And in the rage, the tide turns inward on itself

I don't know how to write about myself. You should probably ignore the pretty symbols and metaphors I use and just concentrate on the underlying confusion that haunts every post, in obscure passages and as a sentiment expressed throughout.

When I left Florida in mid-August, amid a flurry of byes and ill-expressed well-wishes, I had a few things in mind, some goals to accomplish. Korea was, is, and will forever have been a necessary step, far-removed though I am now from the familiarity of all that was, well, familiar. But I don't want to recount here the purposes of coming to Korea. I could spend hours on that topic, and only begin to exhaust its insatiable reservoirs of discontented feelings. In any case, those thoughts are better said in a poem:

A trough in the outboard waters
seekers drifting without their daughters
cars collide in the aftermath
careening through and around the path
like songbirds sweetly, swiftly moving
glanced upon by sun reproving
outwards all our sights are bent
inwards to our discontent

That poem, like so much of my writing, is unfinished. And indeed, that is the theme of my life at this moment: that I am not finished. I won't say unfinished, for perhaps my manuscript has already been written; but it is not completed to my satisfaction, and in my voyage to Korea, and in the subsequent days here, I am renewing the alterations, I am changing the substance of my character into something unrecognizable.

This week was miserable. My students were frustrating to no end, and it grieved me to punish some of them so severely. I had little humor to indulge, even to my prized Minnie, who, despite her frequent errors, tries harder to than anyone else in the class, a fact for which I am indebted to her. The glare in my eyes was harsh and unceasing all week, exacerbated by a renewed struggle with a sore throat (damn kids, with their pathology-spreading fingers).

All this, and I no longer can tell myself in a mirror. This is frightening to me, to be so far gone that introspection seems futile. I am not unhappy, but the origin of what I do feel remains a mystery. And when I know, I feel that will crash the levees finally.