Submerged

The warm water overflowed. It seeped into the drain in the floor of the motel washroom as she stepped into the bath her lover had drawn for her. She felt a little unwell, but baths had always calmed her down, helped her feel weightless as her back floated above the rim of the tub, not quite making contact.

The day before, it had rained. They'd purchased an umbrella and had become lost, part of the throng of multi-coloured, spinning, dripping rain-gear, which possesses a certain beauty when it's observed from above street level. Down below, as part of the mass, clinging onto his damp arm, moist with sweat and rain, she'd felt completely submerged, swallowed, even, by the city, by the world, by her own thoughts. It made her temples hurt as she struggled to breathe, as she fought to keep her head above all this water, to keep from sinking like the stone it felt like she'd swallowed.

He knelt by the tub of water that had chilled significantly when her body, lithe and cool, had entered it. As he twirled her long, dark hair about his fingers, she told him something she'd read once about womb simulation—how if a tub of body temperature water were large enough to immerse you completely, to the point where you were just floating, it would be like being back inside your mother. You wouldn't know where your body ended and the water started. Isolated and drifting, you'd be recalling your original condition, somehow.

As she told him this, this bit of trivia, the source of which she couldn't remember, it struck her as mildly ironic that such serenity could come from being submerged, overwhelmed, led, even, by a force so much more powerful and so much more permanent and certain, than she, the self-proclaimed chaotic one.

As he leaned in to kiss her, biting her lower lip the way she liked it, she slid back slowly, holding her nose and clamping her eyes shut as she went under.

From beneath the bathwater, she opened her eyes and looked up at his rippled, wavy face and thought he'd said something, the way his mouth seemed to open, and how she caught a glimpse of his tongue, but she could hear nothing.

She imagined this as perfect numbness, like a sedative effect or an unbreakable fever, like trying to distinguish shapes through a haze. For a second, she thought it was beautiful, but as she re-emerged, coughing, the cold air hitting her neck and chest immediately, the thought disappeared in the hot-water fog. Leaning her arms against the rim of the bathtub, she sighed deeply, and looking into his eyes for just a second, suggested a hot shower instead.

The past few weeks have been difficult ones. Every day for the last nine or ten days now, I've woken up feeling as though my head were being grasped and cruelly squeezed. I haven't had headaches this terrible in nearly a decade. I've been taking (in addition to the Prozac) Motrin, Tylenol, Nyquil and whatever it is the Korean pharmacists give me when I tell them "Migraine." And, grimacing painfully, like a bad mime, I clutch my throbbing brain--to illustrate the severity--which I'm sure has split open and is slowly leaking into my sinuses. The veins in my temples pound and their movement are palpable as I sandwich my face between my hands. During the day, the pain and the pills put me close to falling asleep at my desk at work, while at night, despite my exhaustion, I wake up constantly, as it's unpleasant to sleep with a pulsating cranium.

I am making an effort to eat more protein during the week, as I thought at first the excruciating pain in my head and face might have to do with some sort of deficit in my diet. Regardless of my effort and the vitamin popping, I am still exhausted, still dizzy, Imagine a thumb tack being steadily filed down to the little colourful plastic halo that sticks out of the corkboard; that's how I feel. Soon, I may be utterly useless, which is sort of how I felt two weeks ago, when two friends commemorated a successful year in Korea with a not so happy final morning.

That night, there were a lot of tears, none of which I felt responsible for, but which I felt a need to soak up, an urgent desire to stop. I've never been comfortable around crying. I myself am subject to it very rarely, but when it happens I exert every effort, every thought, to holding it back, to steeling my eyes and poker-facing it through the turbulence until my voice is steady and I can look up again, mascara intact, cheeks un-streaked by the little rivulets that strip one's face clean, vulnerable.

We stayed up all night and into the afternoon of the next day and the tears continued to flow as I bobbed along helplessly in this whirlpool of worry and despair and frustration and alcohol, which made drowning a little more tolerable. Despite a truly terrible morning, my friends managed to make it back across the Pacific Ocean (another significant accumulation of salt-water) and are in the United States, again. I miss them very much and I hope the tears have dried.

I remember learning in science class a long time ago about the water erosion of sedimentary rocks in river beds and how when you fish one out of a stream, it will most likely be perfectly smooth and even—the slow result of water pounding and rushing steadily over it, breaking it down, making it just right. I recall being very interested in this idea and how water is so responsible for shaping the world we currently know, a world that may have been very different before islands went under, and tectonic plates creaked away from each other as the oceans smashed up archipelagos and narrow land bridges holding on, staying connected by just a relatively tiny strand in the sea—a negligible prospect for permanency. I think my fascination in all this lies in the gradual, protracted sort of attribute of such enduring, results; how it's something that you can't notice happening, but will change you forever.

When I think about it deeper, in bed at night, or alone at my desk in school, I apply it to myself and grow extremely anxious and worried. How permanent my self-inflicted erosion must be; how steadily life has rushed above my head, like water, and kept me under, breaking me down in its quest to make me a little more perfect, a little more rounded and smooth: nice to look at, nice to touch, but not quite the same as I was, not the original person I might have been in a less turbulent, drier environment. I've lost a lot of myself, I think, before I even knew where I was and where I stood.

She had run through the woods that day, her birthday, trying desperately to find them, her invited guests. They had been playing Hide and Seek, you see, and she was 'It'. Special girl. In the February cold, she struggled to walk in her tight, bunched up snowsuit, the bottoms of which had frayed the year before and were becoming increasingly grey and she dragged her feet through the murky, brown sludge, a mixture of half-melted snow, mud and dog shit.

She could hear them giggling, these girls from her class to whom the swamp was foreign, the murkiness and mess of fallen branches a one-day affair. She knew they weren't far, just in the knocked down cabin she'd gotten in trouble for painting one year when she was much smaller, or behind the rusted out water tank behind the tree she spent most of her summers dangling her legs from, maybe.

Lifting her feet one at a time, she began to walk again, through the swamp, a place her mother had warned her about—a dangerous place to get lost in. The girl knew where she was—not far at all from the house. She could see her bedroom light (she often forgot to turn it off, which would make her father yell about the cost of electricity), so she wasn't scared.

As the minutes passed, it occurred to her that the giggling had stopped a while back, that there was no longer that thick sense of anticipation in being discovered, chased and tagged. She had stopped moving for five minutes at least, resenting having to search for people she didn't particularly like, anyway. She hadn't even wanted to be 'It.' They could come find her.

Angry thoughts rattled about her mind as she waited, sitting in the swamp murk, becoming greyer and greyer, her hot pink snow pants completely submerged in the muck, her boots soaked right through.

Days get dark quickly in February, as the sky starts off in grey scale to begin with. This said, within a half hour, when no one came to find her and the moon was visible, she decided she'd been "It" long enough and began to pry herself out of the sludge, though with some difficulty.

Later when they saw her clothes and asked her if she'd gotten lost, embarrassed at her behaviour, she told them "yeah," and played up how scary and terrible it was, realizing full well that foregoing solid ground and allowing herself to go under, had been her choice. Later, she told them that she'd accidentally tripped and fallen in.

On top of my current depression, I am having problems with my boss, who isn't paying me once again. This week I had a major confrontation with him and essentially told him that he was very incompetent and insensitive. I told him how it was hard enough to be isolated on the other side of the world without knowing the language; how hard it was to be stared at not only by the locals but my few co-workers, none of whom acknowledge my existence; how hard it all was and how everything was so much worse given that I have an employer who frequently lies and neglects my needs and contract clauses. I told him that if my money isn't in my account by the end of the week, I will not come back to work, because I'll be at the Ministry of Labour issuing a formal complaint. I am so tired of this. I have three more months in this country and I refuse to feel like a slave, which working for no money makes me, essentially.

My boss makes me feel so uncomfortable. Whenever I broach a subject to him, he cuts me off or lies, then bids me to follow him into a closed classroom where he starts up about the school's current economic situation, which I really couldn't care less about. I get paid once a month and nearly a quarter of it goes to my student loan (when I can afford it), the money for which, when he doesn't pay me, I am forced to use for necessities. Speaking to him Wednesday, I was very unwavering as I clutched my books to my torso, wanting so very badly to scream, or at the very least, look away. He just stood there in silence staring coolly at me, considering. Then, seeing that I wasn't about to move—I was quite petrified, in every sense of the word--or say anything more, he stormed out, slamming the classroom door behind him, Paaaff.

I exerted every last effort to not start crying and I didn't, but I came very close. While he was still there, staring, which those who know me realize I can barely tolerate in children let alone odious sweating men who stomp around the room to make their presence felt by those about them, slamming their hands down for dramatic effect, my voice broke once and horrified, I clutched my books tighter and stood standing motionless against the whiteboard for a full ten minutes until finally, I heard him close his office door behind him.

When I went home about an hour later, the ocean smashed into the archipelago, so to speak, snapping and destroying it permanently. I was amazed at the quantity of tears streaming from my face, how very miserable I was. It was a veritable deluge that sent my head into a terrible, unsteady spin-cycle. This is rare for me and I wasn't sure how I would ever manage to stop now that I'd finally managed to feel anything but arid apathy and annoyance.

Later, as the tears continued to roll, and I sat hunched over a my table, wholly unable to stop neither the steady streams of water running down my face nor the wracking pain in my chest, I thought of Alice in Wonderland and how she grew to an immense size (from drinking something suspect after her fall down the rabbit-hole), which of course, made her start crying. Maintaining proportion with the rest of her body, the huge tears splashed down and became an ocean, which, when she shrunk again nearly drowned her. It's interesting though, how Lewis Carrol suggests the possibility of drowning in one's own tears. Perhaps he's implying that the things we despair about are all of our own creation, how maybe there's something in our personalities that makes others react to us or treat us in a particular way.

It's also interesting that Alice becomes smaller again in the wake of her great flood, like her enormous 'breakdown' resulted in an ultra-quick erosion. But then, I'm probably reading too far into it all, as is often the case.

Anyway, I'm officially on vacation as of tonight. I'm going to Jeju-do with John on Sunday night. I'll try to keep my head above water for another week at least.

Shape-shifters

On my way back to Sognae Sunday night, nodding off on the train, I felt very low--utterly sapped--like I'd been sucked dry, tetra-box style. An Arab man sitting next to me seized the first opportunity of my blinking my eyes awake to assail me with questions—"Excuse me, where are you from? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you think of the Korean people's character? Where are you going now?—which I was not in the mood to answer. Every time I closed my eyes again, hoping he'd get the message (as though my barely monosyllabic responses weren't enough), he's start up again, keeping me conscious, not only that I was cognisant, but also of my increasingly budding irritation and of feeling more exhausted and rickety than I've felt in some time. Eventually, I just pretended to be in a deep sleep, head resting uncomfortably against the metal hand-grip attached to the seat I was lucky enough to have gotten.

Lately, I've felt so overcome by so many different stimuli; people, events and feelings. My temperament has always been a little extreme, I realize, but lately, I've been seized with a sort of zealous need to be involved, often beyond all physical capacity. It's most definitely a weird sort of mania, whatever it is I've got, that has me wanting everything one moment to wanting nothing the next; from spinning madly around a packed dance club and belting out songs at a nori bang one night, to barely having enough energy to stand straight the next. It's a weird sense of detachment (for lack of a better word) that comes over me and makes my eyes blur vacant. When I feel this way, I can't be convinced of anything; I am inconsolable; I robotically revert to a sort of mental autopilot, and I am conscious of little more than that there is something wrong with me and with my surroundings, where everything about me moves so quickly as though to spite my own sense of the tiresome slow, like waiting for the sun to rise in a smoggy, cloudy sky.

The strange thing is that when I am energetic and happy, smiling an insanely toothy smile for the cameras that will inevitably be pointed at me, that I desire nothing, so content am I to be seen and heard and dare I say, admired, even if I never talk to anyone in particular (any of my random commentary to the open room will suffice). When I'm like this, I feel almost special, like nothing, not warmth or food, neither flattery nor extra attention from random strangers, can make me feel more perfect than I do at these rare, luminous moments. It is then that I need nothing and am without care; I wish the night were longer—that this infrequently felt, practically alien sensation, would last forever.

However, the opposite is true of my alternative (there is rarely a middle ground, it seems) personality, which I know intimately and have grown to both loathe and need, which I cling to almost desperately in a sort of fearful paranoia—a fucked-up relationship if ever there was one. It is when I am most overcome by this sensation that I feel the tension in my neck, the throbbing of my wrists (I close my fingers around them tightly, wishing for the terrible feeling to stop), and the seemingly massive weight of my body (which all logic and a good set of scales would deem ridiculous, I know), as I plod heavily along crowded streets, discerning the stab of eyes through me, examining, curious, judging. I look down and avoid contact, blind to all who would attract my attention. It is then that I feel utterly empty and lost and alone. It is then that I need a hand to grab, a steady body to lean against, and someone to squeeze me so hard that I feel the pressure against my ribcage, a reminder that my bones do exist, as I do, and that I'm not just a disenchanted floating blob, a lonely buoy in the ocean nodding to the beat of the waves.

It is difficult for me to write this, as I've always felt rather ashamed of my self-consciousness, like any delving into my hideousness or feelings of irrelevance would be met with a laugh and a swatting of hands through the air, a "Don't be ridiculous," and a quick change of conversation.

Last year, in my Indigenous Literature class, I did a lot of reading on shape-shifters. The most interesting character is probably the archetypal "trickster figure." The Trickster has figured not only throughout many Aboriginal stories, but throughout myth in general. Some call him Whiskey Jack (or Wasaygachuck); others call him Loki; some call him Pan. In fact he has many names, but one essential personality that seems to figure so prominently in life, literary or otherwise. The Trickster can be perceived as good or evil, depending on the effects he has on the mortals he interferes with. Either way, his function is to influence destiny, to steer you on or off your intended path, to change you for better or worse, depending on his own inclinations. As an instrument of destiny, the Trickster can assume many different forms, reproducing the faces of those closest to you, because like they say, "seeing is believing," right? And in the end, ironically, it's our reaction to the shape-shifter that changes us.

I think there must be something of the shape-shifter in all of us too. Some sort of duality that never quite evens out. It's this character, I think, that fundamentally makes us all entirely unpredictable, flexible even, able to control the outcome of our respective destinies, be it for good or ill. We are malleable creatures, I've decided, able to go from one extreme to the next, expanding, shrinking, exploding and imploding. We can change and sometimes we are hardly recognizable.

I received an email from my mother this week and in it, she expressed her regret that we aren't closer, that we don't have the mother-daughter relationship that I suspect she felt would just happen naturally, as it might for some offspring for whom reaching out and needing is not associated with shame, but with love or nature. As a teenager, sitting alone in my room, and reading as I tried to filter out the roar of the vacuum, the slamming of cupboard doors and the sound of my mothers' feet pounding heel first directly above my head, I was resentful that she never seemed to 'try' very hard with me.

That we didn't have the sort of sit-com-everyone-hugs-at-the-end-of the-show-relationship didn't worry me—I'm not that deluded. What bothered me is that she left it up to me to approach her if I had a problem or was feeling badly or needed to be paid attention. While this technique may work with less stubborn, more at ease children, for me, it generally meant nothing ever got solved. Needing anything, to me, grew to be almost shameful. Wanting—the occasional frivolous little mall purchase, that is—was fine. Needing, though, just seemed so much more intimate, personal, "of the body," something I'd been trying to deny the existence and urges of, and pulling uncomfortably at since elementary school.

When my siblings and I were very young, I remember this 'bit' my mom and brother would do; from the end of the hallway, Sacha would catch sight of her, and running towards each other in mock slow-motion, they'd hug fiercely, jokingly exclaiming how they hadn't seen one another is "so long" (at least a full two minutes). At seven or eight years old, I remember wishing I could do that, but I never said anything about it and would usually return to colouring and sipping grape juice with a spoon, slurping extra loudly until it became irritating and I was told to "cut it out." When this inevitably happened, slightly annoyed, I'd bring the cup to my lips and drink quickly, barely stopping to breathe or taste it. I'd let out a big "Aaaaaahhhh" for effect, and that would be the end of that.

My mother thinks I resent her, and I sometimes do, but I understand why she couldn't be the sort of mother I required. My mother spent my childhood going through the motions of being a parent to three very dissimilar children—she worked, she cleaned, she made frequent trips to the doctor's, dentist, the hairdresser and the shoe-store. And, I knew it was difficult. I remember how she used to keep a "budget," a blue Hilroy notebook on the dashboard of the light blue, peach-striped van that was constantly at the mechanic's or sputtering on the auto-route. It was all just numbers then, but I knew that my mother found balancing her money, not to mention her own life, to be somewhat of a challenge. She tries to explain it to me now via emails, as though I wasn't aware then. But, what I needed from her wouldn't have had to be recorded neatly on the light blue notepaper line and submitted to her accountant at the end of the fiscal year.

Years later, after I'd resigned myself to the idea of not needing and sometimes disdaining affection, it was awkward when my mother, her life vastly improved, would lean in to hug me and I'd stand there, stark-still, a little amused at the ceremonial hug 'good-bye' or 'hello,' but generally allowing her to go through what I assumed she now felt was necessary for a mother to do to her daughter. My sister, Maya, had always been warm enough, if not somewhat clingy with her, and having little else to compare me with, perhaps she was concerned upon finally reaching the realization that my desire to not be touched wasn't in fact an awkward adolescent phase, but a choice. Despite it all, I never lied about it, never pretended to be deeply affected or sentimental, and I rarely hugged back, as her embraces seemed too light (as if handling something fragile), un-practiced, like she was cautious or frightened, perhaps, of my reaction to her after everything.

When my mother reads this now, I know she will be hurt. That is not my intention. Though I do believe that most of life is cumulative and that the 'formative years' are dubbed so for a reason, I haven't lived at home for a long time at this point. That said, whatever I suffer now no longer has anything to do with her or my father or Bolton Center. In fact, all of these things have ceased to exist, not so much physically, but more in that all that truly remains of my parents and my early life, are memories. They are beings that have died and have become ghosts, warped versions of their previous forms. They're like photographs left out in the sun, grown pale with the corners curling up at the sides, hiding detail; very hard to decipher.

It's been nearly a decade since I've been to Bolton Center, the place I grew up and railed against and couldn't escape from. There, I used to climb trees and scratch bug bites until they bled, and lie in field grass grown waist high that hadn't been cut all summer, due either to my parents' lack of a functioning lawn mower, or their unwillingness to refute their previous assertion of being hermits.

I haven't seen my father since that night in Waterville four years ago up in my mother's room, as he sobbed pathetically about his poor health and how he'd been betrayed by everyone in his life. I listened to his stomach grumble painfully. Down in the basement, having locked herself in a spare room, my mother wept. I looked at my father and at his tear-filled eyes and long thinning hair and I came to the realization that the father I'd grown up under had already perished and been replaced by whatever or whoever now seemed so desperate and weak, someone I might have felt sorry for had I been able to emote at all that night.

The father of my youth was a massive, strong, terrifying man. Before bed, as a child, he'd hug me goodnight, and horrified of the contact, I'd quickly move my face away. He always used to joke how I gave him the back of my head to kiss. My father was a man whose fingers were always moving, either in rolling Drum tobacco, or in pounding them into an unsuspecting Charlie horse or rib cage for his own amusement—when he laughed, he made no noise except for a sort of uncontrollable wheeze that eventually sputtered out into a cough, as his stomach quaked aggressively. Contemplating my father that night, I felt he had disappeared and had ceased to be a source of fear for me. I rarely think about him now, except for the nights when jolting up in bed, I realize I've had a nightmare and am not in fact a child any longer. It frustrates me that I still not resilient enough to prevent my childhood monster from haunting me again.

I still see my mother when I am home and plan to continue to do so, but the mother I know from childhood has also vanished. It's strange, really, to see her, this woman I barely know, so changed is she, who still regards me with a sort of distance, like concern mixed with defeat and curiosity about her middle child, the problematic one who locks doors and pushes people away and gets headaches that make her want to disappear, not just pound by pound, but entirely and at once. This mother seems happy. In my youth, I'd tell her she looked angry and she'd snap back that that was just how her face was. This mother has had boyfriends and lives in a nice house and eats organic food. This mother laughs and wears dresses and pulls her hair back in a barrette.

For a long time after she'd become satisfied with her life, she'd tell me over the phone to 'forgive and forget,' which I feel is utterly ridiculous and something I do not feel at all prepared to do. When she would tell me to 'move on,' I'd grind my teeth; feeling the hypocrisy of her statements like a lead weight upon my heart. It seemed to be easy for her to say these things to me when she was happy, but deep down, I know she'll neither forgive nor forget my father, the undeniable source of not only so much grief, but of her own children as well. I honestly don't think forgiving anyone will do anything for me. There is no isolated incident to forgive. Forgetting is even more perilous. Forgetting is to make oneself vulnerable. I wonder which adage is more cliché?—'to forgive and forget' or 'if we don't learn from history's mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them.'

Anyway, it's interesting, this duplicity—this ability that humans have to change, warp, shape-shift. As a child, you never really expect your parents to be any different. If they were unhappy, tense people when you knew them best, changing your opinions of them is not at all a simple endeavour. However, I also realize that it is somewhat arduous for parents to behold transformations in their children, especially when they are possessed of a fundamental bias that strives to deny passage to the darkness and negativity that somehow always manages to creep in through the cracks. And, it's this darkness and negativity that can break one down, gradually, but all so effectively.

Today, I read a story with one of my classes—a traditional Korean folklore about a brother and a sister whose mother was eaten by a tiger on her way home from buying them buckwheat puddings to eat. The tiger is not only hungry, but cruel, devouring pieces of her at a time while she is still alive—first an arm, then a leg and so on—because he seems to enjoy her suffering. His hunger still not satiated, the tiger finds their house and poses as the mother he's just killed, persuading her children to come outside. When the children realize what has happened, the tiger tries to kill them too, but they run into the forest. In the end, they have to escape the tiger by climbing as high as they can up a tall tree. But, the tiger starts chopping down the tree with an axe that has unluckily been left behind, and desperate, the children pray for help. Miraculously, a ladder from Heaven is provided for their escape. Taking pity on the newly orphaned children, the God turns the boy into the sun and the girl into the moon (prior to this, these celestial entities did not exist, apparently).

Though they made their escape from the monster—the murderous tiger—the girl soon grows unhappy with her new life as the moon. She exists for many years in the dark, alone and cold, as we know the moon to be. She lives this way for so long that when the God finally consents to let the siblings switch places, the girl has difficulty adjusting to her newfound brilliance as the sun. She is modest and is unable to contend with being stared at and admired and loved by the people down below. To remedy her self-consciousness, she makes herself so bright, so intense, that people need to shield their eyes from in her presence or risk blindness. Having gone from one extreme to another, shape-shifting as she had, it is the only way she can cope.

It's a simple story, but one with many layers, I think. Basically, no matter how much one alters, some small part of one's past always gets left behind whether we can see it or not.

Patterns

It's a very ironic thing to contemplate the utter excesses of this country, especially after a night of soju and noribangs and watching the sun come up on some steps in a bar-district where people continue to stumble around well into working hours. Surrounded by garbage-filled streets and puddles of vomit, and laughing about my earlier rendition of "Oops, I did it again," while I scratched out star-shaped patterns in my denim-clad knees, I felt extremely happy, like I'd finally found people and a life I could tolerate, if not grow to enjoy.

Those in the know might mistake my tendency towards excess as a bad thing, an addiction, and in a way, it is, as my inclinations to absorb completely and yet, be broken down so entirely—erosion on fast-forward—assume so many different forms, pervade so many aspects of my life, and have the ability to thrill me or shut me down absolutely. The odd part is, the differences in what sparks feeling one way or another, are practically minute, if at all decipherable.

I've always believed in the dual nature of individuals, who contribute to a collective that is even more dual, if not outright deranged. However, despite my recent desire to be sociable and to be accepted and entertaining, I say goodnight and end most nights feeling distant, an enigmatic variable unsure of who the hell that person leaving the bar really was and why she was talking so much and so fast, like there'd never be another chance to find a friend who'll listen and laugh and enjoy her company. With people, I feel my energy being consumed by my laughter and my stories and my many opinions. But later, alone at home, when the last cigarette's been smoked and it's no longer any fun, and all I've got is dirty laundry and dishes, I feel so alone and I crawl into bed and try to dream, falling into layered stories--which will maybe never be written down—that pattern and spin themselves, spider-like, around my memories and desires so beautifully and so terrifyingly so, that they become lost forever in my catapulting, see-saw mind, an unfortunate victim of duality and the excesses of my body and my thoughts.

Being with friends is rather new for me. I'm used to feeling so abandoned, and here, on the other side of the world, I find myself growing very much attached to certain characters. I'll miss them terribly when they leave or when I do.

I made it home at 8:00 Wednesday morning, and by myself for the first time in about twenty hours, I felt extremely isolated, like I was the last flower in an empty field and entirely without protection from the elements. Swaying back and forth with the wind, or rather, my air-conditioning, this run-down little Lily fell into a very deep sleep until late in the afternoon when there was a rooftop barbeque to go to, and more drinks to be drunk in commemoration of the national holiday as well as a day's respite from sticky little monster-children who think their shrieks and interruptions will intimidate me into letting them play games or sleep through my classes.

Wednesday afternoon was not the best day to be outside. The sky was a smoggy shade of white and the wind was blowing sparks from the fire dangerously close to flowing skirts and loose hair. It worked out in the end, though for at least half an hour, we wondered whether there'd be a monsoon. Later, we moved the party to an apartment where British comedy, music and literature were discussed with great relish. I love that people here get my references, as obscure as they have a tendency to be. It became yet another all-nighter, where no sleep was had, but being surrounded by people is practically a sociological experience--and one that I am happy to have--for me.

However, I'm mildly afraid that the extreme happiness I feel when I'm out sets me up for a really depressing low; like the higher one gets, the harder and more traumatic the fall will be. It's like when I was really young and would become nearly maniacal after supper, an odd tendency of mine that either had me shrieking and laughing in hysterical, choking staccato gasps, or feeling overwhelmingly head-splittingly bad. I cannot explain this nearly violent 'reaction' to food, but considering it now, as I sometimes do, I view it as feedback (pun definitely intended), hostile as it usually was, to my lifelong opposition to being controlled, be it by good-"yes-daddy"- behaviour, or by silently being guilt-tripped into finishing my plate of food ("because there are starving children in India"), all the while secretly imagining with no small degree of bitterness how much happier I'd be if there were less of me. And, until my extreme behaviour was finally instigated into an angry frenzy by siblings, which was of course only to be reprimanded by annoyed and screaming parents, I'd be like this, though honestly, most of my evenings culminated with a general sense of injustice as I sobbed into my pillows.

Thursday morning, at home and nursing a very bad hangover, not looking at all forward to my day at work, I sat at my window and had I had the energy or fluid enough in my system, perhaps I would have shed a few tears if that sort of thing was less of a challenge to me as it is. By myself, in the light of day, without the neon lights vibrantly painting the city electric, I realized I had no distractions to rely on, that until work started, I'd be stuck with the worse companion a girl can have, an insulting, compulsive, lecturing excuse for a brain, or a mind, rather, my invisible, un-trappable, habit-former, problem-maker, that so often tempts me so close to the figurative ledge and forces me to look at the vertigo-inducing aspects of my life that come up, so to speak, and bring me so down.

Work was terrible on Thursday. Head spinning, I forced myself out into the sunlight and manoeuvred down the crowded street, avoiding sidewalk driving, motor-revving scooters and kids on bicycles, their friends perched perilously standing on the back wheels' metal carriers. When I got to my hagwon, the mail was still in the door handles and the cleaning lady was sitting on the steps to my right. No one was there, the doors were locked, and I spent half an hour hunched against the wall near the bathroom trying very hard not to breathe in the urine vapour (an inevitable aspect of life in a country that doesn't flush toilet paper [too many people and an inferior sewer system, I suppose], preferring instead to deposit it in waste-paper baskets that are uncomfortably close to one's legs, given the airplane sized dimensions of most washrooms here. By 2pm, I'd had enough and my nausea was more than palpable. I told the cleaning lady via dramatic hand gestures and eye-rolls that I was annoyed and leaving and that I would come back later.

At home once more, I put my head down near my laptop and closed my eyes, feeling myself becoming thoroughly depressed. This week has been a bad one for me in this respect. I feel entirely isolated, a pattern that has certainly resonated quite strongly and painfully in my life. My boss has hired a new teacher (the third counting myself), a man who despite teaching English, can't seem to utter a single syllable to me, let alone acknowledge my "hellos" and "goodbyes." The principal has started having weekly staff meetings where everyone, including the secretary is involved. Or perhaps "everyone" is the wrong choice of words, because when they're all at the meetings, I'm alone at my table in the teacher's office. But then, who am I to call myself "someone," given what a tricky little thing this concept of my existence poses to me so frequently.

So far, they've changed the timetable around, decided on all sorts of changes together, go out for lunch meetings to which I am not invited, apparently—God forbid they involve the teacher with the busiest workload, a barely existent supper break and a monthly struggle to even get paid on time (as of today, despite having reminded the boss, my deposit is late once again).

In any case, I sometimes thoroughly hate my life and no matter how good things are sometimes, I suspect they'll always be this way. I am so tired sometimes and feel so used up and I don't know what to do but despair and complain and I suppose, let the worry gnaw on my brain, stiffen my shoulder-blades, and press so hard and so cruelly against my temples that my head feels about ready to pop.

I feel overwhelmingly sometimes that I and everyone around me runs around in patterns, concentric of course, much like frost on frigid car windows. No matter how much I strive to purge cathartically by writing or speaking about myself, I feel that as soon as feelings of sadness, frustration and disappointment return, I am helpless and unable to be consoled, even by those I care about. That in turn, causes more disappointment and frustration in the hearts and minds of those around me who wish me well, which leads me to feel even worse that I can't be so easily convinced that my life isn't as bad as it feels sometimes.

The idea that we all just repeat our actions, inevitably, or the actions of our forebears, is not a new one: "The sins of the father…" and all that, right? I feel so cornered and so obsessive some days, like how sitting bored in the back seat of the van as a child, I would count telephone poles and then the yellow lines in the road, silently in my head, wondering if there was always the same number of broken lines; if there was a set sequence that road painters followed before returning to the double-no-passing-under-any-circumstances-unless-you're-a-dangerous-jerk-in-a hurry-stripes, or if it really all was just random, an estimate. Perhaps I was just wasting my time and making myself carsick. I wouldn't be surprised, as it all sounds a little too familiar, anyways.

I remember how in the car, on frigid winter days, when the windows were all decorated up and down with pitches and drops, like kaleidoscopic diamonds (or other such icy jewel-shapes), made counting impossible, I'd trace the patterns in the frost slowly with a warmish finger, not relenting despite the inevitable numb that froze me. And I would quietly watch for the lines in the road as the upward pitches in the frost would roll down to the bottom of the window in a speeding, drippy tear-shaped drop that destroyed the whole pattern as it all fell apart.

The Distorted Breath

Two Saturdays ago, we went to Quidam, a Cirque de Soleil show at Jamshil. We had been walking around Hong Dae with some friends, checking out vintage clothing shops and sort of lost track of time. We had to take a cab there and I thought we'd be late, but we made it just in time, to my immense relief. It would have been a shame to have missed it a second time (we'd tried going several weeks before, but my tattoo session went longer than I'd expected).

I barely know how to begin writing about this show—I sometimes think that language has far too many limitations, considering its developers were of course, 'only human'; Man-made things do tend to be slightly more flawed and disappointing in comparison to things that simply exist—and therefore, I apologize if my words are inadequate to describe such a beautiful piece of performance art.

At the start of Quidam, a girl sits with her parents (both absorbed in newspapers, blank and expressionless) in a rather sedate looking parlour. Suddenly, there can be heard the deep rumbling of a thunder and lightening storm and a stranger, headless, and carrying an umbrella, knocks and enters. He stays only a short time, this curious and completely silent visitor--just until the rain slows down—and when he leaves into the night, he conveniently 'forgets' his seemingly superfluous hat, which he'd been carrying politely up until this point. The girl, still looking very bored, decides to try the visitor's hat on, either on a whim or by some sort of mechanical inclination or divine intervention.

It is at this point that reality sort of falls apart and is consumed by a starving imaginative force. The chairs where the girl's parents sit are lifted upwards to the ceiling and hover, as the floor clears and the performance begins.

A man in a silver wheel is the first to appear and he makes his entrance suddenly, hypnotically spinning around the stage and approaching dangerously close to the floor, but never falling. He spins in his wheel like a top then drops to the ground, rocking back and forth like a tossed, overly-bouncy hula-hoop that refuses to still itself. It's really a feat of perfect balance, I think, and limbs spread-eagle, for several moments, he looks quite like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. It barely seems possible.

The cast of Quidam is massive, so, many people are on-stage at once doing different things, creating their own realities. One young girl twirls around the stage, arms stretched and reaching, like a child playing "airplane," for what must be a very dizzying half an hour, as she captures the wind under her black dress, parachute-style. Others perform acrobatic feats to rather haunting music; a group of tiny girls toss spinning wooden hourglass shaped toys on strings, high into the air and catch them again. This trick is quite amazing, so it is even more incredible when they start tossing and catching themselves on each other's shoulders, perfectly, like there's nothing to it.

There are clowns, masters of slapstick, better at moving than any "Kramer," completely uninhibited. They interact with the V.I.P section of the audience, pulling random people on-stage to create a story—in this case, there's one about an unrequited, tragic love with comedic effects. It was truly hilarious, watching Koreans shake their asses in pantomime, ham up overly dramatic death scenes and pretend to drink poison, Juliet-style, after pirouetting crazily around in some sort of manic interpretive dance. I was thoroughly amused.

My favourite part of the show however, was a performance that has remained in my mind these last two weeks, perhaps because it was so surreal and heart-breaking at once.

From the rafters, two long lengths of what appears to be red silk are sent out to the center of the ceiling. From her place backstage, a woman approaches, leaping soundlessly. In a way that hardly seems human, she scales these ropes, quickly, seamlessly, rather like an insect might. She propels herself this way and that, using one rope for a foothold, tangling up her toes, the other for leverage around her wrists. She does this until she is perfectly horizontal, hanging in mid air. The next moment, she drops dramatically, head first, the only thing saving her from a broken neck, the wound red silk. At one point, the fabric expands, almost magically, and suddenly, one can see her form through the sheer red material, sitting as though she were on a swing of sorts. Her foot wraps around the other piece, dangling in mid-air, and then, she is enveloped and struggling to escape, like a bird pecking its way out of its shell or a caterpillar trying to make its way out of its cocoon a little too early. Her struggle seems frantic, yet determined. The music reaches a really forlorn peak. One can see her hands pressed up against the silk, feeling, searching, almost desperately, like one whose life depends on escape, ultimately.

When she finally emerges, she performs more of her tricks up in the air, making love to the silk, though with not as much passion as before, it would seem; the music is quite serene and quiet. The silk seems somehow to be restrictive; she appears to struggle. Perhaps the butterfly woman feels that her life, resigned to these two lengths of silk, beautiful to be sure, but a prison, nonetheless, would be one too filled with restraint and limitation. Up in the air, twisting and spinning like a spider in her web, a noose is fashioned somehow, and by the time the music stops, she has as well, hanging peacefully by her beautiful neck, dead by the red silk scarves. It may just be the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Several amazing acts follow and at the end of the show, there is seen the familiar doorway, and the headless stranger appears looking for his hat, it would seem. The girl returns it to him and sanity appears to be restored. The sacred and the profane are no longer palpable as separate entities, but have returned once more to an indecipherable, seemingly mundane whole. The stage is calm. The audience is speechless, then roars with applause at this amazing piece of captured dream, the impossible having not only been accomplished, but performed in front of a massive audience, witnesses to humanity's ever-surprising capacity.

To say the experience has left me awe-stricken is putting it mildly. Watching humans move like rubber-bands (despite seemingly skeletally sound bodies) was highly surreal and it will be something I'll remember forever. It's a truly weird thing to watch a distortion of reality which encompasses so many different aspects; love, death, sex, mania, interpretive as they always are, to regular life as we know it.

This Sunday, in Insa Dong, I was talking to a friend about imagination and distortion over a Long Island iced tea. I mentioned the Classical Greek line of thought that had been speculated on quite thoroughly by the foremost philosophers of the day. I brought up the idea that the line between what is real and what is mental fabrication is a highly static one, that it was thought that material things exist because we imagine them, because we will them there. It sounds like a silly idea, I know, but it's one of those sceptical concepts that have been around for an extremely long time.

In an Indian creation story I read some time back, the world begins with nothing and then somehow, a being wills itself into existence before making everything else. It doesn't makes sense, I know, but perhaps, "Nothing" is a poor choice of words and that in essence, the blank, the dark, the void, really is an entity unto itself, a "Something" ironically enough.

Waiting for their friend outside the convenience store, she leans into him, his arm around her neck. He squeezes her tightly and she exhales slowly. He asks her if she is real. Jokingly, she tells him that she is a mirage, a figment of his deluded brain, that she has never existed at all, and that if his sanity is ever regained, she'll disappear, like an absent imaginary friend. "Don't scare me," he smiles. When their friend re-emerges outside the glass doors, and they start walking again, he holds her hand a little tighter and listens to her breathe.

Early Sunday afternoon, tired and a bit dazed, we all went together to Arui, a tea and meditation center in Insa Dong that we've been to several times before. Drinking my White Lotus Flower tea (which is really good and is supposed to be a cure-all for unhappiness), I coloured the mini Mandala that had been provided along with the coloured pencils. We noticed that there was something written underneath each picture and someone suggested it might be some sort of "Confucius Say" fortune cookie type of thing. We asked the ultra-calm waiter who spoke relatively decent English, if he could tell us what the words said, but apologetically, he told us "No," and embarrassed, went to fetch the meditation teacher, who was nearly bilingual. Her name is Eun Jun, I think, but she told me to call her "Amy." She read the Hangeul for us and translated what were basically really profound horoscopes.

Mine was the shortest, just a line. It simply said something to the effect that I should be grateful to be alive and that I should focus on being healthy and happy to the best of my ability. I felt a little trapped by irony and circumstance and John gave me a little nudge. The meditation teacher and I got into a conversation about the practices she teaches and though she told me about a lot of different breathing styles, the one I found really very fascinating was the idea that we need to slow our breathing down; that if we only inhale and exhale two or three times a minute, our lives will be longer and ultimately better. This struck a chord, this notion that we only have a certain number of breaths to breathe per life. It's as though we are each allotted a certain number of breaths and if we waste them on words that really don't need to be said, we're ultimately shortening our lives.

I don't know how meditative a person I have the potential to be. I've got one of those minds that rarely go to sleep, though my body is exhausted. On the rare instance it does, it frightens me, as it's like a black-out instead of a gradual descent into the sort of "Alpha," half-awake state that I'm used to. I mistake this heavy, 'real' sleep for death, and I prevent myself from slipping into it by jolting awake in bed to make sure I can still move. Despite what I've tried, the only success I've had with really deep sleep are the occasional sleeping pills, a temporary suffocating fix to shut the paranoid, gnawing thing up and let me rest.

It's a bit unfortunate, I suppose, that some of my worst habits, which are obviously neither healthy for my body or mind, are really the most calming to me, as it is here when I am most outside myself. It was very intriguing to me, though, the meditation teacher's concept that we're each born with a maximum breathing capacity in life, but that, waylaying any physical intervention or intrusion, we have the ability to cheat our expiration dates and still be 'good,' like mildly-spoilt-is-it-still-okay week old milk. I honestly don't imagine meditation would work for me, but I think I'd like to try it at Arui, just for the experience.

Lately, I've still been feeling really run-down during the week and my boss is still having a lot of problems paying me. He only gave me a portion of my salary this month and I was very upset. He's promised to pay the balance this week. He's hired a new teacher named Ju-Ree Lee, who I like much more than the others before her. She's been here one week now and I've talked to her quite a bit. She's perfectly bilingual, which is quite the comfort, as at least there's now someone in the school who can speak the same language as myself. She's already told me that she doesn't think Wah Jah Nim communicates well and that he never tells her what's going on. I bid her welcome to my world.

Today was Teacher's Day in Korea. My students have been giving me candy all day. The boss gave me a rose (and a massive slab of cake that I was pressured to eat, which was highly unpleasant), all embarrassed, making it clear that there was no romantic intention. I think I rolled my eyes. I can barely stand him. Maybe if he spent his money on my salary instead of roses and cakes, we could be friends or colleagues, but alas, he remains an asshole. He did tell me that I am a very good teacher now though, which makes things slightly more tolerable. I'd be an even better teacher, I think, with a week-long vacation, but he's still undecided on this issue, it would seem.

On the weekends, on the other hand, I feel so much better than I do during the week, even energized sometimes. Maybe I'm happy, though it's kind of strange and out of character. I've never felt it before.

We went to the kitsch museum in Insa Dong on Sunday and I had a great time playing with all the old '70s and '80s memorabilia, Astroboy stuff, chintzy little dolls that I'm sure I may have owned at some point. I was looking for a ViewMaster, but unfortunately, I only found the slides. A LiteBrite game would have been nice too…or an Etch-A-Sketch.

Later, we went to India Style Café with some new friends, a mix of teachers and military people. It felt really good to be in a sort of group and just have conversations and feel like I was interesting. I've never really had that before. I was, of course, the only Canadian in a group of eight or nine Americans with the Georgian drawls and all. It was pretty interesting, I guess, but one of the two military guys was hitting on some Korean girls at the next table/bed (at this bar, you sit on elevated Moroccan, harem-style beds), which seemed a little bad, considering he didn't know a word of her language, or she of his. But, it's something you see a lot here—White guys with Korean girls. Apparently, this pisses Korean men off, but whatever…It's all a bit hypocritical, as I've heard often that Korean men really go for North American/White girls themselves, if they get an opportunity (which aren't as common as those presented to Korean women, of course).

Anyway, it's weird how things work out, really. I came to Korea on a whim. I've met everyone I know here by randomly approaching them and striking up conversations when I decided I felt sociable, or by responding to intelligent, flattering e-mails…J It's weird, it really is how a split-second decision can wind up affecting the course of your entire life. I say this because I feel different somehow; not entirely changed or better (I don't think I've ever consciously felt well), but more "okay," like I'm just going to go along with things and be my own person. While it's true that I've asserted my individuality on many prior occasions, I feel like it may last this time around. It's really ironic too; this feeling of having some control over my life, considering I attribute it somewhat to the effects that someone other than myself has had on my life, thus far, in just a few months. I feel very much myself, which is a comforting change from the tense discomfort I'm used to feeling around many people. I don't know how to explain it, this thing that I was struck with one day, not so long ago, as I am only as articulate as language permits, but it's just one of those feelings that I was sure I was dead to, that I'd never sense or experience at all.

I used to say, "I'm not going to hold my breath" waiting for something good to happen to me. And I'd sigh, voiding myself of air, deflated and limp, absolutely empty. Lately though, I am focusing on conserving my breath (which I've spent quite frivolously up until now, having never really thought much about human expiration dates), figuratively speaking at least. And truth told, prior to my previous assertions, it turns out that holding one's breath isn't so bad after all.

Static

Permanence is one of those concepts that has rarely had much meaning to me. Perhaps it is the sceptic in me who has never quite believed in "that is all," that anyone can really "live happily forever after." Some may chalk it up to paranoia or a lack of trust, to the questioning nature of the human mind that only believes what it can see with its eyes and feel with its fingers. I know that everything is temporary; life itself is seeped in transience for those of us who refuse to subscribe to blind belief in…whatever lies ahead. However, sometimes, some moments, I just want to remain frozen, stationary, a statue to prove to future generations of equally confused people, that I was here and that whatever remains of me, either in memory or material possessions, is highly subject to human bias as well as a special sort of dissolution; an entropy that time lays waste on both the mind and the body.

I've been re-reading Dante's Divine Comedy these last few days. My thoughts are highly influenced by whatever words fall beneath my eyes and so, I guess it's safe to say that it's a good thing I've been writing this year, as my thoughts are very temporary and hard to grasp, slippery as they are.

Fascinating as the book is, one of the best aspects, in my opinion, is how the story is layered, and how seamlessly everything seems to pass, as transitory as one moment is from the next. As Virgil's shade guides Alligeri through Limbo (home of the unenlightened but 'good' heathens and un-baptized infants) all the way to the city of Dis (where traitors are condemned) in the seventh circle, they come across many desolate spirits.

The chapter I find most impacting perhaps is the one dealing with the fate of suicides and those who have harmed themselves; These people lose their independence and become part of an organic whole—a tree in the forest that can still feel human pain and think human thoughts; a tree with a soul that can still recall its earthly life, yet neither move nor assert its individuality. It's ironic really, that in death, these souls become growing, 'live' plants that are even able to produce fruit. Perhaps being forced to 'live' (whether they're human or not), is the consequence of their actions as decided by a life-bestowing universe.

The fruit the suicide-trees produce is the food of harpies (foul, shrieking bird-women) who dwell in Hell. The harpies pluck the succulent fruit from off the trees' branches and devour them. This consumption causes the trees great ongoing physical agony which they can never escape, so bountiful are their boughs. The point is, because these people gave themselves up in life and took control of something that wasn't theirs to control, their punishment is to have no resistance in the afterlife, rooted in the earth as they are. This of course, is the worst imaginable sentence for those who, so to speak, seize the reins on their lives and bodies; eternal torment of the soul when the intention was to attain peace and escape.

I can't say I felt entirely well after reading this chapter, yet another series of thoughts on the consumption of life and its relentless suffering. Like most 'moral' things, it just makes me feel extremely guilty and tired.

It scares me sometimes, to think back on some of the things I've done and how I've lived my life up until now. I look at other people randomly, like on the bus or subway, and wonder about them, these people with their lives, so seemingly different from mine, and I wonder if they look at me and are curious too.

One aspect I have been contemplating a lot lately is layers, not just those in Hell (and there are many), but in everything, both physical and psychological.

Last Sunday, we had our portraits done in the park by three different university-aged artists. Sitting in different spots, they all sketched and painted their subject at the same time, illustrating with their own perspectives (which depended on angle, lighting and the artists' respective milieus) the same person. It was awkward, having not only three artists constantly looking up at my face, but a whole crowd of people with cameras, checking out the foreign girl who had to hold still and be taken in, chin up.

For the artist sitting to my left, the side view of my nose and an exaggeratedly long neck proved to be the prominent features of my face. He made my eyes green (the artists were very liberal with their color choices) with long, spidery eye-lashes under slightly bagged, weary-looking eyes.

To the artist sitting to my right, who essentially drew everyone the same way—in a naïve sort of style on black construction paper, I came out looking like a "little people" doll, those old Fisher Price toys with hollow cylindrical bodies, no limbs and round heads with rosy cheeks, semi-triangle for a nose and big, round eyes, three eye-lashes apiece.

The artist in the middle, who got a straight view of my face, as I stared at the top of his head (my focal-point to avoid eye-contact), first sketched my face in a flesh-toned pencil crayon, and then painted in water colors, creating a beautiful layered effect. My hair in this picture is blue, garnished with the purple flower that John had put in my hair, sticking out of the pig-tail bun just enough. My eyes and the shadows around them are done in yellow and green, suggesting both warmth and ice all at once. My mouth, looks like my actual mouth, really; small, with subdued pink, chapped lips. I look very young. It's a beautiful portrait, though I don't think that it's quite what I look like, irregardless of the odd choice of color.

In any case, the experience made me think of how we are viewed by others on a daily basis, and even more, how we view ourselves. Catching the odd reflection of oneself in a subway window and looking momentarily hideous doesn't necessarily mean a person will look that way all day. Equally, trying to hold a perfect expression will only make one's lips quiver and face hurt. Humans, I've come to realize, are highly dynamic in appearance. Capturing life with a camera proves this. It's amazing to me, looking at old pictures of myself, that a few years ago I might have passed for an entirely different person. I wonder if that person is gone only to me, or if somewhere (about the eyes, maybe?) others can make her out.

Do our collected experiences simply add up, layer upon layer, upon our skins? Are we like tableaux raseau (blank slates) on which the years spackle on exhaustion and bitterness and anxiety and wisdom? Are our sins and weakness perceivable to those who know how to both see and look at the same time, those who can pierce the protective-layer-plastic-wrap and get beneath the surface?

My thoughts, as they often do, return to literature, Dorian Grey's portrait, specifically, and how with each atrocity he committed in life, another layer was added to his picture, making it more monstrous to reflect his inner nature. His outer-self, his public face, that is, remained beautiful, unmarred by time or cruelty. I guess it suggests that we can never really know a person, that we can't assume that a person's character and personality are truthful rather than illusionary.

I sometimes feel a lot of weight, like a sort of pressure on my torso, a constricted sort of breathing; an incubus on my chest. At these moments, I am at my worst. I cannot socialize or speak or focus. I want for nothing but to be left alone and to let the pressure collapse my frame until I'm nothing but an imploded pile of dust on my bedroom floor. But, forced to be out in the world as I generally am, I find myself avoiding a lot of eyes, not being able to find my voice, and walking quickly, twisting my body this way and that to avoid contact, a knocked shoulder, a brushed arm. But, it is very hard to remain inconspicuous here.

Yesterday, in the grocery store, a teenage girl who I've never seen before grabbed my hand and wouldn't let go, forcing me to walk with her and her mother down the soft-drink aisle. Finally, her mother noticed my rather alarmed expression and bade her to let me go. Confused, I muttered "bye," and waved slowly to her, walking in the other direction as the girl whined to her mother, who was pulling her along by the arm, about me being "pretty."

I feel as though I am under constant observation here. People are curious; they check out my shopping basket as I shop; their children come up and stare me down, asking me all sorts of questions, waiting for their parents to congratulate them on their English talent. I've been told by many Koreans that I am very attractive, but perhaps I am made somewhat exotic here, as a foreigner in a rather uni-cultural country. In truth, I feel repulsive many days, to the point of embarrassment. I cannot raise my chin for fear it will be noticed, this albatross, if you can call it that, this weight around my neck that flaps dead and flesh-heavy on my chest, 'thump' with each step I take. Looking in the mirror, I am sometimes demoralized, not because I always feel particularly ugly, but because I come off so one-dimensionally, so flat. And all my steps are like a dull clatter on the pavement, blunt objects smacking together; concrete lips.

When people tell me otherwise, insisting that I am wrong, I am slightly amused that they see joy and light when I spend the majority of my time shuffling around like so much dark matter. Perhaps like the artists in Hongik's Free-Market Park, seen from a different angle or better lighting, I come off differently.

I do have my good moments too, of course. But the warm, headiness of Sunday afternoons is impossible to keep with me throughout the week, as I sit in an isolated teacher's room under flickering florescent lighting, listening to my boss slam doors and clump around with that brisk, aggressive walk of his that makes me angry and uptight; the walk so unlike mine, a near silent, plodding, sneaker-clad tip-toe, making every effort to pass unnoticed, weightless. His walk, which I find nearly audacious, is one that that reminds me of certain family members early in the morning, while I tried to get five more minutes of sleep huddled in my quilt, slamming around cupboard doors and not caring if the wooden steps creaked.

I cringe every time the sliding door of his office opens and 'clump, clump, clump,' he approaches to talk to me or give me negative feedback—apparently I wasn't smiling quite enough for a parent while I was typing my redundant progress reports all this week. Not that this has any reflection on my manner as a teacher in the classroom (my students like me and all seem to have lots of fun, not to mention the fact that they've improved a hell of a lot since I've taken over), but whatever…The boss (Won Jahn Nim) also asked me today whether I had any problems with the job or in my personal life (ha!). I told him that I needed a vacation, maybe in June (he said July would be better), and that I didn't see a point in sitting around bored and doing absolutely nothing for four hours (rather than go home) during the exam period when virtually all my middle school students are absent because they're stressed-out, tired, and busy studying. It shouldn't last too much longer, the exam period, that is, but regardless, I still feel very tired and like I need a bit of time to myself, away from the watching eye of Koreans who discuss me in Han-guk when I'm sitting right in the same room. I guess they assume I can't understand them at all (when in fact, I've picked up on quite a few words and have at least a base vocabulary at this point).

I realize that Koreans view me a certain way and that their opinions are probably based mostly on their expectations; what they know about the few North Americans (with that Anglo-Saxon, mostly Caucasian background) they've encountered before, as well as their biases. I don't condemn them for it or anything, but it just frustrates me that I am viewed here, at Bicycle Language Academy, I mean, and to a large extent, to most of the people in this country, through a very narrow perspective: a keyhole if a might, for which no key has ever been fashioned.

But, because I know that few things are ever really permanent, especially people, with all their frailty and psychosis and vacillation, piled layer upon layer upon their already relatively shaky frames (no foundation necessary), I do have some hope that things won't always be so hard, so sad, so consuming and mind-numbing.

Last Saturday, I got a tattoo to remind me of this. The words 'entropy and optimism' slightly below my navel have become the latest layer upon my flesh. While it's true that I am not a "navel-gazer," if things ever do go that way for me and I become meditative, at least I'll have a built-in mantra, or at the very least, some awesome body graffiti with which to occupy my mind.

Right now, it's kind of itchy and scabby, but I'm sure it will look alright. The important thing to me is that it is permanent, a self-induced scar (via the tattoo artist and 150,000 won) which will remain with me no matter how I might shape-shift, shrink or grow. And like the words I am so influenced by in books, perhaps these words too, as I contemplate my body, day after day, will be able to permeate my mind, or at least the outer-most layer. And maybe they'll resonate in a way that is neither skewed nor shadowed, but visible to everyone in exactly the same way, the variable eliminated.

And until I die and my flesh rots, stripping away layer after layer, like some sort of study shot in still life, it will be legible (a temporary sort of permanence, I guess), not only as a reminder of reality and the fate of those unfortunate enough to be a part of it, but as a chronicle of a time in my life when layers and dimensions really mattered to me, when being clear and legible not only to myself, but to those important to me, was seeped in significance.

Every day and every action and every conversation we have culminates to our current lives. With all the decisions and interacting and talking we make and do, it's inevitable that even the sturdiest of status quos is without a foundation. We are in a constant state of flux, reaching our ends and blossoming all at once.

Right now, despite some very bad days, I think life has never been so full. I cannot prevent hours from passing, words from being said, or eyes from closing shut. But, I've come to understand that I can create a sort of layered static-forever in my dreams, in my writing, and in my soul.

For its own Sake

I think today must mark the beginning of monsoon season. I'm sitting here at Bicycle Academy in front of the portable heater attempting to dry my soaking-wet sneakers and pant-legs. The ten-minute walk to work has never been so unpleasant, and struggling against the wind on my way here, my umbrella turned inside out, splaying its chintzy metal skeleton in eight different directions, mockingly making its escape from its vinyl sheath while drenching me in the process. Right now I am watching the teabag in my glass cup seep. It's a gradual, wavy descent, much like cigarette smoke making its way to the ceiling. My life, like everyone's, has been reduced to this—waiting for the flavour to peak, watching the effervescence die down, patiently allowing it to go tepid before sipping, ever-so-cautiously.

I've felt remarkably depressed this week. I don't know how or why it started, but it seems worse than it's been in some time.

My exhaustion is terrible. I fall asleep at my desk at work and wake up, head nodding like a spring-loaded ping-pong ball. If I squint my eyes a certain way, open just a third or a quarter, I think I see things that aren't quite there. I make out shapes in the pattern of the wood, arrows, faces, shadows. In the dreams I have at night, no one speaks, but lately I've been seeing words, like in books I've read, open to certain pages. I start reading these seemingly giant books within my dreams and try to make sense of them there. I read sentences over and over again until the dreaming me becomes very tired and decides to lie down, at which point, my actual physical self inevitably becomes obligated to swat the piercingly loud alarm clock off her night table… Generally, I guess I'm feeling worn out and lonely and oddly philosophical.

Somewhere, it must have been in a book, I got the idea that people don't live for the sake of life, but rather to enrich themselves. Basically, it's the glimmer of optimism at the end of a dark hallway that makes people brave enough to keep walking. We expect all these rewards out of existence: "If I work hard at school, I'll go to university and get a great job and earn lots of money. If I'm kind and truthful, I'll have lots of friends and everyone will like me, If I slave away at a job I find (at least) mildly distasteful for the next forty years, I can retire and sit in the sun and let the UV rays deepen my wrinkles. If I'm a decent person until the day I die and follow my conscience, I'll go to Heaven." Generally, it seems like a really selfish reason to keep on breathing, this anticipation of some reward, divine or otherwise. To do something, anything, really, for its own sake seems both redundant and complex at the same time. It almost verges on the impossible or questionable, like counting blades of grass because you can, or putting together an all-black five-thousand piece puzzle.

Pater once talked about creating "art for art's sake." And whether or not anyone can actually appreciate something for its intrinsic value, for the process and the head-scratching and all the unpleasant moments in-between, is something I feel is both idealistic and doubtable. Many people consider me to be a very cynical person, but if that's what realism comes down to, what does it say about the state of our day-to-day lives, really? Pater's suggestion can imply deriving joy and peace from splattering paint, delicate brush-strokes, or from sliding one's finger's through clay. It doesn't matter, really. The end-result has nothing to do, ultimately, with the respective concepts behind this sort of art.

And, like the art we are all so capable of producing as humans, our own end results are pretty much predictable, not really worthy of honourable mention, maybe discussed briefly over drinks, a morbid little gallery gathering: "Yes, she was very beautiful." All this, before the spectators of our lives' events move on to more interesting, lively "pieces," those that make them question themselves, their motives, their previous perceptions of their respective emotional ranges and ability to feel anything at all.

What I'm getting at is difficult to articulate, I suppose. It's not that I'm genuinely unhappy at the moment. I know I am very lucky to be here, doing what I'm doing, but some days are extremely difficult for me. If I had no one to see on the weekends and nothing to look forward to, I'd be very sad and lonely and without much purpose. I can't (at this point) fathom life for life's sake and were things worse, I may have already thrown in that figurative towel, only slightly damp, since my relatively shallow life has been anything but invigoratingly, dangerously colourful. Think wading-pool versus the hope for some amazing coral reef: basically you can find a way to drown in either, but when it comes down to it, which is more pathetic, really?

Basically, I've come to understand that if anything, most people's harsh biases and prejudices concern themselves rather than other people. And when we finally manage to escape ourselves when we fall asleep and let our personalities crumble away, our sharp edges rounding off in the blurriness of most dreamscapes, then I guess we can finally perceive things like a newborn in a strange world, a clean chalkboard; and all our emotional precedents and fears cease to exist, because falling over the edge here, in the land of sleep, doesn't necessarily mean death.

How can I write about how I feel lately? Other than by stepping outside myself as the writer of my life and thoughts, and writing about someone who is slightly more difficult to recognize (the thoughts she has the audacity to have!), I simply do not know.

She feels the word forming on her lips; her tongue goes into position, raised behind her front teeth, as it moves downwards and in. "Love." She is amused with herself for uttering such…such…what? In a crowded bar, music playing, people sprawled on floor cushions sipping expensive drinks, laughing, a little intoxicated by tobacco, incense and their own taste of temporary unreality, she cups her hands over an ear made recently more accessible by a very short haircut, and quite audibly, she speaks. She knows herself, realizes that she is often dismissive of most emotionality, that she regards outward shows of anything too strong to be part contrivance, part 'telling them what they want to hear.' But tonight, her face is calm, her heart beats normally (which for her means a little faster than the usual molasses way). In fact, despite the peopled setting, the red-tied waiters zipping around with Mojitos and Margaritas, she is all alone, uttering a sot of monologue, a bit breathy, but never doubting what she says. For the girl, though it's the first time she's said it to someone, the word escapes from her mouth smoothly, no strangulated tightness, no death of sound on the third and fourth letters. Later, she hardly even thinks about it, it's become so ingrained in her new sense of reality. Later in bed, when he asks her if what she said before was true; she simply says "yeah," because what else is there to say, really?

'Love' is one of those concepts that have generally assumed a sort of backseat in my cynical little mind. So many people have tried to define it that it's almost become corrupted, very lame and embarrassing for one such as myself to admit to feeling. I remember when I was young and sitting in the car with my mother-- a generally rather bitter woman with a tight mouth when I was growing up-- how, if we'd pass a church where a wedding was taking place, or go by a procession of car antennas bedecked with dollar-store crepe streamers and paper pompoms, she'd click her tongue and laugh, shaking her head. "Fools…" she'd mutter as we drove by, "They'll see." I know my mother's marriage was anything but happy, but I can't help but shake the feeling that her attitude about the nature of genuine affection sort of set a negative tone concerning relationship expectations, as well as a general sense of shame about happiness for me.

I realize some might say that I'm not old enough or experienced enough to know what I'm talking about, that I will, in fact, "see." It's just that 'love' to me is one of those words that people throw about like money, buying cigarettes at one store, groceries at another, and being frivolous on the weekends, never worrying about their impulsive or unnecessary shopping until they're broke or have become addicted to something, be it a certain delicacy, brand of alcohol, or tobacco. And then there are the fun bits you regret after you're in too deep: lung cancer, obesity, alcoholism, and anything else rehab might not be able to cure.

I think maybe that 'love' should be un-definable, that there shouldn't even be a word, because attaching something as simplistic, as shallow, as letters to something so inexplicably difficult to understand or express, robs the feeling of its intrinsic meaning. And people who actively search for it, the feeling they've head people call 'love', wanting to have love for love's sake 'just because,' all seems rather consumerist and crass to me.

Essentially, there are no rulebooks or courtship etiquette manuals (sorry Ovid…) that can make anyone feel more strongly or compassionately toward another human being. It's just there, in concept, I think, waiting patiently in a sort of soap-bubble above two heads. Sometimes it pops and falls to Earth like a virus, (or a blessing if you're an optimistic, "the glass is half-full" sort of person) and like a delicacy that can give you a stomach-ache at times, but keeps you wanting more, is greedily consumed. Other times, the pseudo-bubble rises and burns up in the atmosphere and disappears forever, simple as that, the moment having passed.

Basically, though it may seem hypocritical of me given my current writing on the subject, it is my opinion that while 'love' is nice and all, the more people worry about the status of the word, the less time there is to actually put it into practice (like obeying the letter, but not the law).

The past few years, I've told many people about my view of existence, the constantly fluctuating states of entropy—the breakdown of organic material—and optimism—an elevated state of mind that makes one able to get up and continue on in the morning. That is all I believe. That is all I know to be true. It's something that's true not only for the planet and for nations—after wars, when large areas of earth have been destroyed, it's the potential to start again, a sort of hope that makes rebuilding, regeneration, possible—but for people too, since as the metaphysical poets once suggested, man, made of the same elements as his planet, is a microcosm of the universe.

As individual beings, we become weak, we fade away. Our flesh begins to die. We are not built to last, and we know it, yet, holding tightly, desperately, some might say, to that 'hope', the one virtue Pandora was able to regain for humanity, we seem to accept that we are part of a morbid sort of duality—nihilism on the one hand, and the inclining of the heart toward love (for the sake of love, sometimes) on the other. And, I've always been hesitant, because I thought, 'Why should I hope?" when I know that 'love' is like a sort of sympathetic embrace of that which is doomed to decay, either in body or in mind. It makes me very sad, but that's just me, I guess, far too concerned and afraid about my flesh and its consumption, either by entropy or by love.

The Abridged Version

A few years back I took a course at Carleton called "Myth and Symbol." Like most university courses, given the heavy assignment-loads and the number of other courses to juggle, only a little bit of what was taught remains in my mind. One particular idea we were constantly reminded of was Joseph Campbell's "Hero Cycle" which essentially shows the circular pattern in any protagonist's life—usually he or she is born, grows up under difficult circumstances, overcomes some adversity or other, then is called away on some journey of sorts, whether literal or figurative. The hero is forced to struggle, battling monsters and those who would wish to see him fail; he or she prevails in doing so until the story's climax when the hero descends into an Underworld of sorts—for Odysseus it was the Land of the Dead, Hades' Realm, as it was for the majority of Classical Greek heroes; for the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins it was the dark caves on his way to find Smog, the dragon; for more modern writers, however, those who wrote of existential crises and emotional hell, Sartre, Hesse, Joyce, their Underworlds are within themselves, those deep murky pools of depression in which a person may easily perish.

Emerging from the Underworld is the hero's biggest challenge. Sometimes it takes years. Often, he barely makes it out alive and lives the rest of his life recounting his darkest moments, unable to escape them, though he is lauded at home or honoured among the Gods or figure-heads of his respective country. In his nightmares, he still struggles; like one who has overcome a disease, he is humbled and wiser; maybe he thinks things through longer, moves a little slower. In short, he is changed. A bona-fide hero, though somehow a more static-y, cautious version of his former self. The golden sheen has dulled. And, unsure of how to end, the Classical writers suggest "Happy Ever After" endings, while modernists come full-circle, implying multiple heroic cycles, ups and downs, in any one person's life. The golden sheen, then, is replaced by the bedraggled look of exhaustion, finality.

I think it suggests that we die and are reborn many times in life, like the mythical phoenix, which perishes in a self-induced ball of fire every 500 years and proceeds to rise form its ashes more beautiful than ever. It is important of course, as a requirement to fulfil Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero, which was influenced by Jung, especially as modern man's psyche is concerned.

In another course I took at Carleton the year before, "Children's Literature," where we learned a bit about Fairy Tales, one of my favourite subjects on this earth, it was implied that the darkest, most terrifying monsters that figured within, as well as the most beautiful, ethereal and ridiculous creatures, were all representative of the deepest fantasies and anxieties of young children. Fear of abandonment, for instance, is a problem that comes up a lot, as does being despised by one's parents, being sent out into a harsh world, or being betrayed by a trusted friend. Cast out to starve in a dark forest wherein dwelt a cannibalistic witch (who conveniently turns out to be their awful, antagonistic stepmother), Hansel and Gretel are a perfect example of one of childhood's greatest fears realized. As they wandered, wind howling, stomachs turning, ready to drop where they stood; as the tree's shadows loomed heavily overhead, blocking out any ray of moonlight, they were living every child's worst nightmare, while serving some might say, as a rather harsh warning to the children reading this original, un-bowlderized Grimm Brothers' version, to be filial, obedient, good little children…or else.

Essentially, Fairy Tales were initially exaggerated threats to terrify children. And, in the unfortunate child's mind, the wicked witches, awful ogres, big bad wolves and whole scores of artful robbers and tricksters, took on the forms and assumed the faces of those who were familiar to them. A cruel father could be a "fee-fi-fo-fumming" giant set to destroy, or perhaps a selfish, restrictive king locking his daughter up in a tower or turning her to gold or stone. An unkind, jealous mother, on the other hand, could most definitely be one of the many representative female demons, witches or fiends who devoured little children, the most satisfying of sweet-breads, a constant threat as the most deceptive of horrors, unlike male monsters whose evilness was never masked. Remember how the wicked witch offered the hungry children candy, how the big bad wolf dressed up as Red Robin Hood's sweet, sickly old grandmother, and how Snow White's jealous Queen offered up a delicious-looking red apple, the color of blood, urgency and rubies, all at once evil masked with beauty.

This notion, the fear that is, of being 'devoured,' consumed, is one I understand very well. It's like being used up, a pawn on one parent's side. And mostly, I think, it's a fear of authority and the unknown, both of which figure so predominately in the minds of children. I think it's also a sort of inability to understand the adult world, this land of giants who rarely reveal themselves as weak, scared, on the same level as their cloudy eyed (though troubled) little offspring.

As a child, and even now as an adult, I was (and am) told many things I did not (and still do not) believe. Little tricks, magic beans, I guess, to lead me happy on my way. As a child, I knew a lot about lies and I was frustrated that I'd never be able to consider my parents on my level, low or middling as it may have been. At a certain point, convinced that nothing said to me could be considered entirely truthful, I grew tired. I am a very precise person and I find worrying over half-truths to be an exhausting past-time. I would lose sleep trying to make myself understand the abridged version of what had been told to me, bit by bit, but like my childhood jigsaw puzzles, bought at flea-markets or jumble-sales, the most vital pieces were always missing, like a giant hole where one's face should be. As I grew older, the blank spaces were filled, mostly by hearsay, the secrets whispered to me by my older sister as I tried to sleep on her green-carpeted bedroom floor, searching for monsters under her bed, attempting to shut out the sounds of the furnace and the breathing below us in the basement, a terrifying place, unlit, creaking, nearly alive or almost dead—I still don't know which frightens me more.

Downstairs was a place to tiptoe. The clank of metal weights, the eerie pumping, breathing sound of the 'stair-master,' stains on the yellow carpet of the 'gym.' I always liked the large mirror with the crack grinning up its side.

My mother's room was blue and cold with no lights save a yellow-brown Tiffany lamp with a chained wire plugged into the wall. The door was made of pressed wood/plywood and had a hook lock that broke every few days with just a little bit of force. Many things were said in this room that I never knew about and which I often speculate on, even today. Sometimes, ear to the vent in my bedroom, I tried to listen in-between the gusts of warmish air and the hum of my humidifier. The words were usually skewed, muffled, though other sounds were clearer and more obvious.

Down the blue-painted steps from my mother's room, were the depths of our house, its figurative intestinal tract, full of cat litter boxes, the overwhelming smell of urine, and spiders brought in with the wood stacked up against the wall. Opening the furnace doors, the red hot embers glowed as the room filled with thick, choking smoke that greyed the white walls. Later, my parents painted them grey-blue, like the steps. I hated being here and I usually only passed through during the daytime or in the summer to get outside through the door leading under the porch where my swing and the little trampoline were kept. I remember the crumbly jip-rock walls under the porch step and how I used to use the fallen bits as chalk to draw pictures on the splintery brown wood.

Occasionally, I'd sit on the box-freezer (my father kept a lot of zucchini here) in the basement as my mother did laundry. Looking for attention, I'd try to impress her with my reading ability, but reciting, some would say, in a highly monotonous voice, it was clear she never listened, always something else to think about. "Mm-hhmm," she'd say, "uh huh." It bothered me.

The most forbidden (and therefore appealing) room in our house was just off this awful dark furnace space. Housing African statues, knives, strange ornaments and drums, it smelled of pouch tobacco, incense and something I've never quite smelled again. Perhaps it was a combination of everything it housed together that produced such a strange odour, like fog, excitement and the unknown. We weren't supposed to go in unless we were told to get something, or to wake up the inevitably sleeping giant within, my father, as he puffed and snored loudly, practically impossible to rouse. A thick red curtain hung over the tiny window that I loved trying to scramble through during summer games of tag or hide-and-seek, and the carpet was a similar shade of burgundy flecked with black. I don't remember ever seeing light in this place. We all called it the 'red-carpet-room' with a general air of solemnity, like it was a place of secrets, Pandora's box, or a terrible cave, wherein dwelt something truly fearful. It was of course, my father's room. He slept there during the day, or when he and my mother were fighting or repulsed by each other, which I suppose was often.

One thing I remember well was the wall beside his bed, which was white stucco, flecked with shimmering pieces of what I always thought looked like glitter. I would try to pick them out, unsuccessfully, whenever my father let me in. It must be a magic room, I thought, which is why it was so shut off, something special that I wasn't good enough for. When I think about it now, of course, it was probably just a place for him to sleep (the walls were relatively thicker than those of the rest of the house, I think, as part of the foundation—at least I never heard anything from above, as it was directly under the bathroom and Danny's room) and probably smoke pot or beadies or whatever else.

In the life of my childhood, this house is representative, as we lived here until I was 13 years old. In life, we are all the protagonists of our own stories and most of us experience many deaths and rebirths, trips to the Underworld and tired, quiet victories. I stopped feeling like a child (not that I ever thought about what it felt like to be a child while I actually was one) early on, but it was close enough to this time to be applicable. When my childhood fizzled out, like flat grape crush, my favourite, the last hint of effervescence gone, I was reborn as a quieter, angrier, more apathetic and infinitely tougher version of the girl who loved little porcelain unicorn statues and dressing her kitten up in doll's clothing. The child who used to cry at the drop of a hat realized that to the giant, it made her weak, pliable. It was used against her. Other times, her tears of frustration were ignored behind a door held closed with the weight of her back, superhuman strength at those times.

I haven't died and I haven't been reborn since then, which is troubling. I still find that I remember everything so clearly, like I'm still in that life, though everything from my body to my heart has changed, if only slightly. I have struggled and continue to do so with many demons. I am terrified of the descent that may potentially come, and whatever changes will occur to make me more cautious, different.

When I was a child, the basement where my parents slept and loved (in their own twisted fashion) and fought, was my Underworld, a place of monsters, both frightening and indifferent. I was always terrified of it and its secrets, yet was so frequently compelled to descend. On my last night in the house in Bolton Centre, I looked into the red carpet room, empty, the curtain gone as sun shone in, twirling bits of dust and cat hair sporadically. The carpet had vacuum marks in it where my mother had cleaned; the white wall was yellowed, stained with rusty water leaks and cigarette smoke. It was no longer a fearful place. It was actually very calm, no ghosts left. Though I was angry that we'd be returning to my childhood monster (boogie-man, bakru and joombie rolled up into one greasy package), a step backwards, I thought, I still had this feeling like I was victorious, that I'd conquered the Underworld and become a heroine, armed with the knowledge to avoid ever being consumed again. When I saw this beast next, I'd have the advantage, and in later years, reminiscent of how easy I used to be to mold, how compliant, how quickly my eyes would fill with apologetic tears, he would tell me that I'd changed, that I'd become very controlling, that I caused tension and misery to everyone in the house with my silence and absence. I'd nod and return to whatever I was doing, as he'd go on about what a sweet child I'd been, how I'd been his favourite, once.

I never cried in front of him again, and the last time I ever saw him, he was blubbering, toothless (a disarmed monster), like a pathetic child as I sat there, repulsed and stoic, slightly confused at seeing this, one of my monsters, as human for the first time. Here, he revealed to me his version of all those secrets I had wished to know for so long, and for the first time in my life, at 18, I felt like part of that monster's adult-world. I barely listened to his revelations. In truth, for the first time, I really didn't care. It had all entered the realm of make-believe. Instead, my thoughts were centered about the idea that I was half my father's daughter, which quite frankly made me venomously sick.

It's like realizing we can't choose our families and the idea that the blood of a being I hated so severely flowed in my veins, left me with very mixed feeling. Like Antigone, I struggle with my origins. Considering them, and all the information I'll never hear is very overwhelming to me. You know how expert liars tell stories so well that they make them real, even to themselves, to the point where the truth has become so indecipherable, so impossible to decode that it's not worth even trying? Well, it feels sort of like that to me, like an undeniable, discouraging, stamped out sense of finality, like a cigarette butt under an especially sharp heel.

Anyway, I am especially exhausted this week. Today, I felt the need to stay in bed until an hour before work. This week, I've written 2 paragraph commentaries on all my students and submitted 2 months worth of lesson plans (and syllabi for the books I use) for each of my classes. The only thing I'd like to do is shut my eyes and keep them closed, sometimes.

I've been here exactly 6 months today. I really need a vacation. I wonder if I'll be allowed to take a week off in June. Right now, I'm getting over another cold. All my students are coughing and sniffling and so, I'm sure it will be impossible for me to ever get entirely better before they all do. Also, last week, there was a report of yellow dust (it comes from China, apparently) that blows into Korea on the wind and can do serious damage to one's throat and lungs, just what I need…Most people here wear SARS face masks outside because they'd rather not get infected, or come down with pneumonia. Personally, I think I was just worn out before I even came here, and right now, I'm close to tearing (were I a figurative piece of fabric).

In any case, I'm attempting to keep a grasp, however slippery, of my current plateau, at least until I leave Korea I another 6 months. I'll decide what to do next, then. That is all.