Bye and have a great life!

Today is post 400 and the perfect place to end the blog!  It’s been a wonderful experience and to celebrate the end I’m posting the best paragraphs/jokes I’ve written on this blog.  Thank you for everything!

I bought scissors the other day that were, and I quote, “designed and sized specifically for man.”  Thank god for this.  I’m so sick of cutting with my girly scissors, where every time I use them a flock of canaries would fly up behind me and sing Tori Amos songs while my scissors automatically curved to cut the paper into a heart.  I kid, but the man scissors were fantastic.  They cut felt with no trouble and gave me up to date info on upcoming UFC fights and Slayer concerts.

Korea loves giant wall ads.  You see them plastered on the sides of stores, across windows, and all over department stores.  But most of the models are foreigners.  Good looking foreigners, which I guess must come as a shock when the children’s new English teacher arrives.

Men’s Fitness magazines change very little across continents.  Same concept, different race.  Take an attractive male.   Have him joyfully smile while showcasing his insane physique, while we all are supposed to find inspiration that he won the genetic lottery.  But, I don’t want to sound bitter.  I’m sure he worked out for hours a day and held onto a very strict diet inbetween banging models and shopping for extra small tank tops.

I love talking to GIs.  They’re all still young with hopes and dreams.  You ask them what they plan to do when they leave the military and you get responses like college, opening businesses, marrying their high school girlfriend, etc.  We’re not like that.  You ask foreign teachers what our plans are after Korea and we go, “Dubai?”

Sometimes I feel as if my experience in Korea is a kind of time loop, where I disappear while life continues around me and then I pop up a year later with $6,000 and stories about Narnia.

I saw a name and a heart in dried cement the other day.  A young man writes his lover’s name in wet cement.  After carving initials into a tree and spray painting a name under an overpass, wet cement writing is the third most romantic form of vandalism.

It’s wonderful to be a white guy in Korea!  I can wear only a fishnet vest and tube socks while riding a unicycle and juggling a pack of spider monkeys, and they’ll still be looking at me solely because I’m white.  If you’re self-conscious, Korea might be a good idea.  It’s nice to know that while I’m eyeballed constantly, it’s not because of my character, but the color of my skin.

My dress shoes need new shoelaces.  The laces are a little torn up and coming undone.  But no matter where I look or where I go, there are no shoelaces in this country.  I’m not looking for solid gold laces made with glitter and endangered animal pelts.  This isn’t the Holy Grail.  I’ve heard rumors that if I go to the old Gunsan downtown, find a mystical old man deep in a dark alley and whisper him a password, I would disappear in a puff of smoke with maybe a child’s laces in red.  These aren’t nuclear secrets or American Idol results!  I’m getting Velcro from now on.

One of my six year-old students was running around with a biography of Stephen Hawking and his contributions to theoretical physics.  This is the same kid, I want to add, who spends most of his time before class trying to punch me in the dick.

One of my kids wore suspenders today.  It’s super cute when they’re little, but what age does it turn nerdy?  Is it as soon as the first pube hair comes in?  The largest, gaudiest belt buckle is still way cooler than even the hippest diamond encrusted suspenders with little pictures of Diddy as buttons.

The school uniform colors for elementary school students in Korea are horrifying.  I’m pretty sure I vomited something that color my freshman year of college.  It looks like Elroy Jetson formal wear.  Little kids don’t care what they wear.  Put your children in glow-in-the-dark tutus, hiking boots, and give them face tattoos.  They won’t care.  But please don’t let them wear clothes that look like a cross between Elton John and an iguana.

Right by the cashier at the convenience store was a mini fridge stocked to the brim with Capri Sun.  The only reason you should buy a Capri Sun is to keep your Lunchable cold.  But featured drink?  No, that’s wildly inappropriate.  You buy these shit packets because your 8 year-old’s soccer team needs something to wash down their orange slices, not because you’re thirsty and that’s the refreshment of choice.  And to make it worse, the only flavor available was Safari flavor.  Safari is not a flavor!  Does it taste like elephant farts and gazelle carcass?  Then fine, call it Safari.  But this pouch is just an orange/pineapple hybrid with sad zoo animals on the cover.

I’ve seen several advertisements of Koreans staring at a beer like they have never seen a beer before.  They’re staring at this alchemist’s potion with the same type of wonderment you use if you saw a bear do a back flip.  It’s not like the beer is super oxygenated or filled with diamond pebbles or made from minotaur blood.  It’s beer, which by the way, the Koreans see more often than their own children.

There is no tipping in Korea.  It doesn’t matter if your waitress juggles the dishes on the way back from the kitchen.  She could somersault onto one table, cartwheel to another, and then wrestle a crocodile into submission, all without spilling a single piece of food.  You do not tip in Korea.

I was a local restaurant the other day and the waiter had a t-shirt that said, “Stable relationships are for horses.”  I’ll bet you money that man’s either a pimp or in a deeply committed relationship with a horse.

I ate two bowls of kimchi the other day and I don’t think my stomach will ever fully recover.  When I get hungry, it doesn’t growl anymore, it just weeps in fear.

I like corn, because it bedazzles my poo.

I saw a store that sold both hot dogs and coffee.  You ever have a frappuccino with your chili dog?  Did you know if you eat those two things at the same time, you can qualify for a handicap parking tag?  Because there’s no way you can walk after your colon explodes.  Add a few shots of whiskey and a bucket of fried chicken and you have the Four Horsemen of Indigestion.  You wrap some kimchi around the chili dog and you will be able to hear your stomach scream like it’s being waterboarded in Tabasco sauce.

I saw an advertisement for soju at the outdoor Daejeon Rock Festival featuring two half naked young people making out in front of a soju bottle.  Embrace your inner soju.  When the band is taking a fifteen minute break, down a bottle and entertain the crowd with sloppy, impromptu love making.  Sure, you just had a platter at that Indian food stand and polished off three spicy chicken kabobs given to you by that Persian man with a solid gold chain and a smile that leaves a grease stain on your soul.  But don’t let the full force of a third world cuisine and a chef that doesn’t wash his hands stop you from doing the horizontal shuffle at an outdoor festival surrounded by sweaty foreigners and the local mosquito militia.

Listen, any ad that says using this product will get you laid is genius marketing and I totally approve.  The soju ad was just a bad sign for the event.  Place it in the hotel room, where Korean couples can express their love for each other amid the low hum of the TV and avoiding eye contact.  Look, the Daejeon Rock Fest was not sexy.  Keith Sweat didn’t lumber onto stage and make the crowd wet their pants.  The music bordered on medium rock to hard rock, with a smell that closely resembled what I believe the street bazaar in Aladdin smelled like.  Though I admit I do have a pretty serious gyro fetish.