Questions
Trip Start
Sep 24, 2005
1
5
10
Trip End
Oct 25, 2005
Fukuoka,
Japan
Thursday, October 6, 2005
I woke up on Monday morning thinking about other things I could do with my life. I thought maybe world history would work better for me. I always found world history to be an audacious and clumsy subject that dealt in too many generalities, but it's a similar field to Korean history and might not require so much travel.
I'd ponder this for the next few days, but I wouldn't have a chance to look anything up until Thursday.
Josh came by at 7AM. I was a little late in my preparations, but by 7:15 my backpack was filled with the various items I thought I might need and we set off for Japan.
We walked through Ewha Women's University and down a street torn apart by construction. The sidewalks had been pulled up and moved away. Some coarse cloth was set down upon the ground like a carpet rolled out for a beggar king. It had rained the night before and the ground was muddy beneath it.
We reached the Ewha subway and made our way to the Seoul train station with only a few line changes. Outside there were more homeless people than I had ever seen in Korea. On of them with a booger hanging just outside of his right nostril said something to me. I thought for a moment he might have been speaking in English so I stopped and leaned in closer. He repeated his phrase though, and it turned out to be (according to Josh) just begging in Korean. I shook my head and walked away. I stopped in a bank to get some cash for the journey and walked out to find an old Korean man, homeless from the look of his clothes, bellowing at the top of his lungs.
Another Tower
Everyone crowded outside of the train station ignored him and piled inside.We planned to take a train to Busan and from there a ferry to Fukuoka, Japan. Trains ran from Seoul to Busan every twenty minutes, and we bought tickets for a fast one. Upon boarding an overhead video screen boasted that the train reached speeds of over 300km per hour, and sometimes during the trip the same screen would post a speedometer while showing baseball highlights or cartoons or other such things to entertain passengers. Knight Rider with David Hasselholf even made an appearance, though I wasn't watching.
Mostly I looked out at the scenery and listened to the Dark Tower by Stephen King on CD. The Korean countryside between Seoul and Busan is hilly, heavily forested and dotted with small white shrines, probably to dead ancestors, though I can't say for sure. It's pretty and seems wild but not forbidding.
We reached Busan after about three hours and walked on foot to the ferry building about twenty minutes away. On the way we stopped at a hole in the wall restaurant and ate a good lunch. Josh bought me a beer even though I said I didn't want one. I ate a pepper that ended up being much hotter than I thought it would be. I called it a 'destroyer pepper' after my mouth was still burning about five minutes later. Josh ate one of his own on a dare and then looked like he was going to pass out. I paid the tab.
At the Busan ferry we were lucky enough to be just in time to catch the jet ferry to Fukuoka.
Bike Guy tries to take my picture and gets a movie
We spent some time getting through customs and then boarded a relatively small ship, two stories housing about eighty passengers or so. At this point I should probably explain what a jet ferry is. A jet ferry doesn't just motor through the water, it hydroplanes on what looks like three fins. It moves very quickly and is a very smooth ride as well. It got us through the Sea of Japan in a little under three hours.
On the way a main character died in the Dark Tower story.
We passed through Japanese security without much of a problem. I examined the Japanese guards in customs, and I found myself frowning in incredulity at how non-threatening they were. None of them carried a single weapon. One was middle-aged, short, fat and nervous looking, fidgeting the whole time I saw him. Another was a young, skinny, timid woman who looked like she would bolt if so much as a mouse crossed her path. I would later describe them to Josh as 'looking like sheep.' I'm not sure if that speaks well or poorly of my American thought processes.
We found the Sun Palace Hotel in Fukuoka on foot and got a double room for about $120 per night. After that we went searching for a bank. Unfortunately our trip had left us with little time to spare in terms of catching our means of transportation, and we hadn't had time to exchange currency. Josh had about $20 in Japanese yen from a previous visit, but that was all we had to go on and Japan is a very cash oriented society (as in not many places take credit cards).
We searched for over an hour and hit four different banks, trying out various ATM cards at each.
Boat
We didn't have any luck.Growing hungry, we decided to search for a place that would take credit cards. We eventually found this in the form of what I was told was a typical Japanese bar.
Inside Josh ordered me beer (again) and we ate some sashimi as well as a number of meat-on-a-stick type of dishes. I didn't care for the sashimi, but the other stuff was good. We got lucky in that respect because neither Josh nor I could read much of the menu and most of our orders were shots in the dark.
The bar had some inexpensive whiskey around, and I mixed it with a coke to make drinks. Japanese whiskey is only about ten percent alcohol and is weak stuff, but it goes down smoothly.
Josh struck up a conversation with our waitress and then extended it to a second waitress. Both of them hung around us during the times when they didn't have to serve other customers. I could say very little in Japanese, but I understood a great deal. That was basically my story when in came to using Japanese in Japan; I could catch enough words to get the gist of most conversations, but I could rarely come up with them on my own to convey a point. None the less, Josh acted as a translator and the girls talked to us about we were from, what bands we liked, how old we were, etc. It was a very good time with lots of laughing.
It did have one lull that made an impression on me though. Josh took a bathroom break for just a few minutes, and I couldn't keep the conversation going with only an elementary level of Japanese.
Bridge
The girls wandered off to do their jobs and stood around off to the side for awhile. Josh came back and he and I talked for awhile. The girls wandered back over and the party began anew, but the lull made me intensely aware of my limitations.This seems like a good time for an aside that I need to add. Josh has had three years of college level Japanese language instruction in the states as well as a year in a half of studying and working in Japan. He can speak with relative fluency after over four years of study, more than a third of it abroad, but he can barely read Japanese at all for the difficulty of Japan's use of hundreds of Chinese characters in its written language.
I point this out because seeing him has made me very weary of how long it might take me to gain fluency in a language. It also disheartened me regarding Japanese and graduate school. The foreign language test(s) for a master's or a PhD in history involves translating a document in the language into English with no aid except for a dictionary. This means that despite being able to converse freely and make complex jokes in Japanese (this later seems to be a specialty of Josh's), Josh could not pass the graduate school language test even after so much study.
Back to the story at hand, after a few hours we said our goodbyes to the girls and left the bar feeling very good and very tipsy. We searched for vitamins to prevent hangovers, but couldn't find any. We settled on ice cream instead, figuring it was the next best thing.
Buddhist Temple
We got about a third of the way back to the hotel when all of a sudden Josh said that he really needed to go to the bathroom. I told him that we weren't that far away from the hotel and he said that he couldn't wait. He began a tense, quick walk back towards the bar. I remember heckling him on the way there. I think it was some long story about the benefits of adult diapers, but two days later and minus some brain cells I can't recall too many details.
Josh made it to the bar; thereby shaming himself by running past the two girls we had spent the evening flirting with and into the bathroom. I stayed outside and finished my ice cream. After that we went home and got some sleep.
The next morning I wrote this in a notebook upon waking:
"The value of a place is in the things you learn from it and the connections you have there. A place in and of itself is just weather, architecture and language."
In the shower I thought about a scene from City Slickers with Jack Palance and Billy Crystal:
Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
I wondered what my one thing was. What was I devoted to, if I wasn't devoted to my pursuit of a history doctorate? The things that came to mind were not professions, and therefore not sustaining.
After I got ready Josh and I hailed a taxi and headed over to the Korean consulate, where Josh was going to his get his visa problem taken care of.
Busan 1
On the ride he asked me what I thought of Japan. I said that I felt more comfortable there than in Korea. I knew more of the language and could get by more easily, but it was more than that. Japan has a clean, professional quality that reminds me of the United States and puts me at ease. I also have an easier time gauging the reactions and thoughts of Japanese people than Koreans for some reason. Their body language and demeanor is more or less the same as that of Americans, whereas in Korea people have a style that makes them difficult to read.We reached the Korean consulate and Josh signed in at the front gate. While he was getting his passport taking care of I walked around the area and took photos. It was nice. A song by Audioslave called 'Doesn't Remind Me' kept running through my head as I wandered. It starts with: "I walk the streets of Japan 'till I get lost 'cause it doesn't remind me of anything."
I went through a park, over a couple of bridges and eventually came back to the consulate. Josh was still inside and I busied myself by studying a Korean phrasebook I had brought from home. I became aware that I was learning more by reading the first chapter of it, entitled 'most commonly used words and phrases', than I had in six weeks of previous Korean language study and would likely learn in ten weeks at K.L.I.
At one point a guard came up to me and asked me what I was doing there in Japanese. I was able to answer that my friend was inside. He said okay and went about his business.
Busan 2
It was a small victory, but I was happy to be able to communicate, if even just a little and at a very basic level.A few minutes later Josh came out, saying that his passport was being processed and would be ready for pickup the next day. That left us the rest of the day to go sightseeing. We ducked into a Family Mart, which is an Asian chain of convenience stores, and asked about places to see in the area. The store manager gave us good ideas, directions, and the locations of a few Family Marts in the area where we were headed. As he was explaining things to us (though mostly to Josh since he understood far, far more than I did) a woman came up to me and asked me in perfect English where I was from and was I in Japan for sightseeing. I answered her and she thanked me and went on her way.
As we left the Family Mart and headed towards a subway station, where we planned to take a train about an hour into the countryside to view a temple, we caught up to her and her two young daughters. Josh pointed out in Japanese that the elder of the two had her shoelace untied. The woman thanked him and asked us where we were going. It turned out that she was headed in the same direction and we all talked for some time, alternating between Japanese and English. I was impressed with her language skills; especially because she said that she had never studied abroad and done all of her English study at a local junior college.
She mistook me for Josh's son, something that happened a few times on this trip.
Busan Harbor Movie
Though I think the mistake is more insulting to Josh than to myself I seemed to be far more bothered by it than he was.She also informed us that there was a park and some castle ruins that I had wanted to see near where we were going. We decided to stop in there and then said our goodbyes.
On the way to the park we passed a neat looking Buddhist temple. On the other side of the street from it we found a giant orange and black bee on the ground feasting on a green stalk of something. I put my Leatherman Swiss army key chain next to it and found them to be about equal size. That would make the bee about two inches long, a true goliath of its kind. It took my examination stoically and was still munching away when we left it behind.
The park we came to was very nice. It was composed of a wooded area surrounding a lake with a series of bridged islands running through its center. The lake was filled with large coy fish and it was a nice walk. There were a lot of Japanese joggers around the lake, as well as some bikers and a few people doing Tai Chi. People seemed to be having a good time.
I always like going to parks in other countries. They're beautiful and they always seem to evoke good feelings.
After a time we came to a garden with an admissions fee. It looked like a neat place to go, so we paid the small amount of money and wandered around inside for awhile. It was very nice, though it quickly became clear that the setting was catered towards romantic dates rather than tourists.
Busan Pastels
As we circled a small pond a crane alighted from the bushes and glided to the pond's center, where it stayed a rock for awhile. I took a lot of pictures. Finally it flew further into the gardens, and from there away and out into the lake. I liked the place a lot, though Josh said that it was a little artificial for his tastes due to the paved paths and occasional gazeboed bench areas for couples. We asked directions from the garden's ticket lady to the castle ruins and she told us the way. As we left I said 'kirai desu.' Unfortunately, this means 'I hate it' in Japanese. I was trying to say 'kirei desu', which means 'it is very pretty.' Josh made me feel a bit better about the slip by telling the story of how he had once made the same mistake when being introduced to a woman's first born baby. I got a good laugh at the thought of the big foreigner coming up and saying 'I hate your baby!' to some poor Japanese woman.
We walked for a ways and made it to the ruins of an old castle. It turned out to be little more than stones, but some of it was still intact. When we first reached it I tried to climb one of its walls after saying that it didn't look very defensible with all of its hand and foot holds. I got a little bit more than halfway up when my hand dislodged a large stone that came crashing down to the pavement below. I jumped off quickly, thinking the security would come yelling at us at any moment. I needn't have worried since there wasn't any.
Josh made it to the top though.
Coy 1
On the way down I got under him so as to brace his fall if he slipped, and as I stood there something red caught my eye between the stones of the wall. It looked like a boxing glove to me, and I reached in and pulled it out after rearranging a few small stones.It turned out to be a wallet, probably a girl's from the look of it. If it had any money inside it had been taken, but there was a phone card and a large picture of Avril Lavenge, along with some odds and ends. It looked as if it had been stuffed into the wall after being stolen and looted.
I held on to it as we continued on, hoping to find a security guard to turn it in to.
As we went up deeper into the ruins it became clear that this was not exactly the historical site that I had hoped it to be. This had less to do with the lack of intact buildings than with the shanty town of homeless people that had sprung up within it. A series of makeshift blue tarp tents were set up at various locations, and we passed a number of Japanese who seemed down on their luck.
Overall the castle was a lonely and forlorn place. After not seeing a single raven up to that point we spotted a few dozen in the castle grounds, and they sent up foreboding caws in the otherwise silent courtyard. We only passed three people, all of them alone, silent and brooding. One of them was a student sitting at the castle's highest point. He didn't even react when Josh and I came up to have a look around. I guess that the ruins are a good place for thinking, or maybe the spirits of the place call out for the company of other forlorn souls.
Coy 2
The place had a bad feel to it.We left without lingering much. Not having seen any security up at the ruins and with a wallet in our possession that didn't belong to us, we found ourselves walking about twenty minutes to the nearest police station. We turned in the wallet and filled out some paper work. Josh had done this once before and had been hesitant to do it again because last time he had gotten the third degree, a lot of suspicion, and a ton of paper work to fill out for his effort. This time it was much easier. The two cops got us in and out and never looked an accusing eye in our direction. When we were done Josh asked them where we could find a good ramen shop. They broke out a large government book filled with city maps and showed us the location of what could be described as the 'ramen district'. It was about thirty minutes back the way we had come on foot, and we went on our way.
I never liked ramen in the states, but the stuff they served me at the ramen house in Fukuoka was pretty good, if in need of a little kick.
After all this we decided it was getting a bit late to head out into the countryside to see a temple. We grabbed a taxi and headed back to hang out in the room for awhile. There our conversation took an odd turn, and I saw a really dark side of Josh. I had been talking about my concerns with K.L.I. and coming to Korea, as I have to given how much it's been on my mind. Somewhere along the way Josh got lost in his own head. He said he was thirty-four, that most of his friends were married, and that time had passed him by.
Crane 1
I asked him why he had come to Korea and he said he didn't know; that honestly all that he felt like doing at the time was nothing. Despite this he said that he had waited two extra months to come to Korea because someone had asked him to, and then at the end of those two months the person had refused to explain their reasons. He also mentioned out of the blue that he had left money with someone in the United States sometime recently and that the money had disappeared with the person denying ever having it.I honestly don't know the circumstances of what happened to him just before he came out here. He wouldn't elaborate when I asked. But he became really furious while thinking about it. I gave him his space and he composed himself in time. Josh is a very outgoing guy who has the tendency to throw jokes into the middle of serious conversations, and it took me a little bit off guard to see him descend so suddenly into his dark place. He would tell me himself later that he was 'wounded' by something that happened just before he came over, but he still wouldn't explain.
That night we went out to hit another bar. It was raining lightly. We wandered for a long time. Josh kept asking me where I wanted to go, to which I would reply 'I don't know; I don't know Japan; I don't know what to look for.' None the less, he kept prodding me to make a decision to the point where I got pretty damn annoyed with him.
As all this was going on we covered a lot of ground. We passed through the red light district to a park with an old, dark Victorian house at the center of it (I joked that it was haunted that kept saying that I saw a face in the window) and then passed a one story building that had a waterfall build in from its top to a small moat that surrounded it.
Finally, tired and a bit wet, we settled in at a bar that we had already passed twice.
Crane 2
It had good food and we had a good time. We couldn't read much on the menu and in the end just pointed to random food. This turned out to be a good deal, and I got to try quail eggs wrapped in bacon and fried. They were quite tasty, like rich and soft hardboiled eggs. The natives laughed at us for ordering a very light alcoholic drink mixed with coca-cola that was a 'girly drink', so to reaffirm my manhood I took the sake we ordered as shots instead of sipping it as Josh said we were supposed to. Our conversation wandered. Josh asked me if I found a girlfriend, would I want to stay in Korea. I said yes, that would be one of the things that would keep me in the country. Later I would think about this a lot. I would wonder whether loneliness was the only thing keeping me from sticking it out in the program and everything else was something of an excuse. I would also wonder if that wasn't more than enough of a reason by itself.
Finally we headed back to the hotel. We crashed out there for awhile and watched Japanese television. The foreigners on it are very stylized. Young Caucasian males, for instance, are all ultra-expressive in body language. They remind me of Jim Carey. It makes me wonder if that's how the Japanese view Europeans and Americans.
We also came across a program that taught English language (there are a lot of these in both Japan and Korea). It was filmed in New York in an international classroom. The students came from a number of different countries, though Japan was a small majority.
Crane 3
Their professor asked them to write a sentence in English answering 'what do you think of New York?' I found their answers interesting. One described New York as 'dangerous', another 'exciting', but the word that they latched onto and was repeated by a number of different people was 'big'. One Korean man there said: "Everything in America is big. The buildings are big, the people are big, the malls are big. Everything is big." His sentiments were echoed by the class as a whole.After awhile we got to sleep.
The next morning was the deadline for a 70% refund for withdrawal from K.L.I., and I made my decision to leave the program. That is not to say that I have made my decision to leave the country, at least not yet. But I'm close enough to it that I felt getting the refund was wise, especially because I believe I can learn just as much Korean with a phrasebook and interaction with the locals as I can in class.
None the less, I felt weak about withdrawing, that I had failed myself in some way. My thoughts and emotions on the subject are complex, as you can tell I'm sure.
Josh and I tried to get an international pay phone working in the lobby so that I could call K.L.I. I spent much of the time staring off into space and thinking rather than doing much in the way of helping. In the end we didn't have any luck with it and I said that I'd call from the ferry terminal instead.
We took a taxi over to the Korean consulate to pick up Josh's visa. He said that now at least I could travel a lot, and that if I did so cheaply enough I could probably see Japan and China as well as Korea on the refunded money.
Don't Piss on the Fish
I said yeah, but in my mind and heart I wasn't so sure. It sounded good, and I'd hate to waste the opportunity. Still, my heart just isn't in it, hasn't been in this trip from the start, and I can't seem to will it to be.We picked up the visa, grabbed a few sandwiches at Family Mart (they put wasabi in the mayonnaise, which gives it a nice kick), and then took a taxi back to the ferry building. There we had the option of waiting around for a little over two hours for a jet ferry or to take a regular one. Josh said he wanted to walk around a bit on the boat, and since the regular ferry was much bigger and looked walker friendly we went with that. We bought tickets and I made my phone call to K.L.I. They said that I had to cancel in person, but that they'd remember I called and still give me the refund if I canceled the next day.
We had a small, economy cabin that was just a carpeted floor with blankets provided. We would've been sharing the space with six other people had we actually stayed in the cabin. As it was when the boat got under way were up on the topmost public deck, watching the scenery. We talked about our concerns. Josh said that he felt rootless, something that I described as being a 'plant floating in the wind', an analogy I borrowed from the Floating World of Buddhist philosophy. They use it to mean that a person has no control and nothing goes as a person wants it to, that he is a slave to the winds of happenstance and fate. There are other interpretations though, such as the Floating World means 'going along with an unsinkable disposition no matter what happens.' I shared this thought with him too, and it might have given him some small comfort.
Flowers
In the end though, we both ended up melancholy. He headed inside and I stayed up on deck.I stared out at the sea for a long time, thinking about all the possible paths before me and which one I should take now that the road that I was on no longer seemed like the right one.
I wrote a few things in my notebook:
"I recognize a lot of 'woe is me' and not a lot of action."
I was thinking about being lonely here, and it occurred to me that I had hardly even tried to alleviate that. I could've hung around outside of the International House (the dormitories for foreigners) or spent more time in the K.L.I. cafeteria. I could've gone to people who were speaking English behind me in line at the corner store, or at another table in the restaurant I frequent.
The people here are very different this time around and I can't say that they'd be very social even if I did go up to them (they haven't seemed social thus far), but I haven't tried as hard as I should have.
I also wrote:
"Loneliness is not the point, though it's been what I've been focusing on."
I thought that couldn't be the main reason for my wanting to go home. After all, I hadn't done much to try to change it, and I had gone through lonely stretches before and continued on my course. I thought about what was different about this time. Maybe I didn't much like Korea this time through. I know I didn't like the K.L.I. program. I didn't like not knowing the language and the helplessness that it caused with no Korean-American friends to help me out.
From the Jet Ferry 1
I didn't like the prospect of how much work and time it would take to learn the language.But I also thought that loneliness was what occupied me most, that even my friendship with Josh didn't do much to sooth me. I wondered if maybe I had too much baggage in that regard, if my loneliness was amplified by past scars to the point where it was nearly unbearable.
As I was thinking these thoughts (among many others) I moved away from the bench that I had been sitting on and over to the railing. There the wind screamed. The sky was stormy and the sea was dark. Occasional drops of rain pelted my cheeks. A man whom I would meet and talk to later moved up to the railing as well, stayed there for a few moments, and they retreated laughing in dismay and exclaimating to an old man whom he had sat down next to. It was hard to stand still against the wind, and if you turned your face towards the gale it blew so hard that you couldn't breathe.
I stayed there for over an hour.
I looked out over the sea and thought as the wind and the rain beat upon me, and I began to focus. Calm came over me, and a sense of determination. My thoughts were complex and difficult to repeat here, but I will relate that at the end I was saying to myself: 'I can do this. I can stay. My will is strong enough. My heart can get behind it, and I can make it do so."
Then a group of Korean girls came from below deck and moved over to the railing near me. One stuck her head out into the path of the window, gave a squeak and then ran back to her friends giggling.
From the Jet Ferry 2
After a moment of conference another came up and did the same, staying a little a longer. Then the third came and stayed a little longer still before running back. They all giggled uproariously at this, and then they went up into the line of the wind and started taking pictures one by one, laughing and playing around as I did so. At first I tried to stay focused and look out over the water, but in the end the spectacle was too funny. Many times little antics forced a smile out of me that I couldn't help, and a few times they made me laugh.It started to rain more heavily and they fled below decks. I tried to regain my focus, but couldn't. After awhile the rain became too much for me and I too headed below decks.
It's always the easiest thing in the world to focus when it's just you and the path. It's not just because there aren't any distractions, it's because the path is your only companion. It's your comfort and your friend. It's what you do. When it's just you and the road there's nothing to do but walk.
But when people walk the road with you, things change. Things get more interesting, more fun, and the path ahead of you seems less important. The destination becomes secondary to the journey.
I sat down in a chair in front of a window in doors and thought for a long time. Mostly my mind went in circles, and eventually I called it quits. I met Josh on his way up to our room, where he was going to go to sleep for awhile. He directed me towards a movie room and an arcade before heading upstairs.
I spent the next few hours playing Soul Caliber 2 in the arcade.
Fukuoka Boat Movie
It's a one on one fighting game with swords and various weapons that I have on Playstation 2 at home. I piled up 187 wins and 11 loses, placing seventh on the high score list. The game also conferred upon me the title of 'Platinum Knight of the Furies', but what that amounts to I couldn't say.As we neared Busan I went above decks to watch the scenery pass. I took a lot of pictures, most of which came out very beautifully. The man whom I had first seen brave the wind next to me earlier came up to me and asked in very broken English if I would like him to take a picture of me. I said thank you very much, and he did. I put my camera away and he tried to talk to me in English with the aid of a pocket Korean to English translator. I in turn tried to answer in the few words that I knew in Korean. At one point he started to say something in Korean and accidentally switched into Japanese. As he was shaking his head at the slip I switched to Japanese too, and we were able to trade some small amount of information. He was a Korean from Seoul who had gone to Fukuoka for a four day bike tour. Eventually Josh came up on deck and took over most of the conversation, being able to speak in both Japanese and Korean, but I was happy with my small amount of applied aptitude.
The bike guy stayed with us through customs, and I think the customs officers stopped him and asked him a few questions because he was with us. As for Josh and I, we got the eighth degree from customs. The Korean officer unpacked everything in my backpack.
Harbor
This lead to an embarrassing moment as he pulled out a box of condoms that I travel with (better safe than sorry) and spent a good twenty seconds examining it before he realized what it was. I guess he couldn't read English.Outside the bike guy took a picture with us and got my e-mail address before going on his way. It is always nice to meet such gregarious and outgoing people, though I don't think I could match their style and do what they do.
On the train ride back to Seoul another main character died in the Dark Tower.
We got back to our apartment complex late and said our goodnights. The whole time we were heading back I got a rising sense of uneasiness and dread in the pit of my stomach. I don't know what exactly causes that to happen when I'm here.
On Thursday morning I got up and began asking myself what I wanted out of life. I decided that I wanted to gain wisdom, to impart what wisdom I have, and to change the world through trickle down. I'll explain the last one, since it's something that I truly believe in. I use the example of Rosa Parks, because she's the same example that I came up with when this thought occurred to me. There were hundreds of thousands of people over countless generations that lead to Rosa Parks. Her ancestors learned and benefited from knowing others who had a positive impact on their lives. They took that influence and made it part of their being. They passed the traits they learned down to their children, who in turn passed them down to their children.
Have a Stiff Hotdog
In time all that led to Rosa Parks, who initially did nothing more than say 'no, I won't move.' This small act sent profound ripples through American society, and in the end was a spark that changed the world. When she said no, it made the lives of her ancestors and everyone who positively influenced them worthwhile. She gave them meaning, because there is a part of them, even if just a small one, in her.I believe in that. I believe that if you help to create ten good men, then they too will help create ten good men, and so on and so forth. One life lived right can make a profound difference, because if you can help inspire someone else to be great, and that makes you great as well.
I have to ask myself whether the path of a history professor is the best (and most realistic) way to do this. If it is, then I should stick it through despite the difficulty. I've got to think about it a bit more. I need to know whether the juice is worth the squeeze, or whether I should be looking for different fruit.
I looked into world history and other graduate programs. I was dismayed to find that knowing at least one foreign language was a requirement across the bar, even for those people in American history. In fact, the requirement extends even to American studies majors. I even looked up a folklore masters program in Berkeley, and that one required it. It seems that for a humanities degree there's no way to escape the foreign language requirement.
The one exception was the journalism masters program at Berkeley, but they said that the majority of their students had at least two years of working experience before joining the program.
All in all I didn't find anything that sparked my interest.
I went to K.L.I. and withdrew from the program, getting a little bit over $1,000 in refund. That turns my one week at K.L.I. into a $600 course on reading and pronouncing Korean, which is steep but not as bad as it could be under the circumstances.
Afterwards I grabbed lunch in the K.L.I. cafeteria. There a Korean-American graduate student sat down near me and we talked for a long time about various subjects. She kept repeating 'god, I can't imagine' when I explained my situation to her. She gave me her business card and told me to call her if I needed anything. So I guess people are out there if I take the time to find them.
That night I knocked on Josh's door when I was going to head out for dinner, but he wasn't around. I ate alone and thought about both going home and about buying a Korean cell phone, two contradictory thoughts.
On Friday I woke up to the rain and wrote this rather than asking myself questions. Except that I suppose that my writing is full of questions that I ask myself too.
Regards,
Jonathan
