It had to be told

So the peopele who bought the English school where I work originally came from an art school background, meaning that they are both art teachers and their first business was an art school. That means that they basically put all their effort into the interior decorating at the English school and none of it into, say, the listening lab they had promised everyone. This is the problem with being incredibly proficient at your job, my wife and I are totally taken for granted. It will be a sad day for them when we leave and they find that your average English teacher/manager will not stay late, will not do any unnecessary planning, and will not basically do their job for them, and, most worryingly, will likely not be a very good teacher.
Anyway, I am confronted with daily reminders that management care much more about what's on the walls than what's on the white board. Every day I come in to find a new piece of amateur-y artwork up on the wall and no work done on the listening lab. I tell you when I see schoolrooms in Afghanistan where there is nothing but a black board and a teacher I totally understand what it's like.
Anyway, the other day I came in to find what is certainly the most amateurish piece of work, but also the most disturbing, in a 'Who made this and why is it hanging on the wall?' kind of way.

Yeah, it's a picture of someone getting an injection in the can. Now that in itself is a little bit weird. First off many of the details are different from an actual injection room. Injection rooms typically don't have huge windows. I have rarely seen a bed in an injection room, and never been asked to lie fully face down to receive an injection. Typically the order is 'Lower your pants', the nurse gives you a few sharp slaps and shoves the needle in, pumps out its contents and you're done, and you didn't feel a thing.

This doctor is giving an injection while sticking his hand up the recipient's shorts. Just stop and look at it, like I am forced to every time I need to sharpen a pencil. Also note that someone has written the Korean word for 'whatevs', jeul (즐, or, if your can't read that, the English letters KIN turned 90 degrees clockwise) on top of the butt. With all of these glaring problems, how did this thing make the cut to go on the wall?

Korea's street trees: forgotten heroes of industrialization

A lot of people had to suffer to make Korea the prosperous nation it is today. Girls shanghaied into institutionalized rape and men pressed into labor by the Japanese army saw their reparations taken by the government for use in development projects. Families were torn apart as young men were sent abroad as coal miners and young women as nurses. Democracy was suppressed in the single-minded drive to modernize.
But lest we think that only people suffered to make Korea the powerhouse that it is today, let us not forget the brave shade givers who gave their beauty and youth to the nation's development efforts. I am speaking of course of Korea's street trees.

Try as they might to touch the sky, these street trees are perennially cut back to manageable proportions, less they tear down power lines or telephone wires in the blustery typhoon season. The tree above has taken on their typical knotty, ugly appearance. But truly these are the hardest working trees in Korea. Called upon to bring a maximally efficient dose of nature in an urban environment dominated by factories and bleak houses, like the lotus, they bloom for you again and again. After their perennial trimming, they are allowed to grow reedy and knotty, delivering a compact blast of foliage to a grey urban milieu.

They resemble nothing so much as whomping willows.

In all seriousness, the Korean street tree is sort of the perfect metaphor for all the negative aspects of the last 60 years of Korean history. It's the semi-fulfillment of a desire (nature in an urban landscape) done with no style or thought to aesthetics. 대충 자연. It's a monkey's paw wish fulfilled with ironic consequences. You look at the tree, intended to make you feel some sort of natural satisfaction, and instead you just see a tortured and stifled captive from the forest that makes you feel even less connected to natural world. And yet in the summer, when these torn up trees are fully foliated, it satisfies your brain's desire for green, just enough, and no more