the god of men

i find it interesting that the god of those who see themselves as the "chosen ones" in history is always a very judgemental and elitist god.
i like Jesus. he made sense and i find it a little funny that he decided to set up camp in paradise.
who the hell are we to think we can do better than him? i certainly don't expect to. you can't measure goodness by the presence of a wedding band or the number of children you were lucky to have.
just like truth, beauty or hate. you just can't measure love.

the heat is on

summer is definitely here.
I love summer nights with a passion.
After a long hot sweaty day with sunglasses and the wrong clothes on, a t-shirt and shorts with the cool breeze cooling your skin and twilight cooling your eyes.....perfecto.
I feel like this summer is going to be wonderful, as in the best summer of my life so far.
I'm not going to lie..I'm very excited.

**Today the president of IlJin( my business English client) took me and my roomie out for dinner at a Tuscan Italian ristorante. Probably the nicest and most expensive meal I will ever eat. 5 courses. Scallops to fine wine to lamb to tiramisu. If you are the kind of person who dreams of food, it was what dreams are made of.
I find it very hard to really appreciate food, and I think it might be because i burned off my taste buds by the age of 10 with my boiling-hot tea obsession. But whatever the reason, I'm really not that into food. I like veggies..and sweets...and that's about it really.
But this meal, ahh....perfection.

**Do you ever get that feeling that you are encouraging someone you love down a path that you know, from experience, won't end well, simply because you're too chicken to tell them how you really feel? Sometimes I find myself affirming and congratulating them on things that I know in my heart I wish I could scold and scream at them for. But I can't...because that would be the official end of our friendship. Call me selfish, it's the truth.
It's almost as if the only reason why they turn to me is because I'm the only one who tells them they're doing OK....Maybe I'm the last thing that keeps them going. But if the going is harmful...do I keep up the game?
I don't know.

**I love LOST. I don't care how ridiculous it has gotten. I freaking LoVe LoSt. This new love double triangle they've got going on ( Kate kicks Juliet's ass btw) has got me quite emotionally involved and the fact that some things (some...) are finally making sense and some circles ( some...) are finally coming around is thrilling.
Anyways, I know there are plenty of haters but I cannot tell a lie...LOST is where its at.

**Goodnight 1:44am Thursday morning.

sleepy

**I went to bed at 2 and my mother just called at 7. lord.
**I bought a wholegrain cracker gift set last night. it's really big and intimidating.

**I also saw Angels and Demons last night with my usual crew
I'm personally not a huge conspiracy theorist atall, but I enjoy the movies that come out of them! Tom Hanks is really quite ugly but he's got an intellectual charm about him that makes him a very complex leading man. Ewan MacGregor, I am a fan but all i can think of when i see him anymore is...why is the Moulin Rouge guy a priest?? Some movie roles outlive you and that's not a bad thing. It was like when Eric from That 70s Show ended up as Spiderman's arch nemesis. I was very confused. Maybe it was just me...
But yes, Angels and Demons is worth seeing. Plot twists, fires, Roman statues, bad priests, hidden passageways, and of course, cataclysmic explosions (my personal favorite).

**Ok, now I think I typed myself back to sleep so goodnight..

The Last Days

This is my last full week in Korea, and my last week working. I'm a bit of chronic quitter by experience so I was surprised when I started to feel sad at the thought of leaving these kids. Some of them were too tired to care that they wouldn't be seeing me anymore, some of them brought me gifts of all sorts and some of them who had barely ever looked me in the eye suddenly seemed strangely and overly curious about me.
I'm sorry to myself for not writing in this regularly( I'm such a such a quitter, i swear )

My baby girl Julie and I said goodbye yesterday.
We had never had a real lesson, ever. I introduced her to Frank Sinatra and she now knows the Thriller dance by heart. I taught her how to say "sit on the beach" properly and I told her exactly word-for-word what to tell that guy who gets on her last nerve at a bar someday.. She in turn taught me how to make a quadruple chin, where to buy the cheapest soda in town and she made me the first person ever to learn her special language
Apparently..."Sa-so" means 25% "So-so" means 50% "So-sa" means 75% and "Sa-Sa"means 98%. This was how Julie rated her friends, and lucky for me.. her teachers. "Teacher you are Sa-sa" "What?!" I would exaggerate and beg to be liked 100%. No avail.



We went to a mini amusement park at Children's Grand Park in Seoul as our goodbye party and when we were flying around and around on the musical chairs kicking our legs and making faces at the flabbergasted Koreans below she shouted out "I love Gloria 100%!!!!" at the top of her lungs. Such a Kodak moment.

##I gave in. I proudly fell off the wagon and am again chain-chewing my way through 2 packs of mint gum a day. Bite me.


To do this week:
pack
pack
pack
overcome my fear of packing
and then pack some more.

8 days and trying not to count...

plain oatmeal

-Good morning-
~For some reason I woke up in a very good mood today. I felt lovely and light and I wanted to dance. Weird right?
~One of those rare days that you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror- bedhead, discolored skin, squinty eyes and all- and you don't want to extinguish that person from the phonebook. Well..at least the bedhead part.
~I adore ,and advocate, plain oatmeal for breakfast.
~I've been told, and I know for a fact, that I don't drink enough water. So every morning, the first thing I do- yes, bedhead, discolored skin, squinty eyes and all- is drink 2 glasses of it. We have a water dispenser in our apartment so the water is safer than most, and I do the dishes a lot so the glasses are cleaner than most. So I know I'm doing right.
~Plain oatmeal, on the other hand, I've gotten mixed reviews about. I love the taste, I think it's just enough flavor for the morning and just enough fiber and grains and blah blah for the day. I just have a bad feeling my future kids might resent me just a little bit due to the lack of sugar-coated purple and blue and red sugar-O's in the cabinets. Just a little bit.
~Its a little bit ironic how we really all do become our mothers.

-later-
I would like to say that Fanta Shakers can absolutely make your day.
It's tried and true. So please try it. I mean, you get the whole package. I personally always want to shake my cans of soda, but I can't because spilling foaming sugar-liquid on your jeans isn't fun. But you are supposed to shake these bad boys. And shake 'em good. Secondly, the texture is amazing. Is it a liquid? is it a solid? Who can tell. And it fizzes in your mouth! Seriously....I don't know where they sell them in the states, or come to think of it, if they even do sell them there but....they're good.
p.s. the orange flavor is the best of the best.
p.s.s Fanta should be paying me for this, but they're not.
p.s.s.s I need to go to work.

-and goodnight-
having an ipod touch is very nice when you are an aspiring writer.
next stop: mac book air.
I just got home from the gym.
It's such a learning experience to have something very normal taken away from you with an almost assurance that you might never get it back. About 2 and a half years ago I was told that I could never run again and that I might not be able to carry my own children. This scared the living hell out of me and gave me the quickest reality check I've had so far. I spent months doing a combination of crawling, sitting, using crutches, and stretching stretching stretching in hopes that my muscles and tendons and ligaments would give my stupid self a second chance. I came home in a wheelchair and my father later cried when he made me promise that I would never let him see me in one again. For a year I couldn't walk for more than 15 minutes without a sharp and deep pain running through the arches of my feet and up my Achilles. I cried many angry tears because it's embarrassing, and humiliating to not have something that is so close to being a human right: the ability to move on our own, when and how we want to.
I just got home from the gym.
I ran the treadmill for 20 minutes and power-walked for 30. This might sound silly but I'm proud of that. Not because I completed a workout, but because I proved the big man with the M.D. wrong. I'm gonna run if I wanna run.
Now, I need to buy some new sneakers. Needless to say, mine have been gathering dust.

First

I want to get into Journalism, and yet...the blog I started just for kicks didn't have a single entry. So here I am and I'm going to try....again.
23 days until I go back to the U.S.. It's been one hell of a ride. A ride that I wouldn't trade in for anything. I've met people who have shaped me so well, I'm finally proud of who I am. I also met people( a choice few) who... let's just use a Korean phrase and say that the next time I meet them I will have an urge to -and I quote-"cut them open and use their insides for jump rope". But hey, they taught me about the person that I never want to be.

-later-
~Today I wore flip flops in the rain. Flip flops are the mascots of freedom, and wearing them in the rain is the epitome of happiness for me. Even with the random pieces of dirt and tree bark that get caught in your toes...at least they get to wiggle around.
~I love crossing my legs on the subway, bobbing my feet to music and having my flips act like drum pedals.
~Way back when in Driver's Ed, my teacher told us to drive barefoot(something about traction) and to keep a pair of black Old Navy flip flops under the driver's seat (something about bare feet driving being illegal). Ever since I have remained true to my school, except i choose AnF cobalt blues as my pair in crime.
~Flip flop- style high heels can also be comfy, actually. I have a pair(somewhere) of brown ones that I found in a Las Vegas thrift shop.
~Your mamma's so fat, she left the house in heels and came back in flip flops, by the way.
~I've purposely worn flip flops in the snow, on numerous, wonderfully adventurous occasions.
~It's 2:11 a.m. and I should go to bed.