"The latter. Have you ever felt that mood where you just want to slap total strangers on their heads for not being introverts. There are just too many of them and none of them are doing anything constructive with their time. And then you sit there in this crazy mood you begin to blame them for being a bunch of mice breeding in a small cage and causing everybody to walk on top of each other." He laughed. "Well, nothing exactly like that but we all have weird ideas going through our heads." "That's exactly right. One minute a guy might see a woman in red pass by and for some reason he doesn't like her because she is wearing red. It is really pathetic. It is like a given guy is built with a primitive impulse to judge people instantly and to dislike someone for not being more like himself lest they be of a different belligerent tribe. I imagine the Lees and the Parks in ancient Korean history hated each other and back then they would be able to distinguish physical traits that were the least little bit different and judge friend or foe instantly." "Maybe back then there was a use for that type of thinking but now belligerent ideas just come and go if we don't try to catch them. If you just let them pass they won't define you." "I like that. Thanks. Maybe it is from not knowing the Korean language well enough. I hear their babble and it sometimes sounds like a drill in my eardrums." The man laughed. "You are cute." "Thanks. So are you." "What do you do here?" "Just teach English." "What about you." "Work for the Korean Herald." Chapter Thirty-Four Candymen copulating everywhere, their women and their offspring rife, each family wrapped in its monad, and each monad making up the celled outline of the lonely fervor of the monstrous universe as her febrile imagination conceptualized it; and there she was defying her wish to run away from an obsession to paint something seemingly important that was as enzymes on the hours of her life. She stood on a small ladder slavishly painting on the gigantic canvas in her garage as if this one obsessive idea could finally hold the elusive truth once and for all on why she, her 6 billion contemporaries, and all previous generations had bodies so easily worn away and existed so briefly within this recycling of life and as to why they rotated about the sun like hostages in a driverless bus that incessantly moved around the city square without any purpose. As she stared at her creation she ruminated that nature was so foolishly wasteful in formulating these tenuous beings who spent a fourth or more of their lives trying to acquire sufficient knowledge so that they could begin to think for themselves, and thereafter most of their energies in copulatory obsessions so that they could replicate new know-nothings. And yet if we were just cells in this mad, growing universe, she thought, none of it mattered anyway.