I'm in a time hole today. I walked downtown, walked around for a bit, went to kyobo to buy a cd, and then took the train back to susung-gu, and the whole venture only killed an hour. it felt like ages, what with the weekend crowding downtown. I don't know if I will ever again be as frustrated with new york crowds, after having known the horror that is downtown daegu on a beautiful saturday afternoon. it's basically impossible for me to function under such circumstances. so I came to the pc bang, and I feel like I've been in here forever, but it's only been an hour and a half.

I may have sucessfully scared off my air force admirer. we exchanged a few emails for the purpose of him giving me feedback on my writing. I was annoyed, because after I sent him the story (one that I'm not partucularly attached to anyway), he sent me this long disclaimer about how his feedback would be completely honest, he doesn't gloss over things, etc. "not that your story is bad," he said. at the end he said "if you still want my feedback, let me know." I was annoyed for a few reasons. for one thing, I wouldn't be asking for feedback if I didn't want honesty. I resent the assumption that I'm fragile enough to be bothered by an honest critique. also, when we discussed books at the bar last friday, his description of his literary tastes was something along the line of "I read everything from Tom Clancy to Nora Roberts." not word for word, but the idea was the same. this is where my literary snobbery comes in. I'm sorry, but I am just not going to be crushed if someone whose preferred form of reading is mass market paperbacks thinks that my story is bad. so I sent him an email back saying "bring it on," mentioning the fact that I've taken part in many a writing workshop and that I have a lot of writer friends and I'm used to critiquing. so he sent me his feedback, and surprisingly it was actually really helpful. he articulated a few problems in my writing that I was vaguely aware of but wasn't sure how to pin point. but I couldn't shake the annoyance from his original disclaimer. I mean, I guess it's a good idea. there are plenty of people running around calling theselves writers, pulling that card out in a bar to impress people but not actually engaging in the nuts and bolts of writing and revising. those people might be offended by an honest critique. and I suppose that since I deliberately sent him something unpolished, he had no way of knowing whether or not I was one of those people. but still. you read tom clancy. come on.
at the end of the feedback email, he asked me tell him something about myself, saying that he found me intriguing and wanted to know more about me. he added that he felt like a sap writing that, as though it was something sensitive...that kind of annoyed me too. so I wrote him back and condensed my last few years in new york into a paragraph...the break-ups, the couch hopping, jack's death, everything that has affected me the past few years. basically saying "hey, I'm a huge walking heap of issues, you should probably run the other way." which may or may not be true. I don't really think it's true. it's just that I don't want to deal with trying to date anyone right now, especially not a 34 year old who's in the air force, spouts semi-racist generalizations, and reads tom clancy. I don't care how good his taste in music is.
so yeah, I haven't heard back from him since the last email, which is why I say I may have successfully scared him off. I'm probably a bitch, and this is probably why I'm going to be 40 and not married, but I just don't want to waste my time when I am annoyed by someone off the bat. I know what I don't want, and I'm not going to compromise.

we won't talk about my recently-developed crush on christopher meloni (who plays detective stabler on s.v.u.). this seems to be a pattern, my attraction to prematurely balding men with nice arms. go figure.

it is currently 11:10 p.m., and sleep does not seem to be in my near future. for some reason, after work tonight, I was hit with the desire not to sit in my apartment and rot in front of the television like I usually do on weeknights, but instead to go for a walk/jog and come to the computer lab. so alicia keyes and I went for a nice brisk jaunt along the sincheon, and now here I am pounding away at the keyboard, three emails knocked out and still ripe with energy for a blog entry.

work today was just about as perfect as work gets. I had plenty of energy and I don't think there was one class where I was looking at the clock. time went by really quickly, and I felt like I was one step ahead of the kids the whole day, anticipating the misbehavior and therefore able to quell the bulk of it before it happened by channeling their energy into other things. I'd say all but one of my classes were more productive than usual. I invented a game on the spot to teach one class about prepositions. I wasn't sure if they'd bite, but they loved it. it was the simplest thing in the world. I placed a yellow chair between two blue chairs and called them up one by one. I would say "sit between the blue chairs," "sit in the blue chair behind the yellow chair," "stand next to the yellow chair," etc.
I teach two writing classes (composition, but for second graders), which have been the bane (bain?) of my existance due to the fact that the book is way ahead of where most of the kids' skills are. there's one little boy, ray, who almost never writes in his book when he's supposed to, and who used to have huge attention problems. he's one of those kids who will zone out and sit in his chair and makes strange noises. we used to wonder if he was a little slow, but recently he's been getting better. the last two days of writing class, he's been running up to me every five minutes with a sheet of paper full of complete sentences. They have nothing to do with the lesson, and each one begins with "give me," but there's no way I'm going to discourage ray from writing complete sentences, no matter what they are. I just correct his spelling. and it seems to me he's a bit of a poet. here's one of his creations:

give me coffee!
give me coffee!
give me pizza!
give me pizza!
give me pizza!
give me money.
give me money!
give me books!
give me books.
give me books.
give me people.
give me people!
give me people!
give me coffee!
give me anything!

it has rhythm, and it clearly builds towards an ending. pretty good for a second grader writing in a language that isn't their native tongue. there's something I love about teaching kids who seem ADD, something in me that clicks with their learning style. it doesn't bother me that I have to tell them to sit down every three minutes or that they're constantly running up to the board and trying to draw a picture to make me understand something, and I don't mind getting off topic and having to work our way back to the lesson...I enjoy finding a way to bring their attention back, and maybe work in the off-topic discussion and relate it to the lesson.

so yes, school today was fun. oh, and one of our sixth graders' mother forced him to come to school even though he was circumcised today. why he was circumcised at 12 years old is anyone's guess, but he was pretty hilarious today. walking was visibly painful, and he had to sit in the teacher's chair because it's padded, but he wasn't embarassed and had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. trust me, it was hilarious.

I've got more to say, thoughts about literary snobbery (my own, not other people's) and my tendancy to lampoon strangers in my blog, but I want to see if I can make it home before svu, so that's it for now.

keep on rockin.