comments on the day

Back from an afternoon of shopping with a bunch of ladies. We're having a massive cook-in tomorrow, in class; yours truly will be doing the cooking, but I have to get a head start on the business tonight. At the request of students who were with me last semester, the menu will be the same as before (shrimp fettuccine, quasi-Mediterranean salad), but with the addition of the appetizers I'd left out last time-- and I'm doing this insanity for twelve students instead of six. Luckily, no particular dish presents a real challenge in terms of skilfulness required, but some dishes, like the salads, will simply take time.

I met four students and went to Lotte Mart and the Hannam Market. Spent less than I thought I would for twelve people; the students will be covering half the cost of tomorrow's meal-- that's what I promised them. I'd love to cover the entire cost myself, but some of us aren't as rich as others. If you're trying to guess how much I spent this evening, know that the students will be chipping in W7000 each.

The students who were with me also came up to see my digs. My digs aren't in the best shape right now, but I let the students in and they giggled as they looked around at my possessions. "You've got a lot of books!" one remarked. I told them my in-Korea stash was only about a sixth of what I actually own (most of it's in the States). Another student grabbed my made-in-China back scratcher and started scratching her back while cackling. She's one of my favorites, that one. Wacky and uninhibited.

We've got a new concierge adjoshi downstairs, and he asked the girls some paranoid questions as we all walked in my dorm's main door-- "How many are you? How long are you planning to visit?"-- the sort of questions that show he's alert for horndog teachers. My suspicion about his paranoia was confirmed when, as the students were leaving barely ten minutes after visiting, he asked them, "That's all of you, right?" I thought that was funny: the idea that one student might break away from the group and be waiting for me upstairs in my room. Or the idea that the entire crowd was colluding in a plan to let one student stay behind and scrog me.

But there was a close call this evening: my computer and monitor were on, as always, and it was just by chance that, when I nudged the mouse to stop the screen saver, Hairy Chasms was not on display.* That could have been the end of me right there. Not that I've written anything horrible about students and co-workers (the infamous Z, from early last year, wasn't in our group), but the students would have shouted, "You have a blog!?" and I'd have had to strike camp and move the Hairy Chasms elsewhere. They would also have seen Hyori's bloated ass and those lovely crucifixion pics. I have no idea how they'd have reacted to those.

Am gonna have to stop here. Too much to do this evening. I still have no sense of smell or taste... well, that's not entirely true: the only thing I smell is my own snot. Will go out, buy some medicine and a couple other items on my list, then get cracking on appetizers and the salad this evening. One area where I wimped out: I'd thought of doing the Nigella mousse for the students, but Hannam Market wasn't carrying those chocolate chips I'd used last time. So instead, I've opted for something far simpler: Nutella and fruit. Yes, I'm a wuss.

I think I'm going to try to figure out the holy mysteries of ravioli next. And one of these days, I have to learn how to make my own kimbap-- something I've never done before.

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*I use a Mozilla Firefox browser, which features tabbed browsing; the blog's tab wasn't the "exposed" one, luckily.


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