Top current 5:

A faux beach/swimming hole has been discovered fifteen minutes from my apartment.  I expect summer refreshment and broken DNA strand mutations.

Gord Downey's voice in City in Color's Sleeping Sickness.

A video that includes me playing rhythm guitar in a song about Tim Horton's coffee.

I get off at 12:30 in the afternoon until school gets back in session on August 25th.

The ache in my right side from the Tarzan vine-to-vine-swing simulation 40 feet up in the air at Herb Hillz, Korea's take on the amusement park.  (It's amusing.)

Bottom current 5:

I can't find the right floss here.  It's all ribbon style floss, which is less effective and less comfortable than your, lets call it 'original' style floss.

That the sharpies I bought to write a story on the guitar I bought are still unopened. 

That tomorrow is Tuesday and I have again not practiced my Korean in the interum between classes.

That I do not have the kind of certain faith I would like in the lesson I'm going to deliver to fifth and sixth graders tomorrow for my first day of summer camp.

That I always put you off.  I'm sorry, I'm working on that.  Good night no dog.

Those Nice Men.

The Nice Men are my daily conflict.  How do I treat them right?  It is a question of etiquette that I ask myself every day.

The Nice Men always sit at the back of the teacher's makeshift cafeteria, which in itself is actually a curtain pulled along a track to seperate us from a combination cooking/chemistry lab.  They are the male teachers, a minority at my school.  They are four spryish physical education teachers, one wizen math teacher, one Principle and one unknown.  Any combination, and on rare occasions all of them, will be seated by the time enter with my lunch. 

Koreans travel in flocks, eat in flocks and leave the table in flocks.  But I am not in sync, I come to the table late, I eat slow.  I can feel the strain as I sit, the last one eating at a table of men who have laid their chopsticks down and are now bound only by social moors.  When they finally get up, I hear the sound of twigs snapping.  Some of them say "I'm sorry," as they leave.

But I can't not sit with them.  I have looked at their near empty bowls and tried to hunker down at the next table so that they can leave with a clear concience.  But then I am certain I can feel them wondering why I didn't sit with them.  These Nice Men, I don't know how to treat them best.   

A bank like bigfoot

I wasn't sure why the police officer had taken my bank card, or if the middle aged woman who'se ID information he was taking down was mad at me, or if she'd even been in the bank the entire time that I was.  I had been wrestling with the ATM to try and transfer money to a travel agent for a summer escape to Taiwan.  When I hit cancel the machine had made a noise each time, but a police summons?  All my attention had been focused between the blinders of the automatic teller, and now I was being asked questions that didn't include what's your name, where are you from and what are your hobbies.  So of course I couldn't answer.  Instead I smiled.  I smiled at the police officer, I smiled at the woman who just went on and on, and I smiled at Brittney to make sure she was smiling too. 

Was I being accused of stealing this woman's card?  He looked over my card and her ID, writing things down.  My ID was not signed, I knew, because I have yet to find a pen that will write on the ultra slick surface furnished for one's John Hancock.  I phoned one of my teachers and then the next, looking for a translator.  No answer followed by no answer.  My smile was wearing out. 

"Password", the police officer said, holding my card up.  It was the first word of English he'd mustered.  My smile wore out.  And then, in comes my Korean deus ex machina.  Another officer, a flurry of words, what I preceived as a nod of his head signalling "over here", but who knows.  And then everyone's smiling, and my card is returned to me, and they're backing out of the bank repeating everything's fine, everything's fine.

I am left so confused.

Monday's Snack Food Wrap Up: Crayon Shin Chan

Today's snack comes highly recommended by Crayon Shin Chan, a sparkplug of a little Japanese manga boy.  With his little robot backpack, impetuous haircut and fantastically high right cheekbone, I imagine he gets into all sorts of half hour misunderstandings.  When I see him on t.v. I wave and then send him on his way with the channel up button, because no matter how long I watch him fidget and scream, I don't understand what he's trying to tell me.  AskJeeves-ipedia informs me that Crayon Shin Chan's humour revolves around misunderstandings and a youthful crassness, like asking tough looking men how many people they've killed and asking the elderly when they will die.  We may not share the international language of laughter, but as luck would have it, we shared a common tongue in small 66 gram bags of crispy barrel snacks.

Hard drinking soju-bunny included for scale reference.

Like someone who pretends to appreciate wine, the first thing I did when I opened by bag of Crayon Shin Chan barrel snacks was to stick my nose in there.  The slight ruddy tinge of the snack on the package had me thinking that what I had on my hands was some kind of chip offshoot of the "nacho" subvariant.  Instead I smelt Cinamon Toast Crunch.  I will hurry through the rest.  They tasted exactly like Cinamon Toast Crunch. 

Fist raised high, screams of "anarchy!" reverberating against the wall of his prodigious asymetical cheek and squeaking out of his tiny mouth hole, Crayon Shin Chan dares the combined might of General Mills and Nestle to try and defend their culinary patent.  His tiny white egg-headed dog lays prostrate in fear.  Chan's rage is undescriminating.  He is a Pirate's Bay of snackfood, and he will distribute that which he sees fit, the profits all funnelled back into his hulking network of corporate spies, snapping stills of carefully guarded recipes and sending them encrypted back to Crayon HQ.

Closing Remark:  They taste delicious, and would likely go well in a bowl of milk.

Results are in: They do.