I don't have much time to write, but I did get my computer back. As soon as I get the operating system back online I'll write more. Compounding my writer's block is the surprising fact that the Korean teachers are incorrigible snoops and gossips. I was writing an email to a female friend when the director called me into his office next to the computer room. I minimized the message window and got up and talked in Director Kim's office for ten minutes. When I came back it was seemingly undisturbed. The next day all the Korean teachers could talk about was my "girlfriend." It was revealed to me today that the Korean teachers wait for me to go home and they jump on whatever computer I was using and check where I was surfing and what I was writing. They do this to ALL the anglo teachers.

I am pretty sure it's just curiosity, and I really don't have any problems with it because I don't do any naughty surfing and my email life is as sordid as a glass of cold water. To me, this behavior is just another manifestation of what Julie's friend Debbie calls "The Korean Logic." Koreans don't value the individual's right to privacy quite like Americans to. For example, I was taking a relaxing piss in a restaurant last weekend. Suddenly, a woman walks into the restroom, enters the stall to my right and proceeds to evacuate her bowels. As I was washing my hands, two more women and a man walked into the bathroom. The women fussed with their makeup and the man took a piss. OK, I thought. I checked the sign on my way out the door. It was a unisex bathroom. There are a lot of unisex bathrooms in Korea. The segregated restrooms one finds in the states make up a minority of restrooms in Korea.

While we're on the subject of restrooms, I might add that you are damn lucky to find a real toilet in a public restroom. Most of the time it's a porceline (sp?) hole in the floor you can flush with grippy-textured places for your feet. Sorry, but I shit in holes when I'm in the woods. This is the 21st century and yes, the sitting toilet has indeed been invented. It's really one of the great triumphs of modern ergonomics, and one comes to appreciate the simple sitting toilet more and more while trying not to lose one's balance and keel over ass-first into a Korean "toilet."

OK, enough potty humor.

The first thing I am going to do when I get back to the states is visit every single one of my middle and high school teachers, fall to my knees and beg their forgiveness for being the obnoxious little shit I was so many times during my formative years.


I made a terrible mistake during my first week of teaching here at ESS: I was nice. I was more than nice, I was downright friendly with the students, and now the children walk all over me. The beginning of the week saw me trying to stop the children from goofing off as a man might try and stop a wave with a bucket. The rest of the week has been spent trying to make up for that mistake, and most of the children I teach now downright hate me and my new mean streak. It's one thing to be mean and then soften up. It's quite another to work that equation in reverse.

Children can smell fear, and I have a natural tendency to want to be liked by everybody. In the world of teaching, such a tendency is NOT a positive survival trait. For the first week of classes I was being naturally selected out of the educational gene pool.

How does one get a class of twenty screaming Korean children who don't want to be there to shut up and learn English for 45 minutes? I'd tell you, but Mr. Ye says I have to go home now because the school is closing up. We'll save it for tomorrow, yes?