Monday, June 8, 2009

Good Legs, Bad Jokes

I'm sitting at my desk in the teacher's room, marking a stack of papers. I want to leave. My boss Ronald walks by on his way out. "I’ll see you guys around."

Me and the funny Peruvian guy I sit beside are stationed in the “Korean” sector of the office, we somehow slipped through the cracks. We are an island of anal jokes in a vast sea of aunt-an-uncle riffs and over-exaggerated laughter. Half of the 20 teachers in our office are Korean broads.

My spot in the office is a mixed blessing. Koreans have no bubbies, but 1 in every 10 has an ass. They disguise these structural deficiencies by showcasing their legs with tiny skirts and heels 3-4 days of the week. 2-3 of those days, the skirts are accompanied by every man's kryptonite, the knee-high sock. The boners are furious. My dick gets headaches. I look down my shorts periodically to see him wheezing like my Dad bent over during half-time of his yearly touch-football reunion. I offer him my puffer. He labours to wrap his urethra around the blow-hole, takes several deep tokes, and waddles back to his post as a flaccid fire-hose patiently waiting to put out the burning school house on Memorial Day.

My seat in the office is a "mixed" blessing because Korean women are not funny. At all. It's a drop dead fact. There are 180 degrees in a triangle, four sides to a square, and zero jokes inside of a Korean woman. Exhibit A: Rebecca. Rebecca is a 33 year old, stone cold Korean fox who tops the over/under on skirts worn per week at 4-5 wears. Unfortunately, knee-highs are not in her repertoire. She sticks with a bare leg, or a simple black tight.

Rebecca's response to Ronald's "I’ll see you guys around," is "Goodbye Jorge." Flag on the play. A mistake has been made. Ronald's name is not Jorge. Under usual circumstances, the person who fucked up would laugh for two seconds, say “whoopsie doosers," and wave Ronald out the door. Case closed, no biggie, let me mark my fucking papers right? Not in Korea. The women here go through such epic droughts of sincere laughter and fun, that a simple slip of the tongue can cause a geyser, a fucking explosive, gut-busting 15 minutes of the worst riffs you’ve ever heard on the topic "Jorge is not Ronald's name." I am not kidding, I wish I was. The moment Rebecca utters "Jorge," ten women detonate. Proximity mines. A bland comment waltzes into the room, unzips his corduroy pants, and peels away his briefs to reveal a pixelated collage of light pinkish hue that faintly whispers the suggestion of a cock, and two seconds later the place is a mushroom cloud of laughter. I mean fuck, the preceding metaphor does not even feature an actual cock. A cock would be funny. But it's not a cock. It's a sterile, butchered excuse for a cock. I am a lonely, innocent egg in a coop of cackling chickens, and their heads are falling clean off.

I drop my pen with purpose. As I bend down to retrieve it, I snipe a coarse "what the fuck is going on" glare across the office. My malicious glance immediately realizes its karmic potential, as I find my body being towed into the Bermuda Triangle of laughter. I am helpless, and it takes me 7 full minutes to tread through the bedlam and wrap my hands around someone coherent. When I do, she pants, "Rebecca, (deep breath) Rebecca, (deep breath) Rebecca (her jazz hands are up, shrieking 'get a load of this') called Ronald...Jorge." She collapses on the floor, and thrashes around like T-1000 in the giant bathtub of lava during the climax of Terminator 2. The rest of them follow her descent like lemmings.

After the dust from the initial blast clears, traces of the explosion can be heard 30 minutes later in those tiny, guilty, giggles that burst out after your Dad has given you shit at the dinner table for sculpting lude appendages into your brother’s mashed potatoes. As the last wave of snickers refuse to snuff themselves out, I am struck by an image I can't shake. It's haunting me. The mash of lude appendages I covertly whipped up all those years ago, has slowly, giggle by giggle, transformed into a veiny Mount Rushmore of the most hilarious cocks ever witnessed, by man or beast, when the laughter it produced is compared with the laughter a simple slip of the tongue created just 30 minutes ago. God bless you Korea. God bless you for being so hilariously unfunny that my childhood memories have emerged as a Throbbing Deity of phalic comedy that I'll never forget.