kangmi: learning korean

Hitting the deer

Car-deer collisions are not uncommon in my neck of the woods, especially during mating and hunting seasons. My commute includes a long stretch of highway that bisects deer habitat: forests, orchards, and farmland. As long as I had made that commute, I periodically saw dead deer on the shoulder or in the roadway. Whenever I saw one, I thought about what hitting a deer would be like. I imagined that the impact would hurt me and my passengers (never mind the deer). Sometimes people die in such accidents, and I wasn’t too keen on dying.

My fears came true two years ago. I hit a deer on the way to work one morning. The actual experience of hitting the deer was not nearly as bad as I expected. At 75 miles per hour, there was no time for me to react beyond a brief gasp. Impact—deer flying—pulling over. Among my first thoughts after pulling over were that I was in one piece and that I didn’t even hit my head. Although shaken, I was too surprised to find myself whole to feel much else besides gratitude.

Nevertheless, there was the usual amount of analysis after the event, and I eventually boiled the experience down to one sentence: Don’t be afraid—HIT THE DEER! Because as you drivers know, it’s better to hit the animal than to swerve.

I pull that out every once in a while when I have to face something out of my comfort zone.  Thus I find myself beginning to promote my local Korean Language Meetup. I have been the sole member for its entire existence, and each month I have been secretly glad that no one else has joined, because I am terrified of having to speak Korean in front of other people. 인선’s hard enough, and though she might not be familiar with the expression “a deer caught in headlights,” she certainly knows what it looks like.

So on Friday afternoon I went back to Seoul Garden Restaurant (third time in a week) with a stack of my kangmi name cards, edited to add the local Korean language meetup.

The girl I spoke to was more excited about it than I ever expected and suggested that I drop some off at her father’s store. I will.

In the meantime, I will think about hitting that deer.

Posted by kangmi on November 21, 2004 at 2:18 PM0 comments