By Yoon Seung Jung - Saturday Sucks

There is this thing I have about Saturdays and it’s that no goddamn thing stands between me and sleep in that day. So if I were to have any bloke who barged into the room blowing on his frigging Korean traditional instrument or something during my bliss hours I would literally throw my pillow at him and pour Powerade over his laptop, and stop right there, because I’m a pacifist. My crazy roommate next door furnishes an axe the size of my printer, and my printer’s helluva lot big, so if I wanted to make my point by wrecking his bed into half, I could easily do so. But as I said, I’m like the patron saint of peace around here, and I’ve seen my axe roommate get into one of his fits before, with all those cussing and loud noises and crap, and when he’s finished, he would have lost us one of our shower doors forever, and, somehow, people don’t like that.  

So as I was saying, I wouldn’t make a whole scene out of all this Korean instrument crap, but that’s not the point. The point is that, in a sense, I’m like the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, I think I’m better than him, because if Gandhi was born in KMLA in the 21^st century, he would just waste his time doing Facebook all day, posting all this crap about why the school is unjust and why the body of students and faculty alike are just a bunch of assholes. Anybody who spends time whining about how messed up their lives are are a just a bunch of phonies, and it downright depresses me to see that they should make such a fuss about things everybody confronts. So if I were to see somebody moaning about how retarded his schedules were, and to see him going on Facebook right at the next moment to moan about his busy life, I would not hesitate but one moment. I would take my crazy roommate’s axe, wreck his computer in half, and tell him to dedicate half the effort and time he pours on Facebook posts to writing his essay, because I truly love him.

After waking up at eight and wondering how I could escape being caught as a late student, it suddenly occurred to me that it was one of my sacred Saturdays and that I should waste no more time in going back to sleep. Time is gold, you see. But just about an hour later I learn a lesson about the miracles of life when my worst case scenario actually springs into action. My roommate Jim, along with some of his friends, barges into the room blowing on his taepyunso as if it’s morning assembly session, and I swear I acted like Jesus Christ in refraining from even pouring water over him. I seem to have underestimated my roommate, and I was proud of this new level of craziness he could attain.

When I actually woke up again after that, it was way past lunchtime, and I thought I would eat one of those delicacies my mother had sent me, when I found out that it was missing. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s food thieves, not necessarily because I’m fond of food, but because I couldn’t stand the sight of him munching away in a silent corner of his room, giggling about his dashing deeds, especially when another sight of my mother comes into my head at the same time, with her shopping into the mart and going through all of the wrapping trouble to send food to his beloved son, just to watch it get eaten by some gluttonous pig.

Anyways, when I climbed out of bed and started searching for food, I realized how much of a mess my room was in, and I started to tidy up. Now I say I tidied up, but in a sense it was just chucking every random thing or so into my closet or drawer, and so I started questioning the integrity of this whole process, when at that particular point I stumbled across a pair of goddamn scissors. I never saw this thing before, and I cussed at whoever was dumb enough to misplace it on my desk, and mused myself over chucking it out of the window, when I saw that it was David’s, at which point I started to cry. David left school a long time ago, but in my opinion, he was one of the grandest fellows there ever was. I was his roommate the particular semester he left, and although I loved him dearly, I could not summon up the courage to contact him afterwards, because I blamed myself for his leaving the school.

David left the school voluntarily, but in a sense it was an induced expulsion, because he had reached way over 80 penalty points the week before he left. David was intelligent, funny, kind, and sports-able and all but if there was one thing he couldn’t do, it was managing his life pattern. I still think to myself what life would have been like if David was still here, if I took the extra step and managed to reduce his penalty points, but this sensation creeps over me that even if he did not reach 80, he wouldn’t have wanted to stay at school, and that he would have left anyway. The more and more I think about it, the more it makes sense, and the more I start to understand his feelings. What kind of school kicks out a guy like David when all those phonies on Facebook, gymnasium podiums and all those piggy thieves are still intact here, receiving good grades and even getting esteemed? Why didn’t things stay the way they are, the way they should be? I wanted to see David, talk to him, and play a round of basketball with him at the gym. And so I walked out of school, wondering about where in Seoul I should go to meet him.