home since 7:30 a.m.

My plane arrived in Incheon at around 3:15 this morning (Tuesday the 15th, back on Korean time). There was no trouble connecting in Atlanta, and I had plenty of time between flights; my bags were checked to Incheon, and I didn't have to pass through another layer of security before boarding the flight to Incheon. All I had to do to board that flight was to stand for a biometric photo right at the departure gate. They didn't even look at my passport. I think everything's going to go biometric soon, with China's repressive technology leading the way, and with the West meekly following it. The flight back was uncomfortable as always (one of the hazards of being a big guy in economy class), but I survived just fine. One hitch as I was boarding was a Chinese woman who had planted herself in my seat, 49G. Turns out she was 49H, the middle seat (GHJ, going aisle to window). Luckily, she was nice about the mixup, but she did want to confirm that "H" was in fact the middle seat, so I had to look again at the seat markings to be able to say that, yes, H marked the middle. After landing in Incheon, I had a massive urge to pee and poo while we all stood inside the aircraft and waited for the front-row people to start vacating the plane, but when I finally reached an Incheon Airport restroom, I only peed and farted for whatever reason. I guess the Number Two is saving itself to surprise me later in an unsuspecting moment. I'm currently eating a salad to help the food along the old Peristalsis Railroad. The subway will exit the tunnel in good time.

I've been frustrated by computer problems since my return to my apartment. My desktop Mac paradoxically doesn't have internet, but it's doing just fine as a WiFi hotspot. Go figure. So my laptop (upon which I'm typing this entry) and my cell phone are both fine, siphoning WiFi goodness from the desktop, which itself is not allowing me to see any websites (except for cached images from March 23, right before I'd left for the States). I've contacted the guy who'd set up my internet; I hope he comes by soon. I'm also waiting for a new electric razor to arrive; several things died right before I'd left for the States, including my razor, which literally fell apart on me (the other two casualties were/are my ceiling lights; I need to order two new lights, then call the building repairpeople to come over and install the new LED panels). 

This being a slow day of recovery, I haven't even begun to unpack yet. I do know my current button-down shirt and pants will need a thorough rewashing: on the Atlanta-Incheon flight, we were served a "snack" of "Mediterranean pizza twists," each of us being given a single twist that was mostly pizza crust with a lump of herbed, seasoned cheese in the middle. Bite the cheese, and chunks of it can fall out and roll gleefully down your shirt, as happened to me when the crust ripped unevenly in my Frankenstein-monster teeth. So I arrived in Incheon looking bedraggled and besmirched, but I imagine the Korean passport-control staffers have seen worse. (At least, I hope so.) After passport control and an attempt at a poop in a nearby restroom (alas, as mentioned above, it was only pee that made an appearance), I went down and got my two bags, which came out fairly promptly instead of following the usual Murphy's-Law pattern of being the last ones out. I then got a ticket for the limousine bus out to the Dogok-dong area; it was a bit after 4 a.m. when I got the ticket via a muin (mu + in, lit. no person, i.e., automatic and unstaffed) ticket machine. What I'd really wanted was a destination of Daechi-dong, one stop down from Dogok, but I didn't see Daechi anywhere (as it turned out, the bus did announce the stop). This ticket was for the 6009 bus, the same one that Mike and I had taken together to the airport last year; it actually goes all the way to Gaepo-dong, my precinct, but the one time I got off at the Gaepo stop, I was unable to get a cab in that area, so I ended up walking back to my place, almost two kilometers away. What a slog. That sucked, and I learned my lesson: get off at Daechi or Dogok, then take a cab the rest of the way or, if I'm feeling strong, walk underground and take the subway to Daecheong Station.

The three weeks in the States now feel a bit like a dream, and I'm back in my element despite being jobless. It was good to see my buddy and his loud, chaotic family, all manifesting the American value of ebullient self-expression as opposed to the Korean/East-Asian values of deference, respect, humility, and conformity. It was a treat to feed the Missus' aging mom twice (she'd lost her husband—a very smart, talented, and friendly gent—to pancreatic cancer and its effects not so long ago), first with the Moroccan-inspired chicken, then next with the gyro-thingies (or almost-gyros or whatever). Everyone in the family has quirky taste preferences; my goddaughter hates mushrooms, and Mike's son doesn't like feta cheese or tomatoes. He told me that, the following day, he'd made his own gyro from leftovers, but he'd added pesto, which sounded like an awful clash of flavor profiles to me, but who knows? Maybe it'll be the Next Big Thing. Not that I can afford to complain given my own hangups about onions (more of a texture thing than a question of taste).

Given my limited outings and interactions with the greater Amurrican populace, I didn't get to see any culture-war drama up close, but then again, there was plenty of minor drama always percolating in my buddy's household when the family got together to, say, watch hockey (the Washington Capitals' Alexander Ovechkin broke Wayne Gretzky's goal-scoring record while I was in America). I go back and forth on the question of whether it's better to be obnoxious but honest or to be politely quiet but constantly backbiting. I've heard Koreans describe themselves as rough around the edges but sincere while the Japanese are urbane but insincere. Is that true? I don't know enough Japanese people to say. The Japanese vlogger Sora the Troll does have a few videos about things the Japanese find distasteful, as well as how they react to outré situations. The Japanese do seem to labor under a lot of social rules.

I got my sea legs back with all of the driving I did—freeway driving, and even some dangerously slalom-y highway along some woodsy, suburban back roads. I did plenty of walking, and while I tried to rein in my baser tendencies to snack, I fell off the wagon many times, with my morning blood-sugar readings over 200 during most of my days in the States. My A1c must be about to commit seppuku. From now until my May doctor's appointment at Samsung Hospital, I'll need to be positively monastic to even hope to get my ruined A1c average down, but I don't have much hope, both because I know I'm still an undisciplined ape (which is most likely what will kill me) and because I know there's only so much a person can do in about a month (my next appointment is on May 23, then there's another on July 11).

Insight: we Americans are generally the pachyderms that the rest of the world makes us out to be. We've learned to get used to a life of overabundance, and we complain that that's somehow insufficient. Our bathroom towels are huge; our food portions are out of control, and the sheer availability of every machine-made food product under the sun is astounding to behold. It really is l'embarras du choix—the burden of choice. I admit I sometimes pine for American-style variety in Western products when I'm browsing through a Korean store's "foreign" or "imported" section, but being confronted with the real thing up close after seven years away was quite an experience. I mean, how many fucking varieties of goddamn trail mix can one convenience store or Walmart have, for Chrissakes? And don't even get me started on varieties of soda and other drinks. It's all carbs, all the time in American stores.

This isn't to say that the American shopper has to buy these bad-for-you things. Plenty of great-quality fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats are also available in most stores. But purchasing those unhealthy, processed items is very, very easy, and like water, the human character tends to take the easiest and quickest path downhill. If anything, I'm surprised that we as a people aren't fatter and more bovine. As a country, though, we're in a huge rut, and I think we're only beginning to reap the karma of what we've sown for ourselves, even as we hide behind the old "it's a disease/epidemic" shibboleth, as if we weren't actively choosing the path we're collectively on.

From what I saw, Mike's family, at meals, tends to eat pretty healthily. I had plenty of proteins (e.g., thin pork chops) and plenty of salads with leafy greens and oil-vinegar dressings. Yes, there were also carbs in the form of pasta and potato salad, and when I cooked for the family, I added my own carbs to the equation in the form of couscous and flatbread. In terms of drinks for us teetotalers, the house's fridges were stocked with diet drinks and flavored waters, but Mike likes his alcohol, and he's got a bar downstairs featuring mostly the non-carby, distilled drinks. All of these alcohols, though, distilled or not, can contribute to fatty-liver disease (look up "distilled alcohol consumption and fatty liver" on Google). Meanwhile, we teetotalers aren't off the hook: as long as we over-ingest carbs and keep snacking, we too can eventually suffer from NAFLD: non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease. According to Dr. Sten Ekberg, scientists decades ago were startled to discover this phenomenon in carb-consuming children, then they turned their attention to adults and saw the phenomenon among them, too.

Americans generally remain more polite to strangers than Koreans are. In Korea, a lot depends on social roles. Today, for example, after I got off the limousine bus at Dogok and walked closer to Daechi to a taxi stand, the taxi driver who stopped for me turned out to be a very polite, solicitous individual who helped me both stow my bags in the back of the cab and take them out at the very end—all with a kind smile. Our social roles were clear; politeness and solicitude were called for. It felt good to return to Korea with that sort of treatment, and to know that kindness is possible wherever one might go. But when it comes to the usual questions of, say, holding doors or saying "I'm sorry" or "excuse me" or not walking in front of someone else's line of sight, Americans win hands down because Koreans, like most East Asians, just don't give a shit. It's not that East Asians are being actively rude; it's more that these considerations just aren't on their radar. The result, though, looks and feels rude on balance. But I've heard complaints about American rudeness from Koreans who've lived in America; Americans do things that Koreans find rude quite without realizing it, so this discussion of rudeness isn't going to be over any time soon.

All in all, though, post-COVID, Trump Round 2 America felt more like a foreign country to me this time around. That may be more a result of my own internal changes than anything else, but the net effect is that I'm increasingly coming to see South Korea as my home. Yes, this is despite my complaints and my rants and my neverending misgivings about peninsular life and culture. What keeps me in Korea is that the good generally outweighs the bad, and maybe it's also partly that I enjoy my outsider status whenever I find myself in Korea or France or Switzerland. Upshot: it's good to be back in the world I know, however strange or off-putting it can be at times. That said, there's still sadness about leaving a friend.

Here's a pic that kind of represents the sad mood I was in when I took it:

my buddy Mike's empty seat at his office desk in Historic Fredericksburg

It occurred to me that I hadn't thought to take pictures of Mike's family: his wife, his two daughters, and his son. Mike did, however, get the idea to take one last selfie at Dulles Airport on the day I departed, so here it is (sent from Mike's phone):

friends since third grade (초등 3, for my non-Yank peeps)

Mike and I have both had minor strokes now; on top of that, I had a miraculously survived heart attack last year, and I've been diagnosed with heart failure, so I have no idea how long my personal party is going to last. We're both planning to walk the final 100-some kilometers of the Camino de Santiago, the French Way (el camino francés), when we turn 60 in 2029. If I'm still around then, of course. I've told Mike of my intention to walk the entire 800-some kilometers of the camino francés later on; we'll see whether I'm in any shape to keep that promise. Meanwhile, there are other paths to be walked, and when one road ends, another begins. For as with friendships, the road goes ever on and on.