For the first time in a long while, I found myself rolling around on the ground.
It was the day my college entrance exam results came out.
I was so happy I rolled and rolled and kept rolling.
It felt like I’d already become an artist.
A month, two months went by after I started, and it didn’t take long for that dreamlike feeling to fade.
Classes were boring, and even as a first-year I was already seeing guys angling to line up with the TA-professor track, and I started seeing the whole rotten system of the art industry, or at least this corner of it.
Looking back now, sure, everyone’s just trying to make a living — but back then, maybe because I was so soaked in punk spirit, that kind of system disgusted me even more, and having already been badly burned once by the church system made it worse.
I was young.
That’s just how it was back then — I was right, you were wrong.
Whatever it was, I was the center of it.
Anyway, I still had to graduate, so I’d show up near school and log my attendance, but I basically gave up on any real intention of actually painting.
If I hated the system that much I should’ve just dropped out, but I guess I couldn’t let go of the diploma, since I stuck around and graduated anyway — which says something pretty two-faced and shabby about the kind of person I am.
The moment I started college, I began teaching watercolor to kids at Saramdeul Art Academy.
Four hours a day, three days a week, which came out to 360,000 won a month.
The next year it was 600,000, the year after that 900,000.
My mom told me to put 300,000 won a month into a five-year savings plan.
I said, are you crazy, then what am I supposed to live on?
We argued for a bit, and then she said,
“I’ll chip in 150,000 won a month for the first year.”
Really?
Okay, hmm, let me think about it, haha.
Anyway, that savings plan would, a few years later, become my very first studio and recording space.
Around the end of my first year, some classmates and I started a Nirvana cover band.
During winter break we set up a drum kit and a couple of cheap little amps in the empty studio room and had a blast.
It was so cold that if you bought a can of vending-machine coffee, it’d turn to ice within an hour.
We played a set at a department event, and overall it turned into a pretty good memory.
When I say
“kids,”
I really just mean students one or two years younger than me, or even the same age.
The idea that I was teaching other people just because I’d started school a year earlier made me feel a little full of myself, I think — and I guess I was also genuinely starting to enjoy teaching, in my own way.