Puppets and Puppeteers

The important issue aside, the real lesson today for me was that wearing black shoes and black jeans in the middle of a sunny Seoul summer is a bad idea. It was an interesting but somewhat painful feeling-almost like having my feet slowly roasting in an oven.

With that out of my head, the whole experience of manipulating and being manipulated was interesting and somewhat annoying.

As the puppeteer, I had to manually operate every part of the puppet that I wanted to manipulate. Things were pretty much exactly what I wanted them to be or at least what I could make of it. This is uninteresting. No random outbursts, no mistakes, no room for creativity, etc. It is much more interesting and funny to watch people do what they are told to do, because the process and outcome of such is random and merely predictable at best.

As the puppet, the experience was annoying because there was no room for one's own pace. In other words, I couldn't slack off and do whatever I wanted. I had no control over neither the process nor the result, and as a result, it was boring.

And my feet were being cooked alive.

Oh joy.