“Dude, there’s wifi at the temple”

I went to bed around 4:30pm yesterday, woke up this morning at 7:30, and needed every minute of it. It was my first night sleeping more than five hours since last week. South Korea is pretty cool.

Boston was pretty cool, although I wasn’t there long. I slept on a futon that belonged to a Ukrainian that worked on bikes and at the local college radio station. He got sick the night I had to wake up and go to the airport, so I spent the night with his roommate instead, who was, small world, extremely into maritime music. That was the first time I’ve ever heard someone not from the east coast reference the Halifax Pop Explosion, and he was very impressed by my having seen Joel Plaskett live. He didn’t seem to know that it was hard to find someone in Charlottetown who hadn’t. I also saw this:

Civil War reenacters

America is weird.

The next morning I met a former NFL player out of Long Beach, although I never got his last name so I’m not sure how good he was. He played for at least a few seasons, though, which I think means pretty good. Now he drives the SuperShuttle in Boston, and seems very happy with the job. The plane ride was long enough that I watched a whole season of House of Cards. Hot tip from 2012: show is pretty rad. I was very impressed with the service as well, which Singapore Airlines apparently has a reputation for. That is, until they lost my luggage.

The first day of orientation, then, I spent smelling like I had been wearing the same clothes for three days and hadn’t showered the entire time, because that was exactly what had happened. I think it probably helped people to remember me, maybe? I’m trying quite hard to find a silver lining for that. The next morning, Jeup Hoe, one of the DKU people helping with the program, brought me my backpack before orientation started, thus earning my eternal gratitude and fealty. The rest of orientation was pretty boring after that, except for learning a bit of Korean which is actually a super cool language. I already know more Korean than I ever learned of Chinese.

About 4,000 words worth of stuff has happened since then, which is more than I feel like writing. Know that soju, the Korean wonder-liquor, usually hits 40 proof and runs about $2 per liter, rounded down to free in my eyes. Know also that restaurants and transportation are both quite cheap (relative to the cost of food). The most notable adventure I’ve been on has been this one, the night before last:

World Cup game in Seoul

That’s what it looks like in Seoul when South Korea plays a World Cup game. It was a bit of journey, undertaken overnight (because the game was at 5 am Seoul time) with soju-induced handicaps all around:

An overlook type thing

A walkway under a highway

Me beside a picture of a similar-looking model

Very good time. If you’re worried about me, don’t be: South Korea is a walk in the park compared to China.

The Road to Seoul

A lot of time between places, lately. Post-graduation Ithaca is breaking up and scattering, myself included. I spent some days in Montreal: hippy housing co-op, four rats and a dog, gusty rooftop, bread and cheese reclaimed from Jean Coutu’s waste; the Plateau, an old man taking an hour to eat a smoked meat sandwich, Ave Mont-Royal closed for twenty blocks to make room for people selling chicken sandwiches and underwear (I bought some); Sainte-Catherine nudists, beer pong, the Village; Silo 5, crumbling concrete and rust, looks terminally ill but too big to imagine demolishing (and a protected historic site now, I think); an old homebody, hosting 9 couchsurfers in a one-bedroom apartment by the pont Jacques-Cartier, bed and couch and floors occupied. Shook a little stiffness out of my French.

montreal

I changed some plans and came back to PEI for a little while. Not long enough to do everything I might have wanted, but enough time for a cold soak in the Atlantic. Enough to get a good chunk of the clan together for brunch. Dad drove me to the bus station, thanked me for coming and sleeping in his house and eating his food. He’s like that. I would hate, I told him, to be God knows where for God knows how long and know there was a time when I was a $150 bus ride away and didn’t take it. That day’s coming, he said.

my immediate family

To Boston. More hours than I care to count on the bus, all the way back through the Gare d’Autocars. Serious case of trucker arm. They never turn off the tube lights in the Riviere-du-Loup station, leave them buzzing over grumpy passengers at 02h00. I bit my nails in my sleep, I guess, woke up with my thumb bleeding. I usually do alright with buses, but not as a lifestyle. Freedom trail, cool walk around Union Square, lots of flags.

Now Jukjeon. I’ve heard quite a few times about Singapore Airlines’ sterling reputation for customer service. It’s true they are quite friendly and well-dressed, but that doesn’t do you much good when they lose your luggage. Tomorrow I start making extremely smelly first impressions. So it goes.

Endgame

Back in the home of the brave, things are fun so far. Today was disgusting, but the freezing rain was falling on a sunburn, so I won’t complain too much.

Ithaca has been a pretty sweaty place recently in a few ways. Finals loom, and my senior friends are drowned in projects. I’m inconvenienced by it myself, in that I’m not very good at figuring out things to do alone and people don’t have much time to entertain me. Saturday was an exception, another party in the chamber of D.O.O.M., this one in honour of hors d’oeuvres. As the hour approached, Eve and the crew took an absolutely unfeasible break from their schoolwork to make bread and cheesecake-stuffed strawberries and bruschetta.

Angela is a mutual friend of Eve and me who tends to arrive early to these affairs to help with the setup. This was the first time I’d seen her on this visit, so there was the usual amount of hugs and yelling. Beyond the usual was a series of expressive eyebrow movements and upward-inflected grunts, giving me my secondary job at the party: Angela’s wingman. Primary job, as always, was comic relief. Angela is an excellent wingperson, sort of a Top Gun character. My exploits at this party, on the other hand, included:

  • Loudly plotting a way to approach a group of people, three feet from that group
  • Waggling my eyebrows at Angela on hearing that a certain fellow was single, with said fellow looking directly at me
  • Slinking away from this destroyed conversation and leaving Angela to resolve the situation

Somehow I maintain a fairly solid group of friends in Ithaca. I think it’s because Canadians are considered cool by default here.

Sunday was the first real summery day of the year, and everyone on campus was out on the quad. There was a group of slackline walkers that my friend Tay and I were happy enough to sit and watch.

“You know,” I said to Tay, “it’s kind of the endgame around here these days, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t sure what I was talking about. That made sense, because really I was talking about myself the night prior, but also something more that I felt and couldn’t really put my finger on.

“I mean, you can burn whatever bridges you want. What’s left, 40 days? And then it’s all over anyway. You don’t have to be nice to people you don’t like anymore. You can say whatever you want. The future isn’t coming.”

Tay was unconvinced and probably didn’t really care what I was talking about. I was unconvinced myself, knowing that I hadn’t really gotten to the core of what I was trying to say.

“Endgame,” I said.

Later that evening, with my sunburn established and barbecue in my stomach, some of us young punks were playing catch out on the yard of Hudson Heights. The moon was low in the sky in the way that people tell me doesn’t actually make it any bigger, and it’s just an illusion, but it was huge and I don’t believe them. The kind of wind that only blows on summer evenings blew. Angela and I took a moment to look at the moon. I thought about the party, and the slackliners, and how absurdly much I like to play catch. I thought about the way the moon wouldn’t be so low tomorrow, would just be another moon, and the only thing we could do was be outside and remember to look at it while it was there. Another future that wasn’t coming.

Endgame, I thought.

I didn’t say it out loud, because that would have been weird.

some polaroids from the weekend