king kang and bettr englishi four yu anb yore pamuh-lee

looking at the consequences of one's climb through and above the shadows of life

so, i woke up one morning not long ago and found myself no longer an english teacher, but co-owner/co-director of a private language institute called kang's language institute. i still teach, but my duties and responsibilities are top-shelf now and come with a sense of adherence to making sure that the school does make my partner, phillip, and i a decent income.

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i found myself contemplating the fountain of water blasting its way out of the shower one day last week and wondering what the hell i'd just done. why did i splash some cash to take on responsibilities in a country where there is a startling lack of people who own up to theirs? why did i tie seung-hee and me down to gangneung for the next two years when all we really want to do is travel and live in other places? why did i decide to take on something that would take even more time from the things i love: wife, writing, whimsical drinking, and the wonderful world of sports? must i have drunk too much soju over the past decade and it's begun affecting my thought process and judgment?

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perhaps it's all those and more. it's a scary thing to look into oneself and try to figure out reasons why one did something, even though one gave considerable thought to it beforehand. this was supposed to be the year that i didn't work from april until the end of the year. this was the year to sit in our study at home and finish all the writing projects that have coalesced in the past decade into a pile of papers crammed into some folders or stored on various portable devices for fetish-like insertion into computer terminals for the promise of convenience. this was to be the year that i finally stopped being lazy about making efforts to publish. this was supposed to be the year...

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..that i didn't do what i did, though i did it, anyway.

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so, remember, those of you out there interested in learning english or in sending your children to a private institute--in korea, of course--please consider our school for all your english-learning needs. your tuition will include the following promise, at no extra charge:

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"al uv our adbertising will hav no spell errols and yur enghlish skils will climd higher quikly."