I’m loaded up with work and have been divested (of my own doing – damn you books!) of sleep, and I really shouldn’t be taking a break from my work when I have to return letters to a most deserving friend, but I just have to punch this up.
So on Tuesday this week North Korea, always with the bellicose histrionics, attacked a small South Korean island just a handful of miles from their shared border. Two marines and two civilians were killed. No further military altercations have occurred and the general consensus is that this is an isolated incident in part to due to the North’s regular, violent international attention seeking and in part due to the regime change. Kim Jong-il’s twenty-five year old son is being set up at the successor, and they want to illustrate that you can’t fuck with him any more than with his father. According to the New York Times, Amercian intelligence said that the North wasn’t planning anything else. Needless to say I was worried, to an extent. Usually nothing comes of this beyond fucking with diplomacy.
So Sarah Palin, who I said in my last blarg is a public figure who definitely deserves derision, apparently confused who our allies were. She said on a radio show that we should always stand with our North Korean allies. What a farce.
A slip of the tongue, or a brain fart (as my Mommy likes to say) can happen to the most well-informed of people. But when it’s one in a series of grotesque idiocies, just call a spade a spade. The lady would make a great model for L.L Bean.
My best friend in Seoul is my laptop. It’s weakening my once impeccable vision. The decision regarding my contract should, hopefully, be imminent, but expecting punctuality from a Korean bureaucracy may be foolhardy. Returning home to the states sounds more like an adventure, and returning at the end of August, whether or not I’ve been deemed worthy of another contract, sounds most appealing. America is large, so large! Diverse in landscape and in people. My home state, North Carolina, is green, beautiful. It has the Blue Ridge mountains and the Outer Banks. I could spend the fall and winter holidays with my family and friends, see my country with refreshed eyes. I love all the little woods; they seem to promise something worthwhile inside.
It’s been near two years since I’v been home, seen my friends, and a year since I’ve seen my mom and dad. I’d do the expat life again, for sure. It’s reasonable to miss good things from home. The Koreans must think I’m mad. Recently I’ve been a tad touchy, touchier than usual. They’re stoic to a fault, to a point where they bottle it all up and end up as the OECD country with the highest suicide rate which I’m pretty sure they sweep under the rug by calling it fan death – dying because a fan in a closed room blew all the oxygen away from you. I’m not losing my grip. Stir-crazy, not shaken. Do I hang up my hanbok like I planned before the Peace Corps broke my wittle heart?
