Okay, I lied. I'm sitting here, reading an essay about the Korean economy that could have been written by a third grader judging from the sentence structure and presentation of facts, and I'm wondering, "Why? Why don't I just quit this dumb-ass job and be done with it? It's not doing anything for me resume-wise, it's not that interesting, and it takes six freakin' hours out of each weekday and four hours out of every other Saturday. Good lord."

After doing really poorly on the exams today (didn't finish one of the essays), I talked to this Canadian army officer who's in the same level as me in the language school. He's on the UN Armistice Commission, or something like that. Point is, he's been to the DMZ, unarmed (cuz he's part of the UN), surrounded with his South Korean military guard, and he said this about it: "The biggest misconception about the DMZ is its name -- it's not demilitarized at all."

I did a double take and said, "Wait, I always thought the actual DMZ -- not the parts of North and South Korea bordering it -- was just lush vegetation and mines."

He laughed. "Not even close! The UN has 150 stations in there, with 30 guys each. At last count, North Korea has 350 stations in there. We don't know how many men are in each one. Last time I went, I was near the actual demarcation line -- about 200 yards away -- and there was all kinds of stuff going on in there."

I asked him if it was true what Pres. Clinton said about it being the scariest place on earth.

"Oh yeah. Definitely. But," and here he seemed to think he had said too much (is this kind of stuff classified?) and so blatantly tried directing the conversation elsewhere, "not as scary as learning Korean. I mean, I understand North Korea and the military and guns. I have no idea when it comes to learning Korean."

Yeah, right, guy. But thanks for giving me an idea of what the DMZ is like. Fascinating.

On a slightly related note, the 2002 recipient of the Walt Whitman award for poetry was a 34-year-old Korean American woman, for her book of poems called "Notes from the Divided Country."