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!

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.

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.”

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.

So a slight itch on my back last Friday turned into this brilliant scarlet rash by the time Saturday rolled around, and come Sunday, it had spread around to the front of my chest. Web fueled paranoia convinced me that my torso would fall off.

Calm as always, Elijah mentioned that it looked more like a case of the shingles. I consulted Web MD and the symptoms seemed to match. I figured there wasn’t much to do until I could get in to see a doctor on Monday, so I just waited and shoved my zombiesque fears into the back of my mind while I worked on my personal statement for law school. Now those of you who may be reading this who are familiar with the law school applications process are probably thinking that this point is pretty late in the game to start applying, and you’re right. Many of my perfectly punctual peers have already received their acceptance and rejection letters for the 2010-2011 cycle. And I started this entire process last June, when I took the LSAT, so it’s not as though I didn’t have plenty of time. My references got their recommendation letters in by the end of November. The only thing I had left to accomplish was a personal statement.

That’s right, a personal statement. Not a research paper, which would require fact checking. The task literally entails writing about myself, which I have done on this stupid blog for six going on seven years already. I mean, how goddamn hard could that possibly be? It’s not like the poor guy who actually has to read the stack of personal statements will call a James Frey on me if I made up an anecdote (ha, who am I kidding, nobody reads these. They probably just shred most of them after glancing at the LSAT scores).

But here’s the catch – apart from blogging, I have not written a single thing since graduating from college in 2006. Every single time I have tried to keep up with my writing, start a new story, even edit and develop ones I’ve already written – this little rowdy Greek chorus in my head pops up, jeering and heckling my every word. And that chorus trotted out in full force, at maximum volume, whenever I worked on my personal statement. “YOU SUCK! Why would any law school take you?” “Oh, now you’re trying to brag about how you’re a good writer? Yeah, that’s a real good tactic.” “You’re applying way too late anyways to get into anywhere good. Maybe you should look into clown school.” “Ha, try bridge-jumping school. You’ll probably fail at that too!” What a valuable, helpful resource to retain in one’s head. (Hey brain scientists: which part do these jerks inhabit? Maybe I could just accidentally fall and hit my head there).

Chorus or not, I am just no good at boasty writing. Most people aren’t, actually, judging from examples of successful personal statements. I guess if you have a 4.0 and a near perfect LSAT, you could turn in an elephant doodled in shit on a bar napkin, and still get a free ride anywhere you like. My stats are good but not quite shit-elephant good so I struggled onwards, the little chorus shouting epithets and filling my head with self-loathing. To make matters worse, I was increasingly distracted by the rash on my back, which stung constantly by this point. I removed my bra, thinking maybe that the strap was chafing my skin. Eventually I just took some ibuprofen and some allergy medicine and went to bed, failing again. Well, I’d have till midnight the next day.

Monday I tried calling the doctor – no answer, so I decided to show up at the doctor’s office, which was full of sick people bearing masks. To a hypochondriac, nothing is more terrifying than being in proximal distance of masked sickies. Tried to set a proper appointment, and the only one that was available was during my work hours, so I just decided to come back after work and try my luck then. I ended up having to wait over two and a half hours to have a doctor take once quick glance at me and confirm that yes indeedy, I did have shingles. (Texted the boyfriend to inform of my lengthy socialist wait for health care). Apparently shingles is a resurgence of the dormant chicken pox virus, which lurks silently in your nerves for years, until a moment of high stress triggers an ambush to knife you while you’re already down. Gee thanks, chicken pox. Asshole. I didn’t get out of the doctor’s office and the drugstore to pick up my prescription until about 9:45 – just a couple of hours to refine a personal statement, which should be plenty of time, right?

My mind shuffled through the tasks I had left to do, a paragraph or two that I’d either need to cut or expand, when – OF COURSE! – blue and red lights danced in my rearview mirror. “Miss, are you aware that you ran that stop sign?” asked the officer. Stop sign. Yes, I remembered that stop sign – a notorious spot for police bored and with nothing to do, the one between the gas stations at the top of 9th and Iowa. One I usually am smart enough to circumvent by electing to drive a few feet further to turn at the lighted intersection, but this time I didn’t. “I did?” “Yep. Gonna have to write you a ticket for that.”

Whether I stopped or not – that is something that is kind of subjective, right? I mean, I’m pretty sure I sssstttttoopppppped. So maybe the officer wanted to see more staccato, less legato. Whatever. $132?! Okay, that is ridiculous. Maybe I could get that fine reduced in court, according to rumored anecdotes from friends of friends who had done the same. By the time I was done being stopped!, I now had an hour and a half to get everything done. Still doable.

There are few things more depressing than still finding yourself at work at 10:00 at night, but since my laptop is still out of commission, I had few other options. Thankfully my helpful sister was online to provide 1) sanity and 2) a fresh perspective, and I managed to cobble together something halfway decent, if not ideal. Even with her help, it took another hour to get it to the point where it was presentable. Countdown one hour. Since everything is submitted online, this part should be a breeze.

WRONG again. I guess the LSAC servers were overloaded with lots of procrastinating dummies like me, trying to upload their personal statements and resumes at the same time. I’d apply to a school, Firefox would implode, I’d have to start it up again and crash it right back into the wall. Eventually I managed to eke in four applications to schools, when I noticed that the timestamp on the LSAC submission was going by Eastern time. Foiled again! I was a day too late and I didn’t even realize it.

I limped back to my car, defeated, my flesh burning and my head in a daze. I still kept it together, barely, right until the moment I got home and my roommate James asked me the innocuous question: “So, how was your night?”

For no justifiable reason at all, I just burst into tears. Poor James helped me open my beer and fled to the safety of his room. He’s a good roommate.

Epilogue to this long-ass post: I have provisionally decided that I probably won’t be going to law school in this next cycle, but at the very least I have everything ready and prepared for the next one. I’m probably not psychological ready for it, for one thing. A number of law school veterans have come out of the woodwork to warn me of the travails ahead (thanks Sara ), and if just the application process itself is enough to bring down some arcane old-timey disease on me, I shudder to think of what medical horrors await me during my first year of law school.

Another reason to wait a year: Eli’s bizarre eye troubles are happily resolved, we’re still young and unfettered. Maybe it’s time to pack our bags and head east.

Tonight I’m off to see one of my long-running favorite bands, Yo La Tengo. I could go into the many reasons why I love this band, but I’ll let the far more entertaining folks behind Mr. Show speak for me:

Thanks to krissy for alerting me to the existence of this on YouTube!

Next moment – total darkness – where am I – oh, this is my bed – I’m in pajamas but backwards. I’ve traveled through time. I flip on the light and look around me, to discover in dismay that my purse did not make the journey with me. Louise, who did, informs me that the boy I like has been dispatched to rescue my belongings. I’m eternally grateful, bewildered but lucky to have such reliable companions.

I haven’t had a New Year’s quite as, ahem, extravagant as that night since, but every now and then I do have that odd sensation of having been hurtled into the future, without quite realizing how I got there. We’re now in a new decade, and my brain still thinks it is 2008, and only yesterday was I pinning Obama flyers to people’s door handles in Kansas City suburbs.

Sometimes I sit at my desk at work, in a quiet little office in a basement on the hill, and feel the sensation of the world flowing past me at a frenetic pace. I see people leave, wish them goodbye, blink and the next minute they are back from their travels, grizzled and world weary. It kind of reminds me of that story of twin astronauts I read about in a science textbook in high school, attempting to explain to us kids the idea of relativity. One twin in the story jets off in a shuttle, travels the galaxy, and comes back in what seems like a few minutes to him. Upon stepping off the shuttle, he is shocked to find that his twin suddenly looks much older. To the twin that stayed behind, the traveling brother has been away for many years.

When I get this way, I am tempted to shut my eyes and wish the world would slow down for a minute, stop changing so rapidly. I don’t want to be left behind, but I also don’t particularly feel like getting up just now and running to keep pace. When on study abroad in England, I felt happiest when I spent my fifteen minutes of free time sitting in a beautiful meadow in the midst of a ruined abbey, and saddest when the professors rounded us up to get back on the bus and see more sights.

Yes, this makes me sound supremely lazy and possibly stoner-like. I could be doing a lot more useful things with my life, than sitting in some dumb patch of grass. Or gathering moss in my basement office. And I would actually like the chance to put these neurons towards more engaging activity than entering data, or surfing the web endlessly.

But I do like that right now, I get to relax and bullshit with my closest friends, pretty much whenever I want. I can watch stock simmer for hours. I want to loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass – or wintry icicle, as is the case right now. I hoard those moments in which I can sneak away to do absolutely nothing.

It’s the little nothings that keep pulling me back.

Lately I’ve been noticing a new filler phrase that has cropped up into the vernacular of friends and people who happen to be on the TV: “stuff like that.” Sometimes it’s used correctly in a sentence: “I want you to go pick up some apples, bananas, and stuff like that.” Oftentimes it’s used incorrectly or strangely, as in, “He was really acting uncool, and stuff like that.” It seems like a relatively recent thing; I haven’t noticed anyone really say “stuff like that” sans referent, prior to, say, 2007 or so.

Every single time I hear it, it is jarring. I’m not sure why. I’m not a stuffy old language maven. I am guilty of saying “like” and “um” quite a bit, which probably sounds like nails on chalkboard to people older than forty. Maybe it’s just because the filler phrase is relatively new, and I’m not quite used to hearing it just yet. Perhaps I am turning into an old grannypants, and I should just shove over and let language evolve again. And stuff like that.

Old timey stuff, like, that there.

New-fangled whippersnappin’.

At around midnight, I was suddenly roused by the tinny sound of the little gnomes in my cell phone playing the marimbas. Blearily I stumbled through the darkness towards the beachy music, picked up my phone and saw “Unknown.” Now if my wits were razor sharp, like they usually are (ha!), I would have screened it – instead, I answered, “…hello?”

On the other end, slight mechanical background hissing, and then an unfamiliar man’s voice: “so, do you want to talk now?” Innocuous enough words when printed on screen in the safety of daylight, but at midnight from an “Unknown,” rather sinister. In my foggy head, the voice sounded at once wounded and enraged. I was going to say, “Excuse me, do I know you?” but was so startled by the call that I just ended up hanging up instead, and was wide awake by the time I went back to bed. Not five minutes later, I heard what sounded like the front door opening. Debated whether I was safer hiding under the covers, like I used to when I was little and afraid of tornadoes (because I was clearly unable to blow away if I had 20 blankets weighing me down), or getting up to investigate.

Like an unwise horror movie victim, I chose the latter. Tiptoed down, tried both front and back door to discover that they were both locked; heard my roommate laughing from his bedroom. Ah, so he had been the one to come home, and obviously wasn’t being murdered. Good.
Tiptoed back up the creaky stairs to my room, when I saw in the shadowy light from the hallway, the silhouette of a…rifle? A machete, on the floor?! AHH…oh, wait, my roommate had borrowed that air-rifle and knife from my boyfriend for a film shoot*. He’d obviously just returned the items to us by leaving them in our room. Okay, and if the real murderer came, we’d be armed. But, say the murderer were big and strong and wrested these weapons from us…

“Don’t worry,” mumbled Eli, sitting up in bed and looking at me with his fly-face. “If there’s a murderer I’ll scare them away.”

Somewhat put at ease, I resumed slumber.

Now, after a bit of rest and some coffee, I’m wondering if that call was from:
a) a murderer who calls people before he murders them
b) a telemarketer, selling I don’t know what, maybe murder?
c) a jealous, murderous boyfriend misdialing in the midst of an argument
d) a debt collector with the wrong number

* – My boyfriend is the owner of such items for non-sinister reasons. Or so he says.