Sunny with a chance of sentimental

Although I doubt I have many readers out there since I blog infrequently and generally my blog isn’t very “edgy” or chalk full of great tidbits, facts or controversial topics, I am going to blog more often, if even for myself.  I think doing some form of writing is important and though I keep my own written journal, I’ll try to write more thoughts on here, in this cyberspace I call my own where both strangers and close friends can meander if they so wish…

I sometimes struggle to think of good post titles, so unless I’m posting about something really specific, I’ll just call my posts whatever the current weather is + “with a chance of” + an adjective to describe an oncoming emotion rising within me.

So today is “Sunny with a chance of sentimental.”  I’m not sure why I feel sentimental, other than I generally tend to feel sentimental often.  Maybe it’s knowing it’s the end of the academic school year for many people, and for much of my lifespan, that academic calendar shaped my life, too.  It’s the feeling of endings and beginnings…one grade down, one summer to go, and then another…   Only in adulthood when you’re working a job not affected much by the academic calendar, June is just June, another month, usually hotter, but that’s about it.

I am feeling the doldrums of living here and fighting the urge to just be okay with boredom in a city so populated and still so foreign to me.  I realize that while I’m conditioned now to walk alongside Koreans everyday and be amongst Koreans wherever I go, I really don’t interact much with Koreans and in a lot of ways they still seem like a mysterious population of people with some odd behavior patterns and cultural norms.  On one hand I just want to see them as the humans they are, but on the other hand they seem quite strange at times, and I feel like a field psychologist.  At the oddest places and times, I will suddenly realize I’m observing them and mentally taking notes, like I’m watching monkeys or something.  Today it was when I was at the Coex shopping mall.  I was sitting in the food court and ended up sitting across from an elderly gentlemen and we sat and ate in silence together amongst the crowded space around us.  How he ate his clear noodle soup and spread his pepper condiment over his food was intriguing to me.  How the businessmen near us negotiated who would sit where was fascinating to me.  During these moments, I feel this deep dark feeling of being very lonely here, even though I know I am not.  I realize just how unique I am as a Korean adoptee and that while I have cultivated strong friendships in my life with others like myself, I am most of the time a very strange person with a strange life story.  I feel the reminder that I am sort of always that outsider in the lunchroom.  It’s bizarre to live here now and instead of feeling like an outsider due to my physical features, I feel like an outsider as a result of my internal hardrive.  I’m like the MacBook that looks like all the other MacBooks now, only I am programmed with just Windows and find it tricky to be compatible with Apple software, even though I originate from the Apple family.  I’m part of some computer experiment where Apple designed me, but Windows tried to install everything on me to see what would happen. 

I’m definitely not from the Geek Squad because that’s about as far as my computer analogy can go, but you get the drift, right?

*Sigh*

I’m glad it’s Friday.  Hopefully I can have another great weekend in Seoul, even if I am slightly bored with this place right now.  I guess I need a vacation but will settle with knowing I can go back to my other home – Minnesota in a few months.  Maybe tonight I should sketch out some weekend ideas to keep it fresh here.  There are a number of places I want to see yet and haven’t been to.