Something big that’s changed in my life recently is that my girlfriend has finally fallen for me. This means that I no longer ever really feel lonely here in Korea, even though my social life has dwindled to my girlfriend and one other solid foreigner friend, with a few other foreigners and Koreans who I see from time to time. BREAK
This means that I have stopped putting the effort in to form new friendships, which I spent six months doing. I want to put my time into the relationships I already have, and spend my remaining time on personal projects rather than having all my free time absorbed by a social life. I got really bored with that. The problem with this is that my current situation could disappear quite fast. My best foreigner friend will leave Korea for good in April, and my girlfriend and I might break up. I think this is okay, because I feel free to leave Korea if I ended up lonely again. My best foreigner friend has been here for five years and he’s had to go through the rounds of making new friends over and over because people are always leaving, but I’m not willing to do that nor do I feel I have to. I’ll just leave. I recognise that this present way of living in Korea with these people who I am close to will not last forever, in fact will not last all that long at all, even if the relationships themselves survive its ending.
The fact that my girlfriend has fallen for me makes me feel a certain amount of responsibility. The cost of that steady companionship is that the relationship is no longer just a casual someone who I’d like to stick around in my life for the time being. The fact that her feelings have changed has changed mine for the more serious, too. I’m not going to be in Korea forever, but I’m not too worried about that because that’s pretty far in the future and we’re probably still in a belated honeymoon period where nothing is clear. I more worry that I need to have a good reason to leave Korea. I don’t feel able, say, to jump over to another asian country and teach English there, as an alternative to my second year in Korea.
I’ve also been thinking about the expectations that we now have of each other. Though, as previously described, my girlfriend has always had various expectations of me, I never let myself expect anything of her besides the really basic stuff (prioritising meeting me, sexual exclusivity etc.). I always thought to myself that I appreciated having her around and so long as that was true, I had no right to expect her to behave in any particular ways towards me. So when she didn’t show me much affection, I just told myself that it’s better than not having her at all. I don’t think this attitude will quite cut it now. I’m not sure what expectations we can reasonably have of each other. Progressives would tell me to talk about it with her but I’m not sure what I’d say because I don’t know yet what expectations make for a good, moderately serious romantic relationship.
My step-brother Alex had a shaking hand he couldn’t hold still, and he couldn’t walk in a straight line, so he was referred for an MRI scan which he had last Friday. About ninety minutes ago, on today the following Tuesday, hospital staff started prepping him for a six hour piece of surgery to remove the brain tumour. If he wasn’t to have it, he’d be dead before the end of 2014. I want to write about what specifically I find sad about this situation.
If you’re spending well below your income and you don’t have anything in particular to save for, then you’ve got a powerful kind of financial freedom. You don’t have the millionaire’s freedom to buy flights to anywhere in the world whenever you want to go, but you do have the important freedom not to have to think about how much individual things cost. It doesn’t matter that something is a bit overpriced. You don’t have to think about how much your gym membership costs. All you’ve got to do is establish the habit of spending, in general, well below your salary. I’m in this position right now.
I have finished reading some chapters of The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. Keith was a vegan for twenty years, and the book is a convoluted combination of the story of the medical problems she experienced that she believes resulted from her veganism; a radical feminist pseudophilosophical narrative about what she sees as our unsustainable masculine spirituality; and an attempt at a scientific case against vegetarianism. This scientific case is meant to support the need for a new culture or spirituality in place of the masculine one that she blames for all the woes of mankind and the planet.
Keith is trying to argue for several things and she does state that she’s trying to argue for them. However, the structure of the arguments are permanently unclear, her arguments for the different things she wants to establish are mixed together, and it’s all punctuated by childish emotional appeals and patronising rhetorical questions and other annoying literary devices. If you’re an expert you might contend with some of the particular scientific claims she makes on various pages. But for my part, I can’t see how to begin to assess the book and figure out if she might be right because I think I’d basically have to rewrite it first. Never have I felt so keenly that a little education in analytic philosophy ought to be part of compulsory schooling, or at least every university degree course.
This all being said, reading the book has given me some new ideas about vegetarianism that I’d like to try to develop. I’ll first try to state Keith’s manifesto by way of background. Then I’ll outline my ideas.