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The morning has been decidedly calm and normal. I feel like I have all the time in the world today. So I’ve been tackling the pile of emails that accumulated over the last three days, catching up on reading diaries, and devouring some mac&cheese.
Soraksan was totally great. I plan to write a lot about it. Maybe I will tack part of it onto the end of this, or maybe I will post retroactively. Qui sais? Haven’t decided yet.
I’m clean. I showered in *my* shower this morning and it felt good. Felt good to be home and it’s a little weird because even though I’ve been here two years I always stop short of calling Korea home and mentally restrain myself from becoming too connected with my surroundings. But standing in that shower which I usually hate felt really good. And now I’m clean and happy sitting at this desk o’ mine grazing all day.
Whoops! The guard just rang. Got a package from Amazon that was totally opened and perused by Customs. At least nothing was taken.
So I want to do a play-by-play for our Lunar New Year’s trip to the mountains. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out; it may not be a journal entry, but something for Stranger instead. We’ll see. Right now I’m going to take a break because I’ve been on-line since, like, 8 am (it’s now 1:30pm) and I’m tired of sitting here staring at the screen.
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I wrote a thing for Stranger about Soraksan. It’s long. … Actually, I think it sounds a little corny. Corny in the way I tell my experiences. You know? You would know, you read them all the time. It’s like there’s this threshold of experience for me. I don’t feel anything - a void - unless the threshold is met; once the threshold is met or exceeded I experience an effusion of feelings. When I wrote that, I pictured myself blinded by millions of stars shining brightly. It’s like that. It’s selfish because the experience is so "me" focused. I guess everyone is always centered on themselves. Maybe I’m just getting tired of reading about my own experience? I live it, write it, then read it. That’s three times. I don’t know.
There’s a lot I left out about the trip. I tried to focus on the highlights, but that leaves out the little details. I thought I might talk about the food because food is always so important, but the story was already so long and it didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. So, I’m gonna talk about the food here. Maybe not today, maybe later when I upload the other page (which won’t be uploaded until I get the pictures back and scanned).
Then there’s all those things, those little flickers of "wow" that happen at various moments. They are all lost because they are just moments and the whole obscures them eventually. I listened to music nearly all the way there and all the way back. I don’t think I can even put into words how music augments the visual experience of "passing through" places. Witnessing just seconds in the life of a house, a person, a cow, which in turn elicits the wonder of a past or present for each thing seen. Always I ask what did this place look like before? What was that man doing in his youth? When was that house built? Why do some farmers bundle the rice stalks in nice decorative stacks while others leave the stalks lying in the field as they were cut? Why?
Later in the mail today came another package from Amazon. This time it was two books I ordered. I am happy but disappointed that I haven’t finished the two books I’m currently reading. I’ve got another one to read before I can start one of the new ones even. We got six books in the mail total. I think Customs might start to worry about us re-selling them. They’re probably wondering what kind of people can just read and read. It can’t be true; they must be selling.
Ooo - X-Files is on. You know what that means….
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