Going viral

I finally had the follow-up appointment with Dr. Choi regarding my illness yesterday. It's been a bit nerve-jangling for the last four days, knowing my test results were in but being unable to get at them. Ive been feeling fine, but worried about how the results would affect my having a job next year, or even being able to run again.

I guessed that I might have a hormone imbalance of some kind, perhaps with my thyroid or testosterone (and, no, despite appearances, not overburdened with an excess of it). But it could have been something far more wicked, such as CFIDS/ME (Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), which I was exposed to for years. I've seen what CFIDS does to someone, and it's not nice.

As it turns out, it was neither hormonal nor CFIDS, just some passing virus, like catching a severe flu with no muscle aches, fever, or rumbly tumbly. I hadn't known that it was possible, for such a minor reason, to feel as if one's veins were filled with molasses and one's eyelids weighed 17 pounds. Each.

It is.

But it's over and no reason it should ever come back.

So... good.

Energy is very good indeed.

Pheeling phully phlebotemized

You know when it would be really good to speak fluent Korean? When you go to the hospital for tests, that's when. (Speaking of "fluent", it would be nice to know, when the guy hands you an empty paper cup, that you're supposed to fill it.)

Yesterday I went to the Catholic University's St. Mary's Hospital, where I go for my BP meds, for tests to determine the cause of my recent mysterious fatigue. Hardly any signs are in English and hardly anyone there, outside the small International Health office, speaks it. And the floor plan that IH gives out is in English, but wildly inaccurate.

Interior design by M.C. Escher.

I finally found a sign that said "phlebotemy", but if I didn't have such a marvelous vocabulary, I would still be wandering around on the third floor.

I had a chest x-ray and wandered into an office that I hoped was the place for an EKG. (Fortunately, since I was unbuttoning my shirt, it was.)

Then it was time to go find the blood-testing office. I walked only about as far as Frodo in the Rings trilogy, but finally found it. The attendant gave me a little paper cup mysteriously devoid of Kool-Aid, and I intuited that I needed to fill it in the men's room. (Jeez, I hope I was right! Otherwise, whoever picks up the cup is in for an unpleasant surprise.)

I'm proud of my blood test result; I didn't even study for it and still ended up with an A+.

Afterward, the guy who took my blood asked his neighbor how to tell me, in English, to press down on the gauze for five minutes. Then he told me, in English, to press down for five minutes. And then I went home.

Oddly enough, I don't like going without food all day and being impaled by big needles. But it wasn't too bad and I'm eager to hear the results. It's kind of a big deal; Dr. Wilder, our new principal, let me know, frankly but sympathetically, that the school can't deal with a chronically ill teacher, so if it's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I'm out of a job and have no purpose in this country. Also, I'll have to say goodbye to the Hash and to marathoning; the way I've been feeling, I can't drive 26 miles.

I really believe, though, that the cause is something more innocuous. (Sleep apnea? Stress? Something environmental?) I'm feeling better now, anyway.

I know I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Sleeping thickness

Yesterday, our school had its Family Day, with all the students and parents gathering for tug-of-war, dodge ball, and assorted sports and games. I confess to doing ten percent more than the required grumbling about holding it on Saturday, thus making me miss my beloved YK hash; in past years, the school had always held Family Day on Friday.

Since I couldn't hash on Saturday, I did on Friday night, where I ingested a grand total of one beer. (One light beer, at that.) We ended at our fellow hasher Panzer's house, where I promptly fell asleep on his couch in the midst of the merriment. Val woke me at 2 a.m. and shepherded me home via taxi.

As it turned out, I missed both YK and Family Day, as I woke up at 10:15, too late to go to either. Apparently I'd forgotten to plug in my cell phone the night before; it died, preventing my alarm, as well as phone calls from work, from waking me up.

Swell. Way to make a good impression on the new principal! How professional of me.

I have been just exhausted every day lately, fighting to stay awake past 9 p.m. I don't know what's wrong. Yesterday, in the afternoon, I went for a gentle hike on the hountain near me, in hopes that the sunshine and breeze would wake me up. I ended up nodding off sitting up on a bench. Last night I fell asleep fully dressed. I woke up and jumped out of bed, ready for the day... till I checked the clock; it was 1 a.m. I went back to bed and got up at 7:00. It's four hours later and I'm still nodding off at my desk; I feel the way I do when I get up for a bathroom trip at 3 a.m., all disoriented, grainy-eyed, and walking through knee-deep pudding.

It's taken me twice the usual time to write this blog entry. Clearly it's not twice as interesting.


To sleep, perchance to dream...

The SJC post without a joke

I'm thinking a lot about age today. It is (or would have been) my father's hundredth birthday. For all the friction between us--caused entirely by me, which is something for me to live with--I see myself as more and more like him all the time.

Also, I'm trying to shake off the flu, which has me shuffling about the apartment like a nonagenarian. I was feeling half-decent on Saturday, so I did the walking trail--not the running--at the hash, but it turned out to be five-plus miles all the way up and down Namsan, Seoul's most prominent mountain, and by the end I was in a lot more pain than in any of my marathons. Till today, I hadn't taken a shower or shaved in about four days and when I got up in the morning, I looked like a past-sell-date potato. My hair looked as if I'd combed it with a slice of buttered toast.

And there's the possibility that my school will institute the Korean public schools' mandatory retirement age of 62, which would give me two more years, or three, if the rule allows someone to serve a school year started at age 61. Oh. I'd barely thought about this until this moment: if they go by Korean count of age, by which you're one when you're born and age a year every January 1, I'm 61 now. I have no idea what else I could do if I got put out to pasture. My friend Bob, who is three years older, is in the same boat.

I just read a new book entitled Korea: the Impossible Country, which says that having a manager (such as a school owner or principal) who is younger than a subordinate (such as me) makes Koreans very uncomfortable, as it goes against the Confucian-based cultural norm that age equals rank. I don't know if that's involved, but from a business standpoint, why would you get rid of a valued employee because of a number? And, frankly, I've gotten excellent job reviews and was chosen Teacher of the Year by the students. That's just a popularity contest, but... hey, they like me.

The cable's not working, so I've had three and a half days of reeling from the computer chair to the bed to read from a laptop or a Nook or occasionally a retro device I vaguely remember called a book. Bored, bored, bored. And woozy.

But, in the year's weakest segue, I was also reminded today of age in the sense of history. I found the president's inaugural speech very moving, especially when he said:
--
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
-- 
I think it was groundbreaking for the president, at such an event, to remind us all that equal rights are for everyone. I'm neither a woman, nor black, nor gay, but human rights are human rights, and I found that paragraph of the president's--especially "Stonewall"--very inspiring. I think people will watch clips of it in 50 years' time. 

One day at a school in Florida, when I said I thought that gay people deserved to have full equal rights, a student asked, "Did you use to be gay, Mr. Cornman?" I said, "No; Martin Luther King is my hero, but I didn't use to be black."

Remember the first three words in the whole Constitution: "We, the people". All of us.

Hear and now

On Friday I missed a huge foreign-school conference in Incheon that everyone else from school attended. I felt guilty; it was an important series of meetings I could have benefited from. However, the steroids for my ear problem ran out the night before, I had an appointment for a follow-up visit, and I wasn't going to risk my hearing by waiting two weeks for the next opening.

I'll spare you the litany of frustrations that followed "Please sit in hallway" when I checked in for my hearing test. It's enough to say I waited an hour and a half because the signs were in Korean and nobody tried to help me. Finally I went down to the first floor and got an elderly volunteer from the International Medicine office to come up and translate for me.

My hearing test showed a mild-to-moderate loss of hearing on the higher frequencies in my left ear, probably permanent. Dr. Park said they couldn't do a different hearing test, which would have helped determine if it's middle-ear or inner-ear damage, because I don't speak Korean. I don't know why that's relevant--does the test involve differentiating between similar Korean words?--and it didn't seem worth pursuing, as it wouldn't make any difference.

I also wasn't clear on whether the plugging-up of my ear, which the steroids fixed, was the cause of the hearing loss, a result, or completely coincidental. Once again, it didn't seem worth pursuing.

As to the high-pitched ringing that comes and goes, Dr. Park had a two-word piece of advice: "Avoid silence." Thanks, Doc.

She also said that the hearing loss isn't unusual "for someone (my) age". Thanks a lot, Doc. I feel much better.

Me.

And that, I guess, is what I want to write about here. I've posted before that, overall, I think I've gained more than I've lost by getting older, and I'll stand by that. (At least while I can still stand.) But I've been feeling run-down a lot lately, taking naps in lieu of runs after school, and getting up for a pit stop two or three times every night. On one hash I actually had to ask my buddy Tirty-tree, whose stamina is generally so much less than mine, to walk awhile instead of running. And I don't think I'm going to make that half-marathon I told myself I was going to run this spring.

Incidentally, though I may be the oldest hasher in Korea, I've figured out that it isn't because hashing is a young person's game. I look at photos from hash kennels around the world and there are lots of geezers. It's just that my job is so unusual; there are very few American-style high schools here, and thus very few professional foreign teachers, as opposed to people who teach ESL at hagwons. That is almost entirely a job for 20-somethings, and so is the US military, and each of those demographics supplies half of our hashers.

Anyroad (I love that Britishism, and it seems appropriate to me as a runner), I'm hoping that a lot of my slump is because winter has sapped my drive and energy. We marathoners (have I ever told you I've run *two* marathons? Not one, two! As in 52 miles, 770 yards of sheer guts and the Triumph of the Human Spirit [cue trumpets]? And how you should be impressed by my indomitability? Oh, I have. Never mind) talk about "hitting the wall", that point, usually around the 20-mile mark, where there's just no gas left in the tank. I'm being melodramatic--I think--but I hope to heaven that, at age 58, I'm not hitting the wall in my life. I would hate that.

And, if I hit it head-first, I might damage my good ear. Then again, it might smooth out my forehead.

So there's that.

Hashing and hearing

Yesterday, Thursday, was a bee-yoo-ti-ful day. It was Independence Movement Day  here, a national holiday commemorating the initial uprising of the Korean people against their Japanese occupiers. Our school has a four-day weekend, and nearly all schools and hagwons were closed, which means one thing in the tight-knit hasher world here: time for the ESL Hash.

We met at noon at Triangle Park, at the base of Seoul's most prominent mountain, Namsan, near the foreign-friendliest neighborhoods in Korea, Itaewon and Haebongchan. The weather was incredibly gorgeous, in the mid-fifties and sunny, and I had the kind of Spring Fever that I never got living in North Florida. Hashing every week through the winter here can be a real grind, and it was wonderful to wear shorts again! If anything, I was overdressed, with two shirts on.

We scrambled up a gully toward Seoul Tower. It was hard work and for a while I wished I'd worn warm-up pants after all; who knew bushes were so scratchy? The long jog down on the road was gorgeous, and we would have had an incredible view of most of Seoul if the air had been clear. (This year's clean air in Seoul is scheduled from 5 to 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 8.) But, oh, the sun and the breeze. People in the American South can have no idea of the feeling of the first spring day.

After the hash, Tirty, VVD, Encyclo, WOPS, T3 and I walked to the Wolfhound Pub in Itaewon for brunch, beers, chat, and drinking games. I stayed too long and ate too much. (I wasn't going to order the apple crumble, but, you know, somebody else did, so I had to.) I didn't get home till dinnertime, at which point I fell, exhausted, into my bed for a nap.

 

 Apropos of nothing, I'm rockin' a goatee now. 

I may look distinguished; I may look like a billy goat. Your call.

Today was not nearly as bee-you-ti-ful. It was cool and spitting rain most of the day, and it was time to head to the hospital. I've had a stuffed-up left ear, periodically with a loud whining noise, for almost two weeks. (It's ringing now; if I hooked up my webcam, you could hear it.) It's very wearing and even more bothersome, especially when I have to ask my students to repeat what they said, and it hasn't done a very good job of going away.

I go to Dr. Choi at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, a branch of the Catholic University of Korea, for my BP meds; with nobody in the school office today to phone them on my behalf, I thought the best thing was just to head over there (45 minutes by foot, bus, and subway) and at least make an appointment.

St. Mary's has some doctors who speak good English and a small International Medicine office to help foreigners. I went there first because the receptionists in Family Medicine, Dr. Choi's department, don't speak it very well. The woman in IM got me an appointment with Dr. Choi ten minutes later, which is amazing, and the doctor suggested I have tinnitus and wrote me a referral to otology.

Incidentally, when you're waiting for your appointment, a monitor shows your name and your place in line; they black out the last syllable of your name to protect your privacy. So you will see (in hangeul letters, of course): 1) Bak Ji *  2) Geem Yeon *  3) Kor Maen Seu Tee Beun *. I am so relieved that the 20 Koreans in the waiting room might have thought it was some other Seuteebeun Kormaen who was having health problems.

She re-upped my prescription for BP meds; you take your sheet to a desk, wait, pay for the visit, feed the paper they give you into an ATM-like machine, then take that sheet to one of the dozen yakguk (pharmacies) within a block of the hospital. All in all, it took five minutes for my appointment and 30 to get the drugs. This was the first time today for that, but not the last.

I wandered over to the Central City underground mall to kill time, then went back to the hospital and up to the third floor, where I was late because the signs were in Korean and the helpful lady in International Medicine sent me to the northwest corner (obstetrics)-- where I got an odd look from the receptionist when I came in for my appointment-- rather that the southeast corner.

Finally I got it straightened away, by stopping in another department, pointing to my ear, and looking pitiful. I may or may not have said "ow". Anyway, after navigating the linguistic maze in otology, I eventually got in to see Dr. Park. (As an aside, Korea is extremely backward when it comes to women's rights and role in society, but both Dr. Choi and Dr. Park are women. I try to do my part.)

She shoved a camera-probe in my ear and showed me the problem: my ear canal looks like what Tim Robbing crawled through to escape Shawshank Prison. She cleaned it out-- there is no truth to the rumor that she shone her light in one ear and it came out the other side of my head-- and told me it was just fluid in the ear, with some inflammation. I told her Dr. Choi had suggested tinnitus, but she wouldn't hear of it. (Har har!) The tinnitus is brought on by the primary problem.

So she gave me another prescription, for nasal spray and steroid pills, of which I must take 11 a day for the next week, and an appointment for a follow-up. She also told me to hold my nose tight, puff out my cheeks, and blow as hard as I can, ten times a day. She may or may not have been funnin' me, but I'm gonna do it.

I  ran the linguistic gauntlet again and went back to the yakguk, got my drugs, and finally, finally, tired and grumpy, headed down into the subway--where the turnstile refused to take my T-Money card. So I went to the info booth, which was empty. So I waited. Then I went back up to the street, walked a half-mile to another entrance (the Express Bus Terminal Station is laid out with its three subway platforms forming a huge "U") and went to that info booth, which was empty. Finally I found the station office, and a guy helped me out.

So I rode back, walked the half-mile home from the stop, and collapsed onto my bed for a nap again. When I woke up, it was dark out. I don't know if it's the ear thing or what, but I'm just tired all the time lately. I guess I'm not 55 anymore.


Tomorrow will be an exhausting day. I never miss my Yongsan Kimchi hash (71 times in 14 months, baby!) I almost never go down to Songtan, an hour south of Seoul, as I'm always sore and exhausted when I get back, 11 hours after I left. But tomorrow is the on-out (final hash) of one of our core people and I can't miss it. Also, they've kidnapped Dick, YK's mascot, and are corrupting his morals, and we have to get him back.

The fiends posted this on Facebook, with the caption "Dick payin strippers".

Tug had better not be on the bed the moment I walk back in the door, or he's gonna get collapsed on.

Life goes od

The last ten days or so have been a slow, somewhat off time for me. After the half marathon two weeks ago, I ran with the cross-country kids on Wednesday, feeling fine, but on Wednesday night I had that ominous tickle in my throat: another cold coming on. I only ever get colds, but they whomp me upside the head pretty good.

My hashing friend Choopa contends that an extreme running effort leads to lowered immunity, and God knows my effort at the half looked extreme...

...though this was just in the last minute of my race, when I was busting a (n ample) gut to try to finish in 2:20.

But really the race wasn't that hard, and the last time I was sick, which was enough to cost me two work days, was under three months ago, three months after my marathon. So I don't think that's it.

The next day, Thursday, our school took a field trip, to a farm a couple of hours outside Seoul. I was feeling pretty cruddy. (As you can see, my hair went mysteriously white overnight.)

 

We had a good time, though, picking strawberries,

learning how to make tteok (rice cakes), which involved whacking huge mounds of rice with big honking mallets ("Okay, when I nod my head, you hit it with a hammer"),  and tofu...

...and riding rail bikes, four-person pedal-carts on a railroad track.

We got rear-ended at one point; somebody's car got derailed, my spine separated slightly, and I said a word I really shouldn't say at a school function.

I got home exhaustipated and each day thereafter I went through more Kleenex, slept less at night and more in the daytime, and blew my nose more frequently but less melodiously than Chuck Mangione on the flugelhorn. (The song I kept playing was "Feels So Bad".) According to my scale, I lost six pounds in a week, and I think it all came out my nose. (Sorry for the lovely mental image!)

I sleepwalked through the height of the cherry-blossom season...

(It's nicer when you can smell them.)

...and tried to focus on my planning and my classes, but I've been just so fuzzy and so snotty. (And not in the usual ways.)

I haven't run in ten days; I attended the Yongsan Kimchi hash each of the last two Saturdays, but could only walk each course, rather slowly last week and with a bit more alacrity yesterday. Every day I wake up thinking I'll be all better and every day I'm not quite right. (Actually, the last six words are always true for me.)

In the realm of longer-term importance, it's only six weeks till Lauren's gone for good and most of our teachers scatter for the summer. The school is going to find me a new, larger apartment. And the noisome recycling center across the street from the school is being demolished to make way for an apartment building.

It's got to be good for the school that we're accredited and the kids will no longer be telling the cab drivers to drop them off at the garbage dump.

So, even working at half-speed with a bad cold...

...life goes od. Bra. La la how da life goes od.

(By the way, it's a sharp picture; it's me that's blurry.)

OK? 5K? Que?

I've always been lucky with my health; I rarely get anything worse than a cold. On the other nostril, my colds wipe me out. My throat started feeling scratchy on Monday and I was glad enough that our cross-country outing was obviated by thick snow. (This has to be the last snow of the season... doesn't it?) By Wednesday, I was exhausted and lightheaded and from my voice you'd have thought I was the lovechild of Kathleen Turner and a Canada goose. I should have called in sick, but the $400 bonus for not using any sick days all year was too tempting. Also, I only had one class to do. My fellow teacher Susan Kim went out running with the cross-country kids after school so I could go home and crawl into bed.

Every day, people asked me if I was OK and the answer was always no. I admit I showed a few movies and made a few classes into study halls to survive the week. Now it's Sunday and I feel like crap, which is better than the hammered crap of midweek. My head still feels as if it's wrapped in gauze, but... well, I'm not OK, but I'm not KO'd.

In the midst of my mummified miasma, it seemed inconceivable that I could ever again run a 5K (3 1/8 mile) race; walking to my classroom was a challenge. But the registration deadline had come for the Bundang Marathon/ Half-marathon/5K, which is being held two weeks from this moment (coincidentally, in the suburb where SPPA stood last year). There are surprisingly few races listed online for Seoul, and this is the only one I've found with a website in English, so I went for it. Susan's also going to run it, as are two or three of my CC kids. (Incidentally, I'm very pleased that I have four runners and two walkers who are apparently in CC for keeps.)

As soon as I get over this damn cold, I will have the energy to start getting psyched for the race. I ran a couple of dozen 5K's from '99 to '04, but haven't raced since the Gate River Run (15K!) in Jacksonville six years ago. My standard time for the 5K was always around 28 minutes, which was good enough to consistently finish in the 33rd or so percentile. Now I'm hoping, if the week off from training doesn't knock me back too much, to do it in 30 minutes and to not finish last in the field. I am 56 years old, after all, and I don't know if slower, older Koreans run in these things.

Unlike every race I've ever run in the States, they're not giving out commemorative t-shirts, which is blasphemous. Those shirts made up half my wardrobe for years.  But I'll be there.

If I'm anywhere.

Days of swine neurosis

...wasn't Jack Lemmon in that movie?

Anyway, this is my 200th blog post... where's my cake?

It's dinnertime Tuesday and we were supposed to be back at work at 1 today, with parent conferences tonight and classes resuming tomorrow after our short swinish break, but I just got email saying that we'll be closed all week, which will certainly muck up our vacation schedule. The last numbers I heard indicated that five of our students (out of a total enrollment of 80) have been confirmed with H1N1, as has the principal. Me? I feel fine. Too lazy to go to the effort of contracting the virus, I guess.

Speaking of health, last Monday I finally reupped my bp meds. In Daegu, I had a little clinic/hospital just a few blocks from my apartment with a friendly, English-proficient doctor. Here, I did a fair amount of research and finally got an appointment at the nearest hospital that promised English competence, St. Mary's Hospital, which is linked to the Catholic University of Korea, in the Gangnam area.

I got off work at 4 and theoretically had to be there by 4:15, which necessitated a hectic search for a taxi, an eight-buck, frustrating cab ride in rush-hour traffic, and an intimidating search through the massive hospital itself, where I only found one person besides the doctor who spoke English. The signs were all in Korean, and I can read the letters just dandy, but unless they spell a word that's basically English (such as the little Hershey's foil packet by my elbow, with Hangul letters reading "kee-sae-seu" but which sadly now has only empty wrappers and little discarded paper flags left to offer), it doesn't help much. Trying to follow the directions of a lot of staffers pointing in general directions across a huge lobby with lots of branching corridors is more frustrating than you might think.

My doctor was surprisingly young (I think I may have been her first patient ever) and, judging from the top half of her face, cute. However, the mask covering the bottom half of her face was quite ordinary. She was quite accommodating and, once I returned to that receptionist to point me to the machine to feed my ticket into to get my prescription to take across the street to the yakguk (pharmacy), it all worked well. Then I looked at my phrasebook and said "Where is the subway?" only to have the pharmacist point down. It turns out the hospital is right on top of a subway stop, just three stops away from our nearest one. So I'll schedule my next appointment, in three months, when I don't have to get there in a rush and ride in relaxed subterranean comfort.

The next night, the PTA had the faculty out to dinner. The family of one of our students owns a galbi (short ribs) restaurant a half-hour south of the city. The property is an amazing mix of lovely park and ticky-tack; the grandfather showed us a tree he planted fifty years ago, there were big pools full of koi the size of your forearm, and there were lotsa nekkid women statues. Apparently it's a big place for weddings. I didn't want to make a fuss or stand out in front of the PTA, so I decided to just eat the multitude of veggie side dishes. Unfortunately, Zach (half of the most awesome department at any prep school in Asia) tried to be nice and told them I'm veg; I tried to tell them don't bother, I'm fine, but they brought me a lovely "vegetarian" plate... tuna. With a side of oysters. Oy.


More successful gustatory endeavors... I found a place called Butterfinger Pancakes in Gangnam, and on Sunday Lauren and I had brunch there. Oh, lordy, lordy... a Village Inn garden skillet, if God were the short order cook! Pancakes with three choices of butter (reg'lar, honey-, and I Can't Believe It's Not) and syrup, a massive omelet subsuming a pound of roast veggies, and a Matterhorn of roasted hash browns redolant of rosemary and delight. And lots of coffee. And last night, I joined Lauren, Susan and Chris from work at a little Mexican restaurant in Gangnam. Dos Tacos is down a wide alley from the main street, hard to find, but worth the trip; I'm pretty sick of the two Korean dishes I know I can order, and a delicious veggie burrito, hot, fresh fries, and a lime margarita... muy, muy bueno, ajosshi! It's a bit of a trip to Gangnam, but my culinary horizons just got a lot wider. As did I.

I have no clue what to do with the next five days. I may chase down to Daegu one day to visit Emma (returning to New Zealand shortly) and Joanna (Alaska, ditto). I think Daegu will always have a bit of a pall for me because I lost Tiki, but I want to see both of them again, and see Heeduk to negotiate terms for me to tutor in January... if these autumn days off for H1N1 don't completely eat up our winter break like me engulfing pancakes.

One flu over the cuckoo's nest

The inevitable has happened; our school's closing for a couple of days due to the "epidemic" Yesterday we had seven kids absent (out of 80 or so). One was out with a broken hand, and I don't think we can blame that on H1N1. Today, the same seven kids were out. There's one funny thing about this horrible, horrible pandemic... apparently it only strikes boys. In my creative writing class today, all four boys were out sick. All seven girls? All feeling fine, all present. Hmm. (Also, one boy yesterday wanted to go home with a temperature that was elevated by 2/10 of a degree.) Anyway, we had been in the middle of a story-writing project and there was no way to continue it with 36.4 percent of the kids missing from their groups, so... we watched Grease. (I was amazed; the girls all knew the song Summer Nights!) It was my only class today. Tough, tough Friday at work.

At noon, the principal made the announcement that the kids would go home two hours early today and that we would be closed on Monday and Tuesday, as a prophylactic measure. (We were supposed to have had three days off for the Jeju trip in October and only had one, to go to Nami Island, so it works out.) The teachers have a three-day weekend and have to report at lunchtime Tuesday for a work day; the endless dreary parent conferences are still scheduled for Tuesday night. I'm thinking of returning to see my friends in Daegu on Sunday.

We have no documented cases of H1N1. Say it with me now, the unofficial motto of this blog: "Everybody here crazy."

A hazy shade of winter

...okay, it's not really winter. It's only the morning of October 31, and soon, back home, the kiddies will be going house-to-house, filling their bags with Reese's Pieces and some odd radioactive stuff rather hopelessly euphemistically called Circus Peanuts. (Do kids still go door to door? Seems like all you ever hear about anymore is "safe" trickrtreatin' in malls, "harvest festivals" at churches, and twenty-somethings [preferably female] swigging tequila in Naughty Nurse outfits. Ironically, the whole "harvest festival" thing that fundie churches go for is totally utterly completely ultimately pagan in origin, and their "Satanic" Hallowe'en-- yeah, I spelled it the way I was taught to spell it in 1960-- is, being the eve of All Saints' Day, in that sense Christian.)

But I digress.

It feels like winter. It's uncharacteristically warm today, 62 degrees at 9:30 in the morning as it preps for heavy rain most of the day, but the little trees just outside my apartment have, overnight, shed all their lovely red leaves. They think it's January. The air, which remarkably has been quite clean since I've been here, in the last week has been filled with fog or smog or something ending in "og". (Frog? Gog? Magog? Egg nog? ) It's windy and gray a lot of the time. And the locals, who by my standards tend to bundle up way too much, are bundled up way too much. I just came back from my morning run and a young Korean guy was out running in a baseball jacket. Buttoned to the neck.

My birthday (my eighth, exactly, in dog years) came and went on Monday and I felt pretty flat. I got lots of birthday wishes on Facebook and a couple of e-cards (thank you all!) and some of my friends at school went out with me for dinner, but it didn't feel very birthdayesque. The big days-- birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas-- are the hardest days to be on the other side of the marble; we're teaching on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, but even if we weren't, it's tough.

On my birthday, the dinner was over early, as they tend to be when you eat at 4:30. I took the bus to Yangjae and walked to Kyobo Books in Gangnam. Walking back, elbowing my way through thousands of Koreans shopping, going out to dinner, or trudging home after a day's work at LG or Hyundai, I felt so alien, so totally out of place, with nobody who looked like me or sounded like me-- hardly anyone my age, for that matter-- in a way I've only felt once before in fourteen months in-country. 

Thursday was more birthdayish for me; Vanessa, one of our other teachers, had her birthday, and her boyfriend sent over a wonderful cake, which she shared. And my Bestie sent a very nice present (for me, not for Vanessa), She (Bestie, not Vanessa) also sent a very thoughtful email saying that I look so much better in photos here than I did in pictures taken in the States, that Korea has obviously been good for me.

And it has; I'm doing pretty darn well. But there are times when early winter comes from inside. I weigh an astounding 199, the most I ever have, and don't seem to get up the energy to do anything much. And a niggling thought keeps sneaking in (or out): my dad had his first stroke when he was seven years older than I am, I have a couple of congenitally narrowed blood vessels in my brain (I guess I'm narrowminded after all), I have rather high blood pressure, and I don't want to one day be alone in my apartment in Korea and stroke out, having somebody find me a day later.

I know that's asking for trouble and certainly self-pitying, especially when I have people I care about with real and serious health problems. Sorry.

So... this post has been a lot of SJC, and not in an attractive light, and not much ROK. Read it fast; I might just decide to delete it. But I feel better for having written it.

And I'll post later about the good stuff at school.

The taking of mental pictures is strictly forbidden

(Believe me, you do not want to see a more on-topic photo.)

I really like my health club so far. It's very plush, it has all the latest equipment, and best of all, it's upstairs from work, so I have no excuse not to go. The process of getting into it works off a few calories in itself. The men's lockers are on the sixth floor, the women's on the fourth. (Remember that, because I like to end a post with a smartass remark.) You take the elevator to your floor (because God knows you wouldn't want to walk up the stairs before your workout), walk past the guy shining shoes, take off your street shoes in the lobby, put them in a little locker, take the key and turn it in at the desk, get a coiled bracelet with a magnetic key to a real locker, change into the workout clothes you pick up there (you don't bring your own), take the elevator inside the club to the seventh floor, then sit on a couch and put on your workout shoes. At the end of your session, you do it all in reverse, but don't forget to include a Jaaaaahcuzi and a saaaaahna.

In three days, I've run on the treadmill twice (they have 50 or so lined up, each with its own tv), used the stationary bike once, and messed around with the weight machines once. Fortunately, all of the machines are American-made and have English text and, in the case of the weight machines, diagrams. This as just as well, as I'm fully capable of simultaneously breaking both a machine and myself. A trainer who spoke just enough English (more... elbow... slow) also helped with that and managed not to laugh at me. I'm embarrassed by my hamster-like upper-body strength, but that's part of why I joined. (Also, largely, to lose 20 pounds. [Largely, get it?])

Speaking of barrassed, I've never been a fan of mass nudity, especially of men, especially especially of me. Besides, I'm taller than 99+ percent of Korean men and rounder than 99+ percent (there are very, very few overweight Koreans), so I outweigh 999 out of 100 locals. I feel like a damn bear.

However, I have found a way (or a weigh) to be exactly 100 lighter on the scales: read the results in kilograms. (Today's fun challenge: do the math and figure out how heavy I am.)

I try to suck in my gut when I'm in the locker room, but it makes my head bulge. I just try to dissociate myself from the situation, as I do when I see tanks overcrammed with fish or eels waiting to be killed or as I did on my long, long, long flight. (I'm an absolute ninny when it comes to flying.)

I do like seeing guys in the Jacuzzi reading (laminated) newspapers.

All around me, there are guys showering (both at stand-up showers and on little plastic stools by sit-down facilities [for God's sake, I'm begging you, don't forget to pick up a thin cloth to sit on]), saunaing, whirlpooling, naked, of course. Sprawling around in an easy chair, watching tv? Naked. (You think Archie Bunker ever did that?) On a chair, reading the newspaper? Naked. Drying off in a primping room equipped with skin lotions, hair, gels, sanitized hairbrushes, huge mirrors fore, aft, and on both sides, and 2000-watt lights? Naked. I'm not used to it yet, though I am grateful that, first, none of these guys knows me or will ever see me again once I leave here, and secondly, that I can't see very far without my glasses.

I gotta see if they'll let me go to the fourth floor instead.

This is NOT good

...this is scary, and I feel so helpless about it:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iiDlfwqOC5I71KgFjzSBuany-hrAD94E73500

(Now I know why it's horribly smoggy even out in the countryside.)

See that tiny dash of white cloud running east to west, toward the southeast of Korea? I'm right on the right-hand tip of it.

No wonder I see a dozen people or more every day wearing face masks.

--

There's nothing amusing about that, but I've been meaning to post the number one song in Korea this year, so you can get an idea of K-pop and how so much popular culture throws in a few words of English.

So, to distract myself from the killer air, ladies and gentlemen, the Wonder Girls:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eptHTEnapH4&NR=1

...you can't go a block downtown without hearing this song blasting from a store.

--
I'm listless and achy with a cold, so a couple of links is all you get today. Sorry! At least I hope it's a cold...

Odds and... well, frankly, odds

It's been an interesting few days, at least if you're living it. As you're only reading about it, I make no promises. Actually this is probably going to be pretty dull. I hope I don't lose either of my fans.

It's been a week since I decided to take a really, really close look at the local sidewalks, and I've healed up remarkably well. I had my stitches out yesterday, although it will be a couple more weeks before the doc wants to stop covering it. He told me to not get it wet for a week. I suspect that if I don't shampoo for that time, I'll look like Larry from the Three Stooges, or maybe like our friend in the picture above.

The purple has receded under my eye to the point that it's only visible in a thin line where I have a wrink... a wisdom crease. The doctor says I'll have a small permanent scar, which bothers me, as it may cut my appeal with the local chicks. Maybe if I say it's a dueling scar...

I wore my new glasses for two days, feeling drunk, before I had to conclude that the lenses weren't right. (I have astigmatism, so if they aren't at precisely the correct angles, you might as well be wearing SADD drunk goggles.) I went back to the optical store and, through the saleswoman's extremely circumscribed English, my gestures, and a little diagram I drew showing my pupillary distance (needed to get the focal points right), I hope we got it right. I'm supposed to get them back in three more days.

I expected to go back out to Palgongsan today to show off my not-running-for-the-bus skills, but woke up with my body saying, and I quote, "Who you kiddin'?" My schedule's shifted so I don't have to go to work till dinnertime most days, so there's no rush. Especially for the bus.

As you may know, I can be pretty indecisive. Or maybe not. Anyway, on Sunday I couldn't decide if I wanted to go to the Samsung Lions' playoff game or just take it easy and check out a department/grocery store I hadn't been to, HomePlus (which is a branch of the British Tesco chain). Fortunately, as both destinations were north of downtown, I headed in that direction and waited for serendipity.

I decided that the ballgame was too much hassle, went to HomePlus (well worth the trip: a bottle of pomegranite juice and some English shredded wheat/cranberry cereal!) But when I came out, it was an hour to gametime and there were the ballpark lights RIGHT... THERE...

Tickets were all sold out, and I thought it might be just as well, but then a scalper buttonholed me and sold me a 15,000 Won ticket for... 15,000 Won. (I'm not entirely sure how Korean scalpers make a profit.) When I got inside, every single seat in the park was taken, and I ended up standing the whole time on the concrete walkway separating the lower from the upper seats, over on the visiting side along the first-base line. On my way there, I saw three Americans, one wearing a Phillies cap, who, seeing me wearing the blue and orange, graciously taunted me on the Mets' collapse.

Speaking of Mets vs. Phillies, I've been to games in Philly where a third of the fans would be rooting for the Mets, which led to cursing and the occasional drunken brawl. I once had a cup dropped on my head from an escalator at Veterans' Stadium. In contrast, here the sets of fans just ignored each other; in front of me were a few thousand Doosan Bears fans with their cheerleaders and flags and signs-- I was even given a kind of Karate-Kid-head-sash reading "Let's Go Doosan" in Korean. Behind and all around me were the Lions' fans. I never heard a harsh word between the two groups.

They'd tarted up the place (and the prices) for the playoffs, with two huge Lion statues in the stands, flame- and smoke-emitting nozzles for when the Lions scored, and a huge banner, twenty rows high, that would unfurl down the stands at opportune moments. The Lions won, my back decided that seven innings of standing on concrete were enough, and I went home.

I received my absentee ballot via email and want to mail it back today. However, I have to print out a certificate swearing I filled out my own ballot and so on, and I can't get it to print. That's odd, considering that the ballot printed. I blame Karl Rove. I hope that Manager Park at school, who speaks no English but is an electronics whiz, can fix that... I would truly hate to not get to vote.

Please insert your own snappy ending here.

Anybody got a chainsaw?

(This picture is two days after the recent unpleasantness. Six stitches lurk under the bandage.)

On the brighter side, I've found out that the prices here for healthcare and the services rendered can be amazing.

When they took me to the hospital, they cleaned me up, examined me, took x-rays, stitched me, gave me an antibiotic shot and wrote me a prescription. Out-of-pocket cost: $19. Cost of one day's pills (nine pills in all): $2.

Each of my follow-up visits: in and out in 15 minutes, checking the stitches, short consult, change the dressing, new prescription: $3.20.

I went to replace my glasses today; I picked out a titanium frame, which is very very thin and tough. The total cost in the States, even at Wal-Mart, would have exceeded $300. Here? Eighty-six bucks. I could have had them in ten minutes, but since I'm astigmatic, they had to order the lenses. At home, it would take a week. I'll pick them up tomorrow.

(Now, if you see the guy in the photo in your neighborhood, lock up your daughters, your sons, and your small animals... and hide the sharp objects.)

...I broke my face.

I fell on my head-- on the sidewalk, after the hike!-- and got taken to the hospital for x-rays and stitches.

Upon demountaining, I walked a quarter-mile to the first pick-up point for the bus; the second stop is right where you come off the mountain, but I wanted to make sure to get a seat. I stopped at the men's room and resumed walking to the bus stop, carrying my daypack and my walking stick in front of me. Why? I don't know.

Then the bus turned out of the parking lot (not visible from where I was) where the drivers take their breaks, and I started to sprint for the bus. I got within thirty feet...

I've been meaning to post about how if Korea were America, there would be lawsuits flying around faster than character assassinations at a McCain rally. There are loose paving stones, little stumps of what once were signposts, concrete pillars below knee level... I always thought somebody was going to get hurt.

Somebody did. The sidewalk in the little town by Palgongsan is made of square bricks, maybe a foot across. A couple of them were sticking up an inch or two. Running as fast as I could, I caught my toe on one and pitched forward at an impressive velocity. I remember a split-second thought: this is going to be embarrassing, almost falling in front of the people waiting for the bus. My next thought was: look at all the blood.

I fell on the left side of my face, broke my glasses, cut my lip a little, scraped my hands, ripped and bled all over my t-shirt (I guess I'll have to go back to Jax and run ANOTHER Gate River Run), broke my watch strap, and laid open my face next to my left eye pretty good.

Luckily, I had an angel. A Korean man about to get on the bus came over to see if I was okay, wiped off as much blood as possible, using paper towels and his drinking water, stayed with me, tried to tell me where I was bleeding from (though as he had no English...), let me call Heeduk on his cell phone, and called an ambulance. I was getting so frustrated that I couldn't tell him how wonderful he was to me. I just kept saying "kamsamida" a lot, and shook his hand and bowed from the waist when the ambulance came. He must have taken 45 minutes to help me.

Hey, at least I didn't have to pay for the bus fare home. It's a long ride back to town, even in an ambulance, and I was embarrassed that I wasn't really hurt badly enough to have one come all the way out for me. George from school met me at the hospital and helped walk me through everything. At least I got a doctor with fair English.

The doctor determined I had only contused my shoulder (yeah, that's a word. It is now, anyway.) He either didn't consider that I might have, or determined somehow that I didn't have, a concussion, and sent me for x-rays in case I broke my crown.

As Yogi Berra said, they x-rayed my head and found nothing.

Then they stitched my up. I must say it's disconcerting to be lying there with a mask over your face while people work with a needle an inch from your eye and say what I'm pretty sure was "oops" in Korean. The doctor said the laceration was narrow but deep, and that he would do his best but couldn't promise it wouldn't leave a scar.

You know, it doesn't sound so bad having a pretty Korean woman telling you to take down your pants, but it turned out to be a pain in the butt.

I'm supposed to take three pills three times a day, use an icepack 15 minutes on and 15 off, and go back to the hospital every day so they can check the stitches, and for the next few days, get antibiotic shots. Meanwhile, now it's time to go to work and for some reason I have a headache.

...if I hadn't decided to go to the farther bus stop, if I hadn't stopped to use the bathroom, if I hadn't been wearing my brand-new hiking boots instead of my running shoes, if this country bothered to fix the sidewalks, if I hadn't been carrying my gear in front of me so I couldn't see the pavement... ah, well, why dwell? I fell. What the heck.

Kind of ironic, negotiating a rock-strewn, root-laced mountain only to split my face on a sidewalk. That was my day, from 1 to 3 a.m. US Eastern time. Was that two hours as interesting for you?

Here's something you don't want the hospital to say...

..."They found something on your chest x-ray."

On Wednesday, I went to the hospital for my mandated physical to be allowed to stay in the country. The blood test and urine test were fine, even though I hadn't studied for them. But my systolic blood pressure was 170, which is ludicrous. (I'd pop like a tick.) I tried to explain that I was exhausted and nervous and had had several cups of my boss Hee-Duk's coffee, which is literally three or four times stronger than I'd ever make. But the nurses barely spoke any English. That in itself is unfortunate in a medical situation, I'd say.

Yesterday, Thursday, Hee-duk told me the hospital had called and wanted me to return right away. "They found something on your chest x-ray," he told me. So immediately I started thinking about malignant growths and such, and getting kicked out of the country, and, well, dying.

It was an anxious ride back to the hospital. It only makes everything worse when nodoby speaks your language, and I had a bit of a wait, during which nobody would or could explain to me what the problem was. Eventually I got to see a doctor who spoke a little English, and he showed me the x-ray and said that it showed that my heart is unusually large. That may come as a surprise to the waitresses I haven't tipped liberally. (Actually, it's the only thing I don't do liberally.) But you can imagine my gigantic sigh of relief. I'm not being deported, I'm not dying. As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."