this is a bad week.
it is not one of my worst. on my worst weeks, all of my underwear is dirty, my apartment is a mess, there’s no food in my fridge, and the milk is bad. i wake up in the morning and realize (again) that i have nothing to make lunch with and so have to go to mcdonalds for lunch. i forget to do laundry. i wait until every dish is in the sink before i start washing, and even then, i only was the one i need right now. i don’t go shopping.
but this is not one of those weeks. my apartment is a mess. the dishes are not done. but the clothes are clean, the fridge is full, and the milk is good.
i looked in the mirror yesterday and saw exactly what i will look like in 20 years. i saw where the weight will settle, where shadows are starting to settle now. i saw how my posture will deteriorate. i saw just how ugly i will allow myself to become.
i never used to worry about how i looked. i didn’t think i looked good; i just thought it was something not worth worrying about, or judging. i didn’t care. then i started having sex, and i did think it was worth worrying about, but right after i started having sex, i loved my body. it was like i discovered it for the first time, far too late, and realized just how wonderful having a body was. i started to notice it, then, but only to admire it, to feel it. i felt sexy and delicious, i felt suddenly aware.
even when that sex ended badly, when it stopped happening, i felt lovely. i felt myself walking down the street and knew exactly what my body was capable of.
but now, at 22, for the first, i look in a mirror and feel fat. not fat – i know i am healthy and not fat. i look – undefined. blurry around the edges. unspectacular. unlovely. unnoticeable. and i’d rather go back to not noticing my body, being unaware of its flaws, especially the ones i create. i’d prefer that to hating it, hating being trapped in its mundanity and ugliness.
mostly, i hate looking at it and seeing it as it will be. i see every flaw accelerated.
and it affects the sex i have now, of course it does. i said once, “my body is a trap, free only when it is a part of yours.” now, not even you can free me. and not since you have i loved a body, any body.
bodies should be loved. my body should be loved. by someone.
yesterday, i had a 12 year old boy removed from my classroom after he rolled up his assignment and used it as a trumpet to call me a bitch. then i watched stonefaced while he sobbed in my classroom for an hour. (it’s very brave, you know, to call your teacher a bitch and then cry for an hour in her presence)
then i sent two boys shuffling shamefacedly home with a stack of failed tests to be signed by their parents.
and today i made my 14 year old native korean speakers slog through difficult university level english because i believe that just because they can, they should.
when did i stop getting yelled at for doing stupid shit and start yelling at kids for doing it? when did i become the grownup? WHAT THE HELL?
Filed under: idiocy (my own)
this weekend i:
x. found myself in a korean hooters. noted i had the biggest hooters there, and considered a career change, but they don’t work for tips.
x. was inadvertently one of only two foreigners wandering aimlessly around a huge protest – an anti-american trade protest.
x. turned a one night stand into a two night stand. dumb!
x. bought furniture. how domestic! i’m not a hobo any more!
i recently had sex with no kissing.
i’ve always considered kissing very important – the most important part, even, of sex. i’d much rather have bad sex than bad kissing. i’ve even stopped when the kissing was bad, made my excuses, and refused to go any further.
good kissing is a skill. it’s a hard one to learn, an even harder one to teach, and damn near impossible to find.
and i recently had sex with no kissing.
i couldn’t kiss anyone – health reasons got in the way of my night. but boy decided to come over anyway. yes, the one night stand. a one night stand that is now a two night stand.
don’t JUDGE me.
all stupid decisions aside, when he rang my doorbell at 5:30am, i got out of bed, answered the door in my underwear, and let him in. and had some of the best sex i’ve had, without kissing. this shocked me. this amazed me. awed me, you could even say. i was not expecting this to be good.
the last time this happened, the boy in question decided to kiss me anyway. he waited an agonizing 5 minutes. i was expecting the same thing this time.
but he didn’t. not once either time we had sex. not when he showed up. not before we went to sleep. not when he got up, or when he left my apartment.
somehow it ended up being very intimate, which is weird, for two reasons: the first being, of course, that casual, one night stand sex is rarely intimate, even if it’s the second one night stand. and the second being that kissing is the most intimate, sometimes the only intimate, part of sex.
and now i have a wildly inappropriate definitely unrequited crush. and under the circumstances, a third one night stand would be very unwise indeed.
the question is, knowing that, will i answer the door next time?
Filed under: english
last week i had to explain the difference between “he went to bed, bu the wasn’t sleepy” and “he went to bed even though he wasn’t sleepy” on the fly.
i hate grammar.
i thought i had avoided it this year. i thought it had gone right by me, onto other, weaker targets. i thought i was stronger than it, had finally outsmarted it, was not to be defeated by it again!
i was wrong. i am weak. i am a weak little defeated baby.
and my skull is so full of mucus it might explode. i spent the day in bed, drinking copious amounts of tea, twisting twoo many blankets around me and sprawling out ridiculously and miserably. i drifted in and out of sleep. i dreamed about whatever was on tv in the background. i woke up to see “beauty and the geek” – possibly the stupidest reality tv program i’ve ever heard of – and in a desperate panic, sent myself straight back to sleep because i couldn’t stand the pain of that one top of the cold. i whined about how raw my nose was getting from blowing it on stupid korean kleenes. i wished somebody would get me chicken soup. nobody listened, of course, because i am in korea, and anybody who would bring me soup if they could stomach my incessant whining is in canada.
it was an awesomely productive day. here is what i managed to get accomplished:
- i bought vaseline for my chapped lips. they really hurt.
- i changed my snotty disease-ridden bedsheets
- i bought some bagels that aren’t really bagels. at least there is no bean paste.
- i mostly cleaned my skanky apartment.
that’s a lot for 9 hours!
i don’t even know what medicine i’m taking. my counselor, the korean woman i work with, asked me some questions and handed me a note written in korean, which i promptly took down to the pharmacy a few floors down from our school. i handed over the note – “i want dis one!” – like a small child on an errand, and received some pink pills. the only english on the box says “non-sedating nasal preparation”, which suggests to me that there’s something else i should be taking, whatever it is that my nasal passages are being prepared for.
not that i know how to ask for it.
it’s on days like these that i question my sanity. i am glad i am in korea. i like where i am living. surprisingly, i really like my job. i enjoy my days at work, and i have no regrets about coming to korea. but on days like these, i wonder what the fuck i possibly could have been thinking to come halfway around the world by myself, where i couldn’t even buy some fucking cold medicine. i didn’t even think about stuff like being able to buy medicine, which seems so small and is so important. i didn’t think that not knowing which laundry detergent to buy could ruin my day, or that i’d be so discouraged and feel like such an idiot when i brought the wrong lightbulbs home. and i really didn’t think about the inevitable day when i ended up with a cold, weeping like a baby and leaking from the eyes, without soup or dristan.
