Life as it Stands

I was going to post another restaurant today, but I really, really had a lot of issues with the place and had nothing at all nice to say. I know my motto has never been that if you have nothing nice to say, you should say nothing at all, but the thing is, the place just opened, and there’s nothing at all about it written in English yet. In discussing it with B (who was also pretty pissed when it came time to pay the bill), I realized that however small and insignificant this blog might be, the post would probably be the first thing to pop up in an English Google search just by default. I’m not a restaurant critic — that’s for absolute certain. And while I may come around to posting negative things in the future, I’d rather just stick to sharing places I find that I quite enjoyed for now.

So I thought, instead, how about a little bit of that old-style INP blogging type stuff? It’s hard. Something has shifted with me. It started with the move to the new job, where running my mouth on the internet in too much detail about  my life could have put me in serious trouble with my employer. And then, over time, I just lost my way with posting about my personal life. I got old and married, as well, which I’m sure hasn’t helped.

You’d think I’d be keen, after the past year, to just kind of take it easy for a while, but I can’t seem to can the frenetic energy that’s kept me jumping from thing to thing over the years. Add to that the fact that I’ve just turned 31 and am genuinely beginning to panic about how little I time I have left on this earth (?), and I can’t sit still at all. Poor B has spent the last week or so complaining about how I’ve been ignoring him, which isn’t really fair, but I can see how it may feel that way after I spent the last year vegging out at home whenever I wasn’t at work. Now I’m home all the time, but I’m always up to something.

Above all, I don’t want to go backwards. I want life to keep getting better. I want to spend my time doing the things I love. Currently, my main focus is on figuring out a way to get someone to pay me to write without having to do all kinds of other unpleasant things, like organizing tax information for 100+ international freelance writers and photographers… in Korean. Just as a random, completely hypothetical example.

I’m studying German, or trying to, which is mostly hilarious. Learning the violin, which is the same. It’s a noisy household these days. A smelly one, as well, at times, given all of the little science experiments I’ve filled our kitchen cabinet with.

I made kimchi, properly, for the first time, in February — a messy, back-bending, weekend-long affair that destroyed the apartment as well as a couple of old t-shirts. After shipping a batch off to my mother-in-law, I was informed that I need to be more thorough with the saucing, add more of everything to the sauce (which is kind of a regional thing — Gyeongsang-d0 kimchi is funky, but I happen to agree with her there), but that the salting and fermentation were impressive and that overall I’d managed to produce certifiably edible kimchi the first time out. I’ve been asked to make and send more, which really, genuinely surprised me. And yes, I’m bragging. But most important is the fact that we don’t have to call 엄마 to beg for kimchi now, which always made me feel like a jerk. Instead, I can pay some of that kindness back (albeit, less deliciously).

Things with B are good. He’s good. Thanks to a friend we visited in Vienna, who recently had a baby and who is trying to draw me into her tangled little web of motherhood, he’s a little bit baby crazy at the moment. I’m not. As owner of the incubator, luckily, I get the final say. And the final say right now is, if we move out of Seoul (to Europe, the countryside or a more manageable city), I will think about it, but I’m not hauling my big pregnant ass around this city full of psychotic bus drivers and crammed sidewalks. Ditto an actual tiny human. Also, I’m just not ready in general. We don’t even know where we will be living next year, for god’s sake. Let’s save that for later.

I don’t know what else to say, really. I’m trying to get and stay focused, to choose one direction and move in it. I guess if the biggest problem I have is having too many things that I want to do and the leisure and privilege to choose among them, life could probably be a lot worse. In fact, it has been. So forgive me for savoring every last drop of the present.