What Comes After

That's the question I'm asking myself right now. I'm graduating from college (finally!) in May, and I don't really have a plan for after. I have a broad, this-is-what-I'd-like-to-do idea, but for the first time in my life, I'm really not sure where I'm going to be in six months. Oh, there have been periods of a few months when I was at loose ends, but this time I'm looking at a big, fat question mark right over the part of my future labeled "the rest of your life".

People keep asking me, "Asian Studies? What are you going to do with that?" I'm rather sick of that question, to be honest. I understand why people ask it - who really knows an Asian Studies major, after all? - but it's annoying when I don't know myself. And then there are those who have a thin, polite veneer over their "What a useless degree!" faces when they ask it, which is even more annoying.

The only real, concrete goal I've ever had for my life is unattainable at the moment. I'm working toward it, but it's not something I can achieve on my own. In the meantime, I have to do something with my life. I have a feeling my parents aren't that anxious to let me live at home while I spend my days watching dramas and waiting for "someday". I can't say that I'm that anxious to do that, either.





[Source]: Photo by Macarena C. here on flickr, with these restrictions

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

This was me, 25 Christmases ago.

I'm hoooooooome!

Not jiggity jig, though. Stephen and I left Logan Saturday morning (after pulling a late night doing laundry, packing, and cleaning) with my cousin and his wife. We stayed the weekend at my aunt and uncle's house and had a fun time visiting with the cousins we don't get to see as often. I also got to go to church with my trainer - she goes to the Korean magnet ward in SLC, and so we went to Sunday School in Korean. I was thrilled to realize that I could follow the lesson on the book of Revelation; there were only about twelve words that I didn't know. Radically different from when I used to go to church in Korean, whew! My mission president and his wife only live about a half-mile from my aunt and uncle, so I was able to go over there Sunday evening and have a nice chat with them, too. All in all, a good weekend.

Monday morning we woke up long before the crack of dawn to go to the airport and catch our 7:10am flight. Everything went smoothly until we were on the approach to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where our flight was scheduled to land before we got off in Houston to catch our flight to Nashville. We made the approach, but weren't able to land because visibility was so bad. They rerouted us into El Paso, where they had us switch planes to a flight going from El Paso to Nashville, while our first flight flew back to Albuquerque. Thankfully, that meant that we didn't have a layover and landed in Nashville only a half-hour later than we were originally scheduled to land. On the downside...we had no layover and landed a half-hour later than we were originally scheduled to land. Which meant that all we had to eat between 5am and 3pm was juice and peanuts. Suffice it to say, we were very, very hungry.

The worst part of getting home is never flying, though. It's the three-hour drive home after we've already been on the plane for six hours. By that time you're just impatient and tired of sitting, plus, let's face it: driving the highway in the dark in Tennessee is not the most interesting thing to do. Thankfully, though, Heidi came to pick us up, so the company and the conversation was good. And of course, actually getting home and having all your little siblings run out of the house screaming your name with joy and launching themselves into your arms more than makes up for not eating for ten hours.

It's good to be home.

The Paradox of Mankind

"The great deceiver knows that one of his most effective tools in leading the children of God astray is to appeal to the extremes of the paradox of man. To some, he appeals to their prideful tendencies, puffing them up and encouraging them to believe in the fantasy of their own self-importance and invincibility. He tells them they have transcended the ordinary and that because of ability, birthright, or social status, they are set apart from the common measure of all that surrounds them. He leads them to conclude that they are therefore not subject to anyone else’s rules and not to be bothered by anyone else’s problems.

...

Another way Satan deceives is through discouragement. He attempts to focus our sight on our own insignificance until we begin to doubt that we have much worth. He tells us that we are too small for anyone to take notice, that we are forgotten—especially by God.

...

The Lord doesn’t care at all if we spend our days working in marble halls or stable stalls. He knows where we are, no matter how humble our circumstances. He will use—in His own way and for His holy purposes—those who incline their hearts to Him."

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

October 2011 General Conference

There's a powerful principle in that - the sin lies in the extremes. God would have us cultivate balance in all we do, and especially in how we see ourselves. It is true that alone we are nothing, and it is also true that each of us have a divine potential - the potential to become like God. But that divine potential can only be realized in a partnership with our Heavenly Father, through the power of the Savior's Atonement. 

[Source]: Picture here at ThingsToLookAtHigh.com

10 Things I Hate to Do

* Clean the kitchen

} Fold laundry

# Scrape ice off my windshield in the morning

@ Smile for pictures

$ Wake up in the morning

^ Write papers

& Explain myself repeatedly

% Clean up other peoples' messes

+ Make my bed

= Wash the dishes

A Few Musings on Beauty

As if anyone needs a reminder how genius John Williams is. The Memoirs of a Geisha soundtrack is one of the most beautiful I've ever heard in my entire life. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, arguably two of the greatest musicians alive, are playing the solo cello and solo violin parts. 

The whole concept of beauty is one that has fascinated me since I can remember. It's one of those things like justice we all agree exists, but we all have such different opinions about what actually constitutes it.  We say music is beautiful, we say people are beautiful, we say a view is beautiful. Why don't we have different words for objects and people and views? Socrates theorized about the Forms, the perfect embodiment of a virtue that exists in another place, of which everything that has that virtue here partakes. So the Japanese vase and the English countryside and the African woman all partake of the Form of Beauty - somehow. 

As with most things Socrates, I don't know if I buy that, but it's an interesting idea. 

I suppose the boring, "correct" answer is that we're conditioned to it based on our cultural norms and values and world views, etc, etc. But those don't spring from nowhere, so from where do they come? And is beauty truly a virtue to be sought after, or just something nice to look at and we're all wasting our time trying to pin it down? Why is one thing "beautiful" but another isn't? Why can ten people look at the exact same thing and come up with ten different answers to the questions, "Is it beautiful? Why?" Why does beauty even matter to us at all? Is beauty strictly a mortal matter, or does it exist (and matter) in the eternal scheme of things?

Good questions. Can't say I have the answers.

The Zombie Song

I feel like everyone needs to see this, because it's genius. 

Chapstick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry

On Living Alone in a Large House

Sometimes,
loneliness is a loud, silent ringing in your ears,
one you try to drown out with music
or the TV.

Sometimes loneliness is
a tingle along your skin,
as you feel someone's eyes on your back,
but turn to find no one there.

Sometimes,
loneliness is the solitary scent
of just yourself on the sheets
when you wake up, blinking and bleary-eyed, in the morning.

Sometimes loneliness is the sour taste
of nothing on your tongue,
as breakfast and lunch have come and gone
with no one to remind you to eat.

Sometimes loneliness
is a flash of movement
at the corner of your eye,
forever elusive, evading you.

Sometimes loneliness 

is a heavy feeling in your chest, 

an ache that sits on your heart 

and makes it hard to breathe.

[Source]: photo here

The Definition of Me

Why are we so quick to embrace the worst about ourselves? Where does it say that who we are at our worst is a more valid who I am than who we are at our best? Aren't we more often somewhere in between? Why is it that when I do something truly good or self-sacrificing, I brush it off as an anomaly, but when I lose my temper and yell at someone, I wallow in how horrible I am for days?

I've been rolling around this idea of identity for the last week or so. Is who I am defined by what I do? I balk at saying a child is "bad" simply because they misbehaved. But I think most would agree that Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler were bad, if not downright evil. Obviously these are two sides of the extreme. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

I think the relationship is more complicated than a simple one-to-one correlation between being and doing. Intent has to weigh in there somewhere, too. Isn't intent the whole distinction between manslaughter and murder one? The outcome is the same no matter what you call it: someone is still dead. But in the eyes of the law, why you killed them is just as important as the fact that you did.

There's no denying that what you do impacts who you are, but I don't think it defines you. I'm not sure exactly what it is that does define you, but I'm sure it's not as simple as one aspect of life.

Boys and Girls Are Different

My cousin James and me when we were both babies

In my marriage prep class we've spent the last couple of weeks talking about how boys and girls are different. Is this really news to anyone? It shouldn't be, but I think what we do need reminding of is that our differences are meant to complement each other, not make us antagonistic towards each other. 

Today we were talking about how we think differently. And by "think", I don't mean your opinion on something, I mean it literally. This is something I never knew until I took this same class last semester, and I gather from my class's reaction that it was pretty much news to them, too. I remember a few months ago, I was talking to my little brother about some things that were bothering me. I can't remember exactly how the conversation went, but at some point he asked me if I ever just thought about nothing. I looked at him strangely and thought about it, and I realized that my brain never shuts off. I've never made a really concerted effort to not think about anything, but just normally, during the day, something's always knocking around in my brain. Usually several somethings at the same time. When I told him that, he looked at me sympathetically and said that that must be very exhausting.

And you know? It is. 

I think that that fact is one of the reasons I watch so many dramas and read so many books. With no "off" switch to keep myself from ODing on thinking, instead I've developed a strategy to switch my brain onto another track. Which is not a bad thing, per se. But it becomes a handicap when it turns into a crutch for not confronting and coping with my problems in healthier (and more effective) ways. Because as a friend of mine once pointed out to me, your problems are still there when you get back from your little "mind vacation", and now you have even less time to deal with them.

We also talked about how girls internalize things. That's a very true truth, too. Not all girls are the same in the extent to which they do this, but in extreme cases some girls take responsibility for everything - everything negative, that is. Rarely are girls with this problem as quick to internalize success as they are to internalize failure. It always seems like a very silly thing to do when you're talking about it in the abstract, but I've done my share of this, too. Every little critique, no matter how lovingly given, becomes the source of a major wound. And I think this results because of the third thing that we talked about today, which is that girls are very focused on what "I am" over what "I do". When you criticize what I do, I think the reason I take it so hard is because I feel like that critique - no matter how valid, no matter how nicely phrased, no matter how much praise accompanies it - is an attack on who I am. That every mistake I make is a flaw in my personality, that every failure to do something is a failure in who I am. 

There's a philosophical question for you - just how closely connected are what we do and who we are? Obviously, stubbing my toe is not an expression of how flawed I am - but is snapping at someone when I'm having a bad day? Not being a great cook shouldn't be a measure of what kind of person I am, but is it? The intellectual part of me scoffs at that, but there's another part of me that isn't quite so sure it isn't right. Like I said, not every girl struggles with this as much as some others, but I think it's a good thing to keep in mind. Hopefully it will make us more understanding of each other and more compassionate with each other when we make mistakes. Because once you've attacked someone for who they are, it's hard for that wound to heal and neither the wound or the hurt are easily forgotten. Sometimes this can lead to a strained relationship with the person who inflicted the wound, but I think the even scarier outcome is that the girl will internalize that relationship strain, as well, and hear a constant inner monologue of "If only I'd done better, this is all my fault, I should have done more, I should have done something different," etc for a long, long time.

I love to see the temple

Seoul Korea Temple

"Holiness to the Lord

The House of the Lord"

Today I am missing this haven of peace. Oh, there's a temple here, too. And I love it. But it doesn't hold quite the same significance. The Seoul temple is literally smack-dab in the middle of the city, and yet, when you step inside the grounds, you can barely hear the hustle and bustle, or even see much of the city.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The other day I was thinking about a friend of mine. This friend is a truly good person - she's kind, she loves people, she goes out of her way to make people feel welcomed and appreciated, she's smart, she's spiritual, she has a great grasp of the world and her place in it, and she's the kind of person you just want to be around all the time because she makes you feel like the world is a good place. And she has a killer smile and a ready laugh, not to mention she's very beautiful. Now, my own talents don't happen to lie in that direction at all. But as I started thinking about what my strong points are, that got me thinking about all the exceptions to those strengths.

The thing about strengths is that they always come with some kind of drawback attached. Think about it for a second: say you're really good at empathizing with people. That's a great thing, and it can really help you in interpersonal relationships. But think about this, too: sometimes being so empathetic can be completely overwhelming, or render you incapable of being objective about a situation or a person. Or being logical and rational - those are surely good, and they give you the ability to examine connections and weigh decisions carefully. But taking too-logical an approach to certain things - like religion or people's motivations - can be detrimental, not helpful. Let's take one of mine: perfectionism. This can be a great thing, because it can increase the overall quality of everything with which you're associated (like, for instance, how I just corrected my sentence so it wouldn't end with a preposition). On the flip side, it can also mean that nothing ever gets done to your specifications, or lead to a perpetual dissatisfaction with yourself and everyone else - because for sure this world is not a perfect place. It can lead to strife in personal and work relationships as your expectations for people's behavior and performance are unrealistically high. And the list continues, but I think I've made my point.

Every plus has its minus. I'd like to have perfect pitch, but I'd also have to live with knowing every time anyone was just a hair flat or sharp, and that might possibly ruin my enjoyment of some otherwise amazing performances.

So think about this the next time you're tempted to envy someone else's apparent strengths: Would you be willing to accept the drawbacks that come along with that strength you're coveting?

Life in a Bubble

Photo can be found here

When I was in school at St. John's, there was some talk of "the Johnnie bubble", as if there was an invisible forcefield surrounding our tiny little campus. And in a way, I think there was, a forcefield of ideas and lack of interest in what was happening in the world at large. Of course, there are always exceptions - not everyone was unaware of what was happening around us while we read the words of long-dead thinkers and talked about them in the shower, at dinner, and in class.

I admit I was firmly inside that bubble, not caring much about what was going on in the city outside SJC, let alone the state, country, and world outside of that. Inside a "bubble" there's a real sense that the things happening outside it are semi-dreamlike, a little unreal, and they certainly don't effect you or your world. Everything is distant and removed from you.

It wasn't until I was serving in my very last area in Korea on a mission - another very real type of bubble - that this view got substantially challenged. I started to think about that way of life, living like all the things outside your immediate sphere don't have much import or effect. And as with all other real thinking, it started snowballing into a reconsideration of how I'd fundamentally viewed the world to that point.

Bubbles are dangerous. Living in a bubble has disastrous effects on everything from your personal relationships to the economy of your country, depending on the size of that bubble you live in. When we cozily draw our comfortable, "normal" worldview around us and tuck ourselves into its warm, enveloping folds, we close our eyes and ears and hearts to the suffering and struggles of millions, even billions of people. We turn everyone outside it into "others" who become stereotypes and sometimes even less than human, or worst of all, simply vague concepts that aren't really that important in the grand scheme of things. We close ourselves off from new ideas, new ways of examining our problems, from the very experience we've been sent here to obtain. We rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow and become better people; we deny ourselves opportunities to love and serve our fellowmen. We do ourselves a horrible injustice, because what happens around us certainly does impact us. A web of choices and consequences connects your decision to purchase a certain item in one country to the dramatic altering of a person you've never met's life in another country. What you do matters. What other people do matters to you, or it should, because it effects you.

All you have to do to prove that is to examine history. Do you think people in America really gave much of a thought to an assassinated Archduke somewhere over in Europe in 1914? Probably not. Probably the majority of Americans didn't even know it had happened. And yet, the consequences of that one action - and all the actions that preceded that decision to act - had a terrible, tremendous impact on Americans then and are still effecting us even to this day. You have a stake in internal politics in China. The economic situation in Europe is effecting you right now. They may seem far off and remote, but life has a way of making a mountain out of a molehill.

Or maybe it's only our perception that makes one a mountain and another a molehill. The thing about bubbles is they have a disturbing tendency to pop.

Photo can be found here

Questions and Answers

I wrote a while back that I didn't know why I was here. Of course, no one can know all the reasons for everything - I'm a firm believer that everything serves more than one purpose, and that God never does anything for a single reason. But I think I know some of the answer to that question now, although the greater part of it goes unanswered.

This is the first time in recent memory that I've spent longer the four or five months in the same place, associating with the same people. In fact, at this point it's almost been twice that amount of time. And so, I think for the first time in a long time, I've learned something new about myself. Or rather, somethings. Putting yourself in a lot of new or different situations will teach you a lot about yourself, but I think I'd forgotten that remaining in the same place or situation for a while will also teach you about yourself. It's been awhile since I've had relationships with people that I didn't leave after just a few months. Being in the same place with the same people has given me the opportunity to examine myself in this context in a little more depth. Actually, I should be more accurate: it's not that I've learned anything really new about myself, per se, but that I've learned more about how those things are interconnected. I've (I think) come to see a little more clearly the whys of certain things, and how one thing influences another so that x result comes out. And it's never just one or two things. People - and especially their motivations and actions - are seriously complicated things.

To be honest, I'm not so happy with what I've discovered. But then, I've always been the type not to see the good in something for staring at its flaws, and that includes myself. Especially myself. It's like being unable to see the beauty of the whole forest for mourning over a few dead or dying trees. Or, when you finally do look around you, bemoaning that even the healthy, beautiful trees have their flaws. Of course they do. Nothing on this planet - human, animal, vegetable, mineral, or otherwise - is perfect, and expecting anything to be perfect will only result in disappointment. I think I've done a good job at embracing this in other people, but as of yet I struggle with allowing myself to make mistakes - to be human, in other words. Am I ever going to be perfectly patient? Not in this life. Perfectly understanding? Nope, not that either. Nor will I ever be perfectly honest or perfectly nice or perfectly full of love. But it's one thing to tell yourself that and know it intellectually, and quite another to forgive yourself and move on and let those imperfections and mistakes go. The gap between knowledge and true understanding can only be bridged with help, and no ordinary mortal help, at that. And is true with anything involving the divine and changes of human nature, that takes time and patience and a lot of work.

Happy Quarter-Century to Me!

25 years ago today, at this very hour (1230), I was just over six hours old.

In that 25 years, a lot has happened. 25 years. It's a whole quarter of a century.

The last year of my life has been quite the upheaval. I decided that I wasn't happy where I was (academically speaking). I dropped out of school. I changed my life goals. I nannied for a semester. I moved 2/3 of the way across the country. I made new friends, settled into a new educational atmosphere, took care of my grandparents, adjusted to a different culture, lost both grandfathers, made life decisions impacting my immediate (and possibly long-term) future. I've smiled, cried, laughed, shouted, slept and dreamed and made mistakes. I've grown. Perhaps not as much as I should have, or could have, but I know that I'm a better person today than I was one year ago, and that's something.

Here's hoping the next year is better than the last.

Not That Today Was A Rainy Day At All

비오는 날 (Rainy Day) by 김사랑 (Kim Sarang)

I love this song. I don't know that I've ever even listened to the lyrics, I just love the sound of his voice singing, the simple guitar accompaniment in the beginning, and the mellow, flowing melody. It captures perfectly the feel of a rainy day for me. And there's something about that first breath he takes before he starts singing, and every other intake of breath we hear throughout the track, that makes me love this song. Usually you don't get to hear the genesis of a song, but I think it's a good reminder that there are two sides to everything, and that we cannot just give continuously, but need to pause every once in a while to be refreshed.

The End of Summer

Summer has never been my favorite season. I much prefer the milder temperatures and back-to-school bustle of autumn. But the thing I do love about summer is the long hours of sunlight, and sitting on the porch lazily watching the sun set and swinging my feet. Summer evenings are especially gorgeous here in Utah, when the sun sets in a blaze of red-orange-yellow-pink glory behind the mountains. I love the slight chill that creeps into the air as the sky gradually darkens, and the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch of the sprinklers as they spray arcs of water across the lawn.

My last year of undergrad starts Monday. The evenings are getting chillier, despite the 90+ degree weather we still have during the day. September is less than a week away. Autumn is right around the corner now.

The State of AnnMarie

Houses and businesses in the middle of Seoul

Still jobless. Still place-to-live-less. Still carless. BUT! Purposeless no longer.

A couple of days ago, Tuesday to be exact (that would be 9 August), I finally decided what I'm going to do after I graduate next year.

I'm going to Korea, people.

Crossing the Han River running through the middle of Seoul in the morning on the train

Ever since April, when the whole question of what I was going to do after I (finally!) graduate in May 2012 first presented itself to my mind, I've been worrying this like a dog with a bone. Should I go to graduate school in the fall? In America? In Korea? What about working for a year and paying off a good chunk of my student loans? In America? In Korea? What the heck would I go to graduate school for, anyway? Something to do with Korea, yes, but what? Literature? Language? International politics? Should I try to work for the government? Should I teach? What should I do? Underneath this whole debate was the fact that I very much want to start a family - preferably before I die of old age. Or, you know, I turn 30. And let's face it, the odds of finding someone to marry in Korea are much smaller than they are in Utah, or even in the DC area (which is where I was contemplating going to grad school).

Kimchi pots at the historical village Minseokcheon

I finally took the question to the temple when I went on Tuesday. As I sat in the celestial room after thinking about it from many different angles, I concluded that there were really two things I want in life: First, I want to have a family and live with them in such a way that we can be together forever. Second, I want to serve the people in Korea in some fashion. Right now, I don't have control over the first one. But I do have control over the second one. And honestly, I don't want to do the "responsible thing" and go to graduate school; I want to go to Korea. This whole debate was ultimately just that: a debate between what I wanted to do and what I thought I should do. When I finally decided to go with my heart over my head, I felt so much better. Of course, that doesn't mean that I'm not open to a change of plans. I still trust that God, possessing the Big Picture, knows what's best for me better than I can. And so I'm willing to make a course correction if I need to. But at the same time, who's to say that what's best for me isn't going to Korea? Just because the odds of finding someone to marry in Korea are small doesn't mean that I won't find someone; after all, if that person is in Korea, it doesn't matter how good my odds are here, because he's somewhere else.

So there you have it. That's my plan. I'm still not solid on any of the specifics, like when exactly I'll go, or if I'll teach English or go to grad school in Seoul, or even if I might end up doing something else entirely. But I'm going. And I feel good about that. ^_^

Looking down on Seoul from one of the surrounding mountains

Some Things I Am Passionate About

family

For someone who travels around as much as I do, the fact that I'm a huge homebody is a little surprising. But of all the things that matter to me, my family matters the most. Despite their flaws, they are good people who love and appreciate each other, and me.

 learning & knowledge

 From the time I was very little, my parents instilled in me a love for knowledge. To me, the world is an amazing place full of so many things to know and learn about.

solutions

I love working out problems, finding the answers to complicated questions. Logic puzzles, crosswords, and sudokus are only part of it; practical things like rock climbing also fascinate me. I love that feeling when things finally click into place and you experience a moment of pure understanding.

connections

The world is probably more interconnected than we can possibly imagine. I love exploring how things are connected, on the micro scale as well as the macro. I love the connections between people and discovering why things and people react the way they do.

Korea

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit. I love Korea. I love the people, I love the food, I love the culture, and I love the way I love Korea. I love my country, but I was born here without choosing it; to me Korea is the home I chose to love.

respect & understanding

I'm passionate about mutual understanding and respect. So many problems in this world are caused by making snap judgments about people and their actions based on how that person sees the world. The truth is that there's more than one "right" way to live, and most people do things for a reason - even if that reason or logic is not immediately apparent to you.

light

I love light. I love sunsets, the subtle glow of a sunlight-filled home, well-lit movie and drama sets, the way good lighting can make or break a picture. I love the warmth of the sun's rays, the twinkle of the stars in a pitch-black sky, the shy radiance of a quarter moon. I love how light can make my soul exult.

stories

Stories play an integral role in human existence. Stories can teach, can warn, can inspire and uplift, can be a way to express things too dangerous or too personal to express in any other way. The stories we tell ourselves tell us about ourselves; they can open a small glimpse into another world or another way of thinking. They offer us the opportunity to explore our lives and the possible consequences of our actions.

music

Of all the things humans do, I think music is the one that brings us closest to the divine. I love listening to music, and I love creating it; there is no other feeling quite like working together with others to bring to life something that makes you feel bigger than just the sum total of your disparate parts. The transcendence of Palestrina's gorgeous counterparts, the sheer triumph of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overature...with those as evidence, you could never convince me that there is no God.

Photo credits: books, solutions, understanding, stories

All That In Such A Small Space?

I've been thinking a lot recently about what I want. Lately my head has been such a mess that it's been driving me crazy, thinking about what people are thinking about me not having a job yet and not having found a place to live next semester yet, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Sometimes I wonder if they think I'm just being lazy for the heck of it, "freeloading" off my grandparents, like my grandpa sometimes accuses me of doing. It boggles my mind to think that some people really think I enjoy being like this, or that I don't know just how much of a loser I'm being, and so feel compelled to point it out to me. Trust me, I am infinitely more intimately acquainted with the situation than anyone else. Except maybe God. But anyway.

So, I've been thinking about what I want. The thing is...I'm not sure what that is. I have long term goals - I want to have a family, I want to live in Korea, I want to help the people of the world somehow - but the problem is, I don't have short-term goals to act as stepping stones to get to those long term goals. I don't know what to do. I don't know where I'm heading, exactly. Honestly, beyond the desire to have a family, I don't really have any other specific goals at all, really.

Thinking about all this has been making my head spin around and around until it literally gives me a headache. One morning I was in the shower, and I started thinking about all the things I've been pondering the last month or so: getting a job, paying for school, paying off my loans, finding a place to live, my relationship with my grandparents, my complete lack of any romantic relationships (ever in my life), domestic politics, international politics, feeling almost guilty about being full when millions of people are starving, using running water so casually when millions don't even have it, various and sundry character flaws, graduate school, taking the GRE, studying for the GRE, whether or not I should go to Korea and work a year before starting graduate school, contemplating what the heck I'm going to do with my life...etc. After a half-hour+ of this (I take long showers), I was ready to scream and desperate to find a way to just SHUT IT OFF already. I told a friend once that I felt like all my worries were roped together, and every time I started trying to think about one in an effort to find a solution, it gave the whole string a tug and everything came crashing into my brain all at once. It's enough to make one go insane.

I think I could handle all of this a little better if it wasn't for the fact that in the last year my entire life has totally changed. I moved all the way across the country into a very different cultural setting, left behind all my friends and my comfort zone, radically changed my educational environment and my expectations for my future, and live in an environment fraught with emotional pitfalls and guilt trips. My response to it all hasn't really done a lot to make me love and admire myself, which in turns feeds the cycle of think-get overwhelmed-avoid-reap the consequences-self loathe-repeat. And yet, I don't think much of all of that shows on the surface, except for maybe as it manifests as a bad attitude, increased touchiness and sensitivity, and an increased penchant for snapping at people and using hurtful sarcasm.

I need to find my iPod and start running again. Maybe that will help me sort out my head a bit and give me a little motivation to be up and doing. Only, I haven't seen my iPod in two weeks...I hope it didn't get stolen. ~sigh~

Gone

My family left this morning.



I miss them already. ~sigh~

Pink Martini - Aspettami

Half the Sky

Photo can be found here

A friend of mine is spending the summer in Uganda. She just posted this post about the thing she's found the hardest about being in Uganda. The whole post is very thought-provoking and interesting, but I'll just quote a little bit here:

"I may be in Africa right now, but still there is a separation between me and these people, as tangible as the glass pane separating me and these little boys.  It’s a weird feeling.  I wonder how long it takes in Africa to stop feeling like a philanthropic tourist.  I’ve wondered a lot since being here if I love Africa for the right reasons.  Or better, do I want to make changes in Africa for the right reasons?  There are over 8,000 NGOs registered in Uganda all trying to make a difference, some for the right reasons, some for other reasons.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of development here.  It’s different than I thought it would be.  It’s messy and disorganized and sometimes (often) ineffective.  I believe in it though.  And I believe that the sooner we’re on the same side of the glass the better it will be."

I just finished the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide yesterday. (I wrote a little about this before here, before the book came out. The authors had released excerpts as articles in the New York Times.) It's a sobering read, but a very eye-opening one as well. We, as humans, have a tendency to block out the uncomfortable things about life and the human existence. I find this tendency to be much stronger in America; the majority of us tend to turn cringing away from the homeless man on the streets of our own town, let alone from the suffering of millions in other countries. Safe in our little bubble of (tenuous and fragile) prosperity, we don't really want to spend a lot of time contemplating the plight of the uneducated, abused, malnourished, and impoverished "other" people that live all over the world. People that don't even have a real floor or running water, let alone the latest iPod or the newest smartphone.

And then, when we do finally look outside of our carefully constructed bubble world, we go into these people's countries and cultures and try to "solve the problem" with no reference to their situations within that culture. Which doesn't really solve anything and just takes a lot of money to achieve (usually) very minimal results. And so, for the last few days I've been thinking about that, and my friend's post just helped me articulate some of my thoughts. The authors of Half the Sky make the point that the kind of aid that countries like Uganda and Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, etc really need is the grassroots kind - that is, locals helping locals, funded by foreigners when the locals don't have the resources. Reading Half the Sky has really gotten me thinking about how we're supposed to fulfill the commandment the Savior gave us when He said we need to love our neighbors as ourselves. Obviously, we need to spread the gospel, and obviously it's the only thing that's really going to fix the problems in this world; everything else is just some form of a stopgap measure, when you get right down to it, or treating the symptoms instead of the actual disease, if you will. But on the other hand, the Church (or its members) can't just waltz into places and start teaching the people and telling everyone to clean up their act without so much as a by-your-leave, and some kind of action must be taken in the interim. The question is, what is most effective? And how can I be part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

That's what I've been pondering. And no solution has readily presented itself. That's the thing about problems that confront half the population of the world - there are no easy solutions.

Things As They Are

Photo can be found here

 Recently I have been pondering on things as they are: our justice system, our food, our cars, our school systems, even the music industry. And though it isn't very profound, it's been occurring to me, over and over, that just because things are as they are right now, doesn't mean that they should be that way. We punish criminals in this society by sending them to jail. Our cars run on gasoline. We HAVE cars, as opposed to any other form of transportation. We eat flour as our primary staple. We send our kids to school starting when they're five and teach them in a certain way, expecting them to stay in school for the majority of their youth.

It's true enough that things as they are work well enough for the majority the majority of the time. But if there's one thing that SJC taught me, it's to question your underlying assumptions. And what I see is the penal system failing to actually improve the lives of those who are sent through it, pollution from all the millions of personal cars and a lack of adequate public transportation, rising education costs and fewer returns on the investment of so much time and money. I see a culture getting increasingly top-heavy, bloated, and stagnating. To my eyes, Americans have little experience with things as they are for other people and other cultures, and so are touting their own status quo loud and long as "the way things should be". And really, "things as they are" is really only "things as I see them from my point of view", since none of us are capable of seeing all the facets, nuances, and variations of life.

Not that I'm advocating radical social change here. I'm just voicing what's been rattling around in my head lately, and maybe suggesting that you take a little time yourself to contemplate what things you're doing in your life just because "it's always been that way" or "we've always done it that way". Tradition and habit are not sufficient reasons for doing anything; there should be thoughtful meaning and purpose in everything you undertake. So get out this week and maybe drive to work or the grocery store along another route and take the opportunity to see things from a different perspective.

Quote can be found here

Nothing and Too Much to Say

CN Blue - 사랑빛 (Lovelight)

Have you ever thought too much? I liken the feeling to trying to untangle a ball of yarn. The more you try to straighten everything out, the more tangled and complicated it all gets until you just want to hurl the whole mess as far away from you as you possibly can. The upshot of the whole thing is that even though I have so much on my mind, I really have nothing to say. Only old problems getting hashed and rehashed in my head until I just want to cover my ears, jump up and down, and scream. Unfortunately, that's not very productive. It doesn't accomplish much at all. Or anything, for that matter.

Recently I've been wondering why I'm here in Logan. Academically, obviously I'm here to finish school (finally!), but the thing about life is there's never just one reason for anything. Take SJC for example. Ostensibly I went to Annapolis to fulfill a dream I'd had since high school of attending St. John's. But I think the real reason I went there was to have the experiences I needed to decide to go on a mission, which was an important part of my development and growth as a person. And of course I met many wonderful people who have influenced me in many positive ways. Not to mention I gained a unique kind of education that I couldn't have gotten anywhere else or in any other way. And I fell in love with the East Coast and its sense of history. I learned a lot from my years in Annapolis. So...why am I here at USU? What am I supposed to be learning from this experience? Maybe it's too early to tell. After all, I didn't move to Annapolis expecting any of the outcomes that actually arose. Maybe my problem is that I moved here with certain expectations and those things haven't happened. I thought I was coming here for one reason and maybe that's not the reason at all. But then, what is it? I wish I knew. 

Why, why Georgia, why?

I am driving up 85 in the
kind of morning that lasts all afternoon
just stuck inside the gloom

Four more exits to my apartment but
I am tempted to keep the car in drive
and leave it all behind

Cause I wonder sometimes
about the outcome
of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why, why Georgia, why?

I rent a room and I fill the spaces with
wood in places to make it feel like home
but all I feel's alone
It might be a quarter life crisis
or just the stirring in my soul

Either way, I wonder sometimes
about the outcome
of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why, why Georgia, why?

So what, so I've got a smile on me
but it's hiding the quiet superstitions in my head
Don't believe me
Don't believe me
When I say I've got it down

Everybody is just a stranger but
that's the danger in going my own way
I guess it's the price I have to pay
still "Everything happens for a reason"
is no reason not to ask myself

Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why, why Georgia, why?

Life Is What Happens When You're Making Other Plans

People keep asking me what I want to do with my degree, and the truth is, I really don't know. But people don't want to hear that you're almost 25 and have no life plan.

The thing is, I did have a life plan. It's just that life didn't work out according to it, and now I'm scrambling to make a new one. In a world where everything worked out according to how I would like it to, I'd get married, move to Korea for a few years, have some kids, and work from home with a partner writing dramas that would be amazingly well-accepted critically as well as popularly. And then (to placate my mother and sooth her fears that her grandchildren wouldn't speak English if we lived in Korea) we'd move back to the States for a bit and live somewhere not too far away from my family so my sister and I can have our kids play together. And everyone would be happy and everything would be peachy and my husband and I would retire and have cute grandkids to spoil and serve a mission and just have a lot of fun.

Of course, I think the actuality might end up just a teeny bit different. But just a teeny bit.

비야

I love this song. Yellow Monsters is one of the best k-rock groups around, in my opinion. And it fits my mood perfectly.

I'm sorry I never post anything other than music, but right now I'm having a hard time gathering my thoughts well enough to make enough sense out of the chaos to write anything.

Satellite Heart

Link to the official video on YouTube

You know, in general I think Twilight and all its attendant fandom craziness is not that wonderful, but I will say, the movies have great music on the soundtracks. This song is just the right sound for me right now.

빛나는 태양

I've been on a crazy Taeyang kick lately, even though his solo stuff isn't the kind of music I normally listen to. Nevertheless, obsessions aren't usually rational anyway, so here you are. Taeyang is part of the five-member group Big Bang, which is arguably one of the most famous groups in or out of Korea. He's known for his excellent dancing and trademark mohawk. And let's face it, for his really nice abs, too. The links will take you to the official versions of the music videos, which are higher quality but don't have English subtitles.

Prayer

Where U At

Wedding Dress

Mental Noise

I haven't been writing much of late, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have too much.  Nothing much is happening event-wise in my life, but there's so much rattling around in my head I might go crazy from all the noise.

To Cherish

cherish |ˈ ch eri sh |
verb [ trans. ]
protect and care for (someone) lovingly : He cared for me beyond measure and cherished me in his heart.
• hold (something) dear : I cherish the letters she wrote. | [as adj. ] ( cherished) cherished possessions.
• (of a hope, idea, or memory) think of longingly or lovingly : We will cherish your memory.
ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense [treat with affection] ): from Old French cheriss-, lengthened stem of cherir, from cher ‘dear,’ from Latin carus.

People put a lot of emphasis on love. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for love, but it strikes me that you can love something (or someone) and still not treat it (or them) very well. I don't know what prompted the thought, but I've been thinking about the word cherish for awhile. I like it. I like the connotations of care and protection included in with love that are the definition of cherish. To me, it means more than just love. That's what I want to be one day, not only loved but cherished.

Kaleidoscope

Photo here

 Have you ever noticed that other people's lives are a lot easier to live than your own? By that I mean that everything is so much clearer to you when it's someone else's problem. As a general rule of thumb. You can tell yourself all kinds of things, things you'd say to your friends if they came to you and asked you for advice, but they're not very motivating or clarifying when you tell them to yourself.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but I think that happens to me because I get locked into a feedback loop of overthinking the situation. Something seems like a great solution until you're lying awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling or the wall, with all the variables (real or perceived) running through your head on repeat. For me, it feels kind of like a kaleidoscope looks - the same basic pieces, tumbling over and around each other, morphing into a thousand different patterns as they twirl around at the end of a tube. Every time you look at it it's different, but somehow it's still the same.

Monday, Monday

The plan for today involved getting the job hunt started in earnest. After sleeping in, of course.

Instead, what happened was a knock on my door shortly before eight this morning. It was my grandma, asking me to take her to the ER. Now, I admit that I was a little bit "Oh, stop being such a baby" about the whole thing, especially since my grandma is just a bit of a hypochondriac. But she told me that she'd called our neighbor (who's a retired doctor) and asked him what she should do, and he told her to go to the ER. So we got into the car and drove to the ER on this dreary, cold, rainy Monday morning after finals.

It turns out that my grandma has some sort of gall bladder problem, which has given her gall stones (and a lot of pain and nausea) and caused pancreatitis. Since she can't eat lest she aggravate her pancreas, she'll have to stay in the hospital for a few days until she stabilizes enough to do the surgery to remove her gall bladder. On an unrelated tangent, it amazes me how quickly news spreads. Already half my grandma's friends and people from church have called asking for an update on her condition; two people had brought her flowers by the time I got back to the hospital after I ran home to check on my grandpa and eat some food.

I'm so grateful that this didn't happen last Monday. Or the Monday before that, even. That would have probably ended me. I would have croaked from the stress of too many things going on in my life. I think now I've finally managed to process - on an initial level - that my grandpa is really gone. I've gotten all my final papers in and that stress out of the way. If this had come on top of those two, I don't know if I'd have made it. I might have just curled up in a ball and stayed catatonic for a while until it all went away. Too bad that doesn't actually solve any problems. Now I need to tackle finding a job for the summer, finding a way to get to that job, and finding a place to live this autumn. And finding out what the heck I'm going to do with my life after next May.

Summer Goals

My Goals for the Summer

make a baby quilt with my grandma

take up rock climbing

learn to longboard

pass the Korean language aptitude test

do a lot of family history

make new friends

 run a 5k

get lots and lots of sleep

Stream of Conciousness

I did it. Remember those two 10+-page papers I had to write in just three days? I did it. I blows my mind just a little bit. With the first paper, the paper I wrote for my Intro to Islam class (fascinating, by the way) on comparing and contrasting the concept of God in Islam and in my religion, I felt such a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I turned it in Friday night. I spent half of Saturday at my grandfather's memorial and with my family; the other half I spent cramming all I could about Sino-North Korean relations since 1949 into my head. I don't do homework on Sundays. Believe me, I was anxious about that. I mean, that left me with just one day to write (and finish researching) a whole paper on a massive topic. But I woke up at five am on Monday and wrote the first 3.5 pages in under four hours -- which is a miracle for me. Then I went to take the one final I had. I came back and wrote a little more, but I couldn't concentrate. I took a break from just after three pm to about six-thirty pm. Watched Bones, checked my Facebook, went and had dinner at a friend's place. I came back, said a little prayer that I could stay focused, and knocked out the rest of the paper. It was in before ten pm, two hours before it was due. The whole experience was completely anti-climatic. There wasn't any sense of accomplishment or relief. Mostly I just felt like I'd written a crap paper. I woke up Tuesday morning and checked Blackboard and there it was: a 19.5/20. Maybe I was too hard on myself. Maybe my teacher wasn't holding me to the standard I thought she was. Maybe she just read it late at night and wanted to just get it out of the way. Maybe she read it after someone's paper that was actually crap. I don't know. I still don't know what I made on my other paper. And I've got one more left. This one's about the Korean War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Not the current war in Afghanistan. The one with the Soviets. And I have to find a job. A car. A place to live. A purpose for the rest of my life.

I said before that I've been listening to Mutemath a lot recently. This is from their song "Clipping".

Feeling overload
Carrying bottled skies around
I've been drowning all along
Wearing out in a faltered sea
And I give up

Common sense failed again
Meddling in a foreign scene
Foreign dream
Oh, Time won't spare another sun
Daring me with another choice, another choice

Anymore, I don't know who to fight anymore
I don't know what is right anymore, anymore

A Music Moment (in Haste)

Photo here

I'm currently trying to cram writing two papers of 10+ pages each (on vastly different topics, I might add) into just three days. This song, "Better" by the Blue Shoes, I discovered on Bones, on the episode "Mayhem on a Cross" (4x21), and it's currently playing on repeat. I do love a show with a good music director. Just one more reason Bones is amazingly awesome. I'd try to be a little more descriptive than that, but my powers of good writing are being channeled in another direction at the moment.

And why would you not watch Bones, especially this amazing episode, when STEPHEN FRY makes a guest starring appearance as a psychiatrist who used to be a glam rocker in six-inch platforms? You don't want to miss it. It's on Netflix InstantPlay with no commercials!

Photo here

MUTEMATH

Photo here

I've been going through a MuteMath phase recently, listening to their albums all day long. They seem to fit my mood recently. Check out some of my favorite tracks: 

One of my favorites, Lost Year, I can't seem to find on playlist.com, but I would recommend going to YouTube to check it out. It goes along quite nicely with my last post about love and choices.

Life and Love and Choices

On the walk back to my car this afternoon (which was lovely, by the way - the weather has cycled out of the constant rain-snow-sleet-and-gloomy-clouds phase into blue-skies-and-fluffy-clouds phase; we'll see how long it lasts), I was thinking about love and relationships, all kinds of them. I was thinking about how people get divorced citing "irreconcilable differences", about how people say they "fall out of love" or just "stop loving" someone else. And it reoccured to me that really all that is is laziness and shifting the blame onto to Fate or the Cosmos or whatever. Love is a matter of choice. Attraction is another matter, but love really is about choices, just like life is. The fact of the matter is that God has given all the priceless gift of agency. No one, not ever, can force you to do something. Your ability to choose exists outside of and independent from anyone else's influence, even God's. What you do is your choice, no matter what anyone else may be doing, to you or around you.

Now, there are mitigating circumstances, of course, but in general the principle applies to everyone. Your choice to smoke pot is still your choice, no matter how many people are pressuring you to do it. It was your choice to be in a place where someone would pressure you to smoke pot, in the first place. Your choice to divorce your spouse because you can't agree about how the money should be spent is a choice that means one or both of you have decided that money or the things it buys is more important than the person you've promised to spend the rest of life (and maybe eternity) with, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health - in short, through everything. It's your choice. No one else can make it for you, and no one else will have to live with the consequences of that choice. You will. If someone threatens you with a gun to your head and tells you to rob a bank or jump off a cliff, you still have a choice. If someone has something on you and threatens to reveal everything if you don't pay them off or do them a "favor", you still have a choice. There is always a choice. To say otherwise is to attempt to pass the responsibility to someone or something else. In the end, you're going to be the one held accountable for your choices. And it strikes me that, unlike most mortal judges and juries, God might not be persuaded that "it wasn't my fault" by pleas of "but I had no choice!"

Which is why I'd better stop procrastinating and get to work on writing these papers.