Miss H's weaselly hagwon

I sure picked the wrong time to try and revamp my vlog. 

It seemed safe to expect things to calm down now that it's the end of the semester. They always do. Once the frenetic rush of grading and inputting is finished, events taper off. There's half a week where students are allowed to complain about their grades and plead on bended knee for clemency, and then the grades are finalized and printed and handed in. (I just did that today, as a matter of fact.) Then, after that...nothing. If you don't have summer classes, you're a free man for two whole months. From July 2 (the end of the finalization period) until the first Monday in September, it's vacation time. 

Customarily, things calm the heck down during that period. 

But not for us. Oh no. We lead a charmed life, Miss H and I. Just a scant two weeks before I leave for Vietnam, my fiancée's school decided to pull the rug out from under us. They asked us to move out of our apartment.

I know, right? 

We were shocked, of course. We've been here a scant four months. Moreover the whole reason Miss H signed a contract with this school is so we could have this huge apartment all to ourselves. That was the agreement. Now all of a sudden the school says "You have one month to move out"? Oh no they didn't!

So we went in and talked to Miss H's immediate supervisors in person last week. They backpedaled and clarified, assuring us that they wouldn't revoke our housing completely; this was simply an expensive apartment, too expensive to have just one teacher and her pseudo-spouse living in it. They'd provide key money and rent for any other apartment, as long as said rent was ₩400,000 per month or less. According to the contract they'd signed with Miss H, they were legally obligated to do at least that much. 

There wasn't much more we could do but agree to that. I'm the moocher here. I don't work for Miss H's school, and was allowed to stay with her in this apartment for no extra money down. But it just wasn't fair of the school to kick our stilts out from under us out of the blue like this. 

Miss H and I quickly decided that there was no way we could find a new apartment, rent it, pack up this apartment, and move everything we owned in the scant ten days remaining before I departed for Vietnam. It just wasn't happening. So we went into meet her supervisors again just a couple of days later and asked them if we could stay in this apartment if I forked over my share of the rent. The supervisors told us that our place costs ₩800,000 per month for the school to rent, and I'd need to stump up half. After a little hemming and hawing and a halfhearted attempt at bargaining, I acquiesced.

But now I'm rethinking even that. If I shell out ₩400,000 per month (roughly $400), that's almost three thousand dollars I'll lose by March 2015—for no reason at all. It's money which should be used to make a security deposit on a stateside apartment, buy a car, and acquire miscellaneous housewares. Miss H and I got it in writing that no one else would be billeted with us in this place, but unfortunately we never secured the school's assurance that we'd never be charged extra rent or made to move out. The school's got us over a barrel. 

I wasn't finished yet, though. On Thursday I marched to the Itaewon Global Village Center, which is on the same floor in the same building as the international clinic where I got my travel vaccinations two weeks ago. The Global Village Center, according to its own website, "offers a variety of services to support foreigners living in the area, and we have classes and programs that help to facilitate cultural exchange and understanding between foreigners and Koreans residents." Among those services is free legal consultation. I made an appointment at 10:00 AM on Tuesday the 8th to see a lawyer. 

Here's what he said: there's nothing in the contract to prevent the school from charging us extra for this apartment. They only agreed to let this apartment to the two of us exclusively. As the lawyer put it, "It was a favor, not a promise." However, there was one spot of hope: if we had a witness to corroborate the school's agreement to let us live here at no extra charge, then we'd have a case. He advised us to get in touch with Miss H's recruiter and obtain her testimony, which I thought was a good idea. I'll keep you posted on what comes next, but...

All this would be hard enough to deal with if I wasn't leaving for Southeast Asia on July 12. That sure complicates things. It's really put the pressure on both of us. But Miss H and I really don't want to move. It's costly, it's a lot of effort, and frankly, we feel that we were promised this apartment and shouldn't have to abandon it because Miss H's school is worried about the bottom line. Moreover, after what we went through in Gwangnaru (living side-by-side in a studio apartment and sharing a twin bed and all that nonsense) we feel that we're owed a nice big apartment for our final year here in Korea. 

And now you've heard the whole story. The fight's not over yet. I'm not going to pay those crooks a single won if I can avoid it. Stay tuned. 

revamping the vlog

As you (should) already know, I'm a blogger. What some of you may not know is that I attempted, for a embarrassingly short while, to keep a vlog as well. I've linked to it a couple of times, but I try to avoid saying too much about it, because it's incomplete and poorly-kept, with overlong and badly-edited videos. It's as underdone as chicken tenders at Chili's. 

Well. 

I'd like to change that. 

I need a decent microphone and some updated video-editing skills. But once I master those, I'm going to revamp that blog of mine. 

How?

Well, since I already cover everything related to travel, cocktails, flying, and writing on this here blog, I'm going to take a different route with my YouTube channel. Oh, of course I'll put up interesting travel videos (should be plenty of those coming from Southeast Asia). Once I move back to the USA, I'll also set up a camera in the kitchen and start making video cocktail reviews instead of just text. (Perhaps once I reach Cocktail Review No. 85 or 90 or 100, whenever that may be.) And when I get back stateside I'll resume my flying career, too: specifically my quest for a single-engine commercial pilot ticket with instrument, floatplane, taildragger, and high-performance ratings. I'm sure that'll make for some interesting video fodder too. I may even need to get a GoPro...

But all that's in the future. For now, while I'm here in Korea, I can definitely do better with the vlog. 

I've been watching a lot of vlogs on YouTube lately (specifically the QiRanger, KWOW, and HowTheWorldWorks), and I love 'em to death. Here are some things that they all do well:

• they supplement their speech with text, music, and hi-def images, artfully edited into the video as a whole
• they talk about pertinent, up-to-date, and interesting subjects
• their bedside manner is engaging and fun, and their speech is practiced, fluent, and clear

I can do all that stuff, easy. Might be a little rough once I first start out, but I'll get into the swing of it. 

So what kind of topics will I talk about, then?

Something that people keep telling me I'm great at discussing in an interesting, meaningful way: history and wordplay. 

Once per week, I'm thinking, I'll do an installment called 5-Minute History, where I'll talk about some obscure and little-known topic that nonetheless had far-reaching consequences on our civilization and society. As the title suggests, these videos will be about five minutes in length. 

On certain days of the week, I'll have shorter and supplementary columns: Slang Saturdays (wherein I discuss the origin of an idiom or colloquialism) and Word Wednesdays (wherein I discuss the etymology, cultural significance, and historical context of English words). In short, I am going to create a whole new world for me and others to play around in online. And maybe learn something along the way. 

Sound boring? It won't be, trust me. 

I'm not sure when all of this will get started. My first order of business is to create a neat channel trailer for this vlog and inform everyone of its revitalization. I need to get familiar with video editing and figure out how to insert music, voice-overs, images, video clips, and so on. But you guys here on the Sententious Vaunter will be the first to know when the new-and-improved Vaunter-vlog starts up. And who knows? This might be a nice segue into the world of radio, something I do on the side that could get me hired one day. 

Stay tuned, vlogsphere. Ex Post Facto is going to get a whole lot sexier. 

Nope, even sexier than that. 

the Tumblr Accent Challenge

Have you heard about this? I saw it on YouTube a while ago—people putting up videos of themselves saying a list of words and answering questions. I thought it sounded fun, so I did it (without joining Tumblr). Watch and enjoy.

If you feel like doing this yourself, here are the rules. No cheating (though if you find a way to cheat, go ahead).

the problem with technology - a philippic

I hope you've liquored yourself up properly before clicking your way over here. This here post is yet another vitriolic op-ed. If the word 'philippic' in the title wasn't enough to scare you off, heed this final warning, go back to your pay-per-view and microwave some lasagna.

I like to think of myself as a principled man. I'll grant you that some of my principles probably aren't all that productive, or even healthy. I go out of my way to step on those extra-crunchy leaves, I write people parking citations whenever they miss the bloody white lines, and I try never to pay for my own drinks.

Diseased as my principles are, however, I stick by them. To betray them is to betray the very essence of my being.

Well, the very essence of my being is feeling a bit betrayed right now.

I read somewhere once that the philosopher Plato despised the invention of paper, alphabets, and written language. If he'd had his way, nobody would ever so much as scribble "bagels and cream cheese" on a Post-It note and tack it to the fridge.

Why?

Writing degrades the memory, he said. If people could just write stuff down, nobody would ever have to remember anything, would they? They'd just let their bloody memories go to pot.

Plato practiced what he preached. He never touched paper. The man routinely memorized verbal treatises on rhetoric (thousands of words long). He remembered the trial of his mentor Socrates verbatim, and in so doing single-handedly set the principle of stenography back by a millennium.

(If Plato were alive today, I wonder what he'd think of things like datebooks, and gingko biloba, and all those memory puzzles on the supermarket racks. Apoplexy anyone?)

I'm kind of the same way. Technology bugs me. By nature of its omniscience and accessibility, technology, as a medium, degrades the quality and uniqueness of the works it so greedily subsumes and regurgitates.

Case in point...

MUSIC

People don't enjoy music anymore; they saturate themselves with it.

My grandfather had a tradition. One night every week he'd shut himself in his den, put a record on, and listen to it, beginning to end, without interruption. My cousins and I could hear him in there, whistling along with Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins. I could almost picture him sitting in his armchair, replete with sweater, penny loafers and black socks, tapping a toe in time to the beat, his eyes closed in concentration like a marquis at the opera.

Nowadays, sitting on the subway, I find it difficult to find anyone under 30 who doesn't have a pair of earphones stuck to their head.

People listen to music everywhere: at work, at the gym, at home, in their cars, on airplanes, even when they go out on an introspective walk in the country.

I'd love to know how you're supposed to commune with nature when Rage Against the Machine is raping your eardrums.

(I don't exempt myself from these habits; read on and you will see how I, likewise, have become a member of the digital generation. Hell, you're reading this very post on the screen of a computer or a smartphone, right?)

I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy music. I'm not even saying that there's a wrong way to do it. It just irks me that, thanks to technology, music has shifted from being an occasional, introspective, evocative, enlightening treat...and has become business as usual. Nothing special. Small potatoes. Et cetera, et cetera. 

People used to look forward to live concerts for months, hoarding tickets like fragments of the Covenant. What with live-streaming video and camera phones and fiber-optics and Wi-Fi, they can push a button and tune into to U2 (Live at the Rose Bowl) from anywhere on the planet.

Whereas folks used to have a collection of ten or so prized vinyl LP records (you may want to Google the terms "record," "LP," and "vinyl"), nowadays they'll have something like ten gigabytes of music. That's hundreds and sometimes thousands of songs, any one of them accessible in an instant. You don't need to put a needle into a groove anymore; just hit a button and spin the wheel.

You could almost argue that people have too much music. People (me included) find themselves slewing wildly through their music collections, skipping song after song until they find one they haven't heard 30,000 times over. Sometimes there's too much even to fit on a single device, and said music magnate must either retain multiple MP3 players or simply rotate their library out every six months or so. (I'm talking to you, Miss H.)

Think of the way it used to be, people. If you wanted music, you had to wait for a band of strolling players to waltz through your village—or make the music yourself. It's everywhere now, all at once, in your face and as loud as possible.

I'm not exempt. I (occasionally) have my ear-buds on when I go out on walks, and my headphones are almost always glued to my cranium when I'm working on my computer. (I'm a little obsessed with LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," okay? Sue me.) But I can still appreciate the specialty of a particular group, artist, song, or album. I still buy most of my music on CDs, so, when the mood takes me, I can pop one into my stereo set, crank it up, and enjoy an entire evening listening to only one band. Crazy, huh?

When you mass-market anything and make it available at the push of a button, it loses its specialness, its rarity, its unique nature. It's not a treat anymore. It's more like...coffee. Or gasoline. Or Pop-Tarts. Just another consumable resource to help get you through your day.

Technology cheapens art. That's the crux of my argument.

LITERATURE

My biggest beef with the techno-revolution. It's screwing with my beloved books.

(Yes, this is a pathetic argument, meaning that it stems from an appeal to human emotion, rather than a logical argument appealing to rationality and common sense. Bite me.)

The Kindle^® is the bane of my existence. I know it's the wave of the future. I know e-book readers will replace printed works in a deplorably short time. I'll even acknowledge that they're a helluva lot more convenient for carrying around your reading material. But I don't like 'em. They can't replace a lovely, dog-eared, care-worn paperback with yellowing pages, coffee stains on the title page, a broken back from all those times you propped it up on its spine instead of using a bookmark, and which smells so deliciously of the wooden cases, gritty carpet, dusty counters, and sagging shelves of every used bookstore you've ever ventured into.

Sure, the Kindle^® and its ilk may do wonders for literacy. Most e-books are only about $2-$3, I hear. And my Kindle^®-owning friends tell me that they can get most of the classics for free. That's all right by me. If a device brings the best literature in the world before the eyes of the proletariat, I'm all for it. Free books for the people, I say. But I dislike the idea of the e-book reader. The primal feeling and sensual joy of reading is no more. You can't smell the binding, feel the rough edges of the paper, read the author's signature on the inside cover. You can't hold the work in your hands and wonder how many other people before you have done the same thing. You can't ostentatiously flash the cover at passersby when you want the world to know that you're an intelligent and well-read human being for reading The Brothers Karamazov. Nor can you hold a Kindle^® up in front of your face when you're sitting on the train next to somebody you really don't want to talk to. And worst of all, at the end of the day, you can't walk into your private library, sit down in a comfortable chair, and cast your eye over the familiar spines of your favorite books crowding the mahogany shelves.

Oh yeah, and books don't need batteries.

That is all.
 
AVIATION

Technology is pervasive stuff, ain't it?

I feel the need to say a little something about airplanes. Aviation has customarily been on the forefront of the techno-tsunami. That's both good and bad, as it turns out.

I had the opportunity to fly a Cirrus SR20 recently.

What's a Cirrus SR20, you ask?

Cirrus Aircraft is a Duluth-based company which prides itself on its line of advanced, user-friendly, safety-focused aircraft. Right now that line consists of two airplanes, with a third in the works: the SR20, the SR22, and the SF50. The SR20 is the basic model; the SR22 is the same airframe with a better engine; and the SF50 "Vision" is a sleek-looking VLJ, or Very Light Jet, projected to hit the market in 2012.

The circumstances which allowed me to pilot a $750,000 airplane are not important. Suffice it to say, however, that though I found the SR20 pleasantly simple to fly, I did not approve of it. The thing is soaked, sopping, steeped in technology.

You remember how I said that Cirrus prides itself on designing safe, user-friendly aircraft?

Yeah, well, they do that by analyzing accident reports, determining what most commonly causes malfunctions, and then designing aircraft that even a knee-biting dumbass could fly.

To give you an example, Cirrus's experts decided that, no matter how safe or intelligent a pilot could be, he might still forget to put the landing gear down sometimes. So they made the SR20's landing gear fixed instead of retractable.

I don't like that. I don't like it when a company assumes I'm going to do something stupid. I don't like it when they try to think for me. I don't like it when they decide that I can't be trusted with retractable landing gear and give me fixed gear just to be on the safe side.

Tish and blather. Fiddlesticks, I say.

Cirrus airplanes have a boatload of built-in fail-safes and recovery devices which are ostensibly intended to help a pilot prevent and/or recover from a dangerous situation. The most notable of these is the SR20's built-in parachute. That's right. The airplane has its own parachute. It's controlled by a red handle on the ceiling of the cockpit, over the pilot's seat. Yank that handle and a solid-fuel rocket blasts out of the airplane's roof, just behind the rear window. Straps unfurl all along the airplane's sides, the canopy deploys, and the airplane floats gently to earth at 15 mph. The aforementioned landing gear is designed to collapse in just such a way as to cushion the impact and protect the fuselage (and its passengers) from damage.

That's not all. The Cirrus SR20 has a blue "LEVEL" button in the cockpit which, when pushed, automatically returns the plane to straight-and-level flight. Let's say you're flying in IFR conditions (when you can't see outside the airplane, and are using your instruments to fly), and you get spatially disoriented. Or let's say you were flying on a clear day and you had to dodge a bird. The plane starts to go out of whack. Push that blue button and the plane quiets down, straightens up, and levels out. Bang, there you are, flying along just as if nothing ever happened.

The SR20 has built-in sensors which know when the plane is about to stall. (Remember, a stall happens when the air is hitting the wing at too severe an angle to generate lift. The plane basically stops flying and begins to fall out of the sky. In the hands of an inexperienced pilot, a bad stall can lead to a spin, rapid descent, and a big smoky hole in the ground.) These sensors simultaneously alert the pilot of a stall and tell the plane to fix it. The plane levels itself back out and recovers from the stall automatically.

The Cirrus company was also the first aircraft manufacturer to put something called a "hypoxia awareness system" into their airplanes. This is a sensor that monitors the pilot's control of the airplane above 12,500 feet. Above that altitude, without supplemental oxygen, the human body won't be able to take in enough O₂ to sustain consciousness. I've experienced this effect myself. There's lightheadedness, headache, decreased awareness, euphoria...and the blackout comes pretty soon after. So, if a Cirrus pilot flies up that high, and his oxygen system malfunctions, and he faints, and he doesn't touch the airplane controls for two minutes...then a computerized voice will ask him very loudly "Are you awake? Are you aware?"

Receiving no answer (or control inputs) the computer is then programmed to automatically take the airplane down below 12,500 feet, all the time asking "Are you awake? Are you aware?" until it gets a response.

Seems cool, right?

No. It isn't.

Look back through those last few paragraphs and you'll notice something. I used the word "automatically" way too much.

My question is this: if you're such a raging dullard that you're up above 12,500 feet with no oxygen, or flinging the airplane all over the sky trying to dodge birds, or letting yourself get stalled out, then what business do you have flying an airplane in the first place?

Okay, sure, this technology saves lives. I read somewhere that the Cirrus parachute system has saved 121 people from almost certain death. The hypoxia awareness thing sounds like it could come in handy. But look, you should be able to do all this for yourself. This technology makes it too easy for you. A pilot could get spoiled, and his skills dulled, flying in a Cirrus. And when the real emergency comes along, when the electrical system fails and he loses all that technological whizbang, how is he going to know how to handle the situation?

Cirrus is barking up the wrong tree. If anything they should be trying to find out how to make people safer, not airplanes. Last I heard, the NTSB had concluded that eighty percent of all airplane crashes, accidents, and mishaps are caused by human error. There's no way to design human stupidity out of an airframe. Cirrus won't be able to accomplish that no matter how hard they try. But they're still trying. And what they're coming up with might ultimately cause more problems than it solves.

Do you see where I'm coming from? Technology is convenient, yes, but there are things far more preferable than convenience. Skill. Talent. Romance. Sensuousness. Appreciation. Peculiarity. All the qualities which make music a treat, books a joy, and airplanes a challenge are being ingested and diluted by the unstoppable march of technological progress. I find this deplorable.

Technology has its uses. Moreover, it is a paean to the scope of innovation and the indomitable human spirit.

But does it have to take my precious books away from me?

Couldn't some of us, withal, remain happy in the Stone Age?

And now, just to prove how inescapable the thing truly is, and how immersed I myself am in it, despite all appearances to the Neo-Luddite contrary, I leave you with a song. A song synthesized with electronic instruments, mixed with digital recording equipment, distributed via laser and fiber-optic cable and data port, brought to you by a video download from a website on the Internet, appearing to you on your computer or smartphone with its LCD screens and high-fidelity sound reproduction, and packaged for you by an online personal blogging tool.

...through which the author has chosen to disseminate his anti-technology rants.

Go figure.

Even the singers are wearing those damn ear-buds...