Off the Cuff

I follow my blog statistics like a farmer monitors crop growth during a drought. Every minimal gain in numbers is a tiny triumph, a comment cause for celebration, a new follower a major victory. My second-most read blog (with 141 hits so far) is Lexicon, a blog about the joy of learning ghetto slang. My first most read blog (with double the blog hits of all my other blogs combined, at 2,149 views) is How Super Junior Changed My Life: A Blog with Pictures! This is a little bit dismaying--The blog with the most views is not one of the blogs about grappling with poverty or trying to understand the dichotomy of words and pictures to communicate. No, the blog with the most views is the one with pictures of handsome Koreans. Blogger statistics reveal the majority of people who come to my blog (from as far away as Singapore, Indonesia, the U.K and Germany) do so on google image search for "super junior" "super junior wearing hanbok" "Suju" and "sj". I guess in the end I find it a little funny. But far be it from me to ever try to manipulate blog statistics by posting ridiculously cute pictures of Donghae offering you (yes, you, female fan) a rose:

Or Kim Heechul playing with a kitten:

Or  Li Seung ki holding a baby:

Or Kim Hyung Joong being, to quote Zoolander, "Really, really, ridiculously good-looking."

Far be it from me to do that. That would just be tacky.

More Fun Things I Found Whilst Cleaning

I found this old picture of me from a play I was in my sophomore year of college. I think I was miscast in my role in this play, as I was playing Ruth Younger [from A Raisin in the Sun], a middle-aged black housewife. Now, normally I am all for color-blind casting, unless the role is specifically meant for someone of a certain race. I think Ghandi should be played by an Indian man, Rosa Parks probably by a black lady (in a bit of nerdery I'm just going to say now that I also think Jake Gyllenhal was egregiously mis-cast as the prince of Persia, and I was gravely disappointed by the lack of Inuit, Polynesian and Asian representation in Avatar: the Last Airbender) Apparently I did a good job, though. At one point in the play I shouted at my sun, "Boy, hush yo' mouth," (that part was in the script) accompanied by a backhand slap (that part was improvised). Afterwards, I was approached by so many African-American ladies in the audience who shook my hand warmly and said, "You did such a good job! You slapped that boy just like you were a black mama!"

This is a collection of pictures that were given to me by one of my seven-year old students when I was in Seoul. I got a lot of gifts as a teacher in Korea, but this has to be one of my favorites. My second week teaching, I was approached shyly by one of my students, a little girl named Kyung Min. "Tea-sher," she said, "I have present for you." Immediately four of the other girls in class jumped from their desk and ran to where I was sitting. I gathered that they had all been talking about this gift from the way they were conferring with each other. "Open it, tea-sher, open it," they said, watching me closely for my reaction. Opening it, I found a collection of carefully cut out photos of Kim Hyun Joong, who I have an absurd, ridiculous, incurable crush on. I gasped. I laughed. I hugged all the girls around me. To this day, I am not sure how my Kyung Min knew about my crush, but I still stand by what I told her: "YES. YES. YES! Best present EVER."