I got up this morning, after actively snooze-ignoring the alarm clock for an hour. Since Natalie fried my alarm clock I brought here from the States, I've been using my cell phone. Not unusual for this part of the world, it's got about 20 pre-programmed "morning tunes" that are so astonishingly horrible they levitate me out of bed and set me into a nearly frantic, reeling consciousness. Every five minutes. Plus iTunes turns on KJZZ a bit after the first cell phone ditty. Between the two, I'm usually in the shower shortly before 10.

This morning I sat in the shower on a small Vietnamese stool I purchased for just that and felt cemented into a hot-water relaxation that nearly sent me back to sleep. Instead, I shaved. At that hour, it's difficult for me to focus properly. Not in the eyeballs-dialating-from-the-morning-sunshine-searing-rods-and-cones sort of way, but in a do-shoes-come-before-or-after-pants kind of way. My brain is stuttering between first and second gear and I make a lot of needless trips back and forth across the apartment.

Anyway, I was out the door and walking down the street shortly after 11. Around the corner from the apartment building is a barber shop, more properly a "beauty salon" although all they really do is cut hair. It was remodeled about three months ago; maybe slightly longer than that. It changed from the "Hair Shop" to "Black and White", trading up a forthright directness for the more commonplace and dubious knack of bizarre-but-kind-of-nice combination of an off-kilter reality vs. concept that makes up an everyday English speakers' Asian background noise. I've been waiting for the owner to make an appearance in the shop for about a week now. I've got a small note that I keep in my pocket on a folded sheet of 4.5x5.5 Xerox paper requesting another fine, fine haircut. The problem is that the owner is the only one who can do that, as it was she who cut my hair last time. She's generally only there when I'm passing by in the morning, which doesn't help me at all. I've got to get to work.

There are two more restaurants I've never tried and then a small intersection of narrow one-way streets; some pay-phones, a convenience store, the Gwan-Ak KT MegaPass branch office and a spicy tofu place. I turn right, walk up a small hill, past the park where the trees, I think, are starting to bud. I was looking at the branches this morning, but I couldn't really tell if the things I was looking at were leaf buds or just the remainders of the stubs the old leaves left behind when they fell off last October.

Past the park is a dry cleaners that has a PC room above it. Another convenience store after that. Then more restaurants, a church and then there's the main north-south road. There's always a lot of construction and traffic at that intersection and I generally have to dodge people in the bus line, old guys out for an early lunch, students hurrying somewhere, and guys walking around with two-ton marble curbs.

Starbucks is usually half-full of studious university students and perhaps a few professors. There are usually some mid-40s couples and maybe a kid or two tottering around the tea stand. One misstep could take the entire thing down, raining an entire Boston Branch Starbucks Tea Party around an unsuspecting two year-old. The baristas (is that word actually applicable to Starbucks employees?) know what I want, which is good for my misfiring brain that has accidentally asked for a "Vegetable of the day" instead of a "Coffee of the day" before, as my Korean is not nearly as wired into my brain as my pants-shoes syntactic circuits.

Out, under the street through the busy subway terminal, up the other side, past the bank and I'm upstairs in the faculty room shortly after 11:25. The day has begun.