Deja vu

My experiences thus far in Korea have been faintly reminiscent of something I've done before--but I've never done anything like this! Some of the memories I've had over the last two and a half weeks remind me of something because it feels as if the memories are older than they should be. But I can never place what they remind me of.

An example comes from my second cousin, Mary (her uncle Bill is my grandfather). We were chatting on Facebook yesterday afternoon (Korean time) when she mentioned that she wanted to get to my blog updates before Uncle [Grandpa] Bill did. I told her that he seems proud of me for going all the way to Korea. She confessed that it was a very central part of his life. A vague something went off in my head when she said that; it wasn't surprising, as if the same conversation had taken place years earlier. I thought back to my grandfather's recent comment on his blog about my adventure: "Show your support, family." I remember going to the Yucatan for a week two years ago and something vaguely suggests that he might have said something like that then... But I don't know if he knew about it.

As another example, yesterday I asked one of my co-workers, Lauren, to find out how much it costs to call the US on my cell phone, as I had already made two such calls. I relayed the good news to the guys I work with, that it was only 9,630 won (about $9) for an hour. Andy commented, "[$50-$60] is about how much it would be to call on a US cell phone, though." Thinking back on the incident, it feels like it was much, much earlier than yesterday, as if this were a duplicate of something that had happened years ago. I wasn't surprised by the numbers.

All of these events feel like deja-vu. I've heard a couple of theories about this phenomenon: One, that it's a sign that you're directly in the will of God. And two, that sometimes there's a glitch (of sorts) in your brain and the memory makes it to long-term storage before it makes it to the short-term. It kind of feels as if both may be happening in this case. Maybe I've jst been absorbing so much because of the newness of everything and my heightened senses. Maybe it's like being born: You're never more alert in your whole life than you are in the first few weeks of life because of the environment you were just thrust into. You have to learn, to adapt, in order to survive. Maybe I've just been learning so much these last couple of weeks. At any rate, if the frequency of these "glitchtes" is any indication, I must be quite in the will of God!