Ok, I know it’s been awhile and I have some very important things to write about, namely my experience in Vietnam and that whole ‘what I’m doing after Korea
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Some of you may have been wondering what Bob Ross has been up to lately. Remember him? He was the white guy with the huge afro who had that color palette surgically attached to his left hand on that old people’s channel you always skipped past on your way to Nickelodeon or ABC as a child growing up in the early 90s, wondering for a hazy half-second if people thought it was still acceptable to look like that. I mean, a white guy with an afro? A button-down shirt tucked into jeans? What??
Anyhow. He actually died back in ’95 of lymphoma (thank you, Wikipedia, for depressing me with More Things I Didn’t Need to Know But Anxiously Looked Up Anyway). But…these sneaky Koreans have somehow brought him back to life.
He’s now living inside my Korean TV, selling Qook & Show smartphones—and consequently killing my soul at every 30-second turn. Here, watch for yourself.
Also.
There’s this website that’s been consuuuming my life ever since I found out about it (thank you Day!) and if by some stroke of horrible luck, you don’t know about it— here you go.
I didn’t think I could connect post-mortem Korean-speaking Bob Ross to Barry Schwartz, but the wonders of the modern age have showed me up again.
While watching this brilliant, inspiring, enlightening talk by Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, I could not (and still can’t) get the theme song of that one sketch on MADtv out of my head. Lowered Expectations.
And no- the connection is not that this is something else I used to watch growing up in the 90s. The connection is that I am currently living inside a Baudrillard novel (if he were to ever have written one) which caused me to watch the commercial in the first place. Before I explain that, here’s a short synopsis of that novel:
Young American woman living inside Asian technological epicenter, slowly but consistently losing her mind as she realizes with each new day that this is not real life. Not really. It is a representation of life. An awe-inspiring concoction of explosive consumption consumption consumption of all-things-tech, all-things-image and all-things-emptiness. Add a dash of Confucianism and a large helping of alcohol and you’ve got…KOREA: Shiny Simulacra and Sparkly Simulations, a novel by Jean Baudrillard.
It is because I live inside this Baudrillard novel that I choose to be mostly absent—mostly (trying to) sleep, exhausted by Nothingness…feeling compelled to let others fill up my mind, hence being consumed by TED…but it was after watching that Schwartz talk, that I became even more hyper-aware of the world around me, the illusion of happiness and choice and…etc. And so—it was in the aftermath of all this (probably fake) hyper-awareness that I felt a strange pull toward my Korean TV, only to see a post-mortem-Korean-speaking Bob Ross and…well, I just thought you all should know about it.
One more thing.. I just went to church and God (Oprah) just told me that Copenhagen
