sometime after my accidental discovery of bts, i caught up with an old high school friend.
we hadn’t seen each other in seven or eight years, so naturally there was a lot to catch up on. life, work, what we had been doing, what had changed, who had disappeared off the face of the earth… the usual conversation you try to squeeze into a few hours after almost a decade.
somewhere in the middle of all that, i casually mentioned bts.
i told her how i had stumbled across their concert on netflix, then watched the documentary. how i vaguely remembered them from years ago but couldn’t really remember much about them. how surprised i was by how grown up they looked now, how good they sounded… and, slightly more embarrassingly, how i couldn’t seem to get them out of my mind.
she listened to me and then said something along the lines of:
“you HAVE to see them in concert.”
not maybe you should go. not if you get a chance.
apparently, i had to go.
she also told me they were going on tour.
well. that was useful information.
then she started talking about something called ARMY and a membership.
army? eh?
membership?
eh?
at this point she might as well have changed languages halfway through the conversation.
i nodded along while somewhere inside my head i was thinking, what ARMY? because — and i am slightly embarrassed to admit this now — when someone said “BTS ARMY,” i genuinely thought they were talking about the military.
in my defence, the word army does tend to point you in that direction.
so i went home from that catch-up with another little thought planted in the back of my mind.
maybe i should actually go to their concert.
then i arrived at work.
i was talking to one of my colleagues and told her about the conversation with my friend and my sudden interest in BTS.
she looked at me and said:
“do you know the song dynamite?”
“no.”
she pulled out her phone and played it, and my face lit up.
“ohhhhh! shoot! this song!”
of course i knew dynamite. i just never knew they sang it.
apparently, the dots had been sitting there patiently waiting for me to connect them.
clearly, i was doing an excellent job.
i told her bts were coming to melbourne and asked if she wanted to go with me.
“yes.” there was absolutely no hesitation.
so that was it. i had a concert partner.
i checked the tour dates and saw they only had two concerts in melbourne. suddenly this casual little idea started becoming slightly more serious.
and that mysterious word my friend had mentioned came back.
ARMY. membership.
so i did what any sensible person does when they realise everyone else seems to understand something they don’t.
i googled it.
what is ARMY?
what is bts ARMY membership?
what are the benefits?
one search led to another, and eventually i discovered that ARMY was not, in fact, a branch of the military.
it was BTS’s fandom.
ah.
now we were getting somewhere.
then i learned about the membership and concert presales, and suddenly the membership made perfect sense.
okay. i need to join.
but let me be clear.
at that point, i had absolutely no intention of keeping the membership. i was joining for one reason and one reason only:
presale tickets.
that was it.
join the membership. get access to the presale. buy my concert ticket. cancel the membership afterwards.
a perfectly sensible plan.
I wasn’t planning on becoming ARMY or anything.
i just wanted a good seat at the concert.
apparently, life had other plans.
there was only one small problem with my perfectly sensible plan.
i still had to actually join.
and i didn’t.
i dragged it out and dragged it out.
why?
i have absolutely no idea.
work was busy. i was tired. there was still plenty of time. tomorrow existed. i had a little black book filled with excuses.
all the usual very convincing arguments we give ourselves right before discovering that, actually, there was not plenty of time.
eventually, i joined the membership and paid for it. i believe it was a wednesday.
perfect.
very organised of me.
except…
little did i know — and i am still kicking myself about this — the day i finally joined the membership was the same day the presale started.
and when did i discover this?
the next day.
…of course!!!
