Only a little tipsy, I swear, this time. Just got back from dinner then drinks then mango popsicle (man, they are SO GOOD) with Lewis and Myung-soo, then just Myung-soo.

At 12:20, I had my speaking test with the teacher I had last term, and it sucked big time, because I was tired from a bad night of sleep (lot of those lately) and because the room was boiling hot (my glasses were literally steaming up) and because I really just didn't care. But after an excruciating 10 minutes, the teacher (who gave me excellent practical advice last term about going to law school or not) and I talked about breakups, the nature of men and women, and various other totally un-school-related topics. For 20 minutes. Making the next student wait 10 minutes.

Foregoing the boring-ass specific details of her advice about my breakup (which I mentioned at the very beginning of the test, as a reason (not an excuse! just a reason, you know?) for why I was subsequently going to blow my test), I will just present to you her theory of how women need to behave around men: "Helen, you and I are capable women who have big hearts and a lot of potential, and that's just not going to cut it with the men. You need to hide that around men, because men need to feel like they are in charge, like they are the ones doing the helping.

"Have you read Racine? No? Well, there's a story he wrote about a man who had to accomplish a deed deep in the forest. His woman friend suggested tying thread to a tree at the edge of the forest so he could find his way about. That woman assumed that since she helped him, he'd fall in love with her. But he didn't. And that's the way it is: men don't like women telling them how to solve problems; they want to be the ones helping the women in their lives.

"I have a very smart friend who was married to a guy who admired her for her smarts. She would work really hard at her studies while he read comics, and for a while it worked, because he liked the fact that she could be a professor if she wanted to."

"Well, did that work for her?" I asked.

"No. They" (with a motion instead of words) "split up. You see, he finally asked for a divorce because, as he said, he wanted her to derive strength from him at times. And so they divorced.

"Some women are okay with being the alpha in the relationship -- they don't mind carrying the guy along with them, they don't mind being the mother. But some men look for a mother in a relationship, and some men look for a little sister. It sounds like you need to look for the latter."

"How are you supposed to bear hiding your talents and abilities?" I wondered out loud.

"Well," she said, "it's like being a teacher. As a teacher, you KNOW the students are saying it wrong, you KNOW there's a better way to write something. But a class where only the teacher is speaking the entire time is really uninteresting. The students learn better by doing it themselves, even if they do it incorrectly or imperfectly. That's how men are similar in relationships; if you, as the woman, are perfectly capable and independent-minded, you need to hide it, so that the men can assert themselves and feel that they are contributing, feel that they are helping. That way, they DO grow, and they DO gain self-confidence."

Interesting, ain't it? Or maybe not. She cited John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and also the movie As Good As it Gets, saying that just as the Jack Nicholson character says to the Helen Hunt character "You make me want to be a better man," women have to let men have the chance to be better men, instead of asserting themselves and making men feel that they are worse men.

I dunno. As most reasonable people do, I scoffed at The Rules, and rightly so. This sounds very Rules-ish. But at the same time, I believe there are kernels of truth in what she said. Prof. Kim is 35 (and looks 27) and says she rejected a bunch of men in her 20s (which I totally believe, because she's really lovely to look at), before she cottoned on to these ideas. Maybe Korean men exhibit more Mars-ish characteristics than Americans. Or maybe these theories are just as applicable in the States. But what kind of men are susceptible to the application of these ideas -- that would be the question.

In any case, it was a new way to look at things. And it's always nice to talk to someone who seems really interested in solving your problem. (This sort of thing cost me $180 per 50 minutes in the States!)

After this whole conversation, I went to work, as usual. You know, at work, the bathrooms are in the back side of the building, so the windows look out upon the mountainside next to which the building was built. During the winter, I would wash my hands and stare out at the bare trees and the occasional dustings of snow. Now the hillside is a mass of wavy green -- treetops swaying in the wind. There's a hypnotic quality to the movement, and a kind of calm that comes upon me when I stand there watching groups of treetops move back and forth in the summer breeze.

After work, I went to Myung-soo to a bookstore, then invited her to come to dinner with Lewis, who works nearby on Thursday nights. We went for, um, grilled intestines, I guess -- a first for all of us. You could tell the intestines apart from the liver (?) and other inner meats by the tube shape. It's not the taste so much as the texture, which is kind of rubbery... anyway, we had a nice time over dinner, and then again over drinks at a nearby cafe. Lewis is such a easygoing New Zealander that Myung-soo instantly felt at ease, and I just liked being with two friends, even if I don't know them all that well. (I find, oddly enough, that I like being with two people rather than just one other, especially when I know both better than they know each other. Is that weird? Or common? Or understandable?)

Lewis is really amazingly good about never speaking English, always speaking Korean, and Myung-soo asked why I don't do the same. We talked a little bit about how it's different for Caucasians/nonAsians and Amerasians in Korea; as you might guess, when I've gone out with Lewis or Ajay by myself, servers talk just to me, not them. When they realize that Lewis or Ajay speaks Korean, they get very complimentary (i.e., "My, you speak Korean so well!"). But at the same time, when they realize that I'm a foreigner, they simply say, "Oh, you're a foreigner, are you?" and rarely, if ever, compliment me on my Korean.

Often I won't answer the server right away, giving my Caucasian friend the chance to speak, just to illustrate that, you know, Whitey can talk the talk too. I mean, it's not a uniquely Korean habit to assume that Slant-eyes is a homie and Whitey isn't; Myung-soo said that in Canada, when she went out with a Korean friend who spoke little English, people would be taken aback when she spoke English, having assumed that both of them couldn't. But that's the way it goes; I look different in America, and some people will always wonder "Where I came from," while in Korea, I look the same, and everyone expects me to be one of them.

Myung-soo lives in the same apartment complex as I do, and so we went home and bought a popsicle for me and a cider for her, and sat on one of the flat platforms that serve as benches on a path between a row of buildings. The night was balmy. Mosquitoes bit us. I was a little (as I mentioned) tipsy (not remotely tipsy now, of course). I told her that I was sad that Lewis was leaving for the summer (he plans to come back in the fall), because he made class really fun, and I always felt happy when I saw him. She said we must be good friends; I replied that no, he works nearby on Thursday nights, and since it's so far from where he lives, he calls up to have dinner or drinks because it's kind of a waste to spend an hour in transit, two hours working, and then another hour in transit. She opined that social people like Lewis always have the door open, but that they only open it part-way, so you can never quite see everything inside, and they open it the same amount for everyone. I thought about it, and offered back: Maybe it's more that the door is very big, but the room inside is rather small.

Rather proud of that metthapor. Metaphor, I mean.

Sorry if any of the above didn't make sense. Tipsified. May have mentioned that earlier. G'nite.