Ahhh, back to school food again.  Lunch and dinner.  Every day.

Now, in America one wouldn’t look forward to that, and it would be real bland.  But, it’s rare to have anything bland in Korea!  Some days the menu doesn’t make sense, like the days I’m grousing “Where’s the protein?  Is there ANY protein today?” or “How many kinds of starch can we have in one meal?”  But most days, it’s pretty good, and at least it’s not the same one pot of stuff that I make do with every day until it’s gone, like at home.

Today’s fare was smoked duck for lunch, with sweet mustard sauced cole slaw, kimchi and I-can’t-remember- which soup, and for dinner we had bulgogi, bokkeum kimchi, and radish/sesame seed/& onion soup.   Can you imagine having that at a U.S. school?  Mmmm….

Post dinner I am sitting here, putting some home-work on my flash drive and looking for eyeglass places, and I ran across this:

Too cool.  Can I get them in burgundy, Brad?

Anyway, I think I’ll be heading to Namdaemun this weekend to find some cheap glasses and get a new prescription, as I can’t see anymore.   Supposedly you can get them made in the same day, in just a few hours, and you can get an eye exam without an appointment.  And there are thousands and thousands of glasses for super cheap.   I can probably do this for really cheap, since I WILL NOT make the mistake of buying expensive bi-focals again, which are what cost so much last time.

Bi-focals are totally worthless and infurating for me, as I never look down to read – I look straight ahead at my computer screen to read, and drawing & painting, so arms length is where it’s at for me.   I tend to have my glasses on my head most of the time, because my crappy vision without glasses is better than my vision with glasses because where I need to see is between the prescription for distance that makes up most of the lens, and the prescription for reading which makes up the other 10%.

I’ve also decided to scrap the idea of saving for lasek surgery.  One, I can’t really afford it even if it is half what it costs in the U.S.  Two, my eyes are already dry and would just turn to prunes if the common dry eye side-effect of surgery were to take place, and Three, you only have one set of eyes, so maybe I’ll be conservative, especially after reading some people who’ve had nothing but regrets and now have to spend a lot of time and money trying to deal with wrong after-effects.  I mean, I’m already dealing with getting dealt a kitten that thinks love is carving their name in your skin, so I’m sure eye operations would end up in much the same way!  So when I get to Vegas, I’m going to try these Wave Lens Rigid Gas Permeable lenses instead.  Healthy, custom fit, half the price, no side effects, and no risks.

Next month Momo gets spayed,  and then I have to start mailing my things to my daughter, one small box at a time, and then the following month I have to get Momo micro-chipped and rabies vaccinated, and the month after that I buy Momo and me luggage, and then it’s vacation when there will be no school lunches and I’ll have to spend double what I normally do eating out at the same old restaurants.

And then?  (sigh)  then I can get on a plane…the thought of that is just so relaxing, you just don’t know…

Here’s me trying to get Momo to play with a small (about 6″ x 4″) box instead of attacking me.

She’s now no longer attacking me and loves her box…my arms are almost healed now!

I bought several toys for Momo, but of course they don’t get played with.  She prefers cigarette cellophane and tied up plastic strapping, and loves to fetch but hasn’t quite got the concept of bringing it back to me, so I have to steal it.

The experts say to play with your cat to wear them out, but I’ve found that just spins Momo up way too much, so I limit play to about once a day now.  They are right that having a toy in your pocket for the times she wants to gnaw on your wrists is a good strategy – you just stick that in her face and she forgets about your arms.

The BEST toy I’ve bought thus far has been this:

It’s basically made like one of the weebles – has an internal weight, so it keeps wobbling long after you’ve hit it and will always right itself.  It’s awesome because it keeps her interest.  So I put it on the end of the bed and when she wakes up wanting to hunt birds and rodents, she has that instead.  She can go totally insane on it by herself for about ten minutes, which is just long enough for her to forget about attacking  my ankles and my bedding. Cost?  $1.50.  I need to go buy a few more, as they get lost after rough play.

I have a little basket now that I throw all the toys in and make my rounds once a day.  She likes it because she can always find them, and she even likes to sleep in the basket, surrounded by the toys.

So after the mistake of shutting the cats off from their litterbox for a full day, I had to decide:  do I just sleep on the loveseat for six months or do I get a new bed?  I decided six months was actually a long time to go without a place to stretch out, so I went for it.  Only this time, not anticipating guests from France, I opted for a twin size to better fit into my tiny apartment.

Turns out, there is no such thing as twin sized in Korea.  So if you’re ordering one, call it single.  I also had a hard time finding a single!  I think the majority of Koreans these days are buying western beds and, if they don’t and they are more traditional, then there are probably several family members sharing their yoh, so they get queen sized, though shorter, eggi (baby) yohs are more common than singles.  While there weren’t a lot of single cotton yoh’s available, there were a lot of foam ones available.  The salesman kept trying to talk me into one and I pantomimed how I didn’t like how they folded.  Because they are so rigid, the smallest they fold up is into thirds, but I wanted a traditional one because it can fold up into fourths, taking less space.  Maybe they aren’t as thick and comfortable, but space is at a premium in my tiny apartment.

Even harder was trying to find a cover for it.  Again, there were a lot of eggi covers (which are too short) but only one or two butt-ugly full-length single covers.  Had to travel to several department stores to find one, which I’m really tickled with, because it’s striped like the sleeves on the hanbok yeogori.  And then I got a slimmer neckroll that matched pretty well.  It was the only yoh cover at the department store – they sell mostly western mattress bedding.  I think the yoh is becoming a thing of the past.  But there are still lots of white goods stores which sell beautiful gorgeous sets for them.  Only they are double or queen sized.  So I’m still in the market for a pad and blanket, but I’ll just make-do with the wrong sized ones I have until I find something that matches.  There are actually tons of websites on-line so I can find the bedding I want, just getting it to match what I have is going to be the challenge.

So the single sized yoh is 100 x 200 centimeters.  The eggi sized yoh is 100 x 185 centimeters.  Double sized are 120 x 200, and queen sized are 150 x 200 centimeters.  You purchase the pad in the exact same dimensions.  (these look like moving pads) and the blankets and comforters and duvets are 20 centimeters wider.  Price of a single foam yoh is $25.  Price of a single cotton yoh is $40.  A pad can go anywhere from $25 – $45.  Comforters and duvets can run about $45 each.  There is no such thing as a top sheet in the traditional Korean bedding system, though you will find seersucker blankets and in the summer they have blankets which are like giant gossamer scarves.  Also anywhere from $25 -$45 bucks.

Momo hasn’t desecrated my bedding for a long time now, and I don’t plan on shutting the door to her cat box ever again.  But just to be safe, I encased the yoh with a shower curtain underneath the yoh cover.  It makes a crinkly sound she loves to pounce on.  I love my new yoh!  And Sara, I will box it up and send it to you before I move.  And if you ever don’t want it anymore, please send it to me instead of throwing it out!

I think the one regret I have about the past few years of disclosure has been publicly discussing my adoptive mother.

Readers have pointed out to me that she was herself abusive for emotional neglect or for not defending me, and that I am wrong to cut her slack by not including her as an abuser.

I guess you’d have to live my very particular childhood to disagree.  The one thing I can say is that she treated me no different than my siblings.  She was equally distant from all of us.  She also sacrificed her own spending money on things for me, and included me in her will, and did every requisite mom thing all moms in the 60’s & 70’s were supposed to do.  I guess I’m saying she did her best.

When my daughter was due, she flew to Guam to be there for the delivery.  Many weeks later when the baby had still not arrived, she extended her stay.  On Christmas day, when we got to come home from the hospital, she started to weep.  When I asked her, “why are you crying?” she said she had never spent Christmas away from my father, and she missed him.  Despite him making her want to kill herself, despite being miserable and trapped and alone, despite him violating her daughter, she could not deal with being apart from him because her entire world was based around him.  How can a child ask a person who feels like that to choose?  This woman, who had never once lived independently and only worked for one year of her entire life, prior to marriage, how can a child ask her, after 30 years of marriage and three biological children, ask her to be a single mom for her adopted daughter?   The answer is you can’t.  The answer is I was not the only victim of my father’s infantile selfishness.  Nor was I the only captive.

So I’m sorry, mom. I understand.

And I know it’s wrong for me to have to become an adult early and protect her.  But you know what?  That’s just what had to be done.  It’s just another thing in a long line of wrong things that one just has to swallow and deal with.

These days I think the real crime is not the transgressions of humans, so much as not being given tools to deal with them.  And, unfortunately, when the perpetrators are parents, then there is already a poverty of tools to share.  If I had my life to do over again, I would wish for a humor gene.  Because life is really really fucked up and amusing.  And I would share that tool with my mom.  And I hope she is laughing in heaven.

Lately I’ve been having reunion envy.  It’s not about getting-to-meet-your-family envy:  It’s more just being left out; of remaining one in the dark. I think that’s because there are so few adoptees living in Korea, and most of the ones that do have found their families.  So for the past 2.5 years I have had to listen to how difficult and problematic it is for them, and they forget what it was like not knowing.  I guess privilege comes in many forms.

It’s also about being an older adoptee.  Us older adoptees were processed en masse, without care, and with little regard to our individual rights as people, so there is very little trace of us.

I met my one Korean friend Miwha, who told me she wrote a poem about my reunion show appearance.  She was struck by how I explained that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but how adoptees only know the middle and the end, and how I can not feel complete without knowing the beginning.  Miwha thought that was unintentional poetry, but actually it was by design.  I wanted to explain our loss in a different way, and somehow knew that Koreans would be able to relate to that.

So us older adoptees are far less likely to find the beginning of our stories.  And here in Korea, I am surrounded by 20 something and 30 something adoptees, but it’s really rare to meet anyone even close to my age, and if I do, we must all swallow that bitter pill.  Likewise, us older adoptees were given to anyone who professed to be Christian, and without any instruction manual, not monitored well and sent to racially intolerant places.  Many pills to be bitter about.

And yet, for all that post adoption past, I’m glad I wasn’t a more recent adoptee.  I’m glad I wasn’t aware of all these issues when I was going through the inevitable angst of youth.  It would have become fuel for every negative thought and an excuse for self-defeating, self-destructive behavior.  And you can bet I see a lot of that in the younger adoptees I meet.  Not to discount our shared losses and what having ones identity stripped away can do to a person, but being aware of ones pain while not having developed tools to deal with it, combined with the self-absorption of youth is not a good combination.  Armed with as much information and networking as today’s young adult adoptees have, would I have had a healthy response?

So I’m glad I put this aside until I was older, with a huge variety of experiences to draw upon which temper and ameliorate.  But I still want a beginning to my story.

So he looked up with a pained expression on his face and said something like, “I can’t believe I’m seeing someone who hates Elliott Smith.  How can anyone hate Elliott Smith?”

Really?  Is that a deal breaker? There seem to be two kinds of people in the world, those that hate him, and those that think he was like a God or something.  I only had one friend who loved Elliott Smith.  It was painful going to visit her, because her playlist was just one long continuous loop of Elliott albums.  It made me want to impale my temples with long needles to put an end to it.

To be fair, I just gave Elliott a listen again and I came up with the same reaction.

So here’s how someone can hate Elliott Smith:  It’s just so gorgeous it makes me nauseous – harmony, in my opinion, is only good in contrast to the solo voice and to have nothing but tracks of the same thin voice laid multiple times over the same thin voice is monotonous.   There’s just never a break from its relentless tyranny.   Not to mention that much of the attraction of listening to singer/songwriters is the privilege of hearing their raw unadorned voices, and overdubbing just destroys the authenticity of the intimacy for me.  And in general, the studio manipulation is just too perfect and self-aware.  There is a limited range of the musical scale in which his music resides, both vocal and instrumental, and (I don’t have the academic musical background to describe this, but) his refrains always end on a lower, depressing note.  Lyrically, he’s good at isolating the ironies of life but so many times what could be really poetic is distorted to fit the song form he so slavishly adheres to.   And when surveying a large sample of his work, its pessimism combined with the gorgeous harmonies and those aurally depressing end notes just make me feel like an anvil is sitting on my chest. It’s not just a cerebral thing – for me it’s physically depressing.

How can anyone hate Elliott Smith?  Well, I ask how can anyone want to live with an anvil on their chest?  And hit repeat?

Now, this is not to say I can’t appreciate the relief of knowing some artist can express feelings you have felt but can’t verbalize.  Or, that nothing can relieve the blues more than knowing others you have an affinity with also share the same feeling:  it can lift you up and out of dark times.  But to my ear, Elliott Smith keeps you in those dark places by all those devices he used but offers you no way out.  The blues, for example, wails and sometimes screams and offers release by loving itself enough to assert that the spirit of people should not be dominated.  Morrisey’s angst is like that – he may express wanting to kill himself, but instead he takes on his oppressors.  Piazzolla, for example, is the king of melancholy yet there is a tension of hope and love for self and love for life that underscores all his work.  Elliott Smith just doesn’t offer that kind of rich experience to me.  Introspection can be over-done, and without taking personal responsibility, it can be a negative force in our lives.  His music is just a huge downer and stays there, offering nothing but solidarity in pessimism.

Because Elliott Smith is emblematic of some major philosophical position, maybe he is a deal breaker.  Negative-sounding as I am, I am still hopeful and optimistic and seek the same.

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An African American Huffington Post author and adoptee speculated about suspicious minds when it comes to white adoptee fathers and their exotic transracial children.  To which I linked to my Screening for Woody Allen post from my adoptionsurvivor.wordpress blog.   I don’t usually do that kind of thing, but felt like it was necessary to let the world know that adoption incest is not just a myth and that exotification of transracial adoptees is actually more rampant than anyone cares to admit.

But, the funny thing is that this topic no longer bothers me personally.  It struck me, reading my own writing of four years ago that it’s all just history now.  Memories of those times have faded.  The feelings of stress around anything associated with it are gone.  It’s almost as though it never happened. Three decades of distress have been wiped out by three years of writing.  There IS a way out of the abyss.  It’s good to get out.

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School is back in session and thank God for small favors.  I don’t do well at home by myself for extended periods of time.  The mundane distractions of work provide a rhythm to life.

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Maestro, the cat I was babysitting, went back to his owner yesterday.  Yet another person who did not enjoy visiting China – she had such an awful time she even cut her trip short!  The only problem that occurred cat sitting was because I stupidly shut the door to the veranda where the cat box was when I was leaving in haste, so I lost the tatami mats.  I’m trying to decide if I buy another yoh for the floor for the remaining six months, or if I just sleep on the love-seat.  I washed the blanket, tried to figure out how to dispose of so much bedding, sprayed the entire contents of a $12 bottle of Nature’s Miracle on everything in the vicinity, and braced myself for the return of hell cat/vampire kitty.

As soon as Maestro was gone, Momo attached herself to my earlobes at every opportunity for the entire night, and I got very little sleep.  And, without Maestro to harass, she’s back to nipping my hands and forearms for attention.  But it has reduced considerably, and she’s also playing by herself more.  I watch her little tiny baby face and she’s so much like a little child, uninitiated and with a whole huge world to experience.  And then she looks up at me with need and adoration and I know I can’t give up on her.

One more set of vaccinations next week and then she’ll get an appointment to be spayed.  Meanwhile, I had my daughter get me some GNC product called, “relax” which is supposed to calm cats down.  It’s active ingredient is tryptophane, so pretty soon it will be Turkey day every day for Momo!