Hail thee Lady Liberty! The Statue of Liberty and her trusty NYC tour guide, Chris!


Three babes on top of the Empire State building. brrrr... It was cold and blustery up there!

Well, more NYC pics to come in the coming weeks and hopefully a summary of my time there.

I was reading what I wrote in my last entry and reliving that memory still causes pain to pull tightly around my heart. I know the other Pohang girls feel similarly (even Sandy who left Korea to marry the man of her DREAMS) which leads me to wonder what was so powerful about that time? Of course, it was a great time with incredible people. But to be honest, I have lots of great friends (as do the other Pohang girls) and I've had a lot of amazing times in my life. But there's something special about the loss of that time.

Just theorizing. It was very concentrated. Just us four, for two years. We did everything together in a fish bowl of sorts.

Well, on to other things before my non-Pohang girl readers start to puke. :-)

Movies I need to see soon:
Lost in Translation
Garden State
House of Flying Daggers (same director as Hero. I've got to see this movie! It looks like more eye-candy from this director. Unfortunately, it's not showing anywhere in SD yet. And they're showing stupid stuff like Blade or whatever that dumb movie's name is instead of this movie!)
Elf (I thought it would be dumb but I saw an advertisement and it looked hilarious! Am I right?)

Okay, breaking news: I'm SLIGHTLY considering going to Biola this January instead of starting that web-design program that I've been bemoaning this whole semester. (bemoaning because I didn't start it in September like I had originally planned) I need to really pray about this and there are a lot of things to consider. I put it out there because I REALLY REALLY need people to pray for me about that. There is a high probability that I'll just stay with the current plan of starting the web-design program in January but just wanted to let you know what I’m thinking about.

Oh and Happy B-day to you, you live in a zoo, you smell like kim-chi and you even spell your name that way, too! (haha, get it? Sandy Chi + Scott Kim= Sandy Kim-chi) Happy B-day! (her b-day's on the 11th, everyone. Just in case you were wondering)

Well, happy b-day, Joanne. Hope you received my e-card. It just seems like yesterday that we were celebrating our December b-days all together at Lilac. I remember it clearly. We had our White Russians and our ice cream cake from Baskin Robin's. Sandy was wearing that colorful funky hat. I was video taping and wearing my new Handong Global University sweatshirt that I had just received from Joanne (which coincidently I'm wearing right now). "Phillylo" was just a distant, impossible twinkle in Sandy's eyes. End of semester grading stress was in full swing but hey, that never stopped us from having a good time. Just shows you how much can change in a year. Amazing! Well, happy b-day to Sandy, Joanne and me-the December birthday three! (and Ro you're cool even though your b-day is in March)

You know, my only beef with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that it isn't the comedy it claims to be. It is a fascinating, unique movie with spectacular acting but a comedy it definitely is not. In an interview with an actor the other day on NPR Terry Gross made the comment that there are actors that you watch and think, "There's an actor." and then there are actors that you watch and think, "There's a normal person. That could be a person at Starbucks or at my work." The latter was definitely the case with Kate Winslet in this move. She was so convincing. I had no idea that she was that great of an actress. Jim Carey was also pretty good.

The movie had an almost hypnotic, dream-like quality to it. A lot of the movie takes place in Jim Carey's mind, his memories to be more specific. But his memories seem to take on a mind of their own much like our dreams do. We are in control of our dreams supposedly but they seem to interact with us in strange ways. At one point Jim Carey is telling the doctor that he no longer wants his memories of his girlfriend removed but the doctor responds it's too late I'm a memory in your head that you're talking to. As Jim Carey relives his memories that are being removed the memories start to distort similarly to how our dreams sometimes become distorted. It was actually a bit disturbing at times but I still enjoyed the movie. However, it won't be a movie I'll watch over and over again.

Okay, I promised myself that I'd reflect on some of the academic stuff I'm currently reading instead of just talking about silly stuff like the links in my profile! :-) But alas, I've run out of time and my stomach is rumbling. But I really, really am going to try to hash out some of my ideas that reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree is provoking in my next entry. Ha, famous last words of this blogger but I really am going to try. :-)

Tonight in class I was treated with an elementary-school-style rudeness that I haven't experienced for quite a while. We were all assigned a scenario and roles to play. The scenario involved a complicated land dispute, which involved the interests of a church, a land development corporation, a small business, the local government and the local community. I just so happened to represent the church in my group (the role was assigned to me). Unfortunately, I was the only one representing my claim in my group and I had to face down the corporates and the government all by my lonesome.

Regrettably, they happened to be slightly rude, vindictive %#!&s and to top it off they happen to work in this field so they deal with these kinds of scenarios everyday. So they had an axe to grind. So yeah, they laughed arrogantly in my face several times. It was grand. I was actually taken off guard by this because before this point I had considered everyone in the program to be exceptionally thoughtful, kind citizens. Well, I definitely saw the RUDE side of three of my female classmates. But to be honest, I had always kept a distance from these three girls and now I know why my intuition had led me that way.

I don't take things like that well. I actually think in that respect I'm easy prey. Perhaps people with thicker skins could have laughed it off or thought of pithy answers but not me. I started to lose my temper. I don't do well in situations where people don't really listen but just attack and laugh.

So I came home steaming about it. I've decided I'm going to email each of them individually when I've lost my sarcasm and calmly tell them I didn't appreciate their @#!$$%^. Just kidding. But I am going to email them and tell them I didn't appreciate how they acted during the project. I actually feel that is the healthy alternative as opposed to us all feeling a little uncomfortable around each other from now on.

Okay, this is not going to be a real entry. Just a half-hearted "i'm here and alive" entry. Here I am. I was going to write a real entry but instead I got sucked into clicking on the links in my profile. (The right corner of my blog for those that are totally oblivious to those sorts of things. You know who you are, joanne.) Did you know that if you put in your fav movies and the other stuff on your profile that blogger actually creates a link to everyone else that listed the same as you? It's been really interesting to read about the different people who like the same books, music and movies as me.

If I click Matrix I tend to find intellectual sci-fi people but if I click Anne of Green Gables the people that share this link tend to be women under 25. It's like doing Social Science using movies or people's interests.

Let's call it "interest clustering". Try it. Often people that like the same movies have a lot more in common than just movies according to Joyce Thompson's "Interest Clustering" study.

What really trips me out is when I click on a person who likes the same movie as me and they’ve listed the same movies and music as me. Then I'm like, "Hey, only I'm allowed to have that great of taste! Stop copying me!"

If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you need to get with the (blog) program!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

It doesn't seem real but I'm flying out to Baltimore tomorrow morning. I'll be staying with Sandy and Scott in Baltimore. Then later I'll be in NY seeing the sights and meeting up with new and old friends. Lucky me! I also got a round trip ticket for $233.41! So I can't stop bragging about that!

Hopefully, sometime soon I'll make time to reflect on the family Thanksgiving meal with its joys but also its frustrating post-election political discussions.
:-0

i can't believe this. i'm typing with only my right hand as we speak. why? I was peacefully chopping up veggies to make some vegetable juice when the plump carrot that i was about to hack into rolled over and instead I chopped into my left index finger.

oh yes. My first thought was, "Ahhhhhhhhh!" My second thought was, "oh crap, that is too deep. Ahh, i don't want any shots!" (i have a deep aversion to shots) I ran out to my grams and unc with a reddening napkin around my finger. At first I thought i might have to go to the emergency room but Dr. uncle and grams helped me wrap it with band-aids. It stopped bleeding and we decided that would be okay with a couple band-aids and disinfectant.

But the last half an hour I’ve been walking around my house with my left index finger in the air like I have a great idea or something. (It starts to pulse if I don't hold it up and it's gross feeling not to mention probably not healthy.) After our little emergency died down my grams looked at me walking around the house with my finger in the air and said, "All you need now is a light bulb above your head." Haha, very funny.

Suddenly something as simple as putting my hair in a bun has become a task. This is going to be interesting. Hopefully it will heal quickly.

Ironically, out of nowhere i've also started sneezing in combination with the sniffles. Look now, i'm starting to sound like a certain hypochondriac prof. at Handong. (hehe pohang girls know what i'm talking about)

Growing up is a weird thing. I just came back from my mentor's 50th birthday party. She and her family were a major part of the wallpaper of my teenage years. Those were tender, vulnerable years. I was awakening from the deep slumber of a shaky, unstable childhood. Yes, trying to find my way. Would I survive the perils of teenagehood without a lot of parental guidance? Thank God, I did. I've turned out pretty well if I do say so myself. :-)

My mentor had a lot to do with that, so perhaps that's part of the strain I feel when I hang out with her family and the people that filled that time in my life. Maybe when a butterfly immerges from a cocoon it doesn't want to remember that it used to be a fat, vulnerable caterpillar.

Most of the people there were part of the legacy of the OB years. I remember that humble beach house packed with visitors and teenagers on that extremely wide street. I used to just go over there randomly and grab the key off the nail in the community laundry room. I would let myself in sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, wake up my mentor to talk about life and my worries.

At the party I was talking with a girl from those years. She's now in her 20's but I remember when she was half my size. She and her mom lived down the street from the OB house. She was deathly quiet back then. I could tell that she was much more outgoing now but that it was easy to sink back into "quiet Tracy mode" when she was around this crowd. I could relate to her. That's the weird thing about growing up. Even though my mentor's son is now a foot taller than me it's hard for me to not see him as the 5 year old that kicked me from under the kitchen table.

And perhaps some people at that party looked at me in a similar way. Yes, as I looked around that room I felt the tugs of my ill-fitting past. It’s that residual memory that makes the growing up process weird. Being reminded of who you are in a historical, cumulative sense when you see yourself through the eyes of others and then comparing that with what you see when you look in the mirror.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So I figure, "hey, let the pics do the talking." This is a picture tour of my last two weeks. In a couple days I'll write and fill in the gaps.

:-)

The Morning After
I can't believe George Bush won! A relief when it comes to some domestic issues but a nightmare for foreign policy!

Ro's coming in tomorrow to visit me! And then Sandy's wedding is this coming weekend! Amazing-the time has finally come....

Just trying some stuff out with photoshop...

I just made this in my Phototshop class. So I just wanted to see how it looked on the internet and if I could even figure out how to get it up on the internet. It's going to be fun to experiment with this...

Okay, back to class...

God is not a Republican or Democrat!!!

Can I get an AMEN to that!

WORD up!!!! Sojourners magazine!

I'm writing an outline for a project this morning and I just so happened to glance at these paintings by Rene Magritte as I was going through different documents in my computer. Suddenly, the upper one spoke to me more clearly. Before I was just intrigued by it but my brain didn't really unlock anything when I looked at. But this morning I thought "sometimes we make a door where really everything is open to us."

I was so tired today that I went to bed at 8pm but then once I got in bed I couldn't sleep. I know you think that's normal but I can usually sleep any time I want to. So this is a bit weird for me. I'm getting a sore throat, so I want to fight it off. But no-suddenly I just can't sleep. Lame.

So I thought I'd try to blog but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get into that either cuz what I really want to do is sleep.

I've gone through this weird cycle this week. Sunday and Monday I started seriously thinking I was going to move out my grandma's house. I ended up calling a Christian gal that was going to have a room open in November. We talked and she sounded cool.

Then my mind started to roll through all the implications. If I moved out I would be paying $600 a month in rent/utilities, so I'd have to get a job that could at least make that. Then I could possibly pay the rest of my expenses with my savings. But what about my grandma and uncle...will I get a chance to get over there to cook and clean enough? What job should I get? I started planning my plan A, B and Cs around my priorities here in SD: hanging out and helping out my sis and her fam, preparing my grams and unc to move into a more dependant life style, working on the two certificates I'm getting (or going to get) in Community Economic Development and web design.

I went back and forth between "I'm too old to be staying with my grams, it's going to make me crazy/depressed" to "but they need the help right now and it will save you a lot of money because you don't want to work full time because you're doing these programs” I went to visit my possible roommates' house and eventually came back to the same conclusion. So I went through 3 days of what about this and what about that and tons of calling and thinking when I should have been doing other things. And I came back to square one (staying at my gram's house) even more convinced that it was the right thing to do. Which I guess that often happens when a person is having that "decision crisis". However, it does make me think why didn't I just save myself a lot of time/stress and not go through that mental exercise.

One benefit of that mental exercise is that I came up with an idea for something that has been eating away at my brain. My grandma is 84 and is getting so that she doesn't walk too steadily. My unc has Parkinson's disease, which will continue to get worse. They are getting more and more dependent even though they're fighting it.

I'm most likely just staying here for a year, what about when I leave? Who's going to watch after them? My sis comes over once a week to do yard work but she has a family to take care of. And I think my grams and unc need someone to stay with them. So I thought of this great idea. I got the idea when I was looking at the roommate classifieds on The Rock church website. I could possibly set something up after I leave where some responsible, young Christian girl rents out my room for a cheap price/no cost in exchange for cleaning and perhaps driving duties.

I think this idea could really work. However, I realized that to make it more likely to work I needed to make the house more comfortable. My grams has super bad fashion sense and sometimes I think questionable common sense. And combined with her old age the house is a bit...cluttery. I don't know quite how to explain it. Just the earmarks of my grandmother's house keeping style. Like random things sitting in the same place forever or jerry-rigging weird things to hold the cat food or keeping chairs that are forty years old and then hanging a 20 year old rug on the back of those chairs to top it off or her color-blind choice of white linoleum through out the entire house (yes, she had the carpet torn out and she replaced it with white linoleum a couple years ago. Of course, I was away at college or I would have talked her out of it. And yes, she really is colorblind. She's become so in her old age.)

I'm so used to her being this way that it's just occurred to me in these last couple months that I need to take the initiative and fix the things the way I think they should be. I used to be more like the child that subconsciously thought, "what place do I have to arrange her house". But now I realize she would like it and it's the right thing to do. So I decided I should put my money and time into making the house more comfortable instead of putting that money and time into rent at someone else's house. So my newest project is making a plan for the decor of the living room and family room. It's actually fun. I don't think I'll start until Christmas break when all my classes are over but grams and I still went to Ikea today to get ideas for couches.

Well, that's one of many things on my mind lately. Another big thing on my mind and a BIG cause of stress is my stupid part-time job. That whole situation is a big confusing mystery to me. As my faithful readers know I really felt God led me to that job but as far as my understanding goes it's been mostly a mistake. Especially because it made me delay my entrance into the web-design program I'm going into. Now I'm starting the program Jan 3oth instead of Sept., which seems like to me the worst mistake possible!! Because the January program won't end until October. Which is terrible for me because I'm planning on going to grad-school in Sept. Which means I will miss 2 months of the program. And it doesn't end there. The two months I will miss are perhaps the most important for me because that's when I'll learn to combine all the skills I've been learning into websites. Which is what I most want to learn about!!!

So this really makes me wonder did I hear God wrong? What happened? There isn't a day that goes by that I don't grumble with regret to myself about choosing to delay the program. I suppose that I've gotten better about letting it go. Because it's done-right? There's nothing I can do now.

There's more I could say about this but I'm going to give sleeping another try. :-)

Wow, this kind of silly "picture movie" just spoke to me a lot. Especially because my time here in SD has been riddled with disappointment and confusion.

The words are in Korean but the pics speak loudly enough that you don't need words. The bummer is it's kind of small but if you click on it you should be able to see it better. (When you double click on the pic to the left of the picture you will see "all sizes" click on that and change it to "large" then you'll really be able to see it.)

Blah, blah, blah.....

That's how I feel.

Man, wasn't able to make my blogging time tonight. Bummer. I guess I'll have to wait until Tuesday or Friday to tell you what I really want to write.

Made burritos for the grams and unc crew tonight. Once again forgot that their tolerance for spice is nil compared to me. whoops.

Did some pleasure reading in my "intro to political science" textbook. It really is pleasure reading for me. Which is saying a lot in my case because usually fiction is the only pleasure reading for me.

And finally got kind of caught up on some email and now I'm hitting the sack. But just thought I'd let you know before I go to bed that http://www.opendemocracy.net/ is just the best online webzine in the world. The article on Iraq from the perspective of a foreign born Iraqi was very interesting.

well, good night...

Hypochondriac
Originally uploaded by Snapatorium.

This girl's art spoke to me about how the bombardment of pop-culture often leaves us feeling fractured. Putting on our fractured masks pretending everything is fine. I think her art also reflects the absurd extravagance of our commercial culture. A lot of her work seems to combine 50's looking magazine pics with modern paraphernalia-expressing the evolution of an era and perhaps some of the confusion as we transition from one period to another. Interesting stuff...

I've been planning on making some artwork for my classes along the same strain. Of course, I don't know what it will look like until I'm done. But I think I'm going to combine family pictures and try to modify them to express the "fracturedness" I see in our generation and in myself. That's probably why I was intrigued by her work.

I was reading an interesting article about muli-culturalism tonight. The author was arguing a point on a subject I'm very much still formulating my thoughts on. I'm still sifting through my experiences and setting mental ground work to start the serious labor on the subject. But hearing him argue a certain point of view helped me better understand the parameters of the issue and it helped to know what academia is arguing about concerning this subject.

I've stumbled upon the issue of multi-culturalism vs. assimilation kind of through the back door. I'm white, low/mid-middle class. Went to private Christian schools. Why would I think about it?

Living in other countries has made me think a lot about national identity. For example, Koreans have a strong sense of Koreaness and after a while of living there you get tired of being on the outside.

I also have a lot of second-generation friends. The kind of people that grow up understanding two cultures and yet watching them from the outside I think they grow up with a stronger sense of identity. True-they often complain about the inconveniences of being a minority and I understand. Yet as I ride with in the car with my Mexican-American girlfriend and listen to her talk about her life I wonder, "What am I really?" Am I the absence of culture? The leftover, white, watered-down culture? I'm Czech, German, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. But I don't know anything of these cultures or their languages. I guess ultimately it doesn't really bother me. But just when I see the cohesion of my second-generation friends' communities it makes me wonder about assimilation.

With thoughts like these back-loaded in my brain, this article definitely added to the list of things to think about in this respect. He actually argues for assimilation.

"Multiculturalism distorts the past, deforms the present, and diminishes the future. The best of America, says Ali Hossaini, shows the world a better route to a free, unified society: its name is assimilation."