Huh, and just like that, I’m back. It’s been two years. I can’t believe it.
Did you know that I once held jobs that required me to write on a daily basis? Like, for work? That I got paid to do? It seems so long ago.
This is disjointed, I know. I haven’t written. Don’t expect seamless transitions. Or topics. Or even complete sentences.
But, for anyone who knows me personally, you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done since my last post. Here’s a numbered rundown for anyone who has stumbled upon this and is still reading:
1. I wrote about my last new job in this blog. That job may not have been an endless parade of coke and hookers like I made it sound, but it was challenging and, goddammit, it was fun. To say that my heart aches everyday because of the loss of that job in an understatement. I grieve for it still. And I doubly grieve for it because I walked away from it; I walked away from it unwillingly, but I still walked away. I wanted to keep in contact with all those people, but I didn’t. I can’t; it’s too hard. Poor me, I know.
2. I wanted to keep my fledgling marriage intact. The first year of my marriage, my husband and I spent eight months apart. I didn’t know if we could survive another separation. He got a new two-part assignment in February 2009 (Washington D.C. to Seoul). I had a choice to make. I could either stay in Wyoming for 15 months by myself while he moved to D.C., and then accompany him to Seoul for three years. Or, I could go with him for the whole shebang. I went for the shebang. (Why? Well, due to a strict schedule and only seven days of vacation time in 15 months, he couldn’t leave D.C., um, ever. And, unfortunately, I didn’t have weeks to take off to fly back and forth across the country either. I guess there were other, more complicated reasons, but we’re nothing if not practical.)
3. We had two weeks’ notice wherein we uprooted our whole lives and moved to D.C. (Seriously, we rented our house, put all of our things in storage, found a place to live in Virginia, sight unseen, etc.)
4. In D.C., he started Korean classes. I sat in. This began the most agonizingly painful and stressful period of our lives. Doing a job that my husband didn’t want to do, and was not even required to do, simply because someone in his agency made a mistake and had to cover his or her respective ass is beyond comprehension. Learning Korean was a miserable and unnecessary part of my husband’s assignment. It was soul-crushing to see him struggle through 15 months of language training. (In writing this down, his depression and anxiety over this struggle seem two-dimensional. They weren’t. Those feelings were pervasive in our home. Palpable.)
I dropped it after eight months. He had no choice. Whatever, we learned Korean. He, uh, learned it better.
I couldn’t in good conscience get a big girl job after I quit. (I was, after all, definitely leaving the country within a few months.) Instead, I worked at a dog wash. Huh, it’s actually a lot more humiliating to write that down for the public to read than it was for me to walk into that shop everyday in my nastiest clothes and squeeze Newfoundlands’ anal glands. Who knew? I guess I still have a modicum of pride in the fact that I graduated from a shitty state college with an English degree and I used to have a job that required me to use my brain (oh, and possess good general hygiene).
5. We moved to Seoul. But first, we had to give our dogs to my father-in-law. It was devastating. It is of little matter to me that those dogs live the most perfect existence of any dog at his home in rural Vermont. They are not with me, and I am selfish. For people without dogs, this will sound psycho and crazy-fur-baby-parent-y, but I feel like I have a phantom limb. My hands still feel their silky ears, but they are not here.
What is here? Well, nothing is here. My husband is here, I suppose. (If you count working 12 hour days “here.”) I am here whether I like it or not. And I don’t. I tried to put on my brave face, and tell people, “Oh, yes, I look forward to exploring Seoul. It will be such a wonderful, mind-expanding cultural opportunity.” Fuck that. It’s a charmless, superficial concrete megalopolis full of completely self-satisfied yet curiously Western-obsessed assholes. Really. My favorite description is from a Lonely Planet user-generated article titled “Cities You Hate” (of which Seoul ranked third). “It’s an appallingly repetitive sprawl of freeways and Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings, horribly polluted, with no heart or spirit to it. So oppressively bland that the populace is driven to alcoholism.” And it’s true.
We live in the upper East Side Manhattan of Seoul. We live in a million dollar apartment. We have floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto, well, a pile of shit. What’s that famous idiom? Oh, right. You can’t polish a turd
6. I had to find something to do, so I read the internet. I’d forgotten how many good blogs are out there. I remembered that I also had a blog (albeit a crap blog with an undedicated and untalented captain at its helm). I don’t even want to say that I was inspired by all of the blogs I’ve been reading because, clearly, this is not so much an inspired post as it is a feel-sorry-for-me-and-the-burden-of-my-privilege post.
I lost momentum with all this complaining. Look forward to my next post.
Note: I actually just want to get this first-post-in-two-years published because the anxiety surrounding writing again is as oppressive as I remembered it to be.
