Summer Intensive in Every Way

The first way I mean that is the freaking ridiculous heat and humidity combo Daejeon has going on currently. I remember saying I had much more specific requirements for places that insist on including "South" in their monikers, and Korea has accepted my challenge with vengeance. Every day is in the mid-nineties with humidity in the same range. It's brutal. I am planning to move to Antarctica.

The second way I mean that is in the scheduling. Summer intensive period brings with it two more hour-long classes per day. It is a lot of children. They are bored. There is nothing more dangerous, Internet, than bored children. They threaten my sanity daily. On the bright side, I now get out of work at 9:40 p.m. instead of 10:40, so the night is younger when I get out, more like a sprightly 35 than wheezy 49. Of course, on Wednesdays, when I teach 7 classes, six of them in a row, I feel closer to the 49... Let's call it a draw.

The third way I mean that (originally, I was only going to write two, but today has changed my mind) is in annoyance. Avalon just told us that it will be fiscally unable to pay us our full salaries on payday. We will receive half when we are supposed to (the 5th) and the rest of it 10 days later. Supposedly. The exact words were, when pressed, "it's not a guarantee." Ah well, another day, another... 50¢

All that being the case, it is not a terrible thing to be me. Choir has started back up, which makes me feel like my life has resumed from the dull sluggery of vacation. It's always nice to be returning to a company, where you feel like you know people and have a social place to come home to. My job sometimes does not feel as real to me as the time I spend schlepping to and from Seoul. You know when you take a shower, and there's one part of you that you have to wash in order to feel clean? For me, it's my hair. I can't feel clean, even if I've taken a CDC-approved decon shower everywhere else, if my hair's not washed. In that same - totally irrational, I know - way, I don't feel like I'm really back into the swing of my life without choir.

It's nice to be back (even if "back" means torrents of sweat and hours of cursing the concept of adolescence).