Sasquatch

Jordan starts school tomorrow. She's pretty nervous because last year was a difficult one for her and she is worried the teacher will be mean and she won't have any friends. Last year she made a really good friend at the beginning of the year, but that friend left halfway through the school year and she never really found another one. She has trouble looking at the positive potential of the future, but we're working on that :) She has her new outfit all laid out with her new book bag and everything, so that has kind of helped her have something to look forward to.
On a somewhat not really related note, I may have mentioned previously that Jordan has larger than average feet. This time last year I think I was buying her women's size 4-5 shoes and was astounded that a then 8 year old was wearing women's sizes. Her feet have grown exponentially since then and earlier this week I bought her a new pair of sandals because her feet were over the edge of her old ones. The new sandals were size 7. We got home and when I saw her try them on (I wasn't paying close attention at the store apparently) I realized they were too small for her - her feet reached the end on both sides. We then decided to compare feet sizes and I realized that she and I now have the same size feet. Jordan wears women's size 8. How can she still be my little girl when she's starting to get so big???

Masculinity

One thing I find fascinating about Korean culture is the masculinity issue. The men in Korea are definitely dominant - woman are sometimes seen walking 5 steps behind their husband down the street. I heard a story from a guy at one of our camps that when his wife was talking with a Korean pastor's wife, she said that wives in the U.S. have heavenly marriages while in Korea it is hell. I'm sure that is not the true with all people and the younger generation seems to be making some changes, but it is true to an extent. Korean men and boys are also very violent. We had the students write about something they would change about their families and it broke my heart how often I saw writing about how cold the parents, especially fathers, were and how they wished they wouldn't get hit - which probably means spankings, but still hard for a non-corporal punishment pacifist like me to read. In the classes themselves, violence cropped up in an organized way. Whenever the kids would play a game, the Korean helpers would quite naturally propose a "punishment" for the losers. So we'd play a word game and the losing team would get hit on the head, slapped on the arm, or a particularly violent punishment in which the boy being punished (this rarely was done for the girls) would crouch down on hands and knees and then the punisher would pound on the back with both hands several times and then slam into the back of the other kid with his elbow.
This is not meant to totally disparage Koreans. There are many wonderful things about Korean people and they did not require punishments (none happened in my class) but it was interesting for me because while these things showed an overabundance of testosterone, there was a much gentler side as well. It was very normal for boys to touch each other, not just patting the back or slapping a shoulder, but putting arms around each other, patting each other gently on the head or face, even holding hands while walking. Boys who one minute were leaving handprints on their friends the next minute were standing almost cheek to cheek.
The two extremes are just interesting for someone who is used to men being closer to the middle. Not as much violence, but not as much closeness either.

I'm Ba-ack

Well, I returned to the ol' USA on Saturday and it's back to the grind already. I have faculty stuff going on tomorrow so tonight J and I will go to Sea World for one last fling of summer. Korea was pretty great. It was cool meeting the kids there and teaching them. The first two weeks we were at an English camp and I had a group of 16 kids, 10 of which were cool junior high boys - a group that I get along very well with. Junior high boys know how to have fun, joke around, and laugh but they aren't clingy and trying to hold hands like the younger kids and girls do. I still find it strange to hold hands with anyone but Jordan, but I sucked it up a couple times.
Our team did pretty well during the 3 weeks stuck together, especially since none of us really knew anyone else before we were thrown together. We did have some major blow-outs, though, which everyone handled very maturely and we managed not to kill each other. We only really got to experience Korea for 4 days of the trip, since the rest of the time we were working, but it was fun to see the countryside and contrast that with the city of Seoul.
One strange thing happened just a little while ago. I signed up on Facebook this summer when my friend Jodi "invited" me. I don't go on it very often and very rarely spend any time looking around, but J is out for the moment and I don't feel like being productive right now, so I was looking at all my facebook friends and learned that one of them passed away last week. She was a girl I went to church with in PA and I didn't know her too well, but did hang out with her periodically while I lived there. It's extremely strange to discover that someone has died on the computer. Under normal circumstances, I suppose I would never have learned about it, since I didn't keep in contact with her after I left PA, but to read casually that one friend is shopping for school supplies, another is drinking Starbucks, and another's family is sad to say she passed away - I'm not sure how to process that.
Anyway, enough darkness for now. Hope all your days are sunny and bright!