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Note #31: Happy (belated) new year (2009.1.8)

A belated happy new year to everyone out in internet land. Believe it or not, I have been sick for most of the time since my last writing—since Monday, the 29th of December, to be exact. I wasn't debilitatingly sick the entire time, but I was weak and/or ill enough to be in a constant state of discomfort. I kept telling myself that I would write once I got better, and I just never got better. Until today that is. I'm not at 100% yet, but I think the storm is finally behind us.

It all began on Sunday the 28th. My professor was hosting his year-end get-together, and of course I attended. Needless to say, there was much alcohol to be had by all. I should probably admit that this is partly my fault—I had two bottles of 21-year-old scotch whisky lying around the house, and I brought one along. We drank mostly beer and soju with dinner, but at the second stop for the night (or “2-cha”—Korean gatherings are divided into how many different places you go to drink, with most gatherings going at least to 2-cha, or the second locale. The longest I've lasted at any gathering was 5-cha, and the sun was rising when I went home) the whisky came out and the fun began. I prefer bourbon whisky, to be honest, but Koreans seem to be partial to scotch, so scotch it was.

I suppose I would have been OK had I stopped at 2-cha, but one of my juniors convinced me to go along with the five other survivors (our professor and most of the company went home after 2-cha) to find a place that served good beer. Unfortunately, we ended up at this place that sold mind-numbingly crappy draft beer. I stayed until the end of 3-cha, when there were four of us left, and then decided it was time to go home. I'm not sure what happened to the remaining three, but I think they went on to 4-cha.

So Monday morning I wasn't feeling too great, and my insides seemed to be wanting to turn inside out. Hyunjin kindly pointed out to me that this always seems to happen after a night of heavy drinking. It's a good thing she mentioned it, too, because the dwarves pounding on my brain with sledgehammers prevented me from thinking clearly enough to properly diagnose the situation. Halfway through the day I started feeling better, but I noticed that the back of the roof of my mouth felt dry no matter how much water I drank. I knew it for what it was—the onset of a cold. Little did I know how tenacious this cold would be.

The worst of it passed on that Wednesday, but the sore throat lingered on. Every time I thought the throat might be getting better, I would have a coughing fit in the middle of the night and tear up the lining of my trachea once again. I was also plagued by bouts of sniffling and “head underwater” syndrome. But I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that, after one last hurrah in which I wanted to chop my entire head off, the cold seems to have subsided. Like I said above, I'm not 100% yet, but I'm looking forward to a much better day tomorrow.

And I have a busy January to look forward to as well. At the end of the month I will be giving an informal presentation that will be a direct precursor to a conference presentation in mid-February. I also have oodles and oodles of translation work to do. The informal presentation is 100% devoted to my dissertation, so I won't be doing much separately on that, but I do want to come up with a tentative table of contents by the end of the month. Oh, I also really need to read and correct the galley proofs from that book I've mentioned so many times it makes me sick. Other than that, though, there's not much going on.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am back, and that I hope to squeeze some Liminality content into my schedule. During my illness I kept a list of entries that I wanted to write, and it is currently at eight items—and this is not including the backlog of photos I need to slog through, as well as a travel journal that is long overdue. I can't make any promises, but I can say that, barring any major illnesses, the content should be coming at a faster rate than it has been.

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