Caveat: It’s OK

I was having dinner with my friend Peter out in Ilsan last night.  We went to the Hoa Binh (Vietnamese Pho seen through a Korean lens, roughly) at La Festa.  Talking about various things, I was feeling very patient with my current limbo. 

After eating I showed Peter the convenient 하이마트 (Hi-Mart) supermarket that's almost literaly across from his building, that he didn't know was there.  I used to shop there when walking back home from work, because it was right on the way and not out of the way like the other supermarkets I knew about. 

Peter and I parted ways, and I was walking to Juyeop station to take the subway back into Mapo-gu when I spontaneously decided to ride a bus instead.  I stood on the bus-stop island and waited for a bus to go by that had in its destination list a location not too far from where my guesthouse is (near Hapjeong).  I ended up hopping on a Number 72 bound for Sinchon.  Not super close, but I knew how to get from Sinchon to Hapjeong easily — it's only 2 stops away on the circle line and I've walked it before, too.

I felt very pleased and competent to be able to just get on a bus, at 9 pm on bitterly cold winter night (-13 C), in this vast, alien metropolis.  Meaning… it's not so alien to me. I know my way around.

It was a local route, and zigzagged through Ilsan, then Hwajeong, then Susaek.  It was about 50 minutes.  I listened to my mp3 player and gazed out the window.  Life is good.

Sinchon is Seoul's Greenwich Village, basically. Trendy, tons of shopping and nightclubs, a bohemian and university neighborhood.  I like walking through there, although it's so "youth oriented" that I sometimes get melancholy.

I took the circle line (green line #2) back to Hapjeong.   I'm craving tteokbokki really bad – it's great comfort food when it's cold — but I didn't see any places selling it on the walk back to the guesthouse.  Hmm, maybe tomorrow.

Caveat: Deistic Distraction

I formulated this last fall, and wrote in a paper notebook. I googled it, and it's unsaid, at least in this form. So I declare authorship of this aphorism at least for now.

"The reason we should not believe in god isn't because there is no god, but because believing in god distracts us from what's important in life."

Here is another quip written nearby in the same paper notebook, that appears original to my own formulation to the best of my ability to research it.

"It hardly matters at all where I end up. Just being there is what's interesting."

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