All I want for Chusok is my two front teeth

Sorry I haven't written in a while, but it's been a difficult week. It's the end of the month, which means reviews, class progress checks, and student evaluations. You know, teacher stuff.

It's also the end of my first month here, which means (strictly unofficially, of course), my own evaluation, which, well...didn't go as well as I was hoping.

Things, by and large, are fine, but I have this one class. It's a prep class for the TOEFL, or Test Of English as a Foreign Language. This is the test that American universities use to evaluate foreign applicants' English proficiency. As you can imagine, this is of very great concern to hyper-competitive Korean parents -- and therefore of concern to the ESL hagweons that cater to them and to the teachers they employ who are all expected to be able to teach TOEFL prep.

My class sucks and I'm bad at it. I'll say that now.

Andy and I had a special little sit-down at the beginning of the month. There were textbooks and schedules and prep tests and such, and there were essays and oral exams and special evaluation forms. What there wasn't was any hint of what the reality of the class would be: nothing at all for an entire week, then two spindly thirteen-year-olds, bone tired from a full day of summer school and completely uninterested in talking, let alone poring over two huge TOEFL textbooks that, incidentally, they don't have. And there's some third book I'm supposed to be using that has fuck-all to do TOEFL or anything else. And I'm supposed to be giving essay homework over the weekends (weekends that are already packed full for these poor bastards with more school). TOEFL? Forget about it, they're not even going to be taking the damn thing for like, five more years. So I abandoned the textbook and spent day after day just trying to pry a little enthusiasm or at least three consecutive words out of these kids. Six o'clock: TOEFL prep. Seven o'clock: slit my fucking wrists.

And then one of the little bastards ratted me out to Andy, saying we hadn't done anything with the textbooks. Andy came down on me, wanting to know what's gong on. Long story short, I'm on something like probation with this class, with a strict schedule and daily reports back to Andy on what we did in class. To be honest, the class goes a bit better now that I know what I'm supposed to be doing. A bit.

I wouldn't really complain, except that Andy's tact in all of this is a bit...nonexistant. I'm willing to give some latitude to the inevitable insensitivity of another culture, but this is a little... Let me explain.

So last weekend, Haseyo and I went to Haeundae. A good solid day of insanely crowded beach, drinking in public, and the seriously kute and bikini-clad. There was a bandstand and some incomprehensible Korean hip-hop festival. I swam in the South Sea. Haseyo scared girls. It was great.

Roundabout nine or so, Haseyo had had enough and decided to head home. I wasn't quite ready to pack it in yet, so I decided to find this ex-pat bar someone stateside had told me about (O'Brien's, Ronnie, the place Jenn's friend Andrew runs). It took a little wandering around, and a train ride, but I turned it up. Decent place. Surprisingly quiet for a Saturday night, but I needed someplace a bit chill after the crush of humanity that was Haeundae. I was totally planning to hang out for a beer or two and then go, but then there was this game of pool and a game of darts, and an extra pitcher someone thought I oughta have, and the next thing I know, it's two in the morning, and it's Andrew and me and a couple of guys sitting around arguing about who fucked up the twentieth century more, England or America. Finally Andrew goes, right, I'm off, the bar's yours -- which I thought was really quite wonderful and irresponsible of him.

It is important that you understand that I was done drinking by now. I was too sleepy (as were my late-night compatriots), so I grabbed some couch time for a few hours and woke up a bit past seven in the morning, just in time to catch the train back home.

I am, at this point, about five hours sober. Hungover? Yes. Tired? Like a dog. Did these things contribute to the fact that, on the big-step/false landing thing halfway down the stairs in Gaya Station, I lost my footing and took an impressive header down to the bottom? Probably. Was I drunk? No, but I wish to Christ I had been.

I'm not entirely sure (as, I suppose, we rarely are when these sorts of accidents happen) how all this occurred, but the next thing I knew, the subway cleaning lady was picking me up off the floor, chattering concernedly in Korean and pressing a wad of Kleenex to my face. It kept coming away bloody, and I had grit in my mouth, which I figured out pretty quickly were chunks of teeth. Super. So I thanked the lady (in Korean, which I guess meant my head was okay) and rode the train home, through the transfer, all the while clutching a handful of tissues to what was undoubtedly, judging from the stares from all the Sunday morning commuters, a gnarly chunk out of my face. What a fucking morning.

And then I got lost on my way home. Fucking brilliant.

When I finally did get back to the apartment, I took a shower and took stock of the damage. Looks like I took the fall on my left side: I had a really nasty cut over my eye, plus some bruises and scrapes; two badly chipped teeth (though, oddly, no bloody nose or bit lip); a cut on my shin that bled freely, but on closer inspection wasn't very serious; and a very sore and probably dislocated shoulder. Fuckit, I said, and went to bed.

I got about two hours before I finally decided that something really ought to be done about my shoulder. And this is where the sobering reality of being in Korea really began to sink in. I needed to go to the hospital, but I needed someone, preferably Andy, to come with me, since I don't speak Korean, and I still don't have my Alien Registration card. I don't have a phone, so I couldn't call him, and it was Sunday, so the hagweon was closed. What ended up happening was I got hold of Haseyo, whose plans that day were conveniently canceled, and together we tried to call Andy. No luck, but Haseyo knew a student who worked nearby and maybe she could come with us and translate. She did, and she helped raise Andy, too, who met us at the hospital and eventually got me taken care of and patched up.

(I gotta say, though, Haseyo was a real mensch with the hospital thing. He stuck through until Andy showed up and I was well in hand. And I don't know what I would've done if he hadn't thought of getting Jessica, his student. I still call him Haseyo, but it isn't ironic anymore.)

All told, things are more or less okay. The cut took stitches (it's going to leave a bitchin' scar), and I'm in the process of getting my teeth capped. My shoulder turned out not to be dislocated, just badly bruised, and my brain isn't broke.

But Andy, man. I told him what happened, and I'm convinced he thinks I'm some sort of drunken reprobate. The TOEFL thing doesn't help. And after the hospital and stitches and everything, there was never any question about me not being at work the next day. I shouldn't complain, I suppose, given that he did, after all, come out (eventually) and take control of things. And I know sympathy isn't his job, but still. God, I'm sick of his shit.

Sick. Sick of Andy, sick of the hagweon, sick of teaching. Sick of wincing when I raise my arm, sick of not being able to bite things, sick of being stared at and asked what happened. I'm sick not being able to speak Korean, sick of speaking English like I'm talking to four-year-olds, sick of not knowing anyone, sick of gimchi with every fucking meal, sick of week-long laundry days, sick of losing sleep to mosquitos, sick of having no money and no ID or phone or TV or Internet so I have to spend my days off back at work just so I can answer my goddamn email. I'm fucking sick of Korea, all right? Joke's over. I miss you guys and I want to come home.

I don't mean all that, of course. But I needed to say it. I mean, I knew Korea wasn't going to be paradise forever. That was honeymoon, and this, for better and for worse, is real life. And I've got eleven more months of it, and while they won't be like the first month here, I also know they won't be as bad as this week was. I'll clean up all right, and I'll get teaching sorted out. And things will be a lot more tolerable once I get paid, which is soon.

So, sorry for the downer post. But I hit the Homesick Wall, and I needed a little therapy. I'll be happier when I have money and new teeth.

Haseyo and Beer Corner...scrivenage and superbug..."It's honey box!"

And here I am on the far side of the weekend. Which, lemme tell ya kids, was rough.

At least I didn't swim to Hawaii, right? Forget it, I didn't even make it to the beach. The farthest I got was Beer Corner. This was Wednesday evening. I figured, since I was looking at four days of cabin fever, I better go off and have a good time for a bit beforehand. Drinking is, happily, real cheap in Korea, and I could shave most of a day off with a proper hangover; so after class, I went and got the drink on with Stan Teacher, whom I call Haseyo. (Haseyo is a Korean honorific, a respectful address for strangers and elders. Stan doesn't know any Korean, but he's thirty-five, so he said I have to call him haseyo. So I do. I started when we had to go to Immigration and Stan had to go because he lost his wallet with his AR card and we left and he had to go back to his apartment because he forgot his passport which he ended up not needing and we were ten minutes late for our afternoon classes. "Good job, Haseyo," I said. I use it ironically, you see.) After a few bars, we ended up at Beer Corner, where I negotiated the purchase, semi-deliberately, of a truly gargantuan pitcher of beer. Mission accomplished.

The next day Haseyo had a date, which apparantly went well because, even though he lives across the hall from me, I didn't see a hair of him the rest of the weekend, since, as he told me later, he was holed up all weekend in his apartment getting laid from here to bejeezus. Beach? What beach?

And so I strapped myself in for a long weekend of scrivenage. How did it go? Well... Maybe I should be a bit more careful about grandiose claims like a complete ninety-page, two-part, first draft script in four days. But no one actually believed that, right? I mean, sure, I could pull out ninety-six hours of straight key pounding -- if I didn't eat or sleep and I had a bloodstream full of speed and a bucket under my chair. But, as anyone who's written a term paper over a weekend knows, all writing is fifty percent actual screen time and fifty percent, ya know, screwing around. So there was an appreciable amount of typey-typey, interspersed with repeated viewings of "Max" when I got stuck, video pinball when I got bored, ramyeon when I got hungry, and naps when I remembered (which was infrequently; my circadian rhythm's so jacked up, I think I might have actually given myself jet lag again). And mosquitos. Bloody fucking evil little bastard mosquitos.

If I may digress. Korea has some sort of fucked-up, gene-spliced, superbug mosquitos that are resistant to bug spray and are smart enough not only to get into an entirely closed off apartment, but to come out only when the light's out so they can make covert raids in the night. And here's the thing: they come one at a time, so I keep waking up at four in the morning with maddeningly itchy welts on my ear or small of my back, and I flip the light on and crouch in the corner of my bed, staring into the middle distance, waiting for a flicker in my focal range or a momentary telltale whine in my ear that I can hone in on and hunt down, but the little beast hides -- they hide, the cowards! -- and I'm back crouching and waiting and meanwhile it sneaks another suck off the underside of my arm and now I see it! -- and it's fat and slow from gorging itself and I smack it and it bursts like a ripe pimple and lies twisted and smashed with its broken legs and wings poking out from a blotch of blood on my arm, a disconcertingly large blotch of dinner that it paid for with its own violent and sudden end and now I can go back to sleep but the wily fuckers come back, one at a time, so in half an hour I have to get up and do battle all over again.

I'm a wee twitchy these days.

Yeah, so, where was I? Ah yes. So the result of this bleary weekend, goggle-eyed from the computer and undernourished from my instant noodle diet (Asians, I should say, are serious about their ramen. All sorts of things go into it, mushrooms and seaweed and fishcakes and dried squid and various unidentifiables not unlike pork rinds or shrimp chips or something -- you kids in the West are truly getting shafted in the pot noodle department.), was not a revolutionary Brave New World epic, but four or five solid pages of notes, a decent outline for the first several scenes, and a six pages of actual script -- good pages, even, until I wrote myself into a corner early Sunday morning, realized that I had misconcieved several fundamental conceits about the setting, shitcanned everything, and had to start from scratch. I am now beginning to understand why so many writers are appalling drunks.

The truth is, I'm not very good at this. I won't say I'm a bad writer -- partly because my dear readers are getting a bit sick of it, partly because I have dear readers to begin with, and partly because I do seem to be capable of turning out decent material on a more or less regular basis. But my talent, it seems, is in short pieces: the blog, corporate letters, the odd song -- simple, contained ideas, stuff that I can bang out in a session or two. I'm good at poetry, which is bit like saying I'm good at tiddlywinks. But this sustained narrative thing, man: characters, plots, settings, development... This is hard. I honestly don't know how the guys on "Lost" do it week after week. (But then, I guess they don't since they seem to burn out and call a strike every couple of years.)

I dunno. I guess it's hard for everyone. Doesn't make it any less frustrating for me, though.

By the way, no encouraging posts or anything, please (Ronnie, I'm looking at you). Not that it isn't appreciated, but, as my dear old Mum used to say, all I need right now is a little sympathy to make me completely miserable.

Anyway. You're not here for this crap, though, are you? You want funny things about those krazy Koreans, right? Can do. You want funny, you want Konglish. Nothing to give the English-speaking mind a twist like Korean attempts at the mother tongue. Virtually everyone here has some sort of English exposure. A lot of things are printed in both Hangeul (the Korean alphabet) and Roman letters, and often English as well, presumably for the benefit of stupid foreigners like myself, but mostly, I think, because it's chic or exotic or sophisticated or something. It's a little like the American fad of Chinese character tattoos, only everywhere. Actually, I'd say it's a lot like it, given that I know hardly anyone with a tattoo in Chinese that actually knows what it means, and I have yet to meet a Korean here who has any idea what his "Muff Diver" T-shirt says (Yes, I've actually seen this).

But the best place for Konglish is MegaMart. Shopping is a wonderful experience, especially when you're measuring the merits of products solely by what they offer in their fractured version of your language. Some are simple, if amusing, mistakes, like American Soft cookies: "Chewing!" they crow on the package, as though these cookies are happy to do all the work of eating them for you. Some are more elaborate, such as the grammatically correct, but decidedly audacious claims made by the Dream File and Binder:

"Dream arranges all kinds of documents conveniently and pleasantly.

Dream gives you satisfaction in quality.

Dream makes you more creative and intelligent."

Super. I'll take three. Maybe they'll help with the writing.

My favorite, though, is the logo I found inside a day planner, which I find attains a transcendent level of daffy poetry:

Cookie=Tong

It's honey box!

It certainly is, Cookie Tong, it certainly is.

Alien cowboy, me!

I'm posting earlier than I expected, but a couple things happened I wanted to tell you about. Yesterday Andy finally took me out to the Immigration Office to get my Alien Registration card. First we had to go to the hospital to pick up my physical exam results (which involved Andy making a creepy joke about AIDS which I'm just gonna assume was his way of saying things are fine), and then we drove all the way out to the docks where the immigration folks are.

My favorite part was when a long, loud announcement came on over the intercom -- all in Korean. In the, ya know, Immigration Office. Where we're all immigrants and probably don't, ya know, speak Korean.

My other favorite part was when they took my passport and told me I would get it back in two weeks with my AR card. No, wait, not "favorite." The other one. I mean that was the part that sucked.

So, aside from I'm broke and don't know the language and don't know the city, I also have no ID, so I guess I really am holing up in my apartment for the weekend.

The other thing that happened was that I have an official nickname at the school now. I'm "Cowboy Teacher." Yeah. It's no secret that I'm from Texas, but that's not it. (There is a reaction, but I found out it's because the Red Light District in Busan is called Texas Street. Because that's where the Russian sailors hang out. I know.) Those of you who saw me last month probably recall my extremely stylish straw Panama hat. Well, I wear that regularly here, too, 'cause I look friggin' awesome in it. But I guess they don't have Panama hats in Korea, because here it's a cowboy hat, and I am Cowboy Teacher.

I really am, too. Ian, one of the other teachers, had this conversation with a student yesterday:

"Ian Teacher, do you know Cowboy Teacher?"

"Cowboy Teacher? You mean Niko? That's Niko. Ni-ko."

"No Niko. Cowboy Teacher."

Yee-haw.

Know Future

Wow, shoot. It's been a week already, huh. Sorry about that. I'll have you all know, however, that it's difficult coming up with something entertaining every week. Despite all your flattering comments, I'm not actually a very good writer.

Which is too bad, because I have rather a project coming up this weekend. This is vacation weekend in Korea, and it means four days off from work. Now for most people (including me, in most circumstances), this would be cause for celebration. But, as I've said, I'm broke and effectively illiterate, and I live without basic necessities like television; so this is meaning four days of sweet f. a. for yours truly.

(Actually, I've been invited to the beach at Haeundae this weekend "to dip my toes in the South Sea." So I'll be doing that, I think. Unfortunately, since Korea is shutting down for the weekend, so will about six hundred thousand other people. I give it about ten minutes before the claustrophobia sets in and I go back and hide in my apartment. Or start swimming for Hawaii. If I don't post next week, you'll know which direction I went.)

Fortunately, I've sort of got my computer working again. I still haven't gotten the transformer I'm convinced I need, but I have pursuaded my plug adapter to work, finally. I'm still offline, of course, but I'm not entirely without entertainment. For one thing, I have the Spore Creature Creator, which is the second most entertaining thing in the universe. (The most entertaining thing will be coming out this fall.) The other wonderful thing I have is "Max Headroom."

I'm sure most of you have at least some residual memory of Max. This should help, I'm sure. Now, those of you who are my age or older may recall that Max had a TV show on ABC when we were kids. It came on after "Moonlighting." Max is a computer-generated simulacrum of an intrepid investigative journalist (Matt Frewer, who also played Max -- you young'uns will know him as the obnoxious neighbor in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or the guy who gets bitten by the zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead and wants "every last second of it" when he dies before he turns into a zombie and Ving Rhames has to blow his head off), who works and lives in a hellish future where TV and consumerism are all that matters, and gigantic media networks rarely think twice about offing people if it means getting their ratings up. Ripping good 80's dystopian sci-fi stuff. Punks with scary hair. Computers with tiny screens and huge, blocky keyboards. Rollerdeathball -- with spikes. Tongue planted so firmly in cheek it's taken root and grown into a great, green Tree of Cynicism that blooms every spring and drops irony berries. Naturally, it got cancelled after twelve episodes. That show was some ballsy noise, and the surprising thing about it is not that a show that great came and went in under a season, but that a show that cynical and critical of TV was ever made in the first place, let alone shown on primetime, by a major network for as long as it was. I miss the hell out of that show. Turns out, there are a number of other people who do, too (Thank you, Dan).

So I've decided to bring it back. I've mentioned this to a few of you, the handful of you geeky, nostalgic, and bitter enough to care. I think we're all agreed that the last few years (Let's pick a random number liiiike...eight. For instance.) have been pretty shitty. Ecomony blah. Environment blah blah blah. Bad guys blew up New York, and we, ya know, didn't do anything about it. (Oooh, I know I'm asking for it with that one.) And you know my favorite thing to do is complain. I figure, times is ripe all over again for Max Headroom and a little snarky, self-righteous satire.

So I've been taking notes, and I'm gonna write me a pilot. Two-part miniseries. One of the things I'm wanting to do out here is write, and this weekend it's gonna happen. Do I know the first thing about writing a teleplay? Well, no, but I said the same thing about teaching, and I still have a job. I figure I can at least pound out a first draft.

And hey, maybe (maybe) it'll be good. Maybe (maybe) I'll shop it around. Maybe (don't bet on it) something ("something") will happen. Mostly, I'll just be pleased if it turns out I can write ninety consecutive pages about the same thing and it doesn't all suck.

Oh, also -- because I know you're all wondering -- I think I'm going to do some laundry. Like I said, I have four days off.

Dirty laundry

All right, I give. You got me.

It's true, I was warned. I was warned that things would be different. That the secrets of the East were many and profound. And I have kept an open mind and sought, if not to understand, then at least to accept and adapt to the new world around me. But this. This, man.

Seriously. For the love of god. Where is the friggin' lint trap?

Two weeks, and I found something that bugs the hell out of me. To be sure, there are a few things, minor things. There are no trash cans on the street, so if you decide to have a Coke outside, you gotta hang onto it all the way home. The public bathrooms are, shall we say, more public than I would like. There's that whole plug adapter thing. But I've got a year of struggle and hardship ahead of me with my washer/dryer.

The good news is that I have a washer/dryer in my apartment. It's kind of weird, because it's a single unit: you wash your clothes in it and then push a button, and dry them in it too. But hey, whatever, right? So the good news is that I have something more than a tub, a board, and some lye. The bad news is...everything else.

First of all, the thing holds three kilos. I'm still struggling with the metric conversion, but I think 3 kg works out to something like five and a half socks. Seriously, this thing is small. So I'm faced with washing my clothes every other day, or a fourteen-hour laundry marathon. That's the other thing. It takes literally (really actually literally) three hours to do a load of clothes, because it takes an absurdly long time to do anything. "Standard" washing time is over an hour. "Standard" drying time is an hour and a half. This, incidentally, does not actually dry your clothes; it just gets them hot and damp, like some tiny fat man went jogging in them for ninety minutes. Real dry, you're looking at two, two and a half hours, and it turns all your shirts into balled up newspaper. During which time, of course, you can't start any more laundry because there's only one damn machine.

And -- of course -- all the controls are in Korean. Natch.

Yeah, that was fun. I washed my sheets three times trying to get them dry before I caved and spent the next two hours translating all the controls on my console. Well, "translating." I figured out that the fourth cycle is the "agitate" cycle (or, literally, the "anger" cycle, as in you anger your clothes, which I like). But what are the spin-dry settings: "river," "standard," and "medicine"? And I understand the setting for "synthetics" but not the one below it for "noisy."

It's a good thing everything I own is cotton. And my place comes with an iron, which is probably the best way to get things actually dry -- and pressed, for that matter.

So I figured, this is how I spend my weekends. Two shirts at a time for six hours a load. Whatever. And then yesterday I spend two hours with a load in the dryer, and it comes out piping hot and soaking wet. So I throw it in for another hour. Nothing. So it occurs to me that I might need to clean the lint trap. Only I can't find the lint trap. There's a "drainage atmosphere" setting for "filter cleaner," but I can't get it to respond. There's a sort of a panel on the front, so it's probably under that. But I can't get the panel off, of course. So then I get worried, because aren't dirty lint traps fire hazards or something? I mean, it's one in the morning, and I still have a load of darks, but I need this thing clean, or I'm gonna burn down Korea.

I asked a teacher about it this morning, and he said, "You know, I don't think there is a lint trap. You probably just put too many clothes in."

Oh. Ah.

Well, another bout with that bastard, and I might just burn down Korea anyway.

I have no life, which is still pretty cool.

Weird. People are actually reading my blog. And commenting and stuff. I mean, I know I've been handing it out like I was campaigning for prom queen, but I didn't expect an actual audience. The pressure's on, I guess. I gotta be regular and interesting and all.

That's no problem at the moment, fortunately. Aside from work, I have very little to do. I don't have my Immigration Card yet, which I need to set up my Internet access and my cable. So I can watch one fuzzy channel in Korean, or doot around on my laptop, offline. And even that's been denied me, since my plug adapter went tits up a couple days ago.

Yeah, I bought this swanky, $30 plug adapter the day before I left. It's got, like, six different plugs for sockets in every foreign country you might visit EXCEPT Korea. Well, sort of. It has a European plug, which is exactly like a Korean plug, only the prongs are, like, two millimeters skinnier, which apparently means it fits the outlet okay and trucks along fine -- until a week goes by and it, I don't know, gets all awkward and shy and quits working. So I went to Mega Mart (which is like Korean WalMart -- I suspect it may even be WalMart), which has every damn thing you could want, like plug adapters that are also the wrong size. And none of my teacher friends here are any help, because they all bought computers here. (Joke's on them, though, if they ever leave the country and suddenly discover the world's outlets ain't interested in Korean plugs.) But I've been doing a little research, and I think I've found some electronics alley in Nampo-dong that carries transformers (no, you dork), which I think will work. In the meantime, much of my four-hour lunch break is spent here at the hagweon, checking email and updating the blog.

Furthermore, I'm also wicked broke, despite the shot in the arm Dad gave me. After the initial necessities-of-life outlays, I've got about $150 to last me until 10 August, and, while Korea is pretty cheap compared to the U.S., $150 doesn't make me king. Naturally, the solution to this is to go out drinking after work tonight, preferably at the pricy American joints around Busan National University. Yeah, fine, look. It's just for tonight. It's the first drinks-with-the-teachers night of the month, plus there'll be other Americans and stuff at the bar -- let's call it networking, a career move. After this it's gimbap and yoga for the rest of the month, promise.

Whatever. It's awesome and you know it. Halfway across the world and penniless, cut off from modern technology, surviving on cheap, unidentifiable local cuisine until I can teach my way into a paycheck? I'm so the hottest person you know, so don't even.

Okay, so sometimes I like pretending I'm hot shit, just to see what it feels like.

Even better than New Fine Arts

So observations are over, the training wheels are off, and I'm a day and a half into my new job. My cool new job. My new job which I -- gasp! -- like. Yeah, didja get that? One more time: I like my job. And you know why? Major reason: for once, I'm proud to tell people what I do. So, please, if you could all bear with me for a second while I introduce myself.

*ahem*

Hi, my name's Niko, and I'm an English teacher.


I'm going to get so ragged on by the other Americans here. It's true, I'm still fresh and starry-eyed and I still love all my students, and I'm sure I'll be jaded and grouchy and hate everything and everyone inside of a few months, 'cause it just ain't cool to like stuff, but for now, fuck cool. Fuck it, man, I'm having a great time, and I'm pretty much exactly where I want to be. This morning, I actually did that thing where you look in the mirror and go "I'm a teacher" and get all pleased with yourself and grin and do a little dance. And then I went to work (!) at the school (!!) where I'm a teacher (!!!).

I have six classes: 10 and 11 in the morning, and 4, 6, 7, and 8 in the evening. It's kind of a wonky schedule, I know, but I just pretend I'm in college (only now I stay sober if I have class in the morning). The age groups are all over the place: I've got college kids in the morning, 4th-graders at four, high school kids at six and seven, and a pair of retired bankers in the evening. And every last one of them is K - U - T - E, kute! 'Struth, kids, Koreans are wicked kute. You talk, and they nod and go "ok" and then it's their turn, and they get all shy and quiet and color up and mutter something brilliant or maybe just something goofy, and your insides just goosh and it's all you can do not to just scoop them all into a sack and take them home and set them on your mantlepiece.

Oh, Koreans. *sigh* They're like kittens, only people.