all i did today was work, pick up dinner, and go home.  i’m livin it up.

at work today, my boss came into the teachers’ room with some paperwork for me to sign and a request for 2 passport photos.  he got my medical check results back and is bringing everything to immigration tomorrow so i can get my alien registration card.  that means i’m going to remain a legal alien.

it also means i don’t have the hiv!  not that i was worried, but my coworker and i were on the bus wondering about what would happen if my medical results did come back positive for hiv or any other disease that they test for (tuberculosis, i believe…i think they did away with the drug screening but i’m not sure).  he had apparently heard a rumor about someone who tested positive for hiv, didn’t show up for work the next day, and was never heard from again.  that probably means that he got shipped back to where he came from, but for the sake of dramatics, i’m going to remain open to the possibility that something more sinister happened to him.

for those of you who know me well enough to know about my history of drug use (or lack thereof) and sexual behavior, you know i’m pretty much the least likely candidate to come up with a surprise case of aids.  still, it got me to thinking.  while it was somewhere around number 3438 on my priority list, it’s nice to know i’m not going to be loaded up on a ship and carted away from korea anytime soon.

what i was legitimately worried about, though, was my chest x-ray.  my bronchitis has been more or less gone since the day before my medical check, but my lungs are still clearing themselves out.  i was pretty scared that they were going to find all kinds of junk in them and deem me riddled with tuberculosis, or find out that i had developed pneumonia without knowing it myself.  luckily, i’m clear on that front.

anyhow, work was full of drama with the children.  i did make one little girl cry like her world was falling apart RIGHT before her last class ended.  that means that she was still bloodshot, puffy eyed, and snotty when she walked out the door to go home, just in time for her mother to see what i did to her dear, dear child.  see, my school has a “no korean” rule in the classrooms.  if the kids speak korean, they get a yellow card, which is just a warning and a tally mark on the board by their name.  if they do it repeatedly, we start taking away stickers on their sticker sheets.

let me digress a bit, and explain the sticker system.

all of the kids get sheets of paper with a gridded design in the shape of the school’s logo.  when they do their homework or answer a question correctly,  they get these tiny square stickers to put on the sheets.  when the gridded logo is entirely covered in stickers, they bring the sheet to susan behind the front desk, and she gives them a prize.  however, when they misbehave, such as not doing their homework or speaking korean in class, they have to peel stickers off of their sheets and throw the stickers in the trash.  got it?

so miss lina would not stop speaking korean.  the first time, she did it before i even sat down to get my pens out.  so she got her first yellow card, which made her so mad at me, she wouldn’t even take the stickers she deserved for doing her homework.  then, she spoke korean again.  i made her throw away 5 stickers.  again.  this time, 10 stickers.  again.  15 stickers.  by the end of class, she had taken her tiny little fingers and peeled 30 stickers off of her chart.  add that to the stickers she refused to take, and she lost 33 stickers today. 

after that class, i went to the teachers room and told stephen that i had taken a lot of stickers away from her and i felt kind of bad.  he laughed and told me that in his class earlier, she was bragging about how she only had 3 more stickers to go until she got her prize.  oops.

call me a monster.  last week, though, i was so busy trying to figure out what i was doing that i kind of overlooked a lot of bad things they did.  i think that gave off a bad impression, because a lot of the kids seem to think they can get away with stuff while i’m teaching.  this week is dedicated to cracking the whip and being a bitch so they will behave and i can get back to not giving a damn.  there’s a method to my madness.

then, in my beloved class with the bad kids, which really is typically my favorite class, chaos broke loose.  sue, the only girl in the class, was crawling around on the floor.  dennis was leaning back in his chair with the front two legs up in the air.  sue crawled under dennis, dennis’s chair slammed upright, and sue’s hand got crushed between the floor and the leg.  crying ensued.  i gave sue a hug (in korea, we ARE allowed to touch the children) and joked with her until she started laughing.  calvin, in the mean time, discovered that when he spit on his desk and rubbed his eraser on it, it made a paint like substance, and he decided he wasn’t going to stop until a square foot of desk was covered in this rubbery, spitty mess.  then, sue freaked out again.  i couldn’t figure out what was wrong, just that something had possibly been stolen.  i temporarily lifted the “no korean” rule in my class so she could tell another kid what was wrong in hopes that he could tell me.  no luck.  she kept insisting that this thing, whatever it was, was stolen by dennis, and she began searching through his backpack, pencil case, even stuffing her hands down his pockets.  finally, i told her we were going to have to give it up and get on with class.  she sat in her chair and whimpered throughout the whole lesson until ryan found the thing on  the floor.  ever seen one of those tiny clear plastic sleeves that you can put memory cards from cell phones in?  it was one of those.  without a memory card in it.  just a piece of plastic.  but she was happy for the remaining 2 minutes we all had together.

so i made kids cry, left work, and picked up a pizza on the way home.  i’ve had a lot of korean food lately and wasn’t in the mood for more tonight.  this time, i passed up the pizza hit and tried pizza maru down the street.  don’t get me wrong, pizza hit made quite an impression on me, and i will be going back.  i was actually heading there when it dawned on me that this was going to be my 2nd pizza in like, 10 or so days, and i didn’t want the pizza hit boys to think i’m some sort of closed minded, stereotypical american, eating nothing but pizza.

this time i got a western style pizza.  yay!  pizza hit’s korean creation is still sitting in my fridge, probably molding, and untouched since the night i got it.  tonight’s pizza was tasty, though the staff was not as friendly.  it was also only 6000 won.  i swear, it’s cheaper to eat out in korea than it is to cook at home.

also, at pizza maru, i picked this out while i was waiting:

mysterious korean drink!

i thought i was in for an adventure in korean soda.  then i took a sip.  it was fucking sprite.  it even has this label on the bottle:

laaaaaame

boring.

at least i tried to try something different, right?