I'm at my dad's apartment. He's watching some TV while I write this.

I didn't watch much TV when I was in DC, although I'd go through phases of watching lots of the boob tube. Here, the TV is usually on in the mornings, so I'll get about 10 minutes worth as I eat breakfast, but other than that, I don't really watch. Some of the people I know here have TVs in their rooms, but I don't. Until about 2 weeks ago, I didn't have a radio either, just a Discman, but I'd stopped using it several weeks ago, due to a tendency to listen to Tracy Chapman songs while moping.

Aya, my housemate, lent me her radio 2 weeks ago, though, so sometimes I turn it on in the morning as I get dressed. I like listening to the classical station; the DJ plays a lot of baroque stuff, which I love. This morning he played a beautiful Bach piece adapted for four saxophones, and I thought of my own saxophone-playing days.

Aya was horrified to find out that I had neither TV nor radio, and since she had both, she offered the latter to me. "It's just too boring if you don't have either!" she said. "You should at least have a radio."

Although I do admit that I miss being able to go out and rent a brainless action flick from time to time, I don't really miss the TV, and while I do appreciate the radio, I didn't mind too much not having one. Not having a lot of time to kill at home lends itself to the not minding, of course. I get home around 7:15 or so, and after eating and sometimes hanging out with Aya and whoever else is around the table, it's about 8 pm. If I'm not doing homework, I'll read one of my few English books, or write in my journal, and that's surprisingly satisfying.

I think my life here is fairly simple. I like that.

Last night, because I've been having some weird skin problems, I went with my dad to this doctor...of sorts. He's not really a doctor. He studied physiology very intently, and has a theory that all people fall into one of around 16 categories. It's kind of hard to explain. He's not even like the Chinese medicine practicioners that my mom used to take me to when I was younger. They'd at least take your pulse before prescribing strained deer antlers.

This guy didn't examine me or anything, he just looked at me and divined that my liver is strong, which makes my lungs kind of weak. According to him, I shouldn't worry too much about my skin. It'll clear up when I get married.

Yeah, my dad and I laughed at that too. I, however, was not polite enough to wait until after the consultation to laugh.

Don't get me wrong -- I was totally willing to go see this guy. I have my rationalistic side, which favors the western med-based dermatology I'm also following, but like the man says (the man this time being my dad), there's got to be something to eastern medicine if it's been around for this long. As long as my treatment is grounded in western medicine, I don't see too much wrong with exploring other options too.

Of course, I didn't pay for the $100 bottle of vinegar that my dad ended up buying from the store where the guy gives these consultations. It was for my consultation as well as my dad's, who went a few weeks ago (he was told not to drink too much water, as it interferes with digestion).

Well, it's a big bottle.

And it's supposed to be good for the complexion.

I did see the news that terrorists hit a hotel in Kenya that caters to Israelis and tried to hit an airplane too. I will have to ask Peter (Father Njoroge in my class) if his family is in Mombasa. It's just too horrible. What can we do to stop these things from happening?

I mentioned before that I experienced some anti-American sentiment here. Subsequently, I asked Myung-soo, my work colleague, about how Koreans feel about Americans, and was treated to a 20-minute long continuous list of grievances. (To be fair, she's pretty longwinded in general.) Among one of her points was that yes, we did experience Sept. 11, but that was one day, one time, and Americans have never experienced war at home.

My kneejerk reaction was of distressed disbelief. I felt that she was dismissing the horror of that day and the months that followed. I have thought about it from time to time since then, and I keep realizing that it is very, very difficult to remove myself from my American mindset, even though in the U.S. I think I'm firmly in the liberal camp and pretty open-minded. When I say American mindset, I mean that I can't imagine how it is to be Korean. Korea's been through some really tough shit in the past century: Japanese occupation for a quarter of a century, the horror of the Korean War, the abject poverty that followed. I think that a lot of people feel that the U.S. presence here is another kind of occupation, and that the U.S. doesn't care about Korea, it cares about its own political strategy, in which Korea, located near China and Russia, plays a small but significant role.

So yeah, it was pretty shitty of Myung-soo to address 9/11 that way, but at the same time, I never really thought about the terrible ordeals that Koreans (including members of my own family!) had to suffer, nor of the suffering of the millions of other people in other countries that have experienced war or terror. I only found out a few weeks ago that my grandfather was from a small town just north of the 38th parallel. He was visiting a friend in Seoul shortly before the Korean War broke out, and never saw his family again.

What's the point of all this? To be honest, I don't know. Being American here is strange, being Korean American here is strange. Being Korean, being Korean American in America is strange. I hardly even know what the questions are, much less the answers.