Heavy loads

My schedule for next week is falling into place nicely as of now. It will be packed, but with good things, like meeting a childhood friend, lacquering my woven pieces, meeting with artists to talk about hanji and collaboration, calligraphy, seeing lots of my family all at once. My fear is that everything will fall out of place, since things scheduled a week in advance in Korea (for me) tend to all get rescheduled last minute. But for now I'm going to pretend like ONE week here will come together the way I want it to.

Today was my day off from interacting with the world, and I got a monster nap in the afternoon that helped a lot. But I got frustrating news from the bf: his deployment has been changed from leaving in Dec for Afghanistan to leaving in Jan for Iraq. In the grand scheme of how all of this war is still not part of my reality, it shouldn't bother me that much. But I spent a good deal of the afternoon feeling sick about it. Mostly, I am bewildered by my situation. I know it sounds horribly ignorant, but do left-wing artists ever get involved with military officers? What is going ON, that suddenly major portions of my life are being dictated by the US Dept of Defense?!

To avoid thinking about this, which for the most part is fruitless worry, I remembered a fun convo we had last night at a mosquito-ridden cafe: we talked about hands, and how you can know a person by looking at their hands. I was saying that since I was so used to getting violin calluses from a young age, I wasn't worried about getting blisters and calluses from weaving and having my skin peeling all the time. Jeong-In showed us her hands and how her right middle and ring fingers don't touch anymore b/c she writes/draws so much; so much of her life has been spent with an implement in between those two digits. Our calligraphy teacher talked about the way that his hands act when he has to do a lot of brush work. Finally, the husband of another classmate showed us his golf calluses.

That said, my hands are telling me that it's time to finish weaving.