23 January 2023 – January Blues a Week Late

I believe Blue Monday (as it’s called) was actually on the 16th, but for me it hit today, and it hit real hard.

It probably doesn’t help that the weather is grey and misty, that sort of drab winter day already designed to make you feel down. I’m officially on leave this week (as I still have too much left to carry over to next year), but of course, I haven’t got anything planned – except trips to the tip if I can summon up the energy (this is harder than before the pandemic, as I have to book in advance and there’s no way to cancel once booked, so I feel guilty if I don’t turn up because I’ve had a panic attack and can’t make it out of the flat, which in turn then makes me feel even worse).  

My energy levels are still low after Friday’s excitement and when I woke up this morning I felt the urge to just turn over and go back to sleep – to not bother getting out of bed at all. I did finally manage to get up, but then spent an hour scrolling through Twitter, liking all the posts about Pentagon and the hourly Yanan (Pentagon member) photos, before finding the get-up and go to do some washing.

At which point I discovered the washing machine has stopped working 😭.

This was enough to completely derail me, so I won’t achieve anything today because I just want to go back to bed and cry forever. I will need to get my act together at some point (not today) and go to the launderette (at least it will count towards me leaving the house, I guess) as handwashing is hard anyway – I can’t wring effectively because of the arthritis in my hands – and with no heating, the wet clothes will go mouldy before they have a chance to dry.

I can’t even begin to think about replacing the machine because ignoring the cost of a new washer/dryer, the last time I had to do it the experience was so expensive and stressful that I’m definitely not currently in the right frame of mind to be able to go through all that again. The one upside is that working at home means I don’t use that many clothes anyway, and as I haven’t had a clear out of my wardrobe for far too long, I could go several weeks without doing any washing if I really had to.

Okay, after what turned out to be quite a long break, I’m back. To calm my mind and relieve the stress over the washing, I made a list and very basic synopsis of my all-time top 10 Korean dramas and I thought that as I went to all that effort I might as well share it here in case it inspires anyone to watch them.

I did discover that none of my top 10 is what would be considered ‘happy’ dramas, although at least half of them do contain a romantic element. While there might be a happy ending, none of them is the cute romantic comedies so beloved and recommended by most people, although number 10 is very popular. I guess, given my own mental health issues, it’s unsurprising that stories featuring these types of health problems are of more interest to me.

1.    Kill Me Heal Me (2015) – a third-generation company CEO with a dissociative disorder (7 different personalities) secretly enlists a resident psychiatrist to try to cure him before his scheming family finds out and takes the company away from him. This isn’t helped by her twin brother, a writer, who knows he has a secret and is determined to uncover and publish it.

 

2.    Missing: The Other Side (2020) – a man gets beaten and almost killed after witnessing a kidnap. He finds himself in a strange village filled with dead people, whose bodies have never been found. Somehow he and one other, who has spent years searching for his missing daughter, can move between the two worlds and they search to find the bodies of the villagers so they can move on. Helping them is a policeman whose girlfriend was the one kidnapped, although he obviously doesn’t believe in the dead village.

 

3.    Jirisan (2021) – telling stories about the mountain rangers of Jirisan National Park and the work they do, keeping people safe and rescuing them. Amidst this, they discover there is a serial killer, who is using the park as their playground.

 

4.    The Red Sleeve (2021) – the real-life love story between King Yi San and his favourite consort, Sung Deok Im, who can’t be his official wife because of her status, but also doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life unable to leave the palace because she’s his concubine.

 

5.    Beyond Evil (2021) – a serial killer’s work is oddly reminiscent of a series of unsolved murders from 20 years before. 2 detectives team up to solve it, but end up questioning everything, including themselves.

 

6.    Mouse (2021) – a kind, steadfast and mild-mannered police officer’s life changes after he encounters a psychopathic serial killer. It examines whether psychopaths can ever feel remorse for their actions, and asks whether, if you could scan fetal material for the psychopath gene, should you let the child live if it has it.

 

7.    Happiness (2021) – a special forces policeman and her ex-pro-baseball player turned policeman best friend pretend to be married to get access to a luxury flat, just as a new virus pandemic breaks out, leaving people as monsters who crave blood. Quarantined inside the luxury block, and with rampant class discrimination, greed, and selfishness rife among the various residents, it becomes a battle for survival, and not just from the disease.

 

8.    It’s Okay, That’s Love (2014) – an OCD novelist and a psychiatrist who has strong negative feelings about love, clash every time they meet as they’re both so competitive. However, over time they begin to fall for each other. But then they discover that his mental issues are far more serious than they originally suspected.

 

9.    A Korean Odyssey (2017) – a modern-day Korean retelling of the classic Chinese Journey to the West/Monkey story, following a woman who is able to see spirits. She was tricked by the Bull Demon King into freeing the Monkey King when she was a child and has been paying the price for it ever since. Reunited 25 years later, the Monkey King is trapped into fulfilling the promise he made to the girl, to allow her to seek help from him whenever she calls him. But neither of them is aware of her true destiny, nor of his role in helping her to fulfil it.

 
10. Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (Goblin) (2016) – a great military general is framed and killed by his king as a traitor, and cursed to remain on earth as an immortal, watching his loved ones die again and again. He is a kind man who becomes a Goblin, helping people, while spending centuries searching for the only person who can finally kill him and end his suffering, the Goblin Bride. In the modern day, some 900 years after his original death, he encounters by chance a group of people who are not strangers but deeply interwoven with his own story.

Interestingly, my Chinese drama top 10 list is nowhere near as serious, with all of them being primarily romance-based. This is probably because I haven’t seen that many Chinese dramas yet and I’ve been focussing on series with actors I know, and they tend to do modern or period romance, Wuxia (martial arts) or Xianxia (fantasy action); all genres that feature prominently in my list.    

I did manage to order some shopping as my body is asking for salad again, and when I’m already feeling lousy I don’t need to feel any worse by not eating the right thing. I’m going to put that away and make another cup of tea (Golden Yunnan today) and then I’m going to start rewatching a K-drama from 2013 called I Hear Your Voice. It's quite low on my all-time list given that I remember really enjoying it at the time, but I think it will ease my mind still further rather than any of the current dramas I’m watching.

Every so often I like to rewatch a drama I remember enjoying when I first started out, as time has sent them down the list, and they probably should be higher. Some, like Secret Garden, really haven’t stood the test of time (for me, at least, I know it’s still popular with a lot of people) and can be extremely problematic plot-wise. Goblin had moved steadily downwards over the years until I rewatched it fairly recently and remembered just how good it was compared to some of the newer, more highly-rated shows. Some end up staying in roughly the same place, but then I know I probably won’t get the urge to rewatch them again in the future.

There are a couple from right at the bottom of my list that I should rewatch as they always get good reviews and are regularly recommended as being amazing; Cheese in the Trap, particularly springs to mind. But I thought so little of the drama last time (I only rated it 2* at the time, so I must have thought it really terrible), that I find it hard to bring myself to rewatch it.   

Before I go it’s time to say Happy Birthday to Yuto from Pentagon – our cute Japanese rapper. Also, to Wyatt from ONF, who coincidentally is also a rapper.

Yuto (Pentagon) and Wyatt (ONF)