Terrible title, but I couldn’t resist the pun. Lime was actually silly enough to be apologetic for not cooking me a birthday dinner, perhaps because I cooked her a birthday dinner with her choice of menu. But really, she shouldn’t have been apologetic at all, since she took me to a really, really nice restaurant and we had 회—which for the Korean challenged, could be called sashimi or simply “raw fish”. Now, in my experience, there are two kinds of places that serve raw fish. The first are those that just give you the fish itself, plus some dipping sauce, …

Or some money, at least! Why? Because it’s my birthday! Wish I could be bouncier about it, but my back hurts like the devil. Off to go do some stretches and take a Tylenol or two.

Sometimes, in this kind of dark winter evening, or is it spring, a name passes through my mind, or another name, of people I barely knew and do not know now, and then I look for them, and find the strangest things. That’s what happened tonight, as I waited for my friend Heather to get home so we could go somewhere nearby for dinner. The name of a guy I went to grad school with came through my mind. He wasn’t someone I was close to, wasn’t someone I got along with very well, and I probably wouldn’t go too …

Was it the time I fell down climbing out of the tub at the public bath, sliding down two stairs onto the hard stone floor, brusing the small of my back in the process? Was it the heavy bag I carried around yesterday during a walk Lime and I took together? Was it the result of a month of stupidly sitting many hours in a row, writing and writing, without walks or much in the way of breaks away from the computer? Or was it the result of a long period of unhealthy living, not exercising because I felt exhausted …

For those who do not enjoy lists, skip this post. Ah, probably of interest to none of my readers, and stolen from Christine Lee Zilka, who stole it in turn from aiyah.net‘s which was inspired by wilco’s favorite fifty foods. 1. favorite main entree: I am thinking I’ll have to say a nice big platter of raw fish, though I could also answer a good dalk doritang (spicy chicken-and-potato stew) or shish taouk. 2. favorite salad: Greek salad. Or maybe a nice chicken salad. 3. favorite soup: Kimchi jjigae, or a nice chicken soup. Dalk kal guk su is also …

via Laura at Oddunout, I discovered a neat blog with postings about elevator experiences. I liked it so much I found out how to post there (in the extended section of this post) and posted something. It’s a little creative writing piece about a weirdly ambivalent experience I had in an elevator a few weeks ago, and how it showed me the kinds of changes and even mild paranoia about others’ thinking of me that I’ve developed living as a foreigner in Korea. Now, that might sound weird, but you know, I’ve heard some pretty weird, bad, strange things about …

Last night, when I met Lime for dinner, she presented me with a book. Now, it’s a book in Korean, and you may not be able to guess why I was so proud of her when she gave it to me. The reason is, the book extensively quotes her writings. See, when she was living in Canada on a Working Holiday Visa, she—a webgeek of enormous proportions, almost as much of a webgeek as I am—wrote a lot about it, online. There’s a daum cafe out there somewhere that has a huge log of her writing on the subject of …

Yes, it’s one of those blogging trends, but I like this exercise. It takes some thinking. 1. Read more than 150 pages of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and really, really enjoyed it. 2. Sent the majority of my phone-text messages during the last year in my third language. 3. Gotten lost in a slum in Agra at night. 4. Lost the ability to speak my second language, which at one point I could at least use passably in the workplace, through disuse. 5. Gone without any sleep for 72 hours (and only about 6 hours during 6 days) while copying …

[Why cannot we say “these nights” as we do “these days”, to mean “lately”? I suppose it’s because technically, day can mean daytime, or it can include both daytime and night time, meaning full days of 24 hour stretches. But you would think that it would be possible, for when one talks of nighttime phenomena, to say instead “these nights”. Have you read Greg Egan’s novel, Quarantine? It’s an early work, and not as fully developed as later works, but it does have one thing that blew me away, and which has come to mind lately, whenever I go outside …