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bogey666
Joined: 17 Mar 2008
Location: Korea, the ass free zone
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 Posted: Thu Jun 05, 2008 4:37 am Post subject: |
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| Hank the Iconoclast wrote: |
I get fed up that a person's self-worth is totally attributed to whether they are overweight or not. If you carry a few extra pounds (not obese), you are automatically considered overweight and therefore a lesser person. It's not healthy.
Btw, thanks. I have a large frame and big shoulders. So I carry 214 very well but I have a fixation on the whole 200 number in my mind. That's why I want to get under it. |
if you have a large frame and shoulder to go along, I wouldn't go that low.. but it's your call. Below 200 is when I start looking pretty good, but you've got 4 inches on me.
I will agree with you on Koreans being over the top though. I did a slide presentation this week with my classes on basic adjectives.. with pics..
two of the adjectives I taught were "fat" and "skinny".
On pics examples for skinny I put up a pic of an attractive yet rail thin runway model and a really old lady, so thin skin was hanging off her bones and it was all visible (and quite unappetizing). I wanted to point out the meaning of "too thin" (just like I put up pics of lardasses in the fat examples, including an avatar someone uses here, with the Korean boys at McDonalds) .
anyways.. in my 3rd grade class today (and this held true on other clases, but this one had the most girls and is the most involved)..
all the boys point at the model and say - my girlfriend... (she really IS too skinny IMO) and the girls are like that's me... When I did fat.. one of the girls pointed at another girl and said "fat"...doing a hand imitation of a belly. Now the girl she was pointing at is in NO way 'fat' according to me, and any other objective observer so I made it a point to say.. NO - I do not think she is fat. Since my opinion seems to hold sway in these classes.. the girl that was called fat was very happy I disagreed.
Here is the image they all idealized - which I think is rather gross. Easily way way too skinny.' This is a perfect example of why I say I'll take 10 lbs over rather than 10 under.. Yuck. She looks like a little boy.
I will say though that at least in my town there are many people who are "larger" than your average Korean, even some I would call 'fat'. Perhaps this has to do with the fact it's a working class town and studies show the lower on economic ladder one goes, the more likely they are to be overweight. |
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theholyinnocent
Joined: 06 Apr 2008
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| Posted: Thu Jun 05, 2008 5:34 am Post subject: |
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| bogey666 wrote: |
I love NYC, particularly Manhattan. If it weren't so preposterously expensive to live there, I'd move there in the proverbal "New York minute  |
I live in Queens, about a 10-15 minute train ride from Midtown. It's still preposterously expensive compared to many places in the US, but it's quite a bit cheaper -- my boyfriend and I can easily afford a two-bedroom apartment. Then again I grew up here so I guess I've always considered the cost of living "high but normal." It'd probably be harder to move here as an adult than to just live here from childhood on.
Hoboken isn't bad! I hate Jersey but Hoboken actually has a nice little walking-culture city vibe itself. I wouldn't travel there to hang out, but I think if you're going to live in north Jersey that's the best place to be.
And as for "foreigners" in NYC, actually the reason I joined this board is because my job involves being basically one of three non-Korean people at my place of work. First I just was curious as to what life in Korea is actually like, so I could get a handle on where they were coming from. Now the Koreans seem to like me and always talk about me sticking with the company when they eventually go back to Korea in a year or two and I'm like....hmmmm. 
I did get a sense, from lurking here, of why they seem to think that just hanging around me will somehow improve their English via osmosis. For a while they kept trying to wrangle me into teaching them private English lessons and I was like, "I am so not trained in how to do that, I would be wasting your money." And they were all like, "But you are native speaker." And I was like, "...." I hooked them up with friends who had studied linguistics or things like that, instead. Now I kind of get their approach to education a bit better so it doesn't seem quite so strange.
On topic, one thing I have noticed about the Koreans I work with and their opinions on weight is that they don't consider "fat" and "pretty" mutually exclusive. Like, if an American guy saw a woman he considered too fat, he'd probably just use the blanket "ugly" term to describe her. But I have definitely heard my co-workers say things like, "She is very pretty, but fat," which is an allowance you don't really hear much in the US -- that you can be pretty AND fat. Everyone knows you can -- the "You've got such a nice face!" line is infamous for a reason -- but people seem much quicker to use "fat" and "ugly" interchangeably, which is something I haven't noticed with my co-workers. |
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