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new year's blogging...

Happy New Year. The translation of the above is "receive a lot of new year's 복", whatever that is. I suppose I wish that for everyone, for myself.

New year. Usually I think of the end of August as the new year, but this time my year is actually starting anew, in a new place with a new lifestyle and new surroundings. Well, relatively new. I guess different is a better word.

I’m not too interested in resolutions, I’ve quit smoking already and none of the things I would resolve to do could possibly happen overnight. I’m not interested in putting pressure on myself just to end up feeling guilty.  

I am interested in metamorphosis though, the slow-cooker changes that are bound to happen over the next 8 months. Already, especially last semester, I feel that I’ve changed a lot. I’ve grown more comfortable with my own company, more understanding of the people around me (and not around me), more capable of loving on people through their struggles, better at listening. Calmer in some capacity. Less quick to anger or jump to conclusions. More prayerful. 

So these are my resolution-type items: I will continue to not smoke, I will continue working on becoming healthier, I will become more loving, I will develop better study habits and I will actively turn my heart towards God. I will stay in touch with home. I will stay in touch with myself and not stop writing or creating just because I’m trying to learn Korean. I will not get involved in a romantic relationship (don’t roll your eyes! ok, I rolled mine, too...) I will not heap upon myself the guilt of an over-achieving perfectionis

t. I will try to release that girl and take on a more realistic mantle of flawed but maturing womanhood. I will take my own advice, or try to.

What I want for this year is really simpler than all of that. I just want to be grateful, everyday, for the tremendous blessings that have been heaped on my life. I want to praise God with every word I speak and every action I take. I want to be faithful to my own beliefs and I want to be strong; physically, mentally, spiritually. I want to love, others and myself, with more fervor than I have before. 

Ok. That’s it for now. I wish everything I wished for myself for anyone reading this, along with whatever your hearts want as well. No pressure, no guilt. No worries. Only joy, and gratefulness.

That’s my address. If you’re so inclined, I could really use some more paper love.

transit

RIP my kicks, holes in the sides = not coming to korea.

nice jacket, homie.

weird, this is the ground somewhere in America. where do those colors come from?

"rumbling over the earth..."

erol is the man for picking me up at the airport, and helping me find a 하숙 in the middle of the night.

the room! so good to be moved in already.

yeah, i dont have a blanket yet so i slept wearing my robe and the jacket hanging there. thats just a sheet on the bed. good call, mom.

14 hours in the FUTURE!

Wow. I am writing this from Ehwa 하숙집 at 3 in the morning. Rent is a little higher than I expected but I had to pick somewhere because it was getting really late. Erol helped me, walking around these university neighborhoods calling every dang ajumma and ajoshi who would get out of bed and let us look at their open rooms. 

I was scolded for being such a crazy person, by Erol and by the sleepy ajummas. Who moves to a foreign country with 100 pounds worth of stuff and has no idea where they are going to stay? Who tries to compare prices for rent at multiple locations at 10 at night? 

I mean. It worked out, no problem, just as I expected. 

Funny how it feels exactly the same, as if the entire last semester never happened and I'd been here the whole time. The airport is routine by now (minus the moment of horror when I realized my money was missing this past summer. thanks to grandma's money belt worn discretely under my dress, that whole fiasco was avoided this time.) My block behind the 신촌 McDonald's felt like where I was supposed to be going home to today. The subway station waffle smell. Erol and Rita and Karina. The same toiletry bags, a similar set-up on a similar bookshelf set that seems to be standard fair for these kinds of rooms. feeling baffled and confused and still sort of illiterate. none of it's different. it's almost anticlimactic, like picking up from a book-marked page instead of writing a new story. tomorrow will be different, less matter of fact and more exploratory in this new neighborhood.

reading dostoyevsky. listening to other people's conversations. eating 라면 and 김밥type convenience store food. idk what else, it's time for me to get some rest.

packing is

a pile of purses.

preventative medicine

T-minus 13 days remaining. It's strange to still be here, to be experiencing things here even as I pack away my intentions and my focus and mail them to the other side of the globe in advance. 

One paper, one exam, Christmas and a day of traveling and suddenly, a new chapter will begin. I'm practically there, I'm practically home already. I'm practically a senior at Yale, nearly a graduate, I might as well be married with children or preparing for my own funeral.

It doesn't roll with quite so much momentum but it pops like bubbles with delineated borders, falls down stairs two at a time and rushes towards conclusions before a thesis is ever revealed.

I'm excited to know where I'll live, to know my new neighborhood and smell the waffles in 신촌역 again. I'm excited to get better at this language. I'm interested in being on television again, and growing in God with the people at Jubilee Church. 

I'm scared of missing this place, that my life will somehow be worse and that I'll wake up in the spring one morning, knowing that I belonged back here instead.

Can't focus on a thing, besides watching these minutes pass and staving off the inevitable absence that will follow in their wake.