Amanda Takes Off...

"Ms, you know Korean, right?" my buddy at school asked me.

"Eh..." I hate that question.

"Can you come down to the office?"

I anticipated her next sentence. "I don't know enough school language to be an interpreter or translator."

"But you can read, right? It's something I got from one of my parents."

I guess I anticipated it incorrectly. "I can try. Why don't you come up here—wait, you want me to show off to the people in the office?"

She laughed. "Exactly."

I grabbed my electronic dictionary (which lives in my purse) and headed to the office. My buddy handed me a package of food and I tried not to laugh. "This is Japanese," I said, pointing, "And this is Chinese. But there is no Korean on this package."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You can't read Japanese, right?"

I nodded, "Right, I can't read Japanese."

Today I finished reading Little House in the Big Woods in Korean. I have spent much too much time on this book and in a wild two days I basically read through one-quarter. Today I read 56 pages of the book (including a chapter on threshing machines, which was way over my head), which works out to be over 20,000 characters.

뇌가 말랑말랑해요. My brain is mushy. ㅋㅋㅋ

On an unrelated note, when you're driving home at 1 am and trying to stay awake, blasting 땡땡땡 works.

I used to hate taking photos of dreary, grey days. Eventually I realized that colors really pop under those conditions.

There is no way that I'm going to reach my 1,000,000 jaso goal in Korean reading this year.

I got a bunch of children's picture books from my ex-coworker's daughter, and before sticking them in a box (to give to Fusion Couple Friends Who Want Kids? to put up on BookMooch? to list on Cragislist?), I've been reading them. Yesterday I flew through:

뭐든지 파는 가게 (A book about a man who sold everything and customers who came in for specifically-shaped things.)
해님 뭐해요? (A cute book about the sun going to sleep.)
통통아, 빨리 와! (A book about a fat pig who visits a rather angry duck.)
잠이 안 오니, 잔은 곰아? (A book about a bear who won't go to sleep.)

Despite the fact that I won't reach my goal, I've still been enjoying reading in Korean. As well as the picture books, I've also finished a translation from a French children's novel, about a fat kid who beats someone up at school after watching a sumo match, and who gains friends because of it.

Next up? The comic book I found in the gu office when we registered our marriage—it's some propaganda from the K-CIA to encourage kids to report North Korean spies. It seems fitting, no?

Several months ago, on a knitting board I belong to, someone said she was thinking of changing her college major and going into teaching. She gave a laundry list of reasons for this, but the one that most stuck out to me was that she said she felt like she was "behind" her friends, who had graduated from college two years earlier, since the writer had taken two years off of college.

A few thoughts came to mind when I read that. First, if you don't enjoy teaching, there is no reason to stay in it, because you'll just be miserable.

Second, you don't become a teacher to get ahead or catch up to people. [Insert rant about my shrinking paycheck despite taking hundreds of hours of professional development, getting stellar reviews, being published in a teaching newsletter, and getting excellent test scores from my students here.] Teaching (in America, at least) is not the way to get ahead.

More importantly than all that, though—I don't get the idea that you can be "behind" in life. It was something that came up on expat English teacher boards in Korea, too. People were worried that by teaching in Korea, they were "falling behind" their friends "back home."

Using schooling examples (since that's what the writer was using as her benchmark)... If you knew my brother in high school, you'd never believe he'd get where he is today. He certainly didn't graduate from high school with any of his classmates. A friend's brother is getting his college degree. He's in his 30s and it took him eight years, and now he's done it! My mother didn't get a nursing degree until two days before her 40th birthday. My stepdad had a BA, an engineering certificate (I think?) and changed his mind and became a nurse—he passed his exams when he was almost 50. Was he behind? I had my Masters when a lot of my high school classmates graduated with their BA—but now they have kids, and I don't. Which one of us is behind?

If you want to get/have/buy/do something, go for it. But do it because it's what you want to do with your life now, not because you think you're supposed to.

It's life. As long as you're living it, how can you be behind?

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers.