you've got to be kind

went on a field trip yesterday to plant some flowers. there were rabbits!!! there were also some naughty children. one of the korean teachers named isaac is a really big target of the children. they love to jump on him and make him throw them in the air etc. so we decided to sic the kids on him and he turned it around on us, the other teachers...so it was kind of like tag except that it was everyone chasing one person instead of the other way around. i had also made the mistake of staying out until 2am the night before. so by the end of the trip, i was exhausted. notice the bags on the childrens' feet so that their shoes wouldn't get muddy. at some point while i was running down a hill i hit a really big patch of thick mud and lost my shoe completely. so it's time to go buy new shoes, for my vans are covered in mud and seem irreparably damaged.


so, as a warning, i will tell you that the following is going to be gross and will have some crude language in it. not for shock value, but because i'm an adult and call shit what it is: shit...not poo, or excrement, or leavings, etc.

so all of the teachers got a talk yesterday about how we can't flush out toilet paper down the toilet when we take shits. my question was "well, what do we do with it?" and the answer was "put it in the bin." apparently, us flushing our toilet paper caused shit to come out of the sinks downstairs and there are major plumbing problems now. so for the next year, i have to wipe my ass and put the toilet paper not in the toilet where it was intended to go, but in a tiny trash can, so that i can make my bathroom smell like shit all the time! what a wonderful place to shower...

now the language should resume to relative safety. i've been watching shows i've downloaded. so now i'm caught up with flight of the conchords. i started watching "eastbound and down" last night and it's so awesome. i love it. i've also got 4 seasons of "it's always sunny in philadelphia" downloaded, which from what i've seen and heard is a pretty good show.

i walked to town this morning to go buy some stuff. i bought a large wooden alto recorder from the music shop and i thought they were in keys, but apparently it's chromatic. so i'm pretty happy to have bought it. i then ventured over to the english bookstore. they mostly have learning materials for children, but they have a small section of popular novels as well as classics. i bought "the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford." i remember seeing the movie and thinking i needed to read the book, so i got that. on the way to the bookstore, i ran into one of my korea friends who was out w/one of her friends. they went to the bookstore with me and then we went out to lunch for kimchi tuna soup. it was...not so great, but my friend's friend was easily the prettiest girl i've seen in korea, and that's saying a lot since pretty much every girl is drop dead gorgeous (she was also chinese, not korean). it's not to say i even developed a fantasy crush on her, but it's like the leonard cohen thing about how even if you're not with a beautiful girl, her warmth is shared with everyone, etc.

after meeting up w/them, i went to a very large tree. this tree to be exact:

i sat and read for a while. i'm halfway through "God bless you, mr rosewater." by vonnegut. on the last page of chapter 7 i had a bit of a revelation. i was thinking "i'm about to read something and i know what i'm about to read." and lo and behold, i did read it. the thing i had read many times over had never had a context. i didn't know where it was from...but i sat beneath the tree of all seeds and read it for the first time on my own. it filled my eyes with tears and i closed the book. i walked home listening to joanna newsom. in a lot of ways, i came here to get away from things halfway around the world, but it turns out that i brought just enough stuff in my suitcase...it's not that i'm in any way trying to forget those things, why would i want to forget the best things? i don't, it's just that they've forgotten me.