Trifecta!

Face it, Tiger. You just hit the jackpot.

-- Mary-Jane Watson

Having lived in Korea for the better part of five years, there's little that surprises or startles me anymore. Rare is it that I find myself astounded, instead finding commonplace what once induced speechlessness. Today, however, I got lucky. Three seperate instances occured to subtly nudge me, to remind me that, regardless of how situated or mundane I consider my life here and now to be, there's always something undiscovered, something waiting.

1) On my way to the 7-11 a few blocks from our place, some kids were huddled around a pair of miniature arcade-style games. They were playing one of those games where one has to hit the right buttons in coordination to the music playing.

And the song that guided them was Pop That Coochie by 2 Live Crew.

2) After work, I showered and went outside for a cigarette. Almost ready to extinguish my smoke, a police car rolled up. The car slowed down and then stopped in front of me. The officer sitting in the passenger's seat rolled down his window and asked me, "do you like marijuanna?"

"No," I answered, nonplused.

"Good!" he exclaimed, giving me the thumbs-up as the car started off.

3) Sitting on the sofa in the TV room, I was reading Jack London's The Sea-Wolf when the doorbell rang. I opened it to find a mother, carrying a baby on her back in one of those traditional wrap-around jobs that can't be good for the old spine. She held a white button-down shirt in her hand, and bobbed up and down like a jackhammer, comforting her roused toddler.

"I heard you lived across the street, and I wanted to ask you something," she said.

"Shoot," I intimated by my facial expression.

"Well, my husband's brother was in Thailand, and he picked up this shirt while there. He claims it's a designer shirt -- that he only paid about 5,000 won for it -- but I've never heard of the brand. I was hoping that you could tell me whether or not it really is a quality shirt."

The shirt was a Nordstrom -- whether real or fake I hadn't a clue (though the circumstances under which it was purchased have me leaning toward the latter). But I told her it was a really spiffy shirt, that the brand was all the rage these days, and she left with a happy grin, thanking me for the clarification.

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In the immortal words of Ice Cube (before he started making shitty music and even shittier movies), "today was a good day."