Transient

That's how more than one person I've met here describes the ex-pat community in Seoul. It's really true, and it makes it hard for everyone to invest in relationships. I thought I'd be doing all sorts of errands today but instead ended up finishing Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, making breakfast and dinner at home (dinner was particularly extravagant, with dark leafy greens!), riding the bus to and from tutoring, and talking w/Terttu before she mails off apps and flies to Estonia.

I'm overdosing on sugar lately. Dried mangoes and citron tea (eating all the rinds), the last bit of chocolate, and grape drinking yogurt. I was doing so well for my first few months here, but have lapsed back into my sugar addiction. I will likely have a hard withdrawal next month, but I'll worry about it then. What I need to worry about before then is serious internet shopping, but I don't even know how.

I'm also not absorbing my vocab and grammar. I'm still stumped as to how I'm supposed to apply it all. There's a magical shift from the classroom / textbook / notes to using it in everyday speaking and writing, but I still haven't figured out how to make that shift happen more often. I'm sure that putting off emailing people in Korean is NOT conducive to learning, but it makes me exceedingly cranky.

After discussing my composition about the difficulty of communicating with elders (b/c of tradition and manners that run counter to how things happen back home), my tutor said that I'm not a typical Korean American, which means that I'm not quite Korean but not quite American. She said that my life must be pretty hard. Interesting. Not quite either or. It's funny timing in terms of highlighting my oversensitivity, b/c last night I watched a silly movie on my computer while strewn out on the floor. I haven't watched a movie since I left home in June. But I keep forgetting that the way I process film is by replaying scenes in my head over and over. It's like a flushing, but it really sucks at night b/c then I can't sleep (my worst ever was after watching "The Triplets of Belleville" - it was like I watched the whole thing all over in my head and got about 2 hours of sleep that night). I realize now that I should save the books I have left for January, since I probably won't have internet access and won't bring my computer. If that is truly the case, I will probably go back to Seoul on the weekends just to get my fix (and do my laundry).