Ahh, microwaves. Those magical devices whose delicate "whhrrrrr"ing sound gently transform your cold spaghetti and meatballs from last night into a deliciously warm breakfast of champions. I was looking closer at the microwave in our dormitory and here's what I found on the pre-sets:



1) Reheat rice
2) Reheat stew
3) Reheat milk
4) Frozen pizza
5) Frozen dumplings
6) Steam egg
7) Ramen
8) Cook potatoes
9) Sterilize a nursing bottle

Glorious mix of east and west. Also seen recently - Konglish t-shirts:



Brilliant flowers on the edge of campus:



And ... my students threw me a party for teacher's day!



My camera is currently broken, which is why all of these were taken with my cell phone. I'm thinking about a Nikon or a Canon dSLR - any suggestions?

I love the joys of the mountains,
wandering completely free,
feeding a crippled body another day,
thinking thoughts that go nowhere.
Sometimes I open an old sutra,
more often I climb a stone tower
and peer down a thousand-foot cliff
or up where clouds curl around
where the windblown winter moon
looks like a lone-flying crane.

- Hanshan (Cold Mountain 寒山)

( So I took a bike trip the other weekend ... )

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Anyone else a Dune fan? I'm reading Heretics of Dune right now, it's blowing me away.

1999 was a great year for movies - American Beauty, The Matrix, and of course Fight Club. As some of you know, my senior thesis partly on Buddhist themes in Fight Club, so I was really excited to watch this: Aren't sports supposed to be substitutions for the old hunting/male dominance instincts? Sports aren't enough? I dunno though, beating each other with keyboards looks pretty sweet.

The other day, after raining in the morning, the sky cleared up dramatically and I could see that the western horizon would be almost completely clear.


So I climbed up the small mountain in the back of the university and I took some pictures of the setting sun.


I've seen the sunset on the beach a couple of times - but never from a mountain halfway across an island. Life is just astonishing sometimes.

So, my friend Guillermo (the other guy in the blue shirt, above) went back to Peru last week, and we had a little party for him. It was really good to break up the work-gym-home routine and get out for a pint.

So -- news. I am now the Activities Director for Camp Fulbright this summer in Korea! It's the job I was hoping for, and I'm really excited about it. It's the opposite of my job at CIEE - fun, creative, demanding, and nonlinear. At the same time though, going back to Korea has always been this big hypothetical well I could throw my day-to-day issues into. Yeah, I really wish I had a more comfortable bed - but why buy one, when I'm going back to Korea? Man, I really hate the metro system here in Boston - but hey, Seoul's is sweet! Now -- it's real. Don't get me wrong, I'm still really looking forward to it, but to leave my roommate and best friend, my family, Taehwa, my friends ... It's real now.

So last weekend, I went to Memphis. It was my first business trip - glamorous! Memphis, as you know, is featured in a few very famous songs - most notably "Walking in Memphis" and "Graceland" by Paul Simon. These two songs played continuously in my head pretty much the entire three days I was there. Ugh, now they're back ... dammit.

I was walking in Memphis ... walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale ...



They've got catfish on the table ...



W. C. Handy, won't you look down over me ...



I have reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland ...



But security did not see him ... they just hovered round his tomb ...



But there's a pretty little thing waiting for the King ... down in the jungle room!



[sorry, no blue suede shoes]

hd

We had something of a Saint Patrick's Day Party at work last Friday.




It was also the last day for my friends Sofi and Ximena - they're now back in Argentina. They'll be sorely missed. I think now no-one will snicker at my bad jokes.





Yes I wore my cheesy "Made in Ireland" shirt.



But I was definitely upstaged by this guy. You can't see it, but he's wearing green pants.



Thanks to Steve Hertz for the images.



Awww yea. This is every day at CIEE. ;)

Sometimes, a weekend takes a life of its own.



So Stu and I thought it would be a great idea to do a shot of rum and ragu, or rum'n'ragoo, which is what I think the kids are calling it these days. Okay, correction. I thought it would be a swell idea, and Stu knew it for the folly it was. Somehow a few months ago it became the "official drink of the apartment", simply because the name rolls quite nicely off the tongue, but nobody in the apartment had actually ever tried it. In fact, we could be the first people in the world to ever try it. Who knows. A Google search for "rum and ragu" reveals just ONE hit, a menu which serves duck and penne in a rum and ragu sauce. Well then.

Let me tell you, before you experiment at home, that I can safely say that there is NOTHING worse than a shot of rum and ragu. The gentle, familiar taste of ragu is annihilated and replaced with the dark, burning underbelly of the rum. And the ragu neutralizes the rum's spice. Plus, it's chunky. God, oh god. This is how we felt after. Yum!

Yes apparently, New England woke up and gave us some snow. And this wasn't the dry, powdery, pointless, non-school-cancelling snow. This was big mean wet lovely amazing snow. I wish I was still young enough to pretend it's coconut and eat it. Second best - orchestrate the CIEE workplace snowball fight of the century!

Todd launches a snowball at Meryl -- action shot!



Running around in the shadow of the John Hancock:



Me and Todd:



More snowball fightin'



I went back to Wheaton on Monday to check out my friend Sarah's play (amazing). She somehow managed to make it blindingly intelligent without being elitist, which is in my opinion quite hard to pull off. Met up with my buddy Adam and waxed philosophic over a beer. Being back at Wheaton makes me feel a little weird, being an alum and all. Aren't we supposed to stay in the real world?? Venturing into the Wheaton bubble is like teleporting into another dimension.

It's winter, that time of year when most animals are asleep and/or vacationing. But Boston's got its own appeal.

Stu and I decided to go on a little Fanueil Hall pub crawl for my birthday. Here we are at the start of it.


We met up with a few other friends, and checked out the Bell in Hand, the Green Dragon Inn, Trinity, and An Tain. This might be my most favorite pic of Stu ever.



My coworkers are all pretty amazing. Slava, Fabi and I at Jillian's ...



And at Mauricio's birthday party in Somerville.



It's been cold ~



And a little snowy. It's nice to be greeted by these wise faces on my walk to work every morning.



Oh - and I went to the noraebang (Korean singing room) the other night!! You never know how much you miss karaoke until you sing "Don't Stop Believin" at the top of your lungs. It was Masako's goodbye party, she's going back to Japan next week. But visiting her is a great excuse to get back to Kyoto. ;)



Today it snowed these big white puffy flakes, and I remembered why I really do love winters in New England.

I'm sick. Does blowing one's nose in the office constitute biological warfare? I hope so. Happy Valentines Day, to you and your immune systems. >:-D

Last night I dreamed that I was in an apocalyptic world where there were zombies who if they touched you, you succumbed to their phage. I went to a waterfall with my family and we were swimming but then the zombies came and I was exploring the underground caverns, and I didn't know if my family had made it. There were lots of old-style spiral staircases and stone steps, and I used these to evade the zombies, some of which looked like blue elephants. I reached an underground bunker I'm sure was inspired by the one in Lost, but this one was huge with rooms upon rooms of entertainment systems, kitchens, and a full room of rare expensive wines. I guess that's what I get for reading a wine magazine right before I fell asleep. Dan Fleming from high school was there, and he told me I could stay as long as I liked. I went up to battle the zombies and get my family, and that's when I woke up.

( On Wednesday I had a wonderful day. )



Koly, me and Joyce after way too much great Chinese food.

Last night I made this great chicken curry and brought a big vat of it into work. I think I'm becoming that "food guy". I don't know if I'm comfortable with having a "thing" at the office. You guys see that episode of The Office? I guess I just don't want to be essentialized to something trivial like that. But I guess being the guy who brings the homemade food is not bad, as these things come.

Left work early and went to Wheaton to give a presentation for the Global Ed center about life after Wheaton. I'm not really sure I was qualified to speak at all on this subject, but I kept it honest I hope. Got to see my friends Sarah and Adam for the first time in ages, and Sarah and I walked around for a while in the Wheaton woods - it was a beautiful day. Walking around campus alone after the presentation was like being in the middle of a memory. I didn't really feel like I was a part of anything, just impossibly surrounded and immersed by it in a kind of super-palpable recollection. Might have teared up a bit, but that was probably just the cold.

Little known fact - in the German version of The Office, the Jim Halpert character is named Ulf Steinke. Oof.

Right now I'm back at home, drinking Rooibos tea and typing this at my kitchen table. My parents are happy and well. And it's time for bed.

P.S. - Has anyone else noticed that there are no spiders around this year? I swear, it's been like 4 months since I've seen one. Not that I want to, but it's eerie. Do they usually hibernate through the winter? Am I going insane?

The magic of the internets continues: I can post from work!
I work at CIEE, a study and international exchange company which handles, among other things, visa sponsorship for international students coming into the States to work. That's the department in which I work.

Nope, there isn't a story there.

It's a good job, the people here have personality, and they laugh a lot, which is good because a lot of what we do is very mechanical - call this employer, update this database, refresh this spreadsheet. But sometimes things get interesting. Today we found a dead mouse on a piece of sticky mouse-trapping paper on the floor. The building has a mice problem. Last week I called a restaurant that ended up being a strip club, but they were still trying to convince me to let this poor Russian girl work there next summer. Cheap thrills, right?

Fun fact! The most common Russian female baby names, circa 1985, seem to be:
Maria
Olga
Svetlana
Yulia

My good buddy St'u recently informed me that everyone and their mom has a LiveJournal account. And I'm not about to get showed up by someone's *mom*!

Actually, I used to have one back in 2003/04. I just looked back at it. You know how sometimes you'll be looking for a book on your shelf and you'll stumble across an old notebook with some writing in it? And you open it, hoping to find some gem of naive wisdom, and you just ... cringe? Yep. I'm not linking to it.

For those of you who don't know, Boston's been abuzz this past week. Abuzz with TERROR. It's tough when Mooninites attack with lite-brites, ehh? If you're not in the loop, check this out - my favorite ATHF episode ever. Enjoy!

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - The Shaving