I think if I had it my way, my work day would never finish, the club doors would never close and our Hulkies would never go home. I feel I have a purpose in Korea now, definitely more so than what I felt when I was running Flipside Fitness. Having said this though, sometimes I often feel the price I paid to get this feeling, to live my dream and make a spot for myself here, has been giving up my social life. My life is Hulk's, 24/7. The extent of my social life these days has been filling up my hours with Hulkie interaction and work related things -- catching up on business emails, text messaging Hulkies, organizing Hulk Family fun nights, and dinners with sponsors and prospective sponsors. I am very much all about our Hulkies and many of them have definitely become more like family to me than the simple coach-boxer relationship they originally signed up for. Consequently, I often find myself wishing our Hulks never went home after training. I have a few late nighters who train right up to closing and often they linger behind to chat with me. They almost always end our chat by apologising for keeping me up so late after closing but it's really not a problem at all and actually I quite like it. We used to have a solid crowd of Hulkies who always stuck around after Monday night training but one of them has since buckled down with his studies and doesn't come out as much, another went away for school, and one now helps run his father's business full time.
I've Incorporated this wish, to have more Hulkies around more often, into Phase 2 of Hulk's, via a "live-in club" option and a team bedroom that will be made available for our Hulkies and visiting boxers.
My life revolves around two main things: Hulk's and my training. They are both the best thing and hardest thing to digest because they are so interwoven into all other aspects of my life
I take both Hulk's and my training very seriously and very personally. Hulk's occupies my business life as much as it does my personal life and today by business life got way too personal when a neighbouring store owner ticked me off. I had tried to play it calm, cool and collective, but this particular store owner and I have had several sour run-ins before, some of which I should note included me sticking up for her daughter whom at the time I had been training.
This was my Facebook status update that I posted early this afternoon:
Pardon my French but I take a TON of shit for being a business owner in Korea who is
1. a female
2. a foreigner
3. young
...especially because I'm in a sport that's been labelled "not female-appropriate" or considered a "real career path". Today the neighbouring shop owner thought it OK to so rudely dispose of their ugly couch and bags of garbage on my front entrance so I thought it OK to pick up the couch and return it to their store, along with the trash.
—feeling like this is why people shoot each other.
I don't like this store owner. I don't like her at all. And the fact that she and I are both females and both business owners, I suppose I had assumed we could kind of relate to each other and be more supportive. No such luck. I feel embarrassed that she is a she; I never want to be the kind of female business owner that she is and I most definitely don't want to ever become that poor mentor she's proven herself to be to her younger daughter. I don't know how someone who has been so rude to me on such a continual bases can have such an incredibly sweet daughter. Her husband must be an incredible man, making up in sweetness for her sourness. It's been almost a year after I stopped training her daughter but her daughter still text messages me and occasionally asks me for food because her mother thinks the way to get her daughter to lose weight is to just not feed her properly. This drives me bonkers.
She parks in front of our no parking sign and often parks right in front of our stairs, thus blocking them. She occasionally throws her trash bags in front of our steps, greets Snickers but not me when we walk by, and she's laughed at me on numerous occasions when I've returned from running and am drowning in my own sweat. To tell you the truth, I could really care less what I look like after a workout and, if anything, I do take pride in just how down and dirty sweaty I get. For awhile there last summer she stopped walking out of her shop to laugh at me when I most randomly decided to whip off my tank top and wipe my face with it when her husband was there. "Your husband doesn't think my body looks funny!" I told her in Korean.
Tonight when I closed the club, that dang ugly couch was still outside. She and her annoying friend and the neighbouring shop had dragged it outside and down the street a bit. I knew she wasn't going to remove that couch like she had told not only me but also Snickers and K-Gere -- all three of us had approached her personally about it. Her SUV was once again parked in front of our club and I seriously pondered if I could heave that ugly couch high enough above my head to put it on her roof. Instead, I dragged that couch back to her store and propped it up against her store door. I'm fully expecting her to watch her CCTV camera tape tomorrow to see how it got there and I am most definitely expecting her to stomp into Hulk's and tell me off. Hope she's expecting to deal with Snickers too though because he is beyond dealing with her nonsense.
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