iphones making music

at the concert i went to in seoul on sunday, there was an older japanese guy who put on this performance. he was a professor somewhere and he didn't speak any english (as i discovered when i tried to talk to him after the show)...but he wrangled 20 iphones into this piece. he set them up and then had the audience participate and touch them while he was manipulating it from his computer somehow. it's pretty wonderful.

i have many adventures to speak of and many photographs and videos that document said adventure...but i am tired. i was out all day and fell asleep on the subway and on the bus. so i will now spend the rest of the night writing letters and sleeping. tomorrow, i am hoping that i will post my pictures (i went to the lotus lantern festival which took place in a picturesque buddhist monastery). i also went to a crazy experimental music concert. it takes place once a month and it was pretty phenomenal. a japanese guy made music with 20 iphones...no, not itouches...iphones...20 of them...how much would it cost to have 20 iphones? 5k? it was really great and i recorded the majority of his performance. so tomorrow.

nothing more than a green mist

so hey guys. having a bit of homesickness. i don't know why really. it's cold here, really cold...my clothes haven't dried yet from the wash. i'm on bus duty this week, so i have to wake up an hour earlier to get the kids. i still can't go to bed before midnight though. so i'm sleepy. all the time. my friends and i booked a few nights in busan for vacation. i don't really care if we do anything. i just don't want to work for a few days. i want to talk on the telephone. i want to like kimchi. i want to not be a stranger in a strange place. don't forget about me.

booking club

so i went to the booking club...but it didn't work out so hot. to refresh your memories, a booking club is a place where guys go, buy a table, and then the hosts bring girls to your table so that you can hit it off...girls go to meet guys and get treated like pieces of meat and to get free drinks. padraig and i went, but we were with our friends briana and rachel.
they didn't understand that we weren't their boyfriends even though we told them over and over. we paid 40,000w for the table, a table that seats 4. there were four of us. since we were sitting with the girls, it made it look like we were doing what we were supposed to be doing, talking to girls, so they never got dragged away and we never had any girls brought to us. it was funny. we left eventually so that the girls could meet some guys and as soon as we left they took them to some. one was apparently very good looking, but his friend was passed out drunk. it was a crazy place to be. there were light shows, dj's, bands w/choreography, and a "sexy show" in which the male dancers ultimately went down to thongs. they cater to a female audience mainly...i think that 90% of the people in that place were women...we were told that we have to go w/out girls one time...but i can't foresee that happening. i can meet girls at the grocery store or something. i'll post more pictures of this event later, i took some video as well. in the end, padraig and i went to the bar to play pool and were quickly joined by rachel and briana who told us that they didn't find what they were looking for and decided that they would settle for second best.
and this picture is just of me and irene, the best little girl in the world.

new song

a single bird - holding rabbits
i recorded this song last night. i need to add some alto recorder and some more guitars...maybe i should mix it some as well. i wrote this song last november and have only just now gotten around to recording it. oh well, hope you like it and that it doesn't make you want to shit yourself with despair.

some videos/update

the first video is of dean/doy-un. everyone says "dean-gu" and it makes me think: "a dean-gu ate my baby."

irene is my favorite kid at school. she is tiny and sweet and it is easy to throw her in the air. all the other kids were giving me flowers at the park, but she gave me a rock.

it's been a rotten week. i don't really feel like writing about it...but my job got bad again...or correction, my bosses got bad again. i woke up this morning (saturday) to get my health check at the hospital for my alien registration card. my good boss took me out to lunch for some amazing chinese food. i ate some mysterious seafood creatures that i've never seen before. one of them was a full blown squid, but it was a baby one that you could fit in the palm of your hand. one bite and mr. squid was gone.

tonight, my friends brianna and rachel want to go to a "booking club" and they want me and padraig to come as well. a booking club is a place where people go to meet each other...i guess it's for shy people, or at least that's how it was presented to me by my boss...but the guys are seated at tables and then the waiters bring girls to your table so that you can talk to them. it's like a bar or something and you (the male) buy the drinks. so girls go there to meet guys and get free drinks. padraig and i are a bit dodgy about it, but supposedly they have been before and it's fun...but they're girls, they are the reason that the boys are there, etc. so it's under consideration. if i go, i'll definitely post pictures of me with a bunch of korean girls who can't speak english.

speaking kong-lish

oh so let's see. i went to the korean gym i joined. it was the first day i could go and so i went with my friend padraig so he could show me about. my wrists still hurt from lifting the most minor objects, such as a laptop, some books, or a child...i must post pictures of the cutest little girl i've ever seen. her name is irene and she runs to me in the mornings and i get to carry her around for a bit. effing adorable. either way, i can only do the treadmill right now, which sucks because they don't seem to have an adjustable incline. also, everything's metric over here (and everywhere but america) so kilometers don't mean much to me, nor do kilos. i did find out my weight tonight at the gym though and i've lost 12 lbs since i've been here which means that i've lost 42 lbs since last summer. that sounds crazy. i don't feel like i look any different...maybe i've just lost 42 lbs of water weight...i think the fact that i live on the fourth floor of the school and have to walk flights of steps to do anything or the fact that i walk a few miles a day doesn't hurt anything...

i went to the cherry blossom festival on sunday. it was great. i saw a lot of...cherry blossoms! it was a fun day overall...went to yeouido for that, then went to itaewon to have a burger. it seems crazy i know, but there's NOWHERE you can get a burger except mcdonald's (which i have boycotted)...even outback steakhouse does not have burgers...it's not a great loss, all the beef is from australia, and is not as good as american...at least not to me. me and padraig have made a tradition of going to outback every 3 weeks or so. it's about as expensive as it is in the states, but that's still MUCH more expensive than everything else we could get. one of the waiters at outback said he had seen us at the bar we go to and was really nice. he gave us each 3 loaves of outback bread! he told us a few days later when we saw him at the bar that there were girls asking about us who thought we were cute because, get this, GIRLS IN KOREA SUPPOSEDLY GO TO OUTBACK (and other western restaurants, i imagine) TO PICK UP WESTERN GUYS. i thought that it was hilarious. for one thing, i don't think much of myself in terms of the looks department, but certainly i think most of the asian girls are terribly attractive...so maybe the combination of my insecurities and their insecurities will make for a great time in korea.

i'm getting my alien registration card soon, which means i can get a cell phone and video store membership. homeplus has dvd sales all the time...this week i bought akira kurosawa's "seven samurai," queen's "we will rock you," and a john lennon tribute concert for 2,800w each, or, a little less than 2$ each. i found out after buying "seven samurai" that the dvd's work on my laptop. i'm excited about "seven samurai" because i've never seen it all the way through.

well, i don't have time to post pictures right now...it's 12:30am, but i will tomorrow. have a good day.

friends of mine

congratulations ben and jessica!

two of my old friends are getting married today. they've dated for like 42 years or something and so it's a good thing. i can only hope that ben listens to my advice...i can only hope...

elton john and sad memories.

i played poker tonight w/the koreans again. i paid 20,000w and won 40,000w! apparently, i could've cashed out way earlier...if i would've known this before 4:30 in the morning, i would've done so when i was around 150,000w at 1:30am.=( but it was fine...i made enough to pay for my whole night out at the cost of being terribly anti-social towards the people i had met up with.

me and padraig ate at a "barbecue" place. "barbecue" in korea means that you cook something over coals and has nothing to do w/any type of sauce. tonight though, we ventured to a new one and they didn't have a picture menu so we just let the waitress pick our food...it was some sort of pork dish (of course) and THERE WERE BONES IN IT...little tiny bones. tongue is one thing, but bones are a different thing altogether...especially tiny little bones that crunch when you accidentally bite them...it became clear to us that we didn't understand something about this dish...i bit into a bone and it crunched and i gagged so hard that i nearly vomited.

on the way home from the bar, i walked because i don't even try to get cab rides anymore because they won't give them to me anyway...so it's about a 20-30 minute walk. i took the long way home and got here around 5am. i didn't see another person on the street at all. it's got a population bigger than atlanta and no one was out. it felt like a post-apocalyptic zombie movie and freaked me out. this place is bitterly alone.

i'm going to record some this weekend and then i'm going to the cherry blossom festival. the cherry blossoms only bloom for about 10 days a year and then it's gone. the trees are all gorgeous and have light pink and white flowers all over them. so i will put up a lot of pictures soon hopefully.

guam pictures

first picture: our hotel was a bit far from everything and it was a 10$ round trip cab ride. so i hung out at the hotel on friday night. i walked to the gas station and bought 2 of the nicest beers they had (rolling rock) and read a book on the balcony. it was one of my favorite recent memories.
picture 2: this is me standing in front of our island. i lied when i said i didn't meet hurley or time travel. am i or am i not wearing the perfect beach attire? it wasn't really planned. i was walking and it was like "oh, there's the beach"

picture 3: my obligatory postcard picture.
picture 4: another picture of the island. i had never seen the ocean be blue before. if you go to florida or wherever, the ocean is brown, but here it's a perfect blue. people were taking little canoes or swimming to the island because the water is especially shallow right here.

what else...i finished "god bless you mr. rosewater" a while ago. i thought the ending was phenomenal. vonnegut really knows how to pull it together sometimes. i felt so thrilled that he ended it the way he did. i started "shalimar the clown" by rushdie yesterday. it's great as usual. rushdie has yet to disappoint me, for which i am grateful. i have postcards to mail, so send me your addresses.

josh, get your plane right on time...

my co-worker vanished. no one in the hotel has seen her. she's not in her room. our flight leaves in a few hours and we have to be at the airport in advance. should i just leave her? this is open for discussion. in spite of really not wanting to hear her talk anymore, i think it would be bad for me to go back without her.

in guam

i arrived in guam last night at 1:40am. i was pulled aside by customs and questioned for about 1/2 an hour. the whole time i was thinking "don't look at my visa application...i don't want to go home"...you see, doing a visa run is illegal. you have to get it before you leave, but i didn't have that kind of time.

i was wearing a sweater and a jacket in seoul, but when i got here it was 27 degrees celsius or 80 degrees farenheit...and that was at 2am...right now, it's 90 degrees. i'm sweating like crazy... it's been so cold in korea. i was ill prepared. so i slept 4 hours and went to the consul this morning and put in all my work and they didn't even interview me. so i was very happy. i should pick up my papers this afternoon and then i have all day and tomorrow off to do whatever...but i do have a 3:20am flight back to korea on sunday morning.

i also got a haircut about 45 minutes ago. i thought "i need to get a haircut where they speak english" and it's a funny way things go, but i just walked into a salon and they gave me a korean woman who didn't really speak english...so it goes...but i'm pleased with it and i won't have to worry about it for a while, so i'm happy. what am i going to do in guam? suggestions?

bruce springsteen is the only boss i listen to

had some drama at work today. i'm not really going to go into it...but a third party spilled the beans about the drama that occurred on friday night. so we had conferences w/our bosses all day about how it wasn't okay to date co-workers...and they asked us all sorts of details which were completely inappropriate. so i'm leaving for guam in about 16 hours...i am freaking out about being rejected for a visa. i don't have much to say...

but congrats to shane on getting married (that is, if she actually did and it wasn't an april fools facebook joke).