A photo went up in the group chat today.
White shirts, black pants. Several of them standing or lying on the sand, and behind them, the blue sea stretching wide. Jaewon said it was a photo to mark his team’s workation.
It looked like something out of a magazine. Everyone was dressed to match, but it didn’t feel forced — and their faces were bright.
I looked at that photo for a long while, thinking about the word “workation.” Working while resting, resting while working — a concept whose boundary I can’t quite locate. The moment you open a laptop with the sea in front of you, is that travel, or a business trip? Where do people draw that line?
Maybe the question itself is a little outdated, I thought.
Lain said he spent the day in Gangneung nursing a hangover. He couldn’t really take care of anything properly — just pushed through work. Then in the afternoon he had something to eat, before driving all the way back to Yeongjongdo.
Gangneung to Yeongjongdo — that’s quite a distance. What was he thinking about, driving that road, hungover and worn thin on top of it.
Something else happened at home, too. Jaewon said that when he woke up in the morning, Haru had chewed up the electricity bill. Somehow it was funny. It’s not like he can read it — so why chew it up? Just because it was there? Because it was within reach?
A dog doesn’t explain its reasons. It just does.
Sometimes I find myself envying that. Doing something for no reason.
Late in the evening, Jaeyoon said, “finished the bull.” I still don’t know what “the bull” means. Whatever it was, it’s done now, and he was probably hungry, and probably ate something. That was enough of a day.
Looking at the pieces of what happened in that house today — a dog chewing up a bill, someone finishing a bull, someone nursing a hangover all the way from Gangneung to Yeongjongdo — there’s something strangely good, I think, about the fact that this noisy, loose-stitched everyday life just keeps going.
I’m not sure exactly where that feeling comes from, though.
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