This will be long, sorry.
Astroboy calling from the future… are you recieving me, evilbeth?
Igo! I have had a ROTTEN day!
Woke up early (about 8 AM), looking forward to a relatively easy, non-stressful day… I only had 1 class to teach, and no work for the business that my friend and I started that couldn’t easily be put off until tomorrow. Screw it, I thought fuzzily, still half asleep, * I’ve been working HARD lately… I’m gonna take it easy today! I’m gonna teach my class, come home, and spend the night playing with my new guitar and watching TV!*
The phone rang: it was Astrogirl, she just got back to Korea (from Saipan)! Huzzah! She’s going from the airport straight to work… then after work, she’s going home! Uh oh! Problem #1: her mother forbade her to go to Saipan, but she went anyway… gonna be a BIG fight with Mama tonight! Will the “foreign boyfriend” issue come up? Dunno…
So after I hung up, I went into the bathroom for the ritual morning “triple S” (sh**, shave, shower), vaguely worried about Astrogirl, and aware that there is nothing that I can do to help her out tonight… Good luck Baby! (side note, right about now, as I type this, she should be arriving home to the wrath of her mother… who has been known, in the past, to beat her with a coat hanger, but (please God) doesn’t do that anymore…).
So, the first “S” is completed without problem until I discovered Problem #2: no toilet paper! AAARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHH! I forgot to buy some yesterday! DAMN!:mad: Well, OK… I’m going to get into the shower in a minute anyway, so no big deal (kinda gross, though!).
Shower completed, and I still have 2 hours before I have to go to class. Am I ready for class? You bet! All I’m doing today is going over the mid-term exam with my students. Easy (for me)! I have already photocopied the mid-term, and the copies reside in my briefcase… no prep-work to do! I face an easy morning!
What to do for 2 hours? I check my e-mail (14 new messages, 12 of which are spam. :rolleyes: ) . Browse the SDMB for a while and then decide to play a game for a while. I’ve been replaying Unreal for the past few days (GREAT game, by the way!), so I load it up and start playing… computer freezes. Reboot, reload, and continue playing. I save the game every few minutes so that if I get killed I can get back to the same place easily. Immediately after the latest save, I am screwed! I get killed right away by some minions, and I haven’t got the health or firepower to get past them! I try several times, but no luck. I give up (later tonight I will have to either a) make it through, b) cheat (which I hate to do on general principal), or c) restart the level and lose a day or so of play…. again: AAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHH!
I give up on the game, and decide to play with my new (well, used, but new to ME) electric guitar… I play for a few minutes, and notice while playing “Hurricane” by Neil Young, that there is a bit of string-buzz from the low E string. I have noticed this several times before, but was so enchanted by just HAVING an electric that I blew it off as unimportant… today I decide to investigate…
(aside: the phone just rang. Astrogirl is now home, and her mother is NOT home… AG is tired and going to bed… that road-bump of life may have been avoided for now… unless Mama comes home and wakes AG up to yell at her and possibly beat her…)
So, upon close investigation (IE: I looked at it.) I discovered that the bridge of the guitar has a tremolo assembly, and the low E string is buzzing against the Humbucker pickup because it is too low. It can be raised, but doing so requires an Allen wrench. I don’t have any Allen wrenches…
Note to self: after class, see if you can find an Allen wrench…
As I prepare to leave for class, there is a beeping noise. WTF? I look around, and realize that the beeping is coming from my PalmPilot. It is an alarm I programmed to remind me of a dentist appointment! Oh, CRAP! I forgot about that! I HATE going to the dentist! Two hours (going and coming) on the subway for a 10 minute (literally! Just fitting a crown that was a bit too long…) appointment. Oh, well… after class I’m going to brave the subway!
Off to class (this is my deadest class of the week: they come to me fresh from 5 straight hours of hardcore engineering classes, and they’re zombies. It’s all I can do to get them to open their textbooks! (I understand… I remember being a student… so I usually take it easy on them): I take roll, and I announce that next week we’re going to have mid-term interviews (didn’t have time before the mid-term exam). Explain the procedures for the interviews, and take questions. Circulate the sign-up sheet for interviews, and go to my briefcase for the photocopies of the mid-term exam so that we can go over it as a class.
There are no photocopies in the briefcase! (Vague memories of throwing them in my locker a few days ago so that I didn’t have to lug them around…) Said locker is all the way across campus in my office! A ten-minute walk up a really steep hill and then ten minutes back again…
So that’s it, 20 minutes into a 200-minute class, and I’m done! I have nothing!
Now what? Do I tell them to hang out while I go to my office, and I’ll be back in 20 mins. (by which time we WON’T have time to go over the mid-term?) Or do I tap dance and come up with something for them to do for the next 180 minutes?
Screw it! I’m the teacher! It’s a beautiful spring day, and I don’t want to be here any more than they do…
I go to the board and write “Spring Fever” in large letters. I immediately get what I call the “Lab look” from my students (if you have ever owned a Labrador Retriever, or any other dog, you will know what I mean… when you try to explain to a dog why it shouldn’t strew garbage all over the kitchen when you are busy in the garage, it looks at you, tilts its head about 70 degrees from normal, and goes: 
). I explain the phrase, and say, “Sign up for your interview time, and go have fun! I’ll see you all tomorrow!” They are Korean, I’m speaking English (I don’t do Korean in class…) so I have to explain another 3 or 4 times before they get that I’m letting them off the hook today!
They go, I go…off to my office where I hang out until it’s time to go to the dentist’s office…
I approach the subway with dread. I’m 6 feet 4 inches tall, fat, and white… in short, I don’t blend in Korea. There is ALWAYS some crazy who singles me out for humiliation on the subway!
Get on the subway, and surprisingly have no problems getting to the dentist’s office… weird!
Dentist grinds down the crown on my tooth to the correct size, and scolds me because my teeth are “too short”! TOO SHORT!?! #1) no other dentist has EVER mentioned this to me! #2) (as I mentioned) I’m 6’4” (194 cm.), fat, can easily palm a basketball, and wear size 16 shoes! I’m friggin’ HUGE!!! In every way! In Biblical times I would have been described as a “giant”! I’m not entirely happy about it, but that’s the way it is… #3) Why scold ME about it? Like I had a choice about how big my teeth are?? (side issue, before anyone asks: in THAT department, I am average… but Astrogirl, being much smaller than me, and inexperienced with anyone else, says it’s too big! I love that woman!!
)
Finished with the dentist, I approach the subway; again with trepidation… now it’s rush-hour, and the subway is going to be PACKED!
It was. I’m claustrophobic… did I mention that?
So this froggy little guy, about 50, about 5 foot nothing, plants himself an inch from my chest and proceeds to spend the next 50 minutes of the subway ride staring up at me, as if he’s never seen anything so strange in his life! There is nothing I can do about this, as there is nowhere else I can move to, and if I challenge him I’m likely to get a group beating on the subway car (life in a Confucian society: do not question or challenge those older than you…).
A thousand years later, I get off the subway near my house. Thank God!
Now all I need to do is go to the store, pick up a few items, and walk home… Oh yeah! I need an Allen wrench to fix the string on my guitar! In the US, this would be a 20 minute project… get in car, drive to Wal-Mart, or other department store, go to hardware section, find wrench, pay, go home! But not here…
There are 3 small hardware stores in the neighborhood near my dorm-room. (Please define “small Korean hardware store” as a space about the size of a large double closet, packed to the rafters with assorted junk, leaving aisles about 6 inches wide, and maybe 4 and a half feet in height. There is no order that I can see to where anything might be…).
I go to the first one. Getting in, at my size, and having a briefcase slung on a strap over one shoulder, amounts to playing a solo game of “Twister”… I worm my way into the bowels of the shop in search of the owner. I find him and a friend deep in a game of “Paduk” (an Asian board game… uh, I can’t describe it here… sort of akin to chess I suppose…), there are empty soju bottles near them (Soju is a Korean liquor. Picture a 50-proof vodka that costs $2 for a gallon, and you’ll have the idea…).
He looks up and says, in Korean, “Whadda ya want?” (remember, he and friend have been drinking…). I open my mouth, and suddenly realize that I HAVE NO FRIGGING IDEA HOW TO SAY “ALLEN WRENCH” IN KOREAN!!!
There follows about 20 mins. of pantomime and broken Korean while I try to explain what I want. We go through screwdrivers first, then pipe wrenches, socket wrenches, adjustable wrenches, etc… finally, I went into a long speech about first: the beauty and worthiness of all of the hardware he has shown me thus far, and second, what I actually want! A light bulb went off over the owners’ head! I thought I had reached the end… “I’m sorry,” he says , “ I don’t have any of those.”** CRAP!!!**
Off to hardware store #2! Worm my way into a space even smaller and more convoluted than the first one, locate the woman supposedly operating this joint, and (while twisted into a shape suggestive of an audition for a “Circe du’Soleil” contortionist) again began my explanation of what I wanted… she was clueless, and finally reached behind her to slide open a panel in the wall… the panel opened (who knew?) into the restaurant next door run by her son or daughter (this person is well-known to we English teachers here as “Korean Pat” [think SNL] he or she runs a great restaurant, but no one knows if he or she is a man or a woman!). “Pat,” also doesn’t speak English… and my Korean is limited to small talk, ordering beer, and trying to seduce women (don’t tell AG!). Anything technical, and I am lost… forget deep discussions about particle physics, philosophy, literary theory, or HARDWARE (all discussion topics in which I can hold my own in English). After about 5 minutes of this, I bought a pair of pliers to save face and retreated!
Off to hardware store #3: I paused in the doorway, and then thought, “Fu** it!”
Went to the grocery store, bought toilet paper and many cans of beer!
Am now home, drinking beer and brooding… I repeat: IGO!!!
Now, does this post go to the Pit or to MPSIMS… the latter, I guess…
