There’s big news afoot in Standland. It seems that I’m bound for New York City in about a week and a half’s time, to be there for about 4 months. My company got a client there (whom I helped to land), so they’re sending me from my environs here in the Land of the Morning Calm to the city so nice they named it twice. I’m very excited. They’re putting up a sizable stipend for my living expenses, and if I work some extra hours, I’ll get a really large salary for them. The only problem with any of it, it would seem, was the look of disappointment in my father’s face since I’ve told him. This puts a rather large dent in the old Korean dating schedule, after all. At this current time, he’s trying to set me up with this chick who really dug me, whom I’ve already gone out with, in fact the last time he was in Seoul he tried to push her on me then, too. I guess you can’t win them all, whatever you do, eh?
In my life, it seems to me I keep breaking the old man’s heart. Again and again and again. This is what occurred to me today, when he asked if I’d go to lunch with him. I wasn’t hungry, so I turned him down. And I was laying there (I’m sorta trying to get over a cold), and I was thinking that it might not be that he’s much longer on this earth, and wouldn’t I regret any chance I’d had to spend with him? Whereupon, he came back inside the house, and I said I changed my mind, and we went and had lunch together. But man, he seems deflated. He’s been trying to get me married off with all his might, it would seem. He keeps wondering what’s wrong with the chicks that he likes, who have good parents and seem as if they’d make good child producing vessels? And I feel bad, really. It seems I can never do right by them, the elders, whatever I accomplish. My thinking is so different from theirs, the distance between us seems so unbridgeable. One day, though… one day….
Reflection
10:22pm sunday, 16th april
Are the people you deal with worth your suffering?
Reflection