Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Yandee16's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
11:38 pm	The Seasonal Bait and Switch So, many of you may think I'm talking about work, but nay! It is in fact the next best thing to bitch about in Russia: the weather! April 1st brought a wonderful April Fool's joke from god when a sunny around 0(celsius) end of March turned into a snowstorm frozen beginning of February. Fortunately, April warmed up, but I was still reticent to believe spring had come. Until, I saw Russian workers everywhere repainting everything, and I thought to myself, "Yes, the yearly spring repairs have begun. It must be for real the Russians are acting like it is spring." But it snowed this morning and was freaking cold after being sunny and like 5 degrees all week until today! I even almost made an lj post about how you know spring has come in Russia when all the repairs and repainting starts. But I have been cruelly fooled again =( I saw pictures of myself today on facebook wearing shorts, and I was actually surprised to remember that I have shorts. Work is going better. I have done a couple things to impress the central administration recently, and they have actually offered to move me to a new school when the hours open up for it which should be nice. Been busy working a bunch of overtime the past few weeks as well. Ben's birthday was last weekend, and we had dericious Indian food and then went to a club that was right near. But Ben left early because he foolishly didn't eat all day until dinner and then gorged himself, which, unsurprisingly, led to him feeling sick. Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Hercules & Love Affair - Athene (Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
11:07 pm	On Workplace Efficiency and Reliability So, I know I did not post these stories on lj, but long story short, in December with my job I had bunch of problems that I needed their help fixing, which they are contractually obligated to help me fix, which they were colossally slow and useless about fixing. Which convinced me that despite their good reputation they had recently become virtually useless and exceedingly unreliable. Including getting stuck in the US for a week longer than planned and having to pay out of my own pocket to reschedule a plane flight thanks to their mistake. As the weeks have gone by with reliably weekly complaint letters from the owner of my school(or the branch school of the parent company, more accurately) to my mentor about me, and thus a weekly letter from my mentor to me about needing to have a meeting to talk about what was up with this complaint, I have finally sort of worked through frustration to truly Camus-esque acceptance of absurdism which has given me the proper perspective to change my opinion about the reliability and efficiency of the parent company I work for. They are exceedingly reliable. I had simply misunderstood their goal. I had naively assumed it was to help their employees work and comfortably integrate themselves into a Moscow lifestyle; when in fact, it is far more clearly to lash at the souls and strip the professionalism from even the most experienced teacher(which I certainly am not) in an effort to boost profits to lesson the blow on the company owner's net worth due to the flagging profitability of his other business ventures. Having made this realization my path is clear, but sadly would be wildly unwise to post here in case work reads this blog and somehow connects it to me as life in Korea proved can in fact happen(but thankfully not to me in said case). But despair not! Upon the very moment I can speak of my austere plan without for of repercussions(read: unemployment) I will share them with the world. Current Mood: cynical Current Music: Royksopp - Happy Up Here (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
11:52 am	Something I Have Noticed So this is not a problem limited to my friends, I see it almost everywhere and in every form of media. But I think the people I hang out with are a good microcosm and representative example of it: Like any good group of university educated, pseudo-intellectuals on the run from real responsibility and our adult lives we like to talk about serious, intellectual issues like politics and philosophy. But I too often see the people around me reducing the arguments to a simple right and wrong dichotomy. But this seems patently ridiculous, in any large, complex issue(or system for that matter) right and wrong or good and bad become erroneous terms. We should only be speaking of better and worse because no course of action will be wholly good or wholly bad in its effects. An example: discussing how to reduce the economic woes that have befallen the world. Almost everyone I have ever heard, in person or in print or TV, discuss the issue of the current bailout plan in American reduces it to one of two things: the panacea or insta-fascism. Why? It seems that by reducing our discourse to this sort of false dichotomy limits the intelligence of any conversation on it and dooms us to fail to make any meaningful progress in solving problems. Anywho, just thought I would rant about a logical fallacy I too commonly see when people argue. For my birthday a few of my students gave me like a journal-esque thing, so I have been jotting notes in it on the metro. I am pondering simply transcribing some of my scrawl to livejournal in place of my usual, "Went here and here and here with friends: got drunk," sort of entry detailing my debaucheries. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Fever Ray - Triangle Walks (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 20th, 2009
3:36 pm	Internet is fixed! And it is sad how much better I already feel for it. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Clor - Goodbye (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
10:39 am	A Worrying Trend As my internet has experienced various periods of extended broken-ness which forces me to rely on a stolen wireless connection which is good for little more than chatting and checking e-mail, I have come to a worrying realization. I do not cope well with not having a good internet connection. As the period without being able to do things like stream TV or play WoW continue, I find myself increasingly irritable and frustrated with things that have nothing at all to do with my internet. I will admit I think a large part of the frustration is actually with work for being so god damn incompetent about helping us out here like we are effectively paying them for; even though, I am not surprised anymore by it, I am still frustrated apparently. In other news I saw Slumdog Millionaire yesterday, in English! It was really, really fun. I enjoyed it a lot. Friday night I taught Ben how to snowboard which was so-so. The runs around Moscow are all sad sad sad =( Saturday was a birthday party which was fun, now it is Monday and back to work =/ Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: This Will Destroy You (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
10:11 am	A Quarter Century in Review. . . postponed So, last week was my 25th birthday, and I recall having something actually intelligent to write about it, but that has been blown out of my head by having to deal with stupid crap. First was finding out that the people who live below us have reported us to our landlord for being loud and such. If it had been shortly after the glam rock party I would have admitted we had been pretty loud, but their harassment of us for, and I am not even kidding, walking around our flat too loudly started two weeks ago. They routinely come up on weeknights within 10 minutes of Ben and I getting home from work screaming at us about making too much noise when we are doing completely reasonable things like. . . the dishes or making dinner or watching TV. Normally I would not mind just telling some crazy Russians to go away, but they have called the police on a few occasions. Fortunately, so far the police have been as sick of their insanity as Ben and I are and just ask for our documents and leave, but I feel like eventually we will get some cops who are as xenophobic as our neighbors and have some issues. While I am not proficient enough in Russian to really be able to effectively deal with the police, I am competent enough to understand that our neighbors biggest complaint is that 'Они Американцы'(they're Americans) and not that we're making too much noise. Second is that our internet has stopped working again. It went down on Wednesday while I was at work and was not working Thursday morning, so I thought perhaps the time I had paid for was up and it was time to go put more money on the account. Which I did, and it worked again on Friday and Saturday. And then on Saturday night it went down again and has not come back up since. I got in touch with work about it, and in shockingly quick fashion, they got back to me to inform that I owed 20 more rubles than I had paid last Thursday(no clue what the numbers involved are to lead this to be true) but I paid 100 more rubles on to it yesterday, and it is still not working. I think this time the problem is in the actual network set up as we use this weird like modem/wireless router in one thing, and since putting money back on my account yesterday the network is suddenly unsecure which it never was before. I have tried going into the modem and re-setting up a new network, but I need login and passwords for it which I don't have. Woo hopefully someone can get down here and fix it soon so that I can stop using weak, stolen wifi. So yeah, meant to post something insightful reflecting on life so far, but got distracted by stupid crap. Otherwise my weekend was actually fun. Had a birthday party, some poker, a night on the town, a friend's birthday party, and Watchmen(which was dubbed so understanding was not 100% =/). Current Mood: blah Current Music: Beirut - "No Dice" (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
2:48 pm	I suck at poker So we had a poker night at my apartment last night which turned out well for the most part, except that the guy who won was a terrible player. This is not to say that I am any good at poker, but I have some sense of the odds and strategy of the game. This guy was just betting like a retard, but he kept getting a huge win on the river(last card shown). Which was so damn frustrating! The first two times someone called his bluff, he went from having a whole lot of crap to a flush on the last freaking card, which then put him in such a dominant chip position he could continue to bet like a retard and rely on his outrageous luck to keep him ahead. By my count, by the end of the night he had won no less than 5 hands by a huge pick up on the river. Frustrating! Even more frustrating is that he was a complete douche about it, but at the end of the night he drunkenly lost all his winnings to my room-mate by betting on arm wrestling. Which is a particularly foolish proposition when a slightly tubby Russian guy is betting against my roommate who is 6'6" and 220 lbs and about as fat as me. So I suppose vindication there. The party was fun otherwise, especially when I just turned the Wii on to play WiiSports with the people who were knocked out after we all get sick of wanker dudes antics. Work continues to go; I only have on class I don't really like, and that class finishes in two weeks anyway. I also have my foot in the door to start teaching morning intensive classes at one of the central schools which would be nice as I might be able to shift towards more normal hours of work. I need to get back to the gym regularly, but I am just so bad at effectively using my time before work. Which would not be a problem except the vast majority of my free time is before work now, so I just sit around at home doofing around and wasting all my time being unproductive. Anywho, there is another update for folks, I believe it is time for a nap. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Jason Isabell and the Unit 400 - Cigarettes and Wine (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
11:19 am	Not sure why this inspired me to return. . . So last year in Korea a friend asked me if I had ever woken up feeling like a caricature of myself, but being the egotistical, narcissistic wanker that I am, I of course responded that, "No, not really, I hadn't." Well, the moment has come to eat my own words. This Monday I woke up and did indeed feel like a caricature of myself. This weekend I basically devolved into some hideous, alcohol fueled, feral creature of hedonism. A late Friday night is not uncommon, nor are both late Friday and Saturday nights. The truly ridiculous part is that both Saturday day and Sunday day I decided hanging out at a bar with some friends would be a good idea, oh yes, and a Sunday night late nighter house party because Monday was a holiday. By the time I woke up on Monday with the second worst hang over of my life, I found myself asking myself(this is quite a sort of Russian phrase) who the hell had I become that any of the decisions I made, especially as they became increasingly imprudent, had seemed like good ones at the time to me. As the hang over has passed and feeling like a normal, physically healthy human being has returned also has the feeling that last weekend was a colossal waste to the dregs of hedonism and that the person who made those decisions must clearly be kept separate from the person sitting here typing today. I guess this sort of inspired me to post at this journal again for a few reasons 1) I needed to kind of vent about this sort of bizarre, alcohol induced existential conundrum 2) I needed to chronicle my feelings on the matter in case I am ever, for any reason tempted to think this sort of bender is anything but a terrible idea again and 3) when I have personal crises I tend to resolve them by returning to where I am most comfortable with myself, which is nerd-dom. Anywho, I suppose just thank god that is over, and may it serve as a reminder to never do something stupid like it again for a good long time. Current Mood: quixotic Current Music: Tilly and the Wall - Pot Kettle Black (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
12:06 am	First it giveth than it taketh away So good news! Only one week left in the CELTA course. I went to a cool concert last night with a Russian friend who seems pretty hip to the local music scene in Moscow. Huzzah! Bad news =( Said friend really has a crush on me which I do not return which could potentially get awkward. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Everything is Made in China (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
12:46 pm	How is Moscow? I don't really know! I basically live in the school where I'm taking my CELTA course at the moment. I occasionally go out and get dinner with the two Brits in my course and on the weekends my flat mate, and I have been trying to get out more. Last night, however, we did go do stuff. It was the last night of our practice teaching course with the elementary students so we(me and the Brits) went out with a bunch of them for drinks after class. The night was a great success, and I think I've met some Russian friends already so huzzah! The really crazy thing about the night though happened on the way home. We were a few stops from our home way in the boonies of southern Moscow when our train just stops in the tunnel. We sit around for about 15 minutes before a police officer comes through and ushers us towards the front of the train where we realize that the first car of the train has reached a station and we can get out there. At which point we see why the train had stopped: some guy had ended up on the train tracks and was trying to climb out when the train came into the station. So everyone got a lovely view of the top half of a dead guy as we left the train. It was a properly fucked up way to end an otherwise amazing evening. Current Mood: weird Current Music: MGMT - Kids (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
5:44 am	Home? I'm back in the states; although, it feels like I should describe my status here as visiting home. Which seems like an odd sort of statement to make. 25 hours in planes and airports, 3 transfers, 3 trips through security already had me questioning my choice to return to the states >.> Managed to go to sleep at midnight but woke up with rocking back pain at 5:30. Hopefully, the pain killers will kick in soon, and I can go back to sleep for another couple hours. Current Mood: sore Current Music: Belle & Sebastian - "Christmas Time/Santa Clause" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
8:11 am	Finishy I am finishy with Korea. All my stuff is packed up and gone and all my finances are in order to be sent to my American bank account. I am now in Bangkok and will be in Thailand for a week and a half. It feels pretty good to be done. Current Mood: accomplished (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
7:49 am	A Few Days Late So my school ended up compromising with me and moved remedial English for volleyball players a week forward so I still get my vacation time. Huzzah! You might think to yourself, "But Chris, you were full of so much anger and so sure that you were going to have to have a long dragged out fight with your school. What happened?" To which I say: I don't know. If anyone else had been in the same meeting I had when I voiced my complaints; I believe they too would have been 99% sure that they were going to get screwed, but hey the Korean mind is a mysterious thing. Although, in my cynical moments, I just think it was the hanging threat of having me talk to the city office that changed their minds. This actually happened a few days ago, but I've spent the last four days in a haze as I pickle my liver with soju =/ The occasions being the last men's club dinner with my male coworkers and mud fest. Current Mood: calm (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
5:04 pm	Lesson Learned Never ever make a spoken agreement with your employer. Get everything in writing first. For two months now I have been bugging my school about summer camp and talking with them about what work I would have to do before leaving so that I could make my plans for August. For two months they have led me to believe I have 12 days of vacation time left and would be done by X day in August. For two months I have told my parents, "I am done on such and such a day, so this day would be a good day to arrive, and this would be a good day to leave for Thailand." Today, my school informed me that three days off that they gave me in February at which time they in no way shape or form mentioned they were counting against my paid vacation days were in fact paid vacation despite my not agreeing to it at the time. The implication of this is that I am now expected to work a one week camp at my school teaching the volleyball team English for 3 hours a day in the afternoon for the week my parents will be in Seoul. Oh yeah, and I'm supposed to be at work at the same time as my flight to Thailand on the last Friday. When I complained and said, "I think it is unfair that you are counting those as paid vacation when you did not tell me you were because that knowledge would have changed my decision three months ago, and that really it isn't even about losing three days pay. It is that I have already made plans that hinge around me having this time off because you said I would and now you are changing that on me, and it is too late for me to change my plans." They just looked at me like I was being completely ridiculous and selfish. So fuck them. They owe me 11 sick days; I wonder if they can guess when at least three of them will be. The sad thing is that I thought I had a good relationship with my school, and I really like a lot of my coworkers and feel well-liked. And the only way for me to get out of this situation without pretty much guaranteeing I stomp all over that is to bend over and take this which is basically impossible as I'm not willing to miss a plane for my relationship with my school. So regardless of whether the city office intervenes or not on my behalf; my school will be pissed at me. If they do, then my administration loses face and everyone is mad at me for that. If they do not, then I simply bail out in the middle of this camp and really screw my school over which pisses them off and likely ruins the reputation of foreigners at the school, which is tragic, but still not a reason to let them walk over me like this. Current Mood: pissed off (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
11:52 pm	Going to Moscow So I have now officially been accepted into a CELTA program in Moscow which starts September 15. So huzzah, at least, that is out of the way =) Current Mood: accomplished (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
4:48 pm	The 8000 won Beer Combo Dear Korea, Your faults may be many and profound, but all is redeemed and you join the proud ranks of those best countries in the world for your 8000 won beer combo. For a mere $8 at most movie theatres in Korea, you can get 2 pints of beer and caramel popcorn. Which is pure awesome. Get Smart was pretty solid to boot. Current Music: Chris Tart - Love the One You're With (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
10:39 pm	I can't think of a name for this post! But the last few days have rocked! I went swing dancing on Sunday night with a friend of mine, and I'm terrible! It was still a blast though; I just wish I could throttle the person who thought doing a 3 beat dance to 4/4 music was a good idea. Anywho, Amy wants to go swing dancing again, so I'll probably be doing that on a regular basis. Apparently, it is in fact true, that when it rains it pours because I got a text message from someone about break dancing in Seoul. I had left my number on waaayyyyy back in October and someone just texted me last weekend; which inspired me to go check some of the bboy forums I'm on, and there is a wealth of information about break dancing in Seoul suddenly on them. So here's hoping the next couple weeks will see the return of break dancing in my life. Finally, I finally have a working debit card again! Which, for better or worse, means I'm back on WoW! It does not, however, mean that I have money on my skype account because skype doesn't play nicely with credit cards. Now to figure out how to call the anti-fraud people at my bank back in America to inform them that it was in fact me trying to make charges to my card via skype at 3 am Mountain time. I'm really tired tonight for some reason and feeling pretty loopy. I also discovered Soulseek and wish I had known of it months ago. Current Mood: weird Current Music: Goldfrapp - "Happiness" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
4:22 pm	My Cursed Computer, This Weekend, and the Return of Pictures As I have mentioned before, we have a fancy new English classroom at my school, and it is all mine! Hurray! The bad news? The computer is cursed. Stupid crap randomly happens to it that I can never fix, but that will inevitably mystically have fixed itself when I get the IT lady's help. The best screw up yet though was two Fridays ago when it randomly turned off and beeped angrily at me when I tried to turn it back on indicating hardware failure. I show up on Monday and open it to find that one of the sticks of RAM has managed to pop itself loose, so I stick the RAM back in and attempt to turn the computer on. No angry beep! But when the computer gets to the windows loading screen it goes dead. I check all the monitor connections, and I even open the box and look at the video card: it seems to be in place; at least, it is still screwed on to the box properly. I call the IT lady, and she comes and looks at it. . . again. Apparently the graphics card was still screwed into the PC box but had managed to slide out of the motherboard slot for it. . . how is that even physically possible? A more humorous computer screw up that was entirely my fault for fun: I showed up for work last week, and the computer wouldn't take my password. I tried it with caps lock on, caps lock off, every variation of shift keys possible to no avail. I think to myself 'it is ska301 right? I've been using this computer for six months; how could I have forgotten or mixed up the password? Am I going crazy?' So I run down to the IT lady again and say the computer won't take my password. She asks me what it is, and I tell her, "ska301". But I spoke too quickly and she typed 'sk301' because that's all she heard. Turns out, that was the proper password, and I had in fact gone crazy and managed to screw up the password to my comp. The big news for the weekend is that it is warm enough to go hiking again! A bunch of us went hiking at Gwanaksan, and it was a ton of fun. It felt good to be outside and walking around and just to be able to be outside doing stuff comfortably. It took us about two hours to get to the top, but we decided to do some ridge walking instead of heading straight back down. Eventually we got tired of ridge walking and decided we were going to head back down right then and there; the only problem being there was no path down where we were. So we just decided that if we headed down eventually we would have to intersect one of the paths that lead to the base. As it turns out we were right! It just took us about 45 minutes to intersect with said path. By the time we got to the bottom we were all starving and went to get delicious shabu shabu in Myung deong. Also! Yesterday I found a couch outside my apartment! I had been planning to buy one next week, but as I was leaving to go hiking I saw that someone had left a perfectly good couch outside my apartment to be thrown away. Naturally, I lugged it back into my room, and I have a free couch now! Today has been dominated by getting much needed cleaning done around home and updating my online life so people back home can keep up with my adventures. ( Picture_time! ) Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Say Anything - "Spay Me" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
7:12 pm	SSBB Code 0645-5477-4267 There ya go =) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
6:56 pm	Happy late St. Patty's day! So this weekend was celebrating St. Patty's day in Seoul! On Friday, I had a pretty laid back night; although, Justin and I did go out to Hongdae for samgyapsal(thick cut grill it yourself bacon) and a hookah at Gr8. We went out super late though because Justin is never on time for anything and has the attention span of a kitten. "Ok, I'm going to the roof to smoke, then I'll leave. Oooooh, shiny Americans to talk to for an hour before I actually leave." Saturday was a really goofy parade at Cheongye Cheon park; the highlight of which was easily the cosplayers randomly in it. I have no idea what anime cosplay has to do with St. Patrick bringing Christianity to Ireland, but it simultaneously warmed my heart and made me feel like a huge dork seeing it. I also ended up buying a $5 women's t-shirt in my subway stop because I realized that I brought nothing green with me to Seoul. After the parade we went to many of the Texas bars in Seoul that happened to be on the river park, where I met many of the new SMOE people. After awhile we left to go to Wolfhound where we met many of the old SMOE people, but it turned out the new SMOE people were there too. We stayed at Wolfhound wayyyyyy too long, and it got way too crowded. Eventually we left to go to homo hill and do some dancing which was fun. I saw a surprising number of straight hook ups for a gay club though. Finally, super late, we went home. Sunday Justin and I vegged at a sauna and went to see 10,000 BC. . . which was even more terrible than my already dismal expectations for it. It was so bad my mind couldn't even turn off; I was stuck in wrenching agony at the many anachronisms and plot holes in the movie. Last night was Alisa's birthday proper and St. Patrick's day proper, and we went to sushi in Gangnam. We also got ice cream at Cold Stone! It was a pretty relaxed night, and we called it an early one too. As for a state of me address: I think I'm working my way out of my funk. The return of a routine in my life has helped immensely as has going to the gym regularly again. I've been a bit home sick which is unusual for me, but it has been seven months since I was last home. Life feels less exciting since school has started again, but I suspect this is because with school I don't go out and drink nearly as often which is where I get most of my wacky stories and experiences from; although, this actually feels like a blessing for once. Current Mood: calm Current Music: The Field - "Silent" (Comment on this)