babel

this week, grant got babel in the mail from netflix and i was excited. i've wanted to see it a long time. so on wednesday night, kristin and i settled down on the couch for a relaxing night of babel watching. about 95 % of the way into the movie--maybe about 2 scenes to go--kristin and i both found ourselves up to here (i've got my hand above my head) with all the confusion, different languages, story lines, unexplained people coming in and out of the story line...and for about the 8th time during the movie, i said to kristin, "man, i know it's the point of the movie to have all the different languages without us understanding, but i REALLY just wish we could have captions! i am SO LOST!!!" then we laughed about the possibility that there were supposed to be captions through the whole movie and we didn't know it. but we were like, naaah, couldn't be. but just out of curiosity, we quick flipped to the menu before watching the last two scenes of the movie...and what did we find? "caption options: english, espanol, none" so to wrap it up, we sat through over two hours of a movie in 4 languages, including an entire story line with a deaf girl who did sign language (which were also given captions we found out) thinking that it was some novel artsy film that was trying to make the viewer see what it felt like not to be able to understand anyone and we completely missed the entire story line of the movie. every time i think about it, i have a mixture of irate anger that turns into uncontrollable giggles. i'd like to say it's a beautiful movie, but all i will remember is this feeling: "what the hell is going on??? who's the guy with the gun? why is he hugging her? why did that girl just take her underwear off? isn't that uncomfortable?" and so on. sigh.

i got a job in korea! i'm leaving august 24. teaching english and music to little kindergarteners. ya!!! it's a new school north of seoul in a city called ilsan. it's just me and a couple other teachers and we are basically the organization of the school from the way it sounds. i'm excited to be able to keep teaching music. it seems like every time i think i'm going to leave it, it just hangs on to me.