Jet Lag and Unmetered Consumerism don't mix.

ho.
ho.
hi.
I've been in the US for about 6 days now. I'm happily consuming, sleeping, consuming and sleeping. Here's a quantitative list of accomplishments since christmas day when I arrived:
$50 at Trader Joes
3+ hours of Television including 2 episodes of what not to wear and 4 episodes of silver spoons
4 pairs of Shoes
1 bag of baked cheetos consumed
1 bag of baked cheetos stowed for return to Korea
3 hours in Target clearance sale shopping.
3 movie theaters
2 trips Red Robin and 400 steak fries in my belly.
2 malls conquered
12 cherry diet cokes
6 lime diet cokes (PS. black cherry vanilla diet coke has ceased to exist in the 10 short months I've been gone. why?)
400 bubble gum bubbles
6 old navy undershirts
1 morning at the temple
10 crest whitestrips applied
2 hours of driving in a car with music
1 niece
1 nephew
2 fights with family that involved tears
3 best friends visited and loved
unmeasurable amounts of english english everywhere!

contented sigh. life is easy good when it's vacation in americation. I'm tired all the time because it's never the right bedtime. I'm a little bit afraid of how hard it might be to get on the plane next saturday. I never realized before how much I've stopped listening...when everything is in a foreign language you get pretty used to following non-verbal clues...so it's strange to be dumped back into a place where verbal clues matter. I stole a very cute boy's french fries at the airport because I wasn't listening to the number. I didn't remember to pick up my change from a $20 because the tab was $10 and we don't have anything higher than a 10 in Korea. I'm surprised at how much money tipping at a restaurant takes and how expensive popcorn is at the theaters here. I'm surprised at how little I care about eating "American" food. It's strange to be back where I am nothing special just because I have blond hair. I'm also a little surprised to remember how good it feels to be with my family, embroiled in their lives and part of the silliness that is us. A wonderfully surprising way to ring in 2008.

Stories I will tell my grandchildren

Once I lived in Seoul, Korea and I knew some girls named Grace and Lumina and we danced and posed and tried to contain our awesomeness but honestly it couldn't be contained...we were awesome. Once, I had to work on Thanksgiving Day (most americans living in Korea just let it slip by unnoticed) and I was really sad that no one recognized what a special holiday it was to me...so we ordered a complete turkey dinner from the army base and invited a bunch of americans and one australian to feast together at Heather's House. It was one of the best thanksgivings I've ever had.

Once I learned the Tango, Cha Cha and Samba from a Korean model named Bruce Lee. Every saturday, after dance lessons, me and my gang, the "Do You Happy Club" went to eat moksal which means literally pig neck. We wrapped the spicy meat in kaenip(sesame leaves) with more peppers, kimchi and korean greens and shoved them in our mouths tirelessly as we laughed and learned languages and fell in love with korea and each other. We dined and dined until we were sick and happy and couldn't help but dance the cha cha in the street.

One fall, in Korea, I listened to a beautiful Chopin recital given by the mother of one of my students. After the music filled me with notes and poetry, we wandered in the crisp fall air and I discovered the most beautiful part of Korea: bare branches hung heavy with ripe fire globes of persimmon fruit against perfectly blue skies. With friends, this moment became a definining one.

Once, I taught a classroom of 6,5 and 4 year olds all about music and songwriting. We wrote a song and made guitars and kazoos from household items and then played them so loudly that the people who worked in the businesses next to us shut their doors until we were finished. I loved noise then.

Once I was a Korean Migrant farmer.

Once I lived in a place that didn't have 24 hour breakfast but luck struck on a friday night when we discovered Butterfinger Pancakes...Real eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes and orange juice never tasted so good! We ate and ate and ate and thought we might order more just to keep us there until the restaurant closed at the old hour of 3am. We didn't, but I did lick the syrup from the plate. The End.

Wanna see something cool?

Here I am just thinking about doing something cool on the church floor. That something cool might be breakdancing. I think about that a lot.

Here I am attempting to execute the something cool that I was thinking about in the previous picture. Notice the way my cool breakdancing looks strikingly similar to falling down.

And here I am receiving help from someone because evidently doing something cool is not in the cards for me.
Luckily, everyone else that I hang out with at church here in korea is wayyyyy cooler than me. This is our group from singles conference nov2007. love love love love love.

Ethical Dilemmas and TreeTop Trouble

There are a million things that I love about Koreans and Korea. The men, the passion, the food, the konglish, the simplicity of the language, the hanbok, the family, the traditions...to name a few. But there are some parts of the culture that I cannot navigate and a few things that I downright hate (besides the leggy shrimp): The vagueness, the indirectness, the saving face. These things are nearly impossible for a cornfed westerner such as myself to grasp and though I understand them to be inextricably connected to the things I love, I find myself at a bit of a cultural crossroad.

I'm staying for another year and a career opportunity has presented itself in the form of a promotion. But the promotion means that I would have to somehow learn how to tread emotionally lightly in true korean fashion...never really saying what I think, bowing down to superiors even when I think they are wrong, saying yes when I really mean no and then just NOT doing the thing I said yes too in order to "save face". It's better to say yes and not do it or make an excuse than to say, "I am unable to accomplish the task you have requested of me." This is NOT true to my character. The reason they want me for the position is because I am a communicator. But I contend that my communication skills are only as effective as the system in which they are permitted to function. I'm interested in challenges but not if it means losing a valuable part of my integrity or what I perceive as my integrity. Any thoughts?

In other news, I've found a new coping mechanism now that my guitar is a bit on the fritz. It's call TreeTop Trouble and just TRY to tell me this isn't addictive... I can't get to level 4 and my students are buzzing up to 20. This is unacceptable. I will simply need to devote more time to competitive chihuahua jumping. If indeed that little animal is a chihuahua.

Zipper's Treetop Trouble