Thursday, November 20, 2014

in a strange place

This is turning out to be a singularly weird week. I'm not sure what it is, but things feel out of balance, off-kilter. Just plain weird.

I didn't walk up the mountain last night, as it turned out. I stayed in and watched "Joe" (starring Nicolas Cage) on my laptop, then went to sleep fairly early—if 2AM is early. My yeogwan isn't equipped with an ondol (heated floor), so it's cold indoors. The bed has a large heating pad on it, but I'm afraid to turn it on for fear that I'll die in a fire. This isn't completely irrational: the yeogwan manager uses huge safety pins to lock down the bedding, and he punches those pins right through the electric heating pad, quite possibly nicking some wires in the process. My fear of an electrical fire is, pardon the electrician's pun, grounded.

Can't quite put my finger on what the general problem is, but time and events are flowing strangely this week, and I don't have my bearings. Maybe there's a Korean term for this mental state—hell, for all I know, there's a proper English term for it. But I don't know the term any more than I understand why I feel so off-balance.

Will meditate on this. My starting point will be: what would need to happen for things to feel right again? Maybe I just need to win the lottery, buy an island, and chill.


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5 comments:

The Maximum Leader said...

Seasonal Affected Disorder?

Anonymous said...

Addofio here. Sounds like fall doldrums. Also--it sounds like you've been pushing yourself pretty hard for quite awhile, maybe you just need some down time. You clearly have more get up and go than I do, or ever have, but still--there's a reason for that whole "day of rest" thing. It's more than just a physical thing. Let yourself take some down time--eventually your innards will come back to life and propel you forward.

John said...

Yeah, I went to the online thesaurus looking for a better term than "out-of-sorts" but that seems to be what you describe. Whatever you call it, I hope it you are back to normal soon.

Kevin Kim said...

Thanks, all three of you, for your concern.

Kevin Kim said...

Mike,

So I looked up "Seasonal Affective Disorder" and saw that it's considered a species of depression. But I'm not depressed: I'm just feeling a bit out of phase, as if I'm not fully inhabiting myself. My brain's homunculus is hanging halfway out of my skull, so to speak. It's all very strange.

I feel a bit more "in phase" now, for what that's worth. My advanced-level students were a big help in getting me sorted out (maybe John's "out of sorts" is the term I'm looking for).