J.T. vs. Literature

J.T. vs. Literature

This post has little to do with Korea, but it is what is on my mind, at the moment.

I have decided that the very most accurate form of literature today is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. These books have a very special place in the childhood memories of many of us, but most of us have failed to truly understand the implications of what these brilliant authors were trying to teach us. This is mostly a cultural fault. Our modern culture has us studying Vladimir Nabokov and Iris Murdoch in our collegiate English classes. Of course the aesthetics of such works are far more pleasurable, but how many of us need to be warned about becoming creepy, self-delusional pedophiles or semi-evil ex-theater directors with magical cousins and an obsession with the sea? Very few, that’s who. However, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books teach us some things that are very important about life. In the absence of any easily-found academic material, I will attempt to begin the educating.

• You start with basically no information.

Well, that’s just the reality of life. When you start are “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, you are given a little bit of background, a description of where you are, and then you start. In life you’re first decisions are all basically random as you learn from them, make mistakes and move on. Some of what you learn will be useful later, but much of it won’t. After all, how many times have you needed to remember how to play “Four Square” or recall those ultra-successful “Freeze Tag” strategies you had. I’m getting a little off track here. The point is you start off with almost no information, and that little information you have can quickly become useless or misleading (Girls have cooties? If only it were that simple.)

• Small decisions can have dire effects.

“You are standing in front of a door. On a nearby table is a piece of glass and a cigarette butt. Before going into the door, you take:

-The Glass (pg. 18)

-The Cigarette Butt (pg. 214)

-Nothing (pg. 54)

On page 54: “In the next room you encounter a crazed and bitter hobo. Perhaps if you had a cigarette butt you could offer it to him to help him calm down, or maybe you could use a glass shard to fend him off while you escape. Sadly, you have neither of those things. He disembowels you with his bare hands and offers your intestines to the Hobo gods. They bless him with copious amounts of “Wild Turkey” and some loose change they had in their godly ashtray.”

That was, of course, just to illustrate a point. Just like in life, you often find yourself making what seem to be nearly pointless decisions that will, in hindsight, be some of the most important of your life. This, of course, works both ways, as you’ll find that you may fret over a major decisions for weeks just to learn that, no matter what you do, it won’t make a bit of difference.

• There are far more ways for things to go wrong than to go right.

Here the parallels begin to become extremely obvious. For anybody who has gone back and done the same “Choose Your Own Adventure” book a dozen times, it becomes obvious that getting someplace your satisfied with is darn near impossible, but completely destroying your life through a few hopeless choices is incredibly easy! In fact, within this lesson is two sub-lessons that are also very much worth remembering.

1). “Don’t wish you had your life to do over again, because you’d just screw it up in some different way.” And then, seriously, what kind of excuse would you have? A whole lifetime of experience and you still couldn’t get to second base with that girl from high school? That’s sad, man.

2). “The only way to ensure a happy ending is to start there and work backwards.” Everybody’s done it: looked through the whole book for a good ending, then tried to trace the steps back to get there. It’s definitely too bad this doesn’t work in real life. “Where’s the mystery?” you ask. The mystery can be found as you ponder how you were supposed to know that the toe nail clippers you left behind on page 87 could be used to repair a broken supercomputer that contained the key to everlasting life.

• Good choices don’t lead to rewards, they lead to more choices.

This is, perhaps, the very deepest lesson we all should learn from the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Just like in life, you are given many different decisions to make. Every time you make a decision is a chance to fail. If you don’t fail, it doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded; you simply get to make another decision, which is also a chance to fail. The odds don’t seem so good, eh? But that’s life. Think of all the good decisions you’ve made in your life. Probably a lot, in all reality. Now remember how some really great thing in your life, which you probably made hundreds of good decisions to create, was quickly obliterated with one or two mistakes you couldn’t have avoided without “reading backwards.” It doesn’t really seem fair. There is a great deal of unfairness in the unfair book, but this particular variation probably makes it into the opening pages. It’s very important to remember that, barring making it all the way to the end, there is no number of good decisions you can make that cannot quickly lead to your falling down a trap door into a pit full of brain-starved goat zombies.

What does this teach us about life, in general?

• Luck is the key to opportunity, but not to Success

That’s most of what there is to it. Luck is such a big part of the game of life. That 47 year old man mopping floors at McDonald’s could have just lost his very noble career due to downsizing. That mega-millionaire was probably just born to the right parents, or happened to meet the right people. Certainly the millionaire had to act on his advantages and the mop-master has a responsibility to himself to rebuild his life (which, if you hadn’t realized it, he is actually doing by working for a living instead of just giving up), so there is some control to be had. Just like the books teach us, you’ll probably fail before you succeed. Your choices are clear: give up or try again. And, no matter how many haunted houses and abandoned funhouses there are between you and a 500 year old pirate treasure, you’ve got to try again.

J.T. vs. Winter

Well, I’m sorry for the lack of recent updates. The simple truth of the matter is I’m not doing much worth writing about. The cold weather has minimized my traveling, so I really just work most of the time. Sometimes I just don’t know where the times goes.

This week (and month, really) isn’t a bad example of that. My first class is at 9:40 and my last class ends at 9:00 most days, a little later on Wednesday. I have a nice long lunch break, but it doesn’t lend itself to a whole ton of social time. I just order/cook up/pick up some food and prepare for my next classes and watch some T.V. or some such thing. The weekends, well, I do whatever I do. Last weekend, I went to see the new “Harry Potter” movie. It was pretty good, I think. I went with one of the other Korean teachers, and we had a pretty good time. She actually just quit her job because she needs more time to study for the big English teaching test she’s taking in a few months or a year or something. Yikes! That’s Korea for you; you might actually find yourself studying so much that you can’t possibly work your part-time job. That’s hardcore.

This weekend I just did a bunch of random junk that needed to be done. I went out and bought various things for my apartment that I should have bought 6 months ago. Oh, by the way, in case any of you haven’t been counting down the very seconds to my return, I’ve been gone about 6 months now. That means I’m halfway through my trip. It makes me think back to when I thought a semester abroad was a long time. Whenever someone like Todd, Cori, Mike, Luke, Katie, etc. went abroad it seemed like they were gone forever. Now I’ve decided to take off for three times as long. I really think it would be much different to have been here for only 4 months or so. Faced with at least a year here, I’ve really had to get into the mindset that I LIVE here. I’m not here just to visit or see the sights; I’m a full-fledged member of the society. Well, maybe not fully, as I still can’t socially interact with most of the population, but a really active member, at least. Plus I have a job and bills and adult-resembling responsibilities. It’s crazy. The longer you stay in a place, especially one so different as Korea is, the bigger the adjustment you have to make and the more it changes you, I think. I was already going through a lot of change even before I got here, so I wonder what I’ll be like to people when I get back. I hope it’s good!

I’m equally curious as to what you people will be like when I get back. Let’s face it, a year is a long time. In the case of Mr. Mikey McG, it’s been almost two years since we’ve been able to have some real good hang out time. That’s a lot of change. For a whole bunch of you people you’ll have only been in the real world that long (much like me). My family will be different, as well. There’s been some family drama while I was gone, the most interesting of which definitely being the purchase of our very own family-run trailer park. For those of you in Grove City, I’ll lay out the scene for you. You know where “Skate America” is, right? Well, really close to there is a trailer park with a nice little house in front of it. Both the trailer park and the house were built by my great-grandfather. If you want to know what kind of man he was, just look at the two-story garage he build for himself there. The one bigger than the house he lived in. Yeah, he was that awesome. Anyways, when he got older he sold off the trailer park. My grandparents currently live in that house he built. The previous owner of the trailer park was talking with my grandfather, Pappy Jack (you know him), and mentioned he was going to sell the trailer park, but he’d like to offer it back to the family. So, my family, one part irreverence to nine parts heart, took up the call. My mother and all her siblings are running the thing. Will the responsibility go to their heads? Will it make mature adults out of them? Will they suddenly become model citizens? I hope not… if my family is anything, it’s crazy and fun, and I don’t expect as simple as business could change that. My grandmother has run her own business forever, and she’s still the family role model. I can’t wait until I grow up and can add my own small business to “Slacker, Inc.: a Grove City family business since, uh, a while ago… sorry, we lost the records… I think they’re in that pile in the corner…”