Up and at 'em

I managed to get to bed earlier than usual last night to help mollify the 6:30am alarm this morning (Saturday). I had a big haul to Gangnam ("south of the river") to take a placement exam at the place where I will receive private tutoring in Korean starting in early Sept. My teacher is super on top of the issues that Korean Americans have, and has already laid out my course of study: basic grammar for the first 10 hours (1st week), families of words based on Chinese characters and how to use them, and minimal deciphering of texts in Korean on hanji. She said that no matter how much Korean I study, it won't help much while traveling b/c the dialects outside of Seoul can get almost impossible to understand, even for native Koreans. She explained one of the things I need to learn via the same issue for Koreans in English: they know lots of vocab, but not how to use the words. So, they know the meaning of "shower" but can only say, "DO shower, DO shower!" rather than "take a shower."

Other activities for the day:
- visiting my cousin and his wife and getting good advice on living with his father (my uncle); also getting a lead on housing
- video chat w/my sister
- more editing on the papermaking video
- Na Rae Kim's opening at Gallery Andante, and meeting the gallery owner
- noodles at a restaurant w/amazing chopsticks: they're metal but hollow!!! So they're super light. Exciting for those of us who have suffered through heavy metal chopsticks that dig into fingers and make hands tired.
- a phone call from the south with another artist to contact.

I still have not come up w/a solid performance to tape but am hoping it will come to me soon. We're in a fantastic respite from the heat (I actually woke up today and was cold!) so maybe my brain will return to pre-fried levels in time to create, perform, tape, and edit a new performance for a rapidly-approaching deadline.