Screen Burn

The imprint deep within
my glass soul.
An informative, yet troubled past.
Something present
and
unknown.
The ghost of heredity
pushing forward
my electronic breastbone.
Until finally,
I am confronted
by the intangible image
running through my veins.

Dostoyevsky

"...if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth."--THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
I should explain; at the present moment I am reading several books, as I am one to have a system(of sorts) for reading a few at a time, with the hopes to keep occupied and balanced between time periods and genres. My present living situation allows me time for a vigorous reading habit, and hopefully this will extend itself even more fully in the months to come. Living in Korea, one is always aware of the extremities of pro-capitalism, and I for one am always uneasy of any lopsided population, so I found it comforting and uncomfortable all the same to have read the above passage.
Heres why:

Socialism may be the answer to atheism. Especially since the socialist desire seems to point towards a question that surpasses mans infatuation with the miraculous. Dostoyevsky writes,"not to mount Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth," which by all consideration could explain the holiness of socialist activism. Not even Christians can argue the good or beauty of new schools, hospitals, and food for impoverished people, and, granted, this isn't a normality in most cases, but in its purest state the idea wrenches itself full of Christian possibilities. Pure socialism is to survive without manifestation. It is to create from the commonality of humanity. In the passage above, Dostoyevsky is writing concerning a character, Alyosha, who was so pure in heart that Dostoyevsky renders him to wanting nothing but immortality, not out of vanity, but out of hope for purity and goodness and all that encompasses God. So, to the opposite, if purity lie not in God, for he not exist, then it must lie in socialism, that which renders itself to the betterment of the human condition.
Now that I have that confusion out of my system, and now that I may have confused you to the point of utter disbelief, it is time to delve into the latter.
It is often that I have heard the terminology, "Building the Kingdom. Raising the Kingdom. Kingdom Principles...etc, etc, etc." and I have often wondered what this really meant. The Kingdom, as far as I understood it, was to represent something that illuminated one to salvation, lasted forever, was furthered through the works of the saints. This was the work of Christians in relaying the spirit of Christ to the earth. The works of Christ: caring for widows, the poor, distraught, abused, enemies, and etc...were actions of selflessness. The most revolutionary facet of the narrative of the gospels is selflessness. There is never a time when acting selfless can fail, even when you incur injury. But, here is the problem....for you. In all honesty, as much as I have prolonged these last few lines, I cannot see much distance between the socialist concept of setting up Heaven on earth and the present activism of American Christianity. (I'm sure my academic friends, my lakeland bro's, will have already read this somewhere and laugh at my tardiness. haha!!)
So, here's where I become a complete heretic (at least I'm warning you). And of course, this is not my complete and utter theology and I am writing this here as an act of processing, but it seems that Christ, by relaying this "Kingdom mentality," may in fact be appealing to the center of all humanity, not lunatic belief. This is His rendering the Holy Spirit to us. Christians struggle with questions of how people can be good and moral and have no religious makeup, and maybe the Holy Spirit is made known to all in a way foreign to the common precepts of Christianity. But, in fact, I do not believe that both can be made completely relative. I believe the activism of socialism failed in many parts due to its lack of selflessness, but I believe the same is true for the present wave of social activism in the church, because(and here's the oxymoronic part, or just moronic) capitalism has rendered us selfish and secure and so once again we will fail in spreading any purity, but rather we will be deemed useless. Unless, somehow, we find that truth lies not in building, but rather in searching for materials.
I don't know if any of that makes sense, but this is a journal entry from disillusionment.

Mud and Muck

So, I've taken the train, the fast one, and a slow one, and a couple of busses and taxis--even the subway. None of this I did alone, however. I met up with a few friends, american ones. We ventured out to the west coast of Korea to the Boryeong Mud Festival. Here we got ourselves covered in mud, which is supposedly really great for your skin(I feel much softer now), and we proceeded to run into two classmates from university, none of whom we even knew were in Korea--ridiculous!! I had a Newsies type of hat on, one that cost around $30, and while eating grilled things from the sea, which I threw up the next morning because I was sure they were trying to escape up my windpipe, a drunken Canadian demanded I sell it to him. At first this sounded ludicrous, considering I really loved this hat and I had taken much time searching for it, so I told him, "There's no amount of money you could pay me."
He said, "Oh, everything is for sale."
"I dunno; I spent a lot of time searching for this hat--its kinda sentimental."
"Ah, c'mon!! How much do you want?"
"Dude! You can go online and buy it for like 30 bucks!!"
"How much?? C'mon!!"
"Okay. Fine. How about 200,000 won?" (The equivalent of $200 US)
So the guy puts 40,000 won on the table and says he'll be back. He takes a long time. Finally, after all of us have agreed this guy is a real deutschbag and that there is no way he is really going to get the rest of the money, he comes back, saying, "Alright...How much do you want for this hat?? This sentimental hat."
I say, "200,000 won."
He says, "I'll give you 100,000 won."
"Fine. 100,000 won, plus the 40,000 on the table."
"Alright, then you got yourself a deal!"
And I walk away 140 dollars richer, but hatless.
Granted, I miss my hat...but not that much. HaHa.

Teaching has been easy and frustrating. I really have no curriculum, so I have to come up with everything on my own, which could be awesome. Koreans, however, really do not have opinions on anything of worth, so that makes things very hard. So far, most of my students really only want to talk about luxury goods or love motels(hotels that couples go to for an hour at a time, mostly because everyone here lives at home until they're, like, 30) or K-Pop (think Britney Spears, N'Sync, and T-Pain with a Korean flair).
So, as much as I like it here, it definitely has its downsides. Like, no turkey. How many Koreans does a guy have to kill for a Turkey sandwich?? Apparently, a lot. No, but seriously, the food is not all bad--just different.

Oh, and by the way, the crazy Canadian guy, who was smoking like a chimney and drinking Hite(equivalent of Budweiser) like a Nascar fan at Daytona, told me this, "Dude. Money is just paper. I'm a Buddhist. I just taught you a great lesson on material possesions. They mean nothing. I own a piece of you now, a piece of your soul. Whaddaya think about that?"
I replied, "No worries. I already sold my soul at Bible College."
HaHa.

ARRIVING

Upon arriving in Korea I was met by my recruiter, who strangely enough looked a bit like KIM JONG IL. Surprisingly, he was really cool. Although he did get us lost and it took twice as long to get to Daegu.
When I got to Daegu I was met by the manager of my school, Herald Foreign Language Institute, and immediately I got into an awkward situation which ended with a hug--not exactly the best greeting in Korea, especially with another man. I found my apartment to have been previously occupied by a schizophrenic woman with a taste for sunflowers. Luckily, they allowed me to remove the hideous wallpaper. Lets just hope that they put new wallpaper up. We'll see.
My school is located in the middle of downtown Daegu, or Jung-gu(the district), and the building also houses the largest Starbucks in Daegu, although it is extremely overpriced. In contrast, I ate a meal today that cost 9,000 won, or 9 dollars US, that included complimentary green tea, coffee, an appetizer of bread, salad, and soup, as well as an entree of Chicken Cutlet, and afterwards included more coffee and dessert. The shocking thing was that the place was so nice that in the US it would have easily cost $25 a person. So, I will be going there again. The school I work at is very large, probably 20 classrooms and a fluctuating attendance around 1500 to 2000 students. From what I understand Herald is inexpensive compared to other Hagwons, or language schools, so students come to Herald more to have fun and speak with native speakers than to have an academic type education. Most all of my students read English extremely well. They just struggle with pronunciation and articulating themselves in conversation, so my job is to lead them in some type of activity that sparks dialogue and conversation. So far I am really enjoying it. One of my students, Song, is very helpful and extremely well versed in many subjects, so we've had many good conversations thus far. Some of my students are university students and high school students, while others are people of prestige (2 are well-known doctors in Daegu, and 1 is a medical professor).
As far as the city itself....I have never been to a place with this much life. I have never felt this comfortable in a new place in all my life. It is somewhat eery.
I have more to write, but I have to meet the BIG BOSS, as he is called, and a few other teachers for dinner.

-ANNYEONGHI GASEYO