slice of life

As it is called the month of family, May is a rather happy and exciting month for Koreans. I mean Koreans ㅁas in those that go to Korean schools – not to be so seclusive or anything. By May, their final exams are usually over, they get a break for Children’s Day, they have Preants’ Day and Teachers’ Day to celebrate, they get the nice weather that supports their celebration, and if they happen to be one of those lucky ones to have a birthday in May, the excitement doubles.

That used to be my case till last year. Then I was introduced to a bunch of acronyms that would turn my life upside down: AP, SAT, and GPA. My birthday became a studying day, Children’s Day became a studying day, and the precious four-day weekend became hard-core cramming time.

Last month we had the April Anarchy at school, when everyone went crazy dressing up as a nerd or a highlighter or finding their twins and triplets for the day. Well, I think it would be most suitable to call this month May Madness (just for the sake of alliteration).

And I know it’s not just me. Everyone (at least the AP-takers) is prone to this highly contagious virus called May Madness. After the exam, we’ll have three weeks to prepare for the SAT II test and final exams. And that means only three weeks to revive our endangered GPAs. Now, I know. I can’t help but sound like a total nerd, but I think that’s just part of the May Madness also. It comes as a big package, you see.

I think it’s my first birthday (that I remember) where I didn’t get super-excited or didn’t throw a birthday party. But on the optimistic side, I’m thankful at least it wasn’t my sweet-sixteen. That would be kind of depressing.

Oops. I’m sorry Monica. But you’ll find something to be thankful for too…I hope.

I like to categorize smells.

So there is the smell of America. In reality, America isn’t typically linked with any particular smell – or, if you have to, I guess most people would say it would be the smell of pizzas and hamburgers. No offense. But the smell I remember of America is warm. Like the fresh aroma of laundry softener when you hug and sniff a stack of clothes fresh out of the drying machine.

Then there is the smell of airports. It’s like that kind of stuffy, dry smell of rugs or carpet, but I call it the airport smell. It’s not really the most pleasant kind of fragrance that you would carry around in a little bottle, but it’s a smell that gets me excited. Probably because whenever I could sense that smell, I was on my way for a vacation.

There is also a smell of Ann Arbor, my hometown. The name suggests that the place is full of trees – and it is – but I remember Ann Arbor more by the smell of fresh grass. My mom liked to keep the garden nice and pretty, so she was picky about the lawn being mowed and sprinkled at the right times during the summer. I didn’t like it when the guy came over to mow the lawn making all kinds of loud noises when I had to finish up my homework, but the smell that came in through the open doors was more refreshing than anything. It’s a smell you can’t really describe except to say that it’s the smell of summer and greenness. It’s a smell I miss dearly.

I used to live in a perfect world.

Now, I don’t mean the world of my childhood days was full of peace and love and kind-hearted people. The world itself was probably not too different than what it is now; I was just too ignorant of all the ugly parts of the world. But now I can see that ignorance was what kept me blind from the tainted. Now I can see that ignorance was what allowed me to see the simplistic beauty of life.

I was so ignorant I used to think the worst hardship a person could ever encounter in life was food poisoning. And oh, I had experienced it. Having to swallow pills instead of syrup after catching a cold was the next scariest thing, and I would always beg the doctor to give me the pink syrup instead. Dentist appointments were just as terrifying, but I could endure them for the ice-cream that always came after.

The 10-year old rusty playground could be more exciting than anything as long as there was a friend with me. Sand became rice, then it became medicine, and later castles and tunnels. In the little forest behind our apartment, we had our own trees. My best friend and I collected rocks as pets. They were all kept in a box and we gave them names. Wherever we went, we looked for special rocks that shined, or were pink, or if we were really lucky, that looked like hearts. The tiny bamboo forest became our secret second home. There was the entrance, the living room, then the restroom to the left and the bedroom deeper inside. We had to be squatting to hide in completely, but we would stay there forever and eat and chat and laugh.  In spring, we went through the yellow tunnel of forsythia by the streams, but if we ever met a bee, everyone would sprint out screaming. In winter the yellow tunnels died, and instead, the streams became the best ice skating rink, where we would play on the way for school and back home. One of the adventurous boys playing on the thinner ice would always end up soaked, and girls always watched and made fun of him.

All we knew about politics was the president’s name. Sometimes I would watch the news, but it didn’t make sense anyway. Dad would always tell me, “I’ll explain it to you when you are old enough to understand.” Back then I thought he was just too lazy to explain, but now I can see maybe it wasn’t just that.

And then I grew, I traveled, I saw, and learned.

Knowledge brings new and exciting things, but it carries just as many shameful things you wish you didn’t know or have to worry about. I’m introduced to roller coasters, Internet, and movies rated PG-13 and even R. Rusty playground has now become Cedar Point, and the bamboo house has become golf resorts in Cancun, Mexico, but true hardship has unveiled itself at the same time. Anxiety has become a lot more than just swallowing pills.

Sometimes I wish I were just a little, ignorant girl again. Sometimes I wish I can escape back into the old days.

The first assignement we had in Mr. Spivey’s AP World History Class was, believe it or not, defining time. If you’re thinking “the infinite continued progress of existence in the past, present and future regarded as a whole” (thank you, Oxford American Dictionary!) that’s not what we were supposed to do. We had to come up with a diagram or some kind of a tangible visual to support our own concept of time.

A common pattern we found was that time is really different for everyone and for everything. So while in winter break, time literally flies by, during math class you feel like time couldn’t get any slower. Well, the reason I bring this up now is beause yesterday, I experienced something that would be the perfect proof for this.

During cross country season, we always run down to the river and start our practice there. So technically the run down to the river should be a “warm up” but to us, it’s like a torture.There’s nothing we like better – okay, maybe except free icecream – than not going to the river. So anyway, when we go down to the river we face this crosswalk. Two of them, actually. And the significance of them are grand, for they are the only two excuses that we can have to not be running and rest. So inside our minds, we’re all secretly praying that we would get stuck on a red light – or was it just me? Those two or three minutes of rest is so crucial it feels like a… spring break after months of school work, if you get what I mean. Or like a Saturday after pulling three allnighters.

You should see now that, obviously, those couple of minutes feel like a second to the runners on a hot August afternoon. So I’ve never thought that the lights took a long time to change. Until yesterday. After KISTIVAL, I was going home and so had to cross that same crosswalk, but alone. You wouldn’t believe how long that felt like. I thought it was taking five minutes. Maybe it is five minutes and all this time I’ve been shortening it just from my experience in cross country… now I’m really confused. So there you see it already. Time is really impossible to measure. The invention called clock that’s supposed to measure time is only a manmade product to help us come up with a unified agreement, so that we don’t get all confused like I just did.

It’s amazing what a puppy can do we humans. I’ve read an article a few months ago about how people who have dogs are much less likely to be diagnosed with cancer compared to those who do not have any pets. You may wonder how that is possible, just as I was questioning the reliability of this article. But living with a puppy just for a month has taught me why that is true.

They can’t talk. They can’t give you an advise for your problems. And worst of all, sometimes they may not even know their own names. But despite all this, the existence of a living being, another friend, can just make you happy. Sometimes in life, you don’t really need someone to talk with about your problems or someone who could give you a bunch of polite and lame advices; sometimes in life, you just need someone to be there. And a dog does is a great companion that listens to everything you have to say.

I’ve spent days playing with this little white fluffy thing and not knowing thirty minutes have passed already. Sometimes that becomes a problem, as I start my homework much later than I planned, but it’s also true that he takes away all my stress – at least for those thirty minutes.

As of now, just the fact that something so small and adorable walks around in my house and follows me is fascinating to me, but I’m sure as time passes, I’ll be even more attached to him. So going back to the article, what cures the person with the dog is not some special medical scientific stuff found only in dogs, but just the joy and happiness a dog can bring to a person’s life. After all, the feeling of happiness is the best cure for anything, isn’t it?

“There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.”  -Ben Williams

I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about what I should write about on my blog, and I decided that I just rant about how hectic my life has been recently. And I bet it’s not just me, because I know that this time of the year is painful to everyone just as it is to me.

This past week has been crazy – we had English discussions back to back, meaning we had to finish annotating everything (not that anyone was cramming the night before or anything…right?). And then I had the econ documentary project rough draft due on Wednesday. Then AP world DBQ due on Thursday and also the dreaded Chem exam on that same Thursday. Then by Friday I had to write my spanish composition using imperfecto subjuntivo, and worse, I found out during lunch that day that I had a AP world map quiz on Europe. And all the while, in the middle of this busy week, we had to watch the last episode of Boys over Flowers, of course. Thank goodness for that one hour of eye-cleansing and mind-soothing, at least.

Now, I know it’s not just me stressing over all the workload here. Although KIS is notorious for its crazy amount of homework and projects, this time of year – also known as The Third Quarter – drives all highschoolers nuts. Okay, maybe minus the seniors who are practically liberated from academics for a couple of months.

Third quarter, compared to a seven-day week, would be like Wednesday going onto Thursday. You’re stuck on the “hump day” as Mr. Duncan calls it, and you’re almost toward the happy weekend but not quite but just enough to have been tired out. By this time, your mind is all loosened up compared to the beginning of the year, but it’s also not excited like the end of the year. You’re right at that point when you’re almost getting sick of all schoolwork, so you hide under the piles of homework and projects – well, in our case, it’s more like one simple Mac that contains it all.

This time of the year is also when you want to start getting lazy, the smell of spring tickling your nose and the sleep sneaking into you before you even notice. But this is all why this time of the year, is also so very dangerous. Because for those that take AP classes, this is when we gotta be going all in for the AP test, as there are less than forty days left until the test. And only one quarter left to take care of raising your grades and making that last strong impression as a sophomore (or whatever grade you’re in).

Believe it or not, that long rant has, surprisingly, made me feel much better. Plus it’s taught me the moral of the story, that we all already know deep inside but want to deny. Yes, you know it:

Stop procrastinating, NOW.

Being a Korean who comes from a non-Christian family, I have a unique obligation of celebrating many different holidays. And I don’t mean holidays like Christmas or Easter, I mean Korean traditional holidays when we are required to give bows to worship our ancestors. The tradition basically stems from the idea that our ancestors exist in the form of ghosts. Thus we prepare food for them to come and eat. Every year, we give three of these ceremonies. The first is on Lunar New Year, second on Korean Thanksgiving Chuseok, and then lastly on the date when our ancestor passed away, called Jesah.

Well, today was one of those three days for our family, so our family was busy preparing for the Jesah. Actually, my mom was busy cooking the foods and cleaning up the house, as always, while Dad and I were working on our own stuff.

Today’s Jesah was a little bit different, because for the first time in Jesah history, we decided to do it at night instead of morning. Every year, we’d been doing it in the morning, which meant waking up at at least five to set up the tables and get ready. I would always wake up last, still yawning and my eyes half-opened as I helped mom set up the tables. You don’t know how glad I was to hear that the Jesah started at 8 PM.

While we were doing the Jesah today, I realized that it is a really interesting and quite a complex tradition. Not only is there a specific menu that of Korean food we must cook, there is a specific way of putting these foods on the tables. On the first row there are rice and soup, and then the meat and fish on the second, then rice cake and namul (or vegetable side dishes), and finally the desert like fruits and chestnuts. When putting these dishes, you must put the red foods to the East and white foods to the West. So you would place strawberries on the right but chestnuts on the left, for example. Another important rule is that you always put the food by an odd number. So if you’re putting a dish of pears, you would  have to put either three or five. Never four.

Speaking of numbers, I think our ancestors had some weird obsession with the number three, because it comes in in every part of Jesah. Before you place the chopsticks on the food for your ancestor to eat, you must tap them three times on the table. When you serve liquor, you also turn it three times above the incense, counterclockwise. Not only that, but when we bow, we do it two full ones and one half, totalling three times.

It may seem all complicated, but as a person going through this every year for the sixteen years of my life, all of this seems natural. Well, but I still have to admit that the order of the food on the tables is still very confusing – even to my mom and my grandma!

If you have been keeping up with my blog posts (like Jessica does, apparently), you should know that just about two weeks ago, I was still busy trying to convince my parents that I should get a puppy. You should also remember – that is, if you read my first blog post – that I said I had almost won their agreement.

Well, apparently that wasn’t just my imagination. Because not too long after I wrote the post, my mom had called up the pet shop to show us the puppies they had. I swear I was counting days – no, hours – since the moment my mom made the appointment for them to visit our house.

You may think the process was so easy, but it really wasn’t as simple as me wanting a dog, convincing, and then immediately getting a favorable reply. You see, the discussion had been going on for a very long time. So long that it dates back even to when I still lived in Michigan. Mom had her reasons then for not getting me a dog. So when I agreed to move to Korea, my dad had made a sort of a “deal” with me, and that was that he would get me a dog. Not surprisingly, now that I was here, the deal did not come true, thanks to new and different reasons.

It wasn’t until my parents went and saw my cousin’s dogs that they started to change their minds. They fell in love with their dogs, and started to slowly change their minds. On top of that, my friend had also gotten a puppy pretty recently, and had introduced us a very nice pet shop.

So there was my long story, and it has a very happy ending.

Because I finally finally got a puppy.

When we were little, my brother and I, we always used to eat ramen when our parents weren’t home.  And because of the fact that he was the older one, he always used to cook ramen for the both of us. Well, the roles kind of changed as we grew older and he started taking advantage of his right to use his little sister, but I remember the time when he used to gladly and voluntarily get up and start cooking.

I liked him cooking, because he was the best one in the house when it came to making ramen (or even udon). For some strange reason, whenever I tried making the same thing using the exact same brand of ramen, it always turned out either too salty or too bland. While he took care of boiling the water and putting in the noodles and cracking the eggs, I took charge of wiping out the tables and getting water, to prepare to eat.

As he made the finishing touches, he would yell at me, “hurry, hurry, set the table now! I’m done!” And as he went to put the pot on the table, he’d always remind me, “and bring my spoon.”

Now, this wasn’t just some regular spoon that he was talking about. I knew exactly what to bring when he said “my spoon.” My brother always used to eat from the big ladle and not the regular silverware that we used to eat rice with. He told me ramen tasted better from the ladle.  Of course, I just ate with my regular spoon, because while I thought the spoon was too big for my mouth anyway, I naturally came to think that it was something that only the big brothers did. From that little habit, I somehow felt a sort of a comforting feeling of distinction between him and me. He was bigger and older, and so he always seemed to know better.

Yesterday, my parents were gone and I didn’t want to wait until they came back to eat dinner, so I decided to cook myself ramen. And when I was done cooking and ready to eat the salty noodle, I suddenly found myself grabbing for the big ladle.  I remembered again what I had forgotten for a long time. It was the big brother’s spoon.

My brother’s not here to cook ramen for me, and I doubt he would do that anymore even if he were here, but I can see that he is still here inside me, calling for his unique spoon.

There is a phrase that I’ve been hearing a lot from my peers recently. Looking at the screen as I work on my Mac, they go: “you actually do that?”

Don’t worry, because it’s not some tacky old game or… some rare and geeky widget for Dashboard. It is what I consider to be the most productive application in Mac – one that I use the most, probably, along with Firefox. Yes, that’s right. I use wonderful application called iCal.

As I plan out my day in the weekly section, my friends sitting around me goes “you actually use iCal?” Now I know this application is not something that a typical high-schooler would find amusing, but I really couldn’t live without it. It’s like the upgraded version of sticky notes and agendas, which is Dashboard, but even an upgrade from that!

You may think carrying around a big, bulky planner like the MacBook may be annoying and uncomfortable, but that’s certainly not true. Because to be honest: I actually open this planner, unlike the school agendas that I abandoned after the first two weeks of sophomore year. What’s the best part of it, though, is that you can add and delete so easily, and move the events around if your schedule happens to change. On top of that, you don’t have to go through the pain of using different colored pens and fretting over messing it all up, because iCal will easily categorize each type of event by color.

As a person who has been obsessed over organizing and planning all her life, I knew this application would suit me perfectly. And really, I play with it all the time – at school, on the bus afterschool, and at home, and before I go to sleep. As nerdy as that my sound, this way, I can really get my homework finished on time, and plan ahead for projects that are due in three weeks but I wouldn’t get started on until three nights before (that is, if I didn’t use iCal). It’s wonderful how each hour is divided in quarters, so I can plan my day by every 15 minutes to be more efficient and productive.

Another great part of using iCal is that you can look back at your week or your month easily, and see what you’ve done, or haven’t done. It helps you remember on which days you did what, when you have situations when you have to remember them (when I was filling out my NHS community service log, I looked back on my iCal to remember which dates I tutored Elliot). iCal is like a record of my life (since I am too lazy to sit down and write diaries every night) and I have literally everything recorded on this application, including when I need to watch Boys over Flowers.

So if you feel like you haven’t done anything by the end of each day, or realize that you need to start your homework five minutes before midnight, I recommend this beautiful application to you. And even if you aren’t a professional procrastinator, this tool should help you with your life. Once you get started, before you know it, you’ll be addicted to it.