Rainbow trout

I done wrut me a poem.

---

A rainbow trout is splashing around,
Going about his fishy business, and
Ventures a little too close to the surface.
He is gripped in an explosion of
Talons and feathers, grasped and carried off
By an eagle, maneuvered around facing front,
Aerodynamically arranged, rising higher and higher,
Gasping frantically, mind whirring in terror and wonder,
As the world spreads out before him
In greens and blues, squares of field and
Ribbons of river and the red setting sun on the hills,
And aha, I see, he thinks,
And what the hell is this, and
How did I never see this before?
It’s all so beautiful and I’m so scared
And I can’t breathe but my God look at it all.

And this is what flashes through our minds
At the moment of our death:
I can’t breathe but my God look at it all.

And I only am escaped to tell thee.

(Photos: Daegu's greatest writers' group, with too much coffee, and Korea's greatest trivia team, with too much beer. What do these two "greatest" groups have in common? Modesty forbids...)

...okay, the title of this post is a teense melodramatic (it's from Job, and Moby Dick), but it's been one whale (ha!) of a four-day stretch and I'm exhaustipated.

Thursday, I had off as I've agreed to work Sundays. It was cold and drizzly all day and all I did was work out and, in the evening, go see He's Just Not That Into You with Joanna from the Samduk LIKE. Well, actually, there was a huge kerfluffle about where she was (not where we were supposed to meet), so having bought two tickets, I left her a note, got to the theater late, and did my best to sprawl across two seats. She found me, though, a half-hour into the movie. Not a good movie. I don't mind chick flicks and I especially don't mind looking at Scarlett, Jennifer, and Jennifer, but there were too many characters to care about any of them in a dramatic sense and it wasn't nearly funny enough to be a comedy.

Friday, E.J. Koo, the head of the language program at the YMCA, helped me buy a cell phone. There are literally well over a hundred little phone stores in a few blocks downtown, all with the same products and services, and they apparently fire anyone they suspect of speaking any English. E.J. overwhelmed me with her generosity; she doesn't really know me at all and she gave an hour of her time and donated a cell phone charger. Then I ate lunch at Hami Mami's, my number-one hangout (American brunch! French toast! Hash browns! The only place in Korea you can get food without hot-pepper paste and garlic!) Hami is the one, by the way, who set me up with my cats; she's really nice. Then I went to school.

After a long day's work, I caught a cab downtown for a midnight trivia game at a dark cavern of an expat bar. I got hooked up with a bunch of strangers, mostly friends of my new friend Justin, some of whom had come down from Seoul for the weekend, who also didn't have teams. Going into battle under the team name "Han Solo Rocks", we kicked ass. There were three rounds; I helped carry us through the first round, history and politics. (Sample question: Mentioned in the movie Die Hard With a Vengeance, who was our twenty-first president?) I was practically useless in Round Two, rock and roll (not a single Carpenters question!) The third round was movie quotes: name the movie, year, and Oscar winners (for any category in any movie) who appeared in the movie. I helped a little, but my teammates did the heavy lifting, and we won easily. Each team put up 20,000 Won and HSR took home all the cash. My share basically paid for my cabs and beers. God, I miss trivia. I miss Hogwarts.

(During the day, George, the Guy Friday at school, had told me the government allowed teachers a cut-rate cancer screening. This is good, as the bar resembled a fire at the R.J. Reynolds factory. I got home, scratchy-voiced and red-eyed, at 2:45 a.m...)

...and found email that the teaching job in Seoul for next year, the one I really wanted and would have had already but for a timing mixup... is basically mine. This may be the only thing in this post of lasting value, so don't bother reading anything above or below it, okay? Uh...

On Saturday, having had five hours' sleep, I attended the first class of the second-level Korean course. Felt totally lost. Went to work most of the day, then caught a cab downtown to see Watchmen with a few friends and friends' friends. If you don't know Watchmen, it was an incredibly brilliant, multilayered, dark comic book series in the eighties and long considered unfilmable. (Time called the comic compilation one of the 100 best novels-- not comics-- of the century.) The movie was astoundingly done but so brutal and nihilistic that I can't say I enjoyed it. If anybody likes royal blue male appendages, though, that's your movie. I'm not kidding. I have always kept this blog family-friendly, so I won't make any jokes about "blue jobs".

On Sunday, having had five hours' sleep again, I taught a new three-hour class on critical thinking and essay writing, then walked downtown to the writers' group meeting at Hami Mami's. It's really nice to have new, like-minded friends. For five months, I didn't know anybody I didn't work with. Daegu is a different, better place now for me. Then I got home, took the arduous trek to and around Costco (as the boys and I agreed that we needed a thirty-pound jug of cat litter, stat), and came home and fell asleep in front of the tv.

And now it's 1 a.m. Monday and I'm awake. Good night!

Best. Weekend. EVER.

(Don't you hate it when people think that their cats-- who, after all, look like a hundred million other cats-- are so cute they'll stick a photo up even when it has nothing to do with what they're talking about? Me too.)

...well, maybe not the best weekend ever. (My honeymoon was pretty good.) But I'm teaching the kids to use strong, interesting words, and I didn't think "A Really Nice Weekend" would cut it.

As there may be one or two Anglophones to whom I haven't whined about how I got offered my dream job (with 600,000 Won a month more in salary) six hours after I'd sent my degree to Daegu and how FedEx promised to redirect the package but didn't, and how they actually called me to apologize for delivering the package faster than promised to the address on the label... I should put in all the tragic details here. But if I do, I'll be up all night and my tears might short out the keyboard, so I'll save it.

But I've been in touch with the aforementioned dream school (St. Paul Preparatory Academy, an elite international school in Bundang, a new and ritzy Seoul suburb) and this weekend I bought my bullet-train ticket for next Sunday to go up, see the school, and meet my contact there, Tony, who sent me the contract last August with the note: "Please please tell me you haven't sent your papers to Daegu yet." He says that they've expanded their enrollment a great deal already in their first year, there's a good chance they'll need another English teacher, and mine is the first name he'll present to the headmaster... so we shall see. I couldn't spend the rest of my career at LIKE school, but I might could maybe do so at St. Paul... I also hope to see Margaret, one of my ex-St. Joe students and cross-country runners, who is teaching up there.

Besides that... I found Korean class on Saturday morning to be difficult, possibly because I didn't glance at the materials all week long, but I made some friends: Joelle and Cliff, though half my age, have let much more adventurous lives than I, including stints in the Peace Corps. We arranged to meet at Club That on Saturday night for the launch party of Daegu's first magazine for Anglos and locals. (Check it out online at daugupockets.com).

During the afternoon, I did my teaching, then skipped the health club (for the first time in ten days!) and went downtown. I was too late for Joelle's birthday dinner, but met them at Club That, along with their friend (my new friend) James. It was less than ideal, as it wasn't so much a party as a shouting match over the band, but then we went down to the first floor (where Hami Mami's is in the daytime) and had a nice talk. Joelle asked if I wanted to come to the Writer's Group at the same place at 2 on Sunday, and being a decisive sort, I said, "Maybe."

Today (Sunday), I went for a run in the park, then showered and headed downtown. Joelle and Cliff were there, as were Emma from New Zealand, Jeremy from California, Justin the Yankee fan and Princeton grad (who despite it all seems like a nice guy), and Pill-kon, who, as you may have guessed, is local. We had 90 minutes or so of people sharing good writing and exchanging commentary. I hadn't brought anything, so I recited the only thing I've ever written that I've memorized:

***
Tom
(once sperm a secret's size
and egg a whisper's width)
Spoke knowingly today.

"God is dead,"
Thomas said.
***

(That poem, by the way, is older than anybody else in the writer's group and shorter than most Koreans.)

So I have friends (my first in Asia with whom I don't work!) and will be going to the meeting next month. They're all smart, friendly, and talented, but I think I could take 'em all in a 60s-sitcom trivia contest. Maybe.

Afterward, Cliff and I went to see Inkheart at the movies. I liked it very much indeed; it's gotten mixed reviews, and it won't be any hit: too dark for little kids, too fairy-tale for a lot of adults, but it's the best movie I've seen in a long time. Right up my alley, anyway.

...and then I stopped at Kyobo Books, bought a gorgeous, 19th-century-looking hardcover journaling book (Tradition notebook: Precious Memories, Magic Spells), complete with placemarker ribbon, for seven bucks, and came home to begin my procrastination over writing this post by Facebook Friending everybody I just met... and now Justin tells me via Facebook chat that...

There. Is. A. Regular. Bar. Trivia. Night! (As you may know, the only things in the world I'm good at are writing, trivia, and one other thing that modesty and a solicitous concern for the sensitive reader prevent me from sharing with the public...) It occurs to me that I work nights, so I might not make it to trivia... but maybe I can work something out; it doesn't start till 11 p.m.

So, to recap, this weekend brought me:

A ticket to check out my dream job
A magazine that might help me find out what the hell is going on socially in this town
A beer
A writer's group, meaning:
a) a kick in the gluteus for my writing, and
b) FRIENDS!
A good movie
A gorgeous journal
Hope for a rebirth of trivia

...and, oh yeah, spring. It's been in the 50s Fahrenheit through all of late January and early February. (Jealous much?)

I feel as if, after over five months of going to work and going home, my world is opening up...and next Friday starts a three-day weekend! So... sometimes you eat the bear. Or, in my case, the bear-shaped block of tofu.