Longing for the big V.

Hello. I'm alive. Actually, I've taken the weekend mostly off, save for a trip to Homeplus on Friday afternoon and a little jaunt into Myeongdong yesterday morning. And so, I'm no longer sick. I think. The weather has helped a bit by not being completely bitterly cold and awful. This week is the last week of "real" lessons (which will mostly be canceled, due to finals prep), so I don't think I should be having another relapse. Hopefully this will be the end of this season's Horrible Plague. Because I'm fucking busy!

Why did I go to Myeongdong during Christmas season? I don't know. Stupid. What is with the Christians there? Why Myeongdong, of all places? I was sitting in a second floor coffee shop looking out the window when I saw a man with an upside-down pot on his head and painted face get his humungous banner caught in the power lines as he was marching along disturbing the general flow of human masses. Ridiculous. You're scaring people. Jesus is not a spectacle. But you definitely are doing your best to make one of yourself.

To each his own, I suppose. I just wonder how people can get so far off the ordinary track that something like that seems like a good plan for the day, when you wake up in the morning and pry yourself out of your probably completely normal bed. It was the same with some of the behavior I witnessed out of my classmates and fellow students back at art school. My favorite time of year was vacation, when suddenly Facebook would be flooded with photos of them standing next to their completely ordinary upper middle class families, maybe off to the side a bit with screwy clown hair, soiled 19th century garb and buckets of eyeliner. Classic.

What was I talking about? Oh. Nothing really.

Well. I don't know. It's officially that time of year where vacation is so close you can almost taste it. I love Korea. I'm one of those annoying fuckers who doesn't even get the point of conversations which center around how this or that Korean culture is anymore, and usually ends up just saying something obnoxious like, "Just get used to it." But. As vacation grows closer, even we pro-Korea folk can start to go a bit funny in the head. Found myself, for instance, on the phone with my aunt late last night suggesting that perhaps if half the country's population were to be drowned in the ocean at random, then I could go about my daily objectives without spending literally hours of wasted time simply physically negotiating my path around other human beings. Be it on a bus or on a sidewalk. Not rational.

I just need some time away from this lovely fucking country. Perhaps even just this city. Some time to miss it and its horrific patches of street stench and awkward face-gawking elderly and groups of school girls walking so slowly that they very nearly literally might as well just have a seat on the sidewalk. Yesterday, in the bathroom queue at Seoul Station, a woman decided that the most logical place to stop and wait for a stall to become available was pressed directly and firmly against my back. And I didn't even budge. Just stood there, leaning against her, her forehead hitting me somewhere between the shoulder blades. Whatever. We can cuddle in line for the bathroom, ajumma, if you really will it to be so. I don't mind.

Vacation. Still got that ever-present last hurdle of camps to get through before I can relax, though, which keeps things right on edge clear up to the end. It's going to fly, though. And then I'll be updating this fucker from some tiny island off the coast of Greece on hotel wifi about how I miss kimchi or some such fucking nonsense. And all will be right in the world again.