"Widespread Dust"

Michael and I met Lee Chang-Soo, an artist in Seoul who uses mulberry bark and natural dyes in his work. As always around here, crazy labor-intensive work, but I'm glad he's doing it. We all suffer from the same disease: once you get your hands on GOOD materials, like Korean mulberry or high-quality hanji, you don't want to use anything else. He also uses natural dyes. It was fun to visit an artist's studio in an artsy art school hood, and then weird to hear the siren routines for invasion exercises. They said they're so used to them that it doesn't freak them out, and when Michael asked what you'd do if the north was really invading, they said, nothing! There's nowhere to escape!

Good old yellow dust season is in high gear, and gross. You can see it and taste it and see more people in masks and covering up their faces. It seems worse to not be able to escape from THIS phenomenon. Tempts me to skip dyeing class until it rains and just hole up at home and WORK. I started my taxes yesterday and it went on far too long, and they're not even done yet. I had a mild anxiety attack last night about overloading my schedule, but my tutor reminded me of how well I'm doing now, like a completely different person from when we first met last fall, and how I just need to ride out the grant period and take advantage of all it has to offer. Which is a WHOLE lot. It's like a test of how big my belly really is.