Adventures in Not-So-Ordinary Days…

Today started out like any other Thursday, except I didn’t eat breakfast. After my one-and-only class of the day finished at 11am, I was ready to head home for brunch, but I didn’t. My friend Marietjie and I made our way to the Gumdo Hall instead. A local hospital is running a free physical check-up here on campus, and instead of paying $200 for a physical in Seoul, I figured I’d take advantage of the freebie here. As it turns out, my pee, hearing, eyesight, teeth and bloodpressure are all A-OK. I do need to lose a dozen kilograms, and I won’t have the results of my blood test or chest X-ray for a while, but apparently I’m pretty healthy.

After lunch, I had a quick stop to make at the art building where I used to take pottery classes. One of the art students in the office there had asked Jen Jordan and I to sit for a few photographs last semester. She wanted to use the photos to practice painting portraits of non-asians. She told us that when she was finished the portraits, she would give each of us a pencil sketch of ourselves. I stopped by to pick up the pencil sketch, and discovered that there had either been a miscommunication, or the artist had changed her mind. I now have a fully framed oil painting of myself hanging on my wall! It even kind of looks like me.

After hanging the picture, I changed into a pair of Old Navy, just-below-the-waist, Large sweatpants ( just incase Santa is reading this), and an old T-shirt. Since then, my day has proceeded in it’s usual Thursday afternoon fashion.

(10 minutes later…) yup. Still proceeding.

Adventures in Oddities…

I was just checking the news and chatting with Mom on-line before hitting the sack. In Yahoo!’s odd news section, I found something that I’m convinced is going to produce an awfully unpleasant dream in about 3 hours time…

Apparently, an Australian fan of the late Steve Irwin has decided to feed his newborn son’s placenta to his pet goannas, “to bring his family closer to the giant lizards.” If you want to read the whole article, you should be able to find it at http://ca.news.yahoo.com/odds
If you do want to read the whole article, you might also be interested in spending some time slapping yourself in the head with a spatula, or building a replica of Mount Rushmore with earwax. Either of the above activities would be more productive wastes of time. Gross. Really, really gross. G’night, and sweet placenta-free dreams.

Adventures in bucking the trend…

I recently read an article that indicated a correlation between how busy a person is, and how often they update their blogs. The article seemed to suggest that the busier a person is, the more infrequent their postings become. I don’t think that’s the case with me. I’ve done close to nothing that past little while – and I haven’t posted, because there’s not much to write about. I’m reluctant to sit down and tell you things like “I had corn.” or “I bought milk.” or “My cat is cute.” Honestly, that’s just nutty.

Also, for a good fourteen days, if I had attempted to write what was going on in my head, all you would have read would be “BANGbangBANGbangBANGbang.” You see, a new dormitory is being built just outside my window. (Well, across the street from my window, but that’s close enough.) For 2 weeks, the heavy drilling started at 7:00am, at the latest, and continued until well past 5:00pm. The big BANG was the pounding of the drill itself. The little bang was the echo of the big BANG bouncing off the other dormitories. BANGbangBANGbangBANGbang. 9-10 hours a day, 7 days a week for two weeks. I couldn’t listen to music in my apartment, because the percussion of the drill wasn’t in sync with the percussion of my music. I couldn’t read, watch TV, sleep or stretch without having BANGbangBANGbangBANGbang reverberating through my brain.

Just as I was about to go truly mad, the drilling stopped and now I’m gently roused from my sleep every morning with the soft rumbling and beeping of big trucks. I hardly notice the trucks, they’re like a soothing lullaby compared with incessant BANGbangBANGbangBANGbanging.