Two Week Summary(?)

Can there be a 2 week summary?

If so, here’s mine. I really like Korea although parts of it are messy and silly. It is impossible, at this moment, to disentangle how much I might like Korea from how much I am relieved to be out of the Bay Area and out of the soul-sucking marketing job. I suppose that relationship will be far clearer in long retrospect. And, of course, even having been in Korea twice before I am in the honeymoon period.

But BPU is agreeably disorganized and I am well suited for that. The students are, at worst, inattentive and the good ones are nearly fawning. Also, Korean students at college age are still much more like high-schoolers. They, almost unanimously, live at home with the exception being the older men, some of whom have done their military service. I haven’t paid much attention to this distinction, but I think I will in the future. Just to see what the service seems to do to personalities. There is no shortage of horror stories about military service here and that should play out in how they act in class. God knows, the women are still in cocoons. That's spooky. But the mix of high-school and college is quite amusing.

The housing is adequate, except for the thumper who lives above me (and I should say he has been peepless for two consecutive nights). It did not surprise me that, at the last 901 club he sat down and immediately knocked his bottle of beer onto the table. Nor did it surprise me that the waitress was over with a rag before he even moved. I think he is one of those characters who just doesn’t see effects, or can’t empathize (in the non weepy sense) with others.

The view from the housing is great. Smoggy neon and hills rendered artificially distant by haze. I don’t mind this at all and if I make up my mind to stay here for another year I will quickly purchase an air-purifier and start loading the place up with plants. O2 is my friend.

The neighborhood is noisy (part of which I defeated with my window treatments), but it is noisy in the way that a city on the hustle is noisy. Shit is being knocked down willy-nilly and new shit succeeds it. It is the classic human delusion that progress can be made and it is fun to live in a city laboring under that delusion.

The time alone, to think, is the grandest thing of all. I have a phone on my table. I went to the trouble of picking it up and, lo and behold, it has a dial tone. Blessedly, it does not ring. I have no idea what the phone number is, so I can’t give it out. It is in all ways the “parfit” phone.
I haven’t even begun to learn the language or head up to Seoul (or even to the local temples) and that should add a whole new level of fun to the game. It looks like the OAF will be here sooner than planned and I imagine this will come at the perfect time since I am starting to feel vestigial twitches of “where my peeps at?”

In two weeks, I imagine, I will wish all the Korean brutes exterminated and be drinking weepy beers with other disaffected expatriates. For the moment, however, Korea is what I expected and perhaps a bit better.

So tomorrow? A drunken Ajeoshi (is that redundant?) should attack me on the street.