After sitting motionless, close your eyes. Our mind is analogous to a cup of muddy water. The longer you keep a cup of muddy water still, the more mud settles down and the water will be seen clearly.
Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
If you’re not taking shots, get the [expletive deleted by paternal decree] out the club.
Li’l Jon, “Shots”
I’ve gotten in the habit of taking breaks from human contact because it tends to exhaust me. My friend here Taylor sent me something to read about teaching, and one of the things it said was that what students really need their teacher to do is believe that they are brilliant, wonderful people. I tried that out and wow! It’s not just students, that attitude is pretty universally awesome to have. The problem is that it produces an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and therefore mental fatigue. So, I’ve decided that in order to be really genuinely nice to people I need to not be around them all the time.
Another thing I’ve gotten in the habit of over the past couple of months is mindfulness-based cognitive self-therapy, also known as meditation and honestly my practice is influenced a lot more by the traditional Buddhist stuff than the new, more scientific stuff so it maybe is better to use the word meditation but people make fun of me when I do that. Really though it’s great stuff and I recommend it.
I also am trying to keep up the habits of drawing and programming on a close to daily basis, which is hard to do but I find both to be oddly therapeutic activities. All of this stuff combined has led me to introduce the Personal Mental Health Day into my week, usually on the sabbath. On these days I see and talk to no one I can avoid, and do all the things that help my tired, battered mind recuperate. People tend to think this is weird and possibly a polite way to say I don’t like them, but the PMHD is a godsend.
I hear you, dear reader, asking, “Tired, battered mind? I thought you were having a good time!” Yes, I am, and it takes a toll. Life on the road has a way of getting out of hand. For example, one time I started a house party in the chamber of D.O.O.M., Ithaca, wearing a tie and ended up without even a shirt. I miss Ithaca.
Anyway, this past weekend was interesting and at the same time reasonably representative of what I’ve been up to around here. I got along quite well with my advanced students, who really needed nothing more than conversation practice, their vocabulary and formal grammar being quite good. To that end we mostly just hung out a lot in and out of class, and on Friday we went out for one last round. We started with beer pong, which they had never played before, at a bar that, impossibly, had bottles of Moosehead.
Beer pong is only fun for so long when everyone present is terrible at it. We went to a Korean bar next, of the sort that I’m not sure what to call it in English. Basically the tables are all in their own little rooms and you are pretty much left alone with your party. We had a great idea at that point: Let’s go buy some soju at the CU (convenience store) across the street and sneak it in! I should point out that this was actually a pretty terrible idea because soju was already less than a dollar per shot in the bar, but whatever, it happened. One of our students, Park Hyeok Jeon, eventually came down to “help” and put a couple of bottles of Sprite in his backpack. It became apparent as we tried to go back into the bar that Hyeok Jeon had never in his life tried to sneak anything into a bar, as he walked in with his backpack hanging open and at his side for some reason unknowable to any outside of him. And so we had our Sprite confiscated, as well as a bag of chips he turned out to be openly carrying. I really should have glanced back at him to make sure he was alright. The burdens teachers bear. Koreans really have a tremendous number of drinking games, and we had a pretty good time at the bar anyway. When we left, we decided to go to the CU again for some ice cream. As we approached, I heard, “Hey, that looks like a white guy!” I was pretty sure I was the only white guy on the street, so I looked around and spotted other white people staring at me. They turned out to be English teachers and turned out to also have friends at a club in the area, where we got in for free and also a lot of free drinks. Being white is pretty great after all. Erik and I stayed up all night, waiting out the last half hour of curfew at a smoking shelter outside the dormitory, the sky starting to brighten with dawn.
The next day we went to Seoul, and had an equally preposterous night. Seoul is really really cool, and I’ll try to do some more posts sometime capturing bits of it.
I have been forced to read this post while writing it, and have decided that the rest of today will be allocated to personal mental health maintenance. I hope everyone’s well!
