Reruns

With a limited number of channels in English at any one time, I have been guilty of watching some pretty awful t.v. in the past few months in the name of post work malaise.  After a childhood spent hunting the program, (and sometimes being denied it for taking over an hour to eat my dinner), I now have access to an unlimited supply of America's Funniest Home Videos.   I guess blows to the groin cross all cultural boundaries.  I'll place my own naivety clearly on display when I tell you, I've never noticed how many of the people featured on this show are drunk.  But I can't say it doesn't make sense.

Nickel Backing

Dear internet,

After about a decade of mediocre guitar playing, certain individuals have been foolish enough to allow me into a band.  We are playing a show this Friday and the event utterly dominates my life at the moment.  I hope we can pick up where we left off sometime next week when I have realized the fleeting nature of celebrity and dedicated my life to orchids.

Until then,

-K

P.S. Wish me luck.

I now pronounce you incorrectly

Late of course, but only by four minutes.  Four minutes rounded between late and not is definitevly not.  It's simple math.

The wedding had already started.

Which is embarassing, or would have been, I mean I would have expected it to be.  But this is Korea and guests were in jeans. 

Now not everyone was wearing jeans.  In fact most people were dressed nice.  The bride of course looked gorgeous.  Her dresss glittered with sequins catching the light or winking diodes running off a thigh strapped generator.  She wore a tiara like a third grade princess for a day.  What I'm saying is there was a variety of dress like there was a variety of attitudes; those sitting in the pews as silent witnesses to the committment of the new weddlings and those standing in a crowd that stretched from the backs of the last seats to the wide doors leading to the hotel hallway, chatting in loose circles or on their cell phones and generally coming and going and then coming again. 

The ceremony was Western style, by which I mean that the bride wore white, the groom wore black and when it was time to take pictures at the alter they employed both a fog and a bubble machine.  Still at the alter the hotel staff wheeled out a decorative multi-layered cake that was efficiently sliced once,  his left and her right hand on the handle, and then wheeled away never to be seen again.  The newly bound sets of parents crowded in for the obligatory silly picture, the theme of this one apparently "most grevious corporate merger face."  Then even I got to join in the fun as the friends came up for a group picture.  I smiled for the camera and laughed along with the everyone when a groomsman made a real zinger in Korean and didn't speak because I didn't know anyone or their capacity for English.  We took three pictures of the bride tossing her bouquet to the prearranged female who stood alone behind her to get it just right. 

At the lunch buffet in the basement, I filled up my plate with medicore things early in the line and was disapointed to find really good spaghetti on the last table.  While we had been deciding where to hand in our envelope of money for the couple, they evidently enjoyed a quick bite and, excited to start their new life together, left.  Brittney forgot to put the battery back in her camera and so there are no pictures.  We sat with an older woman who finished shortly after we began our meal.  From ceremony to leftovers, the wedding lasted about an hour and a half.  Less if you weren't hungry, more if you decided to stay and drink with the older men wearing fedoras. 

Rear ended in the ankle

It was not last weekend but the one before that I was hit by the car.  I desperately wish that I had more to show for it.  Even saying the word 'hit' isn't accurate, it's for effect instead of a description.  I was bumped, no I was nudged, no I was pawed at.  At around three in the morning hanging around outside the bar a I was pawed by a car. 

The downtown of Daegu is a compact place.  Shops and restaurants and bars and boutiques are crammed beside above and below each other.  The narrow streets have no sidewalk, no deliniation at all, so the result is that people flow around the cars as the cars gently try and wade through them.  Gently being the operative word.  Gently being the reason that my ankle is still using all its original parts. 

I'll admit it, I didn't realize the car was behind me.  I'm working on a system of face mounted mirrors to make sure it never happens again.  I was jovial and then the right tire made contact with my left ankle and crept up it just a little.  When I say crept up I mean the tire spun and gripping my skin it pull but in the moment it felt like the tire was off the ground an inch.  At this point I pivoted my body and slammed my hands repeatedly on the hood of the car Donkey Kong Country style (I tried to find a video for reference but they were all too long.  If you know then you know.)  The driver, (young male, Asian, average build), had a heart attack and backed his car up, which at that moment was the exact combination of physical and physiological reactions I was looking for.  My ankle was black from the tire rubber and I was missing a track of hair, but my ankle's integrity was uncompromised.  I walked over to the drivers side window and told him that I was fine in what I hope was a stern voice but probably came off as very excited.  Pictures were taken, but it just looked like an ankle. 

How disapointing.

Walk me home

The time is 4:58pm in Daegu, South Korea as I sit in front of my computer in my apartment after a long day.  I have recently left school. 

Even more recently than that I have walked down through the main gate only to be intercepted by a stooped and wizen grandmother, your typical elderly Korean ajuma: black parachute pants spotted pink, loose fitting synthetic track jacket (also pink), and wrap around visor (purple billed, pink brimmed, with twinkling silver starburts) around a grey perm.  She grabs my arm  and begins, I assume, to tell me her life story. 

In at least a dozen different moments, all of them well before this one, I have been lectured on the importance on showing all possible respect to the elderly in Korean society.  The relationship between the young and the old is so important here for propriety, that Koreans uses the West's relative lack there of to explain why we need to fill the holes in our hearts with pets.

Only a bit more recently than when she first latched onto me, she leads me down the street.  She raises my forarm to her mouth with both hands, presses it to her lips and lays down a flourish of kisses.  "Mwahmwahmwahmwahmwahmwah," she says into my arm.  I stop us and try to tell her that I  need to go.  She responds by pull pulling at my shoulders and puckering her lips.  Just very recently I have learned how to handle this situation better, but in this moment I do not have the applicable life experience, and in the moment I do not stand up straight and draw the line for this old woman, but allow my back to bend.  She is planting kisses on my lips now, "mwahmwahmwahmwahmwah."  Very soon after this begins I gently recoil, still somehow afraid of hurting her feelings.  Her eyes are glass and her smile is crooked.  She does not understand me in Korean, she does not understand me in English, but I believe she understands that she's just gotten away with something.  Where her teeth should be there are little bits of gray, like tiny pebbles poking through her gums.

More recently than that I walk down the street with her along side the school.  A pack of boys passes and askes me what was happening.  "I don't know", I say.  She and they speak.  Unable to understand her, the bow to her very politely and hurry away.  One of my teachers drives past.  "Do you know what's going on here?" she asks through her open window.  "I have no idea," I tell her.  She speaks to the old woman.  She does not know what she is saying.  "I think she has dementia," she says, pointing to her head.  "You can just leave whenever."

I am glad someone says this.  I am glad I haven't been selected by the principal's mother.  But it was quite a while ago before this that I decided I would see these sort of situations through.  It's in large part due to that decision that I more recently found myself in a small shop that I often frequent for sandwhiches still in Her care.  She attempts to buy us coffee, but they have no coffee.  She pours the last of the cup of water I served myself on the floor, digs out a litre of plum juice from her dense purse and pours me two cups.  The rest she chuggs from the carton.  Girls from my school ask me if I know what's going on.  I say no.  There is real compassion in their eyes, but they cringe away when the old woman turns her attention on to them.  "What did she say?" I ask them.  "I don't know," one of the girls tells me, then, "that we were pretty."  The old ajuma comes back to me.  Standing while I sit, we are at eye level.  She tries for more kisses but luckily I had recently aquired some life experience in this area.  I stone wall her.  I point at the time on my phone, I allow her a small peck on the cheek.   We are leaving.  I expect the girls to laugh but they don't.  They have grandmothers.  I hope this is a display of solidarity.

Very recently I waved at the old ajuma over my shoulder as she stood and waved at me with both hands, cackling in what is safe to say nearly unintelligable Korean.  Although, at 5:52 in the evening in Daegu, South Korea, it's getting less recent all the time.


*If any grammar enthusiasts want to work through even a few of the dozens of tense mistakes I've made in here I'd be grateful. 

Monday's Snack Food Wrap Up: Cheez Curlz

 On the docket today are Cheez Curlz, brought to me by "America's BEST Canister snacks" brand snacks.  Amidst the foil bags filled mostly with air that make up the heavily salted section of the Dong-A department store, these curlz stood like a turret in their "convenient, reclosable and durable canister."  Boastful snacks such as these do not ask to be taken to the cashier, they only hope for your sake that you're going to make the right choice.

The first thing you notice as you crack the seal beneath the yellow lid is the smell.  The tinny musk that I first discovered when I stuck my nose into the canister is going strong even after sitting open for an hour and a half. The curlz glow a troubling orange, far more aggressive than the inviting orange-brown display on the package.  I will give them this though; it's packed near full with very little deceitful air inside.  If I'm going to eat bits of nuclear Garfield then I'm at least glad I'm getting as very much of it as I can.

The cheez curlz is an insidious thing.  With the first bite into each curl, my gut droops trying to slide out of the way of the pungent tangy chemicals that pop in my mouth. I chew with a grimace.  Somewhere though, between this first bite and when I swallow the orange capsule rearranges itself, the ingredients mixing together like a secret agent's cyanide pill to become something familiar.  I am left with the striking and nostalgic aftertaste of Kraft's Classic "Kraft Dinner".  My brain, swelling with the positive links to my childhood, forces out the details of that first bite three seconds ago.  Thoroughly mind controlled, I am going back to the canister again, and again...

Closing Remark: Don't buy these unless you're three and a half months into a year's contract in South Korea and you're so desperate for a taste of home that you're considering buying the expensive import toothpaste and then eating it.