Reconnection

About four months after moving to Korea, my laptop crashed. Hard. This wasn't one of those, "Well, let's just wipe the drive and start over," sort of situations. This was a full-on, "Congratulations on you new doorstop, Ms. Pfeifer," kind of thing; frustrating to say the least. While I wanted to 'go Office Space' on the source of my grief, it occurred to me that she was old. We'd been together for almost seven years; she'd served me well, and it was just her time. I had to let her go with dignity.

Pleased with my new, more mature assessment of the situation, I decided to observe a mourning period. Eight months seemed reasonable. So, earlier this month, eight months after my dear computer's demise, I retired my black veil to the back of my wardrobe, and marched, emboldened, into Frisbee, an Apple retailer in Seoul. I bought a shiny, new MacBook with all the bells and whistles.

Since then, I have been entirely overwhelmed with all those things that I missed out on over the past months. Seriously, there is so much to read and watch and forward to relevant people. Responding to the overstimulation in the only way I know how, I have limited my online ventures, for the most part, to the following: iChat, downloading music, Facebook, Surf the Channel, and BBC news. Lame, really.

Fortunately for me, I have some very in-tune friends who read, watch, and forward as much as I'd like to, that keep me abreast of all things awesome online. One of these kind souls, Mindy, sent me a link to this girl. I found myself amused and inspired by these concise, yet astute, observations, and responded to Mindy's challenge to write a 'lifeku' of my own but from a Korean expatriate's point of view. Thanks for that box, Pandora. Feeling inspired to 'write' for the first time in over a year, I've put some together. In reading through them, I realized this medium offers me the chance to share glimpses of my cultural experience here in a way that suits me.

So, future posts will include a little poem and a brief explanation (thereby defeating the point of the haiku, I think, but totally upping the interest factor) to clarify.

I will close with a haiku mission statement:

Korea haiku.

Sharing my experience

With five, seven, five.