This foreigner's Day After Chusseock

A student once told me – to my great surprise – that he loves being hungover. I asked him 'why on Earth', recalling my own misery days after a truly wet experience. “Cause life is like Monet’s picture; you can’t really see clearly unless you squint, and it’s better not to see clearly; you make up stories, then, in your head.” He said something along this line, anyway. I smiled at his answer and thought it was worthy of a young Korean guy and his warped ideas of what’s romantic.
Today, however, going through Day 2 of my hangover - double hangover, that is, after 2 days of drinking - and hardly any sleep last night - I can see what he meant, sort of; it's hard to say, all is still hazy and I am not sure if I can explain... I'll try. It's about me making up stories behind people's faces and even objects.

A bit of elaboration on my 'state': Yesterday I just wallowed in the postalcoholic haze. I didn't really have a headache, I wasn't really sick to my stomach, but I was so slow, it felt like I was stoned. I kept staggering from the bedroom to the living room to the dining room to the bathroom to the kitchen and then all over again, not really knowing what I wanted to do in any of these places. Tried reading, couldn't concentrate; tried writing in my diary, couldn't concentrate again; finally I devoted my incapacitated self to the mindless task (more or less) of organizing pictures from my 'dica.'

At 10:00 pm I felt so tired, I just crashed. For a night of proper zzzzz's in my noisy neighbourhood, one needs a sleeping mask and ear plugs. Properly masked and plugged, I fell asleep almost immediately - alas only to wake up at 2:00 a.m. Stubbornly refusing to take off the mask and unplug my ears, I tossed and turned in total darkness and total silence (except for the noise of the inner workings of my body) until 6:00 am which is when I thought it reasonable to get up.

Looking like something torrents wash up on an unwelcoming shore, full head of make up and big hear was called for. The transformed was striking: I turned into relatively human-looking specimen and "just like Drew Berrymore in the ice-cream commercial" according to my students' later in the day. (As luck would have it - assisted a bit by my gluttonous post-drinking behaviour - I saw her picture in B&R ice cream parlour this evening ; if I remotely remind anyone of her, I look darn good when I feel darn bad, so perhaps I should just continue drinking and got through the Ugly Duckling experience).

Back to my topic of hangover: I don't know what I taught that first [admin.] class; vaguely remember it was something about education, or it must have been something about education ['cause it always is], questions like "would you teach your young children hanja" blah, blah. Then I had one hour to make photocopies for my advanceds; remember leaning against the copier and checking my prettified yet clearly alcohol and sleep-deprivation ravished face in the mirror facing the photo copy machine and me struggling with it.

God bless my advanced class! They were so good! The lesson was all about cooking Cajun food and Chille con Carne, 'cooking verbs' - dicing, slicing, cubing, chopping, mincing, stirring, mixing... and all those quantifiers a.k.a. 'a great deal of," a number of", seasoned [pun intended- and btw: down with that over used "pun not intended bs" ] with questions of the type "which ones do we use with count nouns; which ones with non-count; which ones with both", blah, blah.. I ended the class with the silly "find ingredients for your recipe while asking everybody in the class " do you have some flour/any eggs/some basil" game. They swallowed all of this without a grain of salt or a spoonful of sugar, without a complaint, with a smile, amused and bemused, perhaps. I felt like confessing, like saying, 'if you only knew how weird I feel.' During our three hours together I came up with the idea that instead of letting them listen to the track that featured a French Chef with a false accent, I should just read the script faking "zee French axunt." I did, and I did such a good job of it that they were roaring with laughter. Another brilliant idea brought on by my weird state: we're making our own cookbook; they'll bring their favourite recipes next week and I'll arrange them, decorate them with picturs of garlic and basil and the like flora, photocopy them and make them into booklets - a few students offered help. Nice 'kids.'

Then off to meet Prof. Koh over the super-salty lunch at the cafetteria, made even saltier by a headache that was opening like a huge menacing flower on the left side of my head. The dessert was my first Korean lesson after a long time. Jeez, is Prof. Koh ever a taugh teacher! Unless I get the pronunciation absofrickinglutely correct she wouldn't let me off the hook. AFter 1/2 hour I got so tired, I literally had to hold my eyes open with my fingers, pretending to think hard. The class ended and with me learning very little and promising [quitely]to myself' to be a better student next time.

I didn't learn much Korean but I learned a lot of interesting things about the prof.: her father- in law was a famous Korean novelist Hwang Som-thing (I left my notes at the office) and her husband is a famous poet Hwang Some-younger (again, the darn notes), whose poem "October" is taught to middle school students. It was also made into a 'symphonic poem' by a Korean woman composer and it will be performed next Saturday at the Seoul Arts Center by the KBS Symphony Orchestra. She had thought it was last Saturday, but she was mistaken. The seats in the "royal" row she got from her husband who had received them from the composer. I am given two tickets, pour mois et un autre - and that will be Andrea. It is to be hoped that an evening of modern Korean composers and the Polish pianist Zygmunt Krauze would be something enjoyable. If not, I can always hold my eyelids open with my fingertips and pretend I am concentrating hard.

I learned that she was the only female graduate student at the Seoul National University some 30 years ago or so; she used to play the violin in an orchestra and had all other all male students follow her to her concerts like puppies. One of those gents was her husband; she knew his poems as he had been somewhat of a child prodigy -published first book of poetry when he was 14 - but she didn't know that he was the guy wwhose poems she loved. Once she realized it, she she heard the poetry in her heart, couldn't help but being flattered by the advances of a famous literatti who came from such a stellar background; love blossomed, marriage and kids followed, and the inevitable happily ever after of this petit well-rounded, wonderful, generous, funny, smart lady. After being with her, even on a strange day like this, I feel so calm; I feel like I have an aunt here in Korea, of the type we all like to have (and I actually do, three of them, in Croatia).

Back at home, after the Korean class, I tried catching up on sleep, but couldn't. Then I decided that I absolutely needed to enlarge my enviable library of untouched Korean textbooks; they felt very lonely and insulted by the absence of Steven Revere's "Survival Korean." I love my books and I couldn't ignore their plea. Also, by now, the headache flower in my head turned into a field of them. Hoping the exposure to Seoul's poisonous air brew would kill some of the nasty blossom and feeling guilty for not exercising, I I stepped out into the falling darkness and walked down to the bus stop that would take me to the new Bandi and Luni's at Jongack.

Before long I had Revere in my backpack less 20,000 won it cost me. I walked all the way home, stopping for ice-cream at B&R in Daehangno where I licked my "apple blah this blah that" admiring my reflection in the picture of Drew Berrymore who was also licking but on something of a different flavour, possibly green tea. What sweet girls we are with our unruly hair, our little glinting eyes and our big chins! Les femmes tres adorables, vraiment.


I keep digressing - and this, of course, is on purpose. The form must reflect the content - I am feeling all over the place and I am writing all over the place. Why did I say that I understood how my student felt - humph ! now if I can only rememer?! Oh, yeah, it's coming back to me. Just like him, I was content today to feel hungover because I couldn't see the world clearly nor think about it pragmatically which left me in a mood to weave stories and search for bacground information in the fantasyland. All day long it felt like I had the power to see behind objects and people, to see them within a larger picture. As Prof. Koh was telling me about her family, I could clearly feel present among "yangbans" gathered for Chusseock at her [probably} noble Korean home, I could hear them talk and laugh and eat...I could also picture her as a young pretty girl tagging along her violin with hordes of admirers in tow.... and all this while I was repeating after her "Myot shi ae suobi shijukhasseyo" and the like.

At a little store in Daehangno I saw a pretty necklace with a pendant of two hearts glued together; a minute later I could feel it on my neck, glinting in the lights of Hellios; a pair of hungry young Nigerian's eyes on both of them... I was awash with a pleasant, almost sexy feeling (haven't had those in a loooong time).

As I was browsing among the aisles in the bookstore, I remembered my own almost forgotten literary ambitions: seconds later there was me dressed in a smart yet cool outfit, a brilliant author, headed for the Nobel, as cool as Carrie Bradshaw - except that my book is not fluff - with perfectly framed reading glasses, perfectly highlighted hair and minus 20 kg (lost in long frenzied inspired nights and crazy 'life' experiences of all kinds, from sex to drugs to rock n' roll. I was signing my book, being kind to my admirers and witty and fabulous and glitzy but nice, oh, so nice, a real class act...

It's not like I only had 'visions' or memories of visions past (call them what you will) today; I do have them ocasionally, usually in the unruffled crispness of my spinsterly sheets; they give me a different feeling, though, the sober and somewhat bitter one: 'when did all take a wrong turn?' , how is it that I'm living my life in vain... and the like. In the alcoholic haze, I enjoy my escapades, it feels like I really live them; it's like Bjoerk in "The Dancer in the Dark" forgetting that she is a blind manual labourer with a son who's about to go blind as she creates music in her head based on the the rhytmic factory noises, music that transforms her troubles self into a happy character of a musical. For me, there's no factory machinery noise; that function is fulfilled by alcohol that changes my body chemistry, breaks down the forever upright guards, lets me daydream.

This couldn't have happened only today. I just wasn't aware of it. My last stop was at a little K-mart that used to be my regular greengrocer that I eventually replace by trips to the Donam Market at Sungshin Uni subway. I just needed toilet paper - of all things. The regular cashier was not there; instead, there stood a beautiful young man, all of 18 , at the oldest,perhaps her son. The arms and the hands and the smiley head with "tchiageibsul" {lips so red they look like he just finished eating kimchi chiggae - aha! I have learned something today, after all} , the friendliness, the ease with which he did his job, the graceful movements... I remembered an episode in which Alley McBeal has a crush on a teenager, not because she's a pervert, not because she would ever start anything with him, but because he takes her back to the times when she was still able to 'swoon' over a boy's perfect hands. I had a glimpse of me years and years ago, of my obsession with someone's big round green eyes, my fervent diary entries with all its 'forevers' , hands shaking at the site of him... and I felt sad knowing deep in my gut that this will never happen to me again, and that I haven't had enough of it. The boy's hands could only bring back memories of feelings but not the feelings themselves, and that, my friends, is a tad sad.

Anyhow, all day long I've spent in a dreamland, unusually tuned to the inner secretive me that to my surprise still swims [or is drowning] in the cooler more rational pool. For the discovery of that, Debbie and Masanites, I salute you.