About time

We all heard so many great things about the "future" when we were growing up. Ronald Reagan promised us star wars, Michael J. Fox teased us with the hover board and The Jetsons made us believe that robots with attitudes would be doing our laundry. Yet, here we are in the year 2008 and I haven't seen anything even close to that. I feel like it was common knowledge that we would at least have flying cars by now and still we have nothing. In fact, before today I couldn't have thought of one invention that seemed "futurey".

Luckily, some nerds at Berkley have been spending millions to give people like me some hope for a sensationally fictionalized future.

"Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device. One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level. Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index."

So, light is bending and stuff is happening. I want to know if I can go to the store and buy an invisibility bodysuit. Again, my dreams were dashed.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine said in a telephone interview. "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Nothing soon, but they did say that they are at the beginning, so I have some hope. I wonder though, if I were one of these scientists and I created a cloaking device I'm not so sure that I would tell other people about, so why would they? Don't you think that they would want to do a little spying before releasing it?

You know what I would do?



Nope. I would have something to do with this...



But what?

Any Ideas?

For the past two months or so, I have been teaching part-time at a small school near my current school. The whole idea of this little hagwon is shady. Let me give you a few quick details.

I walked out of school on a Friday after I had finished and was approached no more than thirty feet away from the door by woman who said she was looking for a teacher. She handed me her business card which was made out of basic printer paper. It was all crumbled up and the name and writing on the "card" had faded. First of all, it is illegal for most ESL teachers in Korea to teach at multiple places. However, I'm on a different visa, so I can do whatever I want. Suckers! Still, she did not know that when she approached me and didn't seem to care that I possessed the legal visa. Regardless, I set up an "interview" for the following Monday and went home to tell 고. We were both cautious about the school, but figured an interview wouldn't hurt.

That Monday, I went into her school and met with the director. This women was amazingly creepy. Besides the fact that she was watching cartoons when I came in FOR MY INTERVIEW, this 60 year-old woman had Yoko Uno hair, a checkered silk blouse and a small, yappy Yorkshire Terrior in her lab which, of course, she was compulsively petting during the course of the interview. I asked the basic questions, i.e., pay, hours, and simple contractual details. I was told that there would be no contract "because the director has health issues". That's right. The interview concluded with me having to pass muster or in all reality, the smell test as she made me hold and pet her dog. It was creepy, but since it was virtually thrown in my hands, I had to comply. I gave the dog about 20 seconds of tepid love and then dashed out the door.

The next day, I decided to bring 고 in there to hammer out a few details. Nothing was hammered out, but the pay was good enough and the hours low enough that it would be worth the risk. It has been. I have gotten paid on time, had no problems and it has been worth it.

So, why did I bother writing this? Well, I was in there yesterday and was in the middle of my third class when the director walked in with what I assumed was tea. I was grateful and did my insincere bow and continued teaching while holding the cup of cool tea. I smelled it before I took a sip and it smelled fine. So, I drank. It tasted odd. I smelled it again and then took another sip. The director had put alcohol in the damn tea! And it wasn't just a little alcohol. This thing was loaded up. Normally I would have slammed it and asked for another, but I was in so much shock that I had just been offered alcohol while teaching that I had to put it down.

Why would she do this? Only one clear answer: During her afternoon cartoon-watching marathon, she likes to tie a few off and since she was already plastered while she was making my tea, she mixed the two up and gave me hers.

You have any better ideas?