Haseyo and Beer Corner...scrivenage and superbug..."It's honey box!"

And here I am on the far side of the weekend. Which, lemme tell ya kids, was rough.

At least I didn't swim to Hawaii, right? Forget it, I didn't even make it to the beach. The farthest I got was Beer Corner. This was Wednesday evening. I figured, since I was looking at four days of cabin fever, I better go off and have a good time for a bit beforehand. Drinking is, happily, real cheap in Korea, and I could shave most of a day off with a proper hangover; so after class, I went and got the drink on with Stan Teacher, whom I call Haseyo. (Haseyo is a Korean honorific, a respectful address for strangers and elders. Stan doesn't know any Korean, but he's thirty-five, so he said I have to call him haseyo. So I do. I started when we had to go to Immigration and Stan had to go because he lost his wallet with his AR card and we left and he had to go back to his apartment because he forgot his passport which he ended up not needing and we were ten minutes late for our afternoon classes. "Good job, Haseyo," I said. I use it ironically, you see.) After a few bars, we ended up at Beer Corner, where I negotiated the purchase, semi-deliberately, of a truly gargantuan pitcher of beer. Mission accomplished.

The next day Haseyo had a date, which apparantly went well because, even though he lives across the hall from me, I didn't see a hair of him the rest of the weekend, since, as he told me later, he was holed up all weekend in his apartment getting laid from here to bejeezus. Beach? What beach?

And so I strapped myself in for a long weekend of scrivenage. How did it go? Well... Maybe I should be a bit more careful about grandiose claims like a complete ninety-page, two-part, first draft script in four days. But no one actually believed that, right? I mean, sure, I could pull out ninety-six hours of straight key pounding -- if I didn't eat or sleep and I had a bloodstream full of speed and a bucket under my chair. But, as anyone who's written a term paper over a weekend knows, all writing is fifty percent actual screen time and fifty percent, ya know, screwing around. So there was an appreciable amount of typey-typey, interspersed with repeated viewings of "Max" when I got stuck, video pinball when I got bored, ramyeon when I got hungry, and naps when I remembered (which was infrequently; my circadian rhythm's so jacked up, I think I might have actually given myself jet lag again). And mosquitos. Bloody fucking evil little bastard mosquitos.

If I may digress. Korea has some sort of fucked-up, gene-spliced, superbug mosquitos that are resistant to bug spray and are smart enough not only to get into an entirely closed off apartment, but to come out only when the light's out so they can make covert raids in the night. And here's the thing: they come one at a time, so I keep waking up at four in the morning with maddeningly itchy welts on my ear or small of my back, and I flip the light on and crouch in the corner of my bed, staring into the middle distance, waiting for a flicker in my focal range or a momentary telltale whine in my ear that I can hone in on and hunt down, but the little beast hides -- they hide, the cowards! -- and I'm back crouching and waiting and meanwhile it sneaks another suck off the underside of my arm and now I see it! -- and it's fat and slow from gorging itself and I smack it and it bursts like a ripe pimple and lies twisted and smashed with its broken legs and wings poking out from a blotch of blood on my arm, a disconcertingly large blotch of dinner that it paid for with its own violent and sudden end and now I can go back to sleep but the wily fuckers come back, one at a time, so in half an hour I have to get up and do battle all over again.

I'm a wee twitchy these days.

Yeah, so, where was I? Ah yes. So the result of this bleary weekend, goggle-eyed from the computer and undernourished from my instant noodle diet (Asians, I should say, are serious about their ramen. All sorts of things go into it, mushrooms and seaweed and fishcakes and dried squid and various unidentifiables not unlike pork rinds or shrimp chips or something -- you kids in the West are truly getting shafted in the pot noodle department.), was not a revolutionary Brave New World epic, but four or five solid pages of notes, a decent outline for the first several scenes, and a six pages of actual script -- good pages, even, until I wrote myself into a corner early Sunday morning, realized that I had misconcieved several fundamental conceits about the setting, shitcanned everything, and had to start from scratch. I am now beginning to understand why so many writers are appalling drunks.

The truth is, I'm not very good at this. I won't say I'm a bad writer -- partly because my dear readers are getting a bit sick of it, partly because I have dear readers to begin with, and partly because I do seem to be capable of turning out decent material on a more or less regular basis. But my talent, it seems, is in short pieces: the blog, corporate letters, the odd song -- simple, contained ideas, stuff that I can bang out in a session or two. I'm good at poetry, which is bit like saying I'm good at tiddlywinks. But this sustained narrative thing, man: characters, plots, settings, development... This is hard. I honestly don't know how the guys on "Lost" do it week after week. (But then, I guess they don't since they seem to burn out and call a strike every couple of years.)

I dunno. I guess it's hard for everyone. Doesn't make it any less frustrating for me, though.

By the way, no encouraging posts or anything, please (Ronnie, I'm looking at you). Not that it isn't appreciated, but, as my dear old Mum used to say, all I need right now is a little sympathy to make me completely miserable.

Anyway. You're not here for this crap, though, are you? You want funny things about those krazy Koreans, right? Can do. You want funny, you want Konglish. Nothing to give the English-speaking mind a twist like Korean attempts at the mother tongue. Virtually everyone here has some sort of English exposure. A lot of things are printed in both Hangeul (the Korean alphabet) and Roman letters, and often English as well, presumably for the benefit of stupid foreigners like myself, but mostly, I think, because it's chic or exotic or sophisticated or something. It's a little like the American fad of Chinese character tattoos, only everywhere. Actually, I'd say it's a lot like it, given that I know hardly anyone with a tattoo in Chinese that actually knows what it means, and I have yet to meet a Korean here who has any idea what his "Muff Diver" T-shirt says (Yes, I've actually seen this).

But the best place for Konglish is MegaMart. Shopping is a wonderful experience, especially when you're measuring the merits of products solely by what they offer in their fractured version of your language. Some are simple, if amusing, mistakes, like American Soft cookies: "Chewing!" they crow on the package, as though these cookies are happy to do all the work of eating them for you. Some are more elaborate, such as the grammatically correct, but decidedly audacious claims made by the Dream File and Binder:

"Dream arranges all kinds of documents conveniently and pleasantly.

Dream gives you satisfaction in quality.

Dream makes you more creative and intelligent."

Super. I'll take three. Maybe they'll help with the writing.

My favorite, though, is the logo I found inside a day planner, which I find attains a transcendent level of daffy poetry:

Cookie=Tong

It's honey box!

It certainly is, Cookie Tong, it certainly is.