i just stared at the information and started laughing. not because i was angry. it was the kind of laugh you do when there is nobody else left to blame.
i had researched the membership, procrastinated about buying the membership, finally bought the membership… and somehow managed to miss the exact thing i bought the membership for.
honestly, sometimes life doesn’t need to teach you a lesson.
sometimes it just sits back with popcorn and watches.
oh well.
general ticket sales it was.
i asked my colleague what her budget was for the concert. she asked me what my budget was.
“i don’t really have one.”
because in my head, if i was going to see bts, i wanted to be on the ground floor and as close to the stage as possible.
that was just me. everyone enjoys concerts differently.
she told me her budget.
i thought about it for approximately two seconds.
“well… if the front row costs more than your budget, you can sit somewhere else and i’ll sit in the front row.”
friendship is important.
but apparently there are limits.
while waiting for the general sale, i started doing something else.
youtube.
i searched bts.
eventually, i found run bts.
i watched one episode and laughed so hard.
so naturally, i watched another one.
then another.
and somewhere between the chaos, the games, the cheating, the arguing, the laughing and seven grown men apparently taking completely ridiculous competitions far too seriously, i started wondering:
are they really like this?
because they were funny.
not polished-tv-show funny.actually funny.
they teased each other. they annoyed each other. they knew exactly how to push each other’s buttons. sometimes they looked less like seven global superstars and more like seven brothers who had been left unsupervised for too long.
then i came across one of the newer run bts episodes, filmed after they had returned from the military.
and i was curious.
after all those years, would it still feel the same? would they still be as funny? would their dynamic have changed?
apparently, i was now studying bts behaviour.
this was going well.
but watching them, so many things still felt familiar.
they still roasted each other. they still knew each other’s habits. and somehow, just like in the earlier episodes i had watched, jin and jungkook were still in charge of the cooking.
years had passed. military service had happened. they had all grown older.
and apparently jin and jungkook were still on kitchen duty.
some things in life are reassuringly consistent.
there was another little moment i noticed.
taehyung simply put his arm around namjoon.
that was it.
nothing dramatic.
but for some reason it caught my attention, because i hadn’t noticed that kind of interaction between the two of them in the other episodes i had watched.
maybe because i was still so new to all of this, i was paying attention to little things. not because i was trying to prove anything.
i was just curious.
and the more i watched, the more curious i became.
by then, at least i finally knew what army was.
although, here’s a question:do you actually know what army stands for?
because i certainly didn’t.
then again, not long ago i didn’t even know bts sang dynamite, so clearly i still had a lot of catching up to do.
but there was something else i still didn’t know.
the more run bts i watched, the more i kept coming back to the same question:
are they really like this?
are they genuinely this funny, this comfortable with each other, this… normal?
or was all of it scripted?
i didn’t know.
but apparently, there was only one way i was going to find out.
keep watching…
next in almost missed, part 4: rookie…
i had three concert tickets. apparently, that was only the beginning. next came run bts, episode after episode… and what does the future hold for my ARMY membership? i haven't decided yet.
