Equanimous Antipathy and Misanthropic Musings

Hi,  I am Kyrei, and I am a language whore.

Unlike so many other foreigner-in-Korea blogs, I am not a teacher. At least, not anymore. I have had several jobs here but the one that is the best paying and most fulfilling (most of the time) is voice acting. Sure, reading dialogues for TOEIC, TEPS, and miscellaneous textbooks, endless streams of vocabulary words (sometimes with definitions to at least break up the monotony) can be deadly dull, at least when the job is done, I don’t have to worry about marking things, dealing with parents, administrators, or any of that shit. The fun stuff is documentaries, stories, animations, and commercials. I do have an agent to deal with (let’s call him “Sebastian Crooke”, as all agents should be known). He pays on time, but I am confident takes more than his fair cut in the long run.

There are good jobs and bad jobs, good scripts and bad scripts. Then there are the whore scripts. Every Thursday, I have to go to, what I shall charitably call “Crazy Christian TV” and be a language whore. I say what the script says and try to do my best to make it sound good (read: properly pronounced, intoned, and emoted as well a synched to the video). And, like any other actor, I sleep at night knowing that, as an actor, I (should) be judged on how well I read the words. Let the writers be judged on how well they were written. There is a bit of a line though, somewhere, in the sand. I think.

Today, one of the parts I had to dub was that of a late high school student who had apparently “fallen off a board” and broken his leg in three places. Was he rushed to the hospital for immediate treatment, casting, and possibly surgery? No. He was rushed home so his mother could pray for him; actually, she called the ARS prayer hotline for  CCTV and let him listen to the prayer while he was screaming in pain. Then, he was prayed over by the Big Kahuna of the CC Church, and hey presto! he was healed of his injuries in 15 days.

This bothers me for one main reason: I do not like to advocate in any way at all, the idea that people should choose prayer over medical attention. If prayer is your thing, fine, pray all you like. But go to a fucking doctor and get treated. Now, I should also point out that in order to further CCTV’s warped agenda, they may have elected to simply not mention the trip to the hospital that came either before or after said ARS prayer, or the boy may have exaggerated his injuries. We cannot know.

However, they pay well and when it is done, I leave to go on my merry way and do other things. At least they don’t try and convert me.  That would be tiresome. I am a language whore.