9. 21. 97

Please reference the taxi story if you want more insight into the following: The irony of being picked up by a super nice taxi driver on a night when I was hating all that exists about this place is worth some contemplation. We will never know the real reason he stopped for us and I suppose that is a good thing. Not knowing allows me to choose the reason and it restores a sense of hope for human kindness. See, I’m free to decide that he picked us up because he knows how badly non-Koreans can be treated in this society. For a little fairness, I’ll throw in that he also wanted to practice a bit of English. Now that I’ve decided, I can imagine sympathetic exchanges and connections between people through understanding. This is the fuel on which I burn. It may be that he was simply headed that direction, but I can find enough clues to justify my need for the more imaginative and fulfilling option. I had much stronger feelings about this last night, but now it’s morning and sleep has dulled all that. Now I find that I’m stretching for something to write about because a good night’s sleep has a way of making the morning seem benign and I have this general feeling that nothing worth writing about is happening neither in the physical world, nor in my brain. Must remember to write in the evenings. I did get around to trying out the scanner the other day. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it works without a hitch. Plug and Play may damn well be a reality - on occasion. I toiled over the first picture to scan, as though it should somehow be symbolic and that I would always remember. Kind of like when I bought the CD deck for the car several years ago. I was very determined to grasp the symbolic nature of that event and so I chose U2’s New Year’s Day as the first song to be tickled by the laser. It worked. I suppose I will never forget it and I suppose that’s the reason I really dig symbolic things like that. Well, in the end I thought that I had way too many pictures worthy of symbolism and too little patience to sort through them, so I finally opted for a pretty one that was mildly symbolic in that it reminds me of how wonderful our trip home was, but mostly it was just handy because I hadn’t put the photos in the albums yet. So there you go. So, yeah, the scanner works, but I was a tad disappointed in the quality. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be as good as the photo itself, but noticing the difference between the image on the screen and the fixed photosensitive paper in my hand was a little disappointing. I also didn’t expect to have to mess with the brightness or the color saturation. What’s the deal there? Can’t it just scan what it sees exactly as I see it. Guess not. Oh well.

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