꿈꾸는 무슨이 오더라도 좋다

I am the last one awake and the only sounds in the little house in North Portland are the mechanical whirr of the laptop fan and, rather irkingly, the faint crunching noise the cable TV receiver makes. I have no idea why; there doesn't seem to be a need for anything mechanical within a cable TV receiver to make crunching noises.

But when you turn the television off and leave the cable on, the cable tuner makes this odd crunching noise.

I really wanted to say something to you tonight. I wanted to charm, or beguile, or rant. I wanted to write something that you'd read tomorrow morning - assuming anyone really DOES read this damn thing outside the small group of friends that meets here, and you know who you are - and spend the remainder of the day recalling at odd moments and turning over in your mind like a smooth-washed pebble in your hand because of the intriguing heft of it, the clean, cool feel of it under your fingers.I wanted to sit and really distill my thoughts and provide you with some object for thought, or moment of humor, or charm, that you could savor.

But I'm afraid I've got nothing.

Most of my thoughts are on my son's lost tooth, and my daughter's homework, and my wife's new exercise routine. On the coming two days without school at the end of the week, and how I'm going to get the locates called in for next week's drilling even though I don't have paint on the ground at this moment.

There's nothing in the news, or ABOUT the news, I really have any more intelligent comment to provide than Krugman does, or jim over at Ranger Against War, or Greenwald, or Doghouse Riley or a dozen other, better bloggers.

And because I'm still trying to lose weight right now I'm thinking about the fucking cinnamon graham crackers in the cupboard behind me and realizing that I'd practically KILL for a fucking cinnamon graham cracker and yet I won't get up and get one because I'm finally down to almost 205 from over 235 this past winter and want to get down to 200 by the New Year. But this ginormous part of my mind is taken up with thinking about fucking cinnamon graham crackers rather than coming up with witty and epigrammatic blog posts.

Have you ever had times, or moments, or even days like that? Where you have the feeling that you just want to do some great thing, something utterly brilliant, that you're a fraction of an inch, a flicker of a synaptic leap, a pennysworth of bread away from this immense deal of intellectual sack...and yet, you just can't seem to get there from here?Well, that's where I am.

And the odd thing is, I don't feel frantic or manic about it. I had a moment of panic, a moment of...whatthehelldoIdonow!...but that passed, and now I'm just jotting down random thoughts and readying myself for sleep.

The only thing of real oddity and interest that has occurred to me lately - at least odd and of interest to ME - is this odd series of dreams in which my wife and my in-laws are Korean.I have no idea where I'm coming up with this stuff.

My dream-wife looks very like herself except with Asian features; black hair, dark eyes, epicanthic fold. But she's recognizably "her" in both physical shape and personality

My dream-father-in-law is actually perfect as this gruff little hard-ass Seoul auto mechanic who never says anything except to cuss at me in Hangul. He even has his gray beard and with it looks like a mean ol' retired ROK master sergeant or something. He's kinda scary, but otherwise not THAT much different from his "real" self.

But my dream-mother-in-law looks and sounds like Maggie Cho's gramma ("Magare! What is aaaassss-maaastas? Is it maaastas of aaassss?") and keeps nagging at her daughter in ways that her very diffident real mother would be horrified by ("Dabbeeee! Why you eat SO much? You too faaaat! Look size you boobies, they big like zeppelins!" - I swear, this is actual dream-dialogue and I have no freaking idea where I'm coming up with this. My actual mother-in-law would cut her tongue out before ever mentioning breasts, let alone comparing them to ragtime-era German airships).

I've had something like four of these Korean-family dreams. In one of them my mother-in-law made us Korean pancakes - jeonya (저냐) and bullied the kids when they said they were "yucky".

In another she kept coming out in the back where my wife and I were in the hot tub (we don't have a hot tub IRL...) getting all tender and twining (which is where she made the breast-zeppelin comments) and kept making smartass comments about making another baby.

And in yet another they sat on the porch and spat sunflower seeds at the cats and made grousing comments about our house in Korean.

And now just talking about this makes me want some freaking bulgogi and pajeon. Fuck, dieting SUCKS!

Which reminds me - one of my favorite little webcomics, "K and J" seems to have gone dark. Worth a visit there even so, to enjoy the back issues where the artist tells the tales of his wife's Korean childhood-and-young adulthood. Sadly, I suspect that something bad has happened - marriage fell apart, guy was hit by a bus. Who knows? Destined to be another of those weird abandoned websites visited only by the electronic ghosts of former readers?

Here's a bit of bloggage for you; a group of WW2 enthusiasts trying to restore an old RAF command and control bunker near Newcastle. Just the sort of oddity that makes for good reading on a random sort of Tuesday night.And so to bed.

(Oh. The title of this post? You mean you don't read Hangul? Oh, sorry. Roughly translated, it means "What Dreams May Come". How could you not know that? Really, 당신의 유방은 zeppelins 같이 이다!)