J.T. vs. Blogging

Right now many of you are probably thinking to yourselves, “Is it possible? Has J.T. actually managed to finally update his blog?” And, if you weren’t thinking that before, you definitely are now, seeing as how you just read it. Well, yes, dear family and friends, another blog entry has magically appeared in my little corner of the Internet. Why did it take so long? Well, for many reasons. First of all, anybody who maintains a blog knows it can be tough to come up with interesting content all the time. Second, I’ve kind of been in a work-sleep-work-sleep-etc. schedule for a while, as we’ve been pretty busy. Third, the brain power needed to write an entry has been expended on other tasks, such as laughing at the opening sequence of “MacGyver” in Korean (On a side note, sometimes Koreans will make up their own “English” words or phrases, and we call that “Konglish.” One of the very best Konglish phrases I’ve heard, one I think we should consider adopting in the U.S., is “MacGyver Knife,” which is their term for “Swiss Army Knife.”).

Well, all that waiting has paid off. I have to say, though, I didn’t realize I had so many dedicated readers. It seems like everybody I know sent me an e-mail or I.M. telling me I had to update my blog. I was getting requests to update my blog through my family members from people I haven’t seen in years. I even got a deadline from Ms. Mindi Dodson for last Monday… or maybe it was the Monday before; let’s face it, deadlines aren’t really my strong point. But it was nice to have a deadline… avoiding it reminded me of the good ol’ days of every single class I’ve ever taken in my entire public and private academic life. And as I pointed out to Mindi, it scares me that teaching warps you so much that you start giving assignments out to your friends.

I do have more to talk about than just my lack of talking about things. Last Monday was Halloween. Oh yeah. There are a couple of foreigner bars around here, and one of them was throwing a Halloween party on Saturday. Another one of the English teachers and I decided it would be worth checking out. I didn’t wear my costume (you’ll see why later… it’s not very conducive to hitting the bar), but most of the people there were dressed up. It was a good time. Apparently this bar is co-owned by a foreigner (only in practice; as a foreigner, he has no legal business rights in Korea). Maybe I should have replaced “apparently” with “unfortunately,” because this guy was a huge annoying idiot all night. He got on the mike about 30 minutes after I got there and, despite being obviously much older than almost anybody else there, decided to try to be “hip.” There was not enough alcohol in that bar to make this man hip. However, I met some new people and had a great time, but the Halloween story does not end there.

Before I move on, I’d like to make a public service announcement. To anybody out there over the age of about 35, let me share this with you: you are not hip. Only rarely does somebody 10 to 15 years older than you manage to be “hip,” and even then it’s usually because that person has a lot of money. Oh, and to anybody around my age or older who’s reading this: you are not hip, either. Just the fact that you’ve already been reading this far and didn’t think to yourself what a dorky, uncool word “hip” is proves this fact. Once you leave college your ability to ever effectively interact with that age group again diminishes rapidly. Once you’re more than a few years out, all you can do is go back and regale the young children with the stories of how things were “back in the day.” At least I have some pretty good stories to tell (ask me about the Super Bowl sometime)…

Anyways, back to Halloween. On Monday, I decided to go to work in my costume, which was the Invisible Man. The Invisible Man was a choice of necessity; when you’re in a culture that doesn’t celebrate Halloween, you have to make due. Since the Invisible Man is basically just a man wrapped up in bandages, this was manageable. So, Monday morning, I got dressed, completely wrapped my head up in bandages, threw on some sunglasses and gloves, and headed down to the middle school. For just a moment, I want you to imagine this; you’re in a culture that, while you’ve probably heard of Halloween, you have no idea when it is and have never actually experienced it. You’re walking down the street one day and you look up to see a man dressed as the Invisible Man casually taking a stroll. He looks over you at you and waves and walks away (which I did plenty of, because man, that’s fun!). Personally, I think I probably caused brain damage to no fewer than 5 Koreans.

And if you think that’s funny, try to imagine what would happen when I got to the middle school. You don’t have to, because I’ll tell you about it. I walked down the halls like the real Invisible Man. People stopped and stared, stepped back when I walked towards them, even shrieked a little if I surprised them. And, of course, I did everything I could to mess with them. However, as I’m sure is to be expected, all fears immediately disappeared when I whipped out two huge bags of candy. These same kids, some of whom didn’t have the slightest clue who I was, rushed up to me for candy. They saw a strange man who they’d never met, couldn’t even see, in a freaky costume that just minutes before was enough to make them scream and they had absolutely no reservations about taking candy from me. Yep, it’s a different culture. To be honest, I think that would be true of all children if we didn’t practically embroider “don’t take candy from strangers” on their pliant little adolescent brains.

I had even more fun at the private school where I teach in the afternoons, because there were some little kids to play with. Oh man, good times. What’s funny is I think the kids were less afraid than the middle schoolers! But I chased them around and poked them and tickled them, so a good time was had by all. The kindergartners are so rowdy that it’s like torture to teach them, but they’re amazing fun for the exact same reason. They are so cute it’s impossible to mad when they won’t work sometimes. Sometimes…

Anyways, that’s all from the Korean front today. I hope that’s enough to keep you satiated for a while. If not, try rationing yourself to one paragraph a week, and I’ll try to keep a little more active on this thing! And a big thanks to everybody who told me how much they like reading the blog; it means a lot to me. See ya later!