Remembering a Seoul Portrait

I'm getting to that age where I'm becoming forgetful.

My short-term memory has been terrible for the last few years: if I don't write something down or add it to my smartphone, I'll forget it. I've always been proud of my long-term memory and how I could recall minute details of something from decades ago or even in my childhood, but even that's starting to get a bit foggy.

I've written close to 3,000 blog posts on The Brown Knowser (or will have, by the end of this month) and sometimes, I forget if I've written about something in the past 13 years of this blog. In fact, several times over the years, I've written a post, scheduled it to be published, only to later remember that I had already written about that particular subject in the past.

Once, I even had to pull down a published post because I learned, after it was up for everyone to read, that I had written a nearly identical post years earlier. I had to pull down the newer post after it had already been viewed dozens of times.

Oops.

(I'm not counting the various Christmas—and now Easter—posts that I repeat, on purpose, annually.)

As I was putting posts together for this week, I came across an old photo from when DW and I lived in South Korea. It was just after Christmas, 1998, and we were visiting friends in Seoul. One of our pocket 35mm cameras had stopped working and we wanted to replace it. A Korean friend told us of a shopping district in the capital city, where we could find good deals on electronics and cameras, and we sought it out.

We found a Pentax point-and-shoot for a very good price and snapped it up. The shop even threw in batteries and a roll of film, and they made sure that the camera was good to go as we left the store.

DW wanted to take a picture right away, so as soon as we stepped out of the store and onto the sidewalk, she captured this image of me.

Recognize this jacket? I wore it this past Monday as I de-weeded my back garden.

Returning to this week, I remembered the picture and thought I could share it for Throwback Thursday. Only, I was sure that I had shared this photo in an earlier Throwback Thursday post.

I tried to remember the post by clicking on the keywords on the right-hand margin: selfies, South Korea, Seoul, Throwback Thursday, remembering. None of these keywords brought results (and it took a long time to scroll through all of the posts with these keywords!).

I don't mind occasionally reusing photos in various posts but I never wish to unintentionally repeat a blog post itself (or, retell the same story). The day that happens, it's time to shut down this blog.

So, this photo was of me, in late 1998, in Seoul, South Korea, outside an electronic shop in Namdaemun Market. The first photo from our Pentax 35mm point-and-shoot camera.

I haven't forgotten those details (especially, since the date is printed on the photo). And while I have shared a cropped version of this photo on various social-media sites, it appears that I've never shared the full-sized photo before today.

Happy Thursday!