Once More Into the Breach…

In a relatively rare event, Lime’s posted in English and she basically hits the nail on the head in a number of ways.

Number one: this weekend was frighteningly short, far too short. I ended up having Friday and Saturday off from camp because the band went to some town near Seoul to play at a festival. It was strange: I was still sick from the aircon and kid germs at camp; I’d come home in an awful state Thursday night and Lime had showed up, orange juice in tow, and tried to relieve my sufferings a little. But I was still a little off when we left northwards. By the nighttime, I was exhausted, my right arm was feeling weird (the hand feeling twice as big as normal for a few minutes), and I decided to just sleep there in the grass behind the “green room” tents by the stage.

Bad place to sleep. I woke around midnight to the sound of some band that sounded like a rock band in my high school, but suddenly mildly accented. It was surreal. After we played, I wanted nothing more than to sleep; the bugs had for some reason refrained from biting me, but I felt like hell. Everyone else stayed up sharing beer and snacking till sometime after 4am, I think, but I threw down a �ä (yo, a sleeping mat) and slept.

We got off to a late start in the morning, and Myoung Jae took a wrong turn, leading us not to the Gwangju near our own city, Jeonju, but rather some small northern Gwangju we’d never heard of before. Deeply weird, that was, and it added an hour or more to our trip.

When we got back, I met up with Lime and we spent about 24 hours together. We used to be a 닭살 (dalk sal, ie. chicken skin) couple… which is kind of like, the cheesy couple who is annoying enough to give everyone around them goose bumps from disgust. Now, I think, we are happily developing into a 뒹굴뒹굴 (“ding-gul-ding-gul”) couple, which means we’re a pair of lazy bums who just sit about indolently, napping and chatting and bugging one another.

But after this weekend, I think as she does, that we fit one another really well. She took off to get
some school work done, so I went downtown to take in a movie. I actually saw two, the first of which was my newly-arrived DVD of the Erroll Morris documentary Vernon, Florida which is very obviously a rip from VHS. I think it’s funnier when you are drinking whiskey with friends. I also realized how much of the humor is dependent on one getting the strangeness of the language most of the people in the documentary use, as well as on knowing what North American hick countryfolk are actually like. So I’m not sure Lime’s gonna really “get” it, or get much from it, even if I am right beside her cackling at the turkey hunter and the preacher sermonizing on indeclinables and conjunctions.

The other film I saw was Riddick. I thought, well, I thought a mixture of what these guys thought: it’s not brilliant, but also not bad, and a welcome break from remakes, reimaginings, and continuations of old franchises. The original, Pitch Black, was better, but hey, it’s better than another damned Star Trek movie, you know? I’m trying to find out if there was a connection between the Riddick thing and Harlan Ellison, as someone claimed a few years ago at my old workplace, but I can’t seem to find any evidence of it (and it’s not plausible, to my mind). Anyway, I left the theater thinking, “These SF prison stories need to be done better…” and with the idea for the ultimate SF prison novel in my head. I am thinking of diving right into it, except… all that revision to do.

A late night phone call informed me that Lime is still doing fine, assembling her Powerpoint presentations for tomorrow. And I, well, I should be asleep.