Two's Day

I'm not feeling too great. I have a chest cold with lungs and face afire, and sleeping since Sunday night has been fairly miserable, as I can't breathe through my nose and have been waking up coughing with the most dry mouth imaginable. I'm not in a very good mood when I'm sick, either, and want to stay home in bed. My eyes were rolling into the back of my head in classes today; I wanted to sleep so bad!

When I was a kid, my father would have a passive aggressive freak out if we were sick and coughing at the dinner table. I mean, it didn't matter if you held your hand over your mouth, it was the coughing that bothered him, and so I always felt threatened when I was sick. Even now, my mom still says things like "Jenny, you're always getting sick!" which isn't true, but makes me feel guilty and defensive somehow. Short of a pre-surgical scrub down and donning a mask and gloves before entering my classes, I don't know what I can do to stop from getting sick. When I'm coming into contact with over a hundred kids a day, a handful at least are bound to have something. Today I witnessed one of my students who seems to be perpetually holding a chair up over his head outside him classroom door, tap his neighbour and motion for him to lean in so he could sneeze full force on the side of his head in the guise of telling him a secret.

Anyhow, yep, I'm sick. I'm not very patient when I'm not feeling well, and I can be snappy and irritable, which I was today. That makes me feel more miserable. I suppose my co-workers have worked with me long enough to know what I'm like when I'm ailing, so at least they're not shocked by my being short with them. I was pretty severe with my 2nd to last class of loud silly boys, and had 3 of them write lines in complete silence, while I played a game with the other two kids. Then we went back to work, with the 3 boys hating me, but I won them over by the end of class with a new game. They were all smiles and exclamations of "Teacha, very fun!" as they were leaving the class.

Happier news: I got my MP3 Player back. We'll see if it's all fixed up later in the week when I try to upload some more tunes to it. I got myself some new headphones tonight. Two pairs, actually. I wasn't expecting to go downtown to get my MP3 player, but when I got out of school and saw a bus waiting there, I hopped on. Since I didn't have my headphones with me, and wanted to listen to the thing on the way back home, I bought a new pair, the kind that hook around your ear and are large disks pressed up against your head. I hated them instantly. Too much outside noise gets in, and they make the tops of my ears too "busy" as they're competing for limited space with my glasses. My ear buds that came with the MP3 are better, but a bit too big for my ear-hole, so they're painful after I keep having to shove them back in when they're trying to slip out. So the next shop I passed, I went in and bought a different smaller ear bud and I like them very much. But they're not perfect.

Ultimately, what I'd really like in a headphone is an ear bud with a spike on the end of it that I ram about one inch deep into my cranium via my ear. Then a little umbrella should open up inside my head so they will never ever fall out and I never ever have to hear anything but music.

I'm going to take copious amounts of mystery-medicine my nice Pharmacy Man gave me, and cuddle up and watch "The Polar Express." Perhaps an animated Tom Hanks times 6 will lift my grumpy spirits.

**UPDATE**: Nope, no spirit lifting for me. Even though I checked in both English and Korean with the video store checkout girl that the brand new in-store "The Polar Express" was in English, and she said it was, she is a BIG FAT LIAR, and it is not. In the 3 or so minutes I did watch it, the animation looks spectacular. In the first few moments, a little boy spies a Santa's Cap in his dad's back pocket, and pulls out newspaper and magazine articles from his dresser drawer. It seemed like he had been collecting evidence to confirm Santa's a fake. I thought it was pretty cool the animated newspaper was in Hangul, even though it meant I didn't know what it said.

Today, my crap video store got 2 copies of "The Polar Express," (I hope so much they're not BOTH in Korean, though I strongly suspect they are) two copies of Brangelina's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and 4 copies of what looks to be an abysmal movie I've never heard of, and won't be renting, "The Cave." I dig the prices of renting a movie at my local crap store, but oh, what I would give for the bountiful selection of a Blockbuster.