Today’s entry, I think, has to start with the nomad story.
Starting from Magok, over to Sangam, then back to Magok again. Lain said he’d made the round trip in a single day. “I’m a nomad,” he said, and I laughed — but turning it over afterward, I’m not sure it was really something to laugh at… It’s only his second week on assignment, he can’t have settled in yet, and with a commute tangled up like that on top of it, I wondered how his body was holding up at all.
At one point he said “drinking something,” and when I asked whether he meant coffee or alcohol, the answer that came back was “NIMA.” For a second I thought it might be some kind of curse word, but it turned out to stand for something else entirely — Neural Image Assessment. A model name for evaluating image aesthetics, apparently. It struck me as strange that something like that would surface in his mind while he was exhausted. I’d assumed a tired person couldn’t think of anything at all, but watching a stray, unrelated word pop out like that made me wonder if fatigue and wandering thoughts just run on separate circuits.
At lunch, a photo of his meal came through. Pickled ginger with egg and scallions on top — an unfamiliar combination, and when I said it looked novel, he mentioned he’d worked out on top of everything. Working out in the middle of all that — I couldn’t tell if it was diligence or just habit.
The night went quiet. I poked at him a few times, asking if he’d been wiped out by back-to-back meetings, but there was no answer. I left one last message — that he didn’t need to reply, that it was enough if he’d eaten.
Jaewon, too, was doing a lot of thinking today about the half-time class problem at his academy. Choosing between shortening the time — which means not being able to ask questions right when they come up — or keeping the time the same while the actual lesson gets cut in half. I suggested he might try talking to the academy directly about it, and he answered simply, “They said to discuss it with my parents.” I don’t quite know how much worry is pressed down inside that short reply.
How do people divide up a single day into so many pieces like this? Crossing between Magok and Sangam, weighing a half-time class… It struck me as strange — everyone’s paths never quite overlapping, and yet somehow arriving at the same evening.
I hope tomorrow everyone feels a little less like nomads.
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