The life insurance check came through on a Thursday. Eight thousand dollars for my father, deposited into an account that pays two percent interest — a sentence I can now say out loud without stopping to breathe, which tells you what kind of month it had been.
I’d gotten fluent in sentences like it. Redirecting funds. Beneficiary of record. The inherited IRA. Fidelity had started moving what was his into what is mine, one account at a time, and there was a 7:15 the next morning I was already losing sleep over.
You don’t grieve during the admin phase. You just get very good at spelling your own name.
Then my phone buzzed. My friend Manuel: What are your top 3 K-pop songs?
No preamble. No hey, thinking of you. No let me know if you need anything — which is what people say when they’ve run out of the other things they’re supposed to say, and I don’t hold it against them, because I’ve said it too. Manuel gives zero fucks in all sorts of ways. He goes for the jugular. Rank your favorite Korean pop songs. Top three. Go.
Literally the best thing that happened to me all week.
Here’s why. Not because the question was fun, although it was. It’s that every other exchange I’d had for two weeks required me to be a set of credentials: Last four of the Social. Mother’s maiden name. County, date of death, please, and could you spell your father’s last name again? Hours of it, on hold, with people whose entire job is collecting other people’s facts and numbers, all so I could prove I was who I said I was and that a dead man was as dead as I claimed.
Manuel’s text didn’t want any of that. It didn’t even want me to be okay. It wanted me to have an opinion. Nobody had asked me for one of those in a while. So I did the reasonable thing and opened a note in Obsidian to think it through.
4 WALLS — f(x)
DRAMA — aespa
PEEKABOO — Red Velvet
1 SHOT 2 SHOT — BoA
FOCUS — Hearts2Hearts
SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT — XG
Violeta — IZ*ONE
Cosmic — Red Velvet
INVU — TAEYEON
Lucky Girl Syndrome — ILLIT
Sweet Juice — PURPLE KISS
Helicopter — CLC
Egotistic — MAMAMOO
Ernie, you say, that’s thirteen K-pop songs, not three. To which I respond: you don’t know me.
Number one is 4 WALLS, from the era when SM Entertainment looked around the conference table and thought, you know what our girl groups should be named after? Algebraic notation. The song is shamelessly UK garage, a genre recognizable to approximately zero Americans, although from 2000 to 2002 I was deep into garage and 2-step alongside — research bears this out — six other guys. f(x) had just lost a member; Sulli left that August, and 4 WALLS was the first thing the remaining four put out. The song knows it. Nobody in the video smiles. Everybody is dressed like a 1970s Sears mannequin that has seen some things. This is my shit.
Number two is DRAMA by Aespa. Fun fact for the newly K-pop-curious: one of its composers is EJAE, who would later sing every note that comes out of Rumi’s mouth in KPop Demon Hunters, which means half of America has now heard her voice without ever learning her name. The song is a trap march that struts. I could go get you a real critic’s description of it, but this is my list.
Number three is PEEKABOO — Red Velvet, the one whose video is about luring and murdering American pizza delivery boys. Immaculate.
And then my hand kept going. Number four. Number five. BoA, back and unbothered. XG. IZ*ONE on Violeta. MAMAMOO fully deranged on Egotistic. By the time I surfaced I had thirteen songs, ranked, and I had titled the note “My Top 3 K-Pop Songs” with no trace of irony, and at the top, in the frontmatter, I had written As of 2026-07-30.
As of. Like taste is a balance that has to be reconciled. Like someone might audit it.
Somewhere around the #9 mark, while my heart gets shredded by around number nine I noticed what I was doing, and it wasn’t procrastinating.
The brain that makes estate paperwork feel like drowning — the one that can’t leave a field blank, that reads every clause twice, that needs the record complete and dated and correct — is the exact same brain that turns a three-item text into a ranked thirteen with a timestamp. All week that brain had been a liability. It made me slow. It made me check the routing number four times and still not trust it. It turned grief into a data-entry job I was failing.
Then Manuel asked it a question it was built for, and the whole thing lit up like a pinball machine. Same wiring. For one night the completist wasn’t the guy making my life harder. He was just a guy who loves K-pop a little more than the average 49-year-old American man.
I never did send Manuel three songs. I sent him the whole list. He asked for a top three and got a thirteen-item ranking with a date field on it, because that is who I am, and for once being that guy felt less like a diagnosis and more like a personality.
Is Manuel out there going, bitch, it was a simple question? Yeah, probably. He can take it up with the audit.