He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long. The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he secretly wished-the tattered man that he was. He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study) that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness. Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still, Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum, saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one (in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was.