It's the day before Chusok, and the streets of Seoul are empty, the freeway is a parking lot, the TV show hosts and guests are dressed in hanbok (traditional Korean dress), and I'm beat. After meeting with the high school kid whose essays I'm editing, I went to Insadong, the old part of town, and bought a bunch of stuff to take back with me to the States. Except for four more items, I'm now done with the shopping part of the preparation. On Saturday I need to go cut my hair, but other than that, I'm feeling in fairly good shape.

God, I really need to learn how to stress less about stupid details.

Like I said, the TV show hosts and guests are dressed in traditional clothes today, and I got a kick out of imagining, say, the women on The View dressed in pilgrim outfits. Chusok and New Year's are the biggest holidays of the year, but Chusok is when everyone goes to their hometowns, creating gridlock like you wouldn't believe and tripling the time it takes to get anywhere. A large percentage of people living in Seoul claim other towns as home, so the exodus is awesome. It reminds me of DC on the Fourth, but on a bigger scale.

In recent years, there has been some attention paid to "housewife stress" from Chusok. Because family members gather together, there's a lot of pressure involved in preparing all the traditional foods. I am reminded that this is still an extremely conservative society, and that in the vast majority of couples, it is still considered the woman's job to cook and clean, even if she is holding down a fulltime day job. I was watching a TV game show this afternoon, and a couple in their 40s or 50s was competing. The woman, when asked if her husband helped out in the house, joked, "He has the eating part down pat." The host then commented, "Well, men of your age were actually told to stay out of the kitchen, isn't that right?" And the husband nodded. This would be the reason why everyone is so astonished when I tell them that my dad actually prepares all the food, though I usually add that he's sort of forced to, since I don't. Come to think of it, I get that question regularly from Koreans, which is comment-worthy in itself. Huh.