bad metaphor

These days I’m running around trying to box up my life and stash it in various places: my trusty car Bertha bequeathed to Krissy, my job to another friend*, my cat on loan to a German grad student. The last part is stressing me out quite a bit more than the rest – what if, Molasses forbid, something happened to the furbag while I was gone? His brother-cat passed away earlier this year. Despite being portly, he is in good health, so I’m trying not to worry about that, and instead, have preoccupied myself by running around town looking for a piece of furniture in which to hide his poop-receptacle in German grad student’s tiny apartment. I eventually settled on cutting a door into this trunk which I picked up on sale. It took me several stores and multiple visits to Target to settle on this, because it is of the utmost importance that my cat poops in comfort.

Otherwise, I haven’t really been great about prioritizing the things I maybe sort of need to do, like: call my car insurance company to figure out why they’re not entirely covering what they said they’d cover (bastards!), sneak in doctor-dentist-optometrist visits, cancel my gym membership, pay my massive library fines, oh, and pack. Though these things invariably percolate inside my brain and make it hurt a little, I’m generally taking this moving process with equanimity, even though there are many stressing factors on top of that, such as: Eli has not yet found a job. And oh my gawd I have to teach bored middle schoolers in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. Still, these things are fine, I’ll wing it when I get there, right?

No, the only time I really stress out is when people inquire about my progress. A TA wandered in briefly between classes yesterday to chat. “Do you know when you’re leaving?” she asked, innocently enough.

“Yes, next Wednesday,” said I.

Her eyes bugged out to cartoon anime proportions. “OH my GOD! That’s really soon? Are you packed yet? What are you going to do with ALL your STUFF? Do you have a replacement for your job yet? How are you going to get everything DONE?!”

Now this sort of contagious anxiety is helpful when, say, Tim Gunn does it on Project Runway, and to a designer who has like five minutes before judging starts and all they’ve got is a piece of rope and some M&Ms. NOT SO MUCH TO ME.

Back, I say! I’ll get it done in the nick of time, like I always do. Sheesh.

* just in case HR is reading this and deduces who I am through Internet trickery, she was the most qualified out of all the applicants. definitely heads and shoulders above me!

Hi Internet! I am not dead! I am very much alive, and have avoided my blog till now because the list of things I have neglected to blog about has snowballed to the point where it actually rivals my laundry pile. That ish is BAD, Y’ALL.

Anywhere, here are the major life updates in easy to digest bullet point format:

- I have decided not to go to law school. At least, not yet. The prospect of tens of thousands of debt hanging around my neck, without a strong guarantee of a job at the end of the tunnel, seemed a wee bit unpalatable to me this year. But…
- I’m sick of this town. I love my friends and I love my family, but if I still find myself hanging around the Taproom on Saturdays a year from now, I…well, I don’t know what I would do. Get real drunk and grumpy-dance, maybe. So the solution to this is…
- Eli and I are packing our bags and taking ESL teaching jobs in South Korea! Right when things are ratcheting up between the ROK and their pleasant neighbors to the north. Wonderful timing! We are great thinkers, Eli and I. Especially since…
- Technically, Eli doesn’t have a job offer yet. Turns out ESL jobs in Korea don’t grow from trees any more (or they do, but are immediately plucked off by more aggressive, having-their-shit-together birds). Now initially, I had figured that it would be easier for Eli to get a job since he is, well, white. And by all accounts, it is much easier to land a job teaching English if, say, you look like a creature that knows how to speak English; no matter if Eli often talks as if he is too lazy to open his jaw and separate the words tumbling out (he is).

A month into our job search, and Eli hasn’t had any luck. I have taken a job offer in a tiny village of about, oh, maybe 10,000 souls in a mountainous village, about an hour and a half east of Seoul by bus. It’s a public school post, which – long story short – means I won’t have to deal with the numerous reported shenanigans that those who work in private schools (called “hagwons”) tend to encounter. Of course, public schools have their challenges, too – yet it seems like a safer bet, the work hours are low (less than 22 hours a week for a full time job!), I’ll get oodles of vacation time, and worst case scenario, I’ll actually get paid on time – more than I can expect from the average hagwon.

As anyone who has heard me blather on and on about this job decision for the past few weeks knows, I am nervous. Not so much about the spectre of shabby, starved North Koreans storming the DMZ or anything; I’m more scared of bored schoolkids. I don’t know if Eli can find a job near my little remote town. The recruiter who found me my job (who is amazing and has been super communicative, Korvia rocks!) swears that she’ll be able to get Eli a job near me after the schools return from vacation, but how much can she really do if there aren’t any jobs? I don’t know how the villagers will react to me and Eli; apparently rural Koreans tend to be less hostile to foreigners, but what about mixed-race couples? How will they react to the fact that I look really damn Korean (I’ve encountered Koreans who will attest to this), but I don’t speak the language and my parents are actually originally from Vietnam, which as far as I can tell, is kind of like Korea’s Mexico?

In summary: I’m leaving all my friends and family behind, in this lovely tiresome town where I am comfortable, to go basically live as some sort of weird Cylon creature in a village in another country for a year. Am I totally crazy? Probably, but am I going to go do this thing anyways? Hell yes I am, ma’am, and ain’t no Taepodong gonna stop me from enjoying this journey.

Today I got this work email: “it is cake day! fourteen people have decided to bring in various cakes. Please, relieve us of our burdensome supply of cake.”

I expect this to be followed up with yet another HR email to us fatty secretaries with weight loss tips. I think I could probably write these. “Tip no. 1: stop having cake day.”

I’ve been a bit lazy with both knitting (and obviously blog posting) over the past few months. First my laptop started showing its age, emitting this awful sounding “click click click” noise whenever I started it up, and it took me awhile to ascertain that I just needed to buy a $30 fan on the internets, vs. fork over $200 to the local tech shop. (Ahh, local tech shops. I’m a big advocate of shopping local, but tech shops really test this principle of mine). And THEN I picked up a freak case of tendonitis, when in the midst of getting a line of octopuses out to put on my etsy.

Laptop and wrist fully recovered, I decided to search for a new pattern to make a knitted bear for my adorable niece. Signed on to Ravelry and discovered I had a months-old message from a blog reader (people actually read this thing? Not any more, I wager), tipping me off to this fact: someone is selling one of my free patterns on eBay. Using my photos and everything, unless she just happens to have made the exact same cake, down to my mismatched-weight yarns and felt cutouts and everything. Her description reads: “This is printed instuctions of my moms pattern for carrot cake.”

Her mom’s pattern, eh? Turns out I have a long-lost daughter in England, of all places! How about that?

It annoys me greatly that someone is out there, copying my work (rather lazily, I might add) and profiting off it…but the more annoying thing is that poor knitters are actually buying the pattern, paying over two bucks for my MS paint chicken scratch. Yarn is expensive enough, without poor knitters being fleeced by paying for a pattern that is, you know, free. I don’t feel I am skilled enough to develop patterns for sale just yet, because I do expect a degree of professionalism in the pattern (sizing, gauge and, you know, testing it out as opposed to making it up as I go along). Of course, “professionalism” is a word that one would not use to describe my long-lost eBay daughter.

Still more annoying is the effect this is having on me – I will definitely think twice before I post things to share with other crafters, and I feel bad but I’m not sure how else to protect myself from intellectual theft. I love that the online crafting community provides a great wealth of resources for crafters to share knowledge, in good faith! I hate it when leeches try to take advantage of this good will.

My policy on my patterns: personally I don’t care if people knit octopuses or chocolate cakes from my pattern, and sell the objects themselves. You’ve put the work into it, and congratulations, if you could actually figure out how to successfully make a toy from my incoherent notes, good job! I do care if people STEAL MY PATTERN and sell it as their own, or their “moms.”

Hell, this particular thief might not even know how to knit – looping yarn through needles is not a skill-set required for stealing patterns. All one needs is a lack of shame.