Unemployment

Today is my first day of unemployment in Korea.

Kyle commented that I'm on an unemployment cycle. I work for about a year, then unemployed for some amount of time, and then work again. I guess it's been true so far, but it hasn't really been long enough to tell. You could also call it an employment cycle.

I woke up around 9:30 today. A couple years ago, when I had just quit my job at Mellon, I remember waking up the next day, feeling euphoric. Today I felt pretty good, not as good as when I quit Mellon, but still pretty good. I'm excited about the coming months.

Now that everything is actually over, I hope to write down some things that happened, and what they might mean. For the last year and four months, I have had an incredibly weird job.

The reason I'm unemployed now is because the school that I worked at, Break Away English Academy, has closed due to having no more money. I'll get more into that later.

Today I walked around my neighborhood. It was the first sunny day in at least a week, so I tried to soak up as much sunlight as I could. If there are such a thing as past lives, I was probably a plant in one of them. I'm pretty happy about just sitting in the sun and doing nothing, which is also what plants like to do.

I'm at a coffee shop now. I drink a lot of coffee these days. I was worried that I was drinking too much coffee, so I read about what coffee does to you. I think it's okay to drink a lot of coffee. There are some good side-effects too, and they say that people who drink coffee as a whole are less likely to kill themselves than those who don't.

My boss let me take some things from the school home with me. I took the coffee maker. I was really excited about getting it. In fact, I think I was more concerned about taking that coffee maker on the final day than I was about getting my salary. I could buy a lot of coffee makers with my salary, but for some reason getting a free coffee maker from work was really important to me. I think it's a silly way to think about things.

Next week I will start teaching a student from my school at her house. Her family is moving to New Zealand in January, so they want to cram before they go. I'm looking forward to it a lot, because they're a really nice family.

I think I'm going to miss a lot of my students. It just seems like another day today, but it will probably hit me later. Some of them I've taught since I arrived here last August. I gave my phone number out to some of the ones I really like. Not really for lesson purposes, but just to send me a message sometime. I wonder if that sort of thing would get me in trouble in the US? I think it probably would.