words, which I hope I still remember tomorrow. Went to school and was thoroughly demoralized by two of my class periods. Here’s the problem: my male co-teacher (we’ll call him man-teacher) is the teacher for both of my second grade classes. I see each second grade class twice a week. Stupidly, the students now have two grammar textbooks—the one they’ve always had, with instructions and explanations predominantly in Korean, and the new one my school bought for me to use. Woman-teacher has me work from “my” book for both class periods. Man-teacher makes me work from his grammar textbook for one of the two lessons. Which basically just involves me acting as a parrot and saying “repeat after me” for two stupid dialogues. Bleh! It’s boring me for me, and super-boring for the kids, and not at all useful for actually learning English. No really, the dialogues are dumb. Here’s today’s, so far as I can remember it:

Mina: Mike, will you help me with my homework?
Mike: Sure. What is it?
Mina: It’s a science report. I’m supposed to write it in English.

Mina: Have you ever heard of the koala, Mike?
Mike: No, I’ve never heard of it.
Mina: Really? It’s an animal that lives in Australia. This is a picture of a koala.
Mike: Oh, it’s so cute.
Mina: I’m interested in koalas, so I will write about them.
Mike: Sounds interesting.

Actually, that’s almost verbatim. So, judging from that, you can probably imagine how dreadfully boring it was. And man-teacher makes it worse by interjecting with things like, “Miss Camp(eu), can you please explain what ‘supposed to’ means?” No, I can’t. Why don’t you just translate it into Korean? Don’t get me wrong, he’s a really nice guy, but it’s just not the situation most conducive to learning. But the rewards system seemed to encourage participating and stave off boredom a little. And my first grade lesson went really well! Tomorrow I teach four classes, two 2nd grade and two 1st grade, and they’re both out of my book, so we’ll hope it goes well. Like I said, I still need to finish preparing.

After school Mr. Go drove me home, and we had a nice conversation about… I don’t even remember. Oh yeah, music. He had the Black Eyed Peas on when I got in the car, and I’m pretty sure he asked me if I like ‘colored’ music. I’m not positive that’s what he said, and I didn’t ask for clarification. :) The other day he was listening to KoRn. I find this choice of music perplexing, since he definitely speaks very very little English, and surely doesn’t have any idea what the songs are saying. Oh yeah! He wasn’t even listening to the Black Eyed Peas, he was listening to some awful parody—“Let’s Get Retarded” rather than “Let’s Get it Started.” Is that Weird Al? I don’t have internet access to look it up. Anyway, I definitely felt him listening to said parody was curious.

I had every intention of working more on my lessons when I got home, but instead I went to the store and took an hour-long nap. Then, I met Meghan at 6 at DVD BANG! (Those were excited capital letters, not grammatically correct ones.) Up to now, my most frequent DVD Bang buddy has been Tim, but somewhat perplexingly, Tim and I have slightly different tastes in movies. He typically prefers lomantic comedy or light-hearted story to drama, and dislikes horror, whereas I prefer drama to all things light-hearted, and enjoy a good horror flick anytime. But good news! Meghan likes horror movies too! So we went with the expressed intention of getting scared, and it worked. (More for me than her, I think.) So here it is, my obligatory review for Wishing Stairs. (I’d include the Korean title, but again, no internet access.) I’m going to go ahead and tell you the plot without remorse, because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll see it, and I wouldn’t advise you too.

I give Wishing Stairs BB½ (2.5 B’s out of 5). I really like the horror genre, so I typically enjoy most any horror movie, and this was no exception. I watched quite a few Korean horror movies before I came to Korea, however, and I’m beginning to see the clichés in the genre as potentially troublesome. Wishing Stairs is another story about angsty teenage girls, with lots of scary long black hair and ghostly crawling (a la Ringu and The Grudge). This movie deals with the friendship between two dance students: the obligatory wild girl prodigy who is brilliant at ballet but only does it because her mom forces her, and the less-impressive, less-attractive girl who really loves it. They seem to be great, inseparable friends, until the brilliant ballet dancer wins a competition, which causes her friend to suddenly and inexplicably start to hate her. The title refers to a set of stairs in front of the dormitory that have 28 steps, but apparently if you believe hard enough and walk up them very slowly with your eyes closed (while counting aloud ominously), a 29th step will appear and a little fox(? maybe something was lost in translation) will grant you a wish. Anyway, the less-attractive-and-good girl wishes to win the competition. But her friend wins, and when the winner confronts her about her meanness on the stairs and begs her to be nice again, the less attractive girl pushes her away, and inadvertently down the stairs. She’s too injured to do ballet ever again and kills herself by jumping out the hospital window. Jin (the less attractive one) feels bad, and is shunned by the other students. There’s another character, a fat slightly retarded girl, who is very unpopular but was in love with the now-dead girl, who also makes a wish—first, to be thin, then, for Su-hee (the dead girl) to come back to her. Which leads to haunting and revenge, as I’m sure you can imagine. It’s really not worth detailing the rest of it, except to say that the end of the movie drags a lot, and now, only two hours later, I can’t even remember if the main character dies or not at the end. Wait, I remember what happens. And yes, she does.

Anyway, after DVD Bang we went to Pizza Wing Club, a restaurant nearby that we’d been to the previous weekend with Tim. (There are, by the way, no wings there.) When we were there before, Tim informed the waiter, in Korean, that I thought he was cute, which was fun and awkward. And as it’s a family joint, he was, of course, our water again today. Meghan and I complained gratuitously over pepperoni pizza about our textbook, and our students woeful inadequacy at English conversation, for about an hour, when the waiter came over, sat down, and said: “I want to join your conversation.” We were the only ones in the restaurant, btw. So we agreed, of course. He started off by saying: “I am 26. I am university student at Jeonnam University. This is my part-time job.” I asked what he studied, and he said biotechnology. His English pronunciation of these things was pretty good, so I started to wonder how much he actually understood. We asked for some insight as to why our students were so quiet in class, and he answered a little brokenly. And we were contemplating how to include him in our conversation when he said, “Just… talk.” So we did, which was strange. He just sat there for about 15 minutes listening to us. I dunno. Then I had to get home, so we paid and left. As we were leaving, he suggested we eat a particular dish that Naju is famous for. I’m thinking we’ll make DVD Bang and Pizza Wing Club a weekly event, so perhaps we’ll teach our new friend English as well. He never said his name, or anything we could call him, even after we introduced ourselves, however, which doesn’t bode well for impeding friendship. It was a relatively cheap evening, anyway: about $6 each for pizza and a pitcher of coke, and $5 each for the movie in a private viewing room. And a chance to sit and chat quickly in English, knowing I’ll be understood, which for me is priceless.

Alas. When I got home around 9:15, I surprised myself by actually going jogging again. It rained on my walk home, but it had mostly stopped by the time I got outside, and I think it was a little cooler. I ran along the stream again, and discovered that it’s actually very long, so I ran for 15 minutes without reaching the end and then crossed over and came back. I had my MP3 player, so I just ran for two songs and then walked every third. I think I may have actually hit my stride once or twice, and I wasn’t miserable at all, which was great. I sweated profusely, but it felt really good, and when I came home, I was happy. I was going to try to join the gym, but I may see how this running thing works out. I’ve always wanted to be the type of person who jogged outside (rather than on the treadmill). I’m not sure why it’s going so much better now than it ever has before. Perhaps now more than any other time I need that alone time to decompress, and to get it while also feeling good about working out is an extra joy. We’ll see how long my commitment to the cause lasts.

I do find it easier to confront my fat after exercising. Typically the mirror and I are not best friends, but immediately after exercising, it’s better. I have conversations with my fat. I acknowledge it and accept it to an extent. I can look at it, because I am holding out hope that perhaps this is the last time I will see it, that after the next run it will magically disappear. Or slowly but surely get smaller. After my shower I spent a little quality time with the family, in front of the TV, while eating some tasty oranges.

I only mention this because my family was watching something particularly interesting. It’s a Korean traditional drama, meaning a sitcom/television show set 500 years ago, including actors in traditional dress and depicting, I think, historical events. It was really remarkable how little I understood what was going on, but in a particularly interesting scene, all the boys in a particular area were called to be inspected (by some royal people, I think), and they all had to drop trou. Some woman inspected their family jewels extensively, and they were given some receipt, or something. Every few minutes my family would interject with some translation or explanation of what was going on, and their explanation for this scene was… “In Bible. Jacob… Cut…” [little brother gestures to his you-know]…

And I said what anyone in that situation would say,“…Oh,”and headed to bed. If I come to any more conclusions, I’ll let you know.

Take care!