All this noise is depressing me.

Sigh. What a low! I've been looking forward to Friday all week, and now that its is here I'm ready to just go home. To do standard transmission type classes: ask a question, look at tired sleepy faces, listen to the silence of bored children, grudge it out and go home.

I had a really good day too...I woke up, just predawn, and watched the sunrise. I had really good Oatmeal (hmm I sound like a bit of a hippie...) went to yoga (a lot like a hippie). I exchange English lessons for yoga lessons and i always enjoy them. But today especially so, my yoga teacher bought me a Korean vocabulary book. So now we have a real language exchange going. It was a lot of fun. Yoga was great. That's i suppose when things started to get noisy.

The whole way home it was like there were just people everywhere, noise everywhere, thousands of construction projects, motorbikes on sidewalks, cigarettes, honking impatient drivers, cars doing 140km/h on city streets. Just noise noise noise. Even when I got back to my apartment it was filled with humming buzzing noise. My one neighbours television, the others instant messenger. More construction, more cigarettes, more cars, more children...now usually I like the sound of children, but it wasn't laughter and shrieks it was demanding voices balli-wa, balli balli...

Now I'm trying to find something nice to do on a spring Friday to give the students new ways of using language, and all I can find is noise. Videos ordering people to act. News stories complaining about the ineffectiveness of protest. Nothing just posing a question to talk about, only opinions, orders, demands and reprimands.

Sigh. It is such a battle against all this global and personal hopelessness.

Well Buy Nothing Weeks are still going well at least. I'm really enjoying it a lot, in fact. It's so easy now to just say, "No I don't need (or really even want) that." It's probably not good to remove myself so much from everything, but it's nice to live in a world where consumerism isn't the normative writ. Where there are choices, and they each feel valuable, like they matter. So it's cool if other people think it is weird. I'm enjoying myself. I suppose I should just teach TOEFL and get on with it. If they do well we can have a debate about hair cuts or something...