Frankly, My Dear...

The missus and I were creeping along one of Seoul's expressways recently, mired as always in traffic, when a bus pulled alongside us. It was a green Seoul Milk company bus and it was full of middle-aged women.

"So that's where the milk comes from," I remarked to Na Young of this eureka! moment.

I'd always wondered, in a country that consumes its fair share of milk, why I hadn't seen more dairies dotting the limited landscape, and now I know. On its cartons, the Seoul Milk company touts its superior pastuerization process, which it claims contributes to LOHAS - a "Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability," whatever that means. In addition to purifying the milk, the company's R&D brains have evidently also concocted a secret formula that induces continuous lactation in women like these milk maids on the bus.

For my first six months in Korea I couldn't bring myself to drink Seoul Milk. It smells, for lack of a better word, funny, like it's gone off after sloshing around in some ajumma's teats under the hot traffic jam sun for a few too many hours. Several of my foreign friends claim that, even after years in Korea, this milk still gives them the runs when they drink it, but I haven't bothered to confirm their claims. And for me, the smell remains the product's greatest tripwire, though I've learned to ignore it and just eat my damn cereal.

Na Young was driving when I discovered, at last, from whence Seoul Milk came. She usually drives whenever we go anywhere in Seoul, not because I don't have a license (I do), but because when she drives I have more time and energy to annoy the bejeezus out of her. When we first got married, I was a terribly overbearing backseat driver, a trait made all the worse by the fact that I sat in the front seat. I'd get all bent out of shape when Na Young would take a wrong turn that led us over the bridge into the Mapo district, on the north side of the Han River, thus turning the fifteen minute jaunt from our house to Costco into a forty-five minute safari through vast wastelands of Hyundai and Doosan apartments as we searched for a way back across the river.

It got to the point where Na Young refused to drive unless I promised to not say a word that wasn't, in some way, complimentary of her navigational skills. This being impossible, I focused my energies on operating the stereo and the selection of music or news. When I was growing up, choosing the music was the sole province of the driver, forcing my sister and I to slide down in our seats whenever we passed any of our friends, lest we be associated with the Michael Bolton song blasting forth from the T-top Camaro that my mother drove.

Na Young, however, has been willing to let me fiddle with her knobs, as it were, ever since she discovered that this keeps me from haranguing her about where we're going, why we made that turn, or whether she just ran over that cat/child/cripple back there.

We were listening to James Brown pound out "Get Up Offa Thang" when I spotted the Seoul Milk bus. According to the official rules that regulate our marriage, I'm not allowed to sing when Na Young is driving, but given that she's driving, there's not much she can safely do to shut me up and I thus tend to carry on like a ninny, adding my own accomponiment to whatever's on the stereo.

"Git up offa that thang," James and I implored Na Young, "and dance 'till you feel better."

"Motherfuck, Motherfucker!" yelled Na Young, as she laid on the horn to protest the driver of a Honda that had cut too tightly into the lane in front of us.

Despite having a driver's license, I was initially not allowed to drive our car, Na Young said, because I tended to get so worked up over the idiocy of the average Korean driver that I'd start swearing in a way that would make a longshoreman blush in shame. Over time, though, in the way these things happen between married couples, my foul mouth rubbed off on her and now mothers at crosswalks cover their children's ears when Na Young rolls up to the stoplight in her gray Hyundai.

Korea and I have a way of doing this to people: living in this country or suffering my asinine ways, much less both, could turn even Mother Superior into a fountain of vulgarity. What's remarkable - not only to me, but to anyone who knows me - is that Na Young, despite everyday inching deeper into that world of profanity, nevertheless does suffer my incessant jackassery - no small feat, I assure you.

I am suspicious, however, that she only tolerates me because I haven't yet farmed her out to Seoul Milk.