Fire Bag

A few weeks ago, Samcheok hosted the "SAFEM Expo" - some sort of emergency preparedness and response convention. It was a big deal for the town - 70,000 people, $60 million, and two big-top tents. Our school took us there one afternoon. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, but I did grab this flier, from a booth selling fire preparedness equipment.



Zooming in on the boxes on the left reveals the design of this brilliant device...


Do you feel safe yet?

Beach Trip

With a new hard drive to set up and no internet in the new apartment, it's been tough to blog lately. I have a back-log of pictures that I've been meaning to post though, so I think we'll do pictures for the next few days. That and probably some sort of comment on the election, beyond this: Vote!

A couple weeks ago a bunch of us foreigners from Samcheok went to Chuam Beach, between Samcheok and Donghae. We found the beach at koreaontherocks.com - it is supposed to have some nice bouldering. It was a quick 8,000 won taxi ride from the Samcheok Bus Terminal, and well worth the trip. Bouldering without shoes or chalk turned out to be less appealing than we had hoped, but it is an excellent beach, with no crouds, some nice restaurants and beautiful rock formations.

It is apparently cuttlefish drying season. The ladies that were hanging these didn't want me to photograph them, but I snuck this shot in before I asked.

They kind of look like aliens, don't they? The fish, I mean!

We did get some bouldering in. This is Mark and Chad on the rocks.

And Mark again, having climbed a bit.

This is where we had lunch - excellent dwaenjang jjigae (spicy fermented soybean paste stew). I thought it funny that the wall had a hand-painted fan and roll of toilet paper next to each other, so I asked Ben to pose with them, not thinking that he would try to dominate the funny of the picture.

Kate on Chad's long iron rod.

Melanie took special interest in the shells of the beach, an interest that ended up getting her in quite deep.

And Melanie with her well-earned, picture-perfect sand dollar. And no spare clothes.

Maybe next summer we'll come back for some cliff-jumping.

Review of Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

I first heard of Steve Pavlina when a friend referred me to his blog during his polyphasic sleep experiment. For over 150 days, Steve abandoned sleeping nights, and instead took six, twenty minute naps a day. I was immediately intrigued. And the more of his writing I read, the more I liked the message.

There are hundreds of articles on his website, all about how to grow as a person. His approach is an intriguing mix of hippie, mainstream American, and strait-up crazy person, and from my perspective, the best of each. His thinking and writing is decidedly left-brained, and he doesn’t shy away from financial or career growth issues. At the same time he eats a 100% raw-vegan diet and talks with dead people.

From no other author have I found such accessible, intelligent, practicable personal development advice, and rarely such a warm and inviting tone. So when Steve announced he was publishing a book and would offer free advance copies to bloggers who would review it, I immediatly wanted to participate. That was the original impetus to start and grow this blog, and this review is the result.

The aims of the book - Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth - are ambitious on at least two counts:

1. To be sufficiently different from and superior to the hundreds of articles on his website to satisfy his massive readership (he claims two million visitors a month).


2. To lay out the fundamental principles of personal development.

The book is highly structured, and will probably work better for "thinkers" than for "feelers" on the MTBI T/F spectrum, which may be what Steve alludes to with his tag line “Personal Development for Smart People.”

The book is divided in two parts. The first is the seven fundamental principles of personal growth. Truth, love and power are the three primary principles. From those are derived oneness (truth + love), courage (love + power), and authority (power + truth). And the seventh is intelligence, which is defined as alignment with truth, love and power, and is the "highest form of human expression." Here’s a graphical representation:

I’m not convinced that these principles represent any sort of underlying order to personal growth, mostly because I'm unconvinced there is any such order. The three primary principles seem right to me, but the secondary ones feel forced. I’m not sure, for example, that courage is a combination of love and power. In the section on how to build courage, one of the suggestions is to educate yourself, which I agree is a great way to overcome timidity, but seems to come from the primary principle of truth, not love or power. I can also think of no compelling reason why personal growth should rest on such a neat foundation.

As a tool though, a way of thinking about and planning growth and handling life’s problems, I think this scaffolding will be valuable. Perhaps it is the neatest possible representation of an inherantly complex, chaotic pursuit.

Each of the seven principles is broken down into its key components. Truth, for example, breaks down to perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance, and self-awareness. Each component is explained and described, and sometimes a how-to improve this component is given. On prediction, for example, he says, we grow from exposure to new patterns: when our expectations are met it reinforces our beliefs; when they are not, it forces us to build new ideas about how the world works. Thus we should seek stability and routine only as a launching pad for exploring new areas. In order to side-step denial we can bring the process into the conscious part of the mind by making conscious predictions and comparing our expectations to how reality turns out to operate. He also says that emotions are predictions: when we have negative expectations we feel bad and when we have positive expectations, we feel good. That’s just one component of one of the seven fundamental principles. I wanted to detail it to illustrate the depths the book reaches.

For each principle, he also lays out some common blocks to alignment with the principle. For truth, for example: media conditioning, social conditioning, false beliefs, emotional interference, addictions, immaturity, and secondary gain. And each block is described and explained with similar detail. As I read these, many of the obstacles to growth that I face, some of which I've been struggling for years to elucidate, become immediately clear.

Finally, for each principle, he provides several techniques for coming into better alignment. For truth, he suggests a quantitative self-evaluation in various aspects of life (the process is described in detail), journaling on a regular basis, and forgoing all media, at least for a trial period of time.

In the intelligence chapter, there are extensive quizzes and evaluative material to determine where and how you can best serve your personal growth.

The second part of the book details six primary areas of life: habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality. Suggestions are offered for how to improve congruency in each area with each of the seven principles. If that sounds overwhelming, it reads as detailed and useful.

For example, in the section on habits and oneness, there is a discussion of how our habits influence others and how we might be role models to the world with them, and also how we can use habits to develop congruency with the principle of oneness, like going for long walks in nature, smiling at strangers on the street, or offering hugs instead of handshakes.

I thought there was more value in the first part of the book, and it was more fun to read than the second. When I return to the book to do the exercises suggested — which I will begin this weekend — I plan to spend more time in the first section. On the other hand, if I ever feel in need of help in a certain area of life, the organization of the second section would be of great value.

In sum, this is an excellent book and one that I will use for years to come. I fully recommend it to everyone, and especially those who prefer a rational/logical approach to complex issues (which can be hard to find in the “self help” section of a bookstore). I’m not sure that it succeeds in its most ambitious task, but it is still immensely valuable, even to someone who has read almost all of Steve Pavlina’s website.

9/10 stars.

Synchronicity

One time a few years ago, my sister and I were doing the six hour drive from our parents' house in Denver to our college town, Durango. On this beautiful drive over and through the Colorado Rocky Mountains, you make one turn and stop at one stop sign, other than that, it's just keep driving southwest.

We had been driving for hours, listening to music and chatting it up as we always did about the meaning of life, or our lives or something, when our conversation slowly came to a natural stop, the album we were listening to ended, and we drove up to the single stop sign on the drive. Did a higher power intend those three things to happen at once? Was it just a coincidence, and I remember that time because it was anomalous? Did our subconsciouses notice that the song and car were slowing, causing us to slow and close our conversation?

I like when timings coincide. When after minutes of silence, two people suddenly start talking at the same time. When you can't make dinner without an onion you don't have, and then your partner comes home after stopping at the store for bread and got onions, just because they were on sale.

This seems like one of those times. Yesterday, after two months of begging for it, Melanie and I moved to Dogye, the town in which we teach. The day before that, after two and a half months of pleading for it, a Dell technician brought me a new, fully functional hard drive. And today, winter arrived in earnest in the Taebaek Mountains. So I today I have a new season, with a new home and a new computer system.

The impetus for me to start building this blog was an offer for an advance copy of a book on the condition that I review it, a review which I will post in a few hours. After that, I plan to change the focus and rhythm of this blog, and start putting more effort into two other websites I'm building. Next Wednesday, after the election, I'm starting a media fast, to free my mind from the information inundation I've been forcing upon it, and free-up a couple of hours a day, to put into yoga, guitar, and the above mentioned website building.

So things are changing, lots of things at once. And it feels great. More on the move, the book, and my various websites to come...

Wait... No... Not Quite Moving Day Yet

It seems I blogged a bit too soon when I said that today was moving day.

My mistake was a common one for westerners in Korea. I assumed that plans in Korea are similar to commitments as we make them at home. That, of course, is silly. Decisions in Korea seem to be made hours, if not minutes, before important actions. Discussions and negotiations seem to be replaced by directives from above. Logic and responsibility are thrown out the window. And loud, raucous discussion is needed to sort anything that is even a hair's width outside of standard operating procedure.

Two hours before the moving was scheduled to begin we were informed that the school staff that we had been told would be helping us "with our burdens" was saying it wasn't their responsibility. That and because of the size of the refrigerator and the absence of an elevator in our new building, we would need to rent a large truck that could move the refrigerator through the large windows that are on the side of all Korean apartments. And that to operate the truck, we would need to hire two movers. So the cost will actually be 250,000 won ($173).

Following our insistance that the payment wasn't our responsibility, there was a tremendous amount of discussion, some with us, a lot without us, and finally we were told that we'd actually be moving tomorrow morning. That #4 will come to our apartment at 9:00 and that the question of cost will be settled later.

Will there be new surprises in the 18 hours before we move? It would be quite out of the mold if there weren't...

Moving Day

After two months of expressing our desire to move closer to our school - to our school's administration, to the Samcheok County Education Office, to the Gangwondo EPIK Office, and finally to the head of education in Gangwondo - it's time to move from our old apartment in the 60,000 person seaside town of Samcheok to our new apartment in the 4,000 person mountain town of Dogye.

Last week we saw the apartment, which is roughly half the size and twice as old as the one we live in now. But instead of leaving at 7:40 to take an expensive, nauseating bus ride to get to school, we'll leave at 8:45 and walk down the street, and no amount of space can make up for that.

They keep telling us that the roads are going to be icy and they hope we won't hurt ourselves, and that the boiler has to stay on all the time or it will freeze and explode, and that if we are uncomfortable, they can't help us move again. Apparently, we are yet to convince them that we understand and made our decision conscoiusly. I don't think we've told them that we have both lived through Colorado winters in towns over 8,000 feet; maybe that would've helped. But after another round of what-you-might-not-like, and us agreeing to pay 70,000 won (US$48) for the move (they originally said we'd have to pay 600,000!), they expressed their satisfaction with us at their school, and we all left happy.

Monday we were told that Wednesday was moving day (I had assumed Sunday, so Wednesday is just fine with me), and yesterday we were taken to HomePlus, the local department store, to outfit our new kitchen (no more Teflon and aluminum cookware - yeah!).

Last night we frantically packed all our belongings back into the two suitcases each we brought them here in, plus a couple boxes for what we've already accumulated here. After our classes this morning (and a Dell technician coming to replace my hard drive -- busy day of many transitions), we figure the biggest men at the school will come help us get all our stuff and all the furniture 40km up the mountains to Dogye. How that will happen in a "big rental car" is so far unclear, but we just have to keep trusting and hoping that everything will work out. Speaking of which...

In our meeting on Monday, they asked if were going home for winter break (our contracts stipulate a three week vacation, which was the primary factor in choosing these positions). When I said we wanted to meet my family somewhere, they responded that right now is not a good time for booking travel (with the won's weakness there isn't a good time), but that they would tell us the dates soon, once they decided if "English Camp" would be one or three weeks. Yesterday they said it was to be one week. Which might mean that the other five weeks of vacation time are ours to be in a more hospitable place. It's too early to say for sure yet, but if true, that would more than make up for the trouble we've had so far.

Attacks in Syria, Pakistan

Yesterday the U.S. killed eight people in Syria, just across the border from Iraq. Late last week, using an unpiloted plane, the U.S. killed at least eight children in Pakistan. And again yesterday, in another attack using an unpiloted plane, the U.S. killed ten people in Pakistan, at least in this one it was a militant training camp.

Eight days before the election, and the U.S. has committed what are generally considered acts of war against Pakistan and Syria. The attack in Syria was a first, and we don't know how they might respond. The attacks in Pakistan continue a sharply increasing trend, which has intensified since last week when the Pakistani Parliment unanimously passed a resolution calling on the government to "defend its sovereignty and expel foreign fighters from the region."

First of all, what are they doing attacking a school!? I don't care if it was Al Qaeda Middle School, they were children. How can people claim with a strait face that the U.S. is the primary force for good in the world? They targeted a school.

Secondly, right in lead up to the election, we're pissing off two countries that are most dangerous (Pakistan has nukes, Syria is supposedly armed by Iran), most volatile, and both of which have land disputes with critical allies of ours (Syria with Israel over the Golan Heights, Pakistan with India over Kashmir). A flare up of either of those, directly with the United States, or with our allies would be great for McCain in the election.

So why wouldn't we think that the Republicans controlling the executive are politically motivated in these actions? They've proven the moral laxness to do just about anything for political reasons time and again. Why not killing brown-skinned children?

Hopefully Syria and Pakistan, who like the rest of the world (save Al Qaeda) have an Obama presidency in the best interests, see through the tactics and restrain themselves.

***edit***
Yesterday (the 28th) Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi Government Spokesman, reminded the U.S. that the Iraqi constitution disallows Iraqi land being used as a launching area for attacks on neighboring countries.

It's a tired point by now, but bares repeating: U.S. leaders talk about democracy promotion, but ignore the will of people when it doesn't serve us, as here with Iraq's constitution and a couple years ago with Hamas in Palestine.