Carl Atteniese

I had some major realizations recently. Those who know me might say that happens every day. Well, that’s true, but though it’s often a cause for pleasant and great wonderment,  it was sometimes the curse-of an active mind, affected by a metabolic disease I was unaware of, or couldn’t manage well. And,  I don’t have a good doctor.   So, ah…what’s the dis~ease?                           

I learned in mid 2009 that I have been suffering from hypoglycemia  my whole life! I didn’t know that! Talk about a handicap! I know I have been plagued by it since childhood as I have slowly recalled previously inexplicable anomalies in my energy-levels, moods, and behavior-that were always with me. Sadly, I am only now realizing how to deal with it, and seeing improvements!  

I remember as a boy, as I lay in bed at night very still, my body would tingle and I would experience the sensation of penetrating the bed, as if I were stiff as a board, but floating in space at different angles, like that triangular spaceship in that old video game, Asteroids.  And sometimes, when I woke up in the morning and got out of bed, my legs would buckle at the knees.          

Actually, Amber experiences this all the time, when we are out walking. She has a metabiolic issue, too, related to digestion. We both discovered our diseases at the same time, in the same place. I had taken her to the International Clinic in Itaewon, and we had expensive blood tests done that looked at every blood-serum component. I am pretty sure that as with me, Amber’s “low-grade digestion” issue affects her moods (If you are reading this, I am sorry Love, but it is quite obvious.  You get full after a few bites of food sometimes, your stomach often requires massaging, after a meal, and your moods drop and spike before and after eating more severely than those of others I have known. We cannot forget the dizziness, either, right? But I could deal with it far better now. Read on and see why)     

Also, in the morning-upon waking-I couldn’t make a fist; not a tight one, anyway.  And getting up always took a long time, as if I had died in my sleep and was trying to warm a dead corpse.   Later in the day, after eating, I would  have boundless energy, and a short time after that, be very sleepy.  My attention was hit or miss in school. I was recognized for being bright (I was told I got a 150 on my childhood IQ test), yet my test scores were high at some times, low at others. This was no doubt due as much to ADD-like symptoms I had in my bedroom at night, when I should have been absorbed in study-as much as it was likely due to a blood sugar deficiency during exams.                    

Nobody thought about a metabolic cause. Why? Who knows? Perhaps it is because even today, many doctors do not even recognize hypoglycemia as a disease in and of itself. Who could blame my school teachers and child psychologists in my schools? Even my doctors consistently told me throughout my life that I was “as healthy as a horse”.   Pabo!  Another reason I love people who pay close attention to details.              

hypoglycemia is simple to understand, but easy to miss, even when you know you have it! Amber bought me a great book about it and read one herself. I read a large portion of the book and altered my diet: little or no sugar, starches, fruit juices, processed foods; lots of slow food: vegetables, protein, fresh fruit in sensible quantities, and eating habits that go against the stupid four food group/”three square meal a day” philosophy. Hypoglycemics eat many small meals, when hungry (makes more sense for most people on the go, anyway).     

 But you can actually forget you are prone to the condition, especially when you feel good!  So I was messing up the process of recovery since I discovered the disease’s presence. And if you have a lot of stress, it is really hard to maintain your health as a hypoglycemic, because stress affects eating habits and appetite.                    

It is also a tricky disease to manage, because I am a moderate hypoglycemic. I am not the type that falls to the floor of the bus near death unless I get a cookie or a candy bar, though if I were taken hostage or lost in some remote place, that could happen to me after a prolonged period, before it would happen to someone with a normal metabolism.                    

I remember getting very dizzy after workouts as a young man. Like I was going to fall over and pass out. And in the past few years, extreme stress, especially in my relationship before the one I had with Amber, the nature of the life my former girlfriend had made me so worried that I used to get dizzy and extremely confused at work. It was frightening. This was the onset of extreme  anxiety due to post-traumatic stress. Chong Go Sunim feels I had suffered that as a boy, too, but that is another story.                    

Suffice it to say, it can be torture, comedy, constant surprises, and apparent serendipity all in one, if you are eating incorrectly, and have a too much stress. If you have a sense of humor, it can be downright hilarious, though. But, if you don’t know you have it,  (which includes forgetting you have this predisposition, by eating incorrectly and taking symtom-masking drugs), prepare for unabated euphoria one minute, depression the next; genius on your tests and at work one hour, and near-retardation at another.   

And you can go from being a smart Casanova to an irritable idiot, in a short span of time. Think about what this means at work, in school, and in love. You are in for drama, drama, drama.   Well, that’s over now…finally. As Amber had said, before I started takeing meds, ”’no more suffering from this disease’. And I didn’t have to, had I listened to her and not taken medication, and had I been more vigilent.                     

But if you throw pills at hypoglycemia’s mood-oriented symptoms, I you make it worse. Much worse. It’s tricky, so you have to go through trial and error to master it, but it is much easier without mood-altering medication.                            

Why had I gone on medication to deal with moderate hypoglycemia? Pretty much as a result of my fluctuating blood-glucose levels, I had developed a “general anxiety disorder”. This is not a permanent thing, though. It is really only in effect if I experience great amounts of stress, and have unbalanced blood-sugar.       

Despite the joys and conveniences I have known since coming to Korea,  I have had a lot of stress in the last five years; perhaps in the last fifteen, considering the time since first coming here, in 1996.                            

The great news is, the afore-mentioned realizations. Through my relationship with Amber, the things I needed to do to make changes in my life, now stand out in greater relief more than ever; the most important of   which was to get off the ‘anxiety medication’ I was taking, which was really something of a hinderance to a man with hypoglycemia, rather than an aid.          

 But here is what it was like on the medication: I was on pills that bipolar patients and other psychiatric patients take. My sister thought they were too strong, and she is in the therapy and medical fields for over a decade.       

It was like swatting a fly with a sledge-hammer. It made me drowsy, forgetful, dreamy, and generally a space cadet. And when they wore off, or I didn’t take them for a few months due to lack of funds, or for having felt too good, I think it made it harder for me to adjust, and I when I returned to them, I didn’t realize they were significant in making me moody and unable to tell when my sugar was dropping-because of the fog they put me in.       

Of course, the diet mismanagement-due to feeling good, also added to the problems of taking the drugs. This also makes the “come down” worse, when your sugar drops around the time the pills are losing their effect. A perfect case in point would be the fight that started the fight to end all fights with Amber a few weeks ago.     

We were coming out of a movie, I was carrying her, and we were laughing, and then she stated worrying about getting home late. I had just drunk about one and three quarters worth of big, ball-park sized cups of beer. I had finished a bucket of popcorn, and downed a tray of nachos with processed cheese.       

That morning I had had a little baby-orange pill, and a big mommy-white one. Now it was about ten forty-five PM, and the pills were worn off, but my sugar was spiked! My meds had gone beddy-by, by I was ready to shoot through the roof, and when Amber suddenly said something I thought had no relation to the price of tomatoes in Afghanistan, I thought it was too sharp, and I raised my voice to her.  What was really happening in my body? I will show you:         

Mental Perception of Stress Source (MPS) + High Blood Sugar Surge (HBS) [OR Crash form the hyper-insulin reaction common to hypoglycemics after a large meal or after eating too much starch, processed food, or alcohol; they turn to sugar too quickly-which can make you a nervous wreck] + Over-Active Cortozol Production [a stress-response hormone] (OACP) brought on by the wind-down of the white pill + Increased serotonin Production (ISP), from the wind-down of the orange pill.        

Serotonin is a hormone in the brain that promotes neural function so your nerves fire rapidly across the synapses between them-to run mental processes smoothly and faster, and which the little orange pill inhibits to keep you at a slower pace (since the problem with stress is it speeds you up) = the final blow up. (-.-)                            

Now if you bypass all the jargon (which I made up from common sense; I still have to research this to see if I got it right), you notice the first part of my paragraph above talks about “perceived stress”. This is where mindfulness comes into play-if you don’t want to fight issues or disease with chemicals. If the communication lines in your relationship, are challenged, you need mindfulness (unless you’re The Dude and you smoke a lot of pot). But that is for another article.                          

Hypoglycemia or no hypoglycemia, if you cannot understand what is happening in  your relationship, or you’re prone to misunderstanding (par for the course in international relationships between occidentals and orientals), you need to let go. Meditation helps there.                

So, I have changed my attitude about things that were bothering me. I have taken my health into my own hands. I have resumed my meditation and spiritual practice, and I have begun to do other things with my life.                            

So, most important steps (even before diet and exercise) for a hypoglycemic-to heal his or her life-are to deal with attitude and pills. Change the former; dump the latter (if you can).      

Then, stop putting garbage into your body. I have done all three.                           

I now feel like I have become a new man in just a few weeks! I miss my beloved dearly, but I am not the mess I was for a year the last time I broke up with someone (I didn’t know I had hypoglycemia, and with this disease, YOU ARE what you eat!).    I haven’t lost any glasses, pencils or pens (which for me can be expensive), keys, or wallets. And what’s more, I don’t come close, because I am more lucid; clear-headed.                            

Another thing? Korea doesn’t get me angry like it used to. I am sorry to say that, but every single foreigner here knows exactly what I am talking about. Remember though, it is not one thing or another; all the pats of the problem I mentioned above are like the different structural features of a bridge; all support and depend on one another.    My life is more balanced now. I had been focusing too much on my love-relationship; probably trying to compensate for having been so unhappy in love for the previous decade, and because I really wanted my relationship with Amber to work out well. She is the kindest, sweetest, most talented and forgiving woman I have ever been involved with. And she is beautiful, from every angle, in different ways, every moment. She is an  artist’s and poet’s dream. We are also amazingly similar where interests, idealism, and thought processes are concerned. We differ in our cultural perceptions though. The coming together, or working together methods reconciling those perceptions takes time in all intercultural relationships, but patience, honest, and very clear communication are needed.  Those three things, and acceptance!   

I learned you can’t rush it. You don’t push a sailboat, I have finally realized. You ride in it, and guide it with the winds of change over smooth and rocky seas, through storms and sunny days.   I am seeing my friends more, making new friends, and drawing and writing more. I am exercising regularly, too. I have also found time to edit photos and post them, so my galleries are growing.                            

Since coming off the medication I am eating better, because I was accidentally and sometimes deliberately using the pills as a crutch, thinking I could cheat on my hypoglycemia diet more by taking them; this kills a hypoglycemic slowly, because poor diet in hypoglycemia is how we turn into a diabetic. And along the way, his life a roller coaster ride in which ou become addicted to drugs so you can stay on the roller coaster! How crazy!  

So if anyone out there reading this has moderate hypoglycemia, don’t take drugs if you can help it. Balance your life and your diet.                            

I am meditating, exercising, and praying each day.  These actions reduce stress enormously, especially the diet and meditation. 

Remember, stress is the number one aggravating factor in having low blood-sugar episodes if you are hypoglycemic or diabetic, and in worsening every other disease, whether it is cancer, low-grade digestion, or the common cold!                            

And having control over your thoughts, actions, and diet, naturally makes stress management human and more within one’s control, while leaving your health to drugs means you give the responsibility away, to strangers, and chemicals that lie to you.       

See the Photography section for just a glimpse at how I have balanced my time, with my new attitude, health, and state of mind.                            

Thank you for reading.                            

Love, Peace, and Joy, to You and Yours,                            

Carlo

“I take refuge in the sangha”
This weekend, I did

My Dharma Brother Joseph, “Gil Do”, and his kind and caring wife, Eunbong,
Their wisely-countenanced and
Jolly Daughter, Fina

My patient and erudite teacher and friend, Chong Go Sunim
And my Dharma Brother Marcus, “Seokjong” with his gift of mindfulness

All in kind and compassionate listening, counseling, sharing and generosity
Brought me to this place

So…
To all I say,
Come to the temples
Be you Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Agnostic, or Atheist
There is serenity and the tone of peace here

Emanating,
Resonating,
Penetrating and cleansing

A Holy Spirit, a Buddha Nature, a Juingong
And you find it in yourself
And it takes you home

To freedom

Thank you,

Brothers and Sisters of the Sangha

This is Yongju Sa, in Suwon…
Where the monk said:
“Katchi Sungbulhaseyo”
Let us become enlightened ones,
Together

How beautiful
How necessary

Immature love is a mere feeling, but mature love is a feeling and a practice, like a religion, or an art. That means you feel a growth of attraction and concern for someone, and then you take up a new culture of living, with and for this person and yourself, to sustain that feeling. You follow precepts, or rules, if you will, lest you let love die.

True Love requires submission to its power, but concentration as well, since you will likely feel the incipient calling of love all the time in life, from new sources, in its basest forms, but the measure by which you can resist it, and can focus on the true love you decided on and want, is the measure of your ability to succeed in it and to be faithful. Simply put, you have to decide on one love, to have true love, and you must practice in the ways that will invigorate, stimulate, inspire, and “raise” that love, like a child between you and your lover.

Romantic love is physical and emotional attraction and the inspiration that grows into the dedication to share with the one you are affected by. You find yourself wanting to be with this person more than with any other person; not because s/he is perfect, or because s/he fits some childish fantasy of the perfect mate, but because you feel you can be real with this person and because this person is real with you; because this person makes you feel like you want to be a better person, and because with this person, you know you can be such because this person believes in you, and your humanity, faults, talents and all. S/he brings you to experience the full range of emotions, “good” and “bad”, as a human being, making you laugh, cry, dance, sing, and feel wonderful for whom you are, and making you feel that it is okay, good or bad, because together, you know you can accomplish virtually anything.

Feeling and being in true love is being inspired, and wanting to inspire the one you are attracted to most; to foster growth in him of her, and in yourself, by being together. It is wanting to share all possible experiences-good and bad-with him or her, over anyone else. It is wanting to give and receive fulfillment from him or her, and from oneself–while fulfilling your beloved. And it requires constant growth as you come to build that new culture between you.

When involved in love, “sex”, is love itself in one of its purest forms, in that it requires an acceptance and a physical “worshiping” of the self, and the beloved and his or her self-overcoming insecurity, pride, feelings of superiority, and the sense that you are saving yourself for someone else (ego-based greed and escapism). In this way, “sex” is love, but love, obviously, is not exclusively sex.

Sex is not merely about procreation, otherwise the pleasure in it would mean that it is merely a trick in our biology meant to make us procreate. While this is partially true, most likely, it is not entirely true. Certainly for the religious, this would be an abominable thought to consider because it would mean that God made us enjoy sex so we would have sex, which contradicts the idea that sex is an original sin, unless of course God both wants us to seek sex for it’s own sake (lust), and feel guilt over it at the same time.

Loving Sex, meaning sex with a patner whom one has complete and toal communication in the emotional and verbal aeas, as well as the physical, is a process that brings two human beings together; closer than in any other way, whereas if they are unsocialized animals, they have sex only to procreate (unbeknownst to themselves, in part).

When human beings are socialized and civilized, and they have “loving sex”, or “make love”, they have sex in the process of loving to please one another as well as themselves; to expess their love in a physical way, and to relieve one another of the burden of the eventual pain of the unrequited desire for physical love; and the emotional the closeness that comes with it. They also make love and have sex to release one another from loneliness, perversion, and ultimately neurosis.

Sex, beyond being a great stress-reliever, immunostimulant, and tool of relaxtion, is a builder of mental and physical health. And when it is endered purely for the benefit of the beloved, it might be agued that it is possibly the greatest form of compassion endered in a romantic relationship, since sexual tension is the greatest tormentor of mammals besides starvation or pain due to physical injury.

In the case of civilized human beings and other sentient animals, of course longing of “the heart” is as painful as starvation or physical injury, but who can deny that a broken heart doesn’t also involve the loss of physical intimacy from the lover and beloved?

A mature and wholesome-as well as pure-and fully romantic love-relationship (meaning it is about the two involved and not anyone or any thing else, especially not involving manipulation, deception, transaction, or politics such as status-seeking marriage for personal and/or family gain) requires and involves physical love as the act creates mutually fulfilling intrapersonal and interpersonal joy that should be acquired nowhere else, and which then necessarily deepens the bond of emotional love by creating a physical need and closeness between the partners beyond the platonic, such that they cannot abuse one another, neglect one another, or forsake one another without doing this to themselves…For the other in  love relationship is now an integral part of the one. And that’s the greatest aspect of love of all, and why physical intimacy is necessary to it.

Today I received a request for advice from a young woman in love in America. She told me of her beloved; a young man several years her junior. She loves him very much, but is being told by her mother and a friend who is trying to get her to cheat on the boyfriend,  that she shouldn’t wait for this man while he goes abroad on  assignment for his work. This is because the mother and the friend feel the young woman is too young. She is nineteen, and he is eighteen.  Another apparent mitigating factor in  her detractors’ opinions, is the young man’s stature. It is significantly less than hers, in their opinion, but causes the her no unhappiness.

She recently gave me permission to post her letter:

Here is how I answered her:

Hi, Meg,

Love, Peace, and Joy to You! Thank you for writing!

You are a good soul, but the problem is, good souls, like “great spirits”, as Einstein said, “often encounter resistance from mediocre minds”.

Now, I am not saying your friends and family have mediocre minds. Or, am I? You see, when we are “growing in love”, as Dr. Leo Buscaglia said, and we are mature enough to back it up with the practice of the art of love [which I sense in you]). When we are in love, we are armed with extra-strength power: We are more alive, more aware, more inspired, more driven, more creative, and more honorable. So even if your father were Kahlil Gibran and you were in love and he wasn’t (would that be possible, considering the man he was?), his mind, or spirit, would be duller, or mediocre in contrast to yours.

Your mother and room-mate may mean will, but they need an attitude adjustment: Your mother is accidentally robbing you of your greatest opportunity for the growth and the experience she complains that you do not have, by trying to live for you, and make decisions for you…in the greatest arena of learning known to the human species: the world of love.

Your room-mate is just plain disrespecting you, albeit accidentally, perhaps.

In the beginning, love is a feeling, like a handful of seeds, but when people block it, it doesn’t get a chance to bloom into a beautiful tree of flowers (or conditions and practice) that it is meant to become, finally being realized as a work of art in appearance, and an art form in the practice and the making.

You are already aware of the rules and practices necessary for making a work of art in love; you want to be faithful, you don’t want to hurt your beloved, you want to maintain the integrity of love, and you want to follow your heart in this pursuit of fostering growth (not regret and doubt). Stay the course. You are an angel in training. The surest way to become a devil is to listen to others about matters involving YOUR heart.

There is no such thing as being too young to know what love is, but there IS such a thing as not having been taught, and since the mature, modern, undamaged version of love is hard to come by in capitalist society, most, if not all of us are rarely taught how to create it and build it beyond a feeling. And the best place to find love’s building blocks, is in the heart, not in the heads of others. The heart is wherefrom the divine speaks. The head is wherefrom man speaks. This is ego.

Just so your mother doesn’t focus on me with some pronouncement like, ‘Who is this Carl Atteniese person anyway?’, read some of the books I recommend on the intro page, especially Dr. Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh’s True Love, as well as the poet, Kahlil Gibran’s The Beloved!

Follow your heart, Friend; not someone else’s head!

And remember, you had your answer at the start: I don’t want anyone else.”

To get everyone to understand, just say lovingly, with a clear, peaceful mind (prepare, if you have to-with pryer, meditation, and rehearsal) that you love these people close to you for their concern, but that you have decided as an adult to stay in this relationship, and while the loving care and welcomed advice these people can offer in the future is appreciated when asked for, you don’t want their resistance any more.

Say it firmly, and succinctly that the issue is not up for debate any longer. Then thank them for listening and offer hugs and then go do something fun with them. I recommend no alcohol be present, or other consciousness-altering elements, and if possible, be out in a park, restaurant, or coffee shop, where everyone will have to behave. ^^

Let me know what you think, and what happens.

Love, Peace, and Joy,

Carlo Atteniese

The People at First Glance
The first thing you notice in Korea, besides a seemingly futuristic, science-fiction-like landscape, mixed with a sort of third-world feel, is the equally dichotomous behavior of the people. 

Like anywhere else, there are all types of folks here; “good” and “bad”, and all stops in between, but I venture a guess that like nowhere else will you experience-day-to-day-such an enormous disparity in extremes as is exhibited here; ranging from over-the top, almost in-your-face generosity, kindness, and attempts at helping you (almost to a fault and even rivaling the kindness of the Japanese) to displays of apparent, outright contempt. Perhaps it’s because I am a white guy? An American? Funny looking? More on that, later. 

The Good
Some of the old men here offer a look of recognition in their eyes when they see you; you’re the new-comer from America to them. These old men feel good about you because a soldier, like my uncle (who unofficially adopted a homeless boy on Kudjiae island during the war) was kind to them. Or because they were katusas, the Korean soldiers who worked with American soldiers. Or maybe they just studied abroad ad have fond memories. 

They will smile at you, with a ‘gee, might you be American’ twinkle in their eyes. That’s the closest I get to feeling some home-town country sentiment that I experienced around the heartland, back home. It’s the look  an old-timer betrays when he sees his youth in me and grins for the same reason I take pleasure in watching young boys cutting up with one another. It’s a common affinity for a bygone time that perhaps all men feel when they advance in years. 

This type of man in Korea will offer you a seat on the bus, the subway, or a bench-welcoming you almost aggressively, as if to say, ‘Hey traveler, you must come and rest, and tell me all about your journey.’ And this kind of Korean friendliness is wonderful, unrivaled, and even a bit embarrassing, for you almost cannot pass it up. And when you do, you feel like you have been un-neighborly. 

This type of “han-gook-bun”, or Korean person (in the most polite speech), is the type that lets you ride free on the bus when your commutation card is empty. Or he offers you money when you come up short. 

The Bad (or The Ornery)
Other men, middle-aged men, will glare at you, as if you have just lifted their wallet from their pocket (or tried to). I experience this almost every day, at one point or another. I have been attacked by this kind of man on several occasions. 

The Indifferent
Still, other folks pay you no mind, rarely smiling when they catch your eye-as is customary in other countries, like mine. 

Friends
Most interesting is when men are out together-especially older men who are out drinking and moving from watering hole to watering hole or restaurant; they will hold hands, and argue and cajole one another very loudly over who should take a seat on the subway or the bus. 

In Chongno, a soldier once took my hand to guide me while giving me directions, and I sheepishly slid my hnd ut of his, like jelly sliding down the sie of a table-after a few seconds. Though I am a man of softer sentiments about humanity than many I have met and grew up with, I am still from the somewhat homophobic USA, where men do not hold hands, unless they live in Chelsea! 

Young girls and teenagers hold hands too, of all ages.

And everyone seems to feel free to announce his or her business to the world, talking loudly, on buses, trains, and in airports and subway stations-in booming voices-in person, or over their ever-present cell phones. 

Children seem to to be freer; able to walk into alleys and big streets unattended, shockingly close to traffic, almost being hit by motorists, but never quite. It used to give me the willies, but now I am used to it. 

One also finds extreme frankness and honesty. “Teacher, this is Hye-kyung, my friend. She is nice, but she is fat”, and Hye-kyung blushes. Adults are this way too, often, and it takes a while to get used to the fact that when they are talking about you, they mean no harm, but it is always hard to tell whether you are being put on or not. 

In business, or on the subway or a bus, this almost embarrassing frankness is very direct, especially among the older folks who come from a more simple life: “Hi! Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? What is your job?” How much money do you make?” After you summon some answers and manage to display a bit of composure by taking a step back, you may hear, “I am Kim! I graduated from Seoul National University!” Apparently everyone has! 

It has often been my experience that Koreans seem to have the warmest hearts I have come across, but express that warmth sparingly. These people, so accustomed to having to behave well according to their hierarchical confucianist societal rules-in place for thousands of years-seem to practically take it for granted that their indirect nature, discretion, reserve, and strength to tell many white-lies, and display apparent outright fabulism is seen as a form of politeness, or even shyness that has to be understood and accepted-for the sake of social harmony. Or, they don’t think you can see through it at all. 

Many people often make the unconscious mistake of thinking other people are like themselves and that they expect to be treated the way “the treater” wants to be treated. Across cultural divides this is the biggest mistake a person can make, I have found. 

I cannot speak for those from other western countries (though I have heard my observations echoed thousands of times), but to the foreigner raised in New York, where a social premium is placed on “keeping it real”-to the virtual point that a measure of whether you are a cool person or not, depends on how well you can do it, the perception that Koreans try to make you feel so good all the time that it seems like they are trying to keep it as unreal as possible…can be really mind-bendingly frustrating, to say the least. But you fall for it, or you learn to see through it and forgive them, or you just refrain with all you strength from wringing their necks over it. And on the other hand, you also privately thank them once in a while, because they are masters at trying to conceal bad news. But I hate that, because I feel like I am being treated like a child when anyone does it. 

To be fair, human beings often-if not always-want to be told what they want to hear, and so sometimes (maybe even more often than not), it really works, and Koreans perhaps know this better than anything else. 

Whatever stress and frustration I feel living in Korea over culture shock is often made up for by kindness; more on that later. And I also find it helpful to remember what Kipling said about the cultures of foreign countries having been set up for the locals, not the visitors. That helps deal with the problem. 

Many are successful at understanding the intricacies and nuanced differences between East and West here. I am working on it all the time. Meditation and prayer can help. Also, having a very loving friend who knows your world is crucial. My friend Dave is a master at dealing with the nuances and discretion of Koreans. It’s quite remarkable. But then, Dave left…

The closest to us often stand in our way. Being frank is the solution. Some individuals, and in my experience, certain peoples, see intellectual challenge from friends and family not as loving concern, but as obstacles and violence to their purposes and state of mind. This may be unpopular to say, but in the spirit of being honest, this is my observation. The proof is in the pudding, which I offer to loved ones and people of a certain culture, lovingly, but which they often see as virtual dog excrement.

You may know what I mean. You try to encourage someone you love to see something by way of gentle critique, and s/he sees it as an attack. More egregeous, at other times, you are not even criticizing, but what you say is seen as such, because that is what the listener is used to. It happens among all of us.

It all depends on what one believes. If you believe someone truly loves you-and this is based on actions, not only words-you see what he or she says as positive in some way. If you do not believe in love, do not know what love is, or do not believe a person loves you, everything s/he says is supsect.

I find living here very challenging because I generally believe that Confucianists believe in romance, but to a large extent, do not believe in “love”. They rest the bulk of their trust in “Woo Jung”, instead, and Confucianist norms of respect, rather than equality, which are falsehoods, in reality, in my view; subjective holdovers of the kingdoms period in their history, and supportive of their egos, not the their hearts or the true general good.

On another note, this is why spreading true democracy to premodern cultures always fails, I believe, at least for several decades if not a century. A society has to agree on love before it can agree on governance. People of different faiths and traditions have vastly different understandings of love, if they have true love at all.

…And Sex

 “Cradle of The Universe”, and all writing published under that name and at this site, including, Occidental Accidents in The Orient, by Carl Atteniese Jr., is copyrighted and licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Write carlatteniese@gmail.com.

CHAPTER ONE  

Flying to Korea

The flight to The Hermit Kingdom, as Korea was once known, took me to the other side of the planet, and it took a long time. Was it thirteen hours? A seemingly endless amount of time to a young man who by that time in his life had only traveled by plane a handful of times. I love being in the air, but it wasn’t always like that. Thank God, people do change.    

Before coming to Korea at twenty-nine, I’d only flown around the U.S. a bit on my own, in my late twenties. Otherwise, my experience on planes was with my mom, dad, and sisters Mary and Nancy, when I was a boy. And man, oh man; I used to get air-sick.

I recall the first time we flew. I’d recently become a teen-ager. I had the biggest, roundest, shiniest wave of brown hair that hung across my forehead, and a big smile with bigger-than necessary teeth. Friends will laugh when they learn or recall that technically, my mouth was too small (‘Not any more!’, they’d say!), and so, I had four molars extracted! My eyes were still brown then. They are hazel now. I had on a dark blue leisure suit. Whew! What a picture of nerdiness! But, who doesn’t love regailing about how stupid he looked in the seventies? And the best part is, if you were a kid in the time of giant collars, giant bow-ties, and giant bell- bottoms, you can’t really be blamed, right? I mean, I was being dressed by my parents! It’s not like I wore those skin-tight, beige, flegm green, and black-striped pants cause I wanted too (well, actually, they were my favorites)! But the leisure suit I didn’t fancy. My dad was a proud and diligent employee of Brannif Airlines, and “you dress nice when flying with family employees.”

Well, I have this memory of rolfing into one of those nifty white barf-bags with the plasticized exteriors and the bread-wrapper-like ties at the top…. Aren’t they cool, honestly? They would make great lunch bags for kids, I’d always thought! 

And that wasn’t the end of it. After apologising to the person to the left of me (I was a very polite kid), I rested a bit, and on the way out of the plane, had to hurl again, and the stewardess saw me holding the discharge back and when I got to her in the line, she pushed me into the lav saying “get in there!” Ah, yeah, I love flying. 

Then I read about “grunts”, deep breathing, and yelling. Well, I don’t yell on a jetliner, but I had read that fighter pilots used to do this thing called a grunt, before they started wearing bladder suits to prevent blood from pooling in different parts of their bodies.

You see, when fighter pilots are zooming around the sky at supersonic speeds, their blood wants to suddenly collect on one side of their bodies or the other, depending on which way they are rapidly turning. I suppose that’s not such a big deal if they’re going right or left, but it isn’t great for them.   

But did you know that when fighter pilots go up or down at high speeds, the consequences can be far greater. The blood rushes in and out of their heads, which can cause them to black-out; you know, lose consciousness. That’ s not good, especially since they’re traveling at several hundred miles an hour (these days, up to 1400) several thousand feet above the earth. And people are shooting at them from other planes traveling as fast! So before bladder suits were introduced, which fill with air in different places at different times to pressure the blood to remain where it should-in certain parts of the pilot’s bodies-they would flex the muscles in their legs and stomachs to keep blood there and balance its distribution. This is a grunt. 

I started doing them on passenger planes when the planes hit turbulence, or when they hit an air pocket, suddenly dropping in altitude, which if you have the experience of, you know gives you a sudden sickly feeling in the pit of your stomach. I still do it. Sound a little dramatic? It works. It keeps you from getting nauseous. And, I do deep breathing, too.  It was a little of this, and a little of just maturing that caused me to outgrow air sickness.   

And by applying these methods at amusement parks, I can now ride the craziest roller coasters, and other rides. Yelling helps, too. The yelling keeps fresh air entering and exiting your body, maintaining diaphragm action, so it isn’t shocked by the movement of the stomach and other organs caused by responses to the violence of motions associated with inertia. This keeps the breathing more regular, and lessens vertigo and motion sickness from having the wind knocked out of you and offsetting your sense of balance.    

This deep breathing also helps on ships in violent seas. Later I’ll tell you about my hydrofoil trip from hell, going from Korea to Japan, when the craft was rising out of the water about five to ten feet or more each time, and falling every several seconds pounding the ocean’s surface countless times, making everyone on board sick, except me.    

Back to the skies: I have always loved flying on commercial airliners. When I was thirteen, my family had gone to Florida, and then on to Texas, I think-a year later. I was excited out of my mind to be going not only on an airplane, but to be heading to see the Saturn rockets that took twelve Americans to the moon (all of whom I worshiped). The machines would be gargantuan, lying in wait  in stages on the grounds of the The Kennedy and Johnson space centers, to dazzle me out of my wits. Their enormous size and realism turned out to be a “giant leap” from the photos on my bedroom walls and in the many books I regularly poured over in my spare time and at the library in Lynbrook, Long Island, where I grew up in New York.     

I was also happy to be going to see my silly Uncle Charlie, who had fought the Japanese, and later the North Koreans and the Chinese in that strange Asian region called Korea.

How surprised I would have been to hear from some clairvoyant, that I would be heading for that peninsula one day, in the infinitely unimaginable future. It was, unlike the space centers, a place no one except Uncle Charlie and Uncle Georgie (and of course my knowledgeable dad) knew the location of, much less anything else about.    

If it isn’t abundantly clear to you already, it was almost painfully obvious to everyone who knew me as a boy that I had dreamed of becoming an astronaut. My own loving mother-who was prone to saying “Carl, you’re a world of knowledge”, once said, “Carl, do you ever talk about anything else; you’re gonna go buggy on the subject!”

‘I spoke about the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Skylab missions, non-stop. The space shuttle, though the most complex machine man has yet to make, left me flat, for some reason. Maybe it was becasue it had that very pedestrian name, “shuttle”; making you think of a bus, or that rickety train that runs from Grand Centra to 42nd Street; not very fitting for a craft strapped to three rockets that throttle human beings and heavy hardwear at 17,000 miles per hour into an orbit around the earth in a state of constant free-fall which makes first-time astronauts hurl, themselves, and that’s no joke in “zero-gravity”.

I did “spacework” with my childhood friend, Richard Dee. This meant we would get togethe at my house or his, spead our papers, pamphlets, and books on space and space travel out on the tble, and study, read, discuss, o even make cassette recordings on tape-ecoders about all this. I had once presented my “space files” in my third grade class, explaining what I knew about the space missions. Somehow, I escaped being called a nerd, but I was known-from about junior high until about high school (when I joined the wrestling team and got a new nickname), as “Space Man”. On the wrestling team I was known as “Cal”. Thank the universe it wasn’t “matt-back”, which I would have deserved!    

Alas, as far as riding in rockets is concerned-instead of airplanes-as the years went on, I would learn that there is a universe of difference between a dream and an ambition. I would also learn that politics touches everything, and so astronauts started dying in space, and on the way to it.

And later, in Korea, I would also learn the reason my dream never materialized into an ambition, coming to fruition: I found I have hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Hypoglycemia can continuously derail your educational, occupational, and social life without you knowing it, especially when you don’t know you have it!    

I’ll confess that yet, the boy in me now-though I am forty-four-still occasionally fantasizes (albeit only for a few minutes) about flying in space, and really, the dangers involved are a small concern-especially, I suppose, since I am dreaming.    

And so, sixteen years after boarding a plane to Florida to gawk at rockets and space modules and to bore my parents with detailed descriptions of them and the men that flew in them, I would be boarding a plane to Asia, to pursue a different “dream”, and where I would learn I needn’t leave Earth to visit another planet! I only needed to go to South Korea, and Japan!    

I first landed here, on “Planet Korea” as I like to call it from time to time,  on April fourth, 1996-in the dark. I liked it that way. That made it more mysterious, I suppose. And, it made the next day a second arrival, so to speak, since things are different, between night and day!

After coming through immigration, I was sped from Kimpo airport, on a “stand bus” of some kind. I remembered Kimpo as I had heard my first boss out of high school, Martin Lent, used to stand guard, outside a gate, here, when he was in the air force. In the pitch dark, as his son, my junior high school friend Adam, used to tell me. The day I landed, men were clad in tight black uniforms and black Berets, carrying black machine guns and pacing in slow-motion in pairs. I held on to a strap surrounded by people with black hair on the speeding, rickety bus. The vehicle careened, rocked, and rolled like a boat on waves in an amusement park, through a strange landscape of hospital wall-colored cement buildings and shadowy alleys that carved out squat neighborhoods populated with dilapidated structures; all teeming with hoses and vents and generators and other modular shapes. I was in Bladerunner…    

One of my best friends since childhood, Adam Hoffman-then an assistant professor at Korea University, and now a full professor in the states–balanced himself next to me and spoke in his usually confident way about the locals. I asked if they could understand what he was saying, as he conveyed anecdotes and humorous sentiments. He replied, “Nah”, adjusting his glasses at the bridge of his straight, John Lennon-like nose with a long finger, “I’m talking too fast for them.”