writer, photographer, observer of little things...

Thursday, August 18, 2011

oh new world that has such people in it...

after nearly a year of clearly nothing of great import to discuss, i finally have found a reason to keep the blog, well, a blog.
korea, who knew, new land of opportunities.
although it's really only the first day (well, technically the first day starts tomorrow as that's when we get down to the real learnin'...), it hasn't really sunk in that i'm on the other side of world. perhaps it's because we're sequestered at this university on the outskirts of seoul, and the hodgepodge crowd we have here is nothing short of a direct cross-section of americana (americana as in that giant, healthful, culture salad). every once in a while it sneaks in that i'm not in boston any more - like when i need to find a payphone, and i have to say: 실레 합니다 아주씨님, 전화 어디세요 ? and then get an answer that's indecipherable.
i guess in some way that's not such a bad thing... at least i'm not suffering from severe culture shock... well, i'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. however i don't think the other shoe dropping would make too much of a sound anyway. i've already had a fair share of glitches due to linguistic boundaries at the airport, so it's really up and up from this point on - i mean, my grasp of korean is only going to improve, right? (one should hope.)
oh, one thing i can't stand though... since this week is like summer camp, a lot of the people here are behaving like it really is summer camp - as in all the whining, and how much they miss how things are back at home. HELLO?? you're not home, you're on the other side of the world. things are bound to be different, that's why they call it a different country. and if everything at home was so freakin' great, then why the hell did you leave? the trip alone is not a piece of cake, and i get that you might be jet-lagged, but for godsakes! quit being so ethnophobic! this is not the land of tacos and cheeseburgers, you knew this when you signed up. so shut up, take it all in, and then whine about it when your year is done!
on a slight side note: i think there's a mouse trapped in my toilet tank... i hear little squeaks when i go in the bathroom. it's probably some loose nut, but that's what it sounds like...

Friday, August 27, 2010

august oddities

em and i were born two days under two years apart. perhaps that’s why strangers think we look alike, and family thinks we behave alike.

we got along famously from the first time we met: two chatterbox little girls with equal overdoses of attitude and voice power. time seemed to calm the attitude, but not the voice. my aunt, em's mother, still would come into the room around bedtime, and tell us to keep our shrill, unintelligible barking down, lest the neighbors think our house harbored some torture chamber.

time, though despite much time apart, seemed to transform our personalities in similar ways:

1. upon initial meetings, she would always be cold, and i aloof, the reasoning being: we'll let you know if we like you.

2. neither of us outgrew the childhood habit of squeezing the living daylights out of everything cute.

3. an obsession with searching, documenting, and tantalizing others with, tasty food.

4. a penchant for hoarding all stationery and paper products, from napkins to gift bags to imported handmade paper. our ultimate candy store was the paper stalls in seoul's namdaemun market.

my uncle, em's dad, would often think it odd that we would come home late together as our schedules were equally sporadic. as if we telepathically communicated when and where to get off the subway to meet up and come home. but em's mom's answer would always be a simple multiple choice:

a) we met somewhere for food

b) we met somewhere for karaoke

c) we met somewhere to buy stationery

she would usually be on-the-nose, but em's dad wouldn't be completely wrong either.

while everyone else around us is rushing to get married off and having children, all the while griping about how they hate the jobs they need to pay for everything, we're still strolling through, sipping pudding milk teas. we are willing grown-ups, just not willing to run head first into growing up - because is it really that odd to want to hold onto wonder, marvel, and simplicity for just a little while longer?

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

everything happens on the other side of the earth 12 hours earlier...

오늘의 당신에게 생일을 축하한다면 당신도 내일 생일인 나에게 축하 해 줄래?

Monday, August 23, 2010

sweat the little things

i forced myself awake from a dream last night, and then most regrettably, couldn't fall back asleep. i tried counting sheep, but each seemed to be carrying with it an issue i needed to face during the waking hours. and as the numbers got bigger, so did the burdens on the sheep...

when i finally did awake from the unrestful rest, my head was a tangle of things that needed to be dealt with. but where to start? what to have for breakfast lead to needing enough time to do photo-editing to having enough funds to pay the bills to the ominous loom of my birthday to where am i headed in life... i was trying to focus on a larger picture of the day, but it was coming up blurry.

so i sat down with a bowl of cereal, a text message to have coffee at 3, and a very small resolve: until then, i will edit 20 photographs.

on tackling the challenges ahead, perhaps we have got it all wrong. in searching for the bigger picture, we tend to overlook the smaller images. in trying to solve the larger problem, we are told to not sweat the little things. but that's exactly it - one should not untie a knot just by going at it with a pair of scissors - by undoing the little tangles, we understand how we got to the giant mess in the first place; by sweating the little things, we learn and earn patience for the larger problem; by inspecting the smaller images, we could comprehend more in depth the larger picture...

and so, something as quietly insignificant as putting dog biscuits inside a pair of glasses speaks volumes on so many different subjects...