The farmers have been burning the rice stubble in their fields, these days. The air is often smoky. Combine this with the fact that Glory County has a propensity for coastal fog-type weather, and you get these days when the lowering sun is just a red-orange disk pasted to a hazy, smooth sky that's the same color as end-of-the-week school-cafeteria spicy fish soup.
This morning, it's so foggy out I can't even make out the shiny blue roof of the Hyundai Oilbank gas station 30 meters in front of my apartment building, much less the highway beyond that.
I was so exhausted last night. A week that started in the hospital with food poisoning, and ended with the third graders finally performing their little musical, combined with a right-at-the-same-time visit to our newly remodeled language classroom by the county education superintendent – Ms Ryu was frazzled and panicked as we all scrambled to make it "inspection ready" to meet our vice principal's peculiar, vaguely military notion of orderliness and presentability. The bigwigs came and admired the technology and Ms Ryu talked a mile-a-minute.
It seems I availed myself, more or less – the hotshots were a little bit impressed with the pet foreigner teacher who could actually say a few coherent sentences in Korean. The defining moment was as they were leaving, and the superintendent shook my hand, and I said, gesturing at Ms Ryu, "이선생님이 열심히 하세요" [this teacher works hard]. I think that set the right tone of humility and respect, and at the same time, gave her some often unreceived positive light from her higher-ups. I hope it wasn't too forward of me to offer praise of a coworker in this way – I know Korean office politics work in weird and mysterious ways, as compared to in Western culture.
And then, like that, it was all over. There were parents and proud, happy children all over the school. Some kids stopped by, wondering about the afterschool classes, but they had been cancelled. I had expected to have to stay late, but instead, sitting a little bit bored in front of the computer at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, winding down from so much intensity and stress, I read on the screen a little pop-up message from the administrative office that the vice principal was pleased with how hard everyone had worked for the arts fair, and that therefore we were free to leave at 4 pm instead of 5.
I read the message, in my wackily-pronounced Korean, out loud to my co-teacher, Ms Lee.
"What, really?" she exclaimed in English. She ran over to where I was sitting (she had been sitting at the desk with the fancy new computer that, coincidentally, is too fancy to run the antiquated messaging software the school uses, so she hadn't seen the message, and I knew that).
"Do you know what that means?" she asked.
"Yes. We can leave early."
"Wow, your Korean is getting really good."
It felt very good, at that.
Still, I got home not much earlier than I normally do, though – I only managed a slightly earlier bus back from Hongnong, and I stopped in the 축협 하나로 grocery on the way back from the bus terminal. I bought lots of juice, some tomatoes, and one of my decadences: plasticky Korean processed cheese. I felt really OK, but exhausted.
And, I was terrified of going out to the regular Friday night's pizza and beer gathering of foreigner teachers – because that pizza and beer is now mentally linked with my food poisoning experience. That was what I'd eaten right before getting so horribly sick, a week ago. I'm not sure I'll be able to eat pizza or drink beer for a long, long time, given how… erm, vividly… it all came back up. Even if that wasn't the actual source of the infection – since no one else got it, that I know of, I have my doubts. But what in the world was it, then? Who knows.
I stayed home, watching some Korean drama that I can't understand, and was fast asleep with the TV still on at 7:30 pm. And then I had a restless night. Ever since I stopped the morning coffee (which I did after getting sick because of the nausea and meds), my sleep has been weird and uneven. I woke up 5 or 6 times in the night, even surfing the web for about 20 minutes at 1 or 2 am. I know that the lack of caffeine does this to me.
And so I dreamed cloudy, murky dreams filled with singing children and burning rice fields and political pundits. A sort of postmodern Mordor of the mind.
Good morning. I'm not going to do much this weekend. That's the plan. I just need to take it easy, I think.