yup, my right shoulder done been twitching for a solid 12 hours. i don't know why this happens. seems to never happen to the left side. sometimes my eye will twitch too, mostly when i'm tired, and that's the right eye too. hmmm.
as my last blog post suggested, i'm both highly inactive these days and mildly depressed. nothing to be too concerned about i guess, simply another bout of the funk that's made several cameos in my life over the past year. homesick, bored, lacking tangible goals for the future. you know, the shit that i like to tell myself all other 28 year olds (30 year olds, if you're in the korea) worry about. the same shit i've been talking about for the duration of this here blog. but hey, at least i'm consistent.
moving on. i forgot to mention that i saw some familiar faces from co, mo last weekend. my former boss from the asian affairs center, sang, was in town with another person from aac, dr. herde. it's not unusual to see sang in korea, actually, but it was a very pleasant surprise to see dr. herde. just to see people who've known me for a what seems like a lot longer than most people in korea have known me. and who know columbia.
it sucks to constantly have to explain your references, allusions, context. so much so that you eventually stop explaining those things altogether. sometimes it feels like if i talk about elements of my background too much--my family, my life in missouri, life in austin, past relationships, former cars, dead pets--they become less real, more removed from my current reality. i guess i don't really know any of the significant or insignificant events that formed the character of any of the people in whose company i spend the majority of my time. and i don't know why this makes me so sad. it just does. to not really know anyone outside of myself. i guess that's the big issue i'll have to wrestle with when it comes down to determining what to do next in my life. of course the allure of travelling and getting paid is all-consuming. but it seems like the big compromise there is a life of transience and half-formed, flimsy relationships (both friendly or otherwise). i honestly don't know how long i'll be down with that. and now, segueing out of self-fulfilling prophecy mode...
sang had arranged a lot of dinners for former mizzou peeps to meet, greet, eat, drink. unfortunately, because i live in ilsan and not actually in seoul, i couldn't go to either of the two formal dinners. but that meant i got to hang out on saturday, minus a large entourage of people i don't really know. so me, clayton (friend from high school), another dude from mizzou, sang and dr. herde all met, ate dakgalbi, and just generally made merry. that included drinking some liquor that tasted uber ginsengy. after that, dr. herde ducked out early to go to sleep (she's not much of a drinker). which meant dude party, and jamie.
first we went to a canadian microbrewery place. it's always a treat to drink something besides hite/cass/ob etc. after that we ended up going to the bar at the hyatt. this is probably the swankest hotel i've seen in korea. just because i'm so used to your standard, utilitarian love motel. not that said motels aren't without their perks--sex toy vending machines, free drinks and toothbrushes. hot damn!--but this hyatt was the real deal. so we went to the basement where the bar was. there was a shitty band o' foreigners playing a lot of cover songs. it was funny to see these hardcore looking dudes and a chick, replete with tattoos and hip clothing, so earnestly singing "total eclipse of the heart" and "video killed the radio star." i'm sure it was the culmination of all their rock star fantasies. dudes, we've made it! we're playing the hyatt in seoul! yup, i'm going to hell.
the bar was full of all these middle-aged white dudes in suits hitting on middle-aged white chicks, also in suits. business trip yuppies hitting on business trip yuppies (is yuppie gender neutral? i dunno). gross.
but the best part of the whole evening was when i went to the bar and ordered 4 shots of tequila--the least i could do, since sang had paid for everything up to that point. 60,000 for four fucking shots (that's over $60, folks). and they didn't even fill them to the top. the lemons were also sub-par (notice, i said lemons. apparently limes are like gold here. hard to find). jeebus.
anyhoo, at the hyatt they had a dance floor packed with lots of sweaty people. i'll be honest, the dance floor is where i really shine. not that i'm a particularly good dancer, but i am a particularly good molester. but one can only molest for so long, and then even that gets boring. so that's when we decided to go to...itaewon? fuck. i hate itaewon. but for some reason (remember, i'm with 3 dudes) everyone wanted to go to itaewon. i mean, i like russian whores, belligerent military and civilian foreigners and general drunken debauchery as much as the next person. but i could only tolerate the douchebags and emaciated (and incredibly young looking) prostitutes at the "sky bar" for so long. taxied it home at 4:30 in the am. and still managed to pull it together to do some more drinking the next night. i'm a trooper. a starship trooper.
so i guess the point is, it was good to see sang and to hang out with peeps i knew. itaewon just always sort of kills the mood for me. unless i'm there in the daytime eating mexican food at a restaurant whose name i can't remember. then it's okay.
but back to more recent events. today (after sort of freaking out at work yesterday and kindly requesting permission to go home), i decided to take action against my aforementioned funk. do something productive. leave my fucking apartment!
granted, yesterday's impromptu all day sleeping, bad pizza eating, movie binge was not a total loss. my life is certainly richer/more traumatized now that i've seen xanadu. you know, for a muse who practices skating as much as she says she does, olivia newton john sure wasn't that great a roller skater. i nodded off for part of the movie, but then woke up to people skating in circles, clapping and looking sort of maniacal in the glare of overabundant neon lights. it wasn't the best visual to wake up to. i have reached the conclusion that xanadu is probably what hell looks like. and my friends and family are probably sick of me mentioning xanadu, as it seems to be the only thing i've talked/emailed about for the past 24 hours. haunting, pervasive shit.
but today i went to a bonafide palace! in seoul. changdeokgung. it was a very pleasant surprise for me to realize that a lot of the significant cultural locales in seoul are actually [relatively] close to me. and it also felt really productive to set out with a purpose for my day. the initial plan involved a lot more activities, but the only way to see this place was on a guided tour, so i had to conform to their time schedule. fair enough. at first the place was just the usual sort of korean temple/hermitage looking thing that it seems like you can see in any city in korea. i dunno, you've seen one, you've seen them all. but the coolest thing about this place was that it had these secret gardens. and for the first time since i've been in korea, it didn't really bother me too much that i was sharing this very serene and tranquil natural environment with 100s of other people. it also didn't hurt that i was listening to my mp3 player the whole time, as the only tour i could get in on at the last minute was the korean language one. so i probably appeared to be very rude. i still pretended to listen to the woman in the traditional korean clothing.
but it was downright pleasant to wander among/along all these seemingly hidden stairways lined with huge, mossy trees, lily ponds and other good-smelling nature bits. it sort of felt like i was floating in a dream. which would be a unique thing indeed, as we tend to dream the most when we sleep, and i've been dealing with some very real insomnia for a while now. anyhoo, for a whole 2 hours or so i wasn't thinking about money, or my students, or being homesick, or generic existential angst, or stupid things that annoying people say or any of the other bullshit that's been logging my brain recently. so yup, the palace served its purpose. and at the end of it all, i wanted to punch myself for not having ventured out sooner, both earlier in the day and earlier in my past months living in ilsan.
so that's that. other notables. i think i have an opera singer living above me or next to me. i heard her pleasant voice floating through my walls as she was warming up, doing scales. and later when she was singing something really, i dunno, operatically. at any rate, it sure beats the yippie dog whose room is adjacent to my own sleeping quarters.
also, i got a surprise package in the mail the other day from my old homey at new west records. i'm now acl dvds and cds richer. that was a total surprise. now i just need a dvd player, as my computer is a piece of shit (albeit a free piece of shit...).
i've been listening to rogue wave and twin atlas non-stop since ganking the shit from jules and rory. good fucking eats.
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