Michael’s Forest

Yes! I started working for a new company on March 9th.

I am now happily employed by IDEAL EDU, teaching English to Koreans. I left my job in Convergys in Febuary. Why did I leave my job in Convergys you may ask. Well, there were many reasons, the primary factor being I don’t think I’m really good at selling services. My job as inbound sales rep in Convergys was very stressful emotionally: I had difficulty pushing for sales so my stats were correspondingly low. Despite that, Convergys was willing to regularize me after the end of my probabtionary period, but I declined. I had been nursing a desire to teach English for a long time. I took a gamble and decided to resign so that I could pursue my new ‘dream’. To be honest, teaching English is hardly my deepest passion, but it’s fun and fulfilling. There is also the added incentive of being less stressful (not having to push for sales from irate customers) and besides I am better at teaching English. It fits my abilities better, to put it in another way. On the downside, the pay is much lower, but I am determined to adjust.

TRAINING: When I first entered IDEAL I was not particularly impressed by the facilities and decor. The lounge at the entrance is pretty fancy, but once you enter the main work area the aesthetics take a major downturn and you’ll be confronted by many derelict stations. Each is equipped with a computer. The place is poorly air conditioned and the carpet is peeling in many places. After the fanciness of Convergys, my new work environment was a major change for my luxury- hungry soul.

Oh yeah and the pay seriously sucks.

I haven’t made any real friends yet. The people are nice enough, but they seem pretty banal. Nobody seems interesting enough to get to know..oh except for this one guy named Nix. He’s really fuuny and nice, but he scares me a little. Mainly because he’s gay!

Oh yeah and my buddy was rather mean and difficult to get along with. You see, after you finish the training period, you are assigned a buddy. My buddy had a serious attitude problem. She was so moody half the time I had difficulty getting along with her.

I mean, I have scars of my own. For those of you too obtuse to know, the last couple of years have hardly been rosy. I’ve been through a lot of painful experiences. In short, it does not take a lot to open up my wounds. I’m like a volanoe ready to erupt if you apply the right amount of pressure. Add a little salt and my wounds will smart.

Enough about her…

Well, I’m enjoying my job. I guess that’s what’s most important right? So I just ignore the people all around me with their mindless emotional problems and neurotic disorders and I should be fine.

MY STUDENTS:

Ah, hear comes the juicy part. I like my students. Well, most of them anyway. Koreans are very timid on the phone, not like bold, sarcastic Americans. Most probably because they’re too self- conscious to really rant their feelings. Whatever. It’s the nature of the job, if you really analyse it. Teaching English does not raise the same flags customer service will do in a call center.

Anyway, let me describe in brief detail  some of my favorite students.

A) Ju Hyun: she’s a really smart and funny Korean woman who works in HR. I liked her immediately from the first day I thaught her. She’s really polite and very friendly, which comes across even over the phone. I tell her personal stuff I will not tell any of my other students (I try and forget the calls are recorded). She laughs a lot and shares a lot of interesting stuff about her life: like how she hates her manager, how much she loves drinking etc;  I can’t stand her ringtone though: it’s a duet from the movie ‘Music and Lyrics’ with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.

B) Jae Hyun: He’s a really sweet fifteen year old boy. His voice always sounds hoarse, a permanent frog in the throat. He’s very quiet and will sometimes take an eternity to answer a simple question unless you help him. I like him a lot though. I feel compassion for him. (I’m starting to regard my students as my children). Like a father with a painfully shy son I emphatise with this kid.

C) Seong Ryeol and Ho Yeol: They are very bright middle school teenage boys. They laugh a lot and can speak very good English. In truth they speak much better English than their fathers (who work in Shinhan bank- Korea’s supposed second largest bank). I tutor their dads in the morning. I had a hard time trying to define the word ‘medicine’ to a forty year old bank manager. People who were listening to my call during that class could not stop laughing. Anyway, Seong Ryeol is always complaining to me about all the homework he is given everyday (about three tons) and Ho Yeol’s dad cut off the wires to the family televison because ‘he wanted his son to study more’. Koreans are OBSSESSED with education. The spoonfeeding, book learning kind. It’s like their national religion or something. As if the Asian economic crisis did not teach them the limits of education. I read once in TIME magazine that east Asia with their absolute quasi-religious faith in the power of education were really thrown off the boat after the asian economic crisis: for the first time, it became painfully apparent that having a degree from some fruity prestigious university did not gurantee a good job. Korean education (east asia in general), with it’s obssession with rote memory learning and the stifling of creativity, tends to create robots incapable of lateral thinking. I mean, I understand the importance of education, but studying for six hours a day after school is not going to gurantee anyone a bright future. Did Bill Gates and Beyonce Knowles graduate from Harvard after spending years preparing for some pointlessly difficult entrance exam? East asian education will prepare for a cubicle in an office, but not for a pioneering career that requires freedom to be creative.

Yellow,
the colour of my ancestors.
People from the north
A land of grey mists and
abandoned temples.

Brown,
the colour of my forefathers.
They made houses from the skin
of coconuts and women
from the clefts of the rocks.

Flesh,
the colour with no origin that
is my skin-
a ghost,

translucent
cellophane tape drained of
all desires, all dreams.

No name,
no flame

Green,
the sharpness of your arrows
under my skin
You
my secret fire, secret desire:
even I deny you.

You broke me apart,
the way a spirit breaks a
pearl in the center of a typhoon,
Yet there was nothing inside.
Fragile and wild,
a soldier drunk on fermented grass:
You realized your seeds
in my brook,
then abandoned me.

I have no womb,
yet I carry your children
I am your children

Black,
the darkness of my soul, a
wild river in flood
Wine seven thousand years old
My dark child, my other half
the boy from the nether world:
the land of the dead.
He reaches out with both hands,
a projection from the mirror:
I am the mirror.

White,
the colour of perfection, the
road to slavation and God
a guiding light from above
a love I do not understand.

But colourless,
this rose, seven petals
you dropped
in the ocean of my being
Colourless
as an unwashed pebble
stranded on the side of a cliff:
perfection

Colourless liquid spirit song
where all colours end.

Emerging from pink water,
surrounded by clams

My black hair and yellow face,
encaced in a white mask

Black slits for eyes
and no holes to facilitate breath

I am numb from being underwater
too long

Dressed in a long, wet
cloak, clinging to my
wet skin
the music of my heart is sweet
the intentions of my hands are merciful

Fishermen and fish are terrified
they run away
Am I a saint or a ghost?
Hallucination or concrete truth?

I am an enigma:

ploughing my way towards
the distance

alone

and in secret.

I am asleep.
The waves crash upon then rocks.
Cold water mixes with hot lava.
Steam gushes from the cave.

I am in love.
Making dreams from rubber and plastic.
With an orb and a scepter
I conjure holograms of box and circle:
blue and pink.

Confusion in pigmentation.
Trains, trains
running towards Siberia.
Charging down the track
of pine cones.
You are in love.
You are in lust.

I met you before.
Many dreams before.
In a white desert.
Inside a revolving plastic capsule.
We made love.
We made life and death
at the same time.

You guided me to the pool.
We floated over the waters.
Past digital lotuses,
past electric flora.

Night and Day we composed myth.
We made promises;
exchanged ciphers.
We made promises
by the Mongolian pyramids.

That night
you took me in.
Into your fair body,
your hidden closet.

Up the river and deeper into streams,
into your heart..
You showed me a mirror
and I saw myself.

We lost one another.
In a shower of meteirorites.
Under the bowl of the soil
we found one another again.
Oh what celebration!
You became drunk on my wine,
my worm, my serenity.

I painted a portrait of you,
using your hands.
My talent guiding your body.
My voice coming out of your throat.
My key opening your lock.

Bees in the garden.
Children in the ante-chamber.

My laugh and your wonder.

Following a point of light
down an industrial tunnel,
this is neither a near death experience
nor a joy ride.
Simply shrouded in red:

I am a siren with black hair slashed
into many intricate layers.
Covering my face;
blown by the wind violently.

And I am violent.
Violently in love with you.
Here I am riding a portal
from my silver chamber
deprived of icons
into your open world

of desert and grass.
There you feel real wind and touch bare earth.

How I want to hold you in my hands.
Cupped like a plastic flower of many rays.
I love your nectar, the sweet innocence
at the center.
The honey that drips from your stem
when I pluck you.
I know - soul to soul -
of your kindness and concern.

And in this galaxy of concrete and glass,
of hard steel and conflict
your meadow and perfume
is a lovely apparition.

I want to walk hand in hand with you
in your world of light,
ride
over the desert in floating boxes,
past mountains and elevators to the summit.

Swallowing our love in glass jars.

How deeply is my longing
to lie down with you on bare earth
surrounded by an open, cloudy sky.
Pierced by intense light,
refracted by many mirrors.
Holding your hand
stroking your cheeks

Your pale body against my plaid skin.
Awashed in revelation.
My subteranean world an unpleasant memory.
My loneliness a forgotten pain.

There is only you, me, wind and the glowing sun
in the center of our hearts.

A letter from China arrived today,
across the ocean from Guillin mountain.
It was a sealed parchment, soaked in yak’s
milk:
I smelled the aromatic fragance of a
distant land.

I broke the seal (red) but did not understand the
writing:
scribbles about concubines, warlords, empty
bedchambers and sand particles from outer Mongolia.

I did not need to understand the words
because my heart
already understood:
the layers of silk hidden in my being:
the garbled hopes and dreams,

mixed with the legacy, the tragedy
of a hundred
thousand years of ancestral blood- flood,
flowing from parchment into
my skin like slamon travelling up a stream.

Covered in rust I corrode in this empty wine glass. My feathers are perforated, my hands deteriorate in this empty crystal refuge. I remember insects, nights of masquerades. I was deceived before, lost in a sea of kimonos, I was drained of life. Pain slowly evaporates, leaving a scab; wounded (yes) but experience has thought me to distill truth.

I am a secret. A moth wrappped in layers of silk tissue. I hide my true feelings and beliefs, the one true melody in my heart. I am afraid: of the laughter of babbons, the caricatures drawn on mirrors. I am afraid of the vulgarity of shadows, forests….

Who am I? What am I to myself? To those who read the intricacies in gestures: am I perceptible?  I do not understand this work of art.

I only know his feelings and passions. His love of paintings, faint music in cloisters, his madness for velvet cloaks that cover all his sins.

I only know that I see him through a broken mirror: he is a soldier in gilded armour, pierced by torns, tormented by madirgals:

broken by dreams that can never come true.

I went with Gay to watch Babel in Poweplant Mall today. I’d been anticipating this movie for a long, long time.

I was intruiged by the idea of a connected story in several languages (and anyone who has read the Bible would surely be familiar with the story of the tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis - the starting point in human history where the various languages supposedly originate from).  The actual movie blew me away, to put it quite bluntly. I’ve seen many ‘artsy’ and ’serious’ films before, so I felt really jaded when I first sat in the cinema.

The opening scene begins with two boys in Morroco. They are given a gun by their father, in order to protect the family’s herd of goats from jackals. While rifle testing the contraption (by shooting fully loaded cartridges at passing vehicles on an otherwise deserted highway) they accidentally shoot an American tourist. This one single incident sets of a chain of unusual, seemingly unrelated incidents.

‘Babel’ explores the links that connect human lives and events (even seemingly unrelated ones that take place continents away). Inter-layered with the original catalyst are the stories of a Japanese girl, a Mexican nanny and an American couple on holiday in Morcco. The stories take strange, unexpected turns : revealing human folly and misunderstandings along the way. The Japanese girl turns out to be an emotionally disturbed teenager recovering from her mother’s suicide. The Mexican nanny loses everything she’s ever worked for in two extrordinary days.

I don’t want to spill to many details about the movie. If you’re intruiged enough, go watch it yourself!

Please take note of the final scene in the movie, it’s so beautiful! (PS I must warn you, Babel is a little disturbing, mainly because it’s too realistic - not much Hollywood escapism here.)