Open Thread #787

I am very excited to talk kdramas next week in the zoom discussion group organized by @reply1988. I’d like to thank her for this—to discuss kdramas with fellow enthusiasts in “real time” has long been a desire of mine! But unless I get my act together over the weekend, I am embarrassingly going to have NOT watched the entire short kdrama that is our discussion topic. So I’ll be the one person looking around nervously with wide eyes in the corner of the zoom gallery screen, hoping that no one calls on me asking what I think.

Now, not meeting deadlines is a specialty of mine, but that’s for work. For something fun like this, I feel I have to justify my failure– that is, make an excuse. Those of you who are teachers in the U.S. know the joke excuse of students when they fail to complete their home assignments, “My dog ate my homework.” I was thinking of that one, but somehow, “my dog ate my streaming service” doesn’t have quite the same plausibility, especially with my dog, whose bark is worse than her byte. (Get it—streaming service, byte?” Maybe I could just make bad word play jokes and my failure would be ignored!)

My students have at times claimed “I couldn’t get my essay done. My friend’s grandparent died.” This excuse was, in the past, fairly safe. After all, what college age person doesn’t have a friend with a dead grandparent? And what are you going to do as an instructor, demand that the student prioritize the assignment over helping a grieving friend mourning her beloved grammy? Just the thought of Kim Young-ok, Korea’s national grandma, playing a character on her deathbed brings tears to my eyes! (As it has, without fail, the multiple times I’ve watched her die in various kdramas.) Although, there was one particular research paper I assigned a few years back that apparently killed off 3 grandparents. I joked with my wife that the assignment was the leading cause of death that week among the Southern California elderly!

Unfortunately, as far as the usefulness of that excuse for me, not only are my friends in their 50s and 60s, with grandparents who have been deceased for decades, but even if I did have a few younger friends, the pandemic has tragically killed some of their grandparents. So its not an excuse I want to make lightly. Plus, I myself am the age of a grandparent. And while my death would certainly provide me with a good excuse for not seeing the show, I would rather not resort to that.

So that leaves me with one just one course of action– go ahead, tell the truth and face the embarrassing consequences as a responsible adult. After all, is it my fault that both my t.v. and my computer got sucked through a time portal into the Joseon era?

Open Thread #787
Source: Buzz Pinay Daily