Screws (bus ride to Chicago)

I look around and notice the screws.

Holding everything together

The entire bus held together by screws.

If I had a Phillips head screwdriver, I think I could take apart this whole bus.

The blue and yellow Megabus décor theme throughout would cease to be part of their brand as the shiny banana yellow metal rails and the fuzzy royal blue seat cushions would be scattered and apart.

It all fits together so perfectly

But if they were apart, they’d become unique.

A cold vibrant yellow railing hanging on the clean white wall of an art gallery, in between paintings of love and soup cans and death and anguish.

A soft blue seat cushion saturated with wet mud in a puddle in an alley, with pallet splinters, dirty crumpled newspapers, and discarded plastic packaging floating around it.

A gun gray grate being fixed onto the inside panel of a new Megabus, recycled into a new but entirely similar atmosphere.

A dull green ceiling light being fiddled with by a rough fifth-grader in a science class.

But I’d keep the screws. Clinking them all into a glass jar as I unscrew them one by one, the tiny pieces of metal, the skeleton that seats, armrests, engines, doors depend on for structure.

Taking them out one by one, pieces that traveled together as a unit falling apart and away from each other, being tossed to the different ends of the earth, but the screws stay in the same place, my jar, which I bury in the deepest depths of the ocean.

I don’t know the girl next to me.

I barely glanced at her. She was black, about my age, I think.

We won’t exchange more than ten words between each other but we will be sitting next to each other, with our upper arms grazing, for two and a half hours.

She’ll accidently bump me out of my sleep, and I’ll look up at her bleary-eyed and surprised and she’ll nervously smile and wave her hand close to her body and softly say “Sorry” and I’ll smile back and say “tsokay” and close my eyes again.

I’ll jerk out of sleep and surprise her then act like nothing happened and go back to sleep.

I don’t know anything about her other than that she owns an iPod like me, has a not-quite-designer purse, an average-priced pea coat, and her hair looks like it’s done at a pretty decent salon.

I wonder if she noticed my iPod, my coat that looks like it could be from a second hand store but was actually bought by my mom for me for a good amount of money, my gray sweatshirt that I wore under the coat, which matched my gray jeans that I wear all the time because they fit me the best, but since they clash with gray sweatshirts I don’t usually wear them together except for on days like today when I don’t care because I know I’ll be traveling next to someone I’ll probably never see again and I don’t care much what I look like anyway.

If I see the girl sitting next to me again I probably won’t even recognize her. There are tons of girls that have the same or similar things she was wearing and that’s all I can remember. An instant image conjured up from the corners of my brain that remember the things I see at shops and stores and worn by people and advertised on the internet. Everyone buys the same things even though no two people look alike, not even identical twins. It’s a shorthand to determine what someone’s like before you even start talking to them.

Bulky, puffy, plain white shoes, classicbluejean-blue jeans that fit baggily, a plain color, poorly fitting t-shirt, a jean jacket or a shitty leather jacket…I know this person. I’ve seen thousands of them. And even though they might have some differences in what kind of tv shows or movies or books (if they even read) or videogames they like, I’ll have a basic idea of them.

Same with ugg boots, tights or jeans, a northface jacket, straight hair, big sunglasses and a designer-looking purse. I can assume a thousand things about them, even though some might not be true, I can still tell what kind of person they are. People say things that they don’t mean, but they rarely own things they don’t mean.

Cafe in Hyehwa

Mike and I meet in a café in Hyehwa. It’s a drizzly day, but the temperature is fine and we decide to sit on the covered patio. The café’s on one of the main roads in Hyehwa so there’s plenty of opportunity to people watch. I get a kiwi juice and he gets a coffee. We’re sitting on the patio, but a table away from the edge of it. We notice a couple at a table closest to the street getting ready to leave and we decide we want to take their table to get a better view of the passing crowds.

My kiwi drink is good and I drink it slowly because it costs more than a meal and I want it to last. Mike asks “You don’t drink coffee?”

“No, not really”

“It’s good for you. It increases your metabolism.”

“I don’t like the way it makes me feel though. It makes me too jittery and I usually have to shit like an hour after I drink one.”

Mike laughs. “Yeah true. A cup a day isn’t bad though.”

I remember an article in Men’s Health about “superfoods” and remember kiwis being one of them.

He’s reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I’m studying Korean. But mainly we’re having a conversation and watching the parade of Koreans go by.

“Everyone has those red, white and blue checkered shirts. They’re everywhere. We should get them. They should be our new shirts.”

“Really? Yeah I guess I do see people wear those kinds of shirts a lot.”

We keep reading.

“I’m surprised I haven’t seen a Korean with an eye patch yet today. They’re everywhere; I see like a kid a day at school wearing one. Do you see a lot of kids wearing them at your school?”

He’s asked me this before.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. We’ll probably see one.”

I notice a guy wearing one of the shirts we were talking about. Then another. Then a couple wearing matching ones.

“God, you’re right. They’re everywhere. That’s hilarious.”

We’re sitting right next to the big glass windows of the café. There’s a couple just on the other side of the glass. The boy’s simultaneously holding the girl’s cup while she sips from the straw and fixing her hair at the same time. Mike points this out to me: “Oh Jesus…”

I instantly turn around to look as he says it and I catch the guy’s eye. Neither of us is embarrassed. I’m a foreigner and he’s a Korean tending to his girlfriend the way Koreans do. The only time I’ve treated a girl like that has been when I was joking around. But all the Koreans make such saccharine displays of affection constantly. Whereas in America a couple would seem superficial if they did things like that, a Korean couple almost has to wear matching shirts and fix each other’s appearances to be considered genuine.

I keep studying Korean. I’m reading out of my little phrasebook instead of my big textbook. The phrasebook seems more practical, for me at least, since it has the polite forms of speech, the “-yo” endings, rather than the honorific, deferential, or whatever you want to call it: the “imnida”,”imnikka” endings that the textbook uses. My co-teacher told me that the textbook’s speech is seldom used. I’m trying to learn just a phrase or two more that I can use day to day.

Mike gets a call. I learn that it’s his semi-ex-girlfriend. He can’t hear her too well because she’s calling from Skype and the connection’s bad. He hangs up.

About a minute later he gets another call.

“One second,” he says and walks away from the table to talk.

He comes back, “She’s drunk.” It’s night time in Canada.

We sit a little longer, and then his phone rings again. He grumbles and then walks away to take it.

He walks back and sits down with a sigh. Then a few seconds later it rings again. He says, “How long do you think I can ignore these calls?” He ignores them twice and picks up the third time. After coming back to the table he says:

“It’s the same every time. She calls drunk, then talks forever, then I say I have to go. Then she calls me again and I get angry and hang up. Then she calls one more time and apologizes. The same sequence every time.”

I wonder why he still even answers her calls. I thought they had broken up. I guess I still talk to Molly on facebook chat, but that’s different. She never called my Korean phone, even when we were dating. I didn’t give her my number. A year or two ago, I would have wanted a girl to call me. A girl calling over an ocean would have been exciting for me. But now it just feels like it would be annoying. I feel glad I’m single and I wonder if Mike should separate himself further from his ex-girlfriend.

“They’re leaving. The table’s open. Let’s go.”

We move to the table closest to the edge of the patio, closest to the sidewalk and the people.

“Ah yes. This is great.”

We read half-heartedly for a little bit, with the rain still drizzling on the passersby. Mike is still facing the glass windows of the café and sees the too-cute couple again. “Oh boy”

I turn and see the guy giving the girl a back massage.

I notice two people wearing the red, white and blue checkered shirts pass in the next group of people. I can’t really concentrate on my Korean. The textbook is so, so boring. Thankfully, Mike starts talking about his book. He’s a little frustrated by his too. He says the author has been defining “quality” for 20 pages.

Somehow our conversation leads to our situation here.

I tell him about how the thing I hate about our jobs is the ambiguity. We see each kid once a week and they’re not graded on our classes, so there’s no incentive for them to pay attention. No one is really monitoring our progress directly, the school just decides to keep us at the end of the year or not. We’re not exactly sure what we’re supposed to be teaching, or how to judge progress. I’m telling him all this, and he tells me to stop thinking that way.

“We’re not English teachers. We’re just English cheerleaders.”

We’re here to make English exciting for the kids and be cultural ambassadors. The Korean teachers teach them grammar and everything else they should know and test them on it. We’re just there to not get in the way. Make things fun and shake it up a little bit. I tell him that this isn’t my ideal job; I want a job where progress is easily measured and I’m not just supposed to stay out of the way.

“This is a good job at this stage in life though, right?” Mike asks.

I think it is. Even though I don’t like it, and it feels like just bullshit, I think it could be worse.

I think about jobs where people can’t even describe what they do. They come home after work and just watch TV until they go to bed. They make money but don’t have a direction other than making more money. At least I’m learning about another culture and meeting lots of people. At least I’m learning how to teach. At least the students are funny. At least I’m going to Taekwondo classes and seeing palaces and islands and learning Korean. I’m having experiences that people back home would never have. I tell Mike that it’s all relative, and if I was back home and just worked at a restaurant, played soccer a few times, coached a little bit, and went out with friends, that would be a normal routine for me and I’d be happy with that, but here, if I’m not going to a new landmark each week or picking up some Korean or doing something that I might be able to brag about, I feel a little bad.

Then we talk about how we both have that same kind of mindset: that we feel like we need to be doing things to brag to other people, to make us feel justified. Twitter and facebook are the megaphones to shout how much more fun we’re having than everyone else; the meters that record how worthy a life is.

“Every facebook album is like a badge of honor.” Mike says.

I say that even though we’re not accumulating tons of material possessions, we’re locked into the process of accumulating experiences instead. Mike says he likes the phrase “accumulating experiences” and writes it down. He starts talking about “quality” as the author in his book defines it; how it exists in the absolute present, when we are in contact with something, but haven’t yet categorized it in our minds. Being in the present, we decide, is something very difficult for our generation to do.

I notice a girl walk by in a miniskirt. I think about how I want to broaden my social circle, and I think about how I want to broaden my social circle mainly because I haven’t gotten laid in three months and I haven’t picked up a new girl in six. I point out the girl and tell Mike we should go out tonight.

We get back to talking about our job; how it’s an in-between job. Neither of us knows what we want to do, but we both say that we’d love to be professors. We both love to learn. He talks about how he wants to write a thesis on Tom Robbins. I tell him that he can do it. Start specific and get broader; he’ll have to read a lot more but you can write a thesis on anything. I start musing about what I’d like to research or write about. I can’t think of much, but The Sun Also Rises and the Lost Generation spring up in my mind because I just read that book. I think that I want some kind of project.

We talk about how we don’t know what to do with our lives still. We’re kind of stuck feeling hurried into finding the next attraction here that we haven’t been able to focus on a goal. Or maybe we just can’t focus on a goal and head towards it anyway. We talk about being professors again, and how we’d like to go to grad school. Literature really is the one thing that we both really love. Our English degrees give us a pay raise here, but teaching English as a second language to a classroom full of 30 Korean kids isn’t what our American literature classes at university prepared us for.

“Eye patch. I knew it was coming.”

I stop studying Korean and just watch the rain falling for a little bit. I’m enjoying the fact that I have someone I can talk with about this kind of stuff, but I still feel the pull, I still can’t enjoy the moment. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, what my goals are.

I see another hot girl walk by and I text a girl from my Taekwondo class. I don’t want to hook up with her, but I’ve got to start somewhere. I again ask Mike what we should do tonight. I tell him:

“I already know what I’m going to do for class on Monday so I don’t have to worry about anything tomorrow.”

“I’m already done with lesson planning for two weeks.”

I’m a little bit jealous of him, but don’t care too much. He’s in the cycle of things just like me; it won’t end until our contract is up.

Rushing to make the most out of Korea

Since arriving in Korea, I’ve been thinking only about what I can do to make my experience “worthwhile”. How can I accumulate enough interesting experiences to make myself an interesting person when I talk to someone in the future? I get angry with myself after I wasted time instead of doing something interesting for my future riveting conversations with who knows. I look down on the people who have yet to find a job after college: what have you been doing the whole time? Just living with your parents? What kind of things have you been doing? Are you anymore interesting? I’ve been working as an English teacher in another country. You haven’t been to Korea, have you? I’m taking TaeKwonDo. I’m learning Korean. What have you been up to? Seen any good movies? Been getting drunk with your old boring friends? That’s about all right?

And then, when I’m not thinking about what experience I should gather next for my treasure trove (it’s never big enough), I’m looking at facebook albums of people who have gotten another experience that I haven’t yet. And then they post statuses and write on walls: “Busan this weekend: sun, sand, and fun!” “Just had an AWESOME weekend…I LOVE KOREA!”

I look at these life experience stat sheets and plan ways to catch up. I try to squeeze as much “fun” and newness into my free time as I can. But then I never have anyone to tell about any of it.

I sometimes long for home; sitting around with old high school friends, talking about nothing, making the same inside jokes that are still funny after they’ve become annoying to everyone else, drinking and not caring about tomorrow, relaxed, talking about past glories in high school, how lame we are now, but still enjoying it. Talking about how great life is. Laughing about things that aren’t so great. Talking dreamily about the future, but not feeling pressure from it. I think that one moment like that is worth any mountain climbed, any museum visited, any cultural experience had, any weird food tried, any landmark photographed. If you can talk, you can talk. If going around doing things just to say you’ve done them is all you’re doing with your life, there’s no point. No one will be impressed.

What’s better, a man who travelled the world and never really saw it, or a man who sat in his living room with a beer and enjoyed every second of it?

disillusioned about Korea

I came here thinking that this would be an eye-opening, cultural experience, and experience where I would learn more about the world and more about myself. I felt that I “found myself” in college, like most people say they do. Like most people, I was surrounded by other kids who were just getting out of their parent’s houses for their first time, just being exposed to lots of new, controversial, alternative views for maybe the first time, and sharing, changing, distorting, and adding things to all of these experiences. Then after college, I went home. Hung out with the people I’ve known forever, lived in the house I’ve known forever with the family I’ve known forever. I still had a hunger for learning, college left me with that, but I felt bored and like I wasn’t growing. I needed new, eye-opening experiences, experiences that colleges put on their brochures.

I thought I found a brochure like that when I found out about Korea. A new cultural experience, where you can use that degree you paid all that money for to get a job to pay off that same degree. You’ll try new things, meet new people, see the world. A growing time, right?

This culture isn’t for that. It doesn’t support the same individual growth that American colleges do. American colleges prepare individuals for the individualistic society of America. Korea isn’t the same society. When I first got here, I thought that I’d bow, I’d be courteous as possible, follow every etiquette to the best of my knowledge, do favors, and generally get everyone to like me by being a suck-up, which is the way things are done. I also (foolishly) thought that I could still retain what American confidence in my individuality that I had.

So I bowed, greeted, acted meek around superiors, smiled and got on with it when people joked at my expense, acted obsequious in front of anyone older, etcetera. And my mind didn’t last for long. I’m no stoic, no matter how much I tried to kid myself. I was affected, deeply. I’m not myself anymore, not American, and certainly not Korean, something that I could never hope of becoming. There’s no way that I could have hoped to put on a Korean face and remain confident in my American, individual identity.

It’s sickening. I’m nervous, twittering needlessly. Of course some of it has to do with culture shock and the language barrier; how comfortable can you be in a place where you don’t speak the language and you aren’t familiar with the culture? Still, the part of the culture that’s affected me most is the emphasis placed on my status as a young, inexperienced, foreigner.

I hope I can somehow get back whatever confidence I ever had in myself. My sense of wonder and adventure has been blunted by my daily bows and smiles.

date with Ajumma

I’m sitting with her in an underground hookah bar. It’s dark, with a few orange lights. We’re sitting in an enclosed booth, with only the upper part of our torsos showing above the table. She complains though, that we’re the only booth that doesn’t have a beaded screen surrounding it. We each order our drinks and then look around at everything in the dark bar except for each other’s eyes.  I make a comment about a boring piece of the décor; she complains about the hard seat and we both take a few pillows from an empty booth nearby. I think about how old she is and why she’s here with me. She should be getting married; she should already be married. I’m not nearly ready enough to start thinking about marriage.

I talked to my ex-girlfriend the day before: “Drinks mean sex,” she advised. My date had suggested a bar, as well as the cocktails we had with dinner.

We talk about what we each do after work. I say I read or go to Tae Kwon Do. She says she watches TV or plays with her little dog. We take a sip of our drinks.

I ask about her job again because I didn’t really understand what she does. She says she works with people who have problems, and analyzes their art. Not for how good it is, but to see how to help them. She decides to use me as an example to describe what she means. She draws a shape that she can’t come up with the name for, but then after some explaining I realize it’s a fish bowl. She tells me to pick a relationship, any relationship, maybe my friends, or my work, or my family, or me and her, anything. I pick my family. Despite actually harboring some shame for my family, it’s usually a safe topic. So she tells me to draw my family, as fish, in the fish bowl. I think it’s funny that, with her accent, she says “fish-ee.”

So I draw. While drawing, I think about not thinking about it too much. When I’m done, she explains what she sees. She says my family is close. She guesses that I’m the favorite in my family and that I look out for my younger brother. Most of her hypotheses are pretty good, when they’re not they’re pretty close. It’s a perfect time to talk about my family so I do a little bit. There’s six of us so there’s a decent amount to talk about. Five other short, small-talk introductions: “my sister’s an engineer, she lives in Washington, D.C. and we used to fight when we were younger” “my youngest brother’s in high school. He’s not so good in school so I worry about him sometimes.” I start to miss my family as I’m telling her about them, and I tell her that I miss my family. She smiles and giggles nervously and says “OK”. In that moment I want to be home more than anything, but I’m also glad I’m there with her, glad that she made me realize how much I miss them, even though I tell myself I don’t even like them sometimes.

We finish our drinks and I pay. I paid for dinner too. On our way back towards the busses and subway she offers to get ice-cream. The first shop doesn’t have any, so we go to a 24-hour convenience store. There are really young college kids there eating instant noodles under the bright fluorescent lights. She wants to buy the ice cream and I just shuffle behind her, looking at the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I think I see the college kids facing us and laughing or at least smiling. I don’t want to look at her in this store.

She gives me my ice cream and we walk down the street a little further. I need to catch the train soon because the subway and busses will stop running soon. She tries to help me figure out which bus I need to take, but eventually she gives up because it seems too complicated. I decide to take the subway instead. I realize it’s time to say goodbye to her. Maybe I won’t see her again. She’s nice but seems sad. I’m disappointed in myself that I can’t make her happy, that I can’t bring myself to make her happy. Her face is looking up at mine and our eyes meet for an instant. It’s time to say goodbye and I lean in, just giving her a hug. I still feel like everyone around us is looking at us. I feel her sigh during our short embrace, and I notice her sad smile as I walk away.