Last night I was supposed to meet a friend of U-rim’s who makes those big foam costumes people here wear for street events, but she ended up having to work so those plans fell through, so instead U-rim and I had a rediculously huge disagreement last night, and as a result I learned an important lesson: “Never ever have an argument in a coffee shop while seated in the chairs that look out onto the street if you think random people are funny.”
I’ll go into more detail about the fight later, but let’s just say during one of the akward silences, I looked out the window, and I kid you not, saw a guy who was windmilling his arms Pete Townsend style as he walked, followed by a guy walking with a baggette in his coat pocket…like the fool was trying to conceal it. Needless to say I was brought to laughter, which is not really a good thing to do if your girlfriend is on the verge of tears, and take it from me, trying to explain that you are laughing at a guy who was sneaking around with a loaf of French bread in his coat like a bread bandit is not really a viable option, especially if it’s not your native language.
Anyhow the fight basically was due to the fact that as of late, when we are together she’s kind of quite and doesn’t do anything. She explained that due to her work she has recently been extremely tired and stress out. This opened up a whole other can of worms, since I have told her that her work would kill her do to the insane hours she has to keep.
Her answer to decrease job stress was to start smoking again, which I was not enthralled with. I told her I didn’t want her (or me) to get sick. She went on to tell me that her grandfather smoked for 40 years and lived to be 82. I told her that half of all smokers die prematurely, and if she didn’t die, there was also the risk of cancer. To which she replied, “Smoking can’t give you cancer. There are documentaries about it on TV all the time.” That just put me in a rage. It’s one thing if she doesn’t care about her body and wants to smoke (while not around me), but the denial of scientific fact was too much to bear. By this point we had returned home. I typed “smoking” and “cancer” into a seatch engine, and proceeded to read a list of cancers smoking can cause (or increase the risk of).
Eventually the fight ended, but it was kind of a vague conclusion, as in nothing was really solved at all, but no one was angry still in the end. Afterwards, we went for a walk in my neighborhood to go buy 화투 (hwatu), which are some kind of cards used for a Korean card game. U-rim was going to teach me how to play, but when we got home, a bad Korean erotic movie (skin-a-max style). It was truly awful…there was no nudity. Like Japan, Korea blurs out crotches, but they will show tits and ass…this movie didn’t have those either. There were bikini clad ladies, a topless lady covering her breasts with her arms, and a lot of implied (albeit fully clothed) sex grinding. This aside, I understood the dialogue (yes there was more dialogue than, “Ohhh….yeah….more…more!”) and learned a useful phrase. If you want to suggest having car sex to a Korean all you need to say is, “카 섹스스하자!” (Ka seksu-haja!). Unfortunately in Seoul I don’t have a car (or the legal ability to drive one), and neither does U-rim…so though I learned said expression, I will never get to use it.
