Lots of things have come and gone that I thought about writing down. For whatever reason, whether away from the computer or just not wanting to record it just then, I haven’t done it. And now I won’t because the flash is gone.

I’m starting to feel depressed. I realize it’s an interaction of things along the (space-) time continuum. (Heh.) The first is that I’m thinking about going home in June for a couple of weeks. Just the thinking - and this other thing, which is so totally cool I don’t even know the best way to talk about it - are making me excited. Post-April, that first week or so, I felt nothing and nothing means no bad, but it also means no good. So Thursday, I started feeling good - excited about going home.

That morning, there was the possibility I might be home for the June 20 date of Lilith Fair at the Gorge at George. In my mind I just saw the wide open spaces of Eastern Washington, spaces less populated than most and I just needed to be there. I pictured myself in the warm light reflecting off of hay and alfalfa at sunset. I used to ride with my uncle in his big rig out to George where he bought hay for his feed store. When I was nine, the ride seemed to take forever. Riding through most of the day until he found just the patch of land he was looking for amidst all the other patches that looked exactly the same. I couldn’t imagine how he didn’t get lost in all the uniformity. The farm houses stuck up from the earth in grotesque angles, ruining the smooth arcs of rolling hills and even the jagged edges of a carved canyon. At the scales, he bought Idaho Spud candy bars for me. I still love those things, but they are harder and harder to find these days.

Also Thursday morning I talked with my unbelievable friend Tom about the computer he has bought for me. … I’m speechless. I can’t comprehend the good fortune of having a friend like that - the scarcity of it and yet it still belongs to me. He said, "I just couldn’t stand the thought of you still using the 486." So we talked about components and he was telling me about how he plugged it in and it s-c-r-e-a-m-e-d. (I wish there were multiple degrees of italics to choose from; I think "severely italicized" would be more effective there.) There hasn’t been a jump this big since 386 to 486. Just imagine: 486 to Pentium 200. Egads. I can’t wait! Now, every second I wait for an action after one click of the mouse, I think of my new computer waiting for me at home.

Then I left for class at Ewha. (My tea teacher called and canceled again. I was a little bummed because I was really looking forward to the feeding and drinking. But staying at home was a relief too, even though I was, on most levels, tired of being cooped up - yes, it finally did happen.) I arrived just on time, which meant I couldn’t eat my Subway sandwich before class because the paper is too crinkly, the sammo too messy . I had to wait another hour until break, an anxious one because I was so hungry. But the lecturer was absolutely fantastic and it was easier not to focus on the passing minutes because of her. I don’t know where to begin. She’s … remarkable. President, CEO of her own successful company in Korea - a woman in a country where women are so severely marginalized. Although the country is suffering from economic meltdown, she continues forward. It’s too cool:

She is the daughter of one of the richest guys in Korea. This is huge help, of course; it cannot be discounted. Still it has not been easy: Rich folks in Korea educate their kids to the hilt. In her case, she attended one of the best universities in Korea, and then went on to Amherst in the US and then got her PhD from somewhere in Britain. After all her education, she returned to Korea and her family said, "Unh-unh, no way: Women don’t work. You have to get married." That wasn’t acceptable, for her education abroad taught her how oppressive the Confucian social system is and she wasn’t going to go brain dead being a housewife. She said she went to school with so many women at Yonsei University (in Seoul) but now they are all gone. All gone. They’ve been shut indoors. She left her family. A large competing conglomerate to her father’s offered her a job. Her father wouldn’t allow it but wouldn’t allow her to work at his company either. She had no choice but to start her own, but when no banks would give a credit line to a woman, she had to make up with her father and ask him for the funds to start her company. At that time, she was a one woman show, and now, 10 years later, she employs 400 people, 300 of whom are women. She said no men would work for her in the beginning; it was too humiliating for them to be beneath a woman. So, she hired women and eventually she hired men who were uneducated, men who couldn’t get hired elsewhere. And then, because she is Christian and because her education taught her how dirty Confucianism can be, she adopted a policy of transparency and vowed never to engage in the corruption that is endemic in Korea. She said that when you start out with such handicaps, you become creative and find a way to survive and succeed. Succeed she did. Because of her Western education, her adoption of Western business practices, her creativity and her own convictions, she beat out absolutely huge conglomerates for contracts with foreign companies. She asked foreign firms why they picked her small company and they say it is because she runs a Western-style, transparent business. In these days of economic sinkholes, her business strategy is holding fast. What a cool story.

We listened to her tell anecdotes for two hours. She told stories about what it was like to be a young-ish woman in a room full of old men, who expected her to bring them each 2 million won (approx. $1500) in gifts (bribes) just to start off the meeting on the right foot. When she showed up with papers only, some of them actually just left. Or, how when she would enter the room, they thought she had come to serve them coffee. She told us about her investment in a women’s center at Yonsei University to train women for work. Women lack confidence, she says, to be leaders. All their lives they’re taught that they must serve someone else and so they aren’t confident enough to be managers of teams. She’s had to teach hers and she finds that just giving them confidence is all they need; once they have that, they have no problem leading a group.

Her lecture was so different from all the others. Usually we sit listening to researchers, people who take a look at the way things are, qualify it, and make recommendations for change. But Ms. Kim, she’s one of those valuable individuals who just goes out and does: She sees a need for something to be done and does it without asking questions. No hesitation: a doer. From my non-doing point of view, I can see how much we need those kinds of people. It’s so easy to hide behind research, recording the problems but not making change.

After class, in Mala’s car heading back to the women’s center, a group of us chatted about the lecture. I knew everyone there except for one woman who seemed to be Korean-American. I didn’t introduce myself because I thought she was someone in the class and I thought for sure I’d met her before somewhere. I didn’t want to look like a dork introducing myself to someone I already knew. Then she introduced herself to me. We talked:

Turns out she’s here in Korea for a year under a Fulbright grant. I asked her about her research and found quickly that she’s shooting from the hip. I began to feel self-loathing. This woman knows less about women’s experience in this country than I do, less about research methods too; not to mention that she’s changed her study 2 times in the last year because she just doesn’t know what she’s going to write and even now, as she was explaining to me what she’s researching, I could see that she still doesn’t have a clear focus. And yet, this woman is going to stick these most important words on her vitae: Fulbright grant. What the hell is my problem? For some reason, it never occurred to me that ordinary people could get grants. It doesn’t seem like they’d just give out money to anyone who says they’re going to go off to some country and do research. Apparently, they do.

This is the part where I start feeling bad. I had been feeling good remember? But getting out of the house, out of my neutral state, left me open to the gamut of possible feelings. I kicked myself all the way home. When I got there, I got on-line and found grants galore and now I’m feeling even worse. I haven’t been this humiliated in years. WHAT have I been doing with my time?

Nothing.

Tricking myself, apparently.

Well, there’s still time. The question is, do I have the courage? Because that’s the real issue.

Here’s something I’ve wanted to put here all week. Each time I sat down to write an entry, something different came out and was eventually deleted when I came back after leaving it and could no longer relate to what was written. I should’ve just uploaded then but didn’t. I’ve learned my lesson, I hope.

Anyway, this blurp below was included in an opinion piece written by some White Guy regular columnist in one of the English Dailies. The guy wrote about how Kimpo airport needs a serious overhaul to improve foreigners’ first impressions of Korea. I was loving it - the man was finally speaking to a real need. Unfortunately, he almost totally neglected the importance of food and shopping, instead focusing on all the security and procedural things, which he submitted were worse than in other countries. They are, maybe, but in my opinion things like Immo, Customs, and Security are just hassles; however being stuck in an airport without any fun way to spend money and without any good food distractions is torture.

To prove his point that Korea needs to work on its image, he added this:

In an annual survey of quality of life for expatriate business people in Asia, the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. (PERC), a private consulting firm based in Hong Kong and Singapore, ranked Korea at the bottom - below Indonesia, China, and Vietnam - of the 11-nation survey, PERC concluded: Although in many ways, the standard of living in Korea is high and it is an advanced, modern country, a large number of expatriates residing there find themselves dissatisfied and frustrated."

Dissatisfied and frustrated. I love that! Can you believe that expats in Vietnam are happier than here? Hell, let’s live there! And Indonesia - well, those people are trying real hard to have a social revolution. Man. What’s wrong with this place? Oh yeah - that visceral thing. How soon I forget.