Kawphy

I heard this from Mrs. Telke, my sixth grade teacher who donned a peculiar wig, almost as curiously strange as her husband's hearing aid. Mr. Telke was also my sixth grade teacher, so I had couple teachers. Mr. Telke would make us sing "Good Morning to you! Good Morning to you! We're all in our places with sunshiny faces for this is our way, to start off the day!~" and I'm afraid I never really got the tune down. As matter of fact, I'm not certain if any of us did. He was rather going deaf in the later years of his blessedly long life, and I suppose his sense of tone was not entirely Mozart clear. Once he asked a question the answer to which was Mexico, and my classmate answered "Canada?", and he said, "Mexico! Bingo!" .... So that pretty much says it all. After singing, or moaning along, we'd all stand up and do jumping jacks with Mrs. Telke's guidance, with her wig tumbling off and her body jiggling up and down along with the wig. Speaking of jiggly old ladies with scary hair, I just saw You Don't Mess With the Zohan starring Adam Sandler. In the film, Sandler plays an Israeli commando who goes to America to become a hairdresser and begins to fullfill his dream while serving haircuts and coitus to old patrons frequenting a salon in the Palestinian area of NYC. Mrs. Telke and Zohan. ... Okay, enough with that.

I was talking about Mrs. Telke's coffee story. There was a university that really wanted to recruit a football player to the school, but the student's grades were far too subpar to be eligible. Hence the coach begged and struck a deal with the administration to let the boy in if he spelled one letter in the word "coffee" correctly. And he spelled it: K-A-W-P-H-Y

I began writing this entry because my friend asked me if I drank coffee every day. In college I had a quotidian habit of consuming my caffeine-packed concoction, a mixture of coffee and cola, a special beverage which apparently only my friend and I enjoyed. There was a commercial effort to market the said drink in South Korea during the late 90's but it quickly disappeared. "Coffee-Cola". The marketing effort and the idea itself weren't so bad, but the product tasted as gross as the critics' imagination of the drink. Yet I made the landmarking discovery of cola-guiness, by mixing instant coffee with coke. Such mixture resulted in rich lathery foam carpeted by dark, thick caffeine juice. I continued my drink in college years, except by using fountain drinks this time. Anyway I'm glad my friend at least enjoyed the drink with me.

It seems that there's a lot more we had in common than we believed there were. I suppose we focused more on differences when our minds were set on bridging the gaps that were set between us from time to time. But when I look back, we had a lot more in common than we suspected. Sorta like how a mosaic seems all fragmented from upclose, but the big picture is actually whole and complete.

I wonder if I'll ever meet someone like that again, someone who appreciates my quirks finds the strangeness of it all amusing. Someone who can share my thoughts so much that we speak each other's words right before the other does. I certainly appreciate the time I have had with my friend, and am grateful that our bond continues though perhaps at a slightly different spectrum than before. Perhaps it's circumstances, as consequences of my actions, a change of heart through time, or any combiation of these elements. Whatever the case, we still remain connected, at least in terms of appreciating coffee-coke.

I don't drink coffee every day nowadays, but I do enjoy a nice cold cup of iced americano once every hot sleepy summer noon. I had a cup with a burger today, when I swept by Lotteria (a Korean fastfood chain) to grab a bite before climbing on the busride home.

Speaking of relationships (albeit a paragraph away) I was browsing through my Korean blog site groups for dating or relationship sites. I think it would not be a bad idea to start seeing people again now that I have settled in a bit. Time's passing by and soon I won't have the youthful leisure to see people as opposed to rushedly securing a candidate for marriage. Anyway, one group's name was identical to my name, even in its spelling, which actually deviates from the orignal source of my name. Perhaps, a sign?

Then again, not big into signs.