Comments Posted By Kevin Kim
Displaying 4,141 To 4,170 Of 4,392 Comments
Congrats on the old/new phone. May it never know the taste of toilet water.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 09/July/2014 @ 1:01 pm
Happy Birthday to the birthday girl!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 06/July/2014 @ 11:24 am
Have yourself a merry little birthday
Wait, so your wife is Tom Cruise?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 04/July/2014 @ 11:19 am
Nah, not Buddhist at all. More folkloric than anything. But modern Buddhists and Christians (and atheists) alike will visit fortune-tellers, even if they might not admit to doing so.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/July/2014 @ 11:33 pm
Was a fortune-teller used with the previous beau? And how did that turn out?
A few good vocab words to know:
점쟁이 (jeom-jaengi) = fortune-teller
평생 (pyeong-saeng) = your entire lifetime
사 (sa) = four (4)
주 (ju) = pillar(s)
평생사주 (pyeong-saeng sa-ju) = the 4 pillars of your lifeThe “four pillars of your life” are your time of birth, your date of birth, your month of birth, and your year of birth. These are used by the jeom-jaengi to determine your destiny (saju, along with meaning “four pillars,” also refers to fate/destiny).
Well… good luck to Sohee and her new guy. Here’s hoping there no new new guy in a few months! May her fortune be a good one.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/July/2014 @ 8:03 pm
Something on your mind?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 30/June/2014 @ 5:15 pm
Sorry for double-posting, but there was an error in the first comment: I’d forgotten an “in” at a crucial moment in a sentence. If you can delete that first comment, I’ll be much obliged.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 28/June/2014 @ 3:25 pm
Sorry the night ended the way it did, and that you ended up with a net W6000 in winnings, post-taxi. Enjoy a nice Korean meal with that money!
I’ve had cabbies drive past me at night, too. Many cabbies who refuse to take you somewhere believe that you have to cross the street to take a cab in the opposite direction. I have no idea why so many cabbies are averse to making U-turns, but it’s a dickheaded aspect of the culture here: they just don’t wanna reverse direction, for whatever odd reason.
In general, though, once I’m in the cab, I’ve had mostly pleasant experiences—I’d say over 90% positive. Either I’ll get to talking with the cabbie, or we’ll ride along in relative silence (possibly with the radio blaring bad bbong-jjak music). I’m comfy either way. There may well be a racism angle, but from the Korean point of view, despite my half-Koreanness, I appear as white as you to most Koreans.
A few things I do when hailing a cab: first, I smile when hailing. Next, when the cab twitches toward me in traffic, I bow in thanks as it approaches. A little ass-kissing helps catch the cab. Next, when I open the door, the very first thing I say is “Thank you!” or “Thank you very much!” Then I settle myself into the back seat. The driver will either wait expectantly for me to tell him where I’m going, or he’ll ask, “Where are you going?” I tell him my destination, and 9 times out of 10, we’re off. On the rare occasions that the cabbie refuses my fare, after all that buttering-up, he’ll normally explain that he’s going in the opposite direction of travel, so I need to cross the street and catch a cab on the other side. As I said above, this is a dickheaded thing to do, and the main reason for it is probably sheer laziness, not racism.
I’ll admit there have been one or two occasions when the cabbie didn’t initially realize I wasn’t Korean. One guy in Daegu did a hilarious double-take toward the end of my ride; we’d been talking the entire time, and it was only at the very end of the route that he looked in the rear-view mirror at me and saw I was an extraterrestrial. I had to make a real effort to stop myself from laughing at his expression. Another time, after a few cabs had passed me by, one finally stopped, and I’m pretty sure it’s because my silhouette looked more Korean than Caucasian to him.
For what it’s worth, I wrote about my absolute worst cab ride, with a man who had to be the world’s stupidest cabbie, here.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 28/June/2014 @ 3:24 pm
Looks as though I’m a BC, too. The questions were so obviously worded that it was easy to see which meant “liberal” and which meant “conservative.” I also loved the questions on immigration (“newcomers”), both of which totally sidestepped the issue of legal versus illegal immigration, forcing you to say ALL immigrants are beneficial or harmful to society. I’m guessing that the person who drafted this quiz leans fairly significantly leftward.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 27/June/2014 @ 10:33 am
Yes, I’m slow on the uptake. I figured out, belatedly, how to click on the subtitles.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/June/2014 @ 8:00 pm
I didn’t see any subtitles, but they weren’t necessary. That was hilarious.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/June/2014 @ 4:28 pm
Glad it all went peachily. Now I can’t get the sexual slang “eat a peach” out of my head.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 12/June/2014 @ 4:38 pm
Hope you get the paperwork straightened out and have a safe trip to Nippon, the Land of the Rising Nipples.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 10/June/2014 @ 7:37 pm
Onions are my Kryptonite, but aside from that, your egg-a-burger looks gorgeous.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 04/June/2014 @ 4:26 pm
It’s my party and I’ll brag if I want to…
You know the Chinese story about the poor old man and the horse? If not, ask Jee-yeun about the Korean proverb “sae ong ji ma.”
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 02/June/2014 @ 4:38 pm
Thanks, Bill.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/June/2014 @ 5:34 pm
“Life is transient” is a truth worth coming back to, so I don’t mind your message.
On the other hand, the caption under your first pic confuses me because you refer to two women “on the right,” and I can’t figure out which is which. Maybe refer to clothing color…?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/June/2014 @ 2:24 pm
Observations regarding a parking lot
Ah, life and its little microcosms…
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 28/May/2014 @ 10:40 am
Congratulations!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 20/May/2014 @ 9:33 pm
Congrats on having unproblematic Caucasian eyeballs, and congrats on the darts victory that those eyeballs doubtless enabled.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 16/May/2014 @ 3:32 pm
May you quickly de-nadirize.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 14/May/2014 @ 9:26 am
Anyway, get well soon! I’m surprised you’ve got any bacteria in you at all, given the disinfectant properties of all that alcohol you consume.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 06/May/2014 @ 11:35 am
For what it’s worth, the meds you took are called “종합 감기약” (jonghap-gamgi-yak) in Korean, which basically means “integrated cold medicine.” (“종합” means “all put together.”)
The “integrated” might be translated more naturally, in this case, as “all-symptom” or “multi-symptom.” So it’s like Comtrex, basically—good old Western-style meds. I often ask for 종합 감기약 when I’m coming down with something.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 06/May/2014 @ 11:28 am
I see you’re taking that bumper sticker to heart, committing “random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” wherever you go. The people of Seoul thank you for your contribution to their horizontal surfaces.
Hope you’re feeling better today. Take it easy.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 04/May/2014 @ 11:16 am
Whoops—I’m a bad editor: I failed to fuse “steak” and “house” in my “final draft” of your sentence. Doesn’t bode well for tomorrow’s editing test.
If quizzes make you quizzical, then tests make you…?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/May/2014 @ 11:28 am
For what it’s worth, I think your sentence is punctuated fine, as long as it’s interpreted charitably.
A semicolon normally separates two independent clauses. You had written:
Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand new place that does steak Korean-style.
If I charitably assume you’re writing in a terse “journal” style that omits subjects, then the semicolon makes sense. What I mean by a “journal” style is something like this:
Got up today. Ate breakfast. Watched some TV. Looking forward to tonight.
—the kind of thing you might find in a journal. The above locutions are all independent clauses (i.e., they can all stand alone), as can be seen when I rewrite them more fully:
I got up today. I ate breakfast. I watched some TV. I’m looking forward to tonight.
By the same token, I could rewrite your sentence as:
We’re fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand new place that does steak Korean-style.
A bit stilted, but serviceable. If I were to correct anything, I might insert a comma after “today” and a hyphen between “brand” and “new” (we normally hyphenate phrasal adjectives); I’d also write “steakhouse” as a single compound, but that’d be about it.
To avoid any dangling-modifier issues, though, I could rewrite your sentence this way:
Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon, we walked, this afternoon, across the street from our apartment to a brand-new place that does steak Korean-style.
The “Fresh off…” phrase now operates more clearly as a modifier instead of as a clause, which justifies switching out the semicolon for a comma. I eliminate the adverb-placement problem with “today” by using a parenthetical expression (i.e., set off by commas on either side, with the commas acting like parentheses), “this afternoon.”
But an even better revision that might take care of the “today” placement problem would be the following:
Today, fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon, we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand-new place that does steak Korean-style.
The above may be the most robust revision because “Today” is a strong way to start any sentence. It grabs the reader’s attention and implies immediacy, which makes whatever you’re about to tell us even more compelling.
My take, anyway.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/May/2014 @ 2:00 am
Once again, John, thanks for the amazing hospitality. It really was great to finally meet you and Jee Yeun. These meetings of e-friends can go well or badly… I remember one very awkward meet-up in DC, which involved some people I knew through an online writing-workshop message-board community. It went horribly. Lots of painful silences as we all realized how little we each interested the other.
And no, you didn’t come off as an interrogator. I wasn’t feeling any pressure, and you thankfully refrained from waterboarding.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 28/April/2014 @ 3:04 pm
Did she at least apologize to you for spearing your footwear?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 26/April/2014 @ 5:37 pm
And it just occurred to me: she COULDN’T EVEN HIT THE FLOOR! Man.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 26/April/2014 @ 2:59 pm
«« Back To Stats PageCongratulations, both on garnering second place and on avoiding certain death by dart!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 26/April/2014 @ 2:56 pm