the blog of pestilence

My place is freezing. To sleep, I turn the ondol floor heat up pretty high, and bundle myself in sweatclothes-- the hood on my sweatshirt is absolutely crucial for the prevention of brain freeze.

But it's not enough. Today, as happened yesterday, I woke up with a clogged nose, headache, and sore throat. The problem is that my shoebox of a place is dominated by very old windows in rickety, sliding wooden frames. The panes of glass are very thin, and the windows don't close properly. It's not so much a problem with draft: the cold simply radiates directly through the windows themselves, because they have no insulating power. The effect, then, is that I'm sleeping in a 3-inch-deep cushion of warm air, emanating from the heated floor, and a contrasting layer of very cold air right on top of that. The ass is warm; the face is cold.

So I'm moving into my kitchen this evening. I can't see any way around it. The kitchen/bathroom area is warmer, mainly because it's away from the huge windows.

In the meantime, I'm sick. It was bound to happen; I should've made the move into the kitchen the evening I got back. So consider this your blog of pestilence.

Some personal news...

The computer is on its way. I'm hoping that it won't be too much trouble to hook my American Mac up to Korean DSL (any advice from fellow Koreabloggers on this would be welcome) in the next week or so. I look forward to leaving the PC-bahng culture behind and writing from the frozen comfort of home.

I went to Dongguk University today and got the bad news: no English teaching positions will be open for the spring semester. Fuck. Luckily, I've got three private gigs that'll keep me going for the foreseeable future, and I hope to hit a UMUC branch office with the KimcheeGI at some point to see about even more teaching opportunities. There's also the women's university right next to where I live, Dong Deok Yeo Dae. Heh. Heh. I don't know how all these gigs will dovetail; I may have to make some changes depending on the circumstances, but we'll see. In the meantime, I've decided, thanks to today's Dongguk rejection, to start applying for grad school right away (close friends will now all breathe a sigh of relief; the question is whether application deadlines have passed). My three candidates, in order of prestige-- and possibly preference-- are UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and GMU (George Mason).

Having spent all morning and afternoon blowing my nose, I anticipate some amazing nose-dandruff tomorrow as the nostril skin cracks and gets all leathery... just the way we likes it, Precious. Nassssty little boogerses!

And with that, Dear Reader, I take my leave of you-- too stuffed-up even to think straight. Let's hope that Scarlett's tautological declaration holds water, and tomorrow will indeed be another day.

_