Follow the River North

I’ve been a naughty blogger again. I know. I gave myself until the end of June to come up with a real and actionable plan for the future, and I’ve been busy making contacts, brainstorming, sketching and re-sketching plans, doing accounts, etc. I’ve picked up some more translation work and have more possibly coming down the pipe. Hooray for properly paid work — I think translators may actually be paid more money than the people who originally write articles, in most cases. Sad state of affairs, but it goes to show how little is thought of writing as a cultivated skill set. Writers are supposed to just be grateful to have their name put on something, while translators are often invisible and unacknowledged but at least paid.

I’m also working on getting my food handler’s certification, which I’ll be explaining more about soon, hopefully. I’m doing it in Korean, which would be a laugh a minute were I a sadomasochist. Nonetheless, I think I’m going to manage it. B, B’s brother and I have decided to take a cross-country bike trip at the end of the summer, too, so B and I have started a kind of lighthearted training to prepare. I’ve started pottery classes, as well, at a nearby studio with a teacher who is quite unique. He’s a high school dropout with a motorcycle who chats a mile a minute and doesn’t seem to realize I’m only catching about 70% of what he’s saying. His approach is decidedly laid back, which is why I chose him. He made it clear from the start that he only teaches basic techniques, and it’s up to me to guide myself through a lot of the learning process, but he offers unlimited studio time and clay and is there to answer any questions and offer critique and guidance. I was at the studio for five hours yesterday, when I’d only intended to drop by for a couple. It’s nice, after focusing on words and language for so much of the day, to sit and quietly work with my hands.

The studio is located in an interesting little alley that is full of other various kinds of studios — sewing, weaving, painting, topiary (?). The studio owners all seem to be friends, and several of them take classes at each other’s studios, and as a result, I’ve had the opportunity to meet other studio owners when they drop in while I’m working. At the same time, the neighborhood is still a neighborhood, with school kids calling out greetings as they pass and older folks sitting out in front of the buildings listening to music, singing and chatting. It’s peaceful. I like it there.

It’s a much different vibe from last year at the magazine surrounded by workaholics. Yesterday, the potter handed me his phone and asked me to take a photo, and before I knew it, he had whipped off his t-shirt and was standing there bare-chested and smiling. I thought, I’m an American. I can handle this. It’s not that strange….

Unlike at the company, where I would sneak cigarettes out behind the car park and hope not to be spotted by the editor-in-chief or any of the (male) company executives, because I’m a female, the potter nearly pushes me to join him for a smoke when the studio is empty besides us.

It’s comfortable, and it’s a side of Korea I need to experience after the competitiveness and backbreaking work with very little thanks of last year. The studio owners chat about being broke and receiving criticism for not having graduated university with a major in their field of work or at all, and how silly it all is, how the work is the work and either you do it well or you don’t. I’m not trying to be a broke artist, or an artist at all, but I feel more at home there, already. At the magazine last year, even the coworkers I really liked would regularly patter over lunch about who needed what plastic surgery procedure or who had gained or lost weight or who had a new car. It’s all fine — it’s part of life. But I’ll choose the seriously invested conversation about whether or not alien lifeforms will arrive on our planet within our lifetime any day, to be honest.

Whatever you’re surrounded by becomes your reality, I think even more so, in a foreign country, where you can’t help but scan for categories and definitions. I desperately needed to re-categorize my definition of Korea after the past year, and I think the simple choice to take up pottery making will go a long way there.

All of this aside, up until this week, the past couple of weeks in the kitchen have been extremely unpleasant. B and I have a hard time being middle class, despite our now middle class combined income. Last week, when B and I dropped by the pottery studio, B pointed to another studio up the road and said it was a good thing I’d found mine. I asked him what he meant. My pottery studio is an open-faced, unfinished building full of mounds of clay and discarded work. The walls are covered with primitive raw-wood shelving stacked with piles of unorganized pottery. The place he’d pointed at was a carefully refurbished shop with delicate displays of painted ceramics in the windows.

“You know, that place is all–” At this point he flapped his hands in the air and his voice went up several octaves. “— ‘Oh, so pretty! Look at me! I have a hobby!’ Your studio is –” He grimaced, and his voice turned guttural and low. “‘I’m an artist! I’m dirty!'”

“Did you just call me dirty?”

“…No.”

“At any rate, my main preoccupations now are baking and taking pottery classes. It’s kind of disgustingly middle class, even if the studio is a mess…”

“We’re not middle class. We don’t have a house or a car…”

“We are middle class. We’re just having a hard time admitting it.”

But I did reach my breaking point with one poor student-like condition last week. I will not continue to cook in our sweltering hot, unair-conditioned kitchen when buying a second air conditioner would not cause us the slightest financial distress. I drew a line in the sand with B and told him to pick a side — new air conditioner or wife on kitchen strike.

It should be arriving later this week.

At which point maybe I’ll get back to doing the business with this blog, although some of my current cooking effort is being diverted to other areas as well.

As a side note, I don’t feel right not at least acknowledging the massacre that occurred in Orlando on Sunday. It’s all the more heartbreaking as June is a month of safety, celebration and acceptance for many LGBT communities across the globe. What is there to say? I find myself at a loss, but I know that at the very least it is a moment to reflect on what is often considered benign “religious freedom,” and the kind of thinking and speaking we permit in our society under the guise of everyone having a right to their opinion. At some point, society has to come to a consensus that some opinions are morally wrong, and they can cause much more tangible harm than just hurt feelings.

Gun control, the US… I mean, fuck it. If we haven’t reached our breaking point by now, I don’t have much hope that we ever will. I never seen a people so stubborn as American gun rights advocates. With both hands plastered over closed eyes, they’ll run screaming through a gauntlet of evidence that change is needed, that something isn’t working, that some things are not worth the price they cost. I’m a Texan — I am outnumbered in my family by gun rights folk. These are people I love and respect and would die to defend. But they’re wrong. Unfortunately, despite not being stupid or ignorant people, there is still no event, no evidence, no argument, no explanation and no statistic or fact that will ever change their minds. I admire the people who take the time to formulate informative arguments for gun control, but I come from the heart of things and I know it’s no use. We’re just going to have to wait for another generation, if not another era.

In the meantime, my heart goes out to the LGBT community. It’s unwarranted hurt, time and time again. It’s ugly. And you better believe that as self-righteous as these kinds of people are, when it comes time to cross over, it’d be better for them if they were wrong about there being a god and a system of divine justice. I pray that I live to see the day when history books tell the story of how once, in America, gay people were shot dead, beaten in the streets, discriminated against, kicked out of their homes and exiled from their families, all just for choosing not to be excluded from love. Until that time, the rest of us will just have to love each other a little bit harder.