Summer vacation

We get one day off for summer vacation at school, which is today. I leave in about an hour and change to head east for another suit fitting and dinner w/family friends. I woke up today at 6:30am and could NOT fall asleep b/c the cicadas were insanely noisy, so I had to put my earplugs in for a few more hours of sleep. Last week, I couldn't decide if I should do laundry b/c it had been raining, but then my aunt said, the cicadas have started up! They only start singing when it's not going to rain anymore. So then I did my laundry. I love that I get to be around people who know things like that.

I met Diana, a current Fulbrighter and a poet, yesterday for tea time, and it was great to finally meet her in person after harassing her for over a year w/questions re: Fulbright. I had just realized on the way there that the stipend is pretty much below the poverty line and how it will be a challenge to budget the coming year. The only way that I'm more comfortable now is thru family and friends, which has always been the hallmark of Korean culture: going all out for people in your circle. It's kind of amazing, even when it can be difficult.

Then I met my language exchange partner, which was really nice. I attempted to explain asiaphiles to her as well as the impossibility of people who are conditioned a certain way to see Asian women as just people - that they can't separate "Asian-ness" from personhood. We talked about the recent controversy over Dokdo, a bunch of tiny rocks/islands between Korea and Japan. Both countries have claimed them for a LONG time and just yesterday G.W. Bush made a statement about how they need to decide it once and for all.

Time to catch the train.

Western medicine back east

I have work in two more shows opening this month, one in Denver and one in Japan:

Interweavings
August 1 - September 13
Abecedarian Gallery, Denver, CO
Artists' Reception - Monday August 25, 6-8pm

Your Documents Please
August 2 - 17
ZAIM, Yokohama, Japan
(with the rest of the show down the block at Galerie Paris

I had a fantastic experience today at the International Health Care Center at Severance Hospital. I walked in, filled out a tiny half-page form w/basic info, was asked to return at 2pm (30 min later), did some homework, and went back. After waiting a few minutes, they took my bp and temp, had me wait a little more, and then I saw the doctor. She was super nice, fluent in English, very calm and reassuring, and didn't condescend or NOT listen or scoff at my concerns. She also didn't act like she had a million other things to do, or that there were other people waiting that she had to get to right away. Then an escort took me to the sampling place, showed me what to do, and took me back to the clinic. I paid for the lab work, and was told to call on Friday for test results, and that was that! Done in 30 minutes flat, with courteous service in a clean, well-lighted place. Soothing music, too. Also, the hospital was nice and fancy and clean and generally just a nice place to be - no weird smells or glaring white walls - almost like being in a museum, with way more people.

I am SO happy to be out of the hands of the American health care system right now. Just delighted.

Pale

I know, it took a million years for me to customize my template. It's not like I have any more time now than I ever did, but it just had gone on for too long. I had kept the tacky green one only out of deference to Polarchip, who inspired me to blog a few years ago. She had started w/the pink version, so I went w/green, and then she went on to change her template about a million times. And I just got stuck in my ways. I meant to change it once I turned 30, and then once I got to Korea, and so on. Now I am going to sleep through grammar lessons tomorrow. My excuse for staying up so late is that I have to wait for the mosquito spray to take in my bedroom.

Last night, I stayed up late trying to finish all the pieces for my subscription series. It felt good to work again but then I had to get up at 6:30am today and take two more exams. Today, I met with Jeong-In Cha, an artist and illustrator who also makes books and does amazing things to support the book arts community in Seoul, namely Artistbookseoul. I also met her sister, Gina Cha, who curates books as well. The studio was SO gorgeous and lovely. I was just happy to sit in a studio for an afternoon and hear about the artistic community in Seoul, how artists are viewed in Korea, and get the inside scoop on the recent book arts fair in Seoul. Funny, since many of my old colleagues from Chicago won prizes at this summer's fair, and it was nice to exchange info - fun for them to hear about how the books were made, and for me to hear about how positively they were received when they arrived in Korea. Hopefully I'll get to visit again soon, WITH my camera so you can see how amazing the space is.

Promises kept

I'm back from Incheon! Apparently, the Pentaport Rock Festival piggybacks on the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, and is one of the biggest in Korea. I waited for about 20 minutes for my cousin after riding the subway for an hour+ and sleeping most of the time. Hilariously enough, my fear of getting eaten by mosquitoes at the festival was a little off. The only attacks that happened were on the air-conditioned subway en route. I was really angry when I woke up from my dozing to see the mosquito that had just bitten me, so I killed it. I know that this is how wars start, but I figure I wouldn't automatically kill a person w/my bare hands if s/he bit me, so I can differentiate between blood-sucking bugs and blood-sucking people.

This is a window grate at the subway station, right near the major river that runs through Seoul. Of course, the sun came out full force right as we arrived at the site, but since it was late afternoon, it only lasted for an hour or two and then calmed down. We went right to the main stage and set up camp. I had never heard of any of the bands (no surprise) that we saw: Hard-Fi, Delispice, and Kasabian. I spent the sunny part of our stay photographing people and being really thankful for zoom lenses. Once we snagged a spot, I did more people watching and then took out my trusty knitting. I knitted for the entire rest of the time.

My cousin got this for us to eat. The hot dog was super spicy! He told me about the Budweiser buy out and we had a good laugh. I have been on the computer too much today so no more typing; here are the pictures.

Playing catch up

I still haven't figured out why mosquito spray is called "F Killer." I'm bracing myself for an afternoon/evening of heavy fire by mosquitoes: I'm going to a rock concert with my cousin and his wife in Incheon, a city west of Seoul and the location of Korea's major int'l airport. It's outdoors, and hopefully my cousin will have picked up a pair of boots for me b/c it has been raining for the last 3-4 days in a row, with the sun coming out today. So it will be muddy and steamy. Can't wait. I'll take my camera, now that I've figured out that I need new batteries (I haven't been taking new photos b/c I had a panic attack several days ago when the thing wouldn't turn on. I had just recharged the batteries but obviously it's time to get a new set, since these are 4-5 years old and not holding a charge. I went to a Canon store in Seoul to ask about the warranty, which wouldn't have been honored here, so thank goodness it's just a power issue).

These are our lockers at school (if you put a deposit down for one). I feel like I'm in junior high b/c whenever I have lunch w/friends after class, I always say, "I need to run to my locker!" Right now, it's holding two bags of crackers, my gift book from Clover, all my homework, a plastic bag, a textbook, and a workbook. That's right, I have two days of exams coming up (Mon/Tues) and I decided to leave my books at school. I figured that even if I study all weekend, I won't get much better at grammar, so why bother? Our teacher must have been concerned on Friday b/c we looked so unhappy during test review, and she said, please don't stress about the tests! Just have fun.

The day before (Thursday), I met another family friend (who has known me since I was a baby) and spent the entire afternoon and evening with her, catching up, eating, getting measured for a new suit (she's a tailor), going to the local market to look for a hanji doll maker (he closed shop a while ago), and watching her make tons of phone calls for me (re: housing in the fall and places to study hanji). On Friday, I had lunch w/a bunch of students from the program: 2 from Japan, 1 from China, 1 from Singapore, and 1 from the US. Then I hiked up the mountain to visit my cousin's friend and met her children, who are crazy beautiful. She's my new local standby b/c my cousin is in Florida for a month w/her kids visiting her sister.

After iced tea, phone calls to random Koreans, and a tiny nap, I went to Sinchon to run errands and meet Kelsey &c (aka 1. her long-lost friend from high school who had moved to Australia and married 2. an Aussie, 3. this friend's cousin who happens to be living in Korea with his 4. Korean gf, and 5. a Korean guy who just spent 10 years in Hawaii and is friends with our Japanese classmate b/c they are in a Chinese-speaking group together). We went to a chicken place for dinner (click here for an image-laden explanation of the food) and then to a club for drinks, where Kelsey's friend (a modern dancer who was in NYC before moving to Seoul five years ago) joined us.

Since everything that I just talked about happened in the kind of rain that makes umbrellas nearly useless, I took all yesterday to sleep in and do calm, at-the-desk activities like studying and working on my first subscription piece. I'm frustrated b/c I wanted to send it out two weeks ago, but have not had the time to sit down and engineer it and make multiples. But hopefully I'll get it done this week. I would do it today, but sometimes you just have to put things off in favor of muddy rock concerts.

Ah yah yay!

I am really really really not as present online as I usually am, which is nice in many ways but also crazy stressful b/c the rest of the people I need to communicate with are still online...so I'm behind, way behind! Still in the throes of planning next year, which means negotiating dates w/Fulbright, the gallery I will show at right after I get back, and the residency I will go to right after I get back. Agh!

BUT in the meantime as I am scattered (I will post more soon about all the things keeping me busy), watch this video of Clover! I met her in grad school, and she's been an amazing friend and colleague and collaborator. A real, dedicated, true performance artist. And artist, period.

Turning Korean (or just turning into Paulette)

Finally! New eyes. I had the same lenses for about five years, so it is really nice to have new ones that aren't all scratched up. The prescription is (amazingly) the same, but they feel much stronger. I was lucky to have my mom's friend meet me near school and take me to the market and haggle with the salesperson. Otherwise, who knows how much I would have paid (though regardless, it would have been less than 1/2 the price I would have paid in the US). It was really nice to meet my mom's friend - she said it was like seeing my mom again b/c I resemble her. Tomorrow, I meet another family friend, which will also be nice. In the meantime, I'm in a crazy scheduling rush for 2009. I am trying to figure out when to return to the US, and thought I had to return early but I might not have to after shuffling dates for a show. It's so hard to know what I will want/need a year from now.

I just had my role play exam today, which I partially bombed by trying to improv a new line and not delivering. Oh well. I had lunch today w/a woman who went to college with my sister - she saw me last week and thought I was my sister. Very random that we're in the same place at the same time. I didn't make it to the opening, but am hoping to hit that museum on Friday afternoon. The weather has not been too oppressive this week, which has given me seemingly boundless energy.

Oh! And I met my language exchange partner today. She's just three years younger than me, and is a psych grad student. She seems really nice and also seems to have values similar to mine, which surprised me (things like not wanting to get married until she finishes school, and doing what she wants to do NOW so she doesn't regret it later). The funny thing is that I feel really weird speaking English to Korean people. Using it with her will be good practice for me, and she's already corrected my Korean a bunch so I'm hoping this will help fill in some of the gaps that classroom work isn't able to address.

Brief bettering

I was just telling Melissa that weather is a real presence out west in the States, and now I realize that I can easily remind myself of the same reality here. I feel GREAT tonight b/c a breeze has come in and it swept away the humidity after the three straight days of rain. After beating myself up for the past month, I forced myself to leave school with all my books and get to Insadong, the area of Seoul w/the folk museum and village and tourist traps, so that I could find the hanji (Korean handmade paper) shop that I've heard about for over a year. I FOUND IT! Bo Kyung Kim of FIDES had given me good directions and even though I was terrified about going and introducing myself, it wasn't so bad. These are the three large sheets that I got for about $45 total.

THESE are the fakey fakey sheets that I got for $4 total - this area has a lot of shops that sell paper that they call "hanji" but is actually just paper made in China for super cheap. Sadly, it's replaced most of the high quality Korean paper, and tourists don't know the difference. The real sheets I got are made in the tradition where two sheets are couched together to make one. This particular shop that I visited is a family-owned one. The father and son work further away in an area with good clean water, making the paper, and the son's wife runs the shop. The father is in his 70s, I think, and learned papermaking from his father, whose father also taught him. So far, it seems like I won't be able to see the real nitty gritty of the mill (family secrets) or apprentice there, but I should be able to visit later in the year since they sometimes have groups of people come by for tours. The woman was very informative and even gave me an article in English written about the family practice and she was happy to have someone come by who knew about papermaking and specifically about hanji. The struggle I'm hearing over and over is the same: cheap Chinese paper undercuts the market, and well-known Japanese paper overshadows the Korean tradition. So more and more Korean papermakers have stopped working (this has been going on for a loooong time; I'm not trying to say it's a recent thing, just that it's a continual pattern). Which is sad, b/c the paper is superior.

Anyhow. I'm feeling better even though my teacher scolded me today for making the same spelling and grammar mistakes over and over again in my homework (I'm one of those notorious phonetic spellers; I just get tired of looking things up and end up guessing). We'll see if I'm motivated enough to go to an opening tomorrow that I just found out about today for thisAbility vs. Disability at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art. I hope I will be, b/c the show seems really interesting. The rumor is that Pauline Oliveros will be there! I haven't seen her perform since the Cat in the Cream at Oberlin almost 10 years ago.

Suddenly frantic

[From the same park near home. I liked this outdoor piece a lot.] Last night, I started to get a little crazy in my head and had to take some melatonin and do some journaling. I've been feeling incredibly limited by my own limitations, wound up with a dissatisfaction with who I am. I realize that my freaking out about my age in comparison with everyone else is just a small indicator of how much I do that in general, and how constantly comparing myself to other people in all aspects always makes me miserable (yet I continue to do it). I feel like I'm not doing ENOUGH here (broken record!) and that everyone else is always doing a million things. So I had all these plans to run errands today but now have to run home b/c I just found out about a print deadline that requires jpgs, which are all at home.

I also realize that I'm out of sorts b/c I'm not doing what I would rather be doing - which would be having a studio, privacy, and time to make art. But yesterday, our class had a funny practice session for the song we have to perform in a few weeks: we went for karaoke! The place was kind of outrageous, with decor, and glittering lights everywhere, self-serve ice cream, and huge teddy bears in each private room. We practiced the lyrics and figured out who gets which, and then a couple of students worked on choreography.

Oh, and the rains have started. Friday night, the rain started and never really stopped. I guess right now we're in a lull and will have a few days w/o rain, but it was pretty hardcore.

Maybe July will just continue to be a rough month

Life is eating me alive! I spent Thursday night with Kiwon and an entire herd of Yale musicians, which was scary. It made me really happy to be in Korea and not in the US. I learned again, for the umpteenth time, that I am not cut out for hanging out w/large groups of people, steering people thru Korean bbq, or witnessing loud drinking games. But I did get a really nice shower at a fancy hotel near City Hall. I had to RUN to school the next morning to get there on time and was totally exhausted from lack of sleep, but it made me realize that I can still operate w/o that much brain and body power. Which means that I need to stop freaking out about language study b/c it basically will cause me to fail miserably. It's like flailing around in water and drowning versus laying down and floating.

Ellie's grandmother passed away a day or two ago from a series of heart attacks (I can't tell anymore w/the time difference), and I feel like all I'm hearing about since July 1 is scary and sad news. I'm hoping whatever weird retrograde is going on will pass soon. I'm babysitting again (very badly, since I'm blogging and my nephew is watching TV) and trying not to stress about how little I'm getting done in my life right now. Because it's true, what Ellie says, that it's your heart that matters.

School makes me stressy

[Mai on the left, my dialogue partner, and Yuko on the right, my birth year partner.] I just found out that Kiwon wants to meet an hour earlier, which cuts deeply into the time I thought I had to make up these silly role play scenarios. Agh. I finally ventured down the hill today for lunch w/Kelsey, my first meal near school but not AT school. I think...

Anyhow. All this cramming is making me crazy. My jaw is wound up like crazy, but at least I know the word for hippo and narcotics. Helpful, right? The grammar is harder for me b/c I have a hard time engaging - I wish we could learn it with English explanations (like tenses, conjugation, particles, etc.). But then when I try to have perspective, I figure it's a much easier life than other people. My aunt told me a couple nights ago about how her entire family migrated from the north to Seoul, and about crossing the border, and how they were incredibly lucky that not a single relative died in the crossing. Though her father passed away at age 50 b/c the suffering later in his life was too hard to bear (they had been well off in north Korea, so he was not accustomed to hardship). I see how hard she STILL works now in her 60s, and how what would totally land me in bed for days is like a normal day's workload for her. The generation gaps here are enormous because the changes in this country have happened at the speed of light. Faster, it seems.

So, trying to get language study done faster before meeting a good friend from NYC so that we can have a fun night out in Seoul might actually just be cake.

Hand cramps

[The student rush that I have to navigate when I get off the second bus that stops near school.] Aaagh. I'm about 40 words away from being caught up w/my vocab. It's making me crazy and I think I'm taking in about one word for every 20 that I write over and over and over. I think I know "smoke" but am not so good on "to be hazy, foggy." Definitely don't know "pattern" but am okay on "gossip."

[This hill looks puny from the picture, but it is no fun climbing it every morning.] We just got assigned our partners and told our topics for next week's oral exam. Already??!?! It's all role play (things like inviting people to a party, introducing friends, and buying things at the market or ordering delivery). I drew one of the best students in the class. I hope she doesn't get annoyed at my almost complete inability to memorize boring dialogue.

[The school facade.] I just got a call from Kiwon and she's just landed today in Korea! So I'll see her tomorrow at the Plaza Hotel. Wohoo. Though I hope we're not out forever. Getting up at 6:30am every morning is really starting to wear on me. I also started to realize yesterday that I think that my eyesight is already starting to get worse from all the studying. Hahahaa. I had a hard time seeing the TV last night while watching some trivia game show. One of the questions was about the title of Michael Moore's last doc, and I loved that one of the choices (it was a multiple choice game) was "Gecko."

[The map for the park near home.] I feel like I'm on this marathon that is kind of neverending, but one where I'm constantly falling behind. So I guess I need to get back to vocab. "Chalkboard," "ceiling," "telepathy," "sweltering night," "addiction," "DWI," and "PSA" are all waiting for me.

Feeling the heat

I forgot to ask earlier: what is it with kids always being sticky, and then always wanting to rub their stickiness onto you? I was sneezing and had a runny nose this a.m. and my aunt thought that I had a cold but I think it's just my body being scared of germy children. Or maybe b/c I slept w/the window open b/c it was so hot. I've been sleeping on the bus to school lately b/c I'm so tired and in our last hour of class today, I had a sudden slump where I was just crazy tired. Luckily, we're learning something really easy (how to speak to people informally, rather than formally), so it didn't affect my performance too much.

{Kelsey is on the left.) I just had a nice long lunch w/Kelsey and we swapped nightmare-ish ancient history stories. Mostly, it was me telling her about mine. We also talked about how vicodin is something I might want to try someday. We have a lot of similarities, and the ways that our brains operate constantly at light speed is one of them. I tried today briefly to just take notes and not re-copy them (I've done this ever since I started undergrad), but it made me feel like a lazy slacker. I think I'll have to hold onto that habit, even if I'm not learning grammar any better that way. I did manage to finish the picture book from my cousin and am almost done w/my extra grammar book. I started doing hardcore vocab drilling, but am not sure how well it's going to work.

Oh! The fun news: I just found out today at lunch that I am NOT the oldest person in my class!!!! There is one person who is older than me by 2 months. I found out that the 19-yo boy is NOT the youngest one, either - there's an 18-yo girl!

Okay. Time to study.