Does a Blog About My Life Make Me Pretentious?

Does a blog about my life make me pretentious?Is that sentence even grammatically correct? Maybe it would be better say, 'Is a blog which narrates the exploits of Blake Hoss, written and creatively controlled by Blake Hoss, pretentious?

Neither one of these are questions I've given any thought to. Or lost any sleep over for that matter. Besides everyone else was doing it, and it's this or keep a diary about Korea. And honestly, what better form of a private diary than an online webpage that everyone can see? At least it will keep me honest.

So now I'm over here in 'Happy Suwon', the city of 'Filial Piety' and I am ready to get my Suwon...on...

The nicest question (or at least the only one I’ve answered seriously since word got out that I was moving to Korea) I’ve been asked over the last six weeks goes something like this: ‘Korea? For a year? Are you nervous?’

Sometimes ‘nervous’ would be replaced with another word, like ‘excited’ or ‘worried’ but since all these questions were pretty much asking the same thing (that is: do you have any fucking clue what you’re doing?/If you were smart enough to graduate why are you not smart enough to go straight to law school?) I brushed them all off with an equal amount of sarcasm.

After all this first question inevitably lead to another round of questions which, despite coming from the midwest’s ‘affluent upper to middle class’ could only be described as racist. Questions like:

“What sort of things will you miss out on? Do they have running water?” To which I had to reply, “no, the united states is the only place in the world with running water.”

or

"Korea? Don't they eat dog?" To which the obvious answer is "only the cute ones."

or

“Now, you’re not going to North Korea are you?” At which point I would be forced to nod seriously, and quote some movie by saying ‘well the closer you are to danger the farther you are from harm, so North Korea is actually the safest place I could go’

and my personal favorite, which always came from my mom, “Now you’re sure this isn’t some scam for harvesting American’s organs?”

I was never really sure how to answer the organs question. My initial response the first time I was asked, was something along the lines of honestly? Who the fuck asks someone that? I’m about to move away from everything I know, and you put that image in my head?

That’s like leaning over to another passenger before takeoff and asking, “did you think the wings on the plane looked a little loose?” or having a nurse tell you before massive surgery, “Sorry the doctor’s running a little late, he’s going through an awful divorce and his mind has just been elsewhere these days...”

Well those are bad examples, but I think everyone knows exactly what I mean, and so as a result when i stumbled (25 hours of travel time + free sapporo on flight + no one to talk to + the movie on the flight was Dragonball: evolution, which can only be enjoyed intoxicated = stumbling) into Seoul and spotted the man holding a sign with my name on it, the first thought to cross my mind was ‘well he certainly doesn’t look like an organ harvester...’

Of course I’m not entirely sure what an organ harvester would look like. In fact, if I had to guess I would say that the one thing which would characterize anyone working in the organ harvesting profession is probably that they all strive to not look like organ harvesters...(A thought which, I realize, implied that, when looking for an Organ Harvester one would be advised to look for people who don't look like organ harvesters. Which also, I supposed, meant I looked like an organ harvester because I didn't look like an organ harvester...and that line of thinking is getting me nowhere)

Hoping to allay my fears somewhat and keep myself from falling asleep, I attempted to ask my driver a few questions about my new home. Unfortunately his english was limited to telling me that he didn’t speak english, so instead I had to sit in silence while he spoke on his cell phone (saying God knows what to other potential organ harvesters) and try not to fall asleep.

I wasn’t actually worried that my organs would get harvested, but I realized that (just to be safe) i might as well stay awake.

So when I woke up thirty minutes later, as my driver was pulling off of a main road into an alleyway (still trying to find someone on a cell phone) I was, how shall I put this, mildly terrified out of my mind.

Of course I quickly calmed down. My home is probably on this alleyway, and he’s probably driving me straight to my door...I told myself, just as he looked back and said in

broken english ‘You wait here,’ jumped out of the car and within a few seconds vanished up the road.

This left me in an interesting position since, I reflected, if I was in a horror film than this was the point where I did something ‘stupid.’ You know, where I either:

1. waited for certain death to come to me

(the part in the movie where everyone says, ‘This is the sort of fake shit I can’t stand - if he left me there I’d pull out that knife I always carry with me and go immediately to a police station)

1. Got out of the car and followed him

(Which is the part of the film where the audience thinks, ‘who the hell gets out of the car?’ Someone leaves me in a foreign country I’m sitting in the car, locking the doors, and praying to all the gods I know - from old ones to new)

Fortunately this story ends with me alive, fine, and passing out in my own apartment. Turns out the driver was simply lost. I still have all of my organs, I still have all my pride and, most importantly, my mom won’t get the satisfaction of telling me she warned me about organ harvesters.

Since I’ll be living in a country where I don’t speak the language, don’t fully understand the customs, and don’t really know what I’m doing, I’m bound to run into all the same sort of disasters which, up until this point, have steadily made up the narrative of my life. Fortunately these disasters usually make for pretty entertaining stories, which I’ll post here from time to time.

And if I stop posting, and I do get my organs harvested well, Mom, you told me so.