The Man Who Can’t Get Married : Intro
The Man Who Can't Get Married - Summer 2009
[KBS - http://www.kbs.co.kr/drama/notmarried/]
Original Air Date: 2009-Jun-15 to 2009-Aug-04 | Number Of Episodes: 16
Related TV Series : Kekkon Dekinai Otoko (Japanese - 2006)
Subbing Groups : WithS2. Swiseyo! (쉬세요!)
About The Subs
Contrary to the ratio depicted on this blog, I have actually seen a lot of Korean dramas. In fact, Korean dramas were some of the first I ever watched. Lately, for my taste, there just have been a lot of Japanese dramas that have appealed to me more off the bat. However, recently I have found three Korean dramas that I am especially interested in and all of them are done by WithS2 (Written in the Heavens Subbing Squad). I have nothing but good things to say about WithS2 and as far as I'm concerned they are one of the best and fastest Korean subbing groups. Their timers are EXTRAORDINARY period. Their website, something that many fansubbing groups don't have, is beautifully designed and laid out and as a web designer myself I absolutely appreciate the work that goes into this kind of a presentation. WithS2 puts out softsubs only - I believe - and their website could easily be just a simple LJ community or forum, like many sub groups have, and contain nothing but links to tons of .srt files ... but it's not. It goes beyond that and sets up a look and feel that clearly represents their detailed attitude and level of professionalism.The total number of their members is close to 200 and since 2006, WithS2 has been kicking ass consistently with dedication, focus, and obviously a strong love for Korean drama. The added bonus to my mad crush on WithS2 is the fact that they are subbing Project Runway Korea! Fashion is the infusion of the ideas, beliefs, and spirit of a nation into wearables for its people. A cultures' fashion is it's way of communicating itself to the rest of the world; a way of showing it's strength, preserving it's history, and even expressing it's complexity. PJK helps to encourage and develop national pride, bridge cultural gaps, and dispel bias and myths by showcasing the beauty, talent, and uniqueness of Korean fashion and artistry to the world. As far as I'm concerned, WithS2 taking on this project is the greatest gift to an English speaking audience EVAR and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
WithS2 you have my utmost respect and appreciation for your work and I look forward to more of your releases!
On With The Show!
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE??? They're clearly aliens from Planet Fortheloveofgod ...
| Uhm Jung Hwa | Yoo Ah In | Kim So Eun | Yang Jung Ah |
Where do they grow those lips that Yoo Ah In has? They make them in science labs with the most precise amount of juicy, pink, lickable material to make you go ... JESUS CHRIST ON A BICYCLE KISS ME KISS ME KISS ME! It's like watching an Ajoo video in 3D and hyper digital HD. Those lips have their own wardrobe and makeup person! Either that or they keep them locked in a special vault until filming and then apply them lovingly. They're probably insured for several million won. They probably have their own trailer on set and they probably eat lunch with Kim So Eun's hair!
Don't get me started on Yang Jung Ah and Uhm Jung Hwa ok? These women are almost 40 and they are SIMPLY STUNNING! With these women, 40 is the new 25. No joke! Every time Uhm Jung Hwa is on the screen I am dying and IN LOVE with her beauticiousness! When she smiles I swear I hear birds singing. I SWEAR! Who smiles like this? Who?? Who laughs like that? Who?? She's like some kind of Asian Angel. Someone please strap this goddess to a rocket and send her back to the Heavens where she belongs! She has no business here breathing mundane air, eating mundane food, and touching the ground with her amazing feet. She has to go. Immediately. God is waiting.
Oh don't worry ... I didn't forget our leading man. How in the world could I forget this geniusciously handsome, gorgeously adorable gentleman by the name of Ji Jin Hee! I LOVE this man. I would MARRY this man! With his annoyed looks, super cute bow ties, and pouty face ... this man is a joy to watch every single millisecond he is on the screen. Will you look at those maddeningly beautiful EYEBROWS?
Come on!! Get the damn Men In Black over here and have them come and capture these aliens!! Does no one else notice how odd it is to have so much perfection on one screen like this? Are no warning flags going off? Have any meteors recently landed in Korea? Any mysterious pods found growing in someones basement? I'm telling you ... somewhere off camera I am sure Ji Jin Hee and Uhm Jung Hwa are scaly-skinned and splitting a guinea pig for breakfast. V is for Very Delicious and could someone please get me a cookbook called "To Serve Koreans".
Ok seriously now ... ON WITH THE SHOW! *smile*
If I use a good chunk of Korean dramas as a guide, I would quickly learn that all Korean men are typically obnoxious charming assholes with no ability to understand or properly treat a woman. In my opinion, though, in their defense, there is absolutely no hope of understanding ANY woman and attempting to try can easily drive any sane man mad. The subsequent madness usually manifests itself as this kind of awkward, fumbling immaturity than can be seen as either charming or annoying by the very women that inspired it.
Cho Jae Hee, however, is not a man who attempts to understand women. He is not a man to attempts to understand anyone. He is not a man who cares about how others think of him. Cho Jae Hee is a man with one love ... MEAT and he is a man with a singular talent ... designing houses. There is nothing this man needs in his life except to be left alone with his steak, his classical music, and his OCD perfection. Am I the only one who would marry this man? As far as I'm concerned he's totally my type already! I understand Cho Jae Hee. I understand him incredibly well. And while I understand that Korean culture has to paint him as this desperately lonely man who can't get married, in reality I imagine a man like Cho Jae Hee is actually perfectly content with his life. It's everyone around him that is miserable with their own choices and rule following while he lives a carefree life of his own choosing. If he is unhappy it's only because he wants to have people around him that understand him and accept him as he is.
Difficult or not, socially awkward or not, blunt or not, Cho Jae Hee is a man filled with clear passion, honesty, and determination and as far as I'm concerned those three things are what make him far more human than most mundanes I know. His eyes are open to the hypocrisy around him and he tells it like it is. While everything he says about the people around him makes it easy for people (and viewers) to write off the plain and painful truth by saying he is jealous, bitter, or lonely, I find him refreshingly accurate. Am I saying he's not jealous, bitter, or lonely? No. I'm just saying that he is honest and he is correct in how he views the world around him and that his deep seeded issues and fears don't negate the validity of what he expresses. If you think they do then you're in your own form of fearful denial and need to look around you. Those breeders with their kids they can't afford, the houses they have borrowed from the bank, the overwhelming credit debt they have wracked up, the weekends spent maintaining their borrowed property instead of relaxing, all the compromises and sacrifices to their own happiness and the abandonment of their personal dreams for the delusional American one ... yeah, those people ... are all miserable. They smile and they go about their routines of sneering at carefree people and pushing their breeder ideals onto their single friends. They laugh and have bbqs and pretend somehow that the nightmare of their life is somehow better than not following the pack of brainwashed animals that surround them with propaganda about marriage, children, and home ownership. For all of this bullshit they end up not in the field of their dreams but having affairs, getting divorces, and/or on the couch in my office. How is this blindness logical or even healthy? It's not. Cho Jae Hee has is own bullshit that he swims in, namely that he doesn't care when in truth he cares more than everyone else about finding true happiness. What he wants is real happiness, not the fake kind that placates the drones around him, but the kind that comes first from within before without.
"The reason why you feel uneasy about not getting married is because you see marriage as your ultimate life goal. Because you still harbor the feeling that you haven't reached your goal, you feel uneasy about your life, or you've developed anxiety about it. You just have to change your thinking a little, you can do it all by yourself."
A-fucking-men! This guy should come work for me!
Here is how Cho Jae Hee communicates:
- Badly AND clearly.
- Bluntly AND honestly.
- Selfishly AND passionately.
Communication has two sides: The side of the listener and the side of the speaker. The problem with the way most people communicate in this country is that they only care about hearing things from THEIR OWN SIDE and not BOTH SIDES. This makes communication selfish and ineffective. If communication was meant to be selfish and one sided then people would ONLY talk to themselves and communication wouldn't require TWO people. The only way for communication to work effectively is for both parties to consider and work hard to understand both sides of the conversation so that the message can be clearly heard, and even moreso, so that any problems or miscommunications that arise can be handled effectively. If the speaker only hears themselves and doesn't consider how their words, body language, and meaning are being heard and interpreted by the listener, then problems will occur. Likewise, if the listener only considers how they are hearing and interpreting what the speaker says and not asking questions, inquiring for more detail, and confirming meaning, then problems will also occur. Consider the three things I listed above about Cho Jae Hee's communication and try to tell me which side is the listener side and which is the speaker side ...
I guarantee you that Cho Jae Hee believes he is communicating clearly, honestly and passionately about things. It is because he doesn't consider how the other person is hearing him that he is interpreted the way he is. I also guarantee you that most everyone else believes Cho Jae Hee is communicating badly, bluntly, and selfishly. It is because THEY are selfish, and don't consider how he understands things, interprets things, and expresses them, that they have trouble with him. Like most people, it seems much easier for them to believe that he's a horrible, heartless, selfish person than it is for them to accept that he communicates badly and learn how to understand him. If you knew someone who spoke a foreign language would you dislike them simply because you didn't understand them? Does that really make any sense whatsoever? Think of Cho Jae Hee as someone who speaks a foreign language from the people around him and then consider how he is treated as a result. While you are doing that consider also how foreign he sounds to everyone else around him and how equally foreign they sound to him.
When he delivers lines on screen I hear them as multi-layered communication; one of the best kinds there is because it's open for so much discussion and can lead to amazing amounts of mutual understanding. I want to ask him questions, I want to get confirmations, I want to compare my hearing to his meaning, I explode with the possibilities of understanding this man through the way he sees the world around him and how he translates that into meaning. To me, a person like Cho Jae Hee is a wealth of passion to be explored and appreciated. Even though I'm talking like this I honestly don't think there is any one person in this drama that dislikes him. All of the people in his life, including his mother, take great strides to accept him despite his flaws which is noble. The only problem I have with this so called nobility is that they try to get him to change which actually denotes a lack of acceptance ... and no, it's not "for his own good" - a concept that people tend to use to actually mask their selfishness and warped sense of altruism. They want him to get married because they are or because they did or because culture dictates you should and because somehow they believe it is the true road to happiness. YOU are responsible for your own happiness and it should never be determined by the presence of another person. If you cannot be happy by yourself then you cannot be happy with another person. And, from one thankfully testosterone laden woman to the single men out there, having a woman in your life is a sure way to find Hell without really looking. Play the field. Get a little of this, a little of that, and keep the hors d'œuvre rotating, diverse, and plentiful because if you look at Cho Jae Hee's diet as an example: When you get a plate of nothing but perfect looking steak and eat nothing else but that for the rest of your life - it may look great and taste delicious going down each time - but your health will pay for it later. Cynical you say? It's actually called realism and knowledge of the science of female brain and body chemistry ... but be a doubter if you like. *smile* It's your funeral, or just hemorrhoids if you're lucky.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are a select few women out there who are true angels and who escaped their boring existence in Heaven to walk around on Earth with us unworthy mongrels and bring joy and happiness into even the darkest of lives. We are lucky if we even encounter one in our lifetime and many people pine away and die waiting for just a glimpse of these hope-bringing beauties. Drama fans, we are the chosen ones! We get to witness the coming of such an angel, such an amazing woman who puts nearly all others to shame with her grace, modesty, kindness, and soulshreading beauty! Cho Jae Hee's assistant, Park Hyun Kyu, brings up the film "As Good As It Gets" - to which this drama bares only mild resemblance - and notes how one woman was able to change Jack Nicholson's whole character. If there is one woman who can change a man's whole life, even Cho Jae Hee's, it is the angel I just mentioned. Her name is Doctor Jang Moon Jung ... *drool*
Cho Jae Hee and Jang Moon Jung are mirror opposites in almost every sense of the word and it's that very thing that makes them perfect for one another. Take it from the therapist ... opposites are better for each other than people who are similar. The truth of people who are only searching for someone who is 90% compatible with them is that in the end your relationship will rapidly become extremely polarized. Deep down people who seek people who are a lot like them are looking for people that can reflect the few things they like about themselves back at them. The problem is that these same people truly dislike themselves and will grow to dislike their "compatible other" in the same way and for the same reasons.
People who are polar opposites have the advantage of learning about themselves through the process of learning about someone who is so far from who they are. The potential of this cross education is that both people evolve in ways that are mutually beneficial to themselves and the relationship simultaneously. To garner understanding of another person and to also share your uniqueness with them is the foundational principal upon how relationships truly ascend and, at the same time, move forward into positive and long lasting futures. To have peace of any kind there must first be a period of discourse which, to the finely turned ear, actually sounds a hell of a lot like passion. Conflict then, at it's most base level, is nothing more than the foreplay preceding a climax of resolution and emotional evolution. (*whistle* Hear that, Duchess? *wink*)
Passion, as the cornerstone of any relationship (friendly or otherwise), rides on the same merry-go-round with anger as it does with love and people who can't discern that fine line spend most of their time banging heads unnecessarily and growling at one another in the most non-sexy way. Underneath it all, you have two people who are fighting to be heard, struggling to be understood, and desperate to connect. If you are afraid to explore the many possibilities and paths of life then you will stay stuck forever in one place watching the world, and Time, pass by in a tortuously slow motion blink. So just open your heart to love and go from conflict to passion, from fear to trust, and from chaos into glorious harmony ...
... or deal with hemorrhoids ... your choice. *smile*
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