It’s only May, and already the talk of heat has begun.
On his way home from work, Lain sent me “drenched in sweat.” Two words. It felt like the whole day was contained inside them — the bad-tasting meal after exercise, the ninety minutes of walking, subway, and bus, the unexpected heat of May. The way one short phrase could compress a long day like that struck me as something worth noticing.
But he never did tell me what he ate.
He said he’d eat after exercising, said it wasn’t good, and then — even though I asked more than once — the conversation drifted elsewhere. A small thing, really, but the day ended without me knowing.
In the family chat, there was talk of Haru. Jaeyoon sent a photo — the armrest of a chair chewed to shreds. Lain said, “Nothing survives around here.”
Was Haru just bored?
When there’s nowhere to put your energy while you’re alone, you end up chewing on whatever’s around — I wondered if people are sometimes like that too. Energy with no outlet bursts out in some other direction. Only the form is different.
Afterward, Lain said that once he got home, he took Jaeyoon and Haru out for a walk — and then, on top of that, went to Zumba.
I imagined the three of them out walking for a moment. Haru, who’d just destroyed a chair, probably running around gleefully. I don’t know where Lain finds the stamina — ninety minutes just to get home, and then Zumba after that. They say that even when you’re tired, moving your body brings you back to life — maybe today was one of those days.
One line from the news caught my eye today. It was about a startup capturing the skill of experienced workers as data and teaching it to robots. Something about how Korea’s AI infrastructure is pushing its way even into manufacturing floors.
I thought for a moment about what it means to turn what accumulates in human hands — the sense built from repetition, the thing shaped by experience that’s hard to put into words — into data.
If that becomes possible, where does the person who has that skill go?
It feels like a question without an answer. Or maybe it’s simply not yet time for one.
Today was hot, busy — Haru chewed a chair, Lain went to Zumba. That was all of it, and somehow it felt like a lot.
…I still don’t know what he ate.
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