Oh, Canada!

One of the windfalls of Rebecca's visit was that, flipping through the "Lonely Planet" book she got me before I left, we found the paragraph about the supermarket with the widest selection of western goods in town. After she left, I tracked it down and was delighted to find that they carry not only oatmeal and raisins (of which my parents and Rebecca had bee shipping me replenishments every few weeks) they carry...

...Canadian maple syrup (at about $50 a liter, which is only twice what I remember paying for it back in New Hampshire! Al Gore hates me right now. Kernoff's probably not too pleased, either). I returned there this weekend to actually buy a jug (I thought I could do without at first, but there is no methadone for the maple junkie). As I wandered through the aisles trying to decide if I needed anything else, I noticed that (unlike the last time I was there) they also had a supply of Tillamook cheeses (for those of you reading because you met me in New Hampshire and not named John Turner, Tillamook is the Cabot of the Pacific Northwest). It was shelved just beneath this:



I checked the ingredients list. It is what it says it is. Though, in keeping with the "eating is a non-local phenomenon" theme of the store/this post, this packet came from Spain.

time and distance

One day, during my first year at Dartmouth, I was putzing around the kitchen in my Whitman College T-shirt when my Chinese (as in, at this point, he'd been in the US for a handful of months) roommate came down the stairs. He looked at my shirt and said, "ah, you went to White Man College?" This was especially awkward, because some of us actually called it that behind its back.

This morning, as I was getting my morning coffee, Kyung Kiu noticed my Dartmouth College travel mug and commented on the seal. I started explaining it to him: "See, this is supposed to be an Indian, and here's the Bible beaming down knowledge..."

The history of Western academia is messed up.

Errata: It's also possible that I'm the one who is messed up (see the comment section)

mad/angry/confused scientist noises

For a while now, I've been intending to write a post about how I seem to be living on top of a naturally occurring Van de Graaff generator.* I mean, there's a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa, so why not? Seriously, most mornings when I get up and turn on the faucet to get a drink of water, I get shocked touching the stream of water (not the faucet fixture) to check that it's cold enough. It could be that, after years of hang-drying my clothes, I've forgotten how much static electricity driers deposit in our clothes, and, when my arm hairs all stood on end as I put on my freshly laundered running shirt this afternoon, I thought "well, duh; that must be it!" Then I remembered:

I hang-dried (hung-dried?) my running clothes last night.

???

*for those of you whose middle school science teachers sucked: a Van de Graaff generator is a contraption for generating hilarious amounts of static electricity (and then performing neat tricks like pretending your a Centauri from Babylon 5 or Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars)

Note to the galley:

My junior year at Whitman, the intercollegiate debate topic was something like "Resolved that the Federal Government should substantially change it's policy towards Indian Country in one or more of the following areas: ...." Early in the year, when we had no idea what anyone was actually going to say (beyond that it would involve Indian Country and "one or more of the following areas") someone produced a file whose index contained the following two entries:

"You say Indians are just like us: that's racist!"
"You say Indians are not like us: that's racist!"

(There was also the litany of evidence arguing that anything less specific than "Lakota" was racist/not racist). Every now and then, I worry that I'm going to cross that line on this blog. Obviously, there are some assumptions that were safe in America, but have nothing to do with the way things are done in Korea (e.g. I'm pretty sure "personal space" isn't much of a concept over here). On average, that makes me uncomfortable. I know how to live in America - I've had 28 years to figure out (note the lack of the word "perfect") the art - so any time I comment on how things are different over here, it's going to read like "things are different over here and I don't like it."

Several times since arriving here, I've ordered something I've never had before at a restaurant. It arrives. I examine it. I start eating it in a way that makes sense to me and allows me to figure out what, exactly, everything is and tastes like. Invariably, I'm eating it wrong, and the waiter/owner feels the need to point this out. Sometimes this is as unintrusive as the porridge lady pointing out that I have an empty bowl into which I can ladle my porridge (instead of eating it straight out of the big bowl with the ladle). Sometimes it involves the owner dumping the sauce that came separately with my meal onto my meal before I have decided whether or not I actually want the sauce (today's sauce had ice crystals in it - Koreans apparently aren't fans of warm noodles - so the answer was probably going to be "no thanks"). I'm sure this is somehow related to the man who helped me hoist my suitcase up the stairs in the subway station the day I first arrived here (incidentally, the exact same thing happened when I was helping Rebecca carry her luggage earlier this month). Kyung Kiu described it as a need by elders to treat every young man as if he were their son. Therefore, let's just pretend that I wrote about it and that I said something with an appropriate amount of sarcasm.

While we're talking about noodles, can I just point out that Korean noodles are long. I'm pretty sure the characteristic unit in question is the meter. They are also very thin, meaning that, when you order a bowl of noodles, you don't actually get a bowl of noodles so much as a Gordian Knot of food. Unfortunately, unlike Alexander, all you have is a spoon and chopsticks, so good luck (did I mention that they're very elastic, so teeth literally won't cut it, either?).

Finally: the noodles were blue and the title of this post was meant to make some of you think of "Note to the galley: Romulan ale no longer to be served at diplomatic functions." It probably didn't do that.

So, yeah, I guess this post is about noodles.
And my fear of making normative statements about people.

Schrodinger's meat

I'm sure you've noticed that there weren't any posts during the month of October. October was not a good month. About a week after my last post I had a total breakdown of the (to quote Boromir) "whatthefuckamIdoingheregoddammit" variety and came within a mouse-click of buying a one-way ticket back to Seattle. I obviously (or not, given that not many of you are in a place where you'd bump into me on the street if I had) didn't, but was never really comfortable with the "why." The best I could come up with was that Korea was just another obstacle (along the lines of Whitman College's first year Core and my thesis defense) erected between me and what I want by people who don't even really know me (that's not an entirely fair characterization: I loved my first year Core class). This attitude did not lend itself to engaging with the rest of the city, and I spent a lot of my free time either pretending I was still a grad student or consuming books and DVDs.

So, in summary:

I spent a lot of September being sad,

and a lot of October being angry.

Then Rebecca came and stayed for a week.

Having someone to explore Seoul with me broke my shell. In eight days, we did everything in the "Seoul" section of Lonely Planet's Korea book that I thought looked remotely interesting. We did noraebang (Korean karaoke, which Rebecca says is very similar to Japanese karaoke -- otherwise known as karaoke -- but, as I pointed out earlier, Korean culture puts a lot of effort into explaining how it is not Japanese culture). We hiked Dobongsan (Seoul's Mt. Cardigan). We saw a paper lantern festival. We found a good district for international eating (and the vegetarian buffet I was trying to find when I stumbled onto that porridge joint). We had the following experience (twice, actually), which I am going to Fox Newsify to clarify the narrative:

Scott and Rebecca sit down at a restaurant.

Scott points to what he wants on the menu, points to himself, and says "I am vegetarian" (still the only complete sentence I can say in Korean; see the whole disengaging from the city thing).

Gesticulating occurs; maybe a waiter who speaks English is called; Scott thinks he's managed to convey what he wants and what he wants removed from it.

The food comes with meat or something that looks kind of like meat and Scott can't tell what it is still in it.

Scott gets annoyed.

Rebecca reminds Scott that everyone is doing the best they can except that there's this three-foot thick solid lead language barrier standing between him and everyone.

The moral of this story is twofold:

On the small scale, I'm either going to have to keep eating the same three things over and over and over and over again, or I'm going to have accept that I can no longer control what I'm eating as perfectly as I would like to. I think I have chosen the latter. That's where the title of this post comes from. There's only meat in it if I'm absolutely 100% certain there is meat in it, in which case, it's so obvious, I can just pick it out and eat around it.

On the large scale, I think I'm also going to have to accept that, for the next two years, my life just isn't going to make sense. The things I want and the things I have chosen to do are not going to be at all related in any way that I can see and that's just the way it is.

I don't know what that means for this blog. It's probably not going to be a very good guide for anyone who ever wants to visit this city -- more engagement will happen, I'm sure, but it's no longer really a priority for me (and in less than five weeks, I'm going back to the States for three months) -- but I guess that's not really what this was ever supposed to be. I will try to do a better job of conveying to you that I have not been kidnapped and dragged north of the DMZ.

There. I've done it. I've written a post apologizing for not posting. My slide into the dustbin of digital background noise begins...

...now.