On my mark: 3. 2. 1. Bored.

Okay, I'm not so excited about that email anymore.

But I am still bored.

To be honest, I feel like I'm marking time here. School's done, work's blah, taekwondo feels repetitive (though I started learning a new series of movements today, so that was exciting). When I have freelance work, it's often more tedious than not. When I don't have freelance work, I'm half-heartedly learning Chinese characters and doing a crap job of translating Auster's Red Notebook.

Working on keeping up my Korean seems like a futile exercise, since I'm just going to lose it all when I head back to the States. What did I come here for if I'm just going to forget everything I learned in 1,000 hours of instruction?

Matt Sal says I should relax and enjoy my free time, since the immediate future is decided and taken care of. But I am type A, after all (no, really: A+ blood type and everything), and I can't relax for long without starting to feel like I'm wasting time. I'm really not good with free time.

Long goodbyes. I hate them at the airport, I hate them at farewell parties, I hate them at the Copa, and I hate them with croutons. This period feels like the long goodbye from hell. It would be one thing if I could just skiv off and travel instead of hanging around Seoul. But I feel like I shouldn't empty my bank account here (not to mention the oppportunity cost of not working for six weeks) if I'm going to be taking out USD$30,000 in loans this year alone. In any case, at heart, I'm bored because most of my friends are gone, and traveling alone'll just exacerbate that loneliness. I must say that I'm really feeling for Etsuko, who will be working here until next April, and is already suffering from major friend-withdrawal symptoms.

On a completely different topic: I was watching the Discovery Channel last night, and saw a clip of an Indian movie from the 1960s. Watching the stylized dancing/acting and listening to the peculiar high-pitched singing reminded me of my last year of high school, when I happened to be hanging out with a lot of Indian Americans, and of my first year of college, when I was dating an Indian American guy. The clip reminded me that there have been periods of my life when a lot of my friends seemed to fall into one category, and I was the odd one out.

There was a phase after college when everyone I knew in DC was Jewish, thanks to my friendship with Nina and through Nina, Fearless T. I went to a Kentucky Derby party hosted by an orthodox Jewish friend one year, and upon opening the door to her apartment, I realized that 1. I was about the only woman not wearing a hat and a long floral skirt (the non-observant and Reform Jews arrived after me); and 2. I was the only non-Jew there (that was true for the whole party). Which was awkward, but in retrospect, very funny. I think nowadays, I'd find it funny at the moment.

Here in Seoul, I have often been mistaken for Japanese, because 1. usually I'm in a group where Japanese people outnumber non-Japanese; and 2. there are so many Japanese students learning Korean, thus I speak Korean with a slight Japanese accent (or so I've been told). I suspect too that I don't fulfill the Korean image of an American (I'm not usually speaking English, I'm not loud, I'm not demanding. Hey, just stereotypes, remember?). Anyway, at Sogang -- just like any given Korean language institution -- the majority of students are Japanese, so naturally most of my friends are Japanese. And there have been many, many times when I'm the only non-Japanese person in the group.

Being the odd one out is really wonderful, because you learn so much. I was introduced to those great Indian movies in high school. I've been to more shabbat lunches than any shiksa's got a right to go to. And I know how to say "I am not Japanese" in Japanese.

Of course, being the odd one out is also lonely at times. I never ran with the Korean American crowd at high school or college or post-college, even though some of my KA friends did (the ones I was close to, though, generally didn't either). I mentioned Kamp Konifer, the kamp for Korean Amerikans, a couple of posts ago -- I hated it with a passion, because I felt so left out and weird and different and nerdy and ugly and I really don't need to go on, do I? I was certainly awkward then, even for the awkward set, but even now, I don't think I'd enjoy being there.

One of the things I noticed about bigbro and J1 when they visited was their familiarity or knowledge of certain facets of Korean culture. Like, they knew about yogurt soju. They had had yogurt soju. Whereas I'd never even had plain soju before I got here. bigbro and J1 were involved with KA stuff in college, and while they have a diverse range of friends, I get the feeling that Korean culture, filtered by and adapted for the KA experience, was an organic part of their lifestyle. For me, Korea was much more of a foreign land.

Sometimes I wonder if I came here to see if I could belong somewhere. Be part of the majority for once. See how it felt. I never consciously thought of that as a goal. But even if I did have that thought somewhere deep inside, I don't think I could have predicted how disconcerting it is to look like everyone else but feel like a stranger.