A Letter to Me.

Dear 18 Year Old Self,

Congratulations on making it into university. I know it wasn't the one you were hoping for but it's still something and you should be proud that you've come this far and trust me, you're going to go a lot further.

First, leave the Star Trek action figures at home. If you think you're going to impress the girls with your mint on card Captain Picard limited edition, you've got another thing coming. They were alright for a high school newspaper editor who had nobody to invite over but for an independent university guy on the prowl, you need to go out and get yourself some Bob Marley posters and some strawberry scented incense. Chicks dig incense. Chicks also dig musicians so it's time for you to learn how to play an instrument: saxophone or guitar are the big winners; if you're thinking piano - punch yourself in the junk because becoming cool can be painful and you need to feel the pain. And untuck your shirt.

When you get to uni, you're going to meet a guy named Jamie and he's going to introduce you to the demon alcohol. Your first big drink is going to be a tumbler of whiskey and I won't tell you when it will happen but one night you're going to be sitting around and you're going to be tempted to eat an entire bag of sour cream and onion chips, don't. It ends badly: mostly for your roommates and the unwashed dishes that they didn't expect you to puke all over. And don't try and hide it either; the dried vomit 'round your mouth and the fact that you smell like you just crawled out from under a hobo's arm pit sort of gives you away.

On that note, you're not that smart and everybody knows it. There's nothing wrong with being average, as a matter a fact, you're above average average but you're no God's gift to anything. The only person that is going to think you're remotely overly special is a burly bus driver named Scotty who will tell you that killing rabbits is an art and eating rats is an untapped source of nutrition. It'll be on his bus that you'll meet your first real girlfriend.

Sometime around summer, she's going to tell you that the two of you should go halvies on a little gray and white rabbit that she'll let poop all over the living room. Those poop pellets will eventually be collected and will be used in a bet in which you'll eat 12 of them, win $20 and spend that money on pizza and chicken wings. I'll tell you now that the wings won't be that great so if you decide to go ahead with the bet, save the cash and use it for something more practical like a dead bolt for your bedroom door because after the two of you break up and she walks in on you screwing around with a little read head, your second year of university sort of goes belly up. So, word to the wise ... don't follow the White Rabbit and keep your pee pee out of the rabbit hole. Yes, you will get laid but for all the wrong reasons at all the wrong time. And awkward. Very, very awkward.

One thing you're going to get really good at is giving advice but you'll never learn how to listen to it. One of the most important things that you'll ever hear, and that you'll pass on to countless others, is that the only person's actions you can control are your own. The thing about giving advice, and you'll learn this in spades, is that advice - like dirty laundry, becomes washed out and dry in the rinse cycle. You may not understand that analogy but when you start doing your own wash and accidentally bleach out every pair of jeans you have and go to school looking like a Seigfried & Roy roadie, you'll understand.

A point is going to come, a few years from now when you think you've found the greatest thing that will happen to your life and you'll cling to it and hold on with everything you've got. I'll tell you that even though you think, at the time, that you can't live without it you'll move on and you'll find something that brings meaning to the parts of you that feel broken. That sounds vague but in the interest of ensuring you turn out like me ...

You're going to feel hurt and burned for awhile but it passes. And you both move on.

And hey, nobody ever finds out what really happened with that tire, beer bottle and the Toyota. So don't even worry about it; in fact, you have an amazing talent for being able to get yourself out of sticky situations. For example, when you decide to plagarize part of your Shakespearean Literature essay in second year and you get caught, you're able to prove that in fact, you were plagarizing yourself. How often is it that a professor scans a paper, finds plagarism and doesn't check to see if the authors are actually the same?

Anyway, my last piece of advice to you, something that you should remember indefinitely is this ...

A king once asked a group of monks to assemble all the history and knowledge in the world so that his sons could be the smartest men in all the land. The monks went away for ten years and gathered all the knowledge they could find and presented it to the king in the form of hundreds of volumes. Inspecting the collection, the king told the monks that there were too many books for his sons to read and he ordered them to condense the information. The monks went away for another ten years and returned to the king with only fifty volumes. The king, older and impatient, once again told the monks that his sons would never be able to remember all of the knowledge so he ordered them to condense the information again. After yet another ten years, the monks came back to the king with a single page. The king took it from them and read it; it said, in the center of the page, quite simply: this too shall pass.

Champion of the Solo-Night Chicken Wrangling.

Much of my own choosing, I had an alone-CJs only night tonight; Jinah went out with her high school buddies and my posse are all lost in the late evening discharge of private schools - effectively leaving me to my own devices. It's the first night since I came back to Korea that I've had completely to myself. When I got home from work at 5:30, I put on my Penguin (the Batman villain) t-shirt and a pair of shorts and danced around the apartment listening to Korean pop music; then I passed out for half an hour.

When I woke up, it was 6:55 and I was hungry. I wanted chicken. Something fried and rebellious that would sit, rotting in my gut for hours and hours and that would make me feel fat after I ate it. Jinah has been encouraging me to eat more vegetables, rice and less red meat and although I didn't go all out and mow down on a burger, I felt just as badass stuffing my face with the deep fried crunchiness of the chicken tenders. The thing was that when I called to order my 20 piece meal for $16, the girl on the other end of the line couldn't understand my Korean and hung up on me. Twice. How difficult is it to understand the words "chick tenders"? They're the same in Korean as they are in English. Throw me a chicken without the bone here. So, in defeat, I called Jinah and asked her to order the chicken for me. And, like the loving girlfriend she is, she did it - after she laughed at me, asked me to hold the line while she told her girlfriends how incapable I was in Korean, had a good laugh with them and then gave me a hard time for wanting to eat nasty fried food. Just order the damn chicken.

While I waited for the chicken man to come, I caught up on the last two episodes of Boston Legal: something I've been meaning to do the past two weekends. Is it just me or is William Shatner aging in reverse? He actually looks like he's getting younger.

With the chicken, I wanted a salad because I've gotten into the habit of eating roughage. It's good for keeping a guy regular. So I washed, ripped and tossed myself some Romaine lettuce, got my chicken and covered the whole thing with ketchup. It was beautiful. To top it all off, I cut myself a piece of pumpkin pie that my dear friend Big Ten dragged home for me on her last trip to Costco in celebration of the American Thanksgiving. Although I'm not American and don't mark the European-Native break-breaking, I was more than cordial about accepting the wonderful gift that is pumpkin pie.

To end off my evening, I plan to take off my pants, kick back and watch Californication because David Duchovny as a witty (add in perverted, dirty and oversexed to the point that I'm jealous) writer makes me laugh.

Excuse me Blogosphere but I have no time for you.

I am a horrible person. I'm careless, discriminatory, inconsistent and shall forever be guilty of pushing skinny middle-school girls out of the way on the bus just so that I can stand by the back door when I'm won't be getting off for another seven or eight stops. That's just where I like to stand.

I haven't run into Saintwitch again since my last post. I scan crowds of faces looking out for her just in case she sneaks up on me when I least expect it. I've told my some of my friends about her and none of them believe she really exists. I've tried to describe her freaky little face as a warning to my comrades who she might try to enlist in the "pleasure group" she tried to recruit me for. Despite the weirdness, I admit now that I was a tad flattered that she would try to get me - of all people - to join. My grandparents think it was a sex cult: like the kind you hear about that operate out of a big mansion in California where the members don't do anything all day but copulate and maybe eat and sleep.

I like being a white guy in Korea because I'm different and being different here gets me and everyone like me attention. The minority - everyone who isn't Asian - is a spectacle: Koreans eavesdrop on our English conversations to see if they can understand a word or two, school-girls giggle at white guys on the street and shout things like "you're cute", "you're handsome" or "lose weight!" and there are times like yesterday, when my Australian friend Big Boy and I were shopping for shirts and because the shirt and tie that Big Boy wanted to buy were too expensive as a pair, he asked for a discount ... because he's white.

And usually it works.

Nine out of ten times, white people receive generous discounts on clothes, electronics, whatever for just being white. There was a time when Jinah and I went to eat at a Korean restaurant and it was the first time the restaurant had ever served a white person ... the owner was so pleased to have me eating his food that he gave us our meal (a cost the equivalent of $40) for free. Service they say.

People ask me frequently why I decided to come back to Korea and most of the time I lie and say something like, "I love the people and the culture and I wanted to travel" or "I wanted the teaching experience and the challenge of encouraging non-English speaking students to learn to speak English because I have a dedication to the language." The real reason is because, as selfish and disgusting as it sounds, I get free shit. Or, at least a discount on shit. And at the price of shit these days, we can all use a bit of a discount now and again.

The best invitation to join a cult that I've ever received.

This morning I was standing at my usual bus stop, at my usual time, with the usual people, listening to the same usual music on my iPod thinking about how I'd rather still be in bed in the usual way when a slim, stunning, curly-haired Korean poked me in the shoulder. I turned, pulled my earphones from my head and she stared at me.

Chick: Good morning.

C.J., a little shocked: Good morning, how are you?

Chick: I'm fine, thank you, and you?

C.J.: I'm good, thanks (pause), is there something I can do for you?

Chick: You're foreigner right?

I stared back at her and tried to think back to when I saw myself in the mirror this morning. I knew that I was white when I went to bed the night before but did I somehow magically transform or fall victim to some strange UFO-abduction-ethnicity-altering-surgery?

C.J., smiling politely: Yes, I am.

Chick, blank and just standing there: Where are you from?

C.J., looking over my shoulder for the bus and turning a little bit away from her: I'm Canadian.

Chick, trying to following my eyes: I'm Saintwitch. What's your name?

My eyes winced and my brow furled, I turned back toward her. I once heard comedian Lewis Black describe a moment in which a person hears something and despite how disinterested they are in the person who said it, the words stick in the receiver's ear until they obtain clarity about what they've heard. The chick's name is Saintwitch.

C.J., stifled: I'm ... John.

Saintwitch, extending her hand: Nice to meet you.

C.J., reluctantly shaking: And you.

Saintwitch: I'm recruiting a foreigner to join my group.

Her English was uncannily good. Her pronunciation, articulation and grammar seemed immaculate and though I might have wanted to ask her, finding out how and where she learned to speak English seemed like a less than important subject of conversation in contrast to some of the more pressing topics and questions that I had.

C.J.: Really? What kind of a group?

Saintwitch, producing a pamphlet from her coat pocket: It's named Eros.

C.J., looking for the bus again: Like the Greek god?

Saintwitch, smiling: Yes, right.

C.J., trying to seem impatient and in a rush while taking the pamphlet: I would really like to but ...

Saintwitch interrupted me, still smiling: It's a pleasure group.

You know that sound that Tim Allen used to make on his show Home Improvement? The confused sort of high-pitched grunt? That was the sound I heard in my head.

C.J., looking at her: Excuse me?

Saintwitch: In my group, we bring pleasure to each other in many ways.

C.J.: Ok?

Saintwitch: Would you like to join?

C.J.: Uh ... well ...

The bus turned the corner and came down the stretch. Never in my life have I ever experienced experience a more appropriate example of perfect timing. The gatherers started pushing toward the edge of the road and I moved along with them, away from Saintwolf. Her smile started to fade.

C.J., moving toward the open door of the bus: Thanks very much for the offer and for speaking with me, I'll look at your pamphlet and send you an email or something. Have a good day!

When I got to work and sat down at my desk, I looked at the pamphlet. Turns out this group meets to drink wine, eat good food, listen to music and talk about different cultural subjects. And they do it all in public.