I have just re-read my last post. It would appear that, as well as regularly using prepositions and articles wrong, or leaving them out altogether, I have also developed a problem with using tenses correctly or consistently.
and there were so many things I could have done with that university tuition.
guess i’m not going swimming tomorrow morning. maybe i should see if the pool is open AFTER work – then it won’t matter what time i get to bed.
icanhascheezburger.com is wayyy funnier now than it was six hours ago. i will forever blame my mother for the fact that i am a person who reads icanhascheezburger.com. she told me about it. i started to read it to MOCK it, but, alas, as with so many things i do only to mock, it became a habit. like finger quotes, and letterman.
and john hughes movies, which i have an unnatural love for.
food cravings are stronger this time of night. despite the fact that i have a fridge full of food, including some easy-to-heat leftovers, i wanted apples and cheddar cheese. and so cut off a rather large chunk of mould from more than one side of the cheese in order to fulfill this desire.
i definitely started to think about going to sleep six hours ago. was absolutely going to be in bed at 12, after i got off the phone. got into bed. read 30 pages of Mao (i average 5-10, usually). turned out the lights. got up. checked e-mail, then picked up a play. which i started, and finished. am a geek. a GEEK.
just realized i’ve been leaving prepositions and articles out of all my sentences. my students are rubbing off on me, and my grammar is getting worse and worse. also capitals, but that’s because i’m being efficient with my typing (ha!).
went for a walk. why, when i need a cab at 3am, i can NEVER GET ONE, but tonight, they all slowed down just in case i needed a ride? WHY?
i watched 20/20’s medical mysteries tonight. there’s actually a disease called “FFI” – familial something insomnia – a disease in which something triggers in your brain and you end up with permanent insomnia and after 8 or 9 months with 0 sleep you DIE. i should stop watching medical shows. it brings out the hypochondriac in me.
will be setting my alarm several hours ahead. again. i keep starting out the night with such great intentions but then as the night wears on and i don’t sleep the alarm keeps getting set another hour forward, and then i hit the snooze alarm until 12:30, when i get up to watch judge judy and eat honey nut cheerios from the box before jumping in the shower and walking to work with wet hair. i KNOW. how exciting is my life?!
sleep now.
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.
so i was trying to explain cause and effect to my 12 year olds today, and i got this little gem:
“teacher! i get it! when my snail eats vegetables, snail needs to take a poop?”
ahhaaa. you know in canada, everybody’s walking around with all this clothing and tattoos and things in characters? like we know what they mean, or even what language it’s in?
they do the same thing here with english. i definitely saw a girl today with a cute little pink shirt (she was 11? 12?) with large, curly pink lettering across the front. it said: “GANG BANG”
it’s a good thing i’m not allergic to anything, as i can’t read any of the ingredients of anything in the shops. there’s a peculiar mix of english and korean: on brands that come from the west, the names and slogans are in english and all the ingredients/directions/etc. are in korea. even some of the korean things have names and slogans in (very bad) english: one brand in the kitchen section of the department store was called “clean sink”, and it’s slogan was “this will make your kitchen more cleaner.” stores are named in english as well, sometimes with unfortunate results: the sports store called “the athlete’s foot”, or the store called “children and underwear”.
