Now I can both go to school and not have class

Today marks the end of my first week of classes. The semester here at Yonsei University is six weeks during the summer, although you wouldn’t know it from the course load. The summer still represents a full semester (sixteen weeks) worth of classes which means that although these are undergraduate classes, the workloads are closer to graduate level. Factor this into the larger time spent actually in the classroom and that means I spend the hours between 8pm and 1am hunkered behind my desk. I’m paying for this and I don’t get graduate credit for anything I do here, so this is my vacation and makes me nerd enough for my lunch money to be magic stolen out of my pocket while fate itself gives me a wedgie.

About twelve weeks into a sixteen week semester, my brain starts to give out. My underwear starts showing up on me backwards or I’ll bike away from my office without my house keys. I imagine its like trying to fit two gallons of coffee in a two-cup pot—at some point the old stuff just sloshes out the side. Given the fact that I’ll start back to classes about a week after I get back I figure that means at the current rate I should start a hysterical weeping binge right about at fall midterms, and probably while I’m teaching.

With this in mind I did what any rational adult would do: I dropped a class. Rationally was never really my strong suit though as the classed I dropped was my Korean language class. This is important as apparently the only tattooed, bald men in Korean culture are gangsters, which explains why the locals have made a point not to knock into me while walking down the street. I had planned to learn phrases that would help me avoid death like “frowning means I am confused, not angry” and “I found religion in prison.” Now, though, I have sentenced myself to five more weeks of pointing at pictures of food in restaurants and crooking my head like a dog whenever I don’t understand someone.
















The rest of the undergraduate life is coming back to me though, especially the eternal quest for a free meal. This Sunday, for instance, I went to the campus church because they promised complimentary pizza after the service. Generally I avoid church, as it always seemed to be like standing under God’s magnifying glass and I’ve seen how well that works out for ants. This service didn’t seem much like the one I remember from my parochial school days, though. First off, they include power point presentations now, and I guess I’ve never thought of someone explaining divinity through a pie chart before. Stranger though, was the fact that they showed cartoons. Or one cartoon, rather, which while it involved god and the genesis myth, I suspect it was intended as a parable about environmentalism rather than religion. I mean, Adam and Eve stab God in the brain with a spear. Let me repeat that: Adam and Eve kill God—the transcendent, omnipotent—when they get mad and hurl a spear through his face. Afterward the diecide, they proceed to turn all the animals of the garden into pimp-a-licious hats, which I can except save that at the end they release the animals back into the wild after raising them from the dead. I’m no theologian, but the ability to destroy the universe and power over life and death seem to be a few of the job requirements looked for on a deification CV. Offering hungry students pizza, on the other hand, is merely a step towards sainthood.

Korea Got Seoul

Our guides have gone on and on about the Korean ability to counterfeit brand name merchandise: they have shown us their Rolexes and explained the hand full of pocket change it took to get them. I think I finally understood this concept on the last day of the tour when we went to Everland, which is the RC cola equivalent of Euro Disney. Their mascots are two anthropomorphic rodentish critters that may well be named Smicky and Sminnie. The idea is this: take Peter Pan’s Never Never Land and flip it around into the non-copyright-infringing Everland and the themepark builds itself. As Everland is the reverse of Never Never Land, the thirty-year-old employees all have to wear the garish costumer newborns wear for Halloween. (Considering the teleology of Everland has kept me entertained for days: every child here is given an ulcer and a job in middle management, and every time you say “I don’t believe in fairies” there’s a call for the cleaning staff to bring a bag of sawdust to the teacup ride or a “protein spill” as they call it in the industry). Everland also has different sections including America Land, which consists largely of cowboys and the Blues Brothers. When you consider the rampaging bull and the prominence of poorly dressed men wielding guns, this isn’t so far off. Everland itself is more like its own America Land: all the signs are in English and corndogs and pizza find their way into everyone’s hands. One restaurant listed itself as specifically “Korean Food,” when in reality everything they serve here is Korean food so the sign loses some of its utility. So after spending the afternoon navigating flume rides and children in animal hats, the tour buses dropped us off at the dormitory.
















It’s been nine years since I checked into my first college dormitory: Dupre Hall at Macalester College. Dupre had many architectural distinctions, being both hurricane and riot proof and the showerheads being only five feet off the ground so students can’t hang themselves from them. You might have a bloodmark on your ceiling from a student sitting up too fast in his lofted bed and scraping his forehead across the ceiling, or the obvious stomach acid ring that vomit leaves on a carpet. It had all the charm of a crematorium equipped with bunk beds. Here in Seoul my air conditioning, which even though the room is small enough for me to the door, closet, either desk, the window and—if I stood up and opened it—my neighbor’s window makes this the very best dorm room I’ve ever had. I never really understood the importance of air conditioning until I walked around Seoul for a while. It’s an effect numbers can’t communicate. Part of the Korean experience is learning how to sweat in totally new places, like from your teeth and under your fingernails. Fortunately the twenty year old “Culture Shock” book I read stressed Korea’s formal dress, so I have four kinds of long sleeved shirts but only one proper t-shirt, which means if I ever want to masquerade as a Baton Rouge used car salesmen I have endless options.



















I have spent my time since going to orientation meetings and collecting a few necessities like peanut butter and instant coffee. I know it’s very touristy to comment on the local products, but I’m not savvy enough to figure out a lot of the marketing techniques. Going to the supermarket is like an illiteracy awareness program: the world is filled with squiggled lines you have no hope of understanding. What makes a package appealing becomes a bit perverted. Without the ability to determine what flavors of ramen exist, I bought the one that most resembled a box of tide. When I couldn’t tell which coffee was caffeinated, I liked for the drawing of the shivering, sweaty man splashing tap water on his face. I have to buy books for class on Monday, and I will likely use the same methodology there.

Tour, Day 2: Gyeonju

It still feels like yesterday I was behind the steering wheel screaming because my learners permit had no way of stopping the oncoming traffic from likely killing me. Its almost been two years this august that a bureaucratic mistake gave me a driver’s license, and while I still have the haphazard driving skills of the average seventeen year old I still lack the romance of driving. I pickup remains a pickup no matter how pretty paint job and a BWM is too near a Porsche for me to tell the difference. When I heard the news then that we were going to the Hyundai plant followed by the beach and a ceramics shop, you can imagine the sparklers that didn’t go off in my eyes.














Fortunately we were treated like third graders, which surprisingly made things okay. Hyundai gave us each a toy car—the kind you pull backwards across the floor and it zips forward. Much like a real Hyundai I have no idea what to do if the oil light goes or a tire flattens, but I can get it to scoot awkwardly forward.





















I also haven’t played with ceramics since I was a high school student looking for an easy A in my schedule, so I forgot how unskilled I am with clay. “If you are a good potter, then you are a good masseuse,” my teacher said, referencing the even and even pressure through the fingers and hand. By my bent bowls and lopsided vases demonstrate dates gone horribly wrong. Seeing Shilla Kiln’s master ceramicist Yu Hyo Ung work with clay, on the other hand, is like watching a magic trick—the fast, relaxed way someone might pull a coin from behind your ear. There was a lot of “just do it like this” while in a single gesture he makes a tea pot already full of Oregan Chai. An enormous amount of things in Korea seem to operate on the principal of magic, kind of like the way my tourmates keep manifesting cell phones and Farrah Fawcett haircuts. Sadly, without a crossroads to sell my soul at, I crafted an ashtray the size of a bisected bowling ball. I have the feeling this might be a metaphor for my efforts in local cultural endeavors: lumpy and heavy handed.

Tour, Day 1

Tragedy strikes; that’s its nature. I expect tragedy whenever I start traveling: I picture all my clothes circling around a Nepalese luggage conveyor belt, or my wallet making its lonely way from me in the back of a taxi. Usually I’m way off base and I end up with no more trouble than a screaming baby in the seat behind me or a dirty hotel room. Since neither of those were the case on this trip, I almost missed my three day field trip. My taxi driver from the hotel mixed up the university with the local military base, a fact I did not discover until my cabbie zoomed away from me on the corner. I did manage to flag down a second taxi who got me to the school while twice telling me I was a “handsome boy.” When I say he got me to the school in time I mean just in time—the taxi skidded in front of the departing tour bus the way cops block off a road in Jerry Bruckheimer films. By that time I had missed an orientation meeting and fee Yonsei visors, but I much prefer a seat on a bus and a translator to coral me.

Between the cab driver and my tourmates, my appearance has cone into question a number of times. “Are you half Peruvian?” someone asked over lunch today. Recently my genetics have come into question by a number of observers who question if I’m Basque or Mexican or Italian or Greek. I keep having to explain that I come from the land of the people of the see-through skin—Norwegians and Swedes who yellow instead of tan. I’m German/English, both peoples with a heritage of pastiness. But half-Peruvian…this is a first. Part of this might have to do from the askers. The majority of the student body seems to sprout from California and at least three quarters of the group Asian, so I may begin to appear more ethnically diverse in a country Caucasian minority. Like how I would look better if I hung out with the tragically homely all the time. Or how people look better when they hang out next to me. Hey, wait a minute…















The rest of today I spent at the “Korean Folk Village” (http://www.koreanfolk.com/) which included a traditional Korean haunted house and a demonstration on how to grow traditional Korean rape:























They grow snake’s beard too, but that seems only mildly less troubling. More photos below. I may try to set up a photo bucket program to you can all marvel at my photographic non-artistry.

photographic proof that I'm not dead

The planets must be in alignment and sunspots free of ecclectic activity, because I finally got my photobucket site to work. Right now it consists of pictures from a three day bus tour (they also offered a three hour tour by boat, but the last time I heard about one of those it didn't work out so well). Check back to this occasionally as I'll likely be changing the order around a bit and adding things. Here's the address: http://s83.photobucket.com/albums/j281/eleavitt_2006/

Welcome to Korea

I always thought it would be a little appropriate to die in Seoul, like kicking off in Hell North Dakota. Despite my best efforts though, my plane landed without crashing. More people speak English in Korea than in Idaho, according to my informal airport statistics. What’s more impressive is that without a common tongue Koreans become celebrity doppelgangers. I saw a Korean J Jonah Jameson and a Korean William Defoe. I tried to get a picture with Korean Sean Pen before he decked me.

The trip to the hotel itself was relatively painless as well. The Hotel June comes equipped with a special “tourist restaurant” that serves Cesar salad and fried chicken. The hotel room itself, though, is a different story.



All the power is linked to a hotel key that you have to wedge on a pressure plate like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. This tends to be a popular architectural option in fantasy video games, none of my tour books mention this (or contain the phrase “do you speak English” in Korean for that matter), so I bumbled around what I hoped was really my hotel room like a caveman in an eighties sitcom. To further complicate things, all of the buttons for the lights are in a single universal panel, the kind they have in the horror film about the automated house that goes crazy and kills everyone who lives there. Yes I’m sleeping in a crazy room. Why else equip every room with a “simple descending life line.”


Some things to know about your Korean hotel room: if you don’t close the bathroom door before playing with the Bidet, toilet water will shoot onto the bed fifteen feet away. I know it’s very chic for Americans to make fun of Bidet, but my actually has a butt massage feature. There’s no air conditioning, but I get all the free butt massages I can stand with my room. If I hit a button and a hooker-bot drones out of the wall, I’m writing AAA about the best hotel ever. I already get both regular and bathroom slippers and a bath robe with super tiny sleeves, which make things twice as hospitable here as at home

Although I’ve been unintentionally training for the jet lag by staying up until six AM every night, I’ve had six non-consecutive hours of sleep in the past fifty and I am beat. More soon, or when I get to somewhere to plug my laptop into.

Fight or Flight

If my plane crashes due to a California condor sucked into the jet engine or if I drink twenty-seven cups of airport cappuccino and my heart explodes, my luggage will stand as a time capsule of my neurosis. I’ve packed coat hangers but the wrong replacement shaving cartridges, an iron but no pillow. I’ve jammed sunglasses into one water bottle and cold coffee in another. So long as my shirts are clean and pleated, I apparently don’t care if I look like a hip yet sleep deprived Grizzly Adams.

With the majority of my hair being scraped off every day, I have to get inventive with the shaving methods I prefer. Last night at the store my preference was apparently Lady Gillette which regardless of their silky, nick free finish will not jam into my Norelco Mach Three. This means I will either be shaving my head with my nose hair trimmer, or carefully smoothing my scalp with a replacement blade pinched between a pair of tweezers. My phrase book doesn’t list useful phrases like “please gesture towards the hygiene section of you’re store--I’m a moron,” so I have no soon hopes of remedying this issue.

The actual preparation and process of traveling supersizes my average level crazy. I won’t sit with my back turned to my departure gate in case the flight attendants somehow Houdini the 747 out from under me. The urge to phone every I know is almost irrepressible. When I get on the plane I’ll hunch in my isle and row playing the sit-next-to-me/don’t-sit-next-to-me game with every person I see, which will determine the skill and vigor I put into my oh-god-our-elbows-are-touching game later on. At the very end I will shoulder my way through people to stand in front of an empty baggage claim for twenty minutes, keeping an eye of the geriatric in the wheelchair to make sure she doesn’t snatch my suitcase.

This doesn’t take into account the language barrier and my own ability to bluff it like I could in Europe. The little Korean I already know I picked up in Tae Kwon Do classes, which gives me the ability to both offer and receive spinning face kicks. All of my spin kicking abilities would not hire a taxi to my hotel, no matter how totally awesome my form. I also have the ability to mechanically count to ten while doing jumping jacks, which may aid in looking like the crazy prisoner when I get picked up for vagrancy. So even though I’m still in hunkered in the Boise airport sprawled across the flight gate like a failed protest, in some small way I’m crouched in a East Asian making toilet wine with catsup packets and nutrasweet.

It’s nine AM. I’m going to find a bar and see if I can split a drink with one of the pilots.

Up Chuck and die

There is no appropriate way to try and describe teaching, no matter what Mr. Kotter says about the matter. Or maybe there is no way to describe my teaching. Each semester I seem to find some unintentional theme to my semester. Last semester, as my students read a poem about a married couple eating a baked ape that the wife may or may not have had slept with, someone said “this author is really morbid.” Strangely, they’d said that about every author we’d read that semester—the diary of a grave robber, the review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with cannibal subtext. Usual freshman comp sort of stuff.

I’d really try to clean myself up a bit in the classroom; no stories about bears attacking my friend’s crack house or being propositioned by old German men on trains. Still, this only seems to go so far. For instance, a college invited me to her class to be ethnographically studied as a member of a community of poets. I can’t imagine that a room of Boise freshmen would be all that interested in talking to anyone at seven thirty in the morning, so I put on my best teaching outfit: a purple shirt and cowboy boots. I think I wore pants. I read them some poems and talk for an hour while they took notes. Describing the experience wouldn’t really do it justice. What might do it justice would be their excerpted comments from their essays:

"His choice of the color of his clothing sent a strong message--I am in touch with my feelings."

"I was scared for my life throughout the class. The guy seems as though he was one bad day away from shooting up the school."

"The drawl of the classroom is no more this Friday morning as Erik Leavitt, the Cheshire Cat Poet, vehemently translates Fragment 133 from black print to vivid illustration."

"With all this talk of bloody teeth and spiritual spittoons I think, 'that's too much, Erik Leavitt, too much.'"

"I think, as I often have in the past, why anyone in their right mind would get forearm tattoos. To have any kind of respectable job would require unbearable summer after summer in long sleeves, irritating questions at interviews, and the worst aspect, explaining them to your grandchildren. I soon came to understand Erik's take on the issue--Erik has little or no social conscience. Erik is a poet and suffers from 'poetic diarrhea.'"

"Poets have a certain stigma about them. You never talk to your mom on the phone about meeting a poet. They are not known for being cool or anything of that sort. The idea that I had of a poet was a beanie wearing hippie that would show up and want to recite a poem about how the clouds remind him of cotton candy. Thankfully, that was not the case."

Sting, an inspiration to all the zombie afeared

Here's the sting poster in my office from the last post. Stare deeply into his dreamy man-cleavage.

Official Denial Part 1

On WKRPin Cincinatti Less Nessman taped an office shaped square around his desk, an act which always made sense to me. I enjoy my cramped little spaces, from snow forts to sidecars; I'd probably be a candidate for autoerotic asphyxiation if not for a lack of mechanical expertise.

All the years I spent in cubicals I dreamed of having my own office. Not in a way that would make me work any harder to earn it, but in that way I'd like to master the unicycle without all that awkward practice.

In the acceptance letter for the teaching assistantship here at BSU, I found out I would finally get my own office. What the MFA department lacks in disposable income they make up for in irony though; my office is one of a number of converted apartments. If I so chose I could grade student essays in a bathtub or just kick back and lie on kitchen linoleum, which were all the same things I could have done working in my own apartments.

That being said, the office do lend themselves some character through the residue of junk left by former graduate students. Check a filing cabinet and it wouldn't be unusual to find a banjo and a barbe head snapped off at the neck. Whose lava lamp is that? Why is there mold in the coffee pot and is it safe to use? These seem to be questions no one has answers for. No one may have touched the reference books on the shelf since beta-max was all the rage, but I'm save from almost every kind of apocalyptic event:

The staff keeps "Zombie Killer" stashed behind the recycling bin for the day when the dead will rise up and crave the flesh of the over educated living. Professional wrestler Sting acts as an operational manual of sorts.

The fear of zombies abounds on BSU campus, and by abounds I've found two people who balance hammers on their doorknobs so no zombie will sneak in.

It's a little known fact that zombies are the number three reason college professors leave their jobs (following closely being a roadie for AC/DC and using up the half of their ass that they teach with). Hence we TAs are supplied with a croquet mallet and useful passage from the Zombie Survival Guide like:

"Solanum is the virus that turns humans into undead zombies...the disease is 100% communicable (with a 100% mortality rate). Although bites are most common, infection can be obtained through open wounds brushing against each other or being splattered with remains, usually after explosions...no one has recorded a test of sexual contact with a zombie but, through other cases, is a highly probable path of infection."

Seeing as a large undercurrent of my classes last semester dealt with cannibalism and veiled necrophillic references, this proves ominous. Then again, as a man who keeps a poster of WWF’s sting as a operational manual for a croquet mallet, ominousness abounds.

Houston, we have contact...

Call me Midwestern, but blogs always carried an narcissistic stink to them. It's the same sort of problem that sending out photos of yourself for Christmas gifts--it sort of says "look what a wonderful person I am." It's a loaded thought, and likely one incorrect. With that in mind, here I am typing out my wonderfulness. Not that this was my intent; sloth is a more accurate focus. I'm a lazy communicator and I can't keep up with all the folks I ought to be keeping up with. This blog, then, hopes to communicate some of what stumbling through a graduate program in Idaho is like.

I'm also traveling to Korea soon, and again I thought this would be cheaper than buying prints of photos for folks. It should help communication abroad: I hate mass e-mails but this format seems okay, so I try not to think about the logic.

I'll be posting some photos of Boise soon because I've grubbed my paws on my brother's digital camera and I need to make sure I can operate it without caveman-style grunting. I'll try to save that for counting on my fingers or holding an apple between my first and second toes.