but where it's going no one knows

nothing's happening here but i've thought about a change of plans. i was considering coming back to korea and teaching next year, but i'm considering coming back here instead on an education visa and getting my masters. it's about 1/4 of the cost compared to the states. so i might come home for a few months and come back in august for my master's in english literature. the classes are in english and all that. i'd have to stay in a dorm, which would be fine...but the only thing i'm wondering is how i would live. i could do some private lessons, but those are much harder to come by than i was hoping. i figure that if i taught 5-10 hours a week i could live a relatively normal life, making between 500,000-1,500,000w a month. i just don't want to take out a ton of student loans. the thing is that the programs over here are based not only on your academic standing but also on your interviews and gre scores and personality. so it seems like a good deal. i think that maybe i'm starting to think of this place as home. it feels like so much has changed since i left and that home will never be the same. oh well, so it goes.

i bought a t-shirt today. i like it for some reason or other. the perplexing array of t-shirts here baffles me. there will be a shirt and it will have an amazing design and some random english phrase that somehow makes sense in a way that an english person couldn't. for instance, one is a shirt with these geometrically arranged cassette tapes and the slogan is "slow life." i like this one for the fact that it's sort of an obvious yet still bizarre phrase. "when changing the way you think, there will be a...wonderful change." it's rather obvious but still evasive in a way that only a non-native speaker could be evasive. it's still odd though because koreans for the most part will never understand the irony of things like a "three wolf moon" t-shirt or even that new threadless shirt with the three cats playing piano under a full moon...i guess most americans don't get it either.....all the same. i think i like the shirts here because they are equally bizarre to anything you could find back home, but they're worn in complete sincerity. often times they have no idea what they say. i saw a guy wearing a shirt that said "fuck you!" on it and a girl wearing one that said "about our conversation earlier...i never said shit." in a way, i don't think they appreciate the innocence of their t-shirt choices in the same way i do.