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Last night I thought of you. I thought of you as a massive juggernaut of a kickboxer delivered punishing blows to a midget on TV. I thought of you, bathed in neon blue, my window open and beckoning in the dull roar and sharp tongues from the street below. And I know that Before will never be After, but on those rare nights when I lie awake in bed I like to remember that, once upon a time, there was something better than kickboxing.

...If that's even possible.

I am a boor here in Korea, a cultural philistine. Since my arrival, I have read a grand total of 200 pages of Book. This, my friends, is definitely not enough Book. I am bordering on falling into the category of reader that dominates the lowest echelons of literature; the reader who lines their bookshelves with whatever Oprah tells them to. The kind of reader who reads the first thirty pages of every trendy novel just so they can name-drop characters at the dinner table. The attention deficit disorderly. The legions of Satan's suburbia. One final mean name for people who don't really like books. That's right. One more, you fuckers.

It's strange. This is the least I've read in my entire life and, conversely, the most I've ever watched kickboxing. There's a giant Korean hero who all the people here worship, a long-armed lummox who is apparently quite famous for punching people in the face and knocking them down. Everyone gathers in bars to watch him kick and punch and punch and kick... it's really the closest thing to hockey I've seen since I got here. So instead of sleeping last night, I thought of you and watched him fight, thrashing slowly as if underwater and landing the most terrifying of blows to a poor midget's skull. I'm sleep deprived and the afternoon looms.

On a brighter horizon, I have undertaken a light study of Korean and can now phonetically pronounce every single letter in Hangul! Sadly, once I have assembled the correct sounds in a word, I'm still fucked because I don't know what they mean. But at least it's a start. And I know how to say "milk"! and "bridge"! And "I want beer"! Yeah, it's coming along nicely.

Is it wrong to take pictures of another's misfortune, not because you want to mock them but because they're the most interesting thing you've seen in a traffic jam for three hours?

Posted by Chris at 11:29 PM >> Commentations (1)