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.

Korea is a crazy place, no doubt.  Eighteen year old girls will outdrink me and then kick my ass with taekwondo.  There’s so many bright lights and flashes that I’m now ADD and colorblind to neon.  But Korea’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?  An old woman held her umbrella over me during a rain storm once.  A waiter stood three tables over and watched me down my entire meal just to make sure I could eat it properly.  I saw a man holding a live chicken at the Daegu train station and a Korean man standing beside me looked me and said in perfect English, “That’s really weird, huh?”

But most of all, I’ll miss you guys, my dear Gunsan friends.  We’re all weirdos or losers who came together as friends to vomit on each other and make some extra money unwisely shaping the youth of Korea.  Look, it’s clear.  We’re not the best and the brightest.  Many of us are borderline retarded  in both mental capacity and life decisions.  But we did the best we could and I love you all.  Thank you for a wonderful year in Korea.

I seriously can’t wait to go home.  Final post tomorrow.

The premise is horrifying to me, but I’m not going to question Korean cinematic choices.  Except in the top left corner where it says “2010 Happy Comedy.”  Unless the orange line going through Happy is like the No Smoking sign and tells you outright that this is a depressing tragedy.

Look, I laugh at many terrible things.  I thought Grown Ups was really funny for one.  But this whole movie is banking on the idea that the audience doesn’t mind the fact his entire family was murdered or killed or in a house fire or whatever they chose to explain it.  You know another movie with a similar premise?  The Punisher.  Maybe I don’t understand Korean humor or maybe the movie is actually really funny.  Hell, I think I laughed once or twice during Casper.

No, there’s no better way to tell everyone how much fun you had with your friends than a foreground of carnival food.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand Korean culture, but I do respect it simply for the sheer amount of effort it takes.  There are fifteen “frames,” twenty different sticker pictures and faces, and any color text you want.  Someone took a large amount of time and put this together and stuffed it deep in the bowels of the phone settings.  I admire the work, but don’t understand the reason, much like Justin Bieber’s haircut or why Madonna is still relevant.

On a final note, my school asked me to come in to work for a few hours tomorrow and Tuesday to watch my replacement teach and give him pointers.  A day where my only job is to give criticism?  Jason just got a late Christmas present.

When people badmouth Texas, here’s how I know it’s jealousy: Ask a non-American to name one of our states.  They all know Texas.  You live in Iowa?  I’ve never heard of you.  But everyone knows Texas, the magical land where renegade gunslingers ride their unicorns from town to town shooting evil sheriffs with handlebar mustaches, cheating in poker, and bedding the saloon hussies with hearts of gold.

You know that saying that the crappy restaurants are usually the best?  It’s about half and half.  Few people realize that what makes the crap places taste good is a thin layer of bacteria that acts as a special coating of sauce.  It’s made from a combination of normal griminess, no desire to follow safety protocol, and an employee who didn’t wash his hands after taking a dump.  My friends and I ate at one of these places recently.  Luckily, I had an antioxidant Vitamin Water that day so the worm eggs and fly vomit couldn’t penetrate my stomach lining.  Right at the front entrance was a large chunk of uncooked pig, complete with seven colors of brown and half attached organs.  I’m not a biology expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s the pig’s soul.  This is either a Korean delicacy or a war trophy presented to the owner when his cutlery army successfully defeated the enemy pig general.  Either way, sure beats décor like flower bouquets and pictures of satisfied customers.

I saw a Lollipop2 cell phone ad blasted in pink with a very effeminate man sexily shushing me with his finger.  If they were trying to get my attention, they succeeded.  Before I was only interested in Samsung, but I was born that way and had no say in the manner.  Sure, I enjoyed the curves and softness of their phones and I was taught that other companies aren’t what society demands I own; Samsung’s upgrade program works so it would ensure I could contribute to the next generation of phones.  But something has clicked in my brain.  After this ad, I felt a desire to experiment with other phone companies.  Nothing serious, just a few harmless flings.  An iPhone here and a Google Android there.  After all, in a few years I have to go live a normal life of a 9-5 job and white picket fence.  Now I’m wearing sequins to match the crystals on my Lollipop2.  Tomorrow I have to bedazzle my jacket to match my Lady Gaga ring tone.  There’s a lesson here, kids.  Straying from society’s path is expensive.  Save some money first.

A man I saw the other day had the Batman symbol on the back of his capris.  I’d say that’s a warning to pickpockets that stealing his wallet will trigger sleep gas or a batarang, but who knows his fashion reasoning.  My students will frequently come to class wearing jeans with the McDonald’s logo on the back pocket.  These pants don’t come with the chicken nugget Happy Meal.  I don’t know why parents buy these jeans for their children, but I’m not going to dwell too much on it.  And when you try to steal the kids’ wallets, hot grease and apple pie pieces shoot out.

Listen, if I was told that Obama was smoking crack during his cigarette breaks, I’d be fine.  If I was told that Leonardo DiCaprio was leaving acting to just follow me around and bone women that I was interested in, I’d get over it.  But I refuse to ever accept that I just paid 1,500 won for my pastry and instead of delicious chocolate or more pastry, I bite into the disgusting red bean paste that has haunted my taste buds ever since I came here.  Korea, I use food as an emotional crutch, and I won’t have you spoiling my few minutes of happiness with a food that tastes and looks like wet dirt.

Today was my final day of work.  It’s exciting to have two weeks off.  I leave Korea the second week of January, so I’m going to pack one item a day to save me last minute packing stuff.  I’m not good at math, but I can’t imagine I have more than fifteen things.

Anyway, yesterday was the Christmas party at my school.  And I know children are only half as cute when you don’t personally know them, but too bad.  Here’s a few of them:

Now what makes the next two pictures so amazing is not that I’m in it.  No, these pictures were taken by kindergarteners, specifically the kids in the previous two photos.  I don’t know how good American six year olds are, but Korean six year olds are definitely masters of technology.  Their cell phones are better than any I’ve ever had.  They can open, play, and pause videos on the computer.  And they take really great photos with my digital camera.

You see?  They don’t cut off my head, they keep the action centered, and the lighting came out perfectly.  All I’m saying is that I’ve been given professional training in photography during my news reporter days and only half of the photos I took yesterday came out okay.

I don’t understand the intelligence of children.  I’ve corrected one of my six year olds every single freaking day I’ve had class with him and he still calls me James.  Yet hand him a state of the art digital camera and he begins switching settings to reduce the shadows in the room when the flash goes off.

In the bakery next to my work, they decided to decorate for the Christmas season:

Yes, this Santa has talents besides managing the largest collection of little people in the world.  Here’s the cool Santa, who under a single beam of moonlight, plays his smooth jazz through the winter nights while Mrs. Claus looks on him with those same eyes as when they first started dating.

Still, Santa always looks the same every year with the same movies and the same songs.  It’s refreshing to see Santa with new props.  Plus, it makes him look hundreds of years younger.

Anyway, I did stand up comedy a second time tonight at the local open mic in Gunsan.  I think I did better than last time but I couldn’t tell over the sound of my own fear.

This is the last unused picture I have at the moment, so let’s talk about it.

This is the triangle-shaped album of the #1 single in Korea (at some point, maybe still), “Bad Girl Good Girl” by the girl group Miss A.  The song’s decent, but that’s not the reason I show this to you.  The album name has blown my mind.  I don’t understand.  Long but short.  Fire but water.  Start but finished.  Beard but clean shaven.  Tom but Jerry.  I can’t wrap my mind around it.

Look, one night of drunken debauchery doesn’t make you bad.  Karma is a ladder that takes a long time to climb down.  There’s no explanation in the music.  And the song lyrics aren’t exactly Dickens.  Oh well, let’s just say it’s a bad song but it’s good that it sold so many copies.

I’m not an angry person, but sometimes I see something that I can rage about and I always feel great afterward.  And today, something at LotteMart caught my eye.  It’s a beautiful sight.

You can see the dog food before you buy it!  Really?  As in one packet of pebbles doesn’t look as appetizing as the other?  You want to search through the dog food like an owl pellet, looking for squirrels bones or rubber bands or loose pieces of ribbon?  The dog doesn’t care what the food looks like.  For god’s sake, dogs eat their own shit!

I’ve eaten many things in my life that look like vomit, and I don’t just mean Indian food.   Hell, we’re in Korea, the land where fish heads are a delicacy and boiled silkworms are eaten by the handful.  So why would I or anyone in this country care what the dog eats?  Dogs are tough by nature, and it won’t matter a single bit if you get the dog the beige food over the auburn.

This is the saddest notebook I’ve seen in a long time.  The inspirational message is vague and the cat looks wildly unhappy.  I know cats can’t smile.  Hello Kitty doesn’t even have a mouth.  It’s the eyes.  It’s crazy how much emotion is told through them.

I have one student who has eyes that pierce your soul.  It’s like every time I look at her, a glimpse of sunshine flickers past her pupils.  She’s a first grader, yet I see in her eyes a wonder and curiosity that I haven’t ever seen in any other.  She’s not a gifted student or a philosophical prodigy.  I think it’s just a lucky genetic break.  She can’t  spell “spaghetti” for the life of her and she’ll constantly trip up her verbs, but I still see that twinkle in her eyes every single time.