One of the magazines I read is Korea Magazine, published by the Korean Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Tourism.[^1]. Yesterday I was reading the July 2025 issue[^2] and I encountered an interesting article which reminded me of the quote which I used as the title for this post.[^3]

You know how towns have festivals highlighting whatever product the town is famous for? You know: Crawfish festival, potato festival, mullet festival, and so on. Well, apparently the South Korean town of Boryeong is famous for their mud, to the point that they have a festival for it.

Once you get past the oddity of having a festival about mud, it's actually a good story that other places[^4] could benefit from: Boryeong was previously a coal-mining town, then when the mines closed in the early 1990s, they needed some other product to give the town a reason to exist. They discovered that the mud in the flats around the town was rich in bentonite and germanium, both of which are apparently beneficial for the skin, and so Boryeong went into the mud business. And now the mud festival, originally organized to promote the mud business, has become big enough to become an industry of its own, with mud-based entertainment opportunities, live music, and Korean music shows coming out to film episodes at the festival. The mud festival is now big enough to attract international visitors to Boryeong, most of whom would almost certainly not have even heard of Boryeong without the festival, much less have gone there. "Famous for our mud," indeed.

[^1] It used to be a free paper magazine, but now it's strictly an e-magazine.

[^2] I read a lot of magazines, but except for The Nation I don't read any of them in anything like a timely manner.

[^3] For those of you who don't recognize it, it's from My Cousin Vinny, which I highly recommend if you haven't watched it yet.

[^4] I'm looking at you, West Virginia.

For as long as I can remember, I've disliked sleep. It seems like the biggest waste of time there could possibly be. I've used sleep as an argument against intelligent design — not necessarily against "design," but at the very least against "intelligent": Designing a mechanism that has to be shut down for at least 1/3 of its lifespan in order to function doesn't strike me as a very good idea. Combine this with my perfectionist/workaholic tendencies and you end up with someone who goes full tilt until they just can't anymore, at which point I end up going to bed several hours early, regardless of what I'm leaving undone, because I just physically cannot stay awake any longer.

I know it's not the healthiest way to do things, but I just can't seem to help myself, and until they come up with a chemical substitute for sleep that has fewer side effects than meth or cocaine, well. . . there I am. Or, well, there I was. As we were driving home from the dentist yesterday, A. came up with a way to weaponize my perfectionism against me: Make rest a quantifiable plan/goal for me to work toward (quantifiable both so that I can be sure that I'm doing it and also so that I can know when I've done it enough and don't have to do it anymore). She managed to get me to commit to two 10-minute meditations a week along with one night a week where I don't write (as writing is the last thing I do every day, so it often delays my bedtime). She tried to get me to commit to two meditations and two nights of not writing, I tried to talk her down to two meditations and one night where I try not to write, and this is what we settled on. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that taking this additional rest will make me so much more productive in the time that I'm not resting that I won't resent the time spent resting. On the other hand, if 52 years of sleeping almost every night hasn't reconciled me to the necessity of sleeping. . .