Enefel

Another September, another NFL season begins. The NFL is one of the very few indulgences that I miss dearly from living in the U.S. It was an important part of my weekend routine: wake up Sunday, make coffee, turn on the 10 am game, relax on the couch, let the caffeine kick in, do some chores around the house as the games continued, etc. Football means nothing to the vast majority of Koreans, who are primarily interested in baseball, with progressively receding (can I say that?) interests in soccer and basketball. When I first got here I couldn’t find it anywhere and lived through nfl.com highlights.

The next season, last year, I found one place playing games over the internet, but only live. 10 am Sunday Pacific time is 2 am Korea time. That doesn’t work. But when the playoffs rolled around, a brand new foreigner bar in Haeundae got the NFL Sunday Ticket thingy. They broadcast them on a delay, showing Saturday and Sunday games the following night. An ethical code was born: If you know, don’t tell. Simple as that. And it worked. Either everyone averted their eyes from internet news for the whole day, or no one spilled the beans. I saw five playoff games in a crowded bar and didn’t know the outcomes until I watched them unfold on the screen.

As an indication of how quickly things change here, there are now three bars (at least) showing not just playoffs, but regular season games, using the same model. There’s the original in Haeundae (Sunset Lounge) and two in Kyungdae (HQ and Evas, which both opened only a few months ago). All three bars have the NFL Sunday Ticket, which is far from perfect, but for the most part it works.

Eva’s is a great bar with the best pub food in the city, so I went there for the season opener on Friday night (what was in the States the Thursday night game). There was a good crowd and the Steelers won, so I was happy. Monday night I went back at around 7 for the Sunday games. I was the only one there that early, so I got to pick the game: Chicago at Green Bay. At first, it was just me and a bartender girl, who had no clue what was going on. I taught her the best I could in simple English words. Keep the other team out of your area, move into the other team’s area. OK, now that there’s a safety. The quarterback got tackled in his goal. That’s two points. There’s a field goal, that’s three points. See that quarterback for Chicago? He keeps throwing the ball to the other team. That’s bad. What’s second and seven mean? Um… OK, they have to make 10 yards (you know yards? like a meter.) in four plays. Then they get another four chances to make another 10 yards. Oh, OK. I don’t think she got it. But she seemed mildly entertained. Every time there was a close up of a player showboating after a big defensive play she’d laugh and say “So cute,” which, in itself, was cute.

Eventually, toward the end of the game, regulars started flowing into the bar. After Aaron Rogers threw that beautiful bomb to Donald Driver to win the game, we tried to launch another one. But the site stopped working. It refused to load another game. HQ and Sunset have apparently had the same problem. From what I hear demand is higher than bandwidth supply and it’s created a logjam. Making matters worse, nfl.com doesn’t have any support, so there’s no way to get answers or solutions.

Hopefully things will get worked out, they’ll clear the tubes, and we’ll be able to see all the games we want. It’s still not the same as waking up to morning football. But what I lack in that regard, I gain in the communal aspect of enjoying it at the neighborhood pub with a few friends and regulars.

Go Steelers.

Inertia creeps

It also freezes, as in the case of this blog. I think my excuse this time is shyness. If the internet is a big party, I feel more content these days to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations than to make any effort to join in. Maybe this is a temporary mood, maybe I’ll kill this bugger off, who knows? For now, I should throw off the dust cover to see if the old girl still runs.

OK, enough metaphors. America was nice. Great to see family, great to see friends, and a fantastic week in Portland. There were quite a few unexpectedly rewarding reconnects this time, with people I haven’t seen in years. For example, hearing from a once close friend: “So that’s my last 10 years, tell me yours.”

This was my third return trip to the States, playing the dutiful expat role and enjoying it for the most part. San Francisco remains the greatest city on Earth. But if I do stay for another year after this, I’m not going back next summer. I need a break. A fourth annual trip seems both excessive and pointless. I realized halfway through that America and all that comes with it is just not that interesting when it’s obligatory. The buzz of returning diminishes more and more with each visit and the whole experience now feels a bit silly. This isn’t a slight to those I love. It’s simply that for me going to the States is not “going home.” Home is my bed, home is a sense of purpose, home is a pattern. Returning to the States is travel, it’s a holiday. And a holiday should be about having new experiences.

Now I’m back, and excited to dig into the new semester. This, more than any other, is my academic year to work hard and weigh what to do next. Things have gotten off to a rocky start and I’m flat-out depressed about the way things have started, truth be told. Well, two things really. One resulting from my own prodigious stupidity, the other from spending too much time trying to squeeze even a few drops of blood from a particular turnip.

Probably not nice to speak of people as though they were vegetables. But that’s all I’ve got right now.

Hey, this was fun. Maybe I’ll do it more often.

Dad’s brain

I’ve shifted into the mellow part of my summer in the US. I’m at my folks’ house in California’s central valley, that vast expanse of farmland that provides most of the nation with fruits, vegetables, and meat.

Right now, I’m sitting at my dad’s computer workstation, typing up this post. On the outside, my dad is a pretty mellow guy with an odd sense of humor. But inside he’s a rabid political activist with no real practical means of getting it out of his system. So he plasters the walls and bookshelves with all kinds of interesting stuff:

Begin the begin

San Francisco is full of crazy people. My hotel in North Beach is more like an apartment complex for people in transit, some in body, others in mind. With my window open I can hear a guy in an apartment across the way. He’s spent the past two days yelling. I assume he’s yelling at someone on the phone because no one else is audibly responsive. Maybe there’s no particular object of his anger. Maybe the intended receiver is simply the world at large. Clearly he’s insane, plus probably drunk. Someone owes him money. And the government isn’t to be trusted.

My arrival in the U.S. was mostly uneventful, except for some money troubles. I had forgotten my Wells Fargo debit card had expired. So I spent far too much time knifing my way through a haze of sleeplessness and 15 hours of travel to figure out how to bulk up the seven measly dollars I had in my wallet. I cashed in my leftover won for $39, and took the BART to Montgomery Street, knowing that Wells Fargo HQ was there to help me out.

Friday film links

Just a brief post here to highlight some interesting websites. I’ve been blogging quite a bit about movies lately, something I hope to do more of in the future. I’ve been particularly obsessed with Korean movies. They have the dual effect of giving me interesting stories about the country I live in while also giving me a hint of how well my language studies are progressing. (The answer to that second part: not very fast.)

I’ve also been looking at more film blogs lately. A while back I was nudged in the direction of this blog, which I finally spent some time perusing today. Her site is very nice on its own, but it also took me to some other excellent places, such as the now defunct Film Studies Journal, which has a collection of downloadable articles. I’m in research mode these days, so I’m looking forward to digging into that. Her site also led me to, of all things, the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies—specifically, an excellent article on my favorite Korean movie, A Tale of Two Sisters. And something I can’t believe I haven’t come across before: Koreanfilm.org. (While I’m at it, I should point out one more I came across by accident a few weeks back, The Foreigner’s Guide to Film Culture in Korea.)

Koreanfilm.org in particular is outstanding, with a ton of good content. Just like that, I spent the next three hours reading essays, reading reviews, researching films, and getting completely lost.

And now I see that the day’s over. Time for dinner. And then, probably, watch another Korean movie.

Acupuncture v2

My shoulder is turning into an ongoing medical experiment. There are too many previous blog posts to link to, so I won’t do that. I’ve been pretty open about how the damn thing is rotting to the core and nothing shows any hope of saving it. I did a round of physical therapy at one hospital (limited success), another round of physical therapy at another hospital (less success). I’ve taken meds (against my wishes), gotten two x-rays, diligently done exercises, stopped playing music, and tried my best to sleep only on my right side. Evil is winning over good so far.

I’ve stopped short of doing some things my doctors have recommended. I don’t want to do the cortisone injection, because it sounds like it’s more about pain relief than a cure. I don’t want to get an MRI because it’s expensive. So I haven’t gotten a conclusive diagnosis. Rotator cuff strain seems the most likely, as three different doctors have mentioned it. Bursitis is also a likely cause. The pain has shifted and evolved somewhat. The epicenter remains at a small, tender point on the front of my left shoulder. But I’ve got a host of other ailments: muscle strain from compensating, neck pain, nerve problems in the left elbow, and occasional tingling in the last two fingers of that hand. Most of the doctors and therapists say most of these things are probably not related. My body gives me a different message. I can feel something shifting around in there—muscles or tendons or whatever, swimming around, clicking, fighting for space. When I feel that, I feel it in my fingers, and I feel it in my neck. I’m not paranoid; it’s all connected.

So the new adventure in treatments is acupuncture. I’ve done a bizarre version of it before, but nothing happened. This time I wanted to go someplace with some reputation. Dong-eui Hospital has an Oriental Medicine center, which is offered with English translation. So I decided to give this a shot today. I got my blood pressure tested (110/70), met with the doctor, and then sat on a table. He showed me the needles. I, being a wimp, asked if it hurts. “Oh yes,” he said, “we have at least two or three deaths a day.” Ha ha, I laughed. Very funny.

He walked around to my left side, talking to me, and tapped my shoulder casually with the first needle. No pain, no problem. Then he did another, and I’m thinking, this is easy. Then he went in with a third, at a spot far down on the back of my shoulder, near the shoulder blade. A jolt went through me like nothing I’ve felt before. The weird thing that came to mind is that it felt like a sound reverberating around my body, but if the sound were a form of pissed off electrical energy out for revenge. It was as if this jolt, at light speed, hit my right side, then settled somewhere in my midsection. Something shuddered, my lungs or my heart, I’m not sure. I gasped from the shock and felt for a moment like I was going to fall over. He did this weird kind of vocal “coo” like I was a baby who just spit up some milk. And then he drove the damned thing further in, sending these waves of… something… inside my body.

This interplay of benign pokes with the occasional shocking one went on for the next 10 minutes or so. Then his nurse hooked the needles up to a machine and sent some voltage into me. My upper shoulder twitched aggressively. “Is this normal?” I asked. He told me it should feel weird but not hurt. I told him that this was the case. Then he left me and my quivering body alone for the next 15 minutes. A nurse came, detached the metal and electronics from my body and that was that.

The doctor gave me an exercise to try and then asked me: “Do you still feel the pain?” I thought about it. “Well, the pain seems to be better (I thought, unsure), but I feel a little stiff.” He told me to do the exercises and come back Thursday for my next session.

So here we are, in the next round of treatment. The thing I like about the idea of acupuncture is that it’s not a cure, but it helps the body cure itself. In theory, anyway. If it works, great. If not, I’m on to harder drugs, an MRI, and possibly, last on the list, surgery. I’ll give nature a shot at redemption, and save the magnetic resonance and scalpels for when I’m truly desperate.

Scotch Korean

I don’t watch TV, so I don’t know how saturated this is. But I found this commercial on ESPN.com…

That’s funny. Stupid. But funny.

Ten cinematic observations

I’ve been watching a lot of Korean movies these days. I’ve seen a dozen or so over the past couple years, but lately I’ve been watching them in bunches.

Korean movies are big on melodrama and heartbreak. Filmmakers want to take you to the heights of joy and the depths of grief all in under two hours.

If a culture can be observed, at least tangentially, through its filmmaking, then Korean cinema reveals a series of distinct and interesting patterns. These observations are based on all the movies I’ve seen, but primarily those those that I’ve watched within the past 10 days or so — A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Ji-woon), Time (Kim Ki-duk), My Little Bride (Kim Ho Jun), My Sassy Girl (Kwak Jae-yong), and Happy End (Jung Ji-woo).

So here they are: my 10 themes of Korean culture as depicted in film:

Busan online

Here it is, Busan expatriate, your new website.

It’s a brand new government-sponsored website designed to help foreigners. I spent about 15 minutes looking through it, hoping I might find some nugget of cynicism to spice up this post. But nope, nothin’. Looks like a pretty good site that does a good job covering the basics. The searchable FAQ section is excellent.

I guess my one beef with it is the same as with all Korean websites — you can’t link to individual pages. But I’m happy to see that it works in Firefox, on my Macintosh. Most sites in Korea are Windows-IE only.

Eight days of music

This sounds fantastic. An eight-day festival of international music.

The festival is set to be staged for eight days in late August at Busan Cultural Center and several other venues, with the city-run philharmonic orchestra performing curtain-raisers in collaboration with world-renowned musicians, he said.

A variety of fringe music events under consideration are a concert at Haeundae Beach, the largest summer resort in Korea; the Moonlight Music Station in Jangsan; a temple music concert at Beomeosa Temple; a Beach Music Festival at Gwangalli Beach; and Classical Music at Chungnyeol Shrine, the official said.

So, kind of a PIFF for music. If they do this right, it could be a real blast. With all their boastings of being a film center, the city organizers actually have been successful in putting Busan on the cinema map. Do the same for music, and Busan could really take off as an arts center in Asia. Everything in Korea is so Seoul-centric. This could help spread things out even more. Back it up with some business support for more studios and facilities and you could start pulling some creative jobs down here. Then everyone wouldn’t have to bolt for Seoul once they graduate college.

Someday I’ll be mayor of this town. My first order of business will be to build a massive underground parking structure in the Kyungdae area, close off all those little alleys to cars, and pave the whole area with bricks. My second order of business will be to take that newly built area kitty-corner from the Megamart in Namcheon, that vast plot of land by the canal there, and support a open-air business park with upper-scale outdoor restaurants. Eat a nice steak, listen to some live jazz, and look out at the lights of the Gwangan Bridge.

I guess that’s all Dayeon-dong. Maybe I’ll start with city council.