A Long Time Coming

Every morning I wake up and say, "Today's Sam, you need to write a blog post today."

I always scrunch my eyes up and curse and continue, "you spent last year taking two trips to Japan, you're almost done with your second draft, you've developed a horrendous tea habit and even learned to drink it plain, what gives? You've had a real Christmas and even had a friend come visit you - look at how much you have to write about!"

Every night I go to bed and say, "God damn it. Tomorrow, then. Maybe tomorrow's Sam will be better."

And she never is.

I'm Bad at Titles for Important Posts.

I haven't really had the heart to post. I wasn't really sure how to pick everything back up after my last post, you know? "Hey guys, my dog died" felt kind of lame and a strange explanation for my absence. I accidentally stumbled across that silly Rainbow Bridge poem on Saturday and found myself bawling for a half hour while trying to put makeup on, that was an adventure in and of itself.

But I promise you, I am happy.

I guess in several regards, my life is wonderful. I have a stable job, cheap rent, a short commute. I live on my own working one job when most of my friends from home are working three or four to live in a city and have the kind of life I'm having. (I actually uttered "I can't handle partying this weekend" a few hours ago). I'm sharing this whole experience with amazing people and an even more amazing significant other.

When I travel, the world looks like this and I still put my book down in my lap to stare out the window like an idiot because even though I've passed by the same mountains and farmlands and rice paddies and sky a hundred times before it still wows me, it still makes me want to pick up a notebook and write something, anything, because that's what people like us do when we see nice things, I think.

I have been uncertain the past couple weeks, and the uncertainty led to silence, because I didn't want to admit that I felt like I had nowhere to go in my life. When you have a thousand different paths you want to take, you really have none. My contract here is for a year, and it is up in November. I wanted to go to grad school, I wanted to live some type of Bohemian cafe life. I wanted to see the world, I wanted to go to brunch in New Paltz. I want to be home for Christmas, I want to stand on the edge of the dateline for New Years. I wanted to work in editing, I wanted to work in publishing, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to be eighteen again and redoing everything that went wrong because to be this uncertain has to mean I made a mistake, somewhere. I wonder what it was.

 I don't know if I'm making the right decision, and maybe I'm not really making a decision at all. Maybe what I'm doing is the complete opposite of making a decision and it's really just procrastinating the inevitable. Or maybe I'm learning that not everything has to be settled at once. Maybe one day I'll shake the feeling that I have to have an itinerary for every night out, every vacation, every year of my life.

Yesterday I re-signed my contract.

See you guys in 2015.

Busan Sand Festival, Or, The Last Time I Was Remotely Dry Was Next to the Ocean

Hey, everyone! A few days ago my amazingly wonderful friend Danielle posted an interview with me on her booklover's website site, Bibliosmiles! Go check it out, and all the other awesome articles there!

I've been sitting on these pictures for a long, long time now. We went to Busan's Haeundae Beach for a mini-vacation to definitely not drink, and ended up there during the Sand Festival. I didn't even know it was an actual Festival until after we'd already gotten home and I saw it mentioned somewhere else. (Duh?)

Stare Too Deeply into the Abyss...

It got dark for a while, you guys.

Real talk, I had some stuff happen that completely killed my motivation to do just about, like, anything. My days were literally wake up, shower, breed pokemon, go to work, breed pokemon, sleep. I ate, but it was ramen or cereal and nothing else. I think my weight dropped to a point somewhere in March where I actually had a moment of 100% true self-awareness looking in the mirror and went "wow, ick, that's not right. I'm gonna go get Dunkin." Which if any of you know anything about me, is pretty dire.

This is Why Gameboys Were Banned in 1998.

People of the blogosphere, I have made an observation.

Kids have a past time that involves beating a dead horse with another dead horse stuffed with the garlicky flavored corpse of a third, just-as-dead horse.

I am, of course, talking about Frozen.

Almost a Month!

I'm not sure if this is the longest I've been without going home.

I don't want to say it is, but I went home for so many weekends during college - there was even a horrible weekend where I went home crying because I just couldn't handle staying with my roommate any longer. I went home a lot. If I didn't go home, I went to Dan - who quickly started to feel like a second home, no matter where he was.

Either way, this weekend is going to mark my one month anniversary of arriving in Korea! Woo! I'll probably spending this weekend much like I spend every other weekend here in the big K.

Alone and drinking.

But! Great news! This weekend might be one of my last lonely-lonely weekends for a long time, becauuuseee...

...Dan's coming next weekend! Next weekend! Next weekend! I'm excited in real life you guys! I'll be heading up to Seoul next Saturday and possibly meeting him at Incheon so I can make sure he doesn't get horrendously lost like I did upon arrival. I'm a little nervous about navigating everything on my own, but what's the worst that could happen? I got here, didn't I? (The cab driver bought my bus ticket to get here, everyone basically handheld me every step of the way, I haven't actually had to talk to someone for directions since I got here because I've been relying on my cell phone. So yes, the worst could be pretty bad I suppose.)

Anyway, being a teacher is weird.

I'm not entirely sure I'm too great at it. The class structure for one of my classes is so confusing, I don't understand it at all and especially after tonight, I feel like it's a million times more nonsensical but I don't know who to ask. I'm apparently the first one teaching with this material - does that mean I just make it up as I go along? Because that's what i'm about to do. Things like having to administer a review test on vocabulary even though they were never given the vocab books make me seem like the Wicked Witch of the East. I hate it. They hate me (I mean, they're teenagers, so it's not exactly like I'm a special case here). It's pretty bad.

Come to think of it, I think I might have been the only person back home who never had that "I want to be a teacher when I grow up!" moment during school. I also seemed to be the only person not related to a teacher, though, so maybe that has something to do with. Either way, this was never in my stars. It's strange and foreign and sometimes I wonder what the hell I've gotten myself into.

But there are some times when do I really, really like what I'm doing. 

I have a class today (Wednesday, America) that's just a supplementary session - so essentially three hours of sitting around reading through a single textbook and working through easy problems. There are only three girls in the class, they're all very young, and all very adorable.

But last week was the first session, and I met them for the first time. There are two that are clearly friends outside of class, and sat next to each other right in front of my desk. But then there was a third girl, who came in, sat down on the opposite side of the room and just huddled.

The other two girls spent the whole class answering questions, getting things right, speaking out loud and asking me things when they wanted to. It was a great three hours. But the girl in the corner just...didn't. I couldn't really get her to speak. She would get frustrated and shake her head and clam up whenever she started to say something, and she always spoke so quietly. At the end of that first class, I felt horrible, because I felt like she had left herself out and I'd been there so many times.

So this class, I decided I would do something different. There's only three of them, and it's not like they have to take any quizzes. It's just us and this silly book.

So I got up to my classroom today and did exactly what I had been thinking about for the past week: I set sail for Desk Island.

I pushed four of the desks into a little huddle in the center, put their vocab lists and worksheets on each one, and waited for them to come in. When they came in, none of the girls understood right away - they all wanted to sit in the rows like usual, like I guess they do in every other class, ever. But when I let them know they were sitting in the little desk-huddle, they looked confused, but followed. And when the bell rang, I just scooted my chair over to the empty desk at their island.

The quiet girl was the one I did this for. I'm not worried about the other two, they're both outgoing and they have each other. And Desk Island was fun - I sat with them and we did the work together instead of me standing up at the board while they remain scattered at all corners of the Earth. 

And you know what? It worked almost immediately. Last week I'd had the two of the three of them reciting answers while the third hid her face behind her hair. This week, by the end of the class she was the most vocal of all. I can get her to read, answer questions, and together we can always figure out the word she's looking for so she didn't clam up as much!

And at the end I asked them, "Do you guys want to keep the desks like this? Or do you want to go back to rows?" The two girls shrugged and after some prodding admitted they wanted to keep the desks like this for our class. 

I looked at the quiet one, and immediately she smiled at me, and jabbed her finger down on the desk.

So Desk Island is staying, you guys, and maybe I might not be so bad at this after all.

I teach them things, clearly. Not pictured is an hour later, 

when I "taught" them the names of the Backstreet Boys.

The Life and Times of a Korean Bed Slug

I am turning into the laziest human being possible these days.

I live five feet from my job, have no cash, and a laptop with fast internet.

Settling In

It's been a tough four days of radio silence, but I finally have internet! I'm a little disappointed I broke 2k pageviews while I was gone, but hey, here's to 2000 more!

I passed training, obviously. Otherwise I'd be typing this from New York and probably a lot more drunk than I actually was Friday night. (Beer here seems weaker? At least, I can drink it, which is a good sign it's actually just water.)

So slowly but surely, I'm settling into my new home. 

That some place like this even exists in real life blows my mind. 

I'm actually off to teach my first class in about an hour or so - in something I wasn't even trained in. So needless to say, I'm a little terrified. But I sat in on classes yesterday and at the very least I've managed to convince myself that if I run out of things to say, the kids'll have plenty.

(Sidenote: to the boys yesterday who started slinging Harry Potter spells at each other, props on pulling out 'reducto' and not just settling on 'avada kedavra' like a bunch of plebs. I'm proud of you.)

I have a lot to say! I've been silent for almost four days and I hope I don't wait that long again...until then, I leave you with these words of wisdom: Never ignore the buy 2 get 1 deals on the canned coffee here. You're gonna drink three of them anyway and this crippling regret doesn't look good on anyone.

Oof!

In three hours I'll be taking my final exam for training, you guys.

If I pass, in 12 or so hours I should be in Jeonju, my home for the next year.

If I...y'know...don't pass, I'll be more than willing to grab coffee with someone this weekend once I'm home. Ha-ha?

This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life, and mostly I'm just sad that no matter what happens, I'll be leaving Seoul much earlier than I wanted to.

Que sera sera (but really, holy shit I'm so scared, I am not ready for this.)

Gangnam Style

I figured I would find a way to address the elephantine joke in the room - next to "say hello to Kim Jong-Un for me" the notion of somehow coming into contact with PSY might be one of the most frequent "what-ifs" I was presented with in the seven months leading up to heading over.

I don't know, you guys. What if I met PSY? What if you met Weird Al? 

"I wouldn't meet Weird Al," they'd say, and then I'd just give them a long, level look, and go back to passive aggressively pretending there's something more interesting in my pretend text that I just got on my phone.

Dawn of the First Day

Oof, you guys. I am exhausted.

It's Sunday here, which is strange because when I left it was Friday. Time zones are weird.

Here Goes Nothing

Today's the day, you guys.

By this time tomorrow, I'll be in the air on my way to Seoul. It's been a ridiculously fast 7 months...has it really only been seven months?

I'm trying to finish up my last-minute packing, a feat that ended up being a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I feel like I've packed too much and not enough all at the same time.

I don't really have much to say right now, I'm sure I'll be all chock full of interesting things come Saturday. They said I'd be able to buy an adapter for my laptop at the airport, so I hope they're right, that way I can sit right down when I get to the hotel and tell everyone I'm actually alive.

Time to go take a shower and try to fall asleep amid my luggage for a couple hours.

Love you guys, see you on the other side of the world.

Slowing Down

I woke up this morning at 10AM.

I rolled out of bed and quickly found the envelope of visa photos I had misplaced in the mess of papers on my desk, also uncovering my Starbucks card (which helps because ever since my iTouch was stolen, I haven't bought Starbucks due to not having the app anymore - I know, tragic, right?)

The second I found the photos, I turned around, and crawled back into bed. I was awake for all of five minutes.

1PM.

I woke up again, my mouth still hurting from my wisdom tooth surgery despite it being almost two weeks ago, and my head still stuffed up and fuzzy from sleep. I debated going back to bed. 

I compromised, hauled my laptop up onto my lap, and opened my 3DS to play more Pokemon because it feels like the only thing I want to do anymore.

3:45PM.

I finally slid out of bed. I grabbed a bagel, and now here I am, still wearing the warmest leggings I've ever owned and the Starbucks hoodie I'd gotten last year when I first started my job. For the first time in weeks, I feel like I finally got enough sleep. 

I'll be in Seoul on November 9th.

I don't really know what to think about that. If the alternative is staying here, working at Starbucks, that's not really much of an alternative. And all my reservations are internalized - what if I can't do it? How am I going to keep myself busy for the next year without my computer? How could I ever make friends? I've never taught before. Hell, I might not even get past the training. I might not even ever see Jeonju - the city where I've found out I'm going, which specializes in something called bibimbap which frankly looks delicious and I think I could eat for the next year of my life and not complain.

I taught myself how to read Hangul. Not the language. Literally just the word. Hangul. 한글
It's something, and I think I want to at least learn the entire alphabet soon. Already knowing how the words are structured makes it look less like a bunch of boxes and circles (which is how I had always seen it before) and more like a language. I may not be able to know what the words mean, but maybe if I can at least read them as such, it'd be a lot less scary.

And this whole thing is scary. It's terrifying. But I'm the kind of person who's nver taken a risk in their life about anything. For full disclosure, I didn't even drink until I as 21.

But now, ask anyone who's ever seen me up on a chair or trying to make friends with fat raccoons - it's a risk I'm glad I took. So i'm going into the city tomorrow to go to the Korean consulate and get my visa. And then once that's done, I can buy my plane ticket.

And then, maybe, I'll be brave enough to pull my luggage out of the cardboard it came in.