On Friday night, went out with some people from school for Junior's birthday. Twas fun enough.

Yesterday (Sat.), did nothing much. Had a weird meltdownish moment when my grandmother, who dropped by that morning, asked me in her customary LOUD voice whether I'd thought about staying in Korea and working here. "I'd like it if you stayed here and found a husband and a job," she said. And then: "Do you know what the word job means?" (She thought I was unfamiliar with that vocabulary -- not a putdown.)

"No," I said, "I'm going to go back to the States."

"Don't you want to stay here with your father?"

"No, it's not that..."

"You don't like Korea?"

"It's not that I don't like Korea, I just... the U.S. is my home."

"So you want to live with your mother there?"

"No! I want to live alone, okay!"

Shortly after that exchange, she left, and I got very upset, for some reason. Crying and everything.

It's not that I don't want to live with my dad, and it's not that I don't like Korea -- even if I loved Korea, I don't think I could uproot my life to stay here for what's left of it. America, for all the things I find frustrating about it, for all the things I get angry about, is my home. But I couldn't get that across to my grandmother.

In addition, I couldn't explain that in the States, I was independent, self-sufficient. She chastised me yesterday for not watering the plants that my dad had brought home last week. "If you're going to bring plants home, you need to water them!" she said. "I didn't bring them home," I replied in my usual I-can't-think-of-what-to-say-so-I-say-something-seemingly-unrelated fashion. "You need to water them anyway!" she insisted. And I thought, if my dad brought them home, why isn't he being chastised for not watering them? My mind responded: Well, because he's your parent, duh, and you have the responsibility, as a girl child. Yeah, well, fuck that.