Dirty Laundry: Am I Going Insane?

Actually, for now, I plan on keeping the work situation details to a minimum. People can e-mail me directly if they want to hear my thoughts about what went down.

However, please allow for this confession. I’ve been very hard on my students, over the past three months I have:

*beat them with sticks and other hard objects

*make them stay after and take a test until 1 am

*make them do push-ups for 45 minutes

*shout curses at them

*I told my Korean co-worker I wanted a blow job for Christmas and I believe she was planning to refuse

Wait, I take it back. I didn’t actually do any of these things. I confused the collective memory of the teachers on Jeju with my own. Sometimes it is very hard to distinguish between the two.

I am slowly going insane. One of the first signs that you are a crazy person is a disconnect with your surroundings. My perception of events is not actually how they occurred in reality. Or so I’m told.

I’m not even sure if I’m on Jeju right now. I’ve had more and more dreams that I am back home.

There was a typhoon that hit Jeju, and I did notice typhoon conditions outside my apartment. And there was Korean signage outside in the city I walked around in this evening. So that does narrow things down to only a few places.

I could be on the mainland. I could be in Queens. But there’s a volcano outside. Is there a Korean district in Honolulu?

Onya needs a permanent home. I got a little snippy online with someone who suggested I just take her home. This is POSSIBLE, but not ideal. My family home situation, and my future home situation, is not really conducive to taking care of a (future) large dog. That situation is the one I am most concerned about.

I’m pretty sure I completely imagined my Korean co-worker this month, a la “a beautiful mind.” All the details make too much sense for him to have actually been a real person. Consider that he’s leaving for Australia tomorrow, which for now is equivalent to the dark corners of my imagination.

For now we’ll call him “Gary.” “Gary” was a physical manifestation of my personal anxieties about life.

The first day I was supposed to work with “Gary”, he was extremely frazzled.

“I had a very bad weekend,” he explained.

“I lost my job. I split up with my girlfriend. Her parents are very angry with me. They are threatening to kill me. She’s in the hospital.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “This sounds ridiculous. Just ignore the parents, they sound crazy. What, did she have an emotional breakdown?”

“Oh, no,” Gary said. “I put her there.”

“Whaaaaaat.”

“Yeah, we got in a drunk argument and so I hit her and she fell on the ground.”

Ohhhhhh. So I spent the first week in August wondering if the parents would press charges and Gary would mysteriously disappear. But of course he wasn’t going to disappear. Because Gary existed in my imagination, and you can’t run away from the phantasms of your mind.

Just try doing that in a dream, it doesn’t work, they always pop up again.

Gary spent the week not eating. On Thursday he was very tired.

“Hmmm,” said Gary thoughtfully. “Does starving yourself cause exhaustion.”

“Yes it does. When’s the last time you ate, Gary?”

“Six days ago.”

So then I spent the next few days trying to feed him. I would buy bread and goodies and try to shove them in his face. Proof that just because you are inventing fake people, they can still affect the reality of your wallet.

More on Gary later. Here’s some cute pictures of Onya. Have you considered taking a dog home this week?