Even though I don’t live in U.S. right this second, I am still a citizen and plan to vote in the Presidential election the same as I have in the past two (which covers the amount of Presidential elections I am old enough to have voted in).  So, being the good little voter I am I watched the debates yesterday.  In this case I woke up on a Saturday morning to watch the live debates of Friday night.

Most of the time I find debates dull and useless.  I hear the same old catch phrases in the same old way and there is never really any answer to any question posed.  Usually, I’ve already researched the candidates enough to know who I like prior to the debates anyway.  Of course, this might color my debating-judgement a bit.

This year however I’ve felt cold towards both main candidates.  McCain, the once great-white-hope, has been disappointing me for the past three years.  I’m not a fan of is health strategy.  I’m not a fan of his desire to appoint justices that will constitutionally interpret Roe-v-Wade out of existence.  I am certainly not a fan of the fact that everything he said while running for President the fist time he has unsaid.   And frankly I gotta say, it looks a little like Karl Rove is pulling the strings over there.  And Karl Rove eats puppies.

Hey, that’s just what I heard okay.

However, Obama didn’t seem all that great of a choice either.  I like his health plan only slightly more than I like McCain’s.  I don’t like McCain’s nuclear power plan, but I sure don’t like Obama’s clean coal either.  Obama never felt like he understood who exactly he was going to represent.  He’s a Harvard elitist who knows very little about how to raise a family on one minimum wage job.  

That being said, after hearing him at the debates, I like him a bit more.  I like that he’s ready to talk actual strategy.  I like that he wants to pull us out of Iraq and is willing to say so bluntly.  I like that he is for negotiations and against pre-emptive strikes.  

I could sorta be persuaded to vote for this guy.  You know, debatably.

Apparently, people agree with me.

We were taking an after-dinner walk when we stumbled across a huge street fair happening just a few blocks from our place.  Sweet.  I love stuff like this. There is something kinda magical when the place you live in suddenly pops up hundreds of tents and new foods.  I adore walking through the crowds to see what everyone is getting excited over.  I get excited over it too.  

Because we live in Korea the stuff they get excited with over here is a little different than the stuff we get excited about back home.  So we taped it.  

I played hostess/narrator and ran from booth the booth.  We both wanted to get film of the different foods you can get over here.  Shark, chicken feet, stuffed squid, and then there are the beetles.  

I found a booth that was firing some up.  Hundreds of brown, slimly looking beetle-like things getting cooked in a big skillet.  They were being fried in hot, brown oil and they danced and oozed and wiggled like they were still alive.  Which they could have been.  They didn’t smell very good either.  Imagine frying your used gym socks in dirty peanut oil.  Yeah…that’s what this was like.

A few weeks ago D. and I, in an surge of adventure and curiosity, tried some of these treats.  They tasted about as great as they smelled.  Only a little nuttier.  We both gave them a shot, shrugged and declared that we probably wouldn’t eat them ever again.

Until we were standing in front of a vat of them with a video camera and a nice Korean man was holding a freshly skewered one on a toothpick at me.  From behind the camera D. chuckled:  ”Go on.  Try one.”  The Korean bug-man giggled too.  

So I took it, blew on it, and popped it into my mouth.

And it popped in my mouth, squishing and spilling all over my tongue as I chewed it’s squirmy little exoskeleton.  

“So how was your first bug?” D. asked over the camera in his interviewer voice.  

I shrugged and because I’m classy and have no willpower, I was filmed making a face as I tried to get the gritty bug taste off my teeth.  

“It popped in my mouth.” I critiqued.

Out of the side of my vision the Korean bug-man laughed again and then pointed at me while he motioned his cupped hand at his crotch and said something I couldn’t translate.

“And I think he just said I have big balls.”

Working with kids, mostly kindergartners, I have started to feel terribly old.  Mostly because they like to point at my gray hair and say “Teacher….you’re oooooooold.”

But there are other subtler signs.  Like when one of my boys asked me if I liked the cool part in Star Wars.  Of course I did.  Except the cool part for me was the obvious revelation that Vader is Luke’s DAD.  The cool part for him was when the “roger-roger’s” (known to those of us who have passed puberty as droids) rolled out of the “roger-roger” cars.  

But some things cross the age divide.  Today we jumped roped and all the old rhymes where there:

Cinderella, dressed in Yella,

Went upstairs to kiss a Fella.  

Made a mistake and kissed a snake.  

How many doctors did it take?….”

and of course 

Strawberry shortcake

Cherry on top

How many boyfriends do you got?

(By the way…I have 40.)

Unfortunately, Miss Mary Mack hasn’t found it over to Asia yet.  But Susie and her steamboat with a bell is still a favorite for naughty girls everywhere.

Including me.

I was trying to convince my students to go move into the next room so they could have their snack.  After five minutes I’d almost convinced them all to go eat.  All I had were the two girls hanging around my middle hugging me tighter than a straight jacket.

“Alright girls…lets go have something good to eat!” I said enthusiastically.  They both hopped off me, then hit the floor.  I thought they’d fallen and hurt themselves until they’d started popping up repeatedly.

“What are we doing girls?”

“We’re not girls!” they cried.  ”We’re frogs!”

And then my two frogs hopped off to eat their quesadillas.

It’s true…when you’re a kid…you <i>can</i> be whatever you want to be.

I’m going into a manic phase.  I know it.  I know it in my very bones.  

I can feel myself buzzing.  There is electricity in me, I knew that of course, but now I feel it.  Up through my fingers.  I can soak up the glow from my computer screen.  Like a sponge all things electronic inject me with a new energy.  The colors are amazing.  The sounds are intense.  This is the first time I’ve <i>loved</i> Pink Floyd.  

And in my head, I feel my thoughts ready to go.  It’s like a horse race.  They’re ready to go.  They want it.  They’re chomping at the bit and straining against the gate.  Everything that’s been sleeping during my depression is ready to come out.  

Oh-oh-oh-oh let’s play!

Well it has happened.  My lack of laundry and my insistence that my underwear match have finally come at odds.  

I plan on a dark tank top today.  One that requires a black bra.  I found the black underwear that goes with it…but no where in my closet is there a black bra.  I have pink.  I have purple.  I have white and semi-eggshell.  But no black.  

I did however have a black swim suit.  It was clean.  

So, today, I’m wearing my black bikini with a picture of a pink skull and cross bones on the left breast.  As my underwear.  

If it rains – I’ll be prepared.

I have this great desire to write.

At one in the morning I have this insistent need to pour forth with something of my own.  I want to place my pen on the paper and move.  I want to pull out my paints and go to town with a thousand different colors.  I want to stretch out my arms and create something.  Type and type, the keys clicking in that comforting way, while my soul sings its quiet tune.

I want art.  I want to do art.  I want to create art.  I want a poem of angst and joy.  I want my emotions to take a form that will release back into the world.  I want something that has no function, but functions none the less because it exists.

Yet, all I can think of as I consider the different mediums before me is how bad I want to create.  How bad I need to write.  I much I need to put forth something that is not school work, that is not an email, that is not a response to someone else.  I need something that is me.  That comes from me.  That issues forth from inside.

All I got:  I have this great desire to write.

So last week D. and I just weren’t connecting.  On our mutual day off we played a game of chess then I went back home to mope and he went on a hike alone.

We spent the rest of the weekend skirting around each other and being grouchy.

We’re better now, but as I head of to work each day I start to get that pang of “missing”.  I needed time away, but now I need time with.  

So the plan was to hike ourselves up to Seoul (a nice long subway ride filled with harrowing subway experiences) and see the Grand National Park.  Since it’s such a trip I started to put in some more plans.  Perhaps a trip to the roller rink as well.  And dinner out.  Oh and maybe a street show, or a walk along the river…

It was getting pretty exciting and I went to work with spirits lifted thinking about the awesome weekend of “us” time coming up.

Then I realized that this is the Saturday in which I was shanghied to work – running relay games with people who don’t want to run relays.  

God…three small hours just ruin everything.

There’s been a dry spell.

Literally.

We’ve had the groping, kissing, hugging, pinching, grabbing, caressing, grinding…but when push came to -er- shove it just didn’t work.  Even a liberal helping of lube got us no where.  It got so bad that he took to talking to her.

“Come out?  Want to play?”

Nothing.  The Sahara desert had moved in between my legs.  Night after night me and my girl would roll over to sleep and D. would be stuck with a towel.  Occasionally I’d try to help – but my heart wasn’t in it.  My libido had shriveled up in the drought.  

Then it rained…really.  In the middle of another hot and humid day the heavens opened up for just a few minutes and the air filled with the smell of cool rain on hot stones.  The trees perked up, birds started to sing, and she finally woke up.  Outside the asphalt was beginning to color darker with each drop, inside my clothes colored too.

As the air cooled I heated up.  I had missed her.  She’d been gone for so long and now…here she was…awake and ready for action.  I gave it to her in spades, coloring the pitter-patter of rain drops with my own small moans of joy.  I basked in the completion of that much needed orgasm until the rain stopped and it seemed that she had been sated.  Dormant again but -thankfully- not dead.

Then, as I walked into the shower, she opened up again.  Calling for my attention and responding with avengence when she got it.  Forget the Sahara this was the Amazon.  And I was an Amazon warrior tasked with taming nature.  

So I finally got her down, with a little more work and a lot more moaning, and she napped fitfully.  The work of the day went slowly as I stopped to adjust every so often, but, finally, I was set.

Then he came home.  In that black t-shirt.  Looking the way he…well…looks.  There was no quieting her.  We tried hard to let him read his email.  Eat some dinner.  Come down from the day of work.  But then it was too much as soon as he jumped into bed we both jumped him.

“What?  You’re frisky?” he asked, not without a little incredulity.

Yes, yes, yes! she screamed out.

“I’m really tired, and I have that thing tomorrow morning, and you know…I already masturbated today.”

“So did I!”

“Tomorrow maybe.”

I couldn’t blame him…it was late.  But there was no shutting her up with him lying there in the bed.

So, here I am, in the middle of a monsoon.  Fjording the river.  Floating up the creek.

Without a paddle.

It was just too cute.  Sitting in a basket alone, surrounded by brightly colored plastic thermoses and the smell of coffee, it called to me with its small beady eyes.  Meow?  Rawr?  Trick or treat?  It, like me, had a bit of an identity crisis.  Or, like me, it really liked Halloween.

It was the fact that it was carrying a pumpkin trick-or-treat basket that clinched it though.  The Starbucks 2007 Bearista Bear came home with me that day.  

It’s dressed like a cat.  It even has little holes in its cat costume for its bear ears to stick out.  How-cute-is-that?

That night I spent a good deal of time playing with it.  I huggled it.  I snuggled it.  I made it give kisses to myself, the real cats, my growing-rather-annoyed boyfriend.

“You know, I think I’m falling in love with it.”  I said as we crawled into bed and I snuggled the bear close to me under the covers.

“I can’t tell you,” his reply dripping in sarcasm “how happy I am you gave your money to Starbucks for that thing.”

“Yeah, I don’t really care.  I like it.  It makes me happy.”  

So there.