This is it.

Another night in the neighborhood at a little hof. I don't know why we didn't start doing this before. It's so much nicer than the total insanity that goes on out in that other place. After taking Whiskey round that way on Saturday night and running into The Korean Body Builder, who was a bit of a cock as usual, I feel like I literally can't go out there without losing somehow. Even mildly. It was quite early and I knew all the boys would be out at Haebangchon, so the risk for incident was low. And the incident itself wasn't much to report. But still. It's nicer to just sit in having a few quiet beers and being left alone, without risk of running into anyone other than my students.

So. Something's come up that's got Smalltown racking his brain, and which had us sitting there over our 2000cc's rapping hard about the expat condition and all that comes along with it. How it feels like there's this giant stopwatch hanging over your head all the time, counting down the nanoseconds, and how that's just not the reality -- it's the getting out of thinking that way that's the hard part. How it's ultimately visas and contracts that make love difficult. How the world should be simpler, and how silly these lines we've drawn all over the damn thing are.

Mostly I just cling on to Kel and her partner as evidence that somehow we can all work it out eventually. Which, of course, means that they can never break up or I'll have a life crisis. You hear me, Kel? Even that kid out in Scotland is stressing a bit at the moment, I know. I don't know why living out of your own country makes everything feel so urgent and pressurized, but it does. It's the contracts and visa expirations that make cloudy futures that much harder to cope with.

Mostly I think we're just all in our mid 20s, and this is probably just the way that things are supposed to feel. No matter where we are. We've got the pressure of having to go ahead and just put ourselves somewhere looming just over the horizon, but no real idea how or where or in what manner to do so yet. We need time. But we can feel it eeking away.

All we can do, I suppose, is just follow our guts, deal with the situations we're in as best we can manage at the time, and see where life takes us. There's no more of this waiting around for life to start business -- this is it.

And at the end of it all, I'm just left thinking, Smalltown could be gone in two months. And even if he's not, it won't be long after that he definitely will be. And that leaves me just another good man down. Yet again.

Man. I don't wanna go to work tomorrow. Life feels too heavy at the moment. But I know those little brats are finally getting to bed now, so they can get just enough sleep to sit there and say brilliant, funny things all day long, so that I can forget all this serious business and just get back to enjoying life in the simple ways that they have to show me.