Möbius Strips of Negativity and Billiards on a Saturday Afternoon
It's been three weeks since the last time I updated, and while a variety of things have happened in that time most of my time recently has been spent trying to avoid the negative situations that keep popping up in my life. In particular these revolve around my new coworker (terrible), one of my classmates at the Korean academy (annoying), getting treated like a circus freak-show for studying Korean in public (frustrating), and people making plans with me and then canceling them at the last minute (exasperating). While there are plenty of people out there who blog as a therapeutic release I'm not sure if it's something I want to do for the fact that a) strangers who read my LiveJournal will think I'm a lot more negative than is actually the case and b) thinking about all this stuff in order to write about it just leads to a Möbius strip of negativity.
As my friend Shuyi pointed out, it's better not to focus on people and events like that. They happened, it's done, now time to move on. Of course, this is a little more difficult when I see my classmate and coworker five times a week.
Yesterday was spent meeting two of my coworkers for lunch and pool (pocket billiards). The first place we tried going was a Mongolian-run pool hall that wasn't open yet. The second saw us join a group of five middle school students as the only patrons. While the two boys were playing pool the three girls from the group talked over pizza and preened themselves in a fish-eye mirror. Seeing girls with legs thinner than my arm is still not something I've gotten used to.
My coworkers and I played for a couple of hours but only made it through two games on account of how long it took us to sink the balls. It was great playing with people who enjoy pool and have a skill level similar to my own, since nobody cares if you scratch and everyone gets excited when a ball gets sunk. Here's to hoping this was more than just a one-off event.
Stairwell sign for the Mongolian pool hall "OЮУ"