Honest.
I wanted to respond to a long and thoughtful comment today, but instead, I ended up redrafting an article for the campus English magazine. The kids, their hearts are in the right place, and they do have some interesting things to say, but… well, there’s a lot of rewriting involved. I know more about cosmetic surgery, foot-binding, gender-reassignment surgery, scarification, branding, and all kinds of other forms of body-modification, much, much more than I ever wanted to know. Including a horrifying newfound familiarity with the term “lingerie piercing”. I’m almost scared to google that. No, wait, I googled it anyway, and it seems either they made it up, or else these nice, sweet young kids are tuned into some scary fetish underworld that even Google doesn’t know much about. (It’s not in the top hits, and I’m not looking further.)
When we use “google” as a verb, is it lowercase? Uppercase? Does anyone know or care?
And yes, I think everyone already knows that Koreans don’t approve of tattoos, but I didn’t have the heart to cut that from the article. I just wish the kid who’d written it had noted the irony that breast implants and eyelid hacks are an acceptable form of body-modifications, but tattoos and piercings are still, mostly, beyond the pale. (Though the belly piercing seems to be quietly forcing its way into acceptability over here, isn’t it? Yeah, it is.)
So now, it seems, I can go to sleep. The rest of the week is slow on preparations, and next week is empty of ’em… next week is Chuseok, the Korean version of Thanksgiving complete with ancestor worship, rice-cake moon thingies, and a small, quiet trip around Seoul with Lime on her days off. So I’ll try get to that comment tomorrow or the day after.
And no, I don’t want to know about lingerie piercing. PLEASE don’t tell me all about it in the comments. I’m serious. The things that excite people, in this world. I tell you…