I had fully intended to take advantage of having this Saturday off to travel down to Gwangju, this weekend. I had even declared my intention, which often serves to get me more motivated. But I have lost my motivation, once again, to travel. I have been so not-interested-in-traveling, in recent months – or even longer. The longest trip I’ve taken since moving back to Ilsan over a year ago is to Gangnam, on the south side of the Han River in Seoul. Why am I not into going places?
My journey has felt very interior, lately. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
As far as traveling this specific weekend, to Gwangju… I suppose I’ve been feeling a little bit depressed, and it’s harder to get out and do stuff when in that state of mind, obviously. Foremost, I’ve been depressed about my health: my inability to lose the weight I’ve targetted for losing, my inability to exercise as much as I promise myself I’ll do, a sort of general feeling of poor health. My students don’t help – yesterday I had a grumpy student muttering under his breath about my 똥배 [ttong-bae] – literally, “shit-gut” but basically it’s a low-talking word for what we call beer belly. Students are often unkind.
I’m not as depressed about work as I had been feeling earlier this Spring, but I continue to despise my lack of DRIVE with respect to trying to improve my Korean. Although realistically, I am doing things, I am studying it, I am improving. But it’s so very, very slow. And take, for example, my recent resumption of my custom of posting vocabulary words alongside my blog entries, in my “-Notes for Korean-” (e.g. previous blog post). It’s pretty discouraging to go back and look at Notes from 4 years ago on this blog and see the exact same vocabulary items …talk about feeling like being on a treadmill.
Anyway, apologies to my various friends in Gwangju for the fact that I never go there to visit. To my other friends and family, apologies for blogging about utterly banal and depressing personal topics (TMI?)- but this blog is also, more and more, a kind of continuing journal of my life and state of mind.
This weekend, I am going to draw some pictures. Maybe.