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.