Buzz buzz
[N.B. Please note time of post. Late. Tired. Sense, she be a candle in the wind.]

Shopping at Ewha for shirts with weird English expressions, watching a reenactment of a Joseon dynasty coronation at the biggest palace in town, followed by drinking rice wine and eating seafood crepes/pancakes has resulted in a tired Nina and Helen. Much fun.

We talked a little bit today about spin, Nina and I did. You see, we both (but particularly Nina -- maybe it's the Harvard thing) have these superstar friends who are out getting plucked from postdoc positions to fill tenure positions at Ivy League schools, creating statistical programs that will be used by the CDC -- you know, that kind of thing. Or even just plain old graduating from top law/grad/med schools and getting published all over the place, or making six-figure salaries and traveling to exotic locales for vacation, etcetera, etcetera.

I was reminded of a very similar email exchange I had with Fearless T last year, in which she wisely pointed out that it's all a matter of spin. hk, she wrote, maybe you look at some of your friends (let's take One-Armed Maggie, for example), and think: that One-Armed Maggie -- she's got the degree from HLS and the Robert Burns-quoting husband with the degree from HBS and the prestigious clerkship -- what a life!, but then how do you know that she's not thinking something along the lines of: man, that hk, she's got this glamorous expat life going on in an exotic locale, and the street-smart boyfriend and time to travel hither and thither -- what a life!

Wise woman, that Fearless T. I think I wrote to her and received that reply sometime in early 2003, after I'd made a trip back to the States and was feeling shiftless and aimless compared to my peers. Somewhere along the line, I grew up a little bit and by the time of my latest trip back in the fall of 2003, I didn't feel quite so ... diminished. In fact, I felt fine. I felt good about what I was doing insofar as living my life, and I looked at my lawyer and grad school friends with more of a hm, that could be something to do when I get back speculative interest than insecure envy.

One of the things that I'm afraid of losing when I get back, though, is that perspective. While I've been here, I've slowly shed that rat-race feeling of comparing myself to my peers -- not entirely, but a good amount -- and I hope dearly that it won't all flood back in August. Although Korean society places tremendous importance on achievement, the people I've gone to language school with don't have the hangups about doing something great that many of us at college had. Have. Calvin Trillin called it the burden of promise, that feeling that with all our advantages and education and upbringing, we owed it to ourselves, to our parents, and to society to achieve something great.

While here, I haven't had much responsibility except to learn Korean -- I don't take my job very seriously, and everything else I do is because it's fun. Even learning Korean is fun. It was a goal I had and I put a lot of effort into it, and ... I don't know, I just lived, I guess, while I was here, without worrying too much about how it all fit into the bigger picture of What I'm Going To Do With My Life.

I occasionally think of a character in Douglas Adams' immortal Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- the extravagant space traveler and political figure with the brain-shattering name of Zaphod Beeblebrox. Beeblebrox (as I remember it) at one point quietly confesses that he doesn't remember how he became the wild and adventurous and socially uninhibited man about the universe, but that he wasn't always that way. He recalls noting some strange patterns in his brain, and checking out his little gray cells, to find that the part of his brain where social inhibiting impulses lived had been destroyed, and that the perpetrator had burned his initials into the gray matter.

The initials? Z.B.

Being abroad has quieted the buzz buzz of whatamigonnadowithmylife and howamigonnafulfillthatburdenofpromise. I just wish I could swat that mosquito into complete oblivion.