Update

First of all, sorry for never posting a half year update. First I wrote a long post of the progression of the mundanities, but thought it was boring and provided no real surprises for the faithful reader. Then I wanted to write something more philosophical about how I view my time here so far, what my future plans are, and why; but I lacked the conviction of my writing skill to convey my state of mind accuratly. So in the end I posted niether. For the curious I'll give you a summary of the summaries.

I. Mundanities of daily life
1. the job - the new batch of kids is both more skilled and enthusiastic than the last, which is nice. And I'm using more multimedia in the new English classrooms, and getting better as a teacher myself. Still I consider this an interesting enough job in the short term, but really just a launching pad for adventure rather than the beginning of a career path.

2. social - getting deeper in the frisbee community with weekend trips out of town (including a tourney last weekend about which a dedicated post is forthcoming). Getting disenchanted with badminton crew who are fun to play with, but seeming less and less able and/or interested in having a conversation. Expanding circle of Korean friends though, and having some good times locally. Still no girlfriend .. I need to move to a city perhaps.

3. language - making progress. Actually just in the last week I'm starting to feel a new confidence. My accent and listening comprehension is getting better rapidly at this stage. My vocabulary is between 1 and 2 thousand words. Last night I had a long conversation that was 80% Korean talking about the 4 day vacation I just got back from. So I'm starting to feel like this is not quite an impossible task.

II. Future plans

My current plan is to try to extend my current contract a few months so that it will end at the end of the school year. This will give me a lot more flexibility in looking for a new job should I decide to stay and teach in a different location. Indeed, if I do stay in Korea past this school year I think I will look for a university job. Better pay with same (or less) teaching hours per week, more vacation, and better students. Plus it would be a move to the city (probably Seoul); a year in the country was beautiful and relaxing, but now that I feel comfortable in Korea I'd like to see what city life is like as well.

I'm still having a great time over here. I'm still in my 20's (barely). I don't feel bad about not having a long term plan. I'm a simple man; really I'm basically happy as long as I'm learning new skills, and have a few good friends to share some times with. Some men struggle mightily to achieve great things. I wouldn't mind finding that kind of passion, but it hasn't come to me yet and I'm not going to force it. Maybe you need to suffer in order to find your passion.

Well, I've done things that were objectively difficult: in the physical realm I've completed gruelling bike rides and trained long and hard to attain such skills as left handed pingpong. In the mental realm I had to think a long and hard to solve my dissertation problem; and will probably have to spend even more total hours to achieve a second language fluency. But while it may appear to an outside observer that I was trying hard, I've never felt like I was doing anything besides passing the time during those stretches when I was bored with being lazy. I enjoyed the challenges, but if I had switched one pursuit with another, I bet I would have enjoyed that almost as much. And at any rate, I was never 'suffering for my art'. For now, I will leave the conclusions of this line of reasoning for you to draw for yourselves.