If there's anyone we should really feel sorry for in this pandemic, it's the school nurses. In Korea, at least in my school district, they're hiring new ones every day.
There's a new "health teacher"/school nurse who I feel that I was making a positive connection with for most of day- smiling and bowing in the hallway and such- but it all went wrong at lunch time. After laughing at me for not sticking my hands in the chemicals at the lunchroom door for as long as she wanted, she sat down next to me, licked her chopsticks, and stuck them in my kimchi to instruct me how to tear it apart.
(which I was doing qutie well on my own, thank you very much.)
Thursday, November 26, 2009
American Thanksgiving 2009
With better planning, I probably could have scrounged together the ingredients and friends with which to celebrate Thanksgiving this year. I showed my kids snippets of YouTube videos of wild turkeys and a bit of Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving, all the while thinking how much more fun and memorable the "culture lesson" could have been if I had just smashed together some kind of pie- even picked up some version of (how can you describe these chain French Korean bakeries) sweet bread on the way in to school.
The guilt of this is sitting on me as heavily as a full Thanksgiving dinner. I don't feel thankful. I've just had my plateful of potatoes and salt and peas, sitting at my computer in my yoga clothes, and quite by myself. I'm reflecting, instead of upon all the things I have to be thankful for, on the things I actually miss.
Surely I've criticized consumer culture enough to be drawn and quartered for saying this, but how I miss Christmas shopping for absolute crap and wrapping it in every color and carting the nonsense all around to deliver everywhere... I miss decorations in stores and restaurants and streetlights. A spirit of gratitude is not working for me this year. I need kitsch. I need an unnecessary round of pie.
In a rather botched attempt at explaining the legend of Thanksgiving to a class of semi-interested middle school students, I gave the pilgrims the label of "foreigner" that is usually assigned to me and my kind here in Korea. Though they were messy and loud and generally destructive, the native Americans could see they were hungry and cold, so they poured them some twig tea and gave them some kimchi and fish. So we remember, on Thanksgiving and every day, to be grateful.
The guilt of this is sitting on me as heavily as a full Thanksgiving dinner. I don't feel thankful. I've just had my plateful of potatoes and salt and peas, sitting at my computer in my yoga clothes, and quite by myself. I'm reflecting, instead of upon all the things I have to be thankful for, on the things I actually miss.
Surely I've criticized consumer culture enough to be drawn and quartered for saying this, but how I miss Christmas shopping for absolute crap and wrapping it in every color and carting the nonsense all around to deliver everywhere... I miss decorations in stores and restaurants and streetlights. A spirit of gratitude is not working for me this year. I need kitsch. I need an unnecessary round of pie.
In a rather botched attempt at explaining the legend of Thanksgiving to a class of semi-interested middle school students, I gave the pilgrims the label of "foreigner" that is usually assigned to me and my kind here in Korea. Though they were messy and loud and generally destructive, the native Americans could see they were hungry and cold, so they poured them some twig tea and gave them some kimchi and fish. So we remember, on Thanksgiving and every day, to be grateful.
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