My
Chinese horoscope for today, from
Joong Ang Daily, one of the
Korean English-language newspapers (I'm 1979, so a
Goat): "Goats have been known to silently sneak up and attack unsuspecting
tourists. Keep that in mind as you hit the streets today." I thought long and hard to try to find out what this could possibly be a
metaphor for. I failed. I think it really is telling me to go out and attack unsuspecting tourists. As I'm just recovering from being sick, I'm not sure I have the energy.
Speaking of which, my sickness always follows roughly the same pattern. A few times a winter, I will come down with the vague beginnings of a sore throat. I go home and gargle with whiskey to disinfect. It works, I shit you not, although my roommates sometimes look at me like I've lost my mind. Anyway, that almost always cures the sore throat, but it seems to just drive the bacteria into other parts of my body. Once in a while, I'm lucky, and my sickness will just go away altogether, but more often, it begins a daily migration around my body, giving me a different symptom each day. This one seems to have been a short one. After the sore throat, I had sinus congestion, which has now lapsed to a mere runny nose. I expect to be better when I wake up tomorrow.
I have plans to go to Daejeon this weekend, to see Christina, who used to be the Korean supervisor at my English hagwon (private academy), to give her the Christmas present I bought her in Canada. This is a problem, because, up until the last time I saw her, I've been sleeping with her. Why is this a problem? Well, as I've mentioned in daylogs before, she's 13 years older than me, divorced, with two kids. This is unacceptable in Korean culture, so the two of us are pretty much a secret. That's not so bad, though. I was fine with that before. The problem is that I'm now just starting to become involved with someone my own age (well, two years younger, actually), by the name of Eun Jung, here in Suncheon. Sure, I haven't done more than hold her hand yet, but it seems pretty clear to me that we're heading in the general direction of "relationship." The way I see it, I have a few options, all terrible:
a) Break off with Christina as soon as I get there, and pursue Eun Jung wholeheartedly. Ordinarily, this would be the thing to do, but I dread Christina's reaction; these days, all her similarly-aged Korean friends are too busy/married/etc. and can't party with her, and her two foreign friends in Daejeon both have boyfriends now. So she's incredibly depressed, bored and lonely. She tells me she misses me all the time, and asks me when I'm coming to Daejeon again. Breaking up with her would hurt her too much. At the very least, I'd feel like shit, the whole weekend would be awkward, and there's a distinct possibility that she'd never speak to me again. Also, I have some vague business plans with her in the future. I'm sure those would be out the window if I broke off so suddenly.
b) Continue sleeping with her. I guarantee that she and Eun Jung would never find out about each other; even if Eun Jung found out who I was visiting in Daejeon, it would never even occur to a Korean that two people so disparate in age would be sleeping together... and Christina will never come to Suncheon again, because she's bitter about being fired from our hagwon. However, I'd feel incredibly guilty about doing this. I've never cheated on a girlfriend before, and don't particularly want to start. Besides, if I did this and ever confessed in my daylogs, I'd be serially downvoted by the female noders for being a piece of shit. ;-)
c) Sleep with her just this one, last time, and then break off with her, either in the morning, or by phone after safely back in Suncheon. This would avoid one awkward weekend, but otherwise combines the worst aspect of both other scenarios, except that I might be able to rationalize to myself that I'm not really cheating on Eun Jung, since we haven't done more than hold hands and haven't officially decided to be a couple yet. Except I hate guys who make up that kind of bullshit to justify their actions.
d) Break off with Eun Jung and keep sleeping with Christina. A temporary solution, since I decided long ago that I couldn't possibly be with Christina forever (mainly because I want kids of my own, not to raise her two girls, who are only 12 and 14 years younger than me, respectively), and that I'd have to break off with her when a nice girl my own age came into my life.
I guess that a) is probably the "correct" answer, but I don't know if I can make myself do it before it's too late. I'm chronically bad at breaking up with people. Most of my relationships end up in disaster, because I can't bring myself to actually break up, so I start subconsciously sending out signals and trying to push the girl away, she gets confused as to why I'm acting different, thinks the solution is to try to get closer, rather than further, which makes things worse, so I freak out more, and so on down the spiral. I always manage to patch things up after the fact and stay friends, but it's still not a good scene.
Gah.