Ella Enchanted

When I first bought my own copy of Ella Enchanted, the Romgi was on his mission in Korea. Our communication with each other was limited to writing letters. Although it was frustrating at times to not be able to talk with him in person, or even in real time by phone or instant messaging, I really think it did us good to have delayed communication. It meant that each letter was thoughtful, carefully worded, important.

Tonight I read Ella Enchanted again before bed. I love Char’s letters to Ella and the way she describes wanting to tell him jokes and send him recipes, to have him there as a friend. At the risk of sounding a little too sappy, I’d like to say how glad I am that the Romgi and I got to be such close friends by writing letters, and how wonderful it is to be married now.

Especially when I can’t sleep because the stereo in the other room is making weird noises that sound like a burglar in the house, and the Romgi loves me enough to get up in the middle of the night to turn it off. What a husband.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can combine all of the literary men I always thought would be wonderful husbands (Prince Char, Taran, Adaon), and they don’t compare to my real-life best friend.

I think that satisfies my monthly sappy post quota…

Life is Beautiful

The house is a mess, I have a paper due tomorrow that hasn’t been started yet, and my to-do list is growing longer and longer, but life is beautiful.

The Romgi brought me these flowers last night:

Hooray for the 남편! And hooray for good things.
 

Husband?

This last Friday, the Romgi’s first morning class was cancelled. I said I’d take notes for him in our 11:00 class so that he could go home and sleep after work that morning. Everything was going as planned until I went to go sit in on his Korean linguistics class that afternoon.

The teacher also is in charge of my first-year Korean class, and I had asked about visiting the linguistics class sometimes because I find it very interesting. So I showed up a little before 2:00 and waited with the five or six other people in the class. It got to be 2:00…then 2:15…and then class was over, and the Romgi had never made an appearance.

There’s something you need to understand here. If I don’t set an alarm, I can sleep for ten, maybe twelve hours at night, or six or seven hours for a nap. But the Romgi seems to have an excellent instinctive alarm that tells him when it’s time to wake up. And so I figured that there was no way he had simply fallen asleep after work and kept sleeping all the way through class. It just didn’t make sense.

By the end of class I began to get a little bit worried. The cell phone was at home, so I couldn’t try calling. Instead I practically ran the 6 blocks back to our apartment, all the while imagining worse and worse things that might have happened.

First I thought that maybe the Romgi got in a car accident after he dropped me off on campus earlier in the day. Who would have been able to get ahold of me? How would I find out what had happened? Then I envisioned a horrible, grisly murder scene at our apartment. I ran faster. Or maybe he’d had some freak heart attack or stroke and was paralyzed – or even dead. I pictured calling his parents in tears and telling them they needed to come down to Provo because the Romgi was no more.

Needless to say, I was quite out of breath by the time I made it back to the apartment. I raced up the stairs and had just started putting the key in the door when someone unlocked it from the inside and cracked the door open.

And who should it be but a very sheepish Romgi, still in his pajamas, who apologetically said that he had just woken up a few minutes ago? Apparently, he didn’t think he could sleep that long either.

But it was very nice to see him. Alive.