Continuing with my Awesome Blogging Schedule

In my head, when I typed that, I pronounced it "shedule." My uncle says it like that sometimes, to be funny. I usually don't. I guess you could say I'm feeling a bit homesick.

Really, I'm not sure what my problem is... On the surface, things are fine. My job is (and has been recently, especially) easy. It's also really boring. Not at all what you would call fulfilling. On the other hand, Mi Sun no longer works there and I spend an inordinate amount of time just reading articles online or watching American TV. I miss working with my sweetheart, what can I say? I'm sure there's a cure for this, which will be next week when we finally begin actual classes. However, the fact that I can only see the little lady for like a half-hour when she finally gets off work at 9:30pm isn't really cutting it for me.

I quit smoking a couple weeks ago... yes, for serious. It had been getting steadily worse for the last few years. 2007, I think, was the last time I made a serious effort to quit and managed to for about 4 months. So I'm pretty much riding the ridge of mental meltdown all the time right now. That'll pass, of course, but in the meantime, I'm feeling especially on edge, which makes everything seem a bit worse than it really is. I've also gained like 5 pounds in that time, which makes the whole easier breathing thing at the gym seem like less of a benefit than it really is. I mean, seriously, when I'm home, I'm eating. Probably doesn't help that the market down the street started stocking bags of tortilla chips and I've made it a point to buy more American foods the last few times I've been in Seoul. Yeah, burgers, bacon, salsa, burrito-sized tortillas, giant pre-cooked ham, pepper jack cheese, Kraft mac n' cheese, Valentine's candy... all those things are technically comfort foods, especially when living outside the US, but it sure makes for bad eating habits.

Just today, actually, I finally registered for an online TEFL class. I am... how should I put this... not excited about the idea anymore. Sure, it was less than $200 and it will mean I get an extra 100 bucks a month at my job after I finish; and yes, it will allow me to find at least a decent part-time job in pretty much any big city after I finish working in Korea... I don't know. Yay for semi-pointless career advancement, I guess, right? =) I mean, hell, I'm here, I might as well go ahead and do this, for the extra money if nothing else. Of course I should've done it a year ago. Still, better late than never.

What else is new? Um, the Olympics were awesome! Especially living in Korea... get this. Perhaps you noticed, but Koreans tend to excel in speed skating, especially the short track. So, for the first 10 days or so (basically until the figure skating happened and Kim Yeon A went all ballistic on history), whenever there were no live events on which is pretty often due to the time difference, they would replay the speed skating events that Koreans won. And I'm not talking about no once-in-a-while thing here either. I mean over and over and over again. The same race. I must have seen that Korean guy win the 500m like 45 times. It was absolutely asinine. I mean, I can totally understand making it a point to show the Koreans more often than everything else, but we would literally watch a portion of the race -- the people who finished in the top 4 or 5 followed by the winning Korean -- and then a minute later watch the same thing over again. It was... hypnotic and mind-boggling, all at once.

Although, from what I could gather of NBC's coverage, this might not have been so bad. At least I got to see some curling and hockey and ski jumping and alpine events LIVE! Not on a tape delay interspersed with feel-good puff pieces. So, there was that. Also, the Korean figure skater. Her name is not pronounced Kim Yoo-nah. It just isn't... in Korean it's 김연아. The pronunciation of 연 really depends on the speaker, but it sounds fairly similar to yawn if you don't drag it out too much. Rhymes somewhere between yawn and sun. And the last name is just "A." Pronounced ah. Like, ah, it feels really nice to stretch and yawn when you first wake up. Anyway, that's enough of that little rant.

OK, that's all I got for now. Peace, ya'll.