Emptybottle.org

As more people are hitting this place thanks to the link and kind words by everyone’s favorite enraged guy, I was thinking that perhaps I should clarify what is no doubt an overwhelming impression that I hate Korea. I don’t. Well, sometimes I do, goddamnit, but it’s more complicated than that.
Without getting into icky details of my long and convoluted personal history (which may titillate or bore, but are certainly none of your freakin’ business), let’s just say there have been a fairly significant number of female people who have uttered the fateful words : “Bosco, I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” After they wiped the vomit from their shoes, we would generally get along fairly well, in most cases.
What’s my point? Do I even have one? Fear not – I do, and it’s this: I think that it’s profitable to make the same sort of annoying distinction between ‘hate’ and ‘in hate’. What I mean is that there are times that I hate Korea, but there have been times when I hated pretty much anywhere I’ve lived. I do hate the chaos, the filth, the racism and casual cruelty, but there are scores of Korean people I just love to bits. So I would say that I do sometimes hate Korea, and some individual people here, but that I’m not ‘in hate’ with the place. The inversion of meaning also implies that it’s better to just hate than be in hate, for your s(e)oul, if nothing else.
Waeguk-in who come to live here use the other foreigners around them as ‘complaining posts’. Western-style bars are chockablock with waeguk-in sitting around and commiserating about the last school-director that ripped them off, or the last kid that mimed monkey motions at them. I had enough of that circle-jerking years ago, so was born Waeguk is Not a Soup. Ta-da!