I woke up at dawn this morning without an alarm (about 4:50 am), and decided to eat breakfast, because later today I'm going into the hospital for some outpatient tests (MRI etc) and I'm not allowed to eat or drink water for 6 hours before that.
So I ate my bowl of nurungji (which is a common breakfast of mine lately because it's porridgy, a bit like rice oatmeal or something). I have given up coffee – at least for now, which is a really hard thing to give up. So I drank several cups of water with my breakfast and some weak corn-tassel (옥수수수염차) tea.
Then at 6 am or so I lay down again, and after reading a few pages of a current book-in-progress, I went back to sleep quickly and almost unexpectedly.
I dreamed I was writing my blog. That's not really surprising, I guess.
But the topic of my blog was furniture. Only furniture.
In my dream, I was reading through old entries on my blog. There was an entry about a table. A few about sofas. One about a chair. Somehow, I was writing extensively about these things, but there was nothing at all interesting or remarkable about them as I read them.
That's all there was in the dream – it wasn't long or complicated, but it managed to be quite memorable and vivid. I woke up feeling banal and empty and pointless. Waking up from that dream was like putting down a Kafka novel halfway through, out of frustration and boredom.
My current schedule is to complete these tests today, and check into the hospital for surgery next Tuesday (July 2). Next Thursday or Friday (July 4 or 5) will be my actual surgery day. I feel dread about that. It's a big deal – a major surgery with lots of potential complications and immense impact on my functionality afterward.
In essence, yesterday (Thursday) was my last day of actual work. I will likely be visiting work at least once or twice either Saturday or Monday or both, but Curt and Helen (the subdirector) have cleared my teaching schedule. Hopefully some replacement is found – we interviewed someone yesterday but she wasn't commital. I guess regardless, they'll manage. Did I mention that of ten teachers, two are currently having health-crises, now? Another teacher, a Korean, has been in the hospital since last week, too.
Curt must feel that the plagues of heaven have decended upon his hagwon.
It's Karma. Karma+, even.