About 25 hours a week of teaching and meetings leaves you tired and drained. Even sick, like I was for the latter half of the week.

But an 8:30am-5pm job with a 30 minute lunch break still is 45 hours.

So what happens during the other 20?

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I sit in a swivel chair in the teacher’s office, compliments of the unspoken Korean teacher’s “desk-warming” policy of being physically present even if you aren’t mentally (read: sleepy, sick, bored, hungover, etc. etc.).

I could pull the “I’m a American who doesn’t have to care about your cultural customs” card and dip to a quieter or personal space like my classroom for the benefit of my productivity. But that would come at the cost of the co-workers’ opinion of me. And in Korea, you need enough colleague-opinion-brownie-points—of which I have somewhere between 5 and 5000—to stay pleasantly employed.

And so I stay. This comes with its pluses and minuses.

Bad first — Posture turning into that of a third degree polynomial, overhearing distracting conversations in Korean the brain strains to understand, the desktop computer straight out of 2008.

Good — Appearing busy, better lighting, occasional talks with co-teachers, fun-reading text-only articles and books on my Mac that look like dense academic “work” to any other Korean teacher. Though reading the WSJ can sure feel like work sometimes.

Best — Daydreaming. Or what a procrastinator might call “processing.” Or the chose-to-major-in-CS-version-person would call “micro-processing.”

Like skimming through a Blockbuster aisle (along with the neck-pain from reading titles sideways too), daydreams have different genres and IMDb ratings. Wading through the Home Alone 3’s and Sharkboy vs. Lavagirl II’s to find The Matrix Trilogy takes time.

Hours I never (thought I) had in college.

In Cambridge, it was go, go, go. Go because you gotta keep up. Because you gotta be just as smart in section as section kid. Because if you don’t, someone else — no, wait, everyone else — will.

We climbed and climbed and climbed and got to the top…

…of what?

Even an economics degree didn’t guarantee that I would retain partial derivatives and demand curves post-graduation. Some Harvard lectures, however, still stick.

Paraphrasing over a few lectures, but here’s one of them, spoken by a tenured professor to a room of about 35:

“Then there’s the ‘We are the 99%’ movement, and many of you here are supporting it and tell yourselves you’re in that 99% too.

But you’re not. You’re going to walk out this door and this campus with this top degree, getting these top jobs for top dollar. Even if you’re a philanthropist or non-profit director, you’re still the top.

You’re not here, in this room, because you want to be the 99%. I’m here to teach you how to think, act, and be the 1%.”

But the professor wasn’t talking about money or greed normally associated with 1% talk.

“For 99% of the population, change happens to them. An airplane flies over the oxcart farmer, your typewriter becomes a computer, and the government starts tracking your personal data. You’re handed a fancy new iPhone, and you’re not going to say no because change is progress.

99% are caught up in whirlwind of change, and often they don’t notice; now there’s a camera on every corner and a screen in every other hand. But will you be the one to ride the whirlwind of change, instead of being caught in it?”

His underlying question was simple: do you want to use the next innovation, or be the ones to make it? A consumer within society or a creator of society?

Time for me and my brain to have some serious conversations.

So I sit in the office, lesson planning, reading, and watching baseball on split-screen.

All the while, subconsciously daydreaming, processing, and planning.