We’ve had some bitter cold days here in the DC area (not as many as I would like, and certainly not enough snow, but whatever). What boggles my mind is all the professional women around here that wait for buses and subways in skirts. Short skirts. And not skirts with stockings or boots or anything else that would come between their skin and the weather. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know why they do it. But it just seems like madness.

The term “barbarian” is bandied about a lot these days. Of course, everyone knows it comes from the Greek term “bararoi”, which originally referred to a species of talking pumpkin. Only gradually and through the sedimentation of linguistic geology did the term come to embrace its modern idiom; that is, anybody who, coming across in a thrift store the Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer on the one hand, and, on the other, a questionably pasty stack of Busty magazines, picks up the latter, in a full, though erroneous, confidence that he has made the dirtier choice. Real culture knows the juicy bits.

Encoded deep within our DNA is the desire to have our genitals meet with those of another that ends in either joy or disappointment. Because of that desire, we tend to put ourselves on display, however, our attempts at mimicking mating rituals in the wild kingdom come off as forced and desperate. We wear bright

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I didn’t feel like writing a strip with actual dialogue for today. So instead of dialogue, I’ve inserted the basic idea of what the characters are saying. Feel free to imagine them talking about whatever the hell you want. It’s my Friday gift to you, gentle viewers.

Here, it’s all Bieber. During week one in Daegu, “Korea’s most colorful city,” which is actually, “Korea’s card catalogue of faded gray sky scrapers, overcast skies and endless stream of black Hyundai’s,” I digress into the infantilization that occurs when relocating to a new country. Neon signs are everywhere: small dashes and zeroes mixed into an array of disfigurement as if someone has jumbled the shapes together in a felt bag and then blindly arranged them into miniature squares. My rationalized excuse for not yet enrolling in Korean lessons is that I’m afraid Korean words might lose their beauty. What are probably cell phone adverts and other mindless billboard messages look like oversized scrabble pieces, as if the whole, uniform city is actually a playing board being used to somehow score points in life.