caveat: and on the 8th day, they gave me some food

its not that i forgot the tastes. but with a reengineered tongue and mouth, my face must have been like a babys that first time you give them some new thing to eat. its not the taste thats blowing their minds but rather their efforts to sort out how to control this new object placed there. theres a lot to sort out . . chewing, but not so much as to chew the tongue, then steering the pieces gradually backward and toward the right tube at the back so as not to choke. imagine youve lost all of that automaticity . . . every bite takes several minutes to sort through. i still bit my tongue once.

they gave me juk (rice porridge), fish broth, some finely chopped beef with cabbage and carrots, some fake crab salad, white kimchi, and greens. i managed about 30 percent of the total, focused mainly on juk and fish broth.

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caveat: more becoming ghost

one week ago this morning i went into surgery.

i had already long ago acquired a mental habit of chacterizing major life flexion points such as this as moments of becoming ghost. the reasons for this mental vocabulary are complicated and personal, but include how formative Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was in my youth (ghost) and how influential Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaux was in my subsequent philosophical development (becoming). ive been on this road before: the monotonous hospital hours punctuated by vertiginous pain or impotent frustration.

the beautiful green whooshing trees outside my window provide relief, as does the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends. the ghost, with time, re-anchors himself in the world, a transformed being imminent in the traces of pain and kindness scored across the body of the preceding being.

caveat: giving the white man’s nod to ajeossi

i was doing one of my "orbits" of the ward earlier while my friend grace was visiting. there are plenty of other patients trundling their ivs of varying complexity around the halls at almost any time of the day or night. we all walk around like somnabulent ghosts of diverse mood and genre.

because, currently, i cannot walk and talk at the same time – to walk i need a hand to steer the iv stand, while to talk i need a hand to put pressure on my tracheal hole, and my sum total of working hands is less than two – we just keep a pensive silence as i trundle purposively.

"there. you did it again," she laughed.

i stopped, carefully parking the iv stand close to a corridor wall. i picked up my folded sheet of clean gauze, and pressed it at the base of my neck. briefly clearing my throat first, i finally managed a weak, "did what?"

"i see you're giving the white man's nod to ajeossi now." she seemed surprised.

there are some terms in that statement that require explanation to anyone not inhabiting the narrow english-speaking expat community of south korea.

"the white man's nod" is the subtle acknowledgement, short of actual greeting, that seems to arise between the confreres of any visible minority in any place, so it doesnt belong exclusively to white men – the naming of the term is more the exception that proves the rule. any non-asian who has spent time in korea knows – when youre walking down the street and pass another non-asian, you almost always share a little nod or duck of the head, as if to say "oh, there goes another foreigner like me. here we are, foreigners in korea."

the other term here is ajeossi [아저씨] which just means an older korean male of indeterminate social status.

both these terms being known to me, i quickly grasped what grace was talking about. "i suppose." i said without hesitation, "its not really a white mans nod as a cancer patients nod." 

and its true – our pajamas and our iv stands a-trundling, we are highly visible and almost a majority. i think the nod has always been more about a sort of solidarity in shared difference as opposed to any kind of greeting at all: "oh, there goes another cancer patient. here we are, cancer patients in the halls."

graces insight is to point out the sociological identity of two seemingly unrelated situations.

Caveat: Telling It Wrong

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, “Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it’s funny or not?” Gödel replies, “We can’t know that because we’re inside the joke.” Chomsky says, “Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.” – See more at: Marginal Revolution

This one of those things I had stockpiled for when I didn't have much to say. Time is really dragging yet I often lack the energy to do anything except cooperate with the nurses, go to the bathroom and take naps. My friend Peter came today, unexpectedy. Just as he arrived, my favorite nurse (my "Korean teacher") said (in Korean, I translate her sense not her exact words), "Oh good a friend came. He was looking a little depressed [실망] and lonely [혼자]." Peter brought a paper newspaper (Korean Herald) which by skimming helps ward off the worst symptoms of internet withdrawal. He is very kind.

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