Yesterday was a very long day. I got up and went with Curt to the hospital in the morning, for a stupid reason: I had done a health checkup / drug screening back in May, because it’s required for the Provincial Office of Education for hagwon employees, but then Curt forgot (or procrastinated on) submitting the paperwork from it, such that it was “out of date” when he went to submit it. So… I had to do it again.
I’m still suffering from too high blood pressure. And I haven’t managed to shed any pounds, either. I continue to be frustrated with my feeling that I should be managing these things better somehow. Probably, that frustration leads to stress which is the cause of the cortisol that’s causing the problems in the first place. Sigh.
After the hospital, Curt and I had some juk (rice porridge) at a juk-joint in my neighborhood. We were eating, and Curt told me that he doesn’t actually like juk. “Why did you get it?” I asked. “You got it,” he explained. It was an odd moment. Like a moment in a novel, interpolated into a regular reality.
Later, I had a busy day at work. And I went with some coworkers to Costco with the idea of buying some Halloween-themed stuff for our hagwon Halloween party next week, only to find that Costco had exactly 1 (one) Halloween decoration in stock. It was dumb. We bought a lot of candy, but we’ll have to find the Halloween stuff elsewhere, or improvise our own (which I would personally prefer but doing that does seem to be labor intensive).
Then we had a hoesik (business-dinner) for a departing coworker – nothing more exciting than watching a bunch of Koreans drinking too much. Well, that’s cynical. I genuinely like and respect most of my coworkers – they’re good people and well-meaning. And often very hard-working, too – more so than I am, in point of fact. But I always feel awkward in the alcohol-themed hoesik – especially since I’ve gone back to my teetotaller ways, lately. I did have one cup of beer – and it was enough to leave me feeling woozy and with a splitting headache in the morning – or maybe that was just staying up too late.
You definitely learn things about people in that kind of environment that you can’t learn if you don’t see them that way. Which is why I always go to hoesik, even though I feel awkward about it. It’s anthropologically fascinating. That sounds so cold, doesn’t it?
