Flossie Away from Home

We just returned from a week away from College Town, visiting a place that couldn't be any more different: Seoul, South Korea. My mom has been living there for the past couple of years since she retired, so my brother and Mr. Flossie and I made the 13-hour flight to pay her a visit.

It was great to spend quality time with the fam, but I have to say that Seoul is getting to be a bit too dystopian and Blade Runner-y for my taste (keeping in mind that I've now lived the provincial life in College Town for ten years, and also that I'm a person, constitutionally, for whom a trip to Best Buy is borderline too stimulating).

Seoul is so big, so crowded, and so polluted. My mom actually lives in Incheon, which used to be a separate port city, but now seems to be continuous with the Seoul megatropolis. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called New Songdo City, which is still under construction on land reclaimed from the sea. Here is the under-construction park outside our window at the Sheraton. You would be able to see the ocean in the distance but for a persistent fog/haze every day.
Ornamental cabbages (?) planted in the streetlamps (??) didn't disguise the fact that nature was not exactly being prioritized in the rush to develop. The only birds I saw all week were two magpies squawking high in the facade of the Sheraton.
But there were redeeming prospects. A human-friendly space was tucked into the shadow of my mom's apartment complex: a little market where people bought fish and produce. Bulk radishes, anyone?
And there's my mom, who takes the subway everywhere and doesn't own a car. So who has the better carbon footprint, my distaste for the decidedly industrial aesthetics of Incheon aside? Finally, there was the uneasy reflection, as Mr. F and I drove home from the airport after our trip was over, that Iowa is no less constructed a an environment than Seoul, only not as visibly so. Our agricultural system is just as unnatural and no more sustainable than the most rampant urban development.

Alas. Nostalgia for home is all well and good, but are Iowa's bucolic rolling hills and the birds at my backyard feeder just our version of the cabbage in the lamppost?

Blogging? What Blogging?

I'll tell you where I've been. I've been on Facebook. Yes, cheating on Blogger with Facebook. Writing 10-word status updates is so much easier than writing a whole blog entry! Let me know if you want to "friend" me.

I've also been in Santa Cruz, California. Ridiculously beautiful. We saw lots of nature: a sea lion family at the wharf, deer wandering around the UCSC campus. Redwoods. Now I understand why everyone wants to move to northern California.

Yep, another place-crush.

Flossie at Work

I've been at my "new" job for a week, and (surprise) I like it! That's one benefit of getting to test out a job for five years before taking it on.

It's nice to go from being "a grad student who is working as an editor for her stipend" to "an editor who is completing a PhD on the side."

As an added bonus, I get to spend the summer away from Toxic Mold Building. They are still cleaning up its basement after the flooding, so I am in a luxurious former mansion converted into a university building. I call it the House of Dudes because it contains the offices of six male professors (and two female staff members). My desk is out in an open area on the second floor surrounded by four dude offices. I feel like Carol, the receptionist in the Bob Newhart Show. Except I don't have to take messages for anyone.

At first I worried that the new job was a big extortive scam I've perpetuated on the university, but after a week I can't believe it was ever a 15-hour-a-week job, which it was for my first five years. I no longer have to go home after three hours a day and know how much is still hanging over my head--or worse, work late and feel resentful. Now I can catch up on our perpetually missed deadlines, and maybe even do a little more than merely keep things afloat.