Bah, humbug.

After taking this photo, I'll have to sleep with one eye open. No regrets. Happy holidays!

Since Amtrak doesn't allow non-service animals, I didn't get to bring Fawkes the Tiniest Reprobate. This was a great disappointment to Grammy, because she's fascinated by my little Korean-bought bunny. She kept asking about him, giving me endless opportunities for stories -- jailbreaking, assaulting another rabbit, tearing up walls, eating clothes, and and bull-rushing friends** are just a few of his favorite habits.***

However, one day over my Thanksgiving vacation, her enthusiasm for bunnies took a nasty turn. She came out of  her room and eagerly held up a newspaper.

Grammy: I found this adorable picture of rabbits in the paper. I thought you'd want to see it.

Me: Ooh! [I take the paper, look at the admittedly adorable picture, and read the caption.] ...

Grammy: What?

Me: These rabbits are in the paper because they were mutilated!!!

Grammy: I know, but I thought you might like the picture.

Me: But they were MUTILATED. They were pet rabbits and they were stolen and killed and MUTILATED.

Grammy: But you don't often see things in the paper about rabbits, dead or alive!

Me: ...

Grammy: ...

Me: Thank you, Grammy.

I love my grandmother, but I will be screening the things she gives me to read a lot more carefully now.

*I mean, she's 95 years old as of Tuesday. She has always been a woman.

**He actually likes my friends, mostly because they give him treats. But on the handful of occasions that they've helped me catch him to put him back in his cage, he has revealed the biggest ball of crazy you can stuff into four pounds of animal.

***He's neutered now. It didn't do any good.

There's lots to love about this place, but my favorite thing is the bathroom, and my favorite thing about the bathroom is that the light and showerhead are nowhere near each other.

Let me explain.

Just looking at it makes me twitchy.

Part I: Cultural Differences & Winnie the (Peeping) Pooh

Bathrooms are a little different in Korea. Instead of a shower or bathtub separated from the rest of the bathroom with a shower curtain or wall, you have one big area with the shower and toilet close enough to swap stories about all the disgusting things they have seen.

My bathroom was not the right one for my personality type. I'm a bath person. After a long day at work, I like to light a few candles, run a bath, fill it with bubbles, and soak until I am a pruney mess. (People who think bathtime can be sexytime must have a Gollum fetish. It's the only reasonable explanation.) Clearly, there is no bathtub here. There are also Winnie the Pooh stickers on the walls, which is a whole other level of unacceptable. Every time I showered, I had Pooh and Piglet and Tigger staring at my ass, and I would be lying to you if I said that was okay with me, but those stickers WOULD NOT COME OFF.

As you can see, my bathroom was so small it didn't even have a sink, because personal hygiene is not as big in Korea as you might expect. It was also so small that the bathroom light and the showerhead were right freaking next to each other.

This is the only photo I have of the bathroom. It doesn't show the showerhead, which is really a shame, because only a head-on photo can really show you the sheer stupidity of this setup. There were less than six inches between a mechanism that shot out water and a light source that ran on electricity. Seriously.

Part II: Surprise! (Coincidentally a Synonym for Shock)

About ten months into my year in Korea, the bulb in the bathroom burned out. I didn't really have a problem with that, because at least it meant that I didn't have to see Tigger and his creepy coiled tail. I made a half-hearted attempt to check the bulb that quickly took a turn for the worse -- I could have sworn the cheap light cover bit me when I opened it. I unscrewed the bulb with a towel, told myself I was being paranoid, and scurried out.

Unwilling to face whatever monsters lurked in my bathroom, I showered in the dark for weeks before a friend of mine who regularly visited made me understand that maybe I should just buy a damn lightbulb because only freaks live like that.

Clearly, she was part of the conspiracy.

I finally bought my lightbulb and went home full of steely resolve. I shut off the light, carefully opened the cover, and reached up to screw in the new bulb that would help me leave the realm of the cave people and rejoin the human race.

It shocked the shit out of me. My right arm spasmed, and my whole body twitched. I dropped the bulb and scrabbled out of the shower as fast as I could, and promptly developed an intense terror of that bathroom.

Part III: No, Seriously, Guys, There's a Problem Here -- Guys? SOMEBODY HELP ME

Needless to say, I showed up at school the next morning an unshowered mess and went directly to my co-teacher. She told me that she'd come over and take a look at it, but when I opened the light cover for her, I got another shock that scared her as much as it scared me. She called the school engineer and arranged for him to come over the next day, but couldn't come with him because of her teaching schedule.

Naturally, when he did come over, he just changed the bulb, stared at me like I was an idiot, ignored me begging him to wait (in Korean) so I could get my co-teacher on the phone to translate, and left the apartment.

It took another heated, slightly desperate conversation with my co-teacher to make her understand that I was too scared to shower in my own apartment and couldn't call up an electrical engineer to investigate myself, but she did eventually call another set of engineers, who came out to take a look. Turns out that the wires for the light were stripped and were being affected by the wetness (I think -- not a good conversation to have through a language barrier). They fixed it with Scotch tape -- yes, Scotch tape -- and took off.

Later, when the plastic cover started opening randomly during my showers and exposing the whole wiring system to the water, the engineer came back -- and fixed it by melting the plastic clasp with a lighter and then jamming it back in so it couldn't open. I'm not sure what they plan to do when the next bulb burns out, but I hope the next teacher survives it.

Part IV: Countries With a Basic Understanding of How to Build Bathrooms Are My Favorite Countries and I Don't Care If That Makes Me Ethnocentric

Now that I've relived my memories of sketchy cartoon animals and the creeping dread that stayed with me right up to my last day in Taebaek (when washing down the bathroom made all the lights in my apartment go out), I'm going to take a long, dread-free bath in an apartment where electrical gizmos and water aren't on speaking terms.

It's good to be home.

What happens when a girl who's spent a year around peace-sign-throwing Koreans gets bored on a train with her cameraphone.

Author's Note: This post is best enjoyed as it was written -- blaring "The Boys Are Back in Town."

I'm back!

Have you seen The Other Guys? Have you at least seen Will Ferrell's interview on the Daily Show about it? If you haven't, click that link and watch the clip that takes up the first 0:36. Warning: Jon Stewart was in his unfortunate I-can't-tell-if-this-is-hot-or-not-my-brain-says-no-but-my-body-says-yes beard period.

If you have a bizarre aversion to the Daily Show (or a much less bizarre one to Will Ferrell), here's the summary: Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell are cops who are desperate to beat other cops to a crime scene. Wahlberg cocks his gun and orders Ferrell to punch the accelerator on pain of getting shot in the foot. Ferrell screams "AMERICA!" and hits the gas.

That is how I feel.

If I had my own Lizzie McGuire-style Disney show, all the cartoon me would ever do is scream "AMERICA!" and run into things. Seeing my friends? AMERICA! Pool tables with pockets? AMERICA! A grocery store that sells tons of vegetarian food? AMERICA! Stores that carry things I want? AMERICA! People who speak my language? AMERICA! Perhaps most importantly, a bathroom with a bathtub in which I can take a long, luxurious bubble bath while reading English fashion magazines? AMERICA!

Okay, most of the previous paragraph screams "self-indulgent stuff I could live without" -- sure! I lived without it for over a year, and despite some marked lows, I ended on a great note with Korea, my school, and my students. But now that I've done my time, I'm so happy to be back that sometimes I feel like I'm hallucinating. I'm not used to this weird bubbly feeling in my chest. At first I was afraid it was heartburn.

I got back on August 25th, and I've been living with my parents in my North Carolina hometown while lining up my future in DC. Well, sort of. Actually I've been bouncing from NC to VA to DC to NC like an out-of-control pinball -- seeing people (my friends DO remember my name!), working out the employment situation (I'm not going to be a hobo after all!), finding an apartment (it even allows rabbits!), and dealing with my bunny's near-death episode (which he survived!).

My enthusiasm these days is pretty out-of-character. And yet, when I think about life, my fingers move for Shift+1 automatically.

Through a mixture of Blip.fm, iTunes recs (it gets it right once every blue moon), and digging through the piles of unheard music on my iPod, I stumbled across some great finds this month. They're all on Blip.fm for your convenience, so you can click through to listen.

Here they are, in ascending order of awesome:

• Electric Six - Dance Epidemic. Pure, dancey fun.
  Favorite Lyrics: I don't <3 this song for the lyrics, man.
• Coldplay - Lost! The soundtrack for a quarter-life crisis.
  Favorite Lyrics: Just because I'm losing / Doesn't mean I'm lost
• Editors - The Boxer. The Boxer lacks the energy of An End Has a Start or the poignancy of The Weight of the World, but damn, these people can write.
  Favorite Lyrics: A bruised full moon / Play-fights with the stars / This place is our prison / Its cells are the bars
• My Friend the Chocolate Cake - Lighthouse Keeper. This is the most unexpectedly awesome band (and song) I've found in months.
  Favorite Lyrics: Let me be your lighthouse keeper / Protect you from the angry seas / In the storm, in times of trouble / When there's no visibility
• Metric - Gimme Sympathy. I got their Fantasies CD a while ago but hadn't listened to it all the way through yet. The acoustic version of this (which is arguably even more awesome) came up on my iPod and stopped me dead in my lesson planning.
  Favorite Lyrics: Oh, seriously / You're going to make mistakes, you're young

Not so here. Even the EPIK orientation didn't accommodate the vegetarian teachers; one day, they mixed fish into the rice and salmon/crab/some kind of seafood into the salad, making kimchi the only option. Baby's first red flag! Awww.

From what I hear, Korean food is pretty great. They're famous for their bulgogi (marinated barbecued beef or pork), dalk galbi (marinated stir-fried chicken), and jjajangmyeon (noodles with a black sauce that invariably contains meat). My fellow native teachers report that this is all great stuff. Unfortunately, these culinary masterpieces are a part of Korean culture that I can't enjoy. I can eat bibimbap (rice mixed with vegetables and egg), kimchi (cabbage, basically) and a few specific kinds of soup, but that's about it.

It's pretty weird to live in a country whose food you can't eat. It's pointless for me to go to most restaurants because all I'd be able to eat are side dishes like lettuce and, of course, kimchi. Kimchi's a big part of my diet because it's one of the only dishes I can trust; even stuff that they claim is vegetarian frequently winds up containing fish or chicken. I can explain my vegetarianism quite well in Korean, but that doesn't help if a restaurant only trucks in bulgogi or seafood.

This past weekend, I got fed up with my options, which are basically a) ordering pizza, b) making ramen, c) making soup from tofu and whatever vegetables are handy, or d) cooking a tofu stir-fry. I'm not particularly kitchen-savvy and my apartment has no oven anyway, which limits the parameters of the possible. Plus, my former go-to staples of cheese and pasta are near-impossible to find.

On Saturday, I vented heartily about this to my friend J back home. She suggested numerous foods, all of which I shot down because I either couldn't get them here at all or couldn't get them here without meat, until she finally declared, "MUSHROOMS!"

Mushrooms never occur to me! After 9 months here in the wilderness, the prospect of something new was scandalously exciting. I immediately ran off to the store, visions of OMGnewlunch!! dancing in my head.

And lo! In the case between the aisle of curry packets (made with chicken or beef broth) and the fridge full of meat products, there they were, like a beacon of salvation in the wilderness. I scooped up a pack, but the problem gazed up at me as I moved for the register...

MOLD.

Okay. I put that pack back, grimacing, and reached for another.

MOLD.

I gingerly replaced it and moved for the last remaining package, crossing my fingers...

MOLD.

Fine. I can take a hint. I stalked home and made my ramen. Korea wins again.

I got home and informed my mushroom-suggesting friend, who responded, amid lolz, "I swear I'm not laughing at your horrible luck, I really do. But you gotta admit that's something fresh out of a sitcom..."

Waygookin*: the saddest sitcom ever! Next season on NBC!

*Foreigner.

On days like this, putting in eight hours of deskwarming (because the students have midterms and I have nothing to do but I still can't go home) and staring out the window at a town I hate and kicking myself over and over and over again for not getting back on the plane when I found out what this year was going to be like, I want more out of 365+ days than "It sucked, but I did it anyway. Go, me."

When I get back (and believe you me, I'm counting the hours), I've got a home to stay in until I get on my feet. I've got a job I could maybe/possibly go back to. I've got friends I can't wait to see. But I don't know what I'm going to do with this sense of futility, this directionlessness that permeates my thoughts about the future. I took a risk coming to Korea, and it backfired -- badly. All I think about, these days, is whether the next risk will go any better.

From kindergarten to tenth grade, I went to a fundamentalist school where church and state were still in the honeymoon days. Our history books drew parallels between the colonists driving out the Native Americans and the Hebrews conquering the Canaanites. We applied Bible verses to World War II and welfare reform and prayed for a Bush victory in 2000. My government teacher jovially endorsed sending gays to the Middle East to be stoned. Because faith was a part of daily life, so was politics; the conservatives and liberals below were vessels for the plans of God in heaven and Satan in hell.

Then I hit college.

Victory Christian School taught that students should only attend Christian colleges -- in fact, only the two colleges that lived up to their standards (Bob Jones U and Pensacola U) -- because all other colleges would turn them against the pure truth in which they'd been raised. I always thought those capricious students were turncoats, so it was a little bit of a letdown when, two years after I graduated, I found myself railing to my parents about the very president I'd thought was divinely chosen. My ideological flip-flop came on the heels of my conversion to vegetarianism, which was the first nail in the coffin as far as my extended family was concerned. The next thing I knew, it was 2008 and I was voting for a Kenyan socialist bent on driving the country to bankruptcy, bilingualism, and death panels.

When I left D.C., I was politics-ed out. The 2008 election season had transformed me from a mild-mannered web worker into a balls-out She-Hulk who obsessively fact-checked campaign slurs, refreshed FiveThirtyEight twice an hour, wrote three-page emails to her mother on the candidates' stances, and went on at least one impassioned tirade a day. Election night was simultaneously victorious and frightening, because a chunk of my life had suddenly closed up shop for the next four years. Besides, I didn't like the fact that I'd gone from a somewhat moderate centrist to a flaming liberal in just a few months. I figured it was time to give politics a rest.

Just one problem: since I got to South Korea, politics have become as much a part of my day as they were in good old '08.

It started with the Daily Show. When you deskwarm as much as I do, you need a source of entertainment on hand during the day, and most streaming websites are blocked outside the U.S. Comedy Central's free video site was my beacon in the dark, mind-numbing hours of the workless workday.

But what started as laughs at the political establishment's expense quickly brought me back to my old ways, especially since I discovered this pastime in the midst of the health care reform hijinx. I went back to reading the news; I started dropping links in my friends' Facebook feeds. Then it was nuclear proliferation debate time. And now comes the Arizona immigration bill, and I am officially off the wagon.

In August, I'm headed back to D.C. and hopefully on my way to making this obsession part of my career. In the meantime, I've realized that although I'm quick to form opinions, I have more trouble articulating and defending them than I used to; I've become heavy on the links and lighter on the research and analysis. I'll be working on both how informed I am and how I write for the remainder of my time here and hitting the ground running in the fall.

In conclusion, my current words to live by: Chasing your passion is tough, but it sure beats being the crazy girl ranting about social justice at happy hours.

U.S. Reality: In the U.S. -- and, as I thought until I got here, every other country in the world -- you turn a year older on your birthday. You're 0 years old when you're born, 1 year old on your first birthday, 2 years old on your second birthday, and on and on.

Koreality:

• You can never be 0 years old. When you're born, you're 1 year old.
• Your age flips up a year not on your birthday, but on January 1.
• Therefore: You're always considered at least a year older in Korea than in the U.S., and your age increases on New Years' no matter when your birthday is.
• Therefore 2: A kid born on December 31 is 2 years old the next day.
• Therefore 3: No, seriously.

I knew about the "Korea Age = U.S. Age + 1" rule, but I didn't find out about the January rule until a few weeks ago. I've been telling my students that I'm 24 since I got here (when I would have been 23 in the States), both last year and this year. But now I'll suddenly be telling them that I'm 25, which will confuse the heck out of them, because how did I change ages in the middle of the year?

I tried to explain this to a Korean teacher with great English, and found out today that what she took away from it was that "all foreigners turn a year older in May." Huh. The next time someone asks me how this works, I'm going to say what I should have said in the first place:

"Magic."

In the meantime, I've got two ages in my head, and it's getting confusing.

• I'm 24 in the U.S., so 25 in Korea... right?
• Or am I 25 in the U.S. and 26 in Korea and the 24's left over from last year?
• This is confusing. I should assign letters. US25 and K26. US24 and K25?
• Or was I US22/K23 when I got here, and now I'm US23 and K24?
• Okay, I was born in 1986. It's now 2010. So if I subtract, that means...
• When did it turn into 2010?!
• Oh, dear God, most of my students were born after 1990.
• Some of them weren't even born when Aladdin came out!!
• Or the Lion King!
• I am so old.
• Shut up, brain. I'm only twenty-... something. I'm a spring chicken.
• Then why am I always playing bingo?
• I'm an English teacher! It's what we do!

Enough chitchat. I've got whippersnappers to entertain, and this bingo game isn't going to play itself.

EMERGENCY ADDENDUM: I did the math wrong. All of my students were born after 1990. Most of them were born after 2000. Yeah. After Y2K. I will be shaking at my desk in horror until further notice.

Thanks, Fawkes. I wasn't using that radial artery anyway.

Dear Disney,

I call false advertising. Thumper was sweet. That Pooh rabbit was responsible. Roger Rabbit was innocent. And let's not even get started on this "I Love You, My Bunnies" nonsense.

Are all the others like this? Did I get the one bunny who's possessed by Satan himself?

Now, I'm not saying it's weird that Fawkes scratched me. Rabbits hate being picked up, so I should have found another way to get him out of his cage. What freaks me out is where he scratched me. On the wrist? Down, not across? Bunny means business. The cut might look normal enough two days later, but believe you me, in the immediate aftermath, my wrist was a bloody thing to behold.

So in case you're wondering, Disney, here's how this monster is properly represented.

Sincerely,
Kat