dinner chez Charles

I was in the Seoul National University neighborhood tonight (Tuesday evening) to pick up the hard copies of my book, and since my buddy Charles lives and teaches in that area, I got an invite from him and his wife to come over for dinner. We begin with the one photo to come out of tonight's affair:

The above gives you a tantalizing look at Charles's new apartment (visit Liminality.org for the move-in saga). Thanks to that image in the background, it seems as if we're in Europe. Charles's wife's relatives have a printing service that printed the Europe image onto a curtain, of sorts. The above photo was, alas, the only pic taken with even a glimpse of the beautiful food I enjoyed, which included both the dinner you partially see and a dessert of brownies and ice cream. Veddy nice, veddy nice. I was too busy eating to think of photographing the food, which is too bad. It had been beautifully prepped.

Hyunjin brought out the selfie stick and insisted she could get all three of us into the picture despite our being spread out, so here we are. I hope you weren't expecting a skinny-as-a-rail Kevin. What you see is Kevin after having lost 28 kilos and having regained about 8 kilos since December 16. I didn't do myself any favors over Christmas break, and January didn't see me dieting as seriously as I should have. Still—a net loss of 20 kg, or about 44 pounds. I've said time and again, even when I was down to 101 kg, that I still looked fat and had a long way to go. You won't see me skinny for a long time yet. I'm still aiming for 90 kg by summertime; we'll see whether I can make that goal. I think I can.

But tonight was not the night to think about dieting. Tonight was the night to enjoy good soup, banchan, and a beautiful jjukkumi-pork rice dish that Hyunjin served, followed by a delicious, perfectly textured brownie and some ice cream whose Korean name I stupidly failed to recognize as the English word "Together" (투게더—Charles gave me a look for not figuring that out, but I seriously wasn't thinking in English at that moment). Hyunjin noted that the Together brand has been around since forever.

Anyway, it was good to see Charles and Hyunjin, neither of whom I'd seen since before this damn pandemic started. I hope we get to meet up more often, but Charles is busy at his university, and while I have a bit more free time on my hands than he does, I've got my own projects, too. Hopefully, we'll all somehow make this work. With the UK basically declaring the pandemic over, maybe other countries will open up, and even Korea will meekly crawl out from under its rock and drop all of its restrictions, too.

I hope, as Morgan Freeman intones in "The Shawshank Redemption."

I hope.