crawling out of the cave

Man, this week sucked pretty bad. At least it's over. 

So... I woke up feeling okay enough on Thursday to go to the gym and lift weights in the morning. My sore throat had morphed into a garden variety cold, which was annoying, but surviveable. My students were pretty good, but the school thwarted me, unsurprisingly. First co-teacher made me feel really guilty about making her feel guilty, or something like that. She was like, I had a terrible weekend, because I felt so terrible about Friday's demonstration class, because it was my fault, etc... So I felt guilty for making her feel bad? Whatever. I just want to forget it. But, in an all-star move, she e-mailed Mr. Jerk and politely reamed him, prompting him to apologize very sincerely and satisfactorily to her, and also send me an apology email. There was definitely more than a hint of "I'm sorry YOU got so offended by my helpful suggestions," but I don't care. I didn't need his apology, but I appreciate that she asked him to, and anything that alleviates those insidious creeping hates in our hearts is good, I guess. Whatever.

I made it through classes on Thursday, but then we had an unfortunate teacher field trip... to see flowers. Don't get me wrong. I don't hate my fellow teachers. I really love my co-teacher, and I actually actively like a couple of the other teachers. I just don't like spending time with them when I could be spending time with students (or my bed, for that matter). We sent the students home three hours early on Thursday so that we could all drive to a city (an hour from my house) and walk around looking at flowers and eat dinner. Needless to say, my 24 hour antihistamine had already worn off by 2pm when we left school. It was just such a disorganized disaster. Apparently the principal was in charge of organizing it, but we didn't seem to have a plan. I sat in the car for 30 minutes while we tried to meet up with our caravan. We went up a mountain, got out and looked around for 5 minutes, then decided we needed a snack, so we went back down. We couldn't find the place we wanted to go to, so there was more sitting around. My nose was running, I had to pee, and I just wanted to go home. The weather had been hot previously, but the day was actually chilly, and I had only a thin jacket, which prompted the other teachers to constantly say "Oh, aren't you cold?" (Yes, I'm cold. If I'd known we were going to be outside for 5 hours, I'd have worn more appropriate clothes. Just kidding, I would have QUIT.) The cold made me have a really bad attitude toward the whole thing, which was unfortunate, because they're all nice people. I just get bored being there, because no one talks to me, I can't follow the conversation, and inevitably, we're always eating something gross, and I spend the time thinking of the many other more productive things I could be doing. Alas. 

I survived the picnic, and unsurprisingly, went straight to bed after school and slept straight through. Then, on Friday morning, the most perplexing thing happened... I woke up injured. Not sure what I was doing in my sleep--nothing THAT exciting, I'm sure, but when I woke up I felt a scary twinge in my back and then anytime I bent it it was perplexingly painful. I tried stretching it, but it's my very lower back, so it's kind of a hard place to stretch. Friday was another long day (5 classes), and I was still fighting the cold, so I again went straight to bed afterwards. The high point of Friday was receiving the following letter from my favorite student (the adorable one from the previous post). Co-teacher and I teased him into writing an English letter, but we didn't think he'd actually do it: 

Dear my sister, 

Hi~ now it's dark. How are you? 

Don't hurt. You often hurt so I worry about you. I wish I could hurt for you. 

Sister, why don't you teach me checkers game? I always wait. 

Will you race 5k? Really? 5k is very far if you want to give up during race you can give up. You don't have to finish. 

These days I cannot concentrate so I worry about middle exam. But I can concentrate for your class, because your class is fun. You make me happy so I am happy during talk to you. Oh... my letter is terrible. I cannot write down letter well. 

Your brother

See why I love Korea? :) Several things about this letter are instructive. Point #1: He calls me sister because of Confucius, indirectly. Koreans have a very strict age-based hierarchy through which they interact with each other. On the internet, I refused to constantly be addressed as teacher. But my efforts to convince students just to call me Brittany proved fruitless, so I settled eventually for older sister. Point #2: In Korean, the words for "hurt" and "sick" are the same, so he's actually saying that I'm often sick. Not that I emotionally or existentially "hurt" often. Point #3: I can give up on the 5k? He would not be a good Biggest Loser coach. Point #4: I AM a good teacher. My class IS fun. Suck it, Mr. Jerk. 

So yeah. I woke up on Saturday around 6am and decided to give running a try. My back was still tight, but I was hoping it would loosen up if I stretched and got moving. That... didn't happen. I ran for about four minutes before I gave up and started limping home. By then it hurt a lot more, and we were having a weird cold spell, so the 45 degree weather wasn't helping either. I made it home and collapsed depressed back into bed, convinced that I was broken and I wouldn't be able to run ever again and I wasn't going to be able to finish training for the 5k... etc. I called my Dad, the expert on running and back pain, and he listened to my teary description and diagnosed me with muscle spasms. I've had back pain before, but never like this. He told me to give it a rest and take ibuprofen. I'd had a lot on my to-do list for yesterday, but I just couldn't bring myself to do any of it, so I spent most of the morning in bed feeling bad for myself. April was a pretty crappy month from a weight loss standpoint, so I was definitely ready to start over, so to find myself incapacitated by a random injury three weeks before the big race was depressing, to say the least. 

Saturday afternoon I went to DVD bang and watched a really sad movie that my favorite student recommended. It was a lot like A Walk to Remember, only with a hot Korean guy, and no annoying Mandy Moore. Ideal. After that I took the bus to Gwangju to meet my co-teacher for dinner... TGIFriday's. It was delicious. I came home and went to sleep, having accomplished roughly nothing, but feeling marginally better. 

I woke up early this morning in a much better headspace. I started in on my to-do list as soon as I woke up, and worked myself into a pretty good mood. Around 10 I went out to run an errand and, on a whim, stopped and got a haircut. I know I need a clean slate for May, so I chose a pretty short little haircut, but it's cute enough, especially since the weather's starting to warm up. Now that I have newly thin and cute neck and collarbones, I don't mind showing them off a bit. Plus, I had some pretty big weirdly-colored chunks still from the purple streak period last year, and my hair was feeling pretty unhealthy, so cutting off a lot of that was good for it, I think. I'm looking forward to having long hair, but I've got time, and I'm happy with it. It's just the change I needed.  I'm now almost completely done with my to-do list for the day (except for pesky lesson planning!), and I feel accomplished. 

As well I should... because I read seven books this month! As you may remember, one of my goals for April was to read 50 pages every day, and 100 pages every weekend day, which was a resounding success. Yesterday I finished Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. It was non-fiction, which is unusual for me, but the genre IS starting to grow on me. It's nice to mix it up, anyway. So this is a memoir by Stewart, a Scottish journalist who decided to cross Asia completely on foot. This book focuses specifically on his walk through Afghanistan, about nine months after the American invasion. It's pretty interesting... there's not too much history, and the anecdotes are enlightening. It only got boring a few times. It was sort of unsatisfying for the same reasons, though... there wasn't enough history to answer the questions prompted by the anecdotes, and the interactions recorded were so brief that it just felt like a lot of snapshots. I also found the narrator curious. He spent a lot of time complaining about walking, which was vaguely annoying, since it was entirely his choice, and that was his shtick. He was also really pissy at times about the shitty hospitality, which was interesting. Granted, the Afghans he met (and most of the people in Asia, apparently) made a big deal about how they were the most hospitable people in the world, so I could see why he would want to point out the difference between what they say and how they act. But it also seemed sort of ridiculous to undertake a journey where you had to rely entirely on others for shelter and food, and to bitch about not being wonderfully received everywhere as a foreigner in a recently invaded country. I guess any complaining was annoying to me, because I'm like, "Then quit. It's your choice. You're doing this to write a book so you can win an award. Spare us." Maybe I'm just a bitch. :) Whatever. 

The good news... that was book #16, which means I'm now caught up for April, and I should finish #17 before Thursday.