where "home" equals ilsan, south korea. sigh. not sure whether that’s a good sigh or a bad sigh; it’s a nonpartisan sigh for now. with good reason. i slept for approximately 12 hours today after making my way from jeff city, mo to the rok in over 24 hours. and yet here i am, wide awake at 4 in the am, drinking a hite tall boy and eating a nutty bar. 1 nutty bar down, 11 to go. then i get to move on to the peanut butter log thingys. oh, little debbie, how i do love you!
before the ensuing chronicling of my vacation, i should probably apologize in general to the many people i wanted to see (either again or for the first time upon my return) but didn’t get to. i am an asshole. i know this. since we all know it, there’s no use dwelling on it. the truth is, i’ve always hated making plans (or being proactive, for that matter), and as soon as i make a plan, i’m immediately anxious about the fact that it might fall through. perhaps this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, i dunno. an ultimate and overriding fear of rejection/disappointment. this dismal fact is only compounded by my fear/hatred of the telephone. anyhoo, the fact is that when a plan does fall through, i do actually feel shitty. there were lots of folks i was sposed to meet during my days in columbia who i didn’t. a lot of this was due to some schedule changes, the commuting to/from columbia, jeff city and springfield, as well as my general mood during the last week and also to a bonafide illness the day before (and of) my departure. as it turned out, there were very few people who i even saw on more than one occassion. and that’s a bummer. especially since i have no idea when i’ll be stateside again.
anyhoo, i suppose i’m done with excuses, at least for now. but i’m sorry if i didn’t get to see peeps as often as we both would have liked. if you didn’t get to see me (and i didn’t get to see you), find comfort in the fact that i’m really not that cool or entertaining anymore. you know, not like i USED to be.
shucks. not really sure where to start here with the recap. i guess the flights back to korea are a good place to start. for now reverse chronological order, or something like that, seems like a good idea. and i’m going to try to save waxing philosophical/overly-analytical (by my low standards) for any later blogs. of course it’s tempting to tackle notions of home and uncertainty and transience and my future and relationships (friendly or otherwise) here, but i’m going to fight the urge, as there is plenty of future blog space, not to mention vacation digestion, that support my postponement of such themes. soul-searching is one of my favorite pastimes...
back to logistics...headed up to stl on saturday around 2:30 with the parentals. drank some beers/cokes at an airport bar with good quesadillas and bad stevie wonder covers. i guess it’s worth noting that in my opinion any cover of stevie wonder is going to be bad. so there.
had to do the all-to-familiar reorganizing of luggage at check-in in order to get both bags to their santioned weights. and i still had to pay $25. i sure returned to korea with more shit, and not just little debbies. bought lots o’ shoes and clothes, reading materials, items for my co-teachers, items for my students, fetched items for the twin sister, fetched items for friends here, and at least one other fun item that i don’t need to mention in detail, lest i make anyone reading this blush, namely myself (i think we all know that’s not possible...whatev). but hey, it glows in the dark, so that’s pretty fucking cool.
flight to lax was fine. 3.5 hours (more, actually, because we were late). then i had to navigate an airport under renovation with the nastiest bathrooms i’ve seen stateside. there also appeared to be claw marks on all the doors...inexplicable, mysterious, everything a public restroom should be. i thought it was standard at airports to have those plastic-wrapped toilets that sound like they’re from the future, or at the very least to have locks on doors. alas, no. if i’ve ever felt like i’ve been in an appropriate place to get shanked, this bathroom was that place in my mind. no shanking occured. so that’s a good thing.
drank a beer in an airport bar where the workers seemed genuinely shocked and dismayed by my request for an amber bock at 11 pm on a saturday night in their bar. now that’s just plain unamerican. tried to change my seat after deciding that the window seat was probably not the best position for someone with long legs on a 14 hour flight. but that chick was a bitch too. seems like peeps in airports are required to be disgruntled, even if for no apparent reason. so those events set my mood. i sat and waited for my flight, stewing the whole time. i wasn’t quite prepared to be in a sea of meandering koreans again. and yet there i was, on vacation from korea, surrounded by the all-too-familiar hordes of people milling about with no particular sense of direction, oblivious to the fact that there might be people trying to make their way through the crowd en route to some other gate taking them somewhere other than korea. but once i got on the plane everything was cool. was seated next to a chinese woman and her 6 year old son, who would eventually become my best friend for about 5 hours. they were headed to chengdu and had 2 flights to go after the long-ass flight to incheon. anyhoo, as soon as i hit the seat i passed out. was in and out of sleep for a long time, all the while a small child elsewhere on the plane was screaming. and i guess there’s no way to quietly scream.
when i woke up for good, the 6-year-old chinese kid was next to me. and he wanted to play. so we raced each other stacking the 12 drink cups he had acquired during the flight. then we took turns trying to catch cups with other cups. that game didn’t work so well, and seemed to annoy the people behind us when a cup flew in their direction. one man actually returned the wayward cup to us, but it was full of his trash. asshole. i never got this kid’s name, but he was so fucking awesome. his english was great, as he’d been living in o’fallon/st. louis for 2 years (his dad worked for pfizer). although he did have the same problem saying his r’s that i had when i was little. i suppose that endeared me to him. we also spent a good half hour talking on the phone/tv handsets in each of our chairs. his remote was a "magical" remote that could turn aliens into people (me) and turn headphones into money or pizza. we decided to have a macaroni pizza party in the sky, where i lived. but it was only a set-up for him to turn all my alien friends into bugs. i negotiated them into butterflies instead. after that it was the assembly of a mini thomas the train and about an hour of dora the explorer. he noticed every time i switched the channel. after that the plane started to descend and his ears hurt, so fun time turned into crying-in-mom’s-lap time.
landed in incheon, and it was smooth sailing. although it’s very hard to lift a ginormo bag o’ luggage onto a bus when the handles have broken off. i managed. again with the sea of koreans not getting the fuck out of the way. it was very obvious that i had 2 giant bags of luggage following me, and yet all the students in their uniforms just stood there, blocking the entire sidewalk. some chick got testy when i ran over her foot. to which i responded "get the fuck out of the way." i’m sure the only word she understood was "fuck."
wheeled my shit from the bus stop to my apartment. where everything was just as i had forgotten. unpacked and passed out.
guess this is all for now. sleep doesn’t beckon, but i’m forcing it. work later this week. yuck.
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