5.16.2013

Long weekend: Hermitting.

Everybody's gearing up for the holiday three-day weekend, and all I can think is how good it will be to have three days to get some shit done.

B's off down to Busan for his grandmother's 100 day funeral rites, and to spend the holiday with his family. Mamma B may be getting a bit frustrated. She was a little tetchy at having the non-fiance, as I believe I was previously known, when it came to such matters, down to the homestead for things like holidays in the beginning, but it seems that after we met, now it's assumed that I'll be down whenever B goes. But there's just too much to be done at the moment.

A friend's fiance's tea shop is opening in Seoul tomorrow, and I may get out at some point this weekend to check it out. And I kind of need a haircut. But other than that, I went to the green market up the road after work today, and loaded myself down with supplies to see out the weekend from my breezy fourth floor kitchen, underneath a pile of books and scribbled notes. No shit -- I now have a five section notebook to try to keep track of my life.

This weekend a friend flies back in from a long sojourn back to the U.S., and time will get even slightly more limited. So now is a good time to get a head start on the shit I'm bound to fall behind on between now and summer vacation, if I don't.

I know this is all incredibly vague, but you can trust there's a good mixture of poetry, Korean study, and preparing my fucking life (apartment shit, moving shit, visa shit, school shit) all rolling around in there, and it's not much more interesting than that, anyway.

As for work, what can I say? This open class is a royal pain, as they are wont to be. My schedule has been all hacked up and stitched back together to accommodate the day off, a sports day, a physical aptitude testing day, and the fucking water being shut off in the whole neighborhood for 24 hours, to provide enough practice time for the open class lesson with all of the other available classes. I spent six class periods in a row today teaching three-day-weekend giddy first graders in the windowless library an overly involved and time crunched lesson plan, while they pondered the wonders of an entirely different kind of chair.

The good news is that the class I have chosen, against everyone else's wishes, burst into applause when they were told I had picked them, out of everyone, and seem eager to do me proud. Everyone pushed for three class, because they are the best behaved, and one class can go a little off the rails if you don't keep the reins tight. But one class has the personality and are less likely to freak the fuck out and freeze with twenty odd foreigners, a host of Korean teachers, the principal, the vice principal and the district supervisor all gawking at them.

As for the nonsense involved on the admin side of things, I've given up trying to explain how the windowless library which is walled off on all sides may not have been the best location to choose. The teachers can just stand up to watch the class. Oh, can they? For forty five minutes? Great. Your problem, not mine. As I told one class today, we are there to study as always, and we should just ignore everyone else who is there. Me and them, doing some English shit, just like we always do.

I put a countdown up in my cubicle. Do you want to know what it says? 21 (9). Nine weeks until summer vacation, twenty one until my contract is finished. The pathetic part is that even while I ache with envy for my future life and glance over calendars just to watch days disappear every morning, I know it will take approximately two months before I start randomly tearing up, remembering the kids. The coworkers? Perhaps arranging therapy for PTSD may be more appropriate.

PS -- That whole water being shut off for 24 hours thing? Guess which 24 hours. If you happen to be attending the open class, and if I look unusually greasy, bedraggled and perhaps am emitting visible fumes of odor, don't judge. It's this Murphy's Law of a job conspiring against me.

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