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.

Maybe

Maybe it's the fatigue of the end-of-the-semester rush to write all my final papers (no final tests, thank goodness). Maybe it's that I'm not too terribly patient and I've found one too many dirty spoons in the clean plate cupboard. (Or maybe it's one too many empty yogurt containers in the fridge.) Maybe it's that my room never really gets any sunlight. Maybe it's that after four months here at a new school I still don't have any friends. (Okay, I have one or two, I exaggerate.) Maybe it's the location change, from one side of the US to the other. Maybe it's that many of my friends are getting engaged, married, or pregnant. Maybe it's the recent upheavals in my family. Maybe it's because I'm spending too much time watching old Angel episodes (mmmmmm, David Boreanaz! ^_^).

Or maybe it's because I just like to wallow. I like a good wallow just as much as the next person.

Picture here

Finals Are a Fun Time for All

I know I've been absent in the blogosphere for a while now. Along with all the craziness inherent in the last few weeks of the semester, some personal and family things have cropped up, as well. I have three final (and long) papers to write this week, a job to find, and I need to start researching what in the world I want to do next summer after graduation. And what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.