analogies

I put thought into this. I want you to know that.

I don't just sit down and start writing some bullshit. Maybe I used to do that, but even then the sitting down was a precursor, a requisite, part of the process, of writing something for you to read.


For a while now I've been trying to think of a way to shoehorn in an analogy. The real life situation I've been working off of has been this: in Daejeon, there are a lot of traffic lights, though not all, which have surveillance cameras on them to catch people running red lights. These cameras have worked like gangbusters at preventing people from running red lights at intersections which have these cameras. The trade-off is that it has increased the frequency of red lights run at intersections which don't have cameras. So, insofar as running red lights is concerned, the cameras have replaced common sense and decency with the thought of monetary loss. In other words, whereas before people didn't run red lights because doing so might kill someone, now they do run red lights because certain intersections won't cost them a fine if in fact they do run them.

This thought came to me about a month ago, and since then I've been trying to apply it to another part of my life. I tried to think of how perhaps the student are the cars, and I'm the camera, and education is the intersection. Or I'm the traffic light, the students are the cameras, and Korea is the cars. Or I'm the cars, the students are the cameras, and Korea is the intersection. None of these ever added up. Now I'm left with the husk of a perfectly good potential analogy, which I'm discarding because I don't know what to do with it.

I went out with a friend tonight. It's a short walk from where I live to the hustling and bustling downtown Daejeon. We went to a bar and played a few games of darts. We then bounced around a few other foreigner bars. At around 3am I decided to call it a night and walk home.

On my walk back to my apartment I ran into a coworker. She, an American, was walking with her Korean boyfriend. I don't know her well so I anticipated a quick wave and nod and hey. It turned out that they were patrolling the area, because not an hour earlier my coworker had been walking down the same stretch of road only to find a 20-something Korean guy beating off at passers-by on a street corner.

Apparently, if I'd had a facebook account, I'd have heard of this serial masturbator who perches out in dark alleys where foreign girls frequent. Regardless, she quickly informed me of what had happened to her, and showed me a video she had taken of the creep quickly pulling up his sweatpants and running off into the distance as she futilely pursued him.

And then her boyfriend spotted something. He took off running, and I, figuring why the hell not, sprinted after him. We ran for two blocks, then circled back around to where we came from. I never saw a thing, I was just counting on him having seen something. It must've been nothing because after all the running we found nothing. It felt good to get my heart rate up, though.

Now would be the perfect time to tie in my previously mentioned potential analogy. But there's nothing connecting these two things. Rather than trying to tenuously string them together, I'm opting instead to use them both as separate cases of people being horrible.

The End