sleep is my way of thinking. Is that wrong?

Fuck, but I'm tired lately. All I ever want to do is take a nap. The weekends are great because I can nap.

I think next on my to-do list is to find someone to force me to do some kind of exercise on a regular basis. To complicate my weekly schedule further and to help me out of this lethargy that I've fallen into.

Other news: Kim Shin-Jung, my official co-teacher, told me today that she felt like a novice teacher because she doesn't know how to make the textbook (which is an improvement from last year's textbook, but still too hard for our students) fun and engaging. (I am so lucky I don't have to use the textbook in my classes. It would be so hard teach material that is too hard for the students in an interesting way.)

Shin-Jung asked me to help her think of ideas to make class interesting. (Why are all my co-teachers always insisting that I know what I am doing and asking me for advice? I'm the novice here, can't you see?)

I took a nap just now, and dreamt.

That happens sometimes lately.

Everyone was in my dream. Ann Arbor friends: Jane, Jamie, Audra, Hannah, Nora, WhitPow, maybe @megiddings, I'm not sure. Teacher friends: Park Mi-Ran, KoHo, Yena, Shin-Jung, maybe gossip girl #1, I'm not sure. Various "fellow" native-English-speaking teachers from Seoul who will go unnamed, because the ones who were in my dream were the ones I hate and avoid, generally speaking.

There was a party, we were all playing an absurd game where we careened around the room acting like we were ships in stormy waters, rocking from side to side and bumping into each other as much as possible. Then we all took our shirts off, and I tweaked everyone's nipples. But then Hannah's and WhitPow's girlfriends got mad at me for touching their women.

At some point, the party ended, and then all of you were gone except for Jane and KoHo (hiking teacher friend), and Jane and I were wandering the streets of Seoul and/or Paris and we came across KoHo, who was surrounded by twenty-odd feral cats. He was clipping the nails of one of the feral cats, and the cat was very angry. Also, we were all standing on the roof of a building and/or high up on the limbs of a telephone pole.

Then suddenly Jane left me on my own and I was trying to find a place to stay in Seoul, only Jane was the one who was living in Seoul and I was visiting her here and I didn't know where to stay. Then I ended up staying in this really plush lobby of some business place for free, I don't really know why. And I think this is where the rest of my teacher friends entered the picture, we were at some conference or something and Park Mi-Ran probably took care of me, the end.

some semblance of a plan w/o any semblance of motivation

Man, this is how it always happens.

I become sure of something without telling anyone about it, and then as soon as I let it out I start to question myself and my decisions.

Having told you all I'm thinking seriously about renewing my contract here, I am now questioning whether that's what I want to do at all, even a little bit. Haven't I felt inadequate and insecure the whole time I've been here? Haven't I been a more anxious person for the past 4 months than I've ever been before? Do I really want to sign up for another year of that? Can I even handle it?

Maybe it's just that I'm tired lately. I really need/want a vacation, I can't wait to leave for BsAs and not think about teaching for a whole month. (@warmandbarky let's never talk about teaching, ok? I mean, let's maybe talk about it just once, but then let's talk only about poems, ok?)

So I guess what I'm saying is: I've lost all of my motivation lately, all of it. I don't have the energy to study Korean, or to study the teaching methodology textbooks I borrowed from Park Mi-Ran just after Christmas, or to lesson plan, or to teach, really. And FUCK, if I don't have the energy to teach, then WHAT AM I EVEN DOING.

I'm also saying that I'm really hoping I get my motivation back after having a break. I really liked it when I was in love with learning Korean and teaching my students and never wanted to stop. I mean, I always hated lesson planning, but that's normal, I think, no one likes lesson planning. I just want to go back to when I didn't dread going to classes.

One more week of winter camp, then a week of no-classes, then a week of goof-off classes and graduation. Then 35 hours on 3 planes and flying around half of the world to get to @warmandbarky. I CAN'T WAIT, I THINK ABOUT SEOUL --> HONG KONG --> JOHANNESBURG --> BSAS ALL THE TIME.

it is harder and harder to get out of bed these days.

I have dreams sometimes lately. (This is really unusual for me. As long as I can remember, I have rarely dreamt, or at least have rarely remembered having dreamt.) My dreams now are often about teaching; sometimes, I wake up certain that I have overslept a class or that a certain class went really well or that a certain class went really poorly. More often than not, my dreams are filled with anxiety. This doesn't surprise me; after all, I have a lot of anxiety about teaching.

Last night I had a dream/nightmare about a lot of people that I didn't know very well in Ann Arbor. Lauren Keils, for example, featured prominently in my dream. The plot of the dream is blurry, but the main setting was definitely Orchid Lane in Ann Arbor, and Lauren was definitely the protagonist. There was a serial killer on the loose, and a lot of other people that I only knew vaguely in Ann Arbor were the victims. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I think there was a team of serial killers on the loose. Maybe they were siblings. Maybe there were three of them. Maybe only two.

Lauren was the owner of Orchid Lane (which was where all of the people were being killed), and maybe she decided to track down the serial killers in a mysterious and carefree sort of way. I have no recollection of what my own role was. There was a lot of blood in the dream, a lot of corpses.

My first thought when I woke up this morning was "what the FUCK" promptly followed by "oh FUCK, I've overslept." I rushed around to get ready for work, arrived at school, taught five classes and spent most of my in-between-classes time being depressed and deciding that I am a failure. And now I have finished my last class of the day, and my first thought when I sat back down at my desk was "I had a dream last night, what the FUCK."

My dreams bewilder me. I bewilder myself.