excerpt....

Below is an excerpt from a short story I'm currently working on.  Please have a read and make some comments if you'd like.


2010 was a big year for me.  Big, that is, in a "Hey mom and dad, I'm getting married and moving to the other side of the world" kind of way.  Some days I know for certain that I have been cursed with with an unyielding tug at my gut to run for far-away mountains, to see rivers and seas that I've never experienced, to drink coffee in a little shop somewhere in old Europe.  I remember as a child asking my dad as we drove on the interstate highway, "so if we keep driving and don't take any exits, where will we end up?"  I don't think he understood my question.  All I could see was open road with seemingly no end. I was too young to be concerned with such ideas.  Other boys my age were watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Saturday mornings.  I was exploring Iceland in the woods on the edge of my neighborhood.  I can't remember my dad's response, but it wasn't good enough.  I had to see for myself.


I now know that interstate 85 north disappears somewhere in Virginia near the Phillip Morris headquarters, complete with factory smoke stacks painted like cigarettes.  Lovely.  Its not quite the Misty Mountains or the Yellow Sea, but now I know.  I've made my trek.  I've seen with my own eyes.  The answer to my boyhood question was less than glamorous: giant Marlboro Reds.


And so I found myself, two weeks after marrying Jessica, 12,000 miles from home in a little country called South Korea.  I was an English teacher.  I was young, energetic, and ready to indoctrinate the locals.  Dr. H. Douglas Brown, professor of TESOL at San Francisco State University, author of multiple textbooks, and widely accepted as an authority on the subject, states that "short attention spans come into play when children have to deal with material that to them is useless, boring, or too difficult."  It would necessarily make sense to put me in a classroom with 15 Korean kindergarten children with no interpreter.  The moment Dr. Brown refers to above, at which the children are confronted with material that to them is useless, boring, and too difficult, coincidentally is the same moment I open my mouth.  The children were apparently expected to have the mental capacity to hear my English, sense and accept the lifelong importance of acquiring the language, mull over future international business dealings, and process the connection with their own language.  I might as well have been farting rhythmically to teach them the lesson.  It would have all sounded the same.