top 5 things i'm tired of

1) crying
2) waking up sad
3) hearing "the subscriber cannot be reached..."
4) busy signals
5) rebooting because my stupid laptop froze up on me yet again

these days

these days, i wake up in the morning and it's cold, and i hate that i have to wake up and cross the street to learn korean language when at this point (with just a month left before i go home) learning said language is not at all useful to me, and so usually i just go right back to sleep, only to wake up half an hour later because i set two alarms on my flip-phone and one on my pda, and i curse a little loudly not caring that the sweet japanese woman living on the other side of my wall might hear, and i try to go back to sleep, only to sit bolt upright a quarter to nine--with barely time to brush-rinse the morning breath out of my mouth--but still i do my thing and stagger into class between nine-oh-five and nine-fifteen when the thing that i wish most in the world is to simply be lie under the covers and sleep some more, dreaming that i am home with those who love me--but these days, these days, i am feeling a little unloved, and even the people in class tell me it's starting to show

dear john (a letter)

hello there!

so glad you enjoyed your tokyo trip and that you're safe back home. no more north korea missile threats for breakfast. yay!

there was a crimson rooftop party earlier tonight, to introduce the new manager and also a farewell party for tasol. finally, she gets her vacation! i skipped the party though. was feeling kinda hermit-y, so i stayed in my room and watched that brothers grimm movie on cable. bleah.

but at midnight, tenzin gave me a call and said they're out drinking somewhere on chamsari-gil. so for the first time in my life, i went out alone after midnight and walked the dark city streets (not that far) to get drunk. hooray for first times.

as expected, the japanese kids with crazy hair (the boyz) and squeaky voices (the girlz) were present. everyone was from crimson except for some dour american dude wearing a backwards cap. also met a couple of new crimson house guys: a portuguese guy (paulo?) and a frenchman (benoit).

eugene, tenzin and i shared a pitcher of yogurt soju with benoit and the japanese girls. it was impossible to get a conversation going because i suck at korean, and the tokyo girls just kept saying they were "hanggugo kungbuheyo". riveting, eh?

we all went home a couple of hours later but we did stop by the corner store to buy some 3-for-1,000 won ice cream sticks. as tenzin said: "in honor of our friend, john dewey." a few seconds later, kalinga chucked his ice cream into the trash by mistake (he was drunker than i thought) and they had to buy another one. hee hee.

yup, i'll be going home in a few weeks (26 september!!!). warts and all, i will miss korea. thanks to you, tenzin, and the rest of the guys, i have some very good memories of my stay here. and when memory fails (e.g., that night in sokcho), there's always photographic evidence.

it's 2:30 am now and it's a school night. yaaargh.

WE MISS YOU!!!!

lovelove,
S

PS: we're going dancing friday night in hondae. it'll be my last chance to do that all-access clubhopping thing they have on the last friday of each month. woohoo.

the nasties

there are four (4) very unforgettable insults which come to me unbidden at the most inappropriate circumstances (e.g., benediction in church, sitting beside the kimchi-scented elderly on the subway, tarahaseyo*-ing in kang young-ah sonsengnim's korean conversation class).

these are vicious and i try to keep them at bay, not always successfully. two of these i witnessed firsthand. one was stolen from one of my favorite blogs**, the other i'd heard about via the ever-reliably-nasty mimosa grapevine***. in no particular order, here are the nasties:

"you've got more fat than bacon, baby!"
- said by R1 to R2 in palawan last year, after R2 weighed in at 150+ lb.

"karaniwan..."
- said by K in reference to Y, a young poet who keeps winning awards.

"it's grotesque."
- said very drily by XX in reference to the outlandish behavior and appearance of XY, who tries too hard to be noticed/liked**** by everyone.

"you have the IQ of a tape dispenser!"
- said by M's ex to a dendrite-deficient underling.

* repeating after the teacher, helpful for memorizing verb conjugations and acquiring that not-very-useful-to-me seoul accent.
** malatemail, your archives make perfect 3:00 am reading.
*** believe me, there is such a thing. mostly bading; not at all botanical.
**** in XY's universe, there seems to be little distinction between the two. it's just sad. first there was the dye-job. then there was the fashionably late entrance wearing a wide zebra-print cloth headband under a brown pleather fedora. very afraid of what might come next.

two degrees of papi gael

chatted with my sister yesterday, who sent me a photo of gael garcia bernal at some anti-WTO NGO forum in hongkong last december. the lucky bastard who actually met papi gael (superstar na, activist pa!) said they bumped into each other at the anti-water privatization tent.

so my sister said gael looks like a hobo here. i say he looks like a rich and elegant hobo. bet i can't afford those shades he's wearing. bet he has more money now than i'll ever make in my lifetime. haha. ha. idle thought: maybe i should work for an international NGO too?

please don't eat here

hunger is never an excuse to eat crap. seen at some mall food court in seoul sometime in june. can't remember if it's lotte department store in myeongdong or at COEX mall in the gangnam district. aren't you glad you don't know where it is?

tell-eh-pigeon?

i swear, koreans are kinda bulol. sometimes in a goofy endearing way, sometimes it just sounds off. when they write english or other foreign words in their alphabet (hangeul), you know things are bound to get screwy.

orange is read as oh-rin-jee. post brand almond flake is spelled as 'peu-oh-seuh-teuh* beuh-rehn-deuh ah-mon-deuh hoo-reh-ee-keuh.' no idea how they pronounce that. they can't seem to either pronounce or write the 'errrr' sound. superman returns is 'syoo-poh-mehn ree-tawn-jeuh' (dunno where they got the 'j' sound at the end). manager is 'mah-nee-jaw'. in the hair salons around my jegi-dong neighborhood, hair is 'heh-awe.' star style is 'seuh-taaah seuh-tay-lee.'

but it gets stranger. at the start of spring term in april, we were forced to call brazil 'peuh-rah-jil', france 'peuh-rang-seuh', and philippines 'pee-lee-peen'. that last one really ticked me off. dammit, can't they see/hear that unmistakable sibilance at the end??? i should know, it's my country! if they can't pronounce fih-lih-peenzzz, they why not just say pee-lee-pee-nasssss?** maybe they'll understand this: naneun hwaganayo. shih-royo.***

anyway. when i turned on the TV (tel-leh-pee-jawn), channel 21 OCN (oh shee ehn) was showing the forgettable ah-nold vehicle end of days (en-deuh op-heuh dey-jeuh). meh. so i reached for the remote.

egads. friends (peuh-ren-jeuh) is on at channel 38 On Style (ohn seuh-tay-lee). the start of the not-new season was announced last night as PEUH-REN-JEUH SEANSON 2. yes, it's a typo. but not mine. they've been broadcasting this little gem for a week now. man, this show sucks in any language. am so glad the show is kaput. it's the most unfunny show ever; could never sit through a whole episode, no matter how i tried. and i was reminded once again why i was ecstatic when brad dumped idiot aniston for angelina. he should've done that sooner.

yay! sex and the city is on. they show reruns every weeknight except the episodes are all mixed up. tonight is 'change of a dress' from season 4. it starts with charlotte in some dancing class, trying to deal with her divorce with her hydraulically-challenged wasp husband. carrie looks ridiculous as always. and i really hate aidan: he's ugly and an insecure a-hole. most importantly, i can't get over the fact that the show's title is spelled 'sek-seuh (insert ampersand) shi-tee'. that just sounds wrong.

oprah on the oprah winfrey show (oh-peuh-rah ween-peuh-ree syoh) is gushing about cakes in miami. shaq, who looks scarily old, is chomping on a cinnamon butter cake. clearly time to switch off the telly.

funny how i endured six years of linguistic oddity when i was tutoring my friend sayo, a japanese housewife (choo-boo in korean) who lived in makati, shopped alone at pickpocket-intensive quiapo, divisoria and relatively shabby landmark. her quirky way of saying things was just that: quirky. and when the lovely kanako (this japanese girl we're all in love with) mixes up her dipthongs, i just melt. hee.

but i must say that i do like how our program manager, yeajin-ssi, has an accent that's softer than the seoul accent i find so grating. her soft syllables go really well with her voice (she sounds like a 5-year-old), the overall effect being an effortless kawaii-cuteness that every young woman in east asia aspires to have. but these other pa-cute girls just end up looking retarded. go watch any TV ad with korean girls mugging for the camera and you'll know what i'm talking about. but yeajin? she's cute and wickedly smart (summa cum laude from seoul national university, korea's UP naming mahal). if we can clone her, there may be hope for korean chicks.


* the letter for 'euh' is a horizontal line (---) and sounds almost like how the french call the letter 'e'. the korean way of shaping the mouth for this sound is too darned hard to explain. here's the french way: shape your mouth into a small O then try to say 'eeeeeee' while keeping that O shape. crazy, eh?

** they also taught us about countries i thought were fictional: mee-gook, yong-gook, choong-gook, moong-gool, eel-bohn, kah-jah-heuh-seuh-tan, hoh-soo. that's the u.s., england, china, mongolia, japan, kazakhstan and australia to you. where do they get these names???

*** transliteration: "me angry. don't like." the syntax is very barok noh? S-O-V and not much else. my buddy eung-hwa (aka pax coreana) says: "korean syntax is very rigid and mechanical, and is therefore a pretty boring language to learn." which is why i have a hard time learning hanggukmal. as a writer, i love playing with syntax. english and filipino allow me room for play and syntactic complexity that seems largely absent in hanggukmal. even a lot of korean literature in english translation seems repetitive and monotonous because there are no pronouns. there is no 'you' either, so if i wanna tell the polymath how cute he is, i can't say "you're cute." i'd have to tell him: "the polymath is cute." makes me sound like a fembot.

recent self-portraits

me in my natural habitat. note the piles
of unread books, clutter, and the TV on mute
with some ditzy fashion/lifestyle show.

i question the wisdom of posting this here.
but i just had to tell all four readers
of this blog that no one here in seoul believes
this is me. can anyone explain to me why?

a moment of cheesiness

here's a line stolen from an old friend's blog, which she in turn had stolen from an old episode of the o.c. (i'm so not making this up):

"someday, we'll be perfect for each other."

so, kids, all together now: aaaawww...

now that's we've gotten than off our chests, lemme share a bit more of what my friend said w/r/t that line:

"maybe it's the poignancy of the line, maybe it's my lack of sleep, or maybe i've turned into a sap. but i suspect i snap to attention because the line holds the promise of time shaping us into better persons, so that someday we'll be the perfect wheels to our perfect cogs."

one more time: aaaawww...

things i'm mulling

1) the effect of weight gain on the dimensions of my hip tattoo. given that the surplus of everything i eat gets divided equally among my cheeks, hips, thighs, and butt, this is a scary scary thought. too lazy to do yoga. wallclimbing here in seoul is too darned expensive. maybe i should just stop eating? my siberian reindeer tattoo is starting to look like a hippo with antlers.

2) getting a bikini wax. because i'm into pain and mutilation. just kidding. while i really am curious about how much pain is involved and the exact nature of waxing-related pain, the real reason, like this entire item, is really too much information. haha. ha.

3) why the past is a foreign country, as pointed out by british novelist l.p. hartley in 1953. it's pretty self-evident, of course. but i'm trying to see how this idea works vis-a-vis a triad of stories by korean writer hwang soon-won. reading him was a little like reading pinoy canon fodder like nvm gonzales and manuel arguilla. but mostly i was bewildered. there seems to be a lot of culturally specific information encoded into the text that did not survive translation. a lot of the behaviors and motives and reactions of the characters i didn't understand at all. maybe because these are "outmoded" (can't think of better word now) ways of thinking, very different from the behavior of koreans i see and meet here in seoul. maybe it's because i really am in a foreign country. i am mystified by the text for at least 2 reasons: chronological distance and cultural distance. this whole frame i'm building is pretty flimsy right now. but if i use pretty words, maybe the end result wouldn't be as embarrasing.

i really want to finish this book review i'm writing but my a/c is now so cold at 3am, i'm dying to get under the covers. will continue writing tomorrow. was supposed to study for the weekly quiz tomorrow (at least i think there's one) but screw it. will just scan my notes before i enter the classroom. haha. i am such a bad student. if i were my student, i'd flunk me big time.

from when i couldn't sleep

for weeks in the last couple of months, i couldn't sleep at all. or when i did, it would be dawn and i'd stagger into class a few hours later, mumbling "miyanhamnida, sonsengnim" to my professor. this post takes from an email i (think i) sent to the polymath around that time. i don't remember if i really did send it. here goes:

back in 1991, when papa was arrested and kept in solitary confinement at camp aguinaldo for supposed leftist activities, he wrote a poem about us, his three children. when i got to read it during one of our visits a month later, when he had been transferred to the camp crame detention center for political offenders, i was suprised to see that he had described me as onion-skinned. it was the first time really that i had any idea how he as a father felt for or thought of us. he's not at all demonstrative or expressive about his feelings.

i'm not sure where that original poem is now. i remember it as being very creased and smudged, having been folded and unfolded many times, maybe by papa. i'd like to think it's somewhere between the pages of my journals. it's not the most lyrical of poems (it starts with "when this forced solitude brings me to the depths of despair...") but still i cannot think how he could write at all. i cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like for him, trying to finish that poem. and i am amazed that he could the find words in that place, at that time.

but i am only half-surprised that he turned to poetry during that dark time. he is, after all, a writer. for a week or so, we didn't know if we would ever see him alive again, and i know he felt the same. and so in those hours and days when no one knew where he was, or whether he was still alive, he was thinking of us, his children, and trying to remember exactly how each of us was like. i'm not really sure what triggered this sudden memory. but right now, i realize he really knows and understands us better than he lets on. my father is a brave man, braver in some ways than in others.

the poem ends with the half-wish, half-knowledge that we will all be together again, and that we can finally finally get to know one another. it's been 15 years since that terrifying year, but i know that i still don't know my family that much. in many ways, we remain strangers to one another, even if we don't have to be. we still don't know how to talk to each other. so many years. i want so badly to think all that time hasn't been wasted. maybe this is all just to say i'm missing my family (papa, bernice, kuya, mama) terribly right now?

why am i telling you this? because i can. because i know you'll let me. and even if you don't always know what to do or say to make me feel better (and i know you feel compelled to think of something to say because you know i go on these talking/remembering jags whenever i'm upset), i know you'll read or listen as you always do, as closely as only you can.

and i love you for that.

my orphan dog

the love of my life (kitty) with a new haircut, on my sister's bed.

here we go again

spent ten minutes thinking of something to say but can't come up with anything. feeling really empty and joyless right now. been shut in my room for two days reading, and trying to write but the thoughts, the words, they just don't come. well, they did, but i couldn't focus enough to get down a single coherent thought. just a blur of associations that left me in an even darker muddled state.

oh, man. am i turning needy-neurotic-wacko again?

i'm hoping these are just symptoms of a kind of envy. my friend john dewey left korea for tokyo this morning, will spend two weeks in that hyper-expensive city, and then fly back home to minnesota. back home to his family and his friends. maybe i envy the fact that very soon, he'll be in a place that speaks his language, where people are genuinely glad to see him.

or maybe this is just hormonal. you know what i mean.

i know there's no use grousing. i'm in a strange exotic city, lots to explore still, with time to write, and think, and read. some people would kill to be in my position. but still. i really really miss home right now. will try to end on a less neurotic note, promise. here goes:

1) tenzin just called. will meet him up on the roof for a breather and drinks. with my erratic airconditioning, spending an hour on the breezy moonlit rooftop feels a lot like redemption.
2) saw the picasso exhibit last saturday at the seoul museum of art with joan and phuong. spent the afternoon giggling at wild sketches of various orifices and countless mammaries rendered in oil.
3) went shopping for skirt, light cargo pants and halter tops at myeongdong and hyehwa with joan. my spring/autumn wardrobe just won't do for these blistering late midsummer days.
4) talked to B for a few mins this evening. it was choppy but i was just so very glad to hear her voice.