In three days, I’ll celebrate my one year anniversary of my arrival to Korea. As the lack of blog posts in recent months might indicate, that time has passed incredibly quickly. Life is fast here. Days are seconds; weeks, minutes. Thoughts of the previous weekend cannot be processed until the following Friday; the events of the weekdays have been just as exciting as those of the weekend, and by the time I have a moment to stop and think, it’s already Saturday again. Everything is perpetually in fast forward.
A friend in America writes on my Facebook wall; my parents have been contacting him because it’s been weeks since I have called them, and they’re starting to wonder if I’m still alive. A friend here in Korea sorts through all the photos taken of us in our time here and notices how much older we look compared to when we got here. I tell the U.S. federal government I need an extension to file my taxes because I’m in another country. They understand; the extension is approved. I open a desk drawer and sift through the physical traces of my last several months in Korea to find a pen or a marker; I have to push aside airplane tickets, promotional fliers, socks, an athletic mouth guard, a MIDI controller, photographs, and coins from East and Southeast Asia before I find what I need.
My room is littered with random slips of paper upon which I’ve jotted random thoughts about my days. Comfortable with the rapid pulse of Seoul life, I’ve lacked the motivation to transform the notes into sensible blog posts for others to read. My attention has been constantly focused on the present, and if my faculties have ever had a moment when they were not too overloaded to process that, they might have time to consider the very immediate future. When you’re constantly experiencing new things, there is little time to anticipate your future, much less reflect on your past.
But every now and then, something will snap me out of my dreamlike, fast-paced existence and remind me of how much I’ve experienced here. I’ve been having a lot of brief moments of perspective for the last several weeks—mostly due to the fact that David and Jason, friends and co-patriarchs of the family of foreigner teachers at my hagwon, have recently left Korea. It is strange living in Korea without them; they were instrumental in creating my amazing experience here. I miss them, and adding to the feeling of weirdness inspired by their absence is my recent realization that, of the foreigner teachers currently employed by my hagwon, I have been around the longest. Excepting me, the hagwon has seen a complete rotation of foreigner teachers. How fast does life move here? Fast enough that being employed for twelve months qualifies you as a veteran.
And like any good veteran, I’ve got my share of longwinded observations fueled by some sense of perspective. In the coming weeks, I’ll try to use that perspective to transform some of these scraps of paper at my feet into something tangible and understandable.
