Happy New Years to My Face

Among other things, my plans for 2009 included partaking in more healthy activities, developing hobbies that don't include bottles or sass, and not falling on my head.

Then I fell on my face.

It's like I lost 2009 already.

Somehow I ended up by the Lotte in Seomyeon, where I felt I needed to go underground to cross the street. I did not actually need to cross the street there, but I don't have my bearings in Seomyeon at the best of times; just short of 5am on New Year's Day I was a lost cause.

You know when you begin to feel yourself falling, and unless you have some sort of special training which involves falling gracefuly, your options are to either accept the fall, or try to sort of run into it in the hopes of catching up with yourself? I tried the latter. Down a flight of stairs.

To make a long story short, this did not end well: My left eye is swollen shut due to a gaping laceration above the brow, both of my knees are purple, as is my hip and various points on my arms. Judging by the pain that is endured when I sleep on one side, one of my ribs may be bruised. My tongue is swollen from where I bit it during the fall. My right thumb is bruised, probably from gripping my purse during the fall.

It's not all bad. I conveniently fell right into a group of young men who immediately called an ambulence. A friend of mine conveniently called to see where I ended up, right as I was ending up at the hospital. Later, another friend and as well as my supervisor came to collect me and ensure that I was still Everybody's Neurotic Friend. When I was at my worst, the troops rallied around me and everything fell into place. I have many things to feel fortunate for.

Tomorrow was to be my first day of work, and I'm pretty peeved that I have to miss it on account of my own idiocy. Frankly, that part hurts more than the surface wounds. As much as it might not seem so given that I can be a total dick about just about everything, I wouldn't have come back for round two if I didn't take my role as an EFL Teacher seriously. This isn't exactly how I planned on starting the year off. I'll make it up to everybody. Somehow.

I wish that I could say that I'm going to walk away from this having learned some invaluable life lesson, but the truth is there's nothing that I'm going to change that wasn't already in motion. At most, this just reaffirmed that the changes I had already planned were a step in the right direction.

I hope that New Year's found the rest of you folk Happy. Here's to not falling on our faces in 2009. Literally. I encourage face splatting in the figurative sense.