i'm still trying to work through this cough i have. it's phlegm-my....yuck. i'm going to take a nap soon, but first i wanted to share this message that is written on the outside of those morning glory (in other words, it's very korean, the grammar is terrible, unless it is actually written in korean)....morning glory stationary and pencils and notebooks and binders always have cute little pictures of animated bears and frogs and penguins and girls in sundresses and flowers and trees, and they always have decorative text on the covers, and they tend to be like "when the bulwarks blow, as does the dream of youth, sweet youth dream, do i like you" (hey i'd be a good writer for this stuff)....i suppose it's like that type of poetry - associatve poetry, except that the connections, in this case, besides being pastoral in nature and including the words "dream love youth sweet heaven" over and over, are thin at best, so it either makes for a very confusing image, or can be intensely philosophical. koreans probably think the latter.

anyway, this binder that i have, which i swiped off a table of free prizes and goodies at this korean fundraising gala thing, well, i thought it was garbage, but i needed a binder, and i assumed that the words on this thing were just ramblings...even though they were in korean. but i just looked at it today, closer for the first time, and i realized that it actually has a very sweet message, without being too outrightly sappy. it's the kind of thing you want to say to a significant other, specifically when you guys are parted by distance. it says, basically, in all this world, which is big and wide, although we see each other in passing all the time (like saying hi and hurriedly going on our way)....love....you know that i love you, don't you"....

okay, so it's not so poetic there, but i'm trying to convey the wording and phrasing...and in korean, it sounds so pretty (which is when i first realized that there is scholarship is prose in korean too - i hadn't really realized - it's not even like formal (as opposed to colloquial, or informal) english, it's like art) and although i don't know korean fluently, spoken or written, this dinky binder gave me a transient sense, my first sense, of the literary/artistic potential of another language besides the english one.

i'm finally getting a handle on my second year of dents, all the reading, the lab stuff, getting these seminars organized and underway, talking to all the people i need to be in contact with....it's been a hectic two (3?) weeks. time for nap.