Woke up today as I was catching the subway. I don’t remember the part where I took a shower and walked from my hotel room to the station. I am staying in a hotel, yes, but just as a temporary measure. With my two jobs requiring long hours, I dedided that I’d give myself a nice place to sleep and some comfort in the last days before I move to my own place. So I was waking up as I avoided being crushed by the large crowds of commuters and reflected on the past few days.
Over the weekend I had promised to act in a movie that Keith’s girlfriend was making. It was a small student film about foreigners in Korea and I had to play a British guy, Ryan. Now, I know I’ve heard the British accent my whole life, but something felt altogether wrong with mine. Maybe it was the fact that I have been concentrating so hard on making myself sound American that my British roots have been trampled. All those hours watching The Bill wasted.
Shooting was an ordeal of waiting, made better by the fact that I was not sufferring alone. Keith and another guy were in the scene together and we took turns complaining about how long it was taking. The first shoot was set in a small bar called Bricx, a favorite hangout of Keith and his gang. Our five minute clip took all of five hours to shoot. In the end though, it was fun and something different.
The plot outline is this, my girlfriend wants to break up with me because her father doesn’t approve of foreigners. Another foreigner is having difficulty adjusting to life here and yet another is sleeping with a married woman. It just so happens the married woman is the wife of the father of my girlfriend. And so it goes.
I returned to work on Monday completely unrefreshed after 1 hour of sleep. I had stayed up late on the final part of the shoot and still had work to prepare for my week of classes. I ended up knocking it out in the wee hours of the morning only to finish an hour before I had to wake up. It was all I could do around 7pm as I taught my class, not to simply nod off in mid speech. Have you ever tried an internal scream to wake yourself up? It’s so ineffective, but it’s all you’ve got, after you’ve downed 20 coffees and you’re still falling. You summon something deep down and make it yell, “wake up”. But once my brain has the idea that it’s going to get at least 5 seconds of good sleep it goes for it and I’m sure my students sat in a few moments of awkward silence a few times yesterday.
Speaking of awkward, maybe you can imagine my surprise yesterday when I entered the male bathroom of my middle school and found a student, pants around his ankles, whacking off like he was trying to start a lawnmower. My entrance made no impression, and by the time I had finished washing my hands, he was still trying to start that thing. Now I was quite certain that this wasn’t some kind of cultural thing, I mean I’d never encountered random public masturbation before in Korea, and besides I had a feeling that this was the special kid who is always grabbing his crotch in the middle of class. Finally realizing that this kid wasn’t going to stop voluntarily, I decided to end the fun. I used my halting Korean to say “Anniya! Hajima!” which prompted him to forgo the wonders of self exploration until some other time, probably 2 seconds after I left the room again.
After my middle school job, I travel another half an hour to reach my second job, spend a few hours there and then return home. It’s a long day but I’d rather work as much as I can now and relax later. While I’m tired at work due to my lack of sleep, the teachers in both places are really nice. One nice lady who sits next to me at the middle school saw me in a sleep filled stupor in front of my computer and showed me a small room where I could sleep. Man, Koreans always amaze me with their cool conveniences. I mean, there’s an actual place at school where you can take a lie down and have a nap! It’s so convenient because I was getting drool all over my keyboard…
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