This post has nothing to do about Korea ...

But a tribute to one of my heroes in life, David Halberstam, who died Monday (local time) in California.

Read on if you like, or tune in later this week for a look at Korean Cemeteries (Kim Rawley won't want to miss that one).

I still remember the day I was in my last semester at the University of Southern California and the announcement was made that David Halberstam was the keynote speaker for our graduation. I was thrilled. For a journalism student who knew something about the world, unlike many of my peers, I admired Halberstam's career with the New York Times covering Vietnam to his successful book writing career.

Halberstam at the 2002 USC commencement, almost five years ago to the day.

I was thrilled. "David fucking HALBERSTAM," I told one of my classmates. He wrote the "Best and the Brightest. He won the Pulitzer for covering Nam."

A lot of my friends and some of my classmates had no idea who the man was. A sad commentary on my generation.

I still remember his commencement speech. It was one of the best speeches I've heard in my life. I was scared shitless about the future when I graduated. I took a job in politics because the journalism job market was so bad and because I was deathly afraid of graduating college without a job.

Halberstam finally put it in perspective. I sat there still drunk from the night before but I had a perfect moment of clarity. When he spoke it was like a the sun came out and I knew everything would be OK.

He said none of us should worry about getting out into the world and making mistakes. In fact he encouraged us to get out there and make our mistakes early, when they would be easiest to recover from while we were still young.

He said none of us should know what we want to do with the rest our lives, because we're only in our early 20s.

I still remember him recalling his first newspaper job. He said it was at the smallest newspaper in Missouri and that he had been fired less than a year into the job.

Those few sentences gave me so much hope that when I eventually became a newspaper reporter nine months later, I always remembered what Halberstam said and where he started his career. I was working at an 800-circulation weekly newspaper and I kept remembering, "David Halberstam started small too. If he can do it, I can do it."

Though I'm glad I'm out of the newspaper business and feel sorry for people still stuck in what I consider the industrial version of a nursing home, I still held Halberstam in high esteem because he gave me hope when I started as a reporter.

A year after graduation I went down to the UCLA Festival of Books, solely to meet Halberstam. I remember going down there with my mom after I drove from the Central Valley to Lancaster. When I met Halberstam I was almost speechless. I was in awe. And for no real reason other than respect for what he had done so far in his career and life.

I tried the best I could to thank him for encouraging me though he didn't know it. I muttered out a one-liner about how I graduated from SC and now work as a newspaper reporter for "the smallest newspaper in California."

So, dear readers, if you've made it to the end of this rambling post, thank you for indulging me in a moment of sadness and memory. I have no idea why the death of a 73-year-old man meant so much more than the deaths of 33 people last week in Virginia, but I can probably sum it up with one sentence. I'm a sick person.

James Loughrie ... Good Day!

"Don't worry about it."

I'm the wrong person to apologize to. Because someone else admitting weakness to me is the sweetest tasting nectar of all.

After a Korean killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, one of my coworkers said they were sorry.

Now that I've felt the surge of apology I want more.

That's why this week, I'm walking through the streets of Seoul asking for apologies. Not just from Koreans, but other Americans and especially Canadians.

OK, in reality I was the wrong guy to apologize to. When my coworker said that, I said, "Ah Don't worry about it. It happens."

I continued, "It had nothing to do with him being Korean, he was just crazy. Yes, he killed 32 people, but more than 11,000 people in America die every year from homicides. Besides, there's a lot are more than 32 people dead because of crimes committed by illegal immigrants."

My colleague understood and we started talking about guns and their availability in America, but I defended my country's homicide rate as statistically insignificant.

Yes, if one of your loved ones was killed Monday or is killed by a homicide, it's a tragedy and there is no justification. But now I have to listen to expats from Canada, England and Ireland talk about how violent America is.

I've been saying it for a while now: America has 300,000,000 people. Approximately 11,000 of them die in gun related deaths each year. That's .003 percent. three hundredths of a percent. That means one in every 27,000 people.

It's not like one will walk off the airplane and get shot once they get to America. Yes, our murder rate may be higher than others, but at the end of the day you're more likely not to get killed.

"So what does it mean ..."

"Nappy headed ho."

Yes that question was posed to me.

I like teaching English. I LOVE teaching slang.

This week, a tip of the hat to Don Imus, because I never thought I would teach someone in a foreign country what a "nappy headed ho" was.

Most of my colleagues are fluent in English but that's the academic sterilized classroom shit. It's hard to try and relate to them how important slang is, but I always try to give them a little extra. When you've been on the streets like I have, hopping from crackhouse to crackhouse, you learn a few extra things. This is one of the rare moments they do some good.

About a day after I explained nappy headed ho - "Nappy means their hair is very dirty and ho is a dirty woman. It used to mean prostitute but now it just means she is a dirty woman who has multiple sex partners" - a student had me cracking up today with this one.

Yes, a student, an 11-year-old Korean boy who said, "Son of bitch is baby dog."

I immediately told him to stop.

There were no articles in his sentence. So I had to show him how to put the letter a in front of "son," "bitch" and "baby."

So once we corrected the sentence to, "A son of a bitch is a baby dog," I had to teach him the word "puppy" instead of "baby dog."

So then we repeated, "A son of a bitch is a puppy."

So I said, "Good, but the subject should be up front. Is the subject the bitch? No, so we need to start the sentence with the subject, 'A puppy.'"

I was so proud when he said, "A puppy is a son of a bitch."

It's a good feeling when you end the day like this, knowing you made a positive difference in a child's life.

James


*The student really said that. I did however, tell him he said a bad word in English and not to say it again. Then I turned around and did everything I could not to cry because I was laughing so hard.

Jesus!

In honor of Easter, a post about Jesus.

That's what the woman said to me.

I was nearly crying I was laughing so hard. Let me explain.

There's a lot of religious people here in Korea. Christians to be more exact, both Protestant and Catholic. I'm still adjusting to some parts of life here after my six months in Turkey and one of them is religion.

In Turkey the people were Muslim, but they were secular. Turks almost never talked about religion unless it was a religious holiday or you asked them, which I did on a frequent basis.

But here in Korea, there's a lot of Christians who have no bones about asking you, "What religion are you?"

Further more there are a lot of missionaries around who stop you on the street and hassle you, no matter how little English they speak.

Missionary #1 stopped me outside the immigration office as I was getting my residence permit processed.

He showed me a piece of paper that read, "Have you heard of God our Mother?"

At first I thought the women's lib movement went to damn far, making God a woman. But then I remembered a little book I read called, "The DaVinci Code."

So I blurted out the best that I could paraphrase, "The concept of a female counterpart to God is nothing new. Pagans believe in the Sacred Feminine and the concept of a woman countering a male deity, much like the Yin and Yang."

To that he nodded his head and said, "Thank you."

Missionary #2 spoke pretty good English. She caught me walking through the streets near my apartment and asked me if I would listen to her give a short speech. At first I thought she wanted me to give her private lessons, until she took out a booklet from her church and asked me, "Have you heard of the Holy Mother?"

To which I said, "Yes, I have."

"Oh really, Western people usually don't about the Holy Mother, how do you know about it?"

To which I replied: "The concept of a female counterpart to God is nothing new. Pagans believe in the Sacred Feminine and the concept of a woman countering a male deity, much like the Yin and Yang."

She was ecstatic and invited me to her church, which I politely declined, telling her I was a Scientologist and preferred to believe human life comes from a far away planet Xenu.

With that I bid her a good day.

Missionary #3 was my favorite though.

I saw her when I went to the bank one day. I passed her walking towards the bank when she tried to hand me a flier and said something in Korean. Thinking she was selling something, I politely said, "Aneo" which means "No" in Korean.

I did my business at the bank machine and walked toward the woman again, heading to the subway entrance. With an excited look in her face, she says, "Jesus!"

"That's nice," I said as I walked by and went on with my day, laughing almost hysterically.

I have to tell you, I never once met a Muslim missionary in Turkey. I took it for granted.

Goddamn germ carrying walking cesspools ...

That's what I thought last week as I battled with a cold.

Most all of my English teaching colleagues have gotten sick in the last month since we began our jobs. It just comes with the turf spending days in class rooms with 30 to 35 children.

Children are dirty creatures, they really are.

I've gotten so afraid of the germs I had a Howard Hughes moment last week. I saw the children coughing in class. Several at a time. As they coughed I visualized the germs and bacteria spreading through the air to each child and trying to make its way to me.

Dirty little bastards.

I feel better now though, thanks to the fact that I've transformed my apartment into a germ free zone, complete with tissue boxes for slippers, duct tape sealing my doors and bottles of my own urine.