Stephan Ko

 Despite record low birthrates in South Korea, the summer days are filled with whaling cries. It's that time of year when the bugs start to sing again.  If you're unfamiliar with what cicadas  sound like, imagine a Mandrake had a baby with a giant horsefly. God is creative like that. They're exceedingly raucous and quite gruesome to look at. And when I was a kid, my least favorite thing about summer visits to Korea was, unsurprisingly, the incessant droning background symphony of cicada families harmonizing to destroy my ears. Perhaps I despised these small yet noisy creatures because they represented the insufferable humid heat waves. Perhaps I felt wronged for having a peaceful headspace stripped away. After all, it's difficult to drown out a lone speaker perched outside your windowsill, let alone a colony.  Having spent most of my life in Southern California and most recently New Jersey, I had long forgotten about their presence... 

There's something surreal about playing a pick up game with complete strangers. This can probably pertain to 99% of team sports bar something like tennis but as the thought of futsal lie fresh in memory, I will reference such in this journal. Though I live in the heart of Gangnam, I made the hour long trip to sweat my fair share, to vent my evils, and more importantly, to impart my creativity unto the ball.  There's a term sports analysts give to different types of team games: weak games and strong games. While the wording may initially be misleading, strong games refer to sports like basketball in which the outcome of a game -- a win or a loss in this case -- is heavily dependent on the impact of star players. If MJ sprinkles some magic on the court, well, bad news for the opposing team. This means that the outcome of a game is directly related to how the best players perform. This is why even though I tend to get picked last for a pick-up game of basketball, I often end up on...