after visiting a temple and a famous buddha on the island we walked back down the hill along a forested trail. more about the temple and the buddha later.
Day: August 17, 2013
caveat: 석모도
riding the short ferry to 석모도 [seongmo island].
caveat: unpleasant speculation
what if the main and most notable side effect of the radiation treatment was a generalized, unfocused grumpiness?
ive been feeling that feeling a lot lately. i suppose its connected to a correspondingly generalized, unfocused feeling of being "under the weather." but as i attempt to travel a day trip to ganghwa with my brother and hollye, i cant help but be conscious of how short my temper is, and how easily i succumb to feelings of frustration or annoyance.
why is it easier to find equanimity in a hospital in a radiation machine than it is on a bus with andrew? that doesnt seem logical.
Caveat: and other yummy alright people in my right mind hey
My friend Peter was playing with the auto-captioning feature on youtube, while watching the video I posted last week of my telling my cancer story to my 7th graders. Honestly, I had never played with this youtube feature before. I was vaguely aware of its existence but I had assumed that if the quality was anything like google translate, it wouldn’t be that useful.
I was right, but I’d underestimated its sheer entertainment value. Having watched my video in snippets with the captioning turned on, I’ve laughed several times.
Peter found and screenshotted one of the best, which he sent to me:
I found this one, too, which matches up with me saying “I feel great.”
I know the software is terrible, but seeing this nevertheless also induced some insecurities with respect to my enunciation, which of course is “re-learned” on my newly re-engineered tongue and vocal tract. I’ll keep working to improve on that. It’s important to me to provide comprehensible input to my students, and lately I’ve been worrying that they’re understanding even less than normal, and just being quiet out of pity or politeness. That’s a hard battle, in Korea.
Caveat: A Saturday’s Banality
I woke up this morning with a very vaguely nauseated feeling. Probably something I wouldn't have even noticed, normally, or something I would have associated with feeling a bit tired or just unmotivated to eat breakfast as sometimes happens. But currently undergoing radiation treatment, it's natural to want to read more into it. I quickly magnified it into all kinds of half-hypochondrical fantasies, and found it hard to eat breakfast. I texted to Andrew and let him know that I was deciding not to try to do an overnight adventure this weekend, as we had somewhat discussed and half-planned.
Walking to work, however, the nauseated feeling seemed to fade.
Later, at work, I felt that way again, however. Not bad, just sort of a background feeling of wooziness. Teaching was effortful – lecturing for a full hour with a dry mouth proved a bit of a challange, but I solved it by keeping a cup of water handy. And actually, both my classes today felt very successful and I was happy with them.
After work, I went over to my "old" apartment, where Andrew and Hollye are staying, and had a lunch of a very large and diverse salad, of the sort almost impossible to find in Korea except at higher end, very westernized restaurants maybe – the sort of restaurant I rarely frequent, anyway. I almost never make such salads for myself, because making salads for oneself always seems to lead to a lot of wastage of vegetables over the longer term. So it was good to have it, and delicious.
Then I packed up a suitcase and rolled it over to my "new" apartment, and here I am, posting to this here blog thingy. It's been a long break between updates – almost 24 hours, which, in recent times, I don't generally let happen.
I'm feeling far from the top of my game, but I'm hanging in there. More later.