Do you recognize that quote? I'll give you a hint - it has something to do with Anne Hathaway's break-out role. If you guessed "The Princess Diaries" then you're right. Good job, you know your chick flicks. Let me refresh you on the context of this quote. It's towards the end of the movie. Adorkable Anne Hathaway, playing the recently royal and athletically challenged Mia Thermopolis, is up to bat during a PE class softball game. This is right after Mia's been betrayed by her new cheerleader friends, alienated her real ones, and is generally failing at behaving like a proper 21st century noble. On her first try, Mia barely hits the ball and it rolls through the group of cheerleader frenemies who are conveniently practicing their routines next to the softball field...not you know, attending class during an average day at high school because, well, evil movie cheerleaders are, as everyone knows, always cheer leading. On her second try, Mia hits the ball directly into the barely-protected by gym-shorts junk of her former-crush: the very douchey, popular boy Josh. Yessss, classic movie justice of taking out the jerk with a blow to the balls. If only that could happen more in real life. Mia triumphantly sprints around the bases and makes it safely home, winning back her pride and (finally!) passing gym class. Let's back track for a second. I'm happy for MIa and as a fellow athletically-challenged adolescent I completely identified with her struggle and longed for a reckoning of my own. Sadly, I never got that moment. Instead, I was more like the cheerleaders shrieking and running away from Mia's first hit. Long exposition aside, this is where I come back to that quote, shouted at the scattering cheerleaders by their exasperated coach: "Oh come on, girls. It's a ball not a snake!" As a teacher at a private academy, I teach a range of different ages. My youngest students are 5-years-old and my oldest are 16. It's fascinating and sad to watch my female students go through that transition of the ball turning into a snake for pretty much every athletic activity. I think about my third-grade girls who haven't really realized that running full-speed across a soccer field and charging past one of their boy classmates to score a goal will make them appear aggressive, tom-boyish and unattractive in just a few years. Right now, they give zero you-know-what's about how they look when they're playing soccer. They just want to score because screw that, soccer day only comes once a month and the other team is not going to win. Flash forward a few hours and I'm playing one-on-one in the gym with one of my 14-year-old male students.I box him out and sink my next three shots. This kid can be a pain so this one-on-one game is my chance to remind him who's really got the power. Luckily, I haven't totally lost my basketball skills gained from 6 years of bench-warming, uh, I mean, practice. Meanwhile, the three girls in the class are huddled in the corner, pulling at their too-short uniform skirts that had to have been an unfortunate choice made by a male administrator, ignoring my suggestions that they join in. When I toss the ball to Minseo she swats it away like it's a disgusting bug. When Ji Eun actually attempts to make a shot she gives it barely any strength, misses the rim by a foot, giggles (while covering her mouth, of course) and glances to see if the guys noticed - they didn't. Hyo Sheen's throwing Bon Seok into the Kindy ball pit, for the third time. Ok, time to go shout at them again... What's so infuriating is not this age group. What's infuriating is the groups in-between. I can see the girls starting to doubt themselves and their own strength, holding back, shrinking into their own bodies and valuing those same bodies only on how desirable they are to their male peers. It's not like this is something unique to young Korean women and girls. I was thinking back and trying to pinpoint when I first realized that being "lady-like" was more important than being athletic. I can imagine several different scenarios and I'm sure that it must have been a combination of a few of these that really made the impact. Maybe it started when my older brother got signed up for baseball and I went to ballet. Or maybe in elementary school, during a unit about future jobs, when the teacher encouraged the idea of the boys becoming sports stars but reacted with little enthusiasm to girls who had the same dream. Or perhaps it was in middle school, when the girls who were starting to get attention from boys introduced the idea that behaving (and talking) like their brains were just for show - probably learned from older sisters or that god-awful Laguna Beach - is what would land you a boyfriend. Whatever it was, it was somewhere in that intersection of discovering that very specific behaviors are seen as more attractive to men and realizing that as a member of the female sex, I have little choice of when the ball becomes the snake.
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Yes you read that right. Four months in and we are about to move to our fourth apartment in Ansan. Is this a normal thing for schools to play housing hot seat with their foreign teachers? Most definitely not. But, for us, due to a stroke of bad luck and cultural miscommunications, we've been playing the game a few more times than we'd like and our suitcases are starting to complain.
Let me take you through it one unfortunate housing situation at a time. Room 205: Unwanted Guests When we arrived in August we were asked to share a room for a single occupant because we were promised couples housing a month later when my contract started. We agreed, seeing as how our school hired us, together, and flew us over together - unmarried, scandalous couple that we are. So we started in room 205 of the (now infamous, to us) JS Building. An ugly, run-down concrete building that looked like it was birthed from the junk drawer of blue prints at an early 1970s Korean construction company. For that entire first month we took shifts sleeping on a mat on the floor while the other person took the single bed. Oh, what? Single bed you say? For two people? Yes that's right. Having been told to bring sets of queen-sized sheets you can imagine our unpleasant surprise upon arriving and discovering that oops!, our American coordinator was confused and thought there was a bigger bed. However, rather than complaining and coming across as over-demanding foreigners we shrugged it off and said to ourselves, "It's only one month, it's not so bad." For the first month I was mostly solo during the day while Danny worked but I didn't have to worry about feeling homesick or lonely - I had plenty of company...of the many-legged variety. Cockroaches, beetles, and one enormous spider that Danny bravely defeated while I was, thankfully, not in the room. Unfortunately, if I felt like having a dinner party with any of my new friends this was not possible as the gas stove only had one setting: burn anything and everything you silly humans try to cook. Room 304 and 305 If I made you believe that we got couples housing after our first month ha ha!...joke's on you...well, really, on us. Due to a sneaky little sentence in our contract that reads something along the lines of "The school will provide couples housing when available" our verbal promise changed to "Can you take another single room instead?" Without any other choice, we reluctantly agreed. We were disappointed but we reasoned "At least we'll both be off the floor, it's not so bad." Enter: room 304. This little beauty is situated right in the center of the third floor of JS building. So unlike room 205 which is a corner room with a bathroom window and laundry room window, 204 only had one window and inadequate ventilation. Korean showers are odd. If you've ever seen one then you know that there is really no separation between the shower and bathroom. There is a drain in the center of the floor and basically everything gets drenched during bath time. In newer places it's ok because it dries fast and cleaning is pretty easy. In rotten, old JS however, it was like nothing ever dried. And what likes damp places? Hello holy moldy! It was everywhere. In-between every tile, in corners of the wash room and even in the air conditioner. Yipee, breathing is mold is super great for your health, right? I lasted in that room about one month. When we both stated getting major allergies Danny lost it and we revisited couples housing with our recruiter and supervisors. Their solution... Room 305 and a queen sized bed. Oh right, because I forgot to mention. The "bed" in 304 was a mattress sans bed frame. So technically I did get off the floor...by about 4 inches. We checked out 305. It looked clean, the burners worked and the air flow seemed existent. Abandoning 304 we relocated, thinking that at last, we could claim 2 acceptable rooms in JS as our own. Little did we know, about a month and a half after moving in and using 305 as our main living and sleeping space, we were doing some cleaning and made an unpleasant discovery. In the corner of the room that was normally hidden by the bed, a flourishing patch of very black mold was growing up the wall paper. Peeling it back we found that it was also giving a lot of love to the concrete underneath. It also happened to be about a foot away from where our faces were when we slept. At this point we said ok, that's it. Get us out of this place. We really don't want to die because of mold after moving all the way to Korea. Junang for Christmas Two weeks before the holidays we got the word that we could move into a newer apartment in Junang (the city one metro stop away from school). We went to check it out and it looked great. Clean, lots of light, loft style, still small but actually in good condition. No mold, no critters, nothing unexpected - as determined by Danny's very thorough inspection that included everything from water pressure to intense examination of every hole, scratch, crack and corner. Sometimes OCD is good. As I write this now we are in this Junang apartment. We had a fun Christmas here with a tree and even a little dinner sitting amongst our suitcases and boxes. We were at the point of arguing about where the TV and playstation should go (I was for the loft because hullooo who wants a huge TV cluttering up the already tiny kitchen/living room/main apartment space that's 13ft long by 6 ft wide). We should have known better. Because #Korea. Yesterday, I get a text from my Korean coordinator. "I have just got an issue...can we meet??" I come to find out that the landlord of our building changed and the old lady taking on responsibilities decided that it is a ripe time to sell our apartment. Never mind the contract the school has to rent it, she is an old woman who said please and culturally, that's just how things go. At that exact moment, Danny was haggling for a deal on furniture. So this morning when a very large Mongolian man lugged our new kitchen table and dresser into the apartment that is no longer ours we told him (through hand gestures) to not bother taking anything out of the boxes, they wouldn't be staying here long. This time it sounds like we'll actually get a choice in where we go next. Plus the landlord really wants to sell so she's offering to pay movers to help us out. In truth, it's annoying but rather than freak out we're finding the humor in it all. When we consider all of the things we do have: great friends; the rest of Asia a short plane ride away; fun students; good food; an interesting language to learn; palaces and temples to explore; and of course, each other, our housing troubles are, truly, not that bad. More to come on Apartment #4. |
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