routine change

Hello the blogsphere!

You already know that people's maudlin problem-laden blogs creep me out. Speaking for myself, posts about people's lifestyles also annoy the cocktail sauce out of me. You know what I mean—the ones about weight loss, green living and the like. Now, don't get in a twist. Hear me out. I realize that these blogs are kept for a reason. Two reasons, in fact: (A) informing readers about useful tips if they want to go green or lose the pounds, and (B) as a sort of self-policing diary for the writer. Those are good reasons. Like I said, my sense of umbrage isn't always logical.

That having been said, if you're anything like me, you're about to be annoyed.

I am pleased to announce that I have made some much-needed changes in my lifestyle. First and foremost, I am actually writing every day now.

It's true! You remember all those posts I wrote about how hard it was to establish a writing routine? How difficult it was to get into the writing mood every day? Well, I put my shoulder to the wheel and forced myself to do it. I started bringing my computer to work every day and trying to write during my breaks. It was tough at first, but it got easier. Soon, I had conditioned myself to get into the writing mood—to turn on the creativity—within seconds of opening MS Word and gazing over the pages of my manuscript.

It's an absolute blast. I've gotten over the shoal water (as Mark Twain would say) and am floating along pretty easily through the chapters that I'm adding. This manuscript has gone from twelve chapters, 296 pages and 58,404 words to twenty-one chapters, 436 pages and 90,106 words—and three of those chapters haven't even been written yet. I estimate the work's final length at 120-130,000 words...twice the size of the first draft.

Awesomeness.

And so, I've managed to overhaul the writing aspects of my life. Excellent. Nice work there, Postie. But it's not enough. There are other matters which also require my attention. As a follow-up, I've decided to focus on something that desperately needs improvement: my level of physical activity. I just read an article on the BBC which frankly disturbed me. Apparently the sedentary lifestyle—sitting around for hours and hours instead of exercising—is a killer. Literally. It zonks 5.3 million people a year, as many as do smoking-related health problems.

Yikes.

I don't want to be a statistic. I'd rather live to a ripe old age, which I'll have to if I want to publish all of the planned twenty-one books in this novel series, and continue to decry anthropic technological obsession for decades to come. Moreover, I'm sick of being doughy. I'd like to be in good enough shape to battle a charging Minotaur, hold on to a bucking Pteranodon, or outrun a zombie. One should always be ready for anything, physically and mentally.

So I've decided to make a change. A link provided within the BBC article explained that a mere 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week is just what the doctor ordered. In addition, one should do muscle-strengthening exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, or yoga two days a week.

Heck, that's nothing. I've no excuse for not doing at least that much. I don't need to be running marathons. I just need to get off my heinie.

In the manner of an annoyingly self-righteous fitness blog, I shall now tell you my new workout routine. This is less for your illumination and more for my own lack of willpower. The following will serve as a public statement, made on the record, which I must hereafter cleave to or face public denouncement.

And so, without further ado, the new era begins. I'm playing an hour or two of basketball with my fellow expats at 5 p.m. this evening in Gyeyang Park. Now that summer intensives are here, and our schedules at work have been changed from 2-10 p.m. to 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m., I have double incentive. I'll have cool evenings to exercise in for the next three weeks. I have a beat-up old bike sitting out in the corridor, which I have failed to employ on a regular basis. I shall start taking evening bike rides. When summer intensives come to an end, I'll ride my bike whenever I can, and walk 30 minutes in the mornings. I shall supplement this with push-ups and sit-ups, with which I am intimately familiar already.

I shall fear neither heat nor humidity. I shall hydrate regularly. I shall ignore all but the most life-threatening aches and pains. My will is set. Only death can break it.

If the fitness regime sticks, my finances will be the final frontier.

Postie out...

Who's the hero in this picture, the guy who sits around all day, or Race Bannon?

blurbs

I went to see The Dark Knight Rises this evening, and was only mildly annoyed with it. That must be some kind of record.

Corn actually tastes pretty good on pizza.

My novel manuscript is 411 pages (double-spaced) and clocks in at 81,476 words.

I went to the bank in my pajamas two days ago.

Somehow I'm in the middle of reading three books: The Chase by Clive Cussler, The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, and Cross the Stars by David Drake.

If I take a walk in the afternoons or make a run to Costco in the mornings, I sweat so much that I leave salt deposits on my T-shirts. It's that hot and muggy out there. This is worse than Tennessee.

Terra Nova (a sci-fi TV show, formerly on Fox) has been canceled. It'll be put out on DVD soon and will henceforth be presented as a "motion comic." I suppose I should know what that is, me being an aspiring comic book writer. But I don't.

The weirdest Google search I've ever done was for "alien draft animals"...three days ago.

Intensive courses begin at work on Tuesday. I'll be working from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., or something. For the next month. Goodbye, sleep schedule.

Sometimes I get the idea that the Koreans' cultural respect of the greater good and their belief in the insignificance of the individual are all a sham. They're all rugged individualists once they climb behind the wheel of a car. Or maybe cars are just Asian Kryptonite.

Listening to Winston Churchill speeches on YouTube gives me goosebumps.

Until tonight I had no idea what the phrase "to wit" meant.

I put one of my felt hats in the laundry last week (it got completely soaked with sweat on my last outing). It came out all limp and misshapen. I still love it.

Getting into the habit of watering houseplants every day has been tricky, but well worth it. We have little red flowers blooming constantly on the plant by the window.

They're not "pushpins," people. They're "thumbtacks." I dare you to tell me there's a difference.

These are just a few of the things occupying my mind at the moment.

so friggin' excited

You know that feeling when you've been trying and trying to get a major project out of the way, and only time and your procrastinating brain have prevented you from doing so? But you've finally bitten the bullet, taken the bull by the horns, cut the Gordian knot and (before the metaphors get completely out of hand) completed the project in one fell swoop?

Yeah, I've got that feeling.

I've finished collating my notes.

Whaddya mean, "what notes"? The notes on my novel, muttonhead! The umpteen kilobytes of Word documents and Notepad files that were laying around on my computer, unlabeled, unsorted and unorganized!

Yeah, them.

This was the first step to creating a comprehensive enchiridion (my new favorite word) for my novel series. You heard me: not just my first novel, the entire series. I'm planning the whole thing out, beginning to end—a full-blown outline. I bought a blank notebook at Homeplus, devoid even of guidelines. It's just waiting invitingly for me to fill it with scribbles, diagrams, maps, plot-lines, threads, trains of thought, brainstorming, character sketches, fictive interviews, story-planning matrices, bits of dialogue, assorted footnotes and other miscellany.

Before that, however, I had to get my house in order.

I have typed roughly 100,000+ words—30,000 more than the manuscript itself—in notes for this first book and almost every book after. (In case you were wondering, I have no idea how many books will be in this series; but with the amount of material I've got, I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20. It all depends on whether I'm a good enough writer to tease enough material out of the miasma of inchoate notions in my brain without going stale.)

Most of that material is—or was, until today—bound up in a little Windows program called Notepad. Notepad lets you type notes to yourself and save them in a simple format. I had collected, by my count, 227 of these "notes-to-self," ranging in length from a few sentences to 1,000 words. (I also have a 40,000-word document on Microsoft Word, and piles of scattered paper notes in boxes back home in California; but we won't mention them here.)

How do I know that there were exactly 227 files, you ask? Well, that's because I numbered them.

I thoughtfully labeled these notes with the letter "z" and a corresponding number in ascending order. I have no idea why. Ostensibly, I wanted them to be easy to find and refer to. The "z" prefix ensured that the novel notes would always be the last in any list (I have quite a few other notes on various topics, not all of them writing-related). That way I could find them quickly and open them.

That would have been okay, as long as I'd had less than 10 note files. But when I found myself typing "z-227" and hitting the "Save" button, I thought Something's gotta be done about this.

I love my Friday class schedule. I have only four classes, with breaks in between them all. This means three hours of classes and three hours of free time, every Friday. The amount of writing/organizing I get done on Fridays is freakin' ridiculous.

And, on this particular Friday...I finished the Great Work. I'm done collating my digital notes. I went through each and every one of the little bastards, examined their content (most of which I'd forgotten that I'd ever written), analyzed them carefully, relabeled or relocated them as necessary, then deleted the originals. There isn't anything in my files beginning with "z" anywhere. They've all been aggregated into large topic-specific files, or renamed and alphabetized.

There remains but for me to go home, get out a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil, lick the tip (if I'm feeling flippant), open my empty notebook, click on the Notepad file named "regions and story arcs," and start mapping out my complete series.

So friggin' excited...

no therapists in cyberspace

I should like to take this opportunity to announce that my blog has just passed the 100,000-view mark. Over a thousand poor suckers welcome visitors have clicked on my blog or one of its embedded links, and been ushered into my world (even though most of them only stayed for one second or less).

Having made this announcement, I want to say a few words about insecurity. Close your browser now or forever hold your peace.

Is it just me, or is every other blogger on the Internet a lonely, maudlin mess?

And by "every other" I mean fifty percent. One out of two. Half of the total (and considerably high) number.

Whereas people once sought out their friends, family members or therapists to bare their souls and get encouragement and reaffirmation, people are using this Internet thingy to do it. I've lost count of how many pessimists, downers, wet blankets, naysayers, doubters, foul-weather forecasters and sticks-in-the-mud I've run into online. I've read their blogs. I've assayed their oeuvre. It's uniformly dismal drivel. It may be well-written and literary drivel, even borderline poetic—but drivel it remains.

I'm afraid I have very little patience for other people's problems. I was never intended to be a therapist. I'm more inclined to put a pie in somebody's face to cheer them up than to bring them a cup of hot tea and give them an ear. Perhaps I'm narrow-minded. Perhaps I lack patience. Perhaps I'm just a selfish bastard.

Either way, I find myself turned off by these blogs—even those penned by close friends. I turn away in disgust, hitting the red "X" and closing my mind to their plights.

I suspect it has more to do with the way I was raised. My family's intensely private. You don't air your dirty laundry in public. You don't fish for sympathy. You internalize suffering and grief until time and experience grant you the clairvoyance and perspective to recover and move on.

(See what I did there? That was four instances of the word "and" in one sentence.)

Perhaps because my family is so private, I interpret others' emotional openness—in cyberspace and elsewhere—to be a form of indiscretion. At best, I consider this a minor annoyance at best. At worst—when bloggers bare their souls, wax poetic, talk about things like despair and love and hope and other abstract nouns—when the pathos becomes overwhelming, in other words—it strikes me as an egregious affront to my sensibilities. I promptly hit the "back" button.

Whatever the root cause, I'd like to make one thing clear: I've gained perspective. I don't think any less of people to pour out their sufferings in the blogsphere. (Not anymore, anyway.) This has gone on too long to be gauche any longer. It's mainstream. It's cool to unleash the travails of your mortal existence onto a consoling (and anonymous) audience.

It just weirds me out, that's all.

Same thing goes for Facebook updates.

the seven-month itch

I have a tendency to seed my writings—and my blog titles—with references to classic novels, well-known poems and pop culture arcana. You know, just to see if you guys are on your mental toes. And to give you food for thought, of course. And to show the world what a well-read and culturally aware fellow I am. The title of this blog post was based on a noteworthy 1955 film...do I really have to say it?

The new semester has begun at work, and I'm adjusting to new faces, new classes and a new course load. I have a fuller schedule this time around. We've lost a few teachers. So many people have departed that the very character of the academy is changing. First it was Chris, the fellow I used to watch movies with on Wednesday nights. We'd barely gotten the tradition started when he up and left for mainland Asia. His replacement is a lovely woman from Connecticut whom Miss H and I have been glad to hang around with.

A couple of our teaching assistants (young Korean adults who do odd jobs like copying, filing, and errands) have left too. One of them went off to Turkey for a few months, and the other's going back to university while he waits for his girlfriend to get done backpacking through Europe. Terrible shame—they were wonderful souls.

And now it's M&E, the head native teachers ("native" meaning "native English speaker"—they're from England). Their last day was Friday. They've been working at Avalon for the better part of five years. Their retirement was an emotional affair—they've watched many of these students grow up. They started teaching them in elementary school and ushered them up all the way to high school. Wow. I mean, I forge bonds with some of my students, but one year isn't enough to make those bonds more than transient. I've dropped out of contact with all but one of my old Geoje pupils (tell ya sorry). But M&E are leaving five years of pure history behind. I wish them luck.

All this talk of departures and new horizons has got me wondering. I used to think it was the bee's knees, living here in Korea. I felt like a seasoned world traveler. Things felt so different here—the language, the culture, the food, the whole nine yards. That was just my inexperience talking. I see that now. Any country, from Canada to Mozambique, would have qualified as an exciting travel destination as long as it wasn't U.S. soil. I just needed to be away from my homeland and discover new things. Korea was a good place to start.

Lately, though, I've begun to think that I've discovered all that Korea has to offer. I'll grant you there's a hundred things in the guidebook that I haven't seen. And a mere two or three years isn't enough to know a place, even a country as small as K-Land. But I've begun to think that this place just isn't different enough. Except for its geographical location, its language and its history, Korea is virtually indistinguishable from a Western nation—particularly the United States. It's got Internet. It's got computers and cell phones (they call them "handphones" here, but what the hell). It's got cars galore. They drive on the left side of the road, too. There's a highway system. There's traffic lights. There's skyscrapers. There's Internet cafés. There's department stores. There's name brands like Converse and Tommy Hilfiger. There's movie theaters, complete with buttered popcorn and 3D screens. There's English-language bookstores. There's McDonald's, Burger King, Quiznos, Subway, Taco Bell. They even have MTV, for Pete's sake.

I feel like my taste in travel destinations has matured, somewhat. I don't need all the comforts of home (and a stamp in my passport) to feel like a seasoned world traveler. Increasingly, I feel the need to get away from the trappings of Western civilization: television, designer clothing, fast food, six-lane boulevards, subway trains, computers, cell phones, pop music. I want to escape. I want to fly the coop. I want to lose myself in the bush, decompress by a crystal lake somewhere with a flask of whiskey and a book (a paper book, thank you very much).

Maybe I've been in the big city too long. I've lived in Bucheon for nearly five months and I still haven't gotten the chance to get away into the countryside. I've made a few trips to the DMZ, but apart from that, I haven't budged from the Seoul metropolitan area. Then again, I don't have anywhere to go. Korea does have some nice national parks, but they take ages to get to. You can't just drive for an hour or two like you can in the States, find yourself in the deserted countryside, sit down and have a picnic.

It's more than that. I don't just want to get away from the city. I want to get away from civilization itself. I've had it up to here with processed foods and noisy copy machines and American politics. I'm done; get me out of here. I want to shop at a Vietnamese market, listen to a beat-up old radio in a ramshackle bar in East Africa, take a nap under a tree in some Patagonian village. Remove myself from technology, world events. Find someplace quiet. Get off the grid. Take a hike. Move off the beaten path. Be incognito for a while.

This is actually a fairly typical phenomenon for expatriate teachers in Korea. Roughly halfway through their year-long hitch, they get itchy feet. They get restless. They get antsy. That, or they go the opposite direction, becoming lethargic, irritable, listless. The humdrum banality of their daily routine gets into their heads, and the cramped conditions on this tiny peninsula exacerbate the situation.

I'm no exception. I find myself Googling pictures of exotic, natural locales like the Atlas Mountains, Anatolia, the Hindu Kush, or Siberia. I feel anxious to be out on the road. I resent being stuck here in the city, going to work 2-10, with hardly a vacation day in sight.

S'pose I'll have to get through it somehow. I'll let you know how it goes.

Here's a tip: reading travel books doesn't help.