You say you want diamonds on a ring of gold...

This picture is from the teacher picnic (during which I wanted to kill myself). That's the principal on the left, and another teacher on the right. I just noticed how pale I actually look. I really felt like shit.  

During the picnic I had at school, which ended up being inside. Gross. The one pointing at me is "kind stalker."

 

Moon bears. Whatever that means. (Lame.)

Me and one of my cutest girls. Don't ask, it's a Korean thing. 

My two favorite boys at not-so-good school playing with my mp3 player on the field trip (to butterfly festival). He doesn't look too manly with that pink thing in his hands. The one on the left is definitely my favorite, because he's grown up so much in the past 10 months. He was kind of a jerk last year, as a second grader, but now he's his class president and generally a good kid. The other day I was slumped over my desk in the teacher's office and he gave me a brief shoulder rub.

Korea's last president showed up at the butterfly festival. That's him in the blue suit with the light blue shirt, behind the little kid. Cool, I guess. 

This was a pretty good week, overall. I only had to teach two days at not-so-good school, then I had Thursday off, which was nice. Thursday was not, as I previously said, Buddha's Birthday. That's actually tomorrow. Thursday was Parents' Day, which sounds like a weird holiday, but they don't have Mother's or Father's Days, so I guess it makes sense. Thursday was fun, because two of my students showed up and we went to DVD bang. It was the ever-adorable HW and one of his best friends, who I guess had expressed an interest in seeing where Miss Camp actually lives. So HW asked me if they could come over, and I said "of course." Then IJ, perhaps not believing, ALSO sent me a message asking permission (in Korean) to come over. I assured him it was really okay, so they showed up after lunch. I let IJ look around my room for a little while until he'd satisfied his curiosity, then we left. 

They were weird at first, as always. I offered three options--DVD bang, noraebang, or bowling, and they debated in Korean for awhile, eventually settling on noraebang. Unfortunately, the awesome one that is geared towards youths and doesn't serve alcohol (and is thus open during the day) closed down last week, so we tried a few unsuccessfully, and then I took them to DVD bang. Once I actually showed them the place, they seemed pleased. Maybe they didn't believe me that one existed, or I suppose it's possible they'd never been to one. But anyone, they seemed pleased at the prospect of watching a movie, so I left them to choose and ran to the convenience store for snacks. I returned to find that HW had chosen, wait for it... Kingdom of Heaven-- an English movie about the Crusades, starring Orlando Bloom, which I saw 5 times in theaters and own. I was thrilled, as I haven't seen it in at least half a year, but I was skeptical they would enjoy it.

I don't know how much they actually know about the Crusades--I'm pretty sure I didn't know much when I was in middle school, but alas. IJ fell asleep, but HW seemed to enjoy it. And I was pleased to see that the line "I once fought three days with an arrow through my testicle," was amusing even in translation. I worried that perhaps they'd felt compelled to choose an English movie for my sake, and hadn't really wanted to see it, but HW assured me that he'd asked for the movie specifically, because he'd been "dying to see it." Whatev. After that they headed to the library to study (ha!), and I went home to finish lesson planning. 

Friday was a good day too. Exams are in two weeks, so we played Review Jeopardy in all three grades. The 3rd graders were fun as always. The 2nd graders were annoying as always. And this was the first time I played it with 1st grade, but they were surprisingly receptive to it and excited, which was pleasant. I was really disappointed, in the morning, when co-teach informed me that my special class was cancelled (for a ridiculous reason). I already knew it was cancelled for next week, and then the week after that was the field trip, so that means 4 weeks until I have it again. I only have 2 months left in this semester, so it's sad. 

Oh right, I didn't blog this. I found out on Wednesday that my fave, HW, pulled off an amazing upset and won the school-wide English competition last week. His best friend MH is generally considered best at English, and there's another boy who is generally considered the smartest in general, so no one was expecting this awesome turn of events. He was really excited when he told me, which was cute. This also means he gets to represent our school in the city-wide contest in two weeks. The details I could glean about the competition were pretty ludicrous--apparently he has to read somewhere between 3 and 6 English books in the next two weeks, including Tuesdays with Morrie and Who Moved My Cheese? (This is impossible, especially because midterms are a week from now.) So co-teach bought him the books in Korean, and we've pretty much given up on winning, is what I gleaned. There's also an interview portion with a native speaker, however, so she asked me if I would use the last two periods on Friday (during which the students were irritatingly not having special class) to help him practice for that. That was the only other way I wanted to spend those two periods, so I agreed happily. 

I assumed he'd be pretty miserable at the prospect of having to speak English with me for an hour and a half rather than screwing around like all of his friends were, but co-teach assured me that he would view it as "an honor to get to practice alone with beautiful native teacher," at which point I burst out laughing hysterically. So we practiced, and I had a fun time, although I'm sure he didn't. Mostly I lectured him about speaking confidently and clearly, because he's actually pretty good at forming sentences. One of the sample questions was "If you could commit any crime without being caught, what would you do?" 

"I would be a bomb terrorist." I laughed for an hour. Both about the phrase "bomb terrorist" and his chosen crime, which I think was killing the president. (He's pretty unpopular nowadays.) I suggested he respond with "I wouldn't commit a crime," but we'll see what happens if they actually ask that question during the interview. Later one of the other 3rd grade boys, who sucks bad at English but is really awesome and funny ("kind stalker"), gave me a lecture about how he hates when HW and I speak English. HW asked him why, but he responded with Korean for "just because." So I teased him in Korean: "jealous?" He responded strongly in the affirmative. It was cute. 

This weekend has been pretty painful, unfortunately. This is the second 3-day weekend in a row, and whereas I would never complain about that in the States, I currently have no extra money and not a lot of lesson planning to do, so I'm really really bored. To give you an idea of how bored... yesterday I watched four Korean movies on the internet. (Actually, one was Japanese.) Today was a little more productive, and thankfully I'll be busy tomorrow trying to finish up everything. But yesterday morning was depressing, with three days spread out before me and nothing planned but running and reading. 

Today I sucked it up and walked 20 minutes to the local track to do my run on it, so that I could once and for all have an idea of how fast I'm actually running. It was a beautiful day-- around 70 but with a nice breeze, and the results were actually pretty amazing: 

Mile 1- 10:17

Mile 2- 10:15

Mile 3- Not sure exactly, because of a stopwatch malfunction, but by extrapolation, I have every reason to believe it would have been under 10:30. 

So I'm confident I can shoot for under 35 minutes... the actually race route has a little uphill portion that I'm sure will slow me down, but today felt so great. Now I know that I can actually run 3 miles, and even better, that I've probably been doing it for awhile! Only two more runs (and exactly 7 days) before the big race!

Finally, an update about extending: No progress on getting a definite answer, and some anti-progress. The Director of Fulbright, who told me, one-on-one at the conference, that extending for 6 months was possible, is now, apparently, telling other people it's not. And she hasn't returned my email (from a week ago). Nor has the woman under her, our immediate supervisor. That's cool, guys. Jerks. But I'm not taking no for an answer. 

Oh yeah... book reviews. Good news: I finally finished 18. Herman Melville: Moby Dick. I'm not going to bother with a review, as everything that could possibly be written about this book had already been written, but suffice it to say, I'm really glad it's over. I feel like if it were re-edited to about 200 pages, removing all the extraneous encyclopedia-like information and leaving only the plot, it might be a good read. But as it stood, it was ridiculous. Also, it's dumb as hell that they don't even start trying to kill the whale until the last 20 pages. What are you DOING, Herm? 

Today I started and finished the very slight (114 pages) 19. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own. I really liked it, surprisingly. I typically hate that kind of writing, and there were a lot of things about it that were troubling (like classism), but I thought her thesis was strong, her ideas were interesting, and she mostly got right to the point... a refreshing follow-up to Moby Dick.