Two In-Laws, a Baby, Three Dogs, and a Cat (#12)

The weekend passes, and when it is over, I remember that it was Super Bowl Weekend in America. In this apartment of four and a half people and four pets, in Busan, it was the car breaking down and the baby kicking over a tree and Matt's frantic search for a doctor weekend.

Here's what happened on Sunday:

In the morning, my brother-in-law, still in cursed Michigan, calls about a bad dream, warning his wife to stay in the house. Cathreen, with her two sisters and their babies, go to a department store where they plan to shop for seven hours. She asks me if I want to go.

They stop off for coffee and the baby kicks a divider into a tree which falls over and almost kills people. I have trouble picturing this, but this is what happens. He has super strong kicks. The cafe gets angry. I picture them turning on the baby, but what can they do, he's a baby.

Maybe they don't believe he's that strong, so they turn the sisters out. Five hours of shopping later, the fam pick me up for dinner. We eat fatty pork and salted baby shrimps until my stomach wants to return home.

On the way, we stop for gas. When we leave the station, the car chokes like a motorcycle, vibrates like a bad massage chair. The baby loves it. We manage to get home by driving slowly, blinking our hazard lights. I pray to God we do not explode.

At home is the message I've been waiting for, from a med-student who will tell me how to finish my novel. I write happily. I get other distressing emails. I watch a movie and get in a bad mood.

I try to make Cathreen make me feel better.

When I wake up from a stress-dream sleep, I tutor and come home as the Super Bowl is ending. I eat more lunar new year food. Facebook tells me I have 106 friends. Most of these people I "know." I check my email again and return to my bad mood.

I flail about online, thinking about unavailable jobs, unavailable apartments, until I realize I am being overdramatic. I realize when I wrote "know" in quotations, it sounded Biblical. I realize I only counted the baby as half a person. Still, I press "publish post."