I am fucking bulletproof, and you can be too! Is it because Korean bosses are slimy little quats too stupid not to hand you a paper trail outlining in fine detail the particulars of their embezzlement? Well, yes, partly. But it is also because Korean women, vastly overrepresented in Korean education, have been down so long, they don't know what up, or in this case the most perfunctory courtesy, is.

My manners might generously be called boorish, assuming you define generous as donating 75% of your paycheck to charity and sleeping on a futon with your 12 adopted crack babies because you're letting syphilitic bums crash in all the bedrooms.  Just till they get this thing together.  Pouring my dinner out of the pot into some kind of bowl or plate is a nicety reserved for company, I rarely speak in a voice below a sotto bellow, and my preferred mode of letting off steam is insulting the intelligence, ancestry, and/or native country of strangers. And yet, compared to your average Korean gent, I'm the closest thing to James Bond these poor broads are ever going to encounter.

I think enough weygooks read this blog that my back is got here. You practically have to grab your average agashi by the hair and pitch bodily her through any door you try holding for her. I can always put a smile on my face by holding the teacher's room door open on the way out for a female teacher who's about 20-25 feet away.  She has somewhere to go, so she can't politely refuse to pass and stand there until I give up, so the only thing to do is get through the door as fast as possible, which is of course impossible in the slippers we all have to wear indoors. They're left with what I can only imagine to be an agonizing half minute of speed-shuffling, eyes fixed firmly on the ground, blushing and giggling as though I've thrown my coat onto a mud puddle so her feet won't get wet as I help her onto the white stallion upon which she'll be whisked off to her third period ethics class. I think with a very basic grasp of the language you could make some serious bank as a Harlequin style romance writer over here. "...and the foreigner gazed at her with his extremely, unnervingly, not-brown eyes and swore from the bottom of his heart that he would love her until she got ugly, and would only get blitzed and bang whores on weekends. Her bosom's heaving was such that it seemed no bra, no matter how padded, could contain it!"

So anyway, three paragraphs later here we are, at the main thrust of the post.  It was a long hard slog, some of you were there from the start, some of you might not have been born when it began,  and the rest are now dead.  But by God, there's no looking back and we're all better people for it.  Here goes: It doesn't matter whether I show up late, hungover, or not at all, the teachers love my ass. I'm like a teflon Elliot Ness! How have I built up this good will? By being a reasonable human being, and assuring my teachers in our conversation classes that no, I don't think I would have a problem drinking or gambling all my money away, Angela's Ashes style, without having my wife hoard it and dole out an allowance, and no, now that you mention it, I kinda do like cooking, and were my back is completely against the wall, I could be convinced to clean

I've brought in homemade chocolate chip cookies, almost out of spite, to shame them into ending the forcefeeding of gloopy unsweetened rice "treats" I endure thrice weekly or thereabouts, with a "Look here you, this is a goddamn confection.  You must feel like a dick now, eh?" moment. I don't think they're well schooled on the subtleties of contempt via pastry, but they were suitably awed. I honestly had to show one teacher where two cookies had fused together and then been broken apart to convince him that no, these are not fucking Chic Choc, human hands can craft cookies.  Of course, if Zeus learns I let the secret out, I'm in for some shit.

I've always wondered about how so many foreigners, especially some of them, end up with the Korean wives they do, in a culture in which mongrel and biracial are more or less synonyms. I guess it's like being proposed to by a dashing aristocrat, who also happens to have a vestigial tail and a heart murmur. Kids'll get a pretty shitty end of the stick, but hey, he pulled my seat out at Mr. Pizza!