Month Seven: Hell or High Water

I've had a stone-cold sober weekend, and the entire day inside to myself. It's led to a lot of thinking. Clear, well-slept early morning kind of thinking.

This place is a total freak show. It's not unlike art school in that way. It's worse, actually. Or less intentionally ironic, anyhow. Well. I guess it's like art school in the first year, before 10% of the freshman class actually got carted off to mental hospitals when their hedging symptoms developed into full-blown disorders after being released from the confines of mom and dad in suburbia for longer than six months.

After that was when the intentional irony started.

And most of those people are still there. Being ironic.

I don't know how you meet decent people in Korea. I don't know how you meet decent people at art school, either. In the first case, I somehow managed in a least a couple of instances. Mostly, though, it ended up being a bric-a-brac collage of personality types that wouldn't have meshed under different circumstances, which rapidly crumbled once those circumstances changed. Sort of like high school. And everything else that came before it.

It's like life is this never ending marathon where you pull this giant oxcart behind you, and as you pass certain stations, shit randomly gets piled on. It stays there for a while, but most of it shifts off as you go along and more shit is piled on top of it.

Some of the shit sticks, though. Shit like Stepho and Magsy, I guess.

That's not really an ideal metaphor. But I think you see where this is going.

Anyway, it's depressing. And I'm tired of carting around random shit. And Korea has had a freakishly high turnover rate thus far.

Drinking in bars certainly doesn't help. But it does help pass the time.

I could say it's Magnes's fault I'm thinking about this, but before he even raised the issue, I'd already woken up thinking about it. And a longish conversation with the kid back home tonight brought it out in verbal form. The problem is, it's easy enough for him to blow off, since this isn't, as he puts it, his "real life". It's what I'm working with for the foreseeable future however.

I don't know. Can a foreigner ever really have a normal life in Korea? Semi-normal? Fractionally normal?

All I know is, I don't want to talk to "Gil" and I don't want to go home with "Ryan" and I don't want to meet Minsu's handsome man friend from her church, or go to a cafe "language exchange" every Friday night like some kind of Match.com paying member. I don't want to spend the next six months (2 years? 3 years?) awkwardly holding my beer while Seoyoung dances to Prince under black lights and tells me about his year abroad in New Zealand.

Good God. Is it really so much to ask?

It's so much, so bad, that about 9 am this morning found me standing by my kitchen sink with my phone in my hand, contemplating the ultimate faux pas.

Dear X.

We didn't have a terrible lot in common to begin with, other than both being alone in the bar. If I were to meet you back home, I would have probably labeled you a complete douchebag. But your douchebaggery somehow seems sort of like a gigantic middle finger to all the things that, socially, frustrate me about the culture you come from. What I liked about you then, and what has me thinking about you now, is that you simply do not give a fuck what absolutely anyone thinks about you. I know I kind of ignored your text messages and acted like a bit of a cold bitch. Where I come from, that's just sort of how things are done. Is there anyway we can forget about it now, though, and hang out sometime? Because I'm bored and I would like to have an honest conversation at least once a week.

x
Liz.

I didn't do it. But fuck if I wasn't tempted.

Well. For the time being I'm somehow standing by my month seven prediction. Just because I have an eerie way with these things. Month Seven better be the month that something fucking real happens in this country. I'm getting kind of tired of amusing myself.