I'll be Home for Christmas!

When I first started singing the song this season, I figured it’d be the first year it would only happen in my dreams, as the song goes. But around the start of my homesick despair, the week of Thanksgiving, the bug my mom had planted weeks earlier started to resurface. Plans to Taiwan were being shot down at every attempt, and I was becoming less and less interested anyway. At this point it seemed just as logical (or insane) to travel home as it would be to go anywhere exotic on my own. And my usual harebrained travel schemes just weren’t appealing anymore: not with the invigorating thoughts of Mom’s fresh baked goods and lasagna and soups heating up the kitchen; the usual madness of carpool coordination in a houseful of drivers and broken vehicles; and the clamor of constant piano and drumsets and barking dogs waking me up early every morning.

I was freaking out when tickets started skyrocketing, by my best friend and all-time kick-assing-est travel agent was able to snag me one for just under $12thou. I’ll be flying out around noon Christmas day, and arriving in Chicago around 3pm Christmas Day.

I'll be home for Christmas.

I suppose a small mundane update on my life is in order. I usually leave that to Twitter but I feel like this week is a good time to do it since I just passed my 4-month anniversary in Seoul. School’s been rough, but my R4 students have finished up an awesome batch of persuasive speeches and an informative magazine about animals. We’ll be celebrating with a “Christmas Bonus” party in the next week or so. R5s blew me away with some astonishing debate prep, and our showcase for Christmas week will be shaping up nicely. If they beat Joe’s MAG5s, my wallet’ll be empty: I promised them pizza for a win.
* Homemade eggnog, a Western necessity and fashioned with surprising success in Korea ghetto-style :)

I’ve had a very creative month thus far with my younger students. Cool lesson plans (homemade Pit!) and even spur of the moment educational rabbit trails have been really fun. Today during a 2nd grade social studies lesson about Jamestown and Plymouth, students were examining textbook illustrations as commenting on the colonists’ canoes. I explained that these were not canoes, they were rowboats. They had never heard of such a thing. They immediately understood when I sang a few lines of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and we proceeded to learn the round at the top of our lungs for the next 15 minutes.

Christmastime and the newly added incentive of going home hasn’t harmed, either. Ask my Uni roommate: Naomi will vouch for my inexplicable boost in charm and wit around this time of year. I’ve had Christmas music going constantly…spicing it up with variations discovered on AOL’s AMAZING Christmas music station. Armik’s Spanish guitar discovered through the World Christmas option is my new favorite. I play the music all morning during my preschool classes as well, particularly in art when we’re coloring. Yes, WE color. They fight over Teacher’s drawings ;)

Christmas is NOT commercialized here whatsoever. At times it’s a relief, at times, I miss it. I put up a $10 string of fabulous Christmas lights I managed to snag in Namdaeumun—which is a traditional marketplace with a few shops decked out for Christmas. The only place I’ve really seen it. One guy tried to charge me $18 for a few feet of tiny lights! Christmas lights make me happy and you can be I’ll be getting my fill of that good old American Christmas commercialization when I do some morning-after shopping at home…I haven’t seen the new Target since it was remodeled and it’s been quite the talk of my little home town.



At the insistence of my Korean coworker, Eileen, I have begun taking weekly group flute lessons at the local department store. It’s been a blast. The teacher formerly taught a flute orchestra in Russia, and although she speaks very little Konglish, we manage to get along and I’m starting to force my shamefully rusty self back into some semblance of musical discipline. It’s been great getting to know Eileen as well. We often eat Korean food together after lessons, and hope to start Tae Kwon Doe classes after the New Year.

Unfortunately, I’ve replaced working out with Internet TV and torrent movies, and am recently obsessed with finding new Christmas movies as well as the recently finished first season of Glee. NEVER thought I’d get into that after Highschool Musical made me gag, but the show is really fabulous. I’m halfway through the first season and haven’t watched anything so voraciously since Weeds. Episode 7 has some particularly pungent one-liners. For example: “We’re dealing with children. They need to be terrified. . . .Without it their bones won’t grow properly.” This completely describes my feelings toward my preschoolers these days.I love the music. As for Christmas movies, I recommend “Joyeux Noel” for its seasonal sentimentality and highly discourage “The Shop Around the Corner” –a rare James Stewart failure and the original “You’ve Got Mail.”

But despite my lapse into the cursed single adulthood bad habits, I’ve also been getting out the house nearly every night to socialize with a fantastic group of fellow ex-pats in my neighborhood. One girl is headed home to Fargo, ND this week so we’ve been trying to squeeze even extra time in. It’s been good to talk and laugh and learn with and from this international group. Tonight a girl just passing through en route to Texas entertained us with stories from her recent trek to India/Nepal and upcoming nine month sabbatical to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Canada. It’s things and times like these that refresh, inspire, and encourage me to carry on… yet to break free from the potential to despair and get lazy. I’m not always faithful, but I’m learning. I’ve also been more regularly attending an International church during this Advent season and connecting more with the 20s-30s group, which has been a lot of fun. It’s kind of a far trek, but lately I’ve been making it a real priority.

I’m only 21. Sometimes I forget that, and it just strikes me, so. I've always been such a nostalgic, and I often feel like I'm 90 years old. I also find myself thinking I sound like my mother! It's the whole teaching thing...

But nothing matters at the moment. Cuz I’ll be home for Christmas.

Failure

The seat was warm.

His music preceded him; a few surprisingly melodic snatches on a battered harmonica.

He was wrinkled; cubic zirconia studs in each of his large leathered lobes. Shoulders hunched forward in a standard olive green overcoat, he staggered with the off-beat roll of a hurrying subway car.

He dropped the arm that held the instrument to reveal a droopy under bite, proffering his other grubby hand to a nearby passenger. The passenger, an American girl, nudged her male companion who immediately offered the ajushee a few coins. The man accepted them soundlessly, remotely—as if it was expected. He added them to a zippered pack around his waist, and moved expectantly to the next foreign sucker.

I feigned poverty and shook my head slightly, and hesitated, he moved on down the long row of soulless eyes whose emotions and feelings, if any, were carefully hidden beneath the obscurity of l'humanité en masse. A few more harmonica blues wafted on with him.

The girl nudged me. “How many of these people do you think are heading to church?” she asked.

I glanced again down the line of glassy eyed passenger, dozing or meditating in their glittery ties, polyester suits, heals, and faux fur collars.

“50%.”

She didn’t respond, so I asked her the same.

“More than half,” she answered, and said nothing more.

The seat was warm. I love these heated subway seats.

We sat in silence. I mulled thoughts of being late to church myself and what I’d possibly eat and do afterwards.

Suddenly, she turned to me again.

“Always give what is asked of you,” she said.

Feeling guilty, I gave a paltry tithe at church an hour later. Perhaps the ajushee is cackling merrily amongst broken green bottles in the gutter, having spent the genuine tinder of gullible foreigners. Perhaps he’s sitting at the hospital bedside of a beloved. Perhaps he’s huddling over the stovetop of a streetfood vendor, waiting for a hand-sized portion of dukbokki. Or maybe he’s in heaven giving witness to the ones who gave to the Christ Child and the ones who sat stonily in church.

He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses. Proverbs 28:27

One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. Proverbs 11:24