Waste

In shopping news, Geoff somewhat recently (everything is recent when you've only lived somewhere for a month) bought a strangely disturbing bobble head type doll. Like everything in Korea, it was intended to melt your heart with its adorableness, but somehow it doesn't. Its cuteness has an awkward, scary quality about it. And it is not content to be a bobble head in the fashion most people are familiar with. Meaning it doesn't just bobble when nudged or when the car begins moving. It has a solar panel built into it and it bobbles when the sun shines, like a reverse vampire.

Geoff was almost suspiciously taken with the bobble head in the department store and looked lovingly over it and its evil but differently colored and themed brothers before carefully selecting a green, broccoli themed bobble head. We brought it home, Geoff triumphant, me resigned and then wouldn't you know it? The goddamn thing wouldn't bobble anymore.

Geoff was, as you might imagine, chagrined. He turned all the lights on, hoping to activate it's solar panel and he fiddled with the sole switch the eerie toy possesses, but to no avail. I felt a little smug frankly. I had warned him (in fact I do often warn him) of frivolous purchases and now here we had a foolish object that's only function was to do something absolutely pointless and it wouldn't even do that. Geoff raged at the thing and then switched tactics and spent the evening speaking to it in low tones, sometimes laced with threats and sometimes beset by begging. I read a book and felt self satisfied.

But after a couple of days of sunlight, the little ugly thing has commenced to bobbling. It's head sways to its left and then its right, completely inanely and unhelpfully. Geoff is enamored obviously. Whenever he notices the stupid thing bobbling (and mind you he has every single hour of daylight to notice this), he will nudge me explicitly and point to the trinket, gleefully noting "Look! He's bobbling!" Then he will rub his hands together happily and call out, "Go Bobble Face, go! Bobble away, friend!"

The nickname Bobble Face is another reason I hate this thing. I hate it. It menaces me. Every time I glance in it's direction (and again, this is possible during every hour of day), there is some freak green head stoically swaying at me. It contributes nothing with this swaying. No insight or optimism. It just shifts left and right, like some idiot listening to metal, some idiot who's forgotten that a whole other variety of rocking out moves are available to him.

I tried to like it. I tried to look upon it as a random thing of fun. Something to constantly put me in mind of childhood and plastic solar powered delights. Unfortunately, I had a much more Laura Ingalls Wilder childhood than that. And I still despise Bobble Face. I think that if the little shit would just move it's head backwards and forwards instead of from side to side...well that would be something. Then it would at least be nodding at me, and communicating something approximating positivity or encouragement.

But no. The silent Bobble Face will change its tune and its sway for no one. Perhaps this explains Geoff's enamor for it. It is as stubborn as he is. Unfortunately for both of them, I am more stubborn still. When Geoff looks away or leaves for work, I've taken to casually moving a clock or candle or other bedside apparatus in front of its little solar panel, blocking the sunlight and ceasing its bobble.

I found the most amazing wastebasket in the history of the non-Native English speaking world. It is navy blue and reads "I'm very hungry wastebasket." I love it. It's so Korean! It wants so hard to be Western, to be a thing of English and as it struggles to do so, it has made the most fundamental Korean error of all, the mistake all my students make, from the children learning the A,B,C's to the kids who understands words like irony.

The article. There are no articles in Korean and one of the more difficult and minor things to acquire and retain is article use. The wastebasket should read, "I'm A very hungry wastebasket." But it doesn't. It just doesn't. I guess the other possibility is that someone is addressing the wastebasket and informing it that they are hungry, but even then, the inscription lacks a very pivotal comma. Either way I am enchanted.