A Reflective Essay: Samuchim performance at KMLA Sponsorship Concert

          Reformation and revolution always takes costs. Especially when they are big ones that rock the society in a whole. And such change has precisely been the thing that has been prevailing Samuchim (the Korean traditional music society in KMLA) has been experiencing for the last two months or so.

          It all began with the KMLA principal Yoon Jung Il's great interest in turning the KMLA Sponsorship Concert into a successful one. Unlike last year's KMLA Sponsorship Concert (which was mainly consisted of students' parents performing and wasn't really that much successful in making people "sponsor" KMLA), he started to emphasize the students themselves getting involved in the concert, and there were even pamphlets made to advertise the concert.

           And many clubs that were participating in the KMLA Sponsorship Concert started to receive great support from the school. Samuchim, of course, was not an exception to this. An outside teacher named Baek Yong was invited.

The photo of Samuchim at KMLA Sponsorship Concert

           On the first day of his lesson, the instructor asked for our club to "play something." After listening to the music for just two minutes, he called us to a halt, and said that we had to "start from scratch." The seven months of practice we did prior to meeting him was considered as nothing.

          That was how the frantic preparation for the Sponsorship Concert has started. Samuchim received permission to not participate in the first self-study period in every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Every week after the mid term exam, 6 hours of time were sacrificed for learning Korean traditional music beats.

          The beats that he taught to us, they were literally "eye-openers." So far, Samuchim has been playing a beat that was extremely simplified so we could easily learn them over a relatively short time. Now, the instructor was feeding us with truly "traditional" beats that are passed down in rural regions of South Korea.

           And in the process of such revolution taking place, I have to admit, there were pains. A large chunk of Samuchim was angry with the instructor being so demanding and the practice taking away too much of their self-study time. Everybody was so nervous in memorizing the beats, and those who made errors in their beats were severely criticized by other Samuchim members. 

Members of the Samuchim (After the performance in Minjok Festival)

          Two months passed with such nervousness and reign of pain. The time of KMLA Sponsorship Concert performance has finally come. On November 19 2011 at approximately 4:40 P.M., in the backstage of Gyedang Hall were the Samuchim members, solemnly preparing themselves for their turn. 

         The performance was a great success. We were welcomed with fervent applause from the audience. The teacher, who has been so cold and harsh to us until now, hugged each and every one of us after the performance.

Samuchim after the concert (The adult standing at the last line is the teacher)

         The KMLA Sponsorship Concert meant something more than a mere "experience" that taught me how to do hard Korean traditional music beats to me. 

         Samulnori (the name of the Korean traditional art that Samuchim performed) is a form of music that require harmony amongst instruments based on high level of individual performance. And throughout the two months of practice, Samuchim has taught me how to be a member of a team and the importance of each and every constituent in bringing about harmony inside the society.

         Also, after two months of pain, the members of Samuchim found the bond amongst themselves to become much stronger than before. The group that used to be so cold and disconnected before is now planning to have a meal together after the final exam as a celebration for the successful ending of the music performance.

[Mr. Moon] Cosmological Argument

Cosmological Argument

Samuel Seung Min Kim (111021, 10b1)

The root of the word “God” comes from the Sanskrit vocabulary “hūta,” which stands for “to invoke, to call.” Indeed, to most Christians, God is the one who “invoked” and “called” the universe into life. And one of the most important tasks that theologists have been holding ever since the creation of Christianity was to logically prove the existence of the “invoker of the universe.” Out of the tens and thousands of theories and arguments proposed for verifying the presence of god, the Cosmological Argument is acknowledged by most philosophers for possessing a firm logic.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Cosmological Argument, proposed by the genius philosopher Thomas Aquinas, has its base on the logic that every existing thing has its cause for existence and that there is no omission in the cause-effect linkage amongst existing things. So since every single thing on Earth has its cause for “being there,” the universe must have an origin that caused its formation, named God. Such meticulous explanation based on the endless reign of causality bond was indeed more than enough to nod the heads of contemporary skeptics. However, viewing the Cosmological Argument as a citizen of a world nine hundred years after its birth, it is not hard to cast doubts and find the holes inside the logic of the theologists.

The first problem with Aquinas’ logic comes from the fact that not every existing things have their causes for existence. Back in the 1200s when scholasticism philosophers developed the Cosmological Argument, they were unaware of the concept of “time travel.” However, in 1905, as Albert Einstein invented the Relativity Theory, the gates of possibility for moving back and forth in time widely opened. In other words, a person from the future could possibly “rewind” the time and erase the thing that originally caused its existence. In such cases, there is no longer a cause that brought about its existence, and the link between the cause and the effect that was assumed to be solid is now broken.

Furthermore, another question arouses from the absence of the origin of the “origin of the universe.” In short, if the causality link is infinite, who created the God, then? Until now, the philosophers have not been successful in providing an adequate explanation on why the reign of causality has to stop at God’s turn. Plus, there’s a lack of logical evidence to prove that things will work as they do for things around us (that everything has causes and effects) when the causality link gets near the origin of the universe.

The Cosmological Argument is indeed a great work of logic and variations are still being fervently formulated by numerous philosophers. However, a fundamental problem lies in the argument: that it is outdated. The advent of high level technology was not put into consideration by the scholasticism philosophers, consequently making premises that were scientifically wrong from its very first beginning of formation.

TED Video: Andrew Mwenda Takes a New Look at Africa

 

Mr. Garrioch's directions

     So this time, when I visited TED, I decided to click on "Resize by .....persuasive" on the left column. After skimming through the titles of the appearing images, I chose a speech with the title "Andrew Mwenda takes a new look at Africa."

     Before I began watching the 17-minute-speech, I skimmed through the comments that were written on the post. Surprisingly, there were some disdainful writers asserting the speech to be dogmatic and provocative.

     After listening to the speech, though, I found myself in dissent with such criticisms. The overall speech was lucid, his discernment being acute. Though his argument that financial aid of supercilious developed countries to African countries actually results in aggravating the infamous corruption in Africa and makes the continent more dependent was rather eccentric and ironical, the speech was elaborate in overall, supported by credulous evidences.
     His saying that many African countries are in fact not in the state of anarchy was also interesting. He contributes the formation of such stereotypes to the media's solicitation  for impressive, but many times biased, stories. 
     After seeing the speech, I did some scrutiny about the speech giver, Andrew Mwenda. Mwenda is a founder and owner of The Independent, an Ugandan newspaper that is renown for its caustic criticisms on the authoritarian bureaucratic government. And even during his writing career in The Monitor and in his quotations for diverse media such as the BBC or CNN, he was well known for his astute visions that financial aids on African countries do nothing but aggravating the stagnation of the continents' countries economy.
(The 20 word burden is off finally. I will write with my voice, my vocab use from here.)
      However, while I was watching this speech, one question came to my mind: The methods that Mwenda proposed, do they really work? He talked about promoting growth in high level scientific technology. Well, how exactly are the "developed" nations supposed to help the countries out? By providing some advanced technology out of a mist for free? Or build a high-tech scientific facility in the center of a desert, when the security of the country is so vulnerable so that the expensive scientific facility is nothing but a piece of ice that would be destroyed if let alone? Are these measures really supposed to stimulate African entrepreneurs and improve independence? Is spoon-feeding of high level technology rather than "letting them grow" after building primary education really something that other countries should do? What does high-level technology supposed to do to entrepreneurs? Aren't other matters such as the vulnerability of politics in the nations or the security issues more urgent? Such questions couldn't be answered by the seventeen-minute-speech by Mwenda.
     I liked the speech. I myself do not believe in spoon-feeding African nations, and it was really nice to see a real Ugandan scholar explaining to me why the nations shouldn't be just given away financial aids. But, unfortunately, there were some holes in the logic of Mwenda that couldn't be answered sufficiently.
    

A beautiful story that I found in the Internet

Click here for the original source

So I was surfing on the Internet and I saw this Internet news about a truly beautiful incident that was in the court.

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     The following is my Korean-English translation for this news article.
     "Stand up from the seat. Will you?"
      Last month, in Seoul Seocho Regional Teen Court Courthouse, the warm voice of Kim Gui Ok judge echoed. On the defendant seat was Ms. X (anonymous), accused for unjustly stealing a motorcycle.
      When Ms. X hesitantly stood up with shrunken shoulders after all the thinking about the punishment that she would receive, Judge Kim said.
      "Shout after me. I am the prettiest girl in the world."
       Ms. X, in surprise, murmured "I am the..."
       "With power!" said the judge .
       "I can do whatever I want! I'm not afraid of anything in this world! I am not the only one in this world!"
        Ms. X, who were following after the judge in a loud voice, burst into a cry as she shouted the last phrase.
        Ms.X's mom, who was also inside the courtroom, started to cry along.
        Ms.X has a history of being accused for convicting theft and assault for fourteen times since last autumn.
       A lawful decision would be one consigning the child to the superintendence of professional teenager facilities. The only order that Judge Kim made for Ms. X  was to "get up and shout with her."
      Such decision was based on Ms.X's background on falling into the state of delinquency. Ms. X used to be a bright, all-A student with a dream as a nurse. However, Ms. X's life changed after being a victim of a mob violence last year. Ms.X had to receive psychological treatment due to the after effect, and parts of Ms.X's mom's body were paralyzed permanently. Sense of guilt has forced her to lose pace in school, and she finally started to hang out with juvenile delinquents.
      Judge Kim quoted in the courtroom.
     "This kid came to court as an assailant. But who could easily say that this girl is the suspect of such wrongdoings if they get to know about her background of being so spoiled? The only wrong thing that this beautiful girl has done is that she has lost self-esteem. And that, is why I made an order that recovers her self-esteem."
     Judge Kim, with reddened eyes, called Ms. X to the judicial bench.
     "Who do you think is the most precious person in this world? You. And all you have to do now is to always remember this fact. Then you would be able to overcome hardships like this one."
     The judge stretched and grasped Ms. X's hand and said,
     "I would really love to hug you, but judicial bench is on our way, and this is all I can do for you."
     This trial was done confidentially, but it became an issue inside Seoul Regional Teen Courthouse and became known to the public lately.

Morning exercise in KMLA

      For majority of the KMLA students, six o' clock in the morning means a "war" between their mind and their body; their minds shouting to themselves to get up, their body shouting back that they are just too tired. And if the bodies win, they are awarded with 30 minutes of more sleep, and then punished by seeing their names in next week's student court list. On the right to their names is the accused item, which reads: Absent for Morning Exercise.

     Morning exercise is a system in KMLA that enforces students to come to gymnasium until 6:30 in the morning every day, and do a physics activity (the student has an option between Gumdo and Taekwondo) for thirty minutes. Such daily physical education on the morning is greatly supported by the current principal of KMLA, Jung Il Yoon, who emphasizes "physical ability" as one of those qualities that are extremely important to "potential global leaders." And as a person who have experienced this system for good 10 months, I have something (perhaps more than just something) to say about the morning exercise in KMLA.

Gumdo (Kendo), a traditional Japanese martial art. KMLA students can choose either this or Taekwondo.

        Okay. I admit that stamina and strength is one of the talents that a leader should possess. I have learned this lesson very well throughout my first semester as I saw myself dozing off in class after sleeping late in the night while others were bright and awake during the daytime even after having just too hours of sleep. So I'm not saying that the half hour of sports per day is too much. No. In fact, I believe that thirty minutes is just the appropriate amount of time that could be invested on sports daily.

      But what I'm angry about is the time. The time that this morning exercise takes place. 6 o'clock in the morning is an hour just too early to get up for students who receive the most enormous amount of stress in South Korea. It is also the very beginning of the day, and since these sports involve extreme sports activity for most of the cases (especially Kendo), students find their bodies filled with fatigue even before they go to class. This eventually leads to them messing up a couple of classes in the morning time.

      The attitude of the teachers and content of morning exercise also makes me mad. In case of Kendo, the assistant teacher who helps the teaching of Mr. Myung Soon Kim is extremely incapable at supervising students. The teacher is also renown for basically "pissing off" students who fall behind rather than helping them. 

      Taekwondo is not an exception. The teacher of Taekwondo is infamous for relieving his personal stress and psychological pain to the students. The time that he finishes the martial arts lesson is also very capricious and fluctuant, thus leading to a confusion inside the students' daily schedule.

Korean traditional martial arts, Taekwondo. It's another option for KMLA students

     Furthermore, there are diverse safety issues if such physical activities are done early in the morning. The students, of course, have just got up from their bed, and many of them are half-asleep throughout the class. Since Kendo involve using wood swords that could easily bruise someone else and Taekwondo's martial arts poses can readily hurt someone else if wrongly aimed, it is not hard to infer that injuries could easily rise. 
     Also, the Kendo and Taekwondo uniforms are extremely formal and not practical, easily putting the user in jeopardy by its long leg sleeves and other parts that are focused on appearances, not safety. 
     I like exercise. Especially traditional martial arts like Taekwondo. But if the teachers are all losers and sadists and the exercise ends up making students to doze off in class, I'm left with no choice but to doubt the need of morning exercise in this school.

A review of the movie "Mr. Popper's Penguins"

Love and Material Success are inseparable

A review on Mark Water's movie "Mr. Popper's Penguins"

     Samuel Seung Min Kim

      I personally like (or should I say love?) Jim Carrey as an actor, especially a comedian. His ability to be absolutely consumed to the film and the million types of faces that he can make are the things that leaves me with no choice but to like him as a person with great aptitude for a comedy film.

A picture of Jim Carrey

     So, lately, I have happened to watch Carrey's most recent piece of work named "Mr. Popper's Penguins." I was fascinated by the movie poster, especially by the fact that Jim Carrey was the one acting. I also expected some environmental issue being mentioned inside the movie, as penguins are one of those animals that symbolize global warming along with polar bears.
     And the movie wasn't bad. Though environmental issues were not dealt as I expected it to be, Carrey was a great actor as always, thus making the movie more impressive than it would have been other actors. His way of acting seemed to fit well with the genre of the movie, which was a comedy with a little tinge of drama.
     At the start of the movie, Thomas Popper seems to be a guy with an indifferent atmosphere surrounding him; he is no longer a boy who used to be fascinated by the stories of his dad's adventure. The episodes that his father had virtually "broadcasted" to him through the microphone now means nothing to him but a matter he could possibly utilize in persuading someone to sell his lifetime's reminiscence.

Mr. Popper dancing with his penguins

     However, as he meets Van Gundi and begins to look for the "worth" he has as a human, as a man with warm memories and a hot heart, he starts to change. The 6 penguins are the main helpers of such changes, as the mind of Thomas Popper that used to be captured by the obsession for material success melts as his love for the penguins burns. (It's interesting to see how he pours "snow" inside his apartment as his "hot" love for the penguins grow.)
    And as the love of Popper grows, the relationship he has with other people, the "networth," also improves. His ex-wife starts to like him (the scene of the two people skating in the ice rink efficiently portrays this), he starts to understand the feeling that his little child's emotional conflict in puberty, and the penguins start to love him back.
     Such rise of love and humanity of Mr. Popper reaches its peak at the end of the movie, when the penguins decide to choose their father (Popper) over their basic instinct to pursue food. At the same time, Van Gundi realizes that Mr. Popper (who was previously a jerk trying to allure an old lady with hallucinations that he had no affinity towards) has become a person that she has been looking for, she awards him with her permission to sell the Tavern on the Green. In exchange, Mr. Popper decides to not destroy the tavern as a place that gave him the warm heart he once used to have.
      Perhaps, the director in this movie, Mark Waters, was trying to teach the watchers of this movie a lesson. A lesson that "love" and "humanity" are not something separable from "material success." Many people around the world seems to forget about this. Even Steve Jobs did; he abandoned his daughter because he had to concentrate on his company affairs. It costed the wealthy CEO the great pain of cancer to learn the preciousness of bonds between family members.
     Before writing this review, while I was doing a little bit of pre-research, I found out originally Ben Stiller was supposed to act as Thomas Popper. I am not trying to degrade his capacity as an actor, but I take a careful guess that "Mr. Popper's Penguins" wouldn't have been able to thoroughly express its theme if such a serious-looking man like Stiller played the Popper.

My rating on this movie:

A paragraph introducing myself

3 words that represent me: Rose of Sharon, a piece of shattered glass, the jewel of inheritance?

The paragraph:

     As a youngster, I used to chronically suffocate from severe cold. Memories of intense physical pain and psychological fatigue fill my childhood days, and such distortion and agony had grown me into a piece of shattered glass, the body so fragile but the mind so sharp. My passion easily flourishes and bursts out but also dies rapidly like the Rose of Sharon, incessantly repeating a sequence of thriving itself and then committing suicide every day. My Korean name, Seung Min, stands for "The Jewel of Inheritance." My English name, Samuel, means "Heard by God" in Hebrew. And fused altogether, my full name Samuel Seung Min Kim, leads to a beautiful interpretation: A person heard by god to be a jewel, but not just an ordinary jewel; a jewel of inheritance.

A Reading Journal of the first 30 pages in "The Body" by Stephen King

     This is a reading journal of "The Body" based on  my reading of the first 30 pages. I have read until the end of the "Stud City." (p.293~326)

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"The Body" by Stephen King

     One thing that I have realized about "The Body" was that the tone was definitely different from that of "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption." Maybe it's because the narrator in this novella is a person looking back when he was a 12 year old boy, but it was not hard to find that the tone was now a little bit more close to that of a thriller story. The voice was no longer that of warmth which seemed to exist in Red's narration.

     Also, I was able to see a lot of swear words coming out throughout the story. Unlike Shawshank Redemption, in which there were no precise descriptions about the words that the convicts used, I could easily find the f*** word if I were to open up a random page in "The Body."

     Overall, the descriptions inside the novella (until the 30th page) seemed to be sufficient, just like any other Stephen King's writings. It was also interesting to realize that the songs that were described to be "coming out from the radio" inside the story actually existed.

     However, the sudden invasion of the "Stud City" seemed to be very abrupt indeed. The tone shift was just way too fast, and there were some inappropriate scenes explicitly dealt inside the passage. Plus, unlike the normal novellas of Stephen King, the way how the story rolled seemed somewhat awkward. There were also some parts that left the reader puzzled about the things that are happening in the story. Also , the Stud City story seemed to be very inconsistent with other parts of the story.
     Otherwise, the novella seemed to be overall well written and descriptive.

An In-class Writing on "Spring" by Kim Ki Duk

This story of a baby monk who ended up killing two animals by tying a rock around their body reminded me of a one episode of mine that happened when I was ten years old.

The elementary school I went to as a 3rd grader was located in a center of the Seoul city. And just like any other schools, it had the main building, a sports field, and a parking lot.

And in the rightside corner of the sandy parking lot was an ant hole. Every now and then around the earth consisted of numerous holes leading towards the heart of the ant community, I was able to see the six-legged black creatures crawling around, scavenging for food.

It all started with me "observing" the ants' daily routine. I simply sat there after having lunch and looked at how the ant community worked. After a while, I started throwing some food in front of the anthole, curious of their reactions. The foods were always covered with the black bodies of ants when I visited the site an hour later.

This behavior of mine lasted for about a week. And as time went by, I started to feel a tinge of superiority over the small powerless black animals growing as I realized that I was the main source of food to them,that I was the guy who fed the whole community.

Then I decided to kill some ants. At first, I gently squeezed my Nike sneakers onto the flat bodies of the creatures. Unable to look upwards and see the deathly blue surface of the shoe approaching down to them, the ants helplessly died. 

I don't exactly remember how I felt that day. But one thing sure was that I was enjoying the situation.That little bit of cruelty innate in my mind has finally revealed itself.

So the massacre started. Every lunch time, I ran towards the ant hole and started ruthlessly stepping on the six legged creatures. And all they could do was to make an alert to the ant community and make some sentinel ants to come out looking for the attackers which appeared from nowhere. It didn't take me more than ten minutes to cover the whole place with dead ant bodies.

And there was this day when I felt the cruelty in my mind just surging. The ruthlessness has now taken full control of my mind. That day, I didn't even had lunch. I had to satisfy the cruelty inside my mind. And for the next 50 minutes of my entire lunch time, I was there on the right corner of the parking lot, slaughtering the whole population of the ant community.

The result was deteriorating. There were just innumerable dead bodies of the ants lying on the earth, and my breathing was uneven after all that killing. There were no longer any sentinel ants coming out. The whole ant community seemed to be dead. Somehow satisfied, I left the site.

That night, I had this terrible nightmare. On the dream, I was on this black silent place, waiting for something to happen. And then I saw a flash of light coming out. As I ran towards the light, I saw the ants that I have killed that day running on the same direction as me. And when I was just about to reach the source of light, I saw the killed ants all clotting and forming a huge black body of something that I wasn't able to recognize.

The black creature (I am not able to remember the exact appearance of it) started to roaring. Though I was not able to pick up the whole sentence I could recognize some fragments of the sentence that said "revenge" and death.

I was horrified to death and tried to run away, but then noticed that my leg was just there sticking.

Then I woke up. I was all covered in sweat. I had never had such vivid dreams in my life, and I was just gulped in fear that I burst out to a cry. 

My mom, who was sleeping in the room next to me, ran to me with surprised eyes, thinking that something terrible happened, and then was relieved as she saw me safe.

I wasn't able to sleep a moment that night. I thought that the monster would come back to me if I go back to sleep.

The next day, as soon as I arrived at the school, I ran towards the place towards the corner of the sandy parking lot.

There, I saw the ant community that once thrived to be dead. The ant carcasses were still there and there no longer were any ants coming out from the holes anymore. It was as if the time around the site had came into a halt.

I started to cover the ants' bodies by throwing sand over them. Soon, the squeezed bodies of the insects were nowhere to be seen.

Then I made a mound of sand and made something that resembled the look of a tomb. The graveyard of the ants was finished by putting a little piece of rock in front of the sand mound, and I gave a pat on the mountain full of dead ant bodies.

Suddenly, I felt something in my mind coming up to my throat. I started to cry again, but this time silently. The tears rolled down from my face and fell on the dusty sand pile.


The superego in my mind started to take control, its voice resonating inside my mind.
What have I done? What have I done to the ant community just for the satisfaction of the horrible cruelty inside  my mind?


(The in class writing time ended here)

Metafiction (Modified)

Note: I found the chain writing thing to be simply impossible to use as part of my metafiction, so I decided to use "The Way I View My Life." The link is here.

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Looking back on my high school “philosophy”

           

Samuel is a student at the Yonsei University, and left the arms of his family after entering the university. And today, he decides to visit his home that he hasn’t seen for three years.

His home was located in Jeolla-nam-do, and as his school is in Seoul, the travel to his house almost took three hours by car. When he arrived parking lot and went outside, he found the atmosphere to be somewhat humid and annoying.

However, as he entered the house gate and started walking through the front yard toward the house, he saw a warehouse, a large steel container box. Somehow, the storage that was so unfriendly before seemed to be asking for him to enter it. Soon, he found himself standing in front of the rusty door.

The door opened with a creaky sound. A cloud of dust released into the air from the steel structure. After leaving the door open for few minutes for ventilation, he stepped inside.

As soon as he turned the light on, he found himself in a complete chaos. The whole place was covered with things that were no longer used. Tools that his father used to use when he was fixing the roof were wandering around in the floor all rusted.

He started slowly walking through the mess, his childhood reminiscences constantly coming to him. And then he found a small notebook that read "My Philosophy" with his handwriting. Hmph, he thought, had I ever had things like a "philosophy"?

Quickly shaking off the dusts on the notebook, he started reading through the first paragraph, which said:

Roll up a boulder to a top of a hill. See the huge, heavy piece of rock roll down the hill. This is the infamous punishment King Sisyphus had to face for infinite times in the famous Greek myth.

“I know this myth, a good one.” Samuel murmured. His eyes started to scan through the second paragraph:

And indeed, I believe that my life doesn’t share much differences from this frustrating penalty that King Sisyphus had to suffocate every day. My life is also consisted of hundreds of “boulders” that I have to mount towards the top of the “hill” with so much effort and simply sit and watch them falling back down with hopeless, frustrated eyes. When I am just about to think that a boulder tagged “Academically successful life in elementary school” is over, “Good grades in Middle School” appears, while “Entrance to KMLA” is idly waiting on the queue.” Even after the “Entrance to KMLA” boulder (that used to so easily fool me that ‘this one would be the end’) is successfully located on the hill top, suddenly a series of huge, colossal rocks named “Good GPAs” or “Entrance to Ivy League Schools” appears.

Samuel was now starting to find the essay to be pretty much intriguing. Though the handwriting obviously showed that it was written by himself, it seemed as if he had forgotten about all this over time. He then went on to the third paragraph:

Yes, I’m starting to get extremely bored and somewhat “immune” to the mental (and sometimes physical) pain I feel as I see all my effort invested in pulling up the rock go into vain. The frustration and fatigue I feel has now become so evident that I’m almost in the state of “expecting” an another objective to pursue by the time I’m done with my work with the previous rock. Now, as I see the boulder running away from me down the hills, the pain I feel is finally almost close to nothingness. I’ve grown so numb out of it.

And the essay stopped here suddenly. The last sentence of the notebook, separated from the essay by about four lines said:

Hell to the world for giving me this cursed fate.

And when he finished reading these lines, suddenly, the light bulb flickered and then went out. Maybe it was too exhausted.

The whole place was now consumed with absolute silence and darkness. Samuel sat down on the couch that used to stay in the house.

Is my life really that bad? Is it really something to “give hell to” and something to be “cursed”? It took him some time spent in meditation to come up with the answer.

And then he realized that himself as a high school was actually wrong. The biggest thing that the 17 -year-old Samuel was not able to consider was that it is basically the task of everybody to pull up the boulder to the hill. Everybody has a boulder to move up; it’s just that the notoriousness of such tasks that is different.

And since it is something that every human being has to do, the job that seems to be so repetitive and meaningless is no longer that of foolishness; instead, it is something that can be enjoyed as one sees the color and the shape of the boulder changing depending on the work he invest on pushing up the heavy rock.

My life is not a cursed one, Samuel thought.

And as he walked to the creaky door and pushed it open, Samuel found the air and the sun to be more pleasant than as it was when he first walked into the storage. Because he had work to do. A work that could be awarding later on if he keeps up with his effort. His life was a blessing of the god.

My insight on Korean Education

     One of my English teachers back when I was a middle school student used to say education in South Korea is one of the things that we are fully authorized to reproach about. Her rationale was that we the students are the ones who are directly being affected by the government policies on the education.
     And having been one of those "directly influenced" by the education policies for 10 years, I have a lot of things to talk about the problematic features of the South Korean education's current state.
     The biggest problem of South Korean education is with the fact that most of the South Korean students' education is heavily dependent on private education. 3 trillion won, approximately 30% of the national budget, is yearly invested for private education tuition fee. 
     Called "Hagwons", the private education institutions in South Korea has been successful in taking a great part inside the students' education. Currently, almost every student in the country goes to at least one hagwon, and it is close to sheer impossibility to get a good grade in school without the help of those private education institutions.
     These hagwons are especially concentrated on a region named "Gangnam" in Seoul. As a student who has lived in the Gangnam region for about 4 years before coming to KMLA, I will briefly illustrate the lives of normal South Korean "Gangnam" students.
     
      The typical life of a Gangnam student begins approximately around 7 o'clock in the morning. After getting up, students put on their school uniform, have breakfast, and then leave for school.
     An ordinary high (or middle) school in Korea finishes its daily curriculum around 5' o clock in the afternoon. The students, after being released from school, mostly go to "hagwons" until around 10 P.M. After coming back home around 10:30, the students spend the rest of the night doing assignments for the school and the hagwons. Majority of the Gangnam students go to sleep around 2 A.M. in the morning.


     Though there is a little bit of extremity added as it is an example of Gangnam students' lives, the daily routine of a typical South Korean consisted of "school-hagwon-assignment-go to sleep" stays the same.
     
     And the biggest problem with this way of life is, of course, the enormous amount of psychological and physical distress that students receive daily. The students are subjugated to extreme fatigue after being exploited all their soul by the everlasting cycle of school, hagwon, and assignment.
     However, perhaps another colossal cost that the country has to pay for possessing a deformed education structure is the enlarging of the gap between the rich and the poor. And as the tuition fee that the students have to pay for going to hagwons is mostly high and could be very burdensome to poor, a lot of those students living in the rural sides or those in a plebeian household are unable to go to multiple hagwons, unlike those who are rich.
     Such difference in the level of education between the rich and the poor, of course, leads to the expansion of the gap based on the difference in the position between the rich and the poor.


     And the government, after receiving huge amount of complaints from the social minors, came up with a policy: to restrict the private education in South Korea. Based on this theme, the South Korean government came up with a series of acts that hindered the growth of private education, such as regulating the hagwons that teaches students after 10 P.M. or collecting more tax from hagwons.

The head of the ministry of education, science, and technology, Lee Ju Ho

     Some might praise such behaviors to be minor-friendly and pursuing equality amongst students. However, I believe that these acts actually brings about larger amount of disadvantages compared to its benefits. Here's a reason why.
     As explained above, the private education in South Korea takes up the majority of the students' education level. And if the government happens to hinder the growth of such important factor in students' lives, all they are doing is simply stopping the future leaders and scholars from being competent.
      Plus, there is an error in the logic that the left-wing parties use when asking for policies hindering private education, which is that there should be an equality amongst students, no matter how they are born. 
     What they are failing to consider is the difference that evidently exists among students. There can be a student who is born with a physical or psychological ability best for figure skating, and there can be a student who is born with an aptitude for a plumber. And private education is the best way to satisfy such differences, as there are obvious limitations of the school education, for it is "universally" applied to all recipients. It was not the standardized school curriculum that brought about Kim Yuna or Ban Ki Moon; the private educations' help was there to maximize their innate talents. And to me, the idea of treating Kim Yuna and Ban Ki Moon "THE SAME WAY" just for mere "EQUALITY" seems to be nothing more than that of insanity.
      Yes, I know. It's harsh, and it's unfair to see students being discriminated. But c'est la vie. Such is the way the life rolls, and maybe it's the job of the school to teach the students how discriminatory the society is before they are tossed into the harsh reality, unprepared.

My Insight on Korean Politics

     So last time I wrote something about the things that happened in South Korea recently. I'm going to proceed such writing and talk about my overall insight on the status quo Korean politics.

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     About three days ago, I scribbled about the controversy over free lunch service that dominated South Korea (especially Seoul) for about three months. (From June to August) And one thing that Mr. Garrioch had asked me was: Why is free lunch service being such an issue in Korea?

     And I tried to come up with a reason why. Why do the South Korean politicians had to be obsessed with free lunch service out of a sudden? Weren't there other more important issues that could have been more closely dealt by the DP (Democratic Party, the most influential left-wing party in South Korea) and the GNP (Grand National Party, the largest right-wing party in the National Assembly), such as the low quality of public education in South Korea or the poor treatments toward those with a distressful job? Why did the free lunch service suddenly have to be a subject of extreme quarrel?

The mark of the Democratic Party (DP)

The mark of the Grand National Party (GNP)

     Honestly,  I didn't know. And when I asked the same question (why the "free lunch service" had to be an issue rather than other urgent welfare issues like the minimum wage) to my peers, the answer was also the same.
     Coming to think about it, I think the mere reason that made the politicians to be extremely enthusiastic about the free lunch service was the fact that it was something dealt importantly during the Seoul mayor election in 2010. Out of a sudden, Myung-sook Han, the official candidate of DP as a Seoul mayor, happened to bring up the issue (which almost nobody in the society, even the students, cared about) and since then the free meal idea has been a matter of severe altercation.

     And this, is the type of problem that I find in South Korean politics. The politicians are too busy fighting about the things that people don't even know why they should care about. Even to me, a person who was one of those attending public middle schools in Seoul, the free lunch service simply seemed simply out of place, out of time.

     Another good example of South Korean politicians' foci being deviated from the public's wants could be the Four River Project. The Four River Project basically aims to promote the quality of the four major rivers in South Korea (The Han River, Kum River, Yong-San River, and Nak-Dong River). This project was put onto open dispute after its proposal as one of the promises that the current president of South Korea (Myeong-bak Lee) made.

The mark of Four River Project

     Many people in South Korea simply assume that 'promoting the four rivers in South Korea' is something worth being done, for it is an issue passionately dealt with in the National Assembly. But if we stop and think about it for a moment, it is not hard to realize that the project referred to as "Four River whatever" by South Koreans is not something to be so crazily fighting over about. Before being proposed as part of the presidential election promise, there was basically no noteworthy public appeal neither a renown survey on the public asking for an improvement on the quality of the four rivers. In other words, the politicians have been being frenzy about something that nobody in the public really cares (or should care) about.

     In this piece of writing, it is not of my intention to censure a specific party for making foolish proposals. Rather, my intention is to criticize the overall South Korean politicians for being so uncommunicative with the public. Every now and then in "election seasons", we find Congress member candidates babbling about "being a good listener to public's needs," and then find them on the news for being involved in a corruption after a few months.

     One of the cardinal premises of a representative democracy (a form of democracy in which politicians "represent" the public) is that the politicians are able to correctly analyze the public's desires and reflect them in upcoming policies. And if that's not something being done in South Korea, I have to say, it is time for a reformation to be made inside the National Assembly Hall, not on the Four Rivers of South Korea that nobody even "gives a damn."