HOMELY PLANET

After three days of continual alcohol abuse I'm back at work. My liver feels like an old lady's handbag, but otherwise I'm doing okay. I'm in my new office, which I share with cattleskin. He's playing "Jewel Quest" on his computer. I'm wearing a pokla-dot tie with a green tweed jacket and sporting a modestly peppered beard. It's all very professorial, an appopriate look since the semester starts today.

This weekend was a blur of pint glasses and some personal drama involving myself and my girl, but we seem to have weathered the storm and made it through intact. This is a very good thing, since my relationships rarely make it past the three month mark. My band played two sets on Friday to a packed and boozey crowd. The Scouser, came down from Seoul and impressed us with his boss clobber (including a sparkly ascot) and ceaseless parade of Liverpudlian lingo. We hooked up with Irish Sean and made it an event. Good times indeed.

I was greeted today by a sickening cloud of Gobi Desert dust that blew over from China. This happens here each spring. It's called 황사, which literally means "yellow dust." It's a nasty concoction, as it contains not only dust, but also heavy metals and other toxic carcinogens from China's factories. The whole city is smothered in the stuff today, and China should be spanked, or at least heavily fined.



View from my office, ten minutes ago. Taste the cancer.

Speaking of fines, has anyone noticed the completely rape-y inflation going on lately? Prices everywhere, for everything, are going up. It started with the restaurant near my college that we like to frequent. They raised their meal prices by fifty cents, which is okay, because we felt slightly guilty about paying so little for so much good food. But then I noticed these increases in other places. My gym suddenly got ten bucks more expensive each month; the toast stand by my house jacked up their prices (the cost of wheat for bread, I believe); the duk-bokey lady near the Dong Eui subway changed from 4 pieces for 1,000 won to only 3. That really burns my ass.

I understand that most of this is fueled by high oil prices and everyone needs oil to transport stuff, but what about my inflation? I'm still getting paid the same amount of money, but everything's now suddenly more expensive.

I want a raise.

This statue sits outside a hair shop near my Korean academy. Note the limp wrist:



"Ooooh, honey, no he didn't!"

I had a good laugh when I first saw it. Whoever made it really nails the flaming gay hairdresser stereotype. Then I got to thinking - who did make it? How did it end up in Korea? Is it a custom job, or is there a factory somewhere, churning out super-effeminate life-sized figures? And why does the hairshop use it? Isn't that kind of like putting a buck-toothed, slitty-eyed, "chinky" statue in front of a Chinese restaurant?