The Human Comedy
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Late at night again, a thought occurs to me that makes me think further and deeper about the subject of a remark . . . and somehow to mingle this with news of recent events, to bring you all up to date.
Sometimes you are glad to get out of a bizarre situation. After almost seven years here in Korea, I thought I had seen just about everything, but no! After just three weeks in the new job (at an "English Center" in Gwangju), I was fired for the first time ever!!!
And now I am sitting here, late on a Sunday night having just travelled back to my new home in Yangsan, north of Busan, from Changwon where I spent a not-entirely-satisfactory weekend trying to relax, but not really succeeding, thinking complicated thoughts because my head is full of complicated emotions due to having been caught up in a complicated situation for so long . . . thinking I must get it all out of my head. Fingers on keyboard . . .
See, I have a number of problems in my life. One of these is that I find it difficult to engage the attention of the youngest students; this was the reason I was fired from my job in Gwangju. And when I finally arrived in Yangsan, expecting something different, I was dismayed to find that it was, well, pretty much the same – in other words, they still had a first/second grade beginner class like at Gwangju. I was immediately despondent, and I am still trying to figure it all out. Even after all this time, it remains hard for me to fathom why educational institutions appear to have no observable ground plan, have an unreasonable and illogical desire to force young students who have virtually no English to speak of into a classroom with a foreigner who probably cannot speak any (or in my case, enough) Korean, and want to throw said foreigner into said classroom unreasonably early after his arrival. Yet it happens again and again, and not just to Yours Truly.
Another is my constant desire for solitude. I am an allergic person, and to a greater or lesser extent (according to circumstances) I have a loud and constant ringing in my right ear, the result of internal allergic oedema which – all my life – has made it very difficult to concentrate upon things (and for which doctors seem unable or unwilling to find a solution). Generally speaking, despite this, I may feel bored sometimes, but it is not normal for me to feel lonely. My mind is always occupied with so many things.
But I was just delving into an area of personal settings in Facebook tonight, and there's this section about "Looking for: friendship/dating/a relationship/networking", and I began to think about my "relationship" with all my lady acquaintances of late, and thinking about how difficult it would be for someone of my temperament to ease himself into a "relationship" with one of them; I really think it would be hard to live in close proximity to a person of the opposite gender for an extended length of time – although I will admit that it would be interesting to try. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly . . .
It's just that for the last few weeks, as the impending change of scene loomed ever larger and time for packing was squeezed increasingly to the very end of my brief sojourn in Gwangju and preparation had to be made for a visa hop over to Fukuoka – including actually putting almost all of my possessions in paid storage, preparatory to moving in in Yangsan – I have been so lacking in energy. Lacking sleep and rest. And yet everything in life still has to go on. It's been six months and more since I had ten free days at the start of the winter "vacation" in Miryang, and even then I couldn't relax properly because that time had to be spent preparing for my four weeks (yes, you did read that correctly, four weeks) of winter school. It seemed to me that public school life did not really offer many advantages over hagwon work; and some of the other foreigners in Miryang told me that they actually had no summer school – although in their cases, this was hardly surprising because they were peripatetic – travelling between four or more schools on a weekly basis, which probably made the kind of thing I was doing impossible. And considering that one of the prime reasons why I wanted to move to a public school in the first place was to make time to fly home some time and see my parents, I started to feel that I was wasting my time there.
Now, I won't go into the detailed mechanics of all of this. It's just that the last couple of weeks have kept me continually "on the go" with little time to rest; and I had only just arrived in Yangsan the other Wednesday when I was told that I was expected to begin working the next day – having literally only just got back from Fukuoka the day before, having been constantly on the move thereafter. And emotional involvements of any kind (and I am a very emotional person) have been unwelcome. But here we come to one of those strange moments in life when – perhaps for just a short period – you "get noticed", in this case apparently by the local female contingent (Korean, I mean, not the foreigners). I have no idea why this is happening just now, and I'm sad to say that so far there has been no real conclusion, but I would also admit that it is not entirely unwelcome. If only it would lead somewhere, it would be great; but that's the problem. I cannot understand why they want to do this, and then just disappear. And at the age of 47, to be perfectly blunt about it, having realised quite some time ago now that my days on this Earth must be numbered, I cannot stand this constant, frustrating time-wasting.
So the new week begins with a set of mixed emotions. But there was one unexpected bright spot on Friday night, when I made a brief visit to the Westin Avenue bar in Changwon (having become temporarily fed up with the IP for various reasons), and the main bar girl made an interesting comment: apparently the women who worked there all respected me because in all the time they had known me, I had never done anything to hurt any female, of any kind, on any occasion. Which now, looking back at that moment, seemed to suggest that being peacable and gentle with your ladies was not usual male foreigner behaviour; a realisation which makes me feel both highly honoured and deeply saddened at the same time.
Anyway, it's late on a Sunday night and I have been working on teaching materials all afternoon and evening since I got back from Changwon; so I guess it's time to hit the sack and try to get some sleep. And try not to be too despondent.
Andrew.
Edited June 25th, 2010.
Tags: change, elementary, Korea, living in Korea, relationships, school, South Korea, teaching
