and nary a drop to drink.

I do have three prospects, but they are all very uncertain.  One of them isn’t open (possibly) until late May.  The other is that construction safety R&D and isn’t baked yet.  The other is in Jeollanamdo (the southernmost part of Korea) living in a two bedroom cottage with stone walls!  Maybe I could do TRACK work remotely from there.  How I really want to go there and bag the city altogether and start over fresh.  Feeling out right now if it is one of the school districts I’ve been blacklisted from.

There are so many jobs, and it’s a full time job every day just sifting through them.  Here we are in the middle of the biggest hiring season for foreigners who speak English, and I can’t find work  because I’m too old and not white.  I started pasting discriminatory hiring posts again, but the list became depressingly too long and figured you already got the picture.  I’m just numb to everything right now.  Live with uncertainty long enough, and it changes you.  Not depressed.  Just numb.

**********

My last days at school are spent cataloging the new English Zone library, looking for work, and organizing TRACK’s volunteer group.  I continue to check the pulse of the adoptee rights groups and the issues surrounding Haiti (and I hope they throw the book at those U.S. missionaries who claimed they didn’t know 10 of the 20 children they attempted to smuggle out of the country had parents)

Enjoying setting up the library and I’m sorry to leave it, unfinished, next week.  I enjoy putting the fiction in alpha order by author, enjoy determining the Dewey decimal number, enjoy writing down all the publishing information and ISBN numbers, enjoy adding them to the database, enjoy discovering interesting new books and writing the synopsis, and especially enjoy putting the labels on their spines.   Back in the day when I did this in college, we also typed the information on paper pockets for the check-out cards, painting glue on them and sticking them inside.  We also typed index cards and filed them.  It was especially fun to write in cross references or corrections with a needle sharp #2 pencil in your most perfect handwriting.  Covering the book jackets was really fun too, and I took great pride in how mine fit like a second skin.

It’s a great collection In Kyung chose:  Newbery and Caldecott.  Cambridge readers.  Scholastic series on world social issues, etc. Makes me want to read children’s books all day.  Too bad the all the shelves are cabinets with solid wood doors that are kept under lock and key.  That’s real inviting.  I mentioned this sarcastically to my co-teacher, wondering if they’d ever get used at all, and she agreed.  The books seem more like decoration.  Hidden decoration.  What a waste.  Also in the English Zone is an area with three office desks and chairs which nobody uses, and four student computers with desks that the kids aren’t allowed to turn on.  Hopefully, they’ll figure out how to incorporate  these things they put in.  But right now, it’s looking like a pretentious show.  And the most important thing – the children’s desks and seats – are pieces of garbage that are already falling apart.

**********

I miss the zen of mindless labor.  My favorite jobs in life were:  being a janitor,  factory work,  and warehouse order picking at Amazon.  Something very freeing about it.  It seemed hard at the time, but the work went by fast, you were physically fit, and your imagination could wander, no politics, and worker fellowship.