Filed under: randoms
and, for an evening, i was able to hold the demons back. and i was able to see what it would be like if i was ok.
it broke my heart.
Filed under: idiocy (my own)
well, i’ve had an exciting night. i made chicken stock. i bought ice cube trays to put it in. i finally got around to washing the dishes and taking out the compost, which had started to grow the most interesting kind of cottony mould i’ve ever seen. i got a coffee table while taking out the garbage. and i was about to make quesadillas with my recently acquired cheese, but my tortilla shells, when i took them out of fridge, cracked.
i am so, so slovenly.
anyway, my kitchen is clean and smells like garlic and chicken, and dokboggae. and i’ve sort of settled, for now, for piling all the laundry, clean and dirty, on sophie (the lovely green couch), so high that i can’t see her, and for kicking all the books and slippers and bags out of my way. the living room will wait until tomorrow, which really means friday, by which time the dishes will need to be washed again (a viscious cycle, really, which explains why i spend all my time cleaning and always have a dirty apartment), but listen: there is no potential growth in my apartment, and that is the main thing.
all in all, a productive evening. now, dokboggae, tea, and vicar of dibley. really should be like, crisps, or pudding with tea and vicar of dibley, but what’s a woman of the world to do?
so, i turns out that i am truly terrible at meditating. when you turn the lights out at 5am and ask me to concentrate on my breathing, i just go to sleep. huh.
i bet the buddhists have us all scammed. i bet ‘enlightenment’ is just fancy code for ‘nap’.
student: teacher! what’s wrong with your eyes?
me: i’m wearing makeup
student: oh. i thought maybe you had been punched.
Filed under: idiocy (other people's)
i don’t know the korean for ‘yeast infection’.
my phrasebook has “i need an abortion” but not “please pass the monistat”, and all drugs, including tylenol, are over the counter here. i need to be able to ask for it.
i don’t even know what the yeast infection medicine is called here, or if i need a prescription.
when i had a cold, the korean woman i work with wrote a korean note with my symptoms on it, and the pharmacist handed me a box. i trusted, and i swallowed my pills. but that doesn’t work so well for a yeast infection. “when you’re finished with those report cards, could you write me up a note describing my discharge, please? don’t forget to mention the itch!”
….i don’t think so.
this is very annoying. condoms are hard to find. lube is impossible. i spent a very fruitless day wandering around looking for a goddamn bottle of KY. which isn’t even good lube! i can’t even find vagisil, which would make me so much more comfortable right now.
in canada, you can walk into any convenience store and walk out with porn, condoms, and warming personal lubricant, and nobody bats an eye. here, i can’t find even the sleaziest of sex shops, which, as soon as my current friend wears out, will become painful. i don’t know if a vibrator would get through customs. i don’t even know if they’re LEGAL.
this is not to say that none of this exists in korea. of course it does. condoms exist. sex stores exist. i am not that naive. but they are not on every street corner, they are not lit up in neon with thinly veiled euphemisms, and i certainly can’t tack on my feminism and march out of a store confidently with a stack of condoms and an anal plug. and without knowing the culture, the city, or, especially, the language, finding this stuff is very, very difficult.
thank god i found playtex.
i’ve mentioned this before, but i have been pretty lucky in the noise department. we are all packed in here very tightly, and i somehow got good neighbours on all sides.
i hear muffled telephones ring, the occasional conversation through the vent in my bathroom, a dog that sometimes gets let out into the hallway to bark at everybody who walks by.
i heard what i think was someone having awful, probably painful sex in the middle of the night. there was no rhythm to the angry banging. it was not effortless, or fun. someone was working very, very hard, and someone was lying there, apparently part of the bedframe, waiting for it to end.
i hear evangelists ringing every doorbell, every fucking doorbell with their incessantly whining für elise, first thing on a saturday morning until the tingling doesn’t leave my ears. i can’t help but think people might be more receptive to their message if they didn’t wake them up on saturday mornings, but maybe that’s too cynical of me.
but tonight. tonight my apartment is quiet. the tv is not on. i am not listening to music. and i can’t hear anything from the street, because i live on the inside of the ‘u’ my apartment makes. the lack of a view is just about worth not hearing the street vendors at 5am. so my apartment is silent, except for my typing and the meowing of a cat.
i have seen a cat in the hallway a few times. unlike the dog, it goes running back to its apartment when interrupted. i have no way of knowing if i am listening to the same cat, but she sounds exactly like one of my cats, idiotic enough to get herself locked in a closet. they used to sleep on shelves of towels or clothes, curled up in the back, and the door, invariably, would inadvertently get shut. a few hours later we’d hear the groggy, panic stricken cat, right after she’d woken up, wailing to be let out, and we’d have a mad dash around the house, wondering which cat it was, which closet it was, how long she’d been in there. and when we found ehr, she’d march out all “where the hell were you?” like she hadn’t been crying desperately, sure she’d been abandoned, a minute before.
it was usually the same cat who, at night, would wail her way through the house, not knowing where any of us were. one of us would, grumbling, pad out into the hallway to her, wave to get her attention (she’s deaf), and haul her back into bed with us, where she’d settle down, starting purring, and we’d wake up to her chewing contentedly on our hair.
and so tonight i am listening to the wailings of a cat, in my empty quiet apartment on the wrong side of the world, and mightily resisting the urge to go dashing out after her.
sigh.
Filed under: idiocy (my own)
guinness shirt? check
guinnes pint glass? check
2 1/2 pints of guinness down the hatch at 8 on a sunday? check.
$80 western chicken boobies and onion rings? check.
good night all around!
