Ugh... I’d had some ideas come together to write the previous post but I didn’t strike when the iron was hot. The ideas are still there, but I haven’t found the time or energy to write it. But I suspect I will eventually.
I don’t know, I’ve just been preoccupied with lining up my next job in Korea and trying to look at prospects of buying rental property. In other words, trying to get myself settled so I can feel more at ease writing. Of course often when I have a job, I feel too tired after work to write anything. We’ll see how it works out this time.
I mentioned near the end of the last season that I was applying for EPIK in Korea. Well, long story short, I got accepted to EPIK but was still waiting to hear where I’d be placed when I received notice from my former principal (who’d transferred from the school I finished working at) that he wanted me to work at his new school, not too far from where I lived in Bucheon. So contacted my recruiter and now I’m in the process of getting my visa to work there next month. I’ll know it’s for sure when I get my visa number and can get to the consulate. But it’s a wonderful break because I was going to be placed way out in the sticks with EPIK.
Anyway, the title of what was going to be the first post is a quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Something one of the men in space said after he’d passed out sandwiches to the others. The sandwiches were some synthetic processed food that was meant to taste like something natural. “They’re pretty good”, one of them said. “Well, they’re getting better at it all the time”, the guy who’d passed out the sandwich commented.
At the time I was reading My Ishmael, and I’d just read a part where Ishmael was commenting on humans constant attempt to reinvent the wheel (or a bridge in the example he used) when what was already there works fine.
But the movie also reminded me of ideas Jerry Mander mentioned in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, including being adrift in mental space and our culture’s infatuation with leaving the Earth.
I’ll try to compile those ideas I’d had when I watched Space Oddyssey and write a full post eventually, but for now...just not sure it’s going to happen.
It’s almost 3 AM right now and while it does seem that I get good ideas and motivation to write at these odd hours, I’m also trying to start going to bed at a decent hour. But the problem is that I haven’t been tired in about 6 months.
In part, I’m not tired because I stay up late and, subsequently, wake up late. Because I don’t have a job to force me to get up? Maybe that’s part of it. But there isn’t anything else that gets me out of bed, either.
In fact it came to my attention a few weeks ago that I might be more depressed than I suspected. I knew I was depressed already but didn’t realize the symptoms until I was reading some user comments of the film Melancholia. I haven’t seen the film yet, but it looks interesting...and possibly related to some of the ideas I mentioned above.
It’s helpful that I know exactly what is causing my depression but at the same time frustrating that the solution will not come in the form of some quick fix. Amazing to me how many people think that there’s something wrong with themselves when they’re depressed (or angry) without considering that there may be legitimate reasons outside of themselves that is causing the depression.
As usual, I’ll think my way out of it and take comfort in the fact that what didn’t kill me before will never have a chance at getting to me again.
Anyway, enough on that. Let me bring you up to speed on books I’ve read (or am currently readying). Still working on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and The Birth of Tragedy (the latter is much slower but the former is blowing my mind) and recently finished My Ismael (really good follow-up to Ishmael with interesting ideas on education).
To balance the philosophical books, I like to concurrently read novels. I read The Angel’s Game (same author of Shadow of the Wind) and...well, first let me tell you about a movie I saw that opened up other fictional books to me. I watched Woody Allen’s film, Midnight in Paris. It was an ok movie, but it did get me more interested in writers from the 1920s. So picked up The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms.
I already read The Great Gatsby in high school but didn’t like it then. When I watched the movie a few years ago, I saw it in a different light. But I never thought to pick up the book again until I’d read Love in the Time of Cholera and found the movie to be much worse than the book. I’m most of the way through Chapter 3 of TGG and am already finding it to be very beautifully written.
Well, this seems like a decent start to the new season. A little late. I usually start at the end of November, but...anyway, I’m starting Season 7 now.
Anyway, off to bed.
