St Patrick’s Day and I’m not wearing green. It doesn’t matter because this is Korea and nobody gives a shit about that holiday. No green beer for me.

I did, however, pick up the new issue of the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies (AJWS), the cover of which is slightly green. I was able to view my name not only inside the cover as part of the editorial staff, but also this time as author.

I can now say that I’ve been published.

Perhaps one day someone will be fishing through the Social Sciences Index, or maybe there will be a database specific to women’s studies, and my name will come up. Doubtful, as I only wrote a book review, but it’s still a possibility. At any rate, I can always look myself up just to feel good until I publish again.

Vita padding.

I’m too hard on myself; I should feel severely excited, but I don’t. I keep thinking, "It’s just a book review, not a research paper." And I think, "Why aren’t I doing research, why can’t I come up with a question and just try to answer it?" Because I’m about as lazy as they make ‘em, which is no excuse. So I think, "I should be published by now (which I am). I should’ve gotten myself a grant and just done something." Nevermind that I’m currently not officially affiliated with any institution or working under anyone whose name could help me get a grant. Still…

Yesterday I got this totally cool (or so I thought) letter from my uncle. He is the only member of my family with whom I want to stay in contact who does not have email. I’ve been making an effort to write to him regularly the old laborious way and he responds in kind. He has always been my favorite uncle. I guess because he is so athletic and had a quiet way of observing things then asking questions about what he saw. It seems that everything he tried he excelled at and I admired that. Since his split with my aunt, he has slumped into some kind of deep hole where he appears and acts more like a child than the adult I always knew. I have little patience for this change of personality even though I know it comes from a broken heart. His transformation has caused me to reflect on the relativity of adulthood and how even someone who is in his mid-forties could be less experienced with loss and heart break than someone even my age. Surely, he has acted immature and he has relied consistently on defiance as a kind of retribution for being hurt. When I say that he is being defiant, I mean it in the context that he is stubbornly refusing to move on. It’s like he’s decided to be fucking miserable forever to "show her." This is what I have little patience for.

Anyway, I have been sharing the things I write about Korea with him. I send him hard copies of email or web pages. Last time, I sent him the thing I wrote about Soraksan. He seemed to like it, remarking on how more people should acknowledge and carry with them the emotions elicited by little experiences. (He didn’t say it that way, but that’s the gist of what he said.) He said, too, that he would try to write like that for me and enclosed was a story about a day of playing soccer - he scored a goal even. A great day. I was so impressed with his insight into his own feelings. His method of observation, which I have always admired, was articulate and clear. Reading further and further along, I couldn’t keep from smiling and feeling joy that he had had this awesome day and I felt hope that maybe he was moving forward and finally (finally!!) he was healing. And then in the very last line he said that each of the good feelings he’d felt that day meant nothing because my aunt wasn’t there to share it with him. My heart came crashing down and I felt angry at him for being middle-aged and not even knowing that he could’ve called up his son or a friend and shared. Or, he could’ve just taken the sum of that day to heart, acknowledging the spirit of being alive and being thankful for it.

The elevator in my building is broken. On the way out today it wasn’t working at all, and tonight it worked but only barely. I was reading some mail when the elevator stopped at my floor so I didn’t look up when I stepped out. It had stopped about six inches above where it was supposed to and I landed unexpectedly and hard.

The weather was sunny again today and maybe a little warmer than it has been. I walked by a blooming Magnolia tree on my way to the bus stop. I wore a long sleeve shirt under my thick brown sweater under my green coat. I froze each time we went out this last weekend, and I was sick of it so I just layered up. Later, the bus I was on got stuck in a serious traffic jam and we sat in one spot for twenty minutes with the sun shining right into my window. I baked instead.

The budding skyscrapers down the street are really starting to look beautiful. I’m in awe at all the constant activity, at their immensity; it’s hard to believe that humans can make such things. The construction is all so close to the sidewalk that I can get really close to huge machinery. A tire on a mobile crane is larger than me. The little man in the box manipulating the giant tool peered down at me as I stared at his rig. There’s just something so beautiful in shiny metal things that large. And in Korea, one can appreciate how things just seem to complete themselves even when the odds are against it.