A DAY IN LIFE (The heavy Version)

These days words aren’t coming as readily as I’d like to write them. I wake early, I eat tofu, I brush my teeth; most of myself-I invest into my students. The only other significant weekly interaction I have is with my co-teacher, which upon reflection, is a bit beyond my adjectative descriptions. His path, has almost completely been defined and layered before him, and yet, he is pleasantly sanguine while persisting an unusual insightfulness into the passing of his personal possibilities- of which, importantly-ironically, were never realistic choices available to him. Meets me, defined by my contrastingly open path, a lack of commitment to definition –me; and my late-blooming increasing opportunities arriving from a Western world. We glimpse each other’s world; and we are better for it. We are linked in a bright but dormant friendship by our mutual humbled open-mindedness; we relate in limited language; - we connect our concerns ever-so-slowly in a culturally wrapped world which is consumed with the fastness of Change. It is a world newly fraught with global definitions.

My interaction with the rest of the faculty and teachers consists of little or no words, sincere smiles, mutual respect, and mystery (none the better for my slow acquisition of the Korean language).

Afternoons are filled with surprisingly long forced readings of Einstein’s biography, Freud’s interpretation of dreams, a Korean culture book, painting, music, pushups, learning for a ripped version of Korean Rosetta Stone, jogging fall nights, avoidance of electronic media, and/or massive consumption of fantasy genre books, or, that is, none of the above.

These weekday nights, I’m recently thinking, are powerfully capable of defining me in the future. As a resident in a border rural town in the mountains one is tempted to distract oneself from their completely revealing solitude, or conversely, to somberly develop themselves from shortcomings into something new. This is the beginning of a new adventure, where once were youthful definitions of love.