Today I’m cranky and tired.  Yesterday I was sitting in the cafeteria and all the teachers were laughing and joking about something they don’t bother to translate or include me in as  always and I just stared off into space like I always have to.  Most days this communication gap is just something I weather.  But some days, especially when I’m tired, well — it gets to me.  Occasionally there will be an attempt at a conversation, but they always dead-end.  So they give up.  And I give up.  And the other foreigners here in this town, I have no idea what they’re doing and vice-versa, and why should them being foreign also make them more lovable to me?  Answer:  it doesn’t.  And they have each other – they don’t need a third wheel.  I wouldn’t know what to do if I had the opportunity to have a conversation anyway.  My tongue is just this phantom appendage in my mouth.

Yesterday also, on top of a little side job that’s a major pain in the arse effectively ruining every evening during prime time and keeping me awake later than I want, I also compiled all the photos of the installation and got about halfway through making them web-ready.  Tedius.  The reward for a lot of work is more work, because nobody else is going to promote it but yourself.

And I haven’t heard back from the boy after his two years late untimely return email and I continue to be the biggest old fool on the planet.

And then I ran across mention of Kim Sook Ja while posting about the art installation and I found another address for her and that she has a cosmetology license…Now I have to gather the resolve to send that off again.  I’m not even sure I’m the same person who wrote that last year.  Sometimes it feels like finding any family is just a masochistic exercise in asking to be beaten bloody with more rejection.

And then a Korean sent me this poem as a gift yesterday, not thinking:

Do you have this person in your life?

By Ham Sok Hon /Translated by Ann Isaac and Sung-soo Kim

Before you leave for a long journey

Without any worry

Can you ask this person

To look after your family?

Even when you are cast out from the whole world

And are in deepest sorrow

Do you have someone

Who will welcome you warmly and freely?

In the dire moment when your vessel has sunk

Is there someone

Who will give you their life belt and say

“You must live before me”?

At the execution ground

Is there someone

Who will exclaim for you

“Let him live, even if you kill the rest of us”?

In the last moment of your life

When you think of this person

Can you leave this world smiling broadly

And feeling at peace?

Even if the entire world is against you

When you think of this person

Can you stand alone for what you believe?

Do you have this person in your life?

No.

I do not have this person in my life.