Meh

I got 'em all and it was an empty victory, for what shall I entertain myself with during the workday now?

Then, I had a three day weekend, which was just fine, lovely even, but has also left me feeling very meh. It started with a ridiculously drunken Thursday night: at the bar in Ilsan for Will's birthday until maybe 1 a.m. and then we spent the rest of the night drinking out of convience stores and playing the claw, that soccer ball-kicking game, the one where you hit a button with a mallet, and the batting cages. We ended the evening in McDonald's, where Orin ordered absolutely everything on the breakfast menu as usual, after an odd night with time spent with a Korean guy in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and a couple of Russian dudes who appeared out of nowhere. Since when have there been Russian dudes in Hwajung???

Sheila and I sacked out with the sun already well on its way into the sky and once we woke up, puttered around my place. Her computer has broken, so she updated her iPod from my iTunes and then we Facebooked the photos and just generally lazed around all day. The next day I had to clean and go buy vegetables, because Jamar came over for dinner. How amusing that I own all the ingredients for steak fajitas except for any vegetables. I now have an incredible amount of tomatoes, having bought them off of a truck.

I had an odd experience in Lotte while veggie shopping. I was bellowing directions into my cellphone to Jamar's cabdriver and a child of about 10 came up and started attempting to grab my shopping basket. I did my best to ignore him whilst yelling over the Lotte speakers belting out the deals: "Yobeseyo. Hwajung yok, Goyanshi? Anyo. Mahjeong, anyo. HWAjung, Goyangshi. Near Ilsan. Neh, neh, neh. Hwajung, ok! Neh! Kamsamida." Finally, I'm off the phone and I step onto escalator and the boy follows me, chatting away in Korean. I tell him I don't speak Korean, then that I don't understand (in Korean, I do have some skills), and finally just speed off to the check-out as the whole time he was making attempts to grab my basket. He follows me to the check-out and tries to grab my bags and then follows me right up to the doors of the store. So, so odd.

Today, I've mostly farted around again. Spent my Teacher's Day gift of Outback certificates with Jamar, watched The Children of Men, which was great, and a couple of episodes of Desparate Housewives. Really the only productive thing I've done is to wash my sheets. It rained and was nasty, so I don't feel at all bad about spending most of my day inside.

While trying to figure out how to spell the Korean for ok (impossible apparently, so I gave up and left it out), I stumbled across this website, which looks normal until you read the last translated phrase...