Just in case you're living under a (Korean) rock. 박재범 화이팅!

Tonight's hwaeshik turned into a bit of a surprise birthday party. Not ready to go into it yet, but it's been a hell of a day, and it was a nice way to end it -- only the old, regular English teachers showed up to dinner, so we were nice and comfortable. I'm beyond exhausted, running on zero sleep and looking like death warmed over (sick as well), so for the first part of the evening, I couldn't make the words in Korean string together to create meaning, although I was catching them, if that makes sense, but eventually I settled into a groove and was able to participate (in English, obviously). Something else weird happened, but I'm not in the mood to trust that yet, or give it any effort of thought at the moment, so we'll get back to that later.

I had my roughest classes today, but my boys rallied around as the absolutely always do when they can tell something is wrong, and performed beautifully, smacking the shit out of each other when anyone got the least bit out of line. Love 'em to death. And it's been decided by the other teachers that Seokhee, my South African student, now considers me a Noona rather than a teacher, given that he marched straight into my office today and asked if he could charge his mp3 player on my computer, proceeded to sift through my music, decided it wasn't up to date enough, harrassed me about it and then put new songs on my mp3 player to get me up to speed.

They were talking about him tonight at dinner, and the old English teacher who taught his class last year said she was surprised to hear how close we had become because he would be awful in my class at times last year. His new homeroom teacher, my new co-teacher, was quick to jump to his defense (which I couldn't do, given that I'm the magnae and she's the head teacher, and also this was all happening in Korean) by saying that he just wanted to have my attention and be close to me.

He's also an awkward teenage boy. They have mood swings sometimes for no reason. Nearly every single one of my students, no matter what their usual demeanor, have had off days where it's nothing but pure nasty attitude. It's nothing to take personally or get worked up about. Honestly. Just wait for them to get their panties back out of a twist, and don't hold it against them when they finally do.